Breakable You by Brian Morton

see."

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Eight
    Adam didn't object to the idea that his dead were calling out . to him. What he objected to was the idea that they were calling out for him to join them.
    He was in the lobby of the building where Izzy Cantor had lived with his wife, Ruth, during the last twenty-five years of his life. It was a brown brick prewar building just off Broadway. The lobby smelled of Jewishness and time.
    He was happy to have escaped from all this—from this Upper West Side world, the world of the fathers, the world of late-night conversations about Marx and Freud in homey little delicatessens of dubious cleanliness, the world that had seemed to be his destined burial ground. He took the elevator to the fifteenth floor.
    It required a full minute for Ruth to open her door: she had to turn three locks and then slide the chain away. When she finally got it open, he was taken aback by how badly she'd deteriorated. Her skin was an unhealthy blue, like a slice of ham that had been left too long in the refrigerator and had aged oddly. She seemed to have shrunk by a foot. And she had let herself go. When they were younger, Ruth had always reached for elegance; now she was in an old gray bathrobe and slippers.
    Adam wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd seen her. Could it have been two years?
    Izzy had been seven or eight years older than Adam, and Ruth in turn had been four or five years older than Izzy. Adam couldn't remember anyone's age. When he'd first met Ruth, she'd seemed the archetype of the desirable older woman—mysterious, alluring, possessed of secret lore. She'd lived on a kibbutz in Israel in the late 1950s and for years had retained or affected a slight accent, and although from his current vantage point Adam could imagine few things less appealing than life on a kibbutz—men hectoring women about fine points of socialist ideology; women muscular and without makeup; children running around filthy and snot-nosed because no one person in particular was responsible for keeping any of them clean; and meetings, meetings, meetings—at the time it had lent her an exotic air.
    "How are you, Ruthie? You look wonderful."
    "How am I? Everything hurts." She smiled and touched him on the arm. "I'm glad you could come."
    "Of course. I'm only sorry I couldn't come earlier." I'm only sorry I never changed my phone number.
    She led him down the long cramped hall. The bookcases that lined it were crowded with books that hadn't quite outlived their time.
The Rise of David Levinsky. Jews Without Money. Summer in Williamsburg. The Unpossessed
. Sometimes Adam would come across a cluster of books like this at a used-book sale, and he would know for sure that another old Jewish leftist had died.
    He himself had staged a bonfire at the end of the century. In a rented cabin in Maine he had burned his papers, and soon after that he'd given most of his old books away to a public library. He'd rid himself of the things that had marked him as a member of a dying generation.
    It was an enormous apartment, though Izzy had never made a dime. The story of literary New York, Adam thought, was the story of rent control. But all that was over now.
    "Will you excuse me for a minute?" Ruth said. "I didn't forget you were coming, but I lost track of the time. I just want to freshen up."
    She left him alone in the den.
    The smell of the place carried overwhelming evidence of her sadness. A smell composed of many different things: microscopic flakes of skin from a lonely, aged body; dust mites accumulated over several decades; the troubling traceless scent given off by someone who has long been sexually deprived; and the faint scent of cat urine, lingering throughout the apartment even though Lionel, Izzy and Ruth's cat, had died almost a decade ago, just after Izzy died.
    But now that she was out of the room, he felt more at home. He wondered how many hours he'd spent in this room with Izzy, bullshitting about politics or gossiping or talking about