A Widow for One Year (44 page)

All the bare picture hooks, which she remembered better than the photos of her dead brothers, were covered now; there were hundreds of uninspired photographs of Ruth, at every phase of her childhood and throughout her young womanhood. Sometimes her father was in the photo, but usually he was the photographer. Frequently, Conchita Gomez was in the picture with Ruth. And there were the endless privet pictures. These measured her growth, summer by summer: Ruth and Eduardo, solemnly posed before the implacable privet. No matter how much Ruth grew, the unstoppable hedge grew faster, until—one day— it had more than doubled Eduardo’s height. (In several of the photographs, Eduardo looked a little afraid of the privet.) And of course there were some recent photographs of Ruth with Hannah.

Ruth was walking barefoot down the carpeted stairs when she heard the splashing from the swimming pool, which was behind the house. She couldn’t see the pool from the staircase, or from any of the bedrooms upstairs. All the bedrooms faced south; they were designed to have an ocean view.

Ruth hadn’t noticed another car in the driveway—only her father’s navy-blue Volvo—but she assumed that his present squash opponent lived near enough to have ridden a bicycle; she wouldn’t have noticed a bicycle.

The degree to which Scott Saunders had tempted her left Ruth feeling familiarly unsure of herself. She didn’t want to see another man today, although she seriously doubted that any of her father’s
other
squash opponents could possibly have attracted her as strongly as the strawberry-blond lawyer.

In the front hall, she got a good grip on her remaining suitcase—the big one—and started upstairs with it, purposely avoiding that view of the swimming pool which was available to her as she passed the dining room. The sound of splashing followed her only halfway up the stairs. By the time she unpacked, the guy, whoever he was, would be gone. But Ruth was a veteran traveler; it took her very little time to unpack. When she’d finished, she put on her swimsuit. After her father’s squash opponent was gone, Ruth thought she would jump in the pool. That always felt good, after being in the city. Then she would see about dinner. She would make her daddy a good dinner. Then they would talk.

She was still barefoot, padding down the upstairs hall, past the partially open door to her father’s bedroom, when a sea breeze blew the door shut. Thinking she would find a book or a shoe, something to hold the door ajar, Ruth opened the door to the master bedroom. The first thing that caught her eye was a woman’s high-heeled shoe of a beautiful salmon-pink color. Ruth picked it up. It was very good leather; the shoe had been made in Milan. Ruth saw that the bed was unmade—a small black bra lay on top of the tangled sheets.

So . . . her father was
not
in the pool with one of his squash opponents. Ruth took a closer, more critical look at the bra. It was a push-up bra, an expensive one; it would have been utterly gratuitous for Ruth to wear a push-up bra, but the woman in the pool with her father must have thought she needed one. The woman had small breasts—the bra was a 32B.

That was when Ruth recognized the open suitcase on the floor of her father’s bedroom. It was a well-worn brown leather suitcase distinguished by its much-traveled appearance and its practical compartments and its useful, efficient straps. It had been Hannah’s carry-on bag for as long as Ruth had known Hannah. (“The bag made Hannah look like a journalist before she was a journalist,” Ruth had written in her diary—she couldn’t remember how many years ago.)

Ruth stood as still in her father’s bedroom as she would have stood if Hannah and her father had been naked in bed in front of her. The sea breeze blew through the bedroom window again; it blew shut the door behind her. Ruth felt as if she’d been locked in a closet. If something had brushed against her (a dress on a hanger), she would have fainted or screamed.

She struggled to summon that state of calm in which she composed her novels. Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.

When Ruth was afraid, she had difficulty breathing. Fear paralyzed her; as a child, the sudden proximity of a spider would freeze her on the spot. Once, behind a closed door, an unseen dog had barked at her; she’d not been able to remove her hand from the doorknob.

Now the thought of Hannah with her father took her breath away. Ruth had to make an enormous effort just to move. At first she moved very slowly. She folded the small black bra and put it in Hannah’s open suitcase. She found Hannah’s other shoe—it was under the bed—and she put the pair of salmon-pink shoes alongside the suitcase, where they could not be missed. In what Ruth knew would be the haste of things to come, she wanted Hannah not to leave any of her sexy little items behind.

Before Ruth left her father’s bedroom, she looked at the photograph of her dead brothers in the doorway of the Main Academy Building. She considered that Hannah’s memory was not as remarkable as she’d supposed when they’d talked on the phone.

So . . . Hannah stood me up because she was fucking my father, Ruth thought. She walked into the upstairs hall, taking off her swimsuit as she went. She looked in the two smaller guest bedrooms. Both beds were made, but one was dented with the shape of a slender body, and the pillows were bunched up against the headboard of the bed. The phone, normally on the night table, sat on the side of the bed. It had been from this guest bedroom that Hannah had phoned her, whispering, so as not to wake Ruth’s father—after she had fucked him.

Ruth was naked now; she trailed the swimsuit behind her as she continued down the hall to her room. There she dressed herself in more characteristic clothes: jeans, one of the good bras Hannah had bought for her, a black T-shirt. For what she was about to do, she wanted to be in her uniform.

Then Ruth went downstairs into the kitchen. Hannah, a lazy cook but an adequate one, had been planning to stir-fry some vegetables; she’d cut up a red and a yellow pepper and had tossed them in a bowl with some broccoli florets. The vegetables were sweating slightly. Ruth tasted one of the pieces of the yellow pepper. Hannah had sprinkled the vegetables with salt and sugar to make them bleed a little. Ruth recalled showing Hannah how to do that on one of the weekends they’d spent together at Ruth’s house in Vermont—complaining about bad boyfriends, as Ruth now remembered it.

Hannah had also peeled a gingerroot, and mashed it; she’d set out the wok and the peanut oil, too. Ruth looked in the refrigerator and saw the shrimp marinating in a bowl. She was familiar with the dinner Hannah was preparing; Ruth had made this same dinner for Hannah, and for various boyfriends, many times. The only thing that wasn’t ready to cook was the rice.

There were two bottles of white wine on the door of the refrigerator. Ruth took one out, opened it, and poured herself a glass. She walked into the dining room and out the screen door onto the terrace. When Hannah and her father heard the door close, they quickly swam away from each other, but both of them ended up in the deep end of the pool. They’d been squatting together in the shallow end—or else Ruth’s father had been squatting while Hannah bobbed in the water, in his lap.

Now, in the deep end, their heads were small against the sparkling field of blue. Hannah looked less blond than usual; her wet hair was dark. Ruth’s father’s hair was dark, too. His thick, wavy hair had turned a metallic shade of gray, generously streaked with white. But in the dark-blue pool, Ted’s wet hair was almost black.

Hannah’s head seemed as sleek as her body. She looks like a rat, Ruth thought. And Hannah’s small breasts bounced as she treaded water. The image that came to Ruth’s mind was that Hannah’s little tits could have been darting, one-eyed fish.

“I got out here early,” Hannah began, but Ruth cut her off.

“You were here last night. You called me after you fucked my father. I could have told you that he snored,” Ruth said.

“Ruthie, don’t . . .” her father said.

“
You’re
the one who has a problem with fucking, baby,” Hannah told her.

“Hannah, don’t . . .” Ted said.

“Most civilized countries have laws,” Ruth told them. “Most societies have rules . . .”

“I’ve heard this!” Hannah called to her. Hannah’s tiny face looked less confident than usual. But maybe it was only because Hannah wasn’t a strong swimmer; treading water didn’t come naturally to her.

“Most
families
have rules, Daddy,” Ruth told her father. “Most
friends,
too,” Ruth said to Hannah.

“Okay, okay—I’m lawlessness personified,” Hannah told her friend.

“You never apologize, do you?” Ruth asked her.

“Okay, I’m
sorry,
” Hannah said. “Does that make it better?”

“It was an accident—it was nothing planned,” Ted told his daughter.

“That must have been a novelty for you, Daddy,” Ruth said.

“We ran into each other in the city,” Hannah began. “I saw him standing on the corner of Fifth and Fifty-ninth, by the Sherry-Netherland. He was waiting for the light to change.”

“I’m sure I don’t need to know the details,” Ruth told them.

“You’re always so superior!” Hannah cried. Then she started coughing. “I’ve gotta get out of this fucking pool before I drown!”

“You can get out of my house, too,” Ruth told her. “Just get your things and go.”

There was no ladder in Ted Cole’s pool—ladders were not aesthetically pleasing to Ted. Hannah had to swim to the shallow end and walk up the steps, near Ruth.

“Since when is it
your
house,” Hannah said. “I thought it was your father’s.”

“Hannah,
don’t
. . .” Ted said again.

“I want you to get out of here, too, Daddy,” Ruth told her father. “I want to be alone. I came home to be with you, and with my best friend,” she added. “But now I want you both gone.”

“I’m still your best friend, for Christ’s sake,” Hannah said to Ruth. She was wrapping herself in a towel—the scrawny little rat, Ruth thought.

“And I’m still your father, Ruthie. Nothing’s changed,” Ted said.

“What’s
changed
is that I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to sleep in the same house with either of you,” Ruth said.

“Ruthie, Ruthie . . .” her father said.

“I told you—she’s a fucking princess, a prima donna,” Hannah told Ted. “First you spoiled her—now the whole
world
is spoiling her.” So they had talked about her, too.

“Hannah, don’t . . .” Ruth’s father said, but Hannah walked into the house, letting the screen door slam. Ted kept treading water in the deep end of the pool; he could tread water all day.

“I had a lot to talk to you about, Daddy,” she told him.

“We can still talk, Ruthie. Nothing’s changed,” he repeated.

Ruth had finished her wine. She looked at her empty glass; then she threw it at her father’s bobbing head. She missed him by a safe margin. The wineglass plunked into the water and sank, unbroken and dancing, like a ballet slipper, to the bottom of the deep end of the pool.

“I want to be alone,” Ruth told her father again. “You wanted to fuck Hannah—now you can leave with her. Go on—just go with Hannah!”

“I’m sorry, Ruthie,” her father said, but Ruth went into the house, leaving him to tread water.

Ruth stood in the kitchen; her knees shook a little when she washed the rice and let it drain in a sieve. She was sure she’d lost her appetite. To her relief, her father and Hannah didn’t try to talk to her again.

Ruth heard Hannah’s high-heeled shoes in the front hall; she could imagine how perfect those salmon-pink shoes looked on a slinky blonde. Then she heard the navy-blue Volvo—its wide tires crushing the stones in the driveway. (In the summer of ’58, the driveway of the Coles’ house in Sagaponack had been a dirt driveway, but Eduardo Gomez had convinced Ted to try crushed stones. Eduardo had got the idea for a driveway of crushed stones from the infamous driveway at Mrs. Vaughn’s.)

Ruth stood in the kitchen, listening to the Volvo moving west on Parsonage Lane. Maybe her father would take Hannah back to New York. Maybe they would stay in Hannah’s apartment. They should be too embarrassed to spend another night together, Ruth thought. But her father, although he could be sheepish, was never embarrassed— and Hannah wasn’t even sorry! They would probably go to the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. And they would call later—both of them, but at different times. Ruth remembered that her father’s answering machine was off; she resolved that she would not answer the phone.

But when the phone rang only an hour later, Ruth thought it might be Allan. She answered it.

“I’m still thinking about playing squash with you,” Scott Saunders said.

“I’m not in the mood for squash,” Ruth lied. There was a golden quality to his skin, she remembered; his freckles were the color of the beach.

“If I can steal you away from your father,” Scott said, “how about dinner tomorrow night?”

Ruth had not been able to cook the dinner that Hannah had largely prepared; she knew she couldn’t eat. “I’m sorry—I’m not in the mood for dinner,” Ruth told the lawyer.

“Maybe you’ll change your mind tomorrow,” Scott said. Ruth could imagine his smile—the self-importance of it.

“Maybe . . .” Ruth confessed to him. Somehow she found the strength to hang up the phone.

She wouldn’t answer it again, although it rang and rang for half the night. Each time it rang, she hoped it wasn’t Allan and she wished she could bring herself to turn her father’s answering machine on. Most of the calls, she was sure, were from Hannah or her father.

And although she’d not found the energy to eat, she’d succeeded in drinking both bottles of the white wine. She’d covered the cut vegetables with some plastic wrapping, and she’d covered and refrigerated the washed rice. The shrimp, which were still in the refrigerator, would keep well for a night in their marinade, but to be sure Ruth had added the juice of another lemon. Maybe she’d feel like eating something tomorrow night. (Maybe with Scott Saunders.)