A Widow for One Year (36 page)

Goddamn you, Hannah! Ruth thought, but she was onstage now. All she needed to do was cast her eyes on the page; her writing completely absorbed her. Outwardly, she was what Ruth Cole always was: composed. And as soon as she began to read, she would feel inwardly composed, too.

She might not know what to do about boyfriends—especially one who wanted to marry her—and she might not know how to deal with her father, about whom her feelings were sorely mixed. She might not know whether to hate her best friend, Hannah, or to forgive her. But when it came to her writing, Ruth Cole was the picture of confidence and concentration.

In fact, she was concentrating so completely on reading the first chapter, which was called “The Red and Blue Air Mattress,” that she forgot to tell the audience the title of her new novel. No matter; most of them already knew the title. (More than half the people in the audience had read the whole book.)

The first chapter’s origins were peculiar. The magazine section of a German newspaper, the
S¸ddeutsche Zeitung,
had asked Ruth to submit a short story for the annual fiction issue. Ruth rarely wrote short stories; there was always a novel on her mind, even if she hadn’t begun to write it. But the rules regarding the submission to the
S¸ddeutsche Zeitung
intrigued her: every short story published in the magazine was called “The Red and Blue Air Mattress”; and, at least once in every story, an actual red and blue air mattress had to make an appearance. (It was further suggested that the air mattress had to be of sufficient significance to the story to merit its existence as a title.)

Ruth liked rules. For most writers, rules were laughable, but Ruth was also a squash player; she had a fondness for games. The fun for Ruth was where and how to bring the air mattress into the story. She already knew who her characters were: they would be Jane Dash, newly a widow, and Mrs. Dash’s then-enemy Eleanor Holt.

“And so,” Ruth told the audience at the 92nd Street Y, “I owe my first chapter to an air mattress.” The audience laughed. It was now a game for the audience, too.

It was Eddie O’Hare’s impression that even the boorish stagehand was full of anticipation for the red and blue air mattress. It was further testimony to how international a writer Ruth Cole had become: the first chapter of her new novel had been published in German under the title “Die blaurote Luftmatratze,” before any of Ruth’s many readers could read it in English!

Ruth told the audience: “I want to dedicate this reading to my best friend, Hannah Grant.” One day Hannah would hear of the dedication she had missed; someone in the audience would be sure to mention it to her.

You could have heard a pin drop, as they say, when Ruth began to read her first chapter.

The Red and Blue Air Mattress

She’d been a widow for one year, yet Jane Dash was as prone to being swept away by a so-called flood of memories as she was on that morning when she’d awakened with her husband dead beside her. She was a novelist. She had no intentions of writing a memoir; autobiography didn’t interest her, her own, especially. But she did want to keep her memories of the past under control, as any widow must.

A most unwelcome intrusion from Mrs. Dash’s past was the former hippie Eleanor Holt. Eleanor was drawn to the misfortunes of others; truly, she seemed uplifted by them. Widows in particular appealed to her. Eleanor was living evidence of Mrs. Dash’s conviction that poetic justice is not forthcoming on a regular basis. Not even Plutarch could convince Jane Dash that Eleanor Holt would ever receive her just rewards.

What was it called—what Plutarch had written? Jane thought it was “Why the Gods Are So Slow to Punish the Wicked,” but she couldn’t exactly remember. Anyway, despite the centuries that separated them, Plutarch must have had Eleanor Holt in mind.

Mrs. Dash’s late husband had once referred to Eleanor as a woman under the constant pressure of revising herself. ( Jane thought this assessment was overly kind.) When she was first married, Eleanor Holt was one of those women who flaunted the happiness of her marriage to such a degree that anyone who’d ever been divorced cordially loathed her. When she was newly divorced, Eleanor became such an advocate of divorce that anyone who was happily married wanted to kill her.

In the sixties, to no one’s surprise, she was a socialist, in the seventies a feminist. When she lived in New York, she thought that life in the Hamptons, which she called “the country,” was suitable only for fair-weather weekends; to live in the Hamptons year-round, or in bad weather, was strictly for bumpkins and other dullards.

When she left Manhattan for a year-round residence in the Hamptons—and for her second marriage—she pronounced that city life was fit only for sexual predators and thrill-seekers who were without her capacity for self-knowledge. (After many years in Bridgehampton, Eleanor continued to think of the south fork of Long Island as rural, for she had no experience with genuine country living. She had attended an all-women’s college in Massachusetts, and while she looked back on her experience there as decidedly unnatural, she did not categorize it as either rural
or
urban.)

Eleanor had once burned her bra in public, before a small gathering in a Grand Union parking lot, but throughout the eighties she was a politically active Republican—the alleged influence of her second husband. Having tried unsuccessfully, for years, to get pregnant, she finally conceived her only child with the aid of an anonymous sperm donor; thereupon she became adamantly opposed to abortion. Possibly this was the alleged influence of what Mrs. Dash’s late husband called “the mystery sperm.”

During two decades, Eleanor Holt went from eating everything to strict vegetarianism to eating everything again. The changes in her diet were confusingly imposed upon her sperm-donated child, a haunted girl, whose birthday party—she was only six at the time—was spoiled for her, and for the other children in attendance, by Eleanor’s decision to show the home movie of her daughter’s birth.

Jane Dash’s only son had been one of the traumatized children at the birthday party. The episode had troubled Mrs. Dash, for she had always been physically modest in the presence of her son. Her late husband had frequently been naked around the house—he slept in the nude, and so forth—but this hadn’t troubled Jane, at least not for her son’s sake. After all, they were both boys. Jane, however, had made every effort to cover herself. Then her son had come home from the Holt girl’s birthday party, having seen an apparently vivid film of a live birth—having seen Eleanor Holt, displayed like an open book!

And over the years, Eleanor would again from time to time impose the obstetrical film on her poor daughter—and not necessarily for educational reasons. Rather it was for Eleanor Holt’s unstoppable self-importance: the woman needed to demonstrate to her own daughter how, at least at the moment of giving birth, she had suffered.

As for the daughter, she either developed or had been born with a contrary personality; whether this was the result of her overexposure to the gore of her own delivery or something in the secret genes of “the mystery sperm,” the daughter seemed intent on embarrassing her mother. And the poor girl’s contrariness encouraged Eleanor to attack other possible sources that might be disturbing her daughter—for Eleanor Holt never faulted herself, not for anything.

What Mrs. Dash would always remember was Eleanor Holt’s emergence as an anti-pornography picketer. The porn shop, which was on the outskirts of Riverhead, Long Island, a far cry from the Hamptons, was not a place that lured young or unsuspecting or otherwise innocent readers to its door. It was a low, shingled building with small windows and a shed roof. The sign outside was not ambiguous.

X-RATED BOOKS & MAGAZINES ADULTS ONLY!

Eleanor and a small band of outraged matronly women only once entered the building. They abruptly withdrew, agitated and flushed. (“The strong victimizing the weak!” Eleanor told a local reporter.) The couple who ran the pornography shop were elderly; they had been longing to escape the dreary Long Island winters. In the ensuing fuss, they conned a concerned-citizens’ group (of Eleanor’s initiation) into buying the building. But the concerned citizens not only paid too much for the old shed, they were left with . . . ah, the inventory, as Mrs. Dash thought of it.

As a novelist, and as an interested party, Jane Dash volunteered to estimate the value of the stock. She had previously but politely declined an invitation to join Eleanor’s crusade against pornography, on the grounds that she was a writer; she was basically opposed to censorship. When Eleanor pressed her case—that she was appealing to Jane “as a woman first and a writer second”—Jane had surprised both Eleanor and herself by her response.

“I’m a writer first,” Mrs. Dash had said.

Jane was allowed to investigate the pornography at her leisure. Its “value” aside, Mrs. Dash found it disappointing. The coarseness of it was to be expected—apparently not by Eleanor Holt! But grossness was the norm for many people. Crudeness and prurient interests were the motivating humors for all sorts of individuals; Mrs. Dash happily did not associate with them. Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of people she had met.

In the unseemly collection from the porn shop, now closed for good, there were no depictions of sexual acts with animals or with underage children. Mrs. Dash considered it mildly reassuring that these depravities had not made their way as far east of Manhattan as Suffolk County—at least not in magazine or book form. What she found in ample evidence was the commonplace exaggeration of female orgasms, and men (always with penises of unlikely size) who displayed an unconvincing interest in the labors they were performing. Bad acting on the part of both sexes, Jane Dash concluded. She thought the closeup views of the countless and various female genitalia were . . . well, clinically interesting. She’d never before looked at other women in such uninviting detail.

Pressed for her evaluation, Jane declared the contents of the shop to be worthless trash—unless the concerned citizens wanted to reduce their expenses by selling off the remaining stock to certain curious locals. But such a sidewalk sale in Riverhead would have amounted to the concerned citizens playing the role of pornographers. Therefore, the books and magazines were burned—a total loss.

Again defining herself as “a writer first,” Mrs. Dash said she wanted no part of the burning ceremony; she wouldn’t even watch it. The local newspapers captured a small but triumphant band of women tending to a fire. Real firemen stood anxiously nearby, in case the burning photographs of strenuous sexual endeavors and stray genitals should suddenly develop into a spreading flame.

In Suffolk County, six years passed without further public demonstrations in the field of sexual morality. The sperm-donated daughter was twelve when she took Eleanor Holt’s dildo—a battery-powered vibrator—to the Bridgehampton alternative middle school for that ill-considered part of American education known as Show and Tell. Once again, Jane Dash’s son, who’d been witness to the film of the live birth at the six-year-old’s birthday party, was privileged to see this brief glimpse of Eleanor’s formerly private experience.

The twelve-year-old daughter was fortunately inexpert at demonstrating the tool, which the astonished teacher quickly took away from her. There was little more to observe than the shocking size of the thing. Mrs. Dash, who never saw it, gathered from her son’s description that the dildo was modeled on nothing resembling an actual male member. The boy compared the vibrator to “some kind of missile.” Also fixed in the lad’s memory was the sound that the missile made when it was turned on. The vibrator, of course, vibrated. While this was not highly detectable, before the teacher grabbed the dildo from the twelve-year-old and turned it off, the particular sound was a surprise to all who heard it.

“Exactly what did it sound like?” Jane asked her son.

“Zzzt! Zzzt! Zzzt!”
the boy reported. There was a hint of warning in this sound, Mrs. Dash thought—a buzzing sound, with a
t
on the end. The novelist couldn’t get this sound out of her head.

And here the playfulness of Mrs. Dash’s late husband would return to haunt her. Whenever they had spotted Eleanor Holt—at a dinner party, in the supermarket, or dropping off her daughter at the alternative middle school—Jane’s husband would whisper in the novelist’s ear,
“Zzzt!”
It seemed to Jane that, in his clever way, he was telling her to be careful.

Repeatedly, it was the sheer good fun of him that Mrs. Dash missed most of all. Even the sight of Eleanor Holt would forcefully remind Jane of her widowhood and what she’d lost.

Five more years passed, yet Jane remembered the dildo episode as if it had happened only yesterday. What possessed Mrs. Dash to confront Eleanor Holt with an almost perfect imitation of the sound made by her vibrator was twofold: Jane keenly desired to bring back to her life her late husband’s sense of humor, and Jane knew that if she didn’t do something to Eleanor directly, she would be driven to write about her, which would be worse. As a novelist, Mrs. Dash despised writing about real people; she found it a failure of the imagination—for any novelist worthy of the name ought to be able to invent a more interesting character than any real person. To turn Eleanor Holt into fiction, even for the purpose of derision, would be a kind of flattery.

Besides, the moment of Mrs. Dash’s decision to imitate the sound of Eleanor’s vibrator was no “decision” at all. It was completely accidental. It was not, quite unlike a Jane Dash novel, a planned act. The situation was the annual picnic for the alternative middle school, which was an alternative kind of school picnic, coming as it did well after the close of the school year; it was intended to coincide with the first good swimming weather of the early summer. The Atlantic Ocean was exceedingly cold until the end of June. But if the school waited for its picnic as late as July, the public beach would be overcrowded with “the summer renters.”