A Widow for One Year

  As for "Marriage at Last," why did the chapter title--the phrase itself--depress her? Was it the way she would get married, too? It sounded like the title of a novel Ruth Cole would never write, or even want to read.

  Ruth thought she should stick to rereading Graham Greene; she was sure that she didn't want to know anything more about his life . Here she was, brooding about what Hannah called her "favorite subject," which was her tireless scrutiny of the relationship between what was "real" and what was "invented." But the mere thought of Hannah returned Ruth to the present.

  She didn't want Scott Saunders to see her naked in the pool, not yet.

  She went into the house and dressed in some clean, dry clothes for squash. She put some talcum powder in the right front pocket of her shorts; it would keep her racquet hand dry and smooth--no blisters. She'd already chilled the white wine, but now she arranged the rice in the electric steamer. All she would have to do later was push a button to turn it on. She'd already set the dining-room table--two place settings.

  At last she climbed the ladder to the second floor of the barn, and-- after she'd stretched--she began to warm up the ball.

  She fell into an easy rhythm: four forehands down the wall, then she would hit the telltale tin; four backhand rails, and then the tin again. Each time she hit the tin, aiming deliberately low, she hit the ball hard enough so that the resounding tin was loud. In an actual game, Ruth almost never hit the tin; in a tough match, maybe she would hit it twice. But she wanted to be sure that when Scott Saunders arrived, he would hear her hitting the tin. And as he climbed the ladder to come play with her, he would be thinking: For a so-called pretty good player, she sure hits the tin a lot. Then, when they started to play, it would come as quite a surprise to him that Ruth rarely hit the tin at all.

  You could feel a little shiver in the squash court whenever someone climbed the ladder to the second floor of the barn. When Ruth felt that shiver, she counted five more shots--hitting the tin the fifth time. She could easily hit all five shots in the time it took her to say, under her breath, "Daddy with Hannah Grant!"

  Scott tapped twice on the door of the squash court with his racquet; then he cautiously opened the door. "Hi," he said. "I hope you haven't been practicing for me."

  "Oh, just a little bit," Ruth said.

  Two Drawers

  She spotted him the first five points. Ruth wanted to see how he moved. He was reasonably quick, but he swung his racquet like a tennis player; he didn't snap his wrist. And he had only one serve: a hard one, right at her. It was usually too high; she could step out of its way and return it off the back wall. And Scott's return of serve was weak; the ball fell to the floor at midcourt. Ruth could usually kill it with a corner shot. She had him running either from the back wall to the front, or from one back corner to the other.

  Ruth took the first game 15-8 before Scott had figured out how good she really was. Scott was one of those players who overestimated their abilities. When he was losing, his first thought was that his game was a little off; it wouldn't occur to him, until the third or fourth game, that he was being outplayed. Ruth tried to keep the score close in the next two games, because she enjoyed seeing Scott run.

  She won the second game 15-6 and the third 15-9. Scott Saunders was in very good shape, but after the third game, he needed the water bottle. Ruth didn't drink any water. Scott was doing all the running.

  He hadn't quite got his wind back when he faulted the first serve of the fourth game. Ruth could detect his frustration, like a sudden odor. "I can't believe that your father still beats you," he said between breaths.

  "Oh, I'll beat him one day," Ruth said. "Maybe next time."

  She won the fourth game 15-5. While he was chasing a drop shot into the front corner, Scott slipped in a puddle of his own sweat; he slid on his hip and hit his head against the tin.

  "Are you okay?" Ruth asked him. "Do you want to stop?"

  "Let's play one more game," he snapped at her.

  Ruth didn't like his attitude. She beat him 15-1 in their last game, his only point coming when she tried (against her better judgment) a reverse corner that hit the tin. It was the one time she hit the tin in five games. Ruth was mad at herself for attempting the reverse corner; it confirmed her opinion of low-percentage shots. If she'd just kept the ball in play, she was sure she would have taken the last game 15-0.

  But losing 15-1 had been bad enough for Scott Saunders. Ruth couldn't be sure if he was pouting or just making an unusually contorted facial expression until he got his wind back. They were leaving the court when a wasp flew in the open door and Scott took an awkward swipe at it with his racquet. He missed. The wasp zigged and zagged. Its erratic, darting flight was on course to the ceiling, where it would safely be out of reach, when Ruth caught the wasp in midair with her backhand. Some say it's the toughest shot in squash: an overhead backhand volley. The strings of her racquet cut the wasp's segmented body in two.

  "Good get," Scott said, as if he were about to be sick.

  Ruth sat on the edge of the deck beside the swimming pool; she took off her shoes and socks, cooling her feet in the water. Scott didn't seem to know what to do. He was used to taking off all his clothes and stepping into the outdoor shower with Ted. Ruth would have to do it first.

  She stood up and took off her shorts. She pulled her T-shirt off, dreading the potential awkwardness--the usual, unwanted acrobatics--of wriggling out of her sweaty sports bra. But she was able to take the spandex bra off without an embarrassing struggle. She took her underpants off last, and walked into the shower stall without looking at Scott. She'd already soaped herself, and was standing under the running water, when he stepped into the shower stall with her and turned on his showerhead. She had shampooed her hair and was rinsing the shampoo out, when she asked him if he was allergic to shrimp.

  "No, I like shrimp," he told her. With her eyes closed, rinsing off the shampoo, she guessed that he had to be looking at her breasts.

  "Good, because that's what we're having for dinner," Ruth told him. She shut off her shower and stepped out on the deck; then she dove into the deep end of the pool. When she surfaced, Scott was still standing on the deck; he was looking beyond her.

  "Isn't that a wineglass at the bottom of the pool?" he asked. "Did you recently have a party?"

  "No, my father recently had a party," Ruth answered, treading water. Scott Saunders had a bigger cock than she'd first thought. The lawyer dove to the bottom of the deep end and brought up the wineglass.

  "It must have been a moderately wild party," Scott said.

  "My father is more than moderately wild," Ruth replied. She floated on her back; when Hannah tried it, she could scarcely manage to make her nipples rise above the surface.

  "You have beautiful breasts," Scott told Ruth. He treaded water next to her. He filled the wineglass with water, then poured the water on her breasts.

  "My mother probably had better ones," Ruth said. "What do you know about my mother?" she asked him.

  "Nothing--I've just heard some rumors," Scott admitted.

  "They're probably true," Ruth said. "You may know almost as much about her as I do."

  She swam to the shallow end, and he followed--still holding the wineglass. If he hadn't been carrying the stupid glass, he would have already touched her. Ruth got out of the pool and wrapped herself in a towel. She saw Scott drying himself, meticulously, before she walked into the house--her towel around her waist, her breasts still bare.

  "If you put your clothes in the dryer, they'll be dry after dinner," she called to him. He followed her inside--his towel was around his waist. "Tell me if you're cold," she said. "You can wear something of my father's."

  "I feel fine in the towel," he told her.

  Ruth started the rice steamer and opened a bottle of white wine; she poured a glass for Scott and one for herself. She looked pretty good with just the towel around her waist and her breasts bare. "I feel fine in the towel, too," she told him. She le
t him kiss her then; he cupped one of her breasts in his hand.

  "I didn't expect this," he said to her.

  No kidding! Ruth thought. When she'd made up her mind about somebody, it was the height of boredom to wait for the man to seduce her. She hadn't been with anybody for four, almost five months; she didn't feel like waiting.

  "Let me show you something," Ruth said to Scott. She led him into her father's workroom, where she opened the bottommost drawer of Ted's so-called writing desk. The drawer was full of black-and-white Polaroid prints--there were hundreds of them--and about a dozen tubular containers of Polaroid print coater. The print coater gave the whole drawer and all the photographs a bad smell.

  Ruth handed Scott a stack of the Polaroids, without comment. They were the pictures Ted had taken of his models, both before and after he drew them. Ted told his models that the photos were necessary so that he could continue to work on the drawings when the models weren't there; he needed the photos "for reference." In fact, he never continued to work on the drawings. He just wanted the photographs.

  When Scott finished looking at one stack of photos, Ruth showed him another. The pictures had that amateur quality which most really bad pornography has; that the models themselves were not professional models was only part of it. There was an awkwardness to their poses that suggested sexual shame, but there was also a sense of haste and carelessness about the photographs themselves.

  "Why are you showing me these?" Scott asked Ruth.

  "Do they turn you on?" she asked him.

  " You turn me on," he told her.

  "I guess they turn my father on," Ruth said. "They're all his models--he's fucked every single one of them."

  Scott was leafing quickly through the photographs without really looking at them; it was hard to look at the photos if you weren't alone. "There are a lot of women here," he said.

  "Yesterday, and the day before, my father fucked my best friend," Ruth told him.

  "Your father fucked your best friend . . ." Scott repeated thoughtfully.

  "We're what an idiot sociology major would call a dysfunctional family," Ruth said.

  " I was a sociology major," Scott Saunders admitted.

  "What did you learn?" Ruth asked him. She was putting the Polaroids back in the bottommost drawer. The smell from the print coater was strong enough to make her gag. In a way, it was a worse smell than the squid ink. (Ruth had first found the photographs in her father's bottommost drawer when she was twelve years old.)

  "I decided to go to law school--that's what I learned from sociology," the strawberry-blond lawyer said.

  "Have you heard some rumors about my brothers, too?" Ruth asked him. "They're dead," she added.

  "I think I heard something," Scott answered. "Wasn't it a long time ago?"

  "I'll show you a picture of them--they were good-looking guys," Ruth said, taking Scott's hand.

  She led him up the carpeted stairs. Their bare feet didn't make a sound. The lid of the rice steamer was rattling; the dryer was running, too--chiefly the sound of something clicking or tapping against the revolving drum of the dryer.

  Ruth took Scott into the master bedroom, where the big bed was in unmade disarray; Ruth could almost see the body imprints of her father and Hannah in the tangled sheets.

  "There they are," Ruth said to Scott, pointing to the picture of her brothers.

  Squinting at the photograph, Scott tried to read the Latin inscription above the doorway.

  "I guess you didn't learn Latin as a sociology major," Ruth said.

  "There's a lot of Latin in the law," he told her.

  "My brothers were good-looking guys, weren't they?" Ruth asked him.

  "Yes, they were," Scott said. "Doesn't venite mean come ?" he asked her.

  " 'Come hither boys and become men,' " Ruth translated for him.

  "Now there's a challenge!" Scott Saunders said. "I liked being a boy better."

  "My father never stopped being a boy," Ruth said.

  "Is this your father's bedroom?" Scott asked her.

  "Check out the top drawer, the drawer under the night table," Ruth told him. "Go on--open it."

  Scott hesitated; he was probably thinking that there were more Polaroids in the drawer.

  "Don't worry. There are no photographs in there," Ruth said. Scott opened the drawer. It was full of condoms in brightly colored foil wrappers, and there was a large tube of lubricating jelly.

  "So . . . I guess this is your father's bedroom," Scott said, looking around nervously.

  "That's a drawer full of a boy's stuff, if I ever saw one," Ruth said. (She'd first discovered the condoms and the lubricating jelly in her father's night-table drawer when she was about nine or ten.)

  "Where is your father?" Scott asked her.

  "I don't know," she said.

  "You're not expecting him?" Scott asked.

  "If I had to guess, I'd say I was expecting him about midmorning tomorrow," Ruth said.

  Scott Saunders looked at all the condoms in the open drawer. "God, I haven't worn a condom since I was in college," he said.

  "You're going to have to wear one now," Ruth told him. She took the towel off from around her waist; then she sat naked on the unmade bed. "If you've forgotten how a condom works, I can remind you," she added.

  Scott picked a condom in a blue wrapper. He kissed her for a long time, and he licked her for an even longer time; she didn't need any of the jelly in her father's night-table drawer. She came just a few seconds after he was inside her, and she felt him come only a moment later. Nearly the whole time, but especially when Scott was licking her, Ruth watched the open door of her father's bedroom; she listened for her father's footsteps on the stairs, or in the upstairs hall, but all she could hear was the clicking or tapping noise in the dryer. (The lid of the rice steamer wasn't rattling anymore; the rice was cooked.) And when Scott entered her and she knew she was going to come, almost instantly--the rest of it would be over very quickly, too--Ruth thought: Come home now, Daddy! Come upstairs and see me now !

  But Ted didn't come home in time to see his daughter as she would have liked him to see her.

  Pain in an Unfamiliar Place

  Hannah had used too much soy sauce in the marinade. Also, the shrimp had languished in the marinade for more than twenty-four hours; they didn't taste like shrimp anymore. But this hardly stopped Ruth and Scott from eating them all, and all the rice and the stir-fried vegetables--and all of some kind of cucumber chutney that had seen better days. They also drank a second bottle of white wine, and Ruth opened a bottle of red wine to have with the cheese and fruit. They finished the bottle of red wine, too.

  They ate and drank, wearing just the towels around their waists-- Ruth with her breasts defiantly bare. She hoped that her father would walk into the dining room, but he did not. And despite the conviviality of her wining and dining with Scott Saunders, not to mention the seeming success of their highly charged sexual encounter, their dinner-table conversation was strained. Scott told Ruth that his divorce had been "amicable," and that he enjoyed "an amiable relationship" with his ex-wife. Recently divorced men talked entirely too much about their ex-wives. If the divorce had been truly "amicable," why talk about it?

  Ruth asked Scott to tell her what kind of law he practiced, but he said that it wasn't interesting; it had something to do with real estate. Scott also confessed to not having read her novels. He'd tried the second one, Before the Fall of Saigon --he thought it might be a war novel. He'd gone to considerable trouble, as a young man, not to be drafted during the Vietnam War--but the book had struck him as what he called a "women's novel." The phrase never failed to make Ruth think of a wide array of feminine-hygiene products. "About female friendship, wasn't it?" he asked. But his ex-wife had read everything Ruth Cole had written. "She's your biggest fan," Scott Saunders said. (The ex-wife again !)

  Then he asked Ruth if she was "seeing anyone." She tried to tell him about Allan, without mentioning any names. The issue
of marriage existed for her as a subject separate from Allan. Her attraction to marriage was deep, Ruth told Scott, while at the same time her fear of it was stultifying.

  "You mean you're more attracted to it than you are afraid of it?" the lawyer asked.

  "How does that passage from George Eliot go? I once liked it so much that I wrote it down," Ruth told him. " 'What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life . . .' But . . ."

  "Did he stay married?" Scott asked her.

  "Who?" Ruth said.

  "George Eliot. Did he stay married?"

  Maybe if I just get up and start doing the dishes, he'll get bored and go home, Ruth thought.

  But when she was loading the dishwasher, Scott stood behind her and fondled her breasts; she felt his hard-on poking against her, through both their towels. "I want to do it to you this way, from behind," he said.

  "I don't like it that way," she said.

  "I don't mean in the wrong hole," he told her crudely. "I mean the right hole, but from behind."

  "I know what you mean," Ruth told him. He was fondling her breasts so persistently that she had some difficulty getting the wineglasses to fit properly in the top rack of the dishwasher. "I don't like it from behind--period," Ruth added.

  "How do you like it, then?" he asked her.

  It was clear to her that he expected to do it again. "I'll show you," she said, "as soon as I finish loading the dishwasher."

  It was no accident that Ruth had left the front door unlocked--or the lights on, in both the downstairs and the upstairs hall. She'd also left the door to her father's bedroom open, in the receding hope that her father would return and find her in the act of making love to Scott. But this was not to be.

  Ruth straddled Scott; she sat on him for the longest time. She nearly rocked herself to sleep in this position. (They'd both had too much to drink.) When she could tell by how he held his breath that he was about to come, she dropped her weight on his chest and, holding tight to his shoulders, rolled him on top of her, because she couldn't stand to see the look that transformed most men's faces when they came. (Ruth didn't know, of course--she would never know--that this had been a manner of making love that her mother had also preferred with Eddie O'Hare.)