A Widow for One Year (78 page)

The Stanhope stationery lent to the letter a formality, or at least a distance, that she hadn’t intended. Such a letter, Ruth thought, should begin “Dear Mother,” but “Mommy” was what she’d called her mother; and it was what Graham called Ruth, which meant more to Ruth than anything else in the world. She knew she’d re-entered the world the instant she handed the letter to the concierge at the Stanhope—just before leaving for Europe.

“It’s to
Canada,
” Ruth pointed out. “Please be sure you use the right postage.”

“Of course,” the concierge said.

They were in the lobby of the Stanhope, which was dominated by an ornate grandfather’s clock; it had been the first thing Graham recognized when they’d come into the hotel from Fifth Avenue. Now the porter was wheeling their luggage past the imposing face of the clock. The porter’s name was Mel. He’d always been especially attentive to Graham; he’d also been the porter on duty when Allan’s body had been removed from the hotel. Probably Mel had helped with the body, but Ruth didn’t really want to remember
everything
.

Graham, holding Amanda’s hand, followed their luggage out of the Stanhope, onto Fifth Avenue, where their limousine was waiting.

“Good-bye, clock!” Graham said.

As the car was pulling away, Ruth called good-bye to Mel.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Cole,” Mel replied.

So
that’s
who I am! Ruth Cole decided. She’d never changed her name, of course—she was too famous to change her name. She’d never actually become Mrs. Albright. But she was a widow who still felt married; she was
Mrs
. Cole. I’ll be Mrs. Cole forever, Ruth thought.

“Good-bye, Mel’s hotel!” Graham called.

They drove away from the fountains in front of the Met, and the flapping flags, and the dark-green awning of the Stanhope, under which a waiter was rushing to attend to the only couple who didn’t find the day too cold to be sitting at one of the sidewalk tables. From Graham’s view, sunk into the backseat of the dark limo, the Stanhope reached into the sky—maybe even to heaven itself.

“Good-bye, Daddy!” the little boy called.

Better Than Being in Paris with a Prostitute

Traveling internationally with a four-year-old requires a devout attention to basic idiocies that may be taken for granted at home. The taste (even the color) of the orange juice demands an explanation. A croissant is not always a
good
croissant. And the device for flushing a toilet, not to mention exactly how the toilet flushes or what sort of noise it makes, becomes a matter of grave concern. While Ruth was fortunate that her son was toilet-trained, she was nonetheless exasperated that there were toilets the boy didn’t dare sit on. And Graham could not comprehend jet lag, yet he had it; the boy was constipated, but he couldn’t understand that this was a direct result of what he refused to eat and drink.

In London, because the cars were on the wrong side of the street, Ruth would not let Amanda and Graham
cross
a street, except to go to the small park nearby; beyond this unadventuresome expedition, the boy and his nanny were confined to the hotel. And Graham discovered that there was starch in the bedsheets at the Connaught. Was starch
alive
? he wanted to know. “It
feels
alive,” the child said.

As they left London for Amsterdam, Ruth wished that, in London, she’d been half as courageous as Amanda Merton. The forthright girl had achieved a measurable success: Graham was over his jet lag, he was
un
constipated, and he was no longer afraid of foreign toilets—whereas Ruth had reason to doubt that she’d re-entered the world with even a vestige of her former authority on display.

While she’d previously taken her interviewers to task for not bothering to read her books before they talked to her, this time Ruth had suffered the indignity in silence. To spend three or four years writing a novel, and then to waste an hour or more talking to a journalist who hadn’t taken the time to
read
it . . . well, if this didn’t demonstrate a sizable lack of self-esteem, what did? (And
My Last Bad Boyfriend
wasn’t a long novel, either.)

With a meekness that was most uncharacteristic, Ruth had also tolerated an oft-repeated and utterly predictable question, which had nothing to do with her new novel: namely, how was she “coping” with being a widow, and had she found anything in her actual experience of widowhood to contradict what she’d written about being a widow in her previous work of fiction?

“No,” said Mrs. Cole, as she’d begun to think of herself. “Everything is just about as bad as I imagined it.”

In Amsterdam, not surprisingly, a
different
“oft-repeated and utterly predictable question” was a favorite among the Dutch journalists. They wanted to know how Ruth had conducted her research in the red-light district. Had she actually hidden in a window prostitute’s wardrobe closet and watched a prostitute have sex with a customer? (No, she had
not,
Ruth replied.) Had
her
“last bad boyfriend” been Dutch? (
Absolutely not,
the author declared. But even as she spoke, she was on the lookout for Wim—she was certain he would put in an appearence.) And why was a so-called literary novelist interested in prostitutes in the first place? (She wasn’t
personally
interested in prostitutes, Ruth answered.)

It was a shame, most of her interviewers said, that she had singled out
de Wallen
for such scrutiny. Had nothing else about the city caught her attention?

“Don’t be provincial,” Ruth told her interrogators. “
My Last Bad Boyfriend
is not
about
Amsterdam. The main character isn’t
Dutch
. There is simply an
episode
that takes place here. What happens to the main character in Amsterdam compels her to change her life. It’s the story of her life that interests me, especially her desire to
change
her life. Many people encounter moments in their lives that convince them to change.”

Predictably, the journalists then asked her: What such moments have
you
encountered? And: What changes have you made in
your
life?

“I’m a novelist,” Mrs. Cole would say then. “I haven’t written a memoir—I’ve written a novel. Please ask me about my novel.”

Reading her interviews in the newspapers, Harry Hoekstra wondered why Ruth Cole put herself through such tedium and trivia. Why be interviewed at all? Surely her books didn’t
need
the publicity. Why didn’t she just stay at home and start another novel? But I suppose she likes to travel, Harry thought.

He’d already heard her give a reading from her new novel; he’d also seen her on a local television show, and he’d watched her at a book-signing at the Athenaeum, where Harry had cleverly positioned himself behind a bookshelf. By removing no more than a half-dozen titles from the shelf, he could closely observe how Ruth Cole handled her fans. Her most avid readers had formed a line for her autograph, and while Ruth sat at a table signing and signing, Harry had a largely unobstructed view of her profile. Through the window he’d made in the bookshelf, Harry saw that there
was
a flaw in Ruth’s right eye—as he’d guessed from her book-jacket photo. And she really
did
have great breasts.

Although Ruth signed books for more than an hour without complaint, there was one mildly shocking occurrence. It suggested to Harry that Ruth was a lot less friendly than she’d at first appeared; indeed, at some level, Ruth struck Harry as one of the angriest people he’d ever seen.

Harry had always been attracted to people who contained a lot of anger. As a police officer, he’d found that
un
contained anger was nothing but a menace to him. Whereas
contained
anger greatly appealed to him, and he believed that people who weren’t angry at all were basically unobservant.

The woman who caused the trouble was in line for an autograph; she was elderly, and at the outset she appeared innocent of any wrongdoing, which is only to say she’d done nothing wrong that Harry could
see
. When it was her turn, she presented herself at the front of the line and put on the table an English edition of
My Last Bad Boyfriend
. A shy-looking (and equally elderly) man stood beside her. He was smiling down at Ruth—the old woman was smiling down at Ruth, too. The problem seemed to be that Ruth failed to recognize her.

“Should I inscribe this for you, or for someone in your family?” Ruth asked the old lady, whose smile lessened noticeably.

“To me, please,” the old woman said.

She had an innocuous American accent. But there was a false sweetness to the “please.” Ruth waited politely . . . no, perhaps a
little
impatiently . . . for the woman to tell her what her name was. They went on looking at each other, the recognition
not
coming to Ruth Cole.

“My name is Muriel Reardon,” the old lady finally said. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“No, I’m sorry,” Ruth said. “I don’t.”

“I last spoke to you at your wedding,” Muriel Reardon continued. “I’m sorry for what I said at the time. I’m afraid I wasn’t myself.”

Ruth went on looking at Mrs. Reardon, the color in her right eye changing from brown to amber. She hadn’t recognized the terrible old widow who’d been so certain of herself in her attack, five years ago, for two understandable reasons: she’d had no expectations of ever running into the harpy in
Amsterdam,
and the old hag had remarkably improved her appearance. Quite the opposite of being dead, as Hannah had declared, the wrathful widow had restored herself very nicely.

“It’s one of those coincidences that can’t be merely a coincidence,” Mrs. Reardon was saying, in a way that suggested she was newly religious. She was. In the five years since she’d assaulted Ruth, Muriel had met and married
Mr
. Reardon, who was still beaming beside her, and both Muriel
and
her new husband had become avid Christians.

Mrs. Reardon continued: “Begging your forgiveness was strangely foremost on my mind when my husband and I came to Europe—and here, of all places, I find you! It’s a miracle!”

Mr. Reardon overcame his shyness to say: “I was a widower when I met Muriel. We’re on a tour to see the great churches and cathedrals of Europe.”

Ruth went on looking at Mrs. Reardon in what seemed to Harry Hoekstra an increasingly
un
friendly way. As far as Harry was concerned, Christians always wanted something. What Mrs. Reardon wanted was to dictate the terms of her own forgiveness!

Ruth’s eyes had narrowed to the point where no one could have spotted the hexagonal flaw in her right eye. “You remarried,” she said flatly. It was the voice she read aloud in—curiously deadpan.

“Please forgive me,” Muriel Reardon said.

“What happened to being a widow for the rest of your miserable life?” Ruth asked.

“Please . . .” Mrs. Reardon said.

Mr. Reardon, after fumbling in the pocket of his sports jacket, produced an assortment of note cards with handwriting on them. He seemed to be searching for a specific card, which he couldn’t find. Undaunted, he began to read spontaneously. “ ‘For the wages of sin is death,’ ” Mr. Reardon read, “‘but the gift of God is eternal life. . . .’”

“Not
that
one!” Mrs. Reardon cried. “Read her the one about
forgiveness
!”

“I
don’t
forgive you,” Ruth told her. “What you said to me was hateful and cruel and untrue.”

“‘For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace,’” Mr. Reardon read from another card. Although it was not the quotation he was looking for, either, he felt obliged to identify the source. “These are from Paul’s letter to the Romans.”

“You and your
Romans,
” Mrs. Reardon snapped.

“Next!” Ruth called—for the next person in line had every reason to be impatient with the delay.

“I don’t forgive you for not forgiving me!” Muriel Reardon cried out, an
un
-Christian venom in her voice.

“Fuck you and
both
your husbands!” Ruth shouted after her, as her new husband struggled to lead her away. He’d returned the biblical quotations to his jacket pocket—all but one. Possibly it was the quotation he’d been searching for, but no one would ever know.

Harry had assumed that the somewhat shocked-looking man seated beside Ruth Cole was her Dutch publisher. When Ruth smiled at Maarten, it wasn’t a smile Harry had seen on Ruth’s face before, but Harry correctly interpreted the smile as indicative of a renewed self-confidence. Indeed, it was evidence that Ruth had re-entered the world with
some
of her former assertiveness intact.

“Who was
that
asshole?” Maarten asked her.

“Nobody worth knowing,” Ruth replied. She paused then, in mid-signature, and looked around as if she were suddenly curious about who might have overheard her uncharitable remark—meaning
all
her uncharitable remarks. (Was it Brecht who said that sooner or later we begin to resemble our enemies? Ruth thought.)

When Harry saw that Ruth was looking at him, he withdrew his face from the window he’d made in the bookshelf, but not before she’d seen him.

Shit! I’m falling in love with her! Harry thought. He’d not fallen in love before; at first he suspected he was having a heart attack. He abruptly left the Athenaeum; he preferred to die on the street.

When the line for Ruth Cole’s autograph had dwindled to only two or three remaining diehards, one of the booksellers asked: “Where’s Harry? I saw him here. Doesn’t he want his books signed?”

“Who’s Harry?” Ruth inquired.

“He’s your biggest fan,” the bookseller told her. “He also happens to be a cop. But I guess he’s gone. It’s the first time I’ve seen him at a signing, and he hates readings.”