A Widow for One Year (48 page)

“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.)

Ruth lay in bed, listening to Scott flushing the condom down the toilet in the master bathroom. After Scott had come back to bed—he’d almost instantly fallen asleep—Ruth lay awake listening to the dishwasher. It was in the final rinse cycle, and it sounded to her as if two wineglasses were rubbing against each other.

Scott Saunders had fallen asleep with his left hand holding her right breast. Ruth was not terribly comfortable, but now that Scott was sound asleep and snoring, his hand no longer held her breast; rather, the hand pressed its dead weight against her like a sleeping dog’s paw.

Ruth tried to remember the rest of the George Eliot passage about marriage. She didn’t even know which George Eliot novel the quotation was from, although Ruth distinctly recalled copying the passage into one of her diaries long ago.

Now, as she was falling asleep, it occurred to Ruth that Eddie O’Hare might know which novel the passage was from. At least it would give her an excuse to call him. (In fact, if she’d called Eddie, he wouldn’t have known the passage—Eddie wasn’t a George Eliot fan. Eddie would have called his father. Minty O’Hare, even in his retirement, would have known which George Eliot novel the passage came from.)

“ ‘. . . to strengthen each other in all labor . . .’ ” Ruth whispered to herself, reciting the passage from memory. She had no fear of waking up Scott, not the way he was snoring. And the wineglasses went on grinding together in the dishwasher. It had been so long since the telephone had rung that Ruth felt the world had fallen sound asleep; whoever had been calling (and calling) had given up. “. . . to rest on each other in all sorrow . . .” George Eliot had written about marriage. “ ‘. . .to minister to each other in all pain,’ ” Ruth recited, “ ‘to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting . . .’ ” It sounded like a pretty good idea to Ruth Cole, who finally fell asleep beside an unknown man, whose breathing was as loud as a brass band.

The phone rang almost a dozen times before Ruth heard it. Scott Saunders didn’t wake up until Ruth answered the phone. She felt his paw revive against her breast.

“Hello,” Ruth said. When she opened her eyes, it took her a second to recognize her father’s digital clock. It took a second, too, before the paw on her breast reminded her of where she was, and in what circumstances—and why she hadn’t wanted to answer the phone.

“I’ve been so worried about you,” Allan Albright said. “I’ve been calling and calling.”

“Oh, Allan . . .” Ruth said. It was a little after two in the morning. The dishwasher had stopped. The dryer had stopped long before the dishwasher. The paw against her breast had become a hand again; it cupped her breast firmly. “I was asleep,” Ruth said.

“I thought you might be
dead
!” Allan told her.

“I had a fight with my father—I haven’t been answering the phone,” Ruth explained. The hand had let go of her breast. She saw the same hand reach across her body and open the top drawer under the night table. The hand chose a condom, another blue one; the hand also removed the tube of jelly from the drawer.

“I tried to call your friend Hannah. Wasn’t she going to be out there with you?” Allan asked. “But I kept getting her answering machine—I don’t even know if she got my message.”

“
Don’t
talk to Hannah—I had a fight with her, too,” Ruth told him.

“So you’re all alone out there?” Allan asked her.

“Yes, I’m alone,” Ruth answered. She tried to lie on her side with her legs tight together, but Scott Saunders was strong; he was able to pull her up on her knees. He’d put enough lubricating jelly on the condom so that he slipped inside her with surprising ease; it momentarily took her breath away.

“What?” Allan said.

“I feel terrible,” Ruth told him. “Let me call you in the morning.”

“I could come out there,” Allan said.

“No!” Ruth said—to Allan
and
to Scott.

She rested her weight on her elbows and her forehead; she kept trying to lie flat on her stomach, but Scott pulled her hips into him so forcefully that it was more comfortable for her to stay on her knees. The top of her head kept bumping the headboard of the bed. She wanted to say good night to Allan but her breathing was jerky. Besides, Scott had jammed her so far forward that she couldn’t reach the night table to return the telephone to its cradle.

“I love you,” Allan told her. “I’m sorry.”

“No,
I’m
sorry,” Ruth managed to say, before Scott Saunders took the phone from her and hung it up. Then he cupped both her breasts in his hands, squeezing them until they ached, and he humped her from behind, like a dog—the way Eddie O’Hare had humped her mother.

Fortunately Ruth did not remember the episode of the inadequate lamp shade in great detail, but her memory was sufficient for her to never want to be in the same position herself. Now she was in it. She had to push back against Scott with all her strength or her head would have kept bumping against the headboard.

She’d been sleeping on her right shoulder, which was sore from all the squash, but her right shoulder didn’t hurt her as much as Scott Saunders hurt her. There was something about the position itself that hurt her—it wasn’t only a matter of her memory of it. And Scott’s grip on her breasts was much rougher than she liked.

“Please stop,” she asked him, but he could feel her pushing her hips back against him and he humped her all the harder.

When he was finished with her, Ruth lay on her left side, facing the empty bed; she listened to Scott flushing away another condom. At first she felt she was bleeding, but it was only an excess of the lubricating jelly. When Scott came back to bed, he tried to touch her breasts again. Ruth pushed his hand away.

“I told you I didn’t like it that way,” she said to him.

“I got the right hole, didn’t I?” he asked her.

“I told you I didn’t like it from behind—period,” she said.

“Come on, your hips were moving. You liked it,” Scott told her.

She knew that she’d had to move her hips against him so that she wouldn’t keep bumping her head on the headboard. Maybe he knew it, too. But all Ruth said was: “You hurt me.”

“Come on,” Scott said. He reached for her breasts again, but she pushed his hand away.

“When a woman says ‘No’—when she says ‘Please stop’—well . . . what’s it mean when a man
won’t
stop?” Ruth asked. “Isn’t that a little like rape?”

He rolled over on the bed, turning his back to her. “Come on. You’re talking to a lawyer,” he told her.

“No, I’m talking to an asshole,” she said.

“So . . . who was the phone call?” Scott asked. “Someone important?”

“More important than you are,” Ruth told him.

“Given the circumstances,” the lawyer said, “I presume he isn’t
that
important.”

“Please get out of here,” Ruth said. “Please just go.”

“Okay, okay,” he told her. But when she returned from the bathroom, he’d fallen back to sleep. He was lying on his side, his arms reaching out to what had been her side of the bed; he was taking up the whole bed.

“Get up! Get out of here!” she shouted, but either he was sound asleep again or he was pretending to be.

In retrospect, Ruth might have deliberated a little longer on her next decision. She opened the condom drawer and took out the tube of lubricating jelly, which she squirted into Scott’s exposed left ear. The stuff came out of the tube a lot faster than she expected; it had a more liquid consistency than normal jelly, and it woke up Scott Saunders in a hurry.

“Time to go,” Ruth reminded him. She was completely unprepared for him to hit her. With left-handers, there’s always something you don’t see coming.

Scott hit her only once, but it was a solid shot. One second he was holding his left ear with his left hand; then he was out of the bed, facing her. He caught Ruth on her right cheekbone with a straight left that she never saw. As she lay on the rug, approximately where she’d seen Hannah’s open suitcase, Ruth realized that Hannah had been right again: Ruth’s alleged instincts for detecting a man’s capacity for violence against women, even on the very first date, were not the instincts she’d thought she had. Hannah had told her she’d just been lucky. (“You just haven’t had
that
date,” Hannah had warned her.) Now she had.

Ruth let the room stop spinning before she tried to move. Again she thought she was bleeding, but it was only the jelly that Scott had got on his left hand when he’d touched his left ear.