A Widow for One Year (33 page)

Eddie took one look at her and assumed that she could beat the shit out of Ted. Indeed, on any squash court of regulation size, she could have. Eddie could never have imagined how badly Ruth
wanted
to beat the shit out of her father, nor could Eddie have guessed that the old man still got the better of his hard-looking daughter in his barn of unfair advantages.

“Hello, Ruth—I’ve been looking forward to seeing you,” Eddie said.

“Hello . . . again,” Ruth said, shaking his hand. She had her father’s short, square fingers.

“Oh,” said the Random House editor. “I didn’t know you two had met.” Ruth had her father’s wry smile, too; her smile arrested Eddie’s speech.

“Do you want to use the bathroom first?” she asked Eddie. And there again came the avuncular editor’s large hand, this time a little too familiarly between Eddie’s shoulders.

“Yes, yes—let’s allow Mr. O’Hare a minute for some hasty repairs,” Ruth’s new editor said.

It was not until he was alone in the bathroom that Eddie realized the degree to which “repairs” were in order. He was not just wet and dirty: a cellophane package, like something from a pack of cigarettes, clung to his tie; a gum wrapper, which upon closer inspection revealed a well-chewed piece of gum, had adhered to his fly. His shirt was soaked through. In the mirror, Eddie at first failed to recognize his nipples; he tried to brush them off, as if they were more chewing gum.

He decided that his best recourse was to remove his jacket and his shirt and wring them out in his hands; he wrung the excess water from his tie, too. But when he redressed himself, he saw that he’d created the most extraordinary wrinkles in both his tie and his shirt, and that his shirt, which had formerly been dress-white, was now a streaked and faded
pink
. He looked at his hands, which were stained from the familiar red ink of his correcting pen (his so-called teacher’s favorite), and—even before he peered in his briefcase—he knew that the revisions in red on the manuscript of his speech would have first run red and then turned to pink on the wet pages.

When he looked at his introductory speech, he saw that
all
his handwritten revisions were erased or blurred beyond recognition, and that the original typescript, which was now offset against a
pink
background, was notably less clear than it had been. After all, it had once stood out against a clean,
white
page.

The ball of coins pulled his jacket askew. Eddie could find no wastebasket in the bathroom; at what he hoped was the height of his ill-advised behavior for the day, he dumped all his change into the toilet. After he flushed, and the water cleared, he saw with his usual resignation that the quarters had remained in the bottom of the toilet bowl.

Ruth used the bathroom after Eddie. When he was following her backstage—while most of the others found their way into the audience and to their seats—she looked over her shoulder and said to him, “An odd place for a wishing well, wasn’t it?” It took him a second or two to realize that she was referring to the coins in the toilet bowl; he couldn’t tell, of course, if she knew it was
his
money.

Then, more straightforwardly—without mischief—she said, “We’ll have dinner after this, I hope—a chance to talk.”

Eddie’s heart jumped. Had she meant that they would have dinner
alone
? Even Eddie knew better than to hope so. She’d meant with Karl, and with Melissa, and doubtless with her avuncular new editor from Random House—not to mention with his large, too-familiar hands. Yet maybe Eddie could steal a moment alone with her; if not, he might be able to suggest a later, more private meeting.

He was smiling idiotically, transfixed as he was by her handsome, some would say pretty, face. Ruth’s thin upper lip was Marion’s upper lip; her full breasts, which were slightly pendulous, were her mother’s, too. However, without Marion’s long waist, Ruth’s breasts appeared too big for the rest of her. And she had her father’s short, sturdy legs.

Ruth’s black T-shirt was an expensive one. It fit her very nicely. It was made of some silky material—something finer than cotton, Eddie supposed. Her jeans were something better than jeans, too. They were also black; they also fit her nicely. And Eddie had seen her give her jacket to her editor; it was a tailored black cashmere jacket that dressed up the T-shirt and the jeans. For her reading, Ruth hadn’t wanted the jacket; her fans expected the T-shirt, Eddie concluded. And she was definitely a writer with more than mere readers. Ruth Cole had
fans
. Eddie was frankly frightened to be speaking to them.

When Eddie noticed that Karl was at that moment engaged in introducing
him,
he chose not to listen. The sinister-looking stagehand had offered Ruth his stool, but she chose to stand, shifting her weight from foot to foot—as if she were about to play squash rather than give a reading.

“My speech . . .” Eddie said to Ruth. “I’m not very pleased with it. All the ink ran.”

She put one of her short, square index fingers to her lips. When he stopped talking, she leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “Thank you for not writing about me,” she whispered. “I know you could have.” Eddie couldn’t speak. Until he heard her whisper, he’d not realized that Ruth had her mother’s voice.

Then Ruth was pushing him toward the stage. Since he hadn’t been listening to Karl’s introduction, Eddie didn’t know that Karl and the audience, which was Ruth Cole’s audience, were waiting for him.

Ruth had been waiting her whole life to meet Eddie O’Hare; from the first time she’d been told about Eddie and her mother, Ruth had wanted to meet him. Now she couldn’t bear to watch him walk out on the stage, because he was walking away from her. Instead she watched him on the TV monitor. From the camera’s perspective, which was the view from the audience, Eddie wasn’t walking away—he was walking toward the audience; he was facing the audience and the crowd. He is coming to meet me, at last! Ruth was imagining.

But what on earth could my mother ever have seen in him? Ruth wondered. What a pathetic, unfortunate man! On the small screen of the TV monitor, she studied Eddie in black and white. The primitive image made Eddie appear youthful; she could see what a beautiful boy he must have been. But, in a man, prettiness had only a temporary appeal.

As Eddie O’Hare began to speak about her and her writing, Ruth distracted herself with a familiar and troublesome question: What
permanently
appealed to her in a man?

Ruth at Thirty-Six

A man should be confident, Ruth thought; after all, men were designed to be aggressive. Yet her attraction to confident, aggressive men had led her into some questionable relationships. She would never tolerate
physical
aggression; so far she’d been spared any violent episodes, some of which had befallen her friends. Ruth held her friends at least partially responsible for these abusive relationships. Given how little she liked or trusted her instincts with men, Ruth surprisingly believed that she could detect a man’s capacity for violence against women on the very first date.

In the confounding world of sex, it was one of the few things Ruth was proud of about herself, although Hannah Grant, who was Ruth’s best friend, had repeatedly told Ruth that she’d simply been lucky. (“You just haven’t met the right guy—I mean the
wrong
guy,” Hannah had told her. “You just haven’t had
that
date.”)

A man should respect my independence, Ruth believed. She never concealed the fact that she was uncertain about marriage, and more uncertain about motherhood. Yet those men who acknowledged her so-called independence often exhibited the most unacceptable form of lack of commitment. Ruth wouldn’t tolerate infidelity; indeed, she demanded faithfulness from even the newest boyfriend. Was she merely old-fashioned?

Hannah had often ridiculed Ruth for what Hannah called “ contradictory behavior.” At thirty-six, Ruth had never lived with a man; yet Ruth expected any boyfriend-of-the-moment to be faithful to her while
not
living with her. “I fail to see anything ‘contradictory’ in that,” Ruth had told Hannah, but Hannah presumed a superiority to Ruth in matters of male-female relationships. (On the basis of having had more of them, Ruth supposed.)

By Ruth’s standards—even by more liberal sexual standards than Ruth’s—Hannah Grant was promiscuous. At the moment, as Ruth waited to read from her new novel at the 92nd Street Y, Hannah was also late. Ruth had expected Hannah to meet her in the greenroom before the event; now Ruth worried that Hannah would arrive too late to be admitted, although a seat had been reserved for her. It was just like Hannah—she’d probably met a guy and got to talking. (Hannah would have got to more than talking.)

Returning her attention to the small black-and-white screen of the TV monitor, Ruth tried to concentrate on what Eddie O’Hare was saying. She had been introduced on many occasions, but never by her mother’s former lover; while this certainly distinguished Eddie, there was nothing distinguished about Eddie’s introduction.

“Ten years ago,” Eddie had begun, and Ruth lowered her chin to her chest. This time, when the young stagehand offered her his stool, she accepted; if Eddie was going to begin at the beginning, Ruth knew she had better sit down.

“Published in 1980, when she was only twenty-six,” Eddie intoned, “Ruth Cole’s first novel,
The Same Orphanage,
was set in a rural New England village that was renowned for its history of supporting alternative lifestyles. Both a socialist and a lesbian commune had prospered there, but they eventually disbanded. A college with questionable admissions standards had briefly flourished; it existed solely to provide a four-year student deferment for those young men seeking
not
to be drafted into the war in Vietnam. When the war was over, the college folded. And, throughout the sixties and the early seventies—prior to the
Roe
v.
Wade
Supreme Court decision, which legalized abortion in 1973—the village also supported a small orphanage. In those years when the procedure was still illegal, it was well known—at least locally—that the orphanage physician would provide abortions.”

Here Eddie paused. The houselights were so low that he couldn’t see a single face in the vast audience. Without thinking, he took a sip from Ruth’s water glass.

In fact, Ruth had graduated from Exeter in the same year as the
Roe
v.
Wade
decision. In her novel, two Exeter girls get pregnant; they are expelled from school without ever identifying the would-be father—it turns out that they had the same boyfriend. The twenty-six-year-old author once joked in an interview that “the working title” for
The Same Orphanage
was
The Same Boyfriend
.

Eddie O’Hare, who was doomed to be
only
autobiographical in his novels, knew better than to presume that Ruth Cole was writing about herself. He understood from the first time he read her that she was better than that. But, in several interviews, Ruth had admitted to having had a close friendship at Exeter—namely, a girlfriend with whom she’d shared a crush on the same boy. Eddie didn’t know that Ruth’s roommate and best friend at Exeter had been Hannah Grant—nor did he know that Hannah was expected to attend Ruth’s reading. Hannah had heard Ruth read before, many times; what made this reading special to her, and to Ruth, was that the two friends had spent much of their time together talking about Eddie O’Hare. Hannah had been dying to meet Eddie.

As for the two friends having once had a “crush” on the same boy at Exeter, Eddie couldn’t have known, but he guessed—correctly—that Ruth had never had sex at Exeter. In fact—and this was no easy accomplishment in the seventies—Ruth managed to get through her college years without having had sex, either. (Hannah, of course, hadn’t waited. She’d had sex several times at Exeter, and her first abortion before she graduated.)

In Ruth’s novel, the expelled Exeter girls with a boyfriend in common are taken by one of the girls’ parents to the same orphanage of the title. One of these young women has her baby delivered in the orphanage, but she elects to keep the baby; she can’t bear to let it be adopted. The other young woman has an illegal abortion. The Exeter boy, twice a would-be father—and now graduated from the academy—marries the girl with the baby. The young couple make an effort to stay married for the sake of the child, but the marriage fails—after a mere eighteen years! The girl who chose the abortion, now an unmarried woman in her late thirties, is reunited with her ex-boyfriend; she marries him.

Throughout the novel, the friendship between the Exeter women is tested. The abortion-or-adoption decision, and the changing moral climate of the times, will haunt them as they grow older. While Ruth portrays both women sympathetically, her personal views on abortion (she supported the pro-choice position) were heralded by feminists. And, notwithstanding that it was a didactic novel,
The Same Orphanage
was critically acclaimed—in more than twenty-five languages.

It had its dissenters, too. That the novel concludes with the bitter dissolution of the two women’s friendship did not make
every
feminist happy. That the woman who chooses to have the abortion is unable to get pregnant with her ex-boyfriend was denounced by some prochoice feminists as “anti-abortion mythology,” although Ruth never implies that the woman can’t get pregnant
because of
her previous abortion. “Maybe she can’t get pregnant because she’s thirty-eight,” Ruth said in an interview, which was denounced by several women who said they were speaking on behalf of all those women over forty who are able to get pregnant.

It was that kind of novel—it wasn’t going to escape scot-free. The divorced woman in
The Same Orphanage
—the one who has the baby soon after she’s expelled from Exeter—offers to have
another
baby and give it to her friend. She’ll be a surrogate mom—with her ex-husband’s sperm! But the woman who can’t conceive declines the offer; she settles for childlessness instead. In the novel, the motivation of the ex-wife to play the role of “surrogate mom” is suspect; yet, unsurprisingly, a few pioneer surrogate mothers attacked the book for misrepresenting
them
.