“I’m so happy to go home alone,” Ruth said. “I can call someone to come over, or I can get into my bed with my book. And most of the time, I like the book better. I’m finding out that I love being without a man.”
“I know,” I said, as though I did. Of course I didn’t. I only imagined what her life was like, and then I imagined what my life would be like without Joe. It seemed clean and appealing, brave and correct. It seemed something I should work toward. Recently I’d actually had a conversation with Meggie wherein I sat her on the sofa and said, “How would you like to live with just Mommy?”
“Yes!” she said. “And Daddy, too.”
“No,” I’d said, carefully. “I mean, what if you just lived with Mommy? And Daddy lived somewhere else?”
“No!” Her face screwed up, tears came to her eyes. I had two simultaneous impulses, both of them terrible: I wanted to slap her. And I wanted to put my head in her lap, say, “Oh Meggie, Meggie, please don’t make me stay here.” What I did was say, “Oh, come on. I’m just teasing you. Want to color?”
She shook her head, her mouth still trembling.
“Want to play Barbies?”
She shrugged, a victor intent on prolonging the victory. But then she went to her room and brought down her doll case, solemnly handed me the single, naked Ken while she lined up the many Barbies. “What should they do?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I’d sighed. “You decide.”
So I watched Ruth drive away from the movie theater that night, looking at her straight neck as she sat behind the wheel, hearing the faint sound of James Brown’s “I Feel Good” coming from her tape player, and I had a nearly irresistible urge to follow her. “Move over,” I would say, when I climbed into bed with her. “Let’s have some cheese and crackers while we read. I’m staying.” I had to sit still for a long time that night before I headed in the other direction.
On the plane to New York, Ruth pointed out the window. “Look how beautiful everything is down there,” she said. “How can you see that and believe there is trouble in the world?”
I leaned past her to look outside. It was nighttime, and the lights below were like jewelry thrown randomly down on black velvet. I liked imagining someone in a kitchen below us peeling potatoes for dinner, having no idea that their overhead light was making such a spectacular contribution. Cars moved toy like along the highways, their headlights peaceful and straight before them.
“Do you want to trade now?” Ruth asked. We’d agreed to switch seats halfway, after discovering we both liked to sit by the window. But now I shook my head no. I was feeling irritated, and didn’t want to improve my mood until I found out what was wrong.
“Get the waitress, will you?” Ruth asked. “I want another drink.”
“She’s not a waitress,” I said. “She is a flight attendant. She is here primarily for your safety. But if there’s anything she can do to make your flight more enjoyable, please don’t hesitate to call on her.”
“She’s a waitress,” Ruth said. “And she’s here primarily for our drinking pleasure. And to give us sandwichettes that taste like nothing, even when you put mustard on them.”
True. Our snacks lay mostly untouched on our tray tables, covered with napkins like a shroud. The flight attendant walked past and I said, “Miss? Could we get another drink, here?”
“Sure can,” she said, in the smoothly nonjudgmental voice of the airline professional. Then, pointing to our tray tables, “All through with your snacks?”
Ruth snorted. “Well, I guess so!”
After the attendant left, I told her, “You know, sometimes you are just too mean to people!”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, and then, whispering, “She’s not a person; she’s a flight attendant. They’re blow-up dolls.”
“I mean it,” I said.
Her face became serious and she said, “I know. I know I do that. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I’m not the one you should apologize to.”
When she was brought her drink, Ruth reached out toward the flight attendant and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry.”
“Pardon?” The woman half smiled. She was wearing pearl studs, and one of them hung endearingly loose on her lobe. I wanted to point to it and say to Ruth, “See? Don’t you see how we all need each other?”
“I’m sorry I was rude to you,” Ruth said.
Now the attendant smiled fully. “Oh, you weren’t rude.”
Ruth looked at me, smirked.
“Nobody likes the food.”
“Well, I want you to know I appreciated the presentation,” Ruth said. “You know. Curly lettuce and everything. That little radish cut into the shape of … whatever it was.”
The attendant shrugged. “I’m not the chef.”
“Were you ever in a wreck?” Ruth asked, and the flight attendant said no and left.
“You drink too much, too,” I said.
“Are you crabby because you didn’t get the window seat?” Ruth asked.
“No. Yes.”
“Well, trade then.”
“No.”
Ruth sipped her drink, stretched out her legs. “We’re almost there. Relax. Stop feeling so guilty. It’s only a weekend.”
“I’m not guilty!” I said.
She waved her hand. “Oh, please! Not much!”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Why should I be?”
“I don’t know. Because of Michael.”
“He’s with his dad. And Meg is with her dad. They’re fine. And we’re fine.” She yawned, stretched. “I got us dates for dinner.”
“What?”
“You’ll have fun. You don’t have to fuck anyone. Although you can.”
“I shouldn’t have come,” I said.
“You’re finally beginning to be happy that you did,” Ruth said. I said nothing until she asked, “Aren’t you?” and then I nodded. And then I got my own drink. A blind date, I was thinking. I hadn’t had one of those since I didn’t know what age spots were.
We all met at a Chinese restaurant. It had a lot going for it: dark-red tablecloths; beautiful, lit lanterns; rich and exotic odors in the air; a novella-sized menu with selections in Chinese on the right, English on the left. The men we were meeting, one of them an old friend of Ruth’s, were already seated at a table in the back. Ruth introduced me to my “date,” Ron, a man who bore an eerie resemblance to a boyfriend I once had. This I told him immediately in a rush of nervous chatter as soon as we sat down. “You look just like John Altamont, my old boyfriend that I first smoked dope with,” I said.
Ruth smiled, pulled her chair closer to her man for the evening, a smallish type named Dennis wearing a black turtleneck sweater and John Lennon glasses, so handsome that if he weren’t petite he would be irritating. She put her arm around him and said, “We did that for the first time together too, remember?”
Dennis smiled, nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I told you.”
Ruth took her arm away and sat back, surprised. “You weren’t a dope virgin?”
He shook his head. “I had thirty cubes of acid in my backpack that night. After I left your house, I went out and took one and sold the rest.”
“My, my. The things you don’t know about a person,” Ruth said.
“The things you can learn,” Ron said. And then, leaning closely in toward me, “Such as … what exactly do you like?” He picked up the menu, to protect himself with a certain ambiguity.
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Been a long time since you’ve, uh … had Chinese?” he asked.
“It’s been a very long time.”
He waited. I crossed my legs, swung my foot a little. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’m going to point to something on the Chinese side, and then I’m going to eat it, no matter what it is. I need a new experience.” I held my face in a way I hoped made my chee
kbones prominent.
“Delivery man,” Ron said, in an oily voice. Then he licked his lips. I uncrossed my legs, ordered garlic chicken from the English side, requested a fork to eat it with. Something had evaporated, almost instantly. That’s what I told Ruth when we got back to our hotel.
She nodded. “Bad feet syndrome, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know, you’re thinking maybe you’ll go ahead and do it and then they take their socks off and their toes are weird and you don’t want to anymore.”
“Something like that. Actually, I think I just all of a sudden remembered … I don’t know, who I am, I guess.” I felt an annoying urge to apologize.
“Well, too bad. I’d have done it if you had. We could have invited them here. Stereo sex.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
“No.” She pulled her jeans off, her sweater. She wasn’t wearing a bra and I saw her breasts for the first time, which were perfect: nice size, pert pink nipples, pointed slightly upward. She pulled her nightgown over her head, shook her long hair loose from the tie she’d had it up in.
“Jesus!” The word sort of exploded out of me.
“What?” She stretched out on her bed, put the pillow over her stomach.
“Well, you can’t just go around fucking everybody! I mean, it’s … passé, even!”
“I’m not interested in fucking everybody. Only some people.”
“I didn’t come all the way to New York to lay some guy I never met. I want to be boring. I want to go to the museums. I want to eat one of those hot dogs from the cart. I want to go to Tiffany’s and try on a diamond bracelet.”
“Tomorrow,” Ruth said. “All this and more.”
“Fine.”
We turned out the lights, listened to the vaguely distressing sounds of sirens in the distance. “We’re in New York City,” I said.
“Um-hum.”
“Everything is so … busy. You feel as if you have to quick hurry up and say things to people, like they’re tapping their foot, can’t wait to get on to the next thing. Everybody’s like that!”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t it make you nervous?”
“No.”
“It’s too much, here. I mean, I’m having fun and everything, but it’s too much. Just walking down the block is so … intense. And everybody acts like it’s normal!”
“It is normal, here.”
I pulled the covers higher over me. “Are you going to call home?”
“You can call home if you want to.”
I thought about it. But the truth was, I didn’t want to. I wanted to think about what it would be like to live in New York City. Maybe I could have had some cramped but arty apartment, walked to my exotic job every day wearing big sunglasses and weird shoes, never married, opened cans of tuna for six or seven cats every night. Why does what happens in our lives, happen? Who really decides?
“You know, my grandmother was a real wild woman,” I told Ruth.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Rumor has it that she was pregnant before she got married.”
“Was it the father she married?”
“Well, of course!”
Ruth laughed. “It does happen that sometimes the mother marries someone else.”
I waited a moment, then asked, “Is that what you did?”
Silence. I strained to see her in the dark, but I couldn’t. They make hotel curtains to serve well in a blackout.
“Ruth?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could have been Eric’s baby. It could have been someone else’s.”
“Whose?”
“This other guy. I really loved him, but he wasn’t the marrying kind.”
“Neither are you,” I said.
“I could have been,” she said.
“Jesus, Ruth. Did Eric know?”
“No.”
“He just thought you got pregnant right away?”
“Right.”
“Was Michael ‘premature?’”
“Of course. By six weeks.”
“And Eric didn’t suspect anything?”
“No. I’m tired. I’m drunk. Let’s go to sleep.”
I stayed awake. I stared up at the ceiling, thinking, how can I love a woman I basically disapprove of? And then, the aftershock, how can I love a woman?
We are in the kitchen—L.D., Sarah, Helen and I—planning Ruth’s party. “Who else?” I ask, chewing on the pencil I’m using for the guest list. We have thought of fifteen women so far. “Should we do guys?”
“No,” L.D. says. It is an autonomic reflex for her, like breathing. She doesn’t even look up.
“Ruth likes some guys,” I say.
“Yeah,” Helen says. “What about those two guys she goes to hear music with at that country-and-western bar?”
“Tim,” I say. “And …”
“I think it’s Luther,” Helen says.
“Tim and Luther?” L.D. asks.
“It’s not his fault,” Sarah says. “His parents named him.”
“No guys,” L.D. says.
The phone rings, and I answer it on the first ring. Ruth is sleeping; I don’t want it to wake her up. I say “Hello” softly into the receiver. It is Ruth’s brother, Andrew, calling from Florida, to see how she is.
“Well … actually, better,” I say.
“Really?”
“She’s had a good few days. No pain. And she’s eating real well.”
“Is she going out at all?”
“Not a lot. She hasn’t been out a lot lately. You know what we’re doing now, though? Planning a party for her!”
Silence.
“I mean, not a party, really. But, well, yes, maybe it is a party. Sort of.”
Silence.
“She, you know, asked for one.”
An even breath in, and then her brother says, “Uh-huh. Well, I’m wondering if she ought to come here, now.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know she’s told you she doesn’t want to, but I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be best at this point. I mean, considering her prognosis. I spoke to her doctor this morning. It sure doesn’t look good. And I am her only family.” He says the word as though it’s a placard he’s carrying.
“Look,” I said. “She has told me she wants to stay here, even when … no matter what happens. She’s told me that more than once, Andrew.” I can feel heat rising up into my face. I look toward the kitchen. Usually Sarah handles this kind of thing. She is all gentle diplomacy, but her face stays full of nonnegotiable intent, her gaze clear and steady. Ruth told me she knows how to use body language to her advantage: at a critical moment in a meeting, she will simply get up, cross the room on her Joan-and-David heels and stand before her opponent, still talking in her soft voice, and she will win, because the person can’t look up at her and feel that he has any authority. “It’s like all of a sudden they’re in their bathrobes, with bed head,” Ruth said. On the phone with Andrew, Sarah’s manner is so cool and decisive it forbids conflict. I’ll never be able to handle myself the way Sarah does. It requires a certain maturation I don’t expect to ever achieve. Every time Andrew has tried to persuade (bully, L.D. says) Ruth into coming to his house for “final care,” as he calls it, Sarah has always taken the phone and told him to fuck himself. In a very nice way.
“She does have the right to change her mind,” Andrew says now.
“And if she does I’m sure she’ll tell you.” I realize my voice has gotten loud, and I return to a quieter one, saying, “We’re taking good care of her, you know. Someone’s with her all the time.”
“I know that,” he says, and I suddenly have an image of him staring out his window, seeing a Christmas morning when he and Ruth sat cross-legged in their pajamas, ripping open presents. I see his hand go deep into his pocket, seeking the comfort of spare change.
“I mean, this party thing,” I say. “She really did suggest it. I think the no
tion of a lot of her friends around—”
Ruth is up out of bed and standing at the entrance to her living room. “Who’s that?” she asks, rubbing one eye.
“Your brother.” I hand her the phone.
“Andy-man,” she says, sitting down and drawing her flannel shirt around her tighter. It’s a deep-blue plaid, makes her eyes stand up and salute. “Hi, sweetie, how are you?”
A long pause. I go back into the kitchen, put my finger to my lips, sit at the table and eavesdrop with all my might. As does everyone else. Helen’s teacup is in midair.
“Oh, no,” we hear her saying. “No, I don’t think I want to, Andy.”
Long pause.
“I know you do, I know you would. But I want to stay here.”
Longer pause, then Ruth’s voice, hesitant, “Yes, I have thought about that. But they’re taking good care of me. I’m all right.”
“Goddamn him,” L.D. says.
“Shhhh!” the rest of us say.
But Ruth is talking too low for us now, and she does, after all, deserve some privacy in her own house. We return to the guest list. “So. No guys, right?” L.D. says. The air has changed, and, like oath takers, together the rest of us solemnly answer, “Right.”
When Ruth is off the phone, she comes into the kitchen. The phone rings again. She sighs, asks L.D. to get it for her.
“It’s Joel somebody,” L.D. says. “Do you want to talk?”
Ruth sucks in a breath, lays a hand across her chest. “Joel? Really? Joel Fratto?”
L.D. shrugs.
Ruth goes into the living room, and we hear her say, “Is this Joel Fratto?” Then she nearly yells, “No! No! I don’t believe this! How did you find me?”
“Who’s that?” Sarah asks.
I don’t know, and neither does L.D., but Helen says, “That’s her old boyfriend, the one she had before she married Shithead.”
“The artist?” I ask.
Helen nods. “He was really handsome. She’s got a picture somewhere. He’s on a motorcycle, with no shirt.”
I feel a blip of jealousy—I’ve never seen that picture.