Too Many Men (10 page)

She had awakened that morning knowing that she had to run. Her first day in Poland with her father was bound to be difficult. She would need all the endorphins that running gave her. She had arranged to meet Edek for breakfast at 8 A.M. Eating with her father was full of pitfalls. She had to make sure that she was as balanced as she could be. She already felt much better than she did when she woke up. She turned into Al. Jerozolimskie.

At least there were some people in the street now.

Max had called her at five o’clock this morning.

T O O M A N Y M E N

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“I knew you’d be up,” Max had said brightly.

“Why are you calling me from home again, Max? What’s up?” she said.

“Nothing’s up,” Max said. “It’s only eleven P.M., it’s not that late. I’ve just got a couple of small queries. Nothing you’ll have to spend a lot of time on. I know you need this time to yourself.”

“Max darling, edit,” she had said. “I’m lying in bed with a stomachache.”

“I knew this trip would be too much for you,” Max said.

“I’ve got a stomachache because I’m premenstrual,” said Ruth. She had been lying in bed holding her stomach and thinking about her mother.

Jewish women in Auschwitz had had no periods, her mother had told her. They had been given medication to stop their menstruation. “We called it
brum,
this medicine,” her mother had said. “They gave it to us in the gray stuff they called soup. I could taste the
brum
even in the stinking taste of the soup.”

“I’ll be quick,” Max said to Ruth. “Can we do a letter about the morning after?”

“The morning after what?” Ruth asked.

“You know, the morning after,” said Max. “The morning after sex. A female client wants a ‘You-were-great-in-bed-last-night letter.’ She’s used us before, we did some thank-you letters for her.”

“Tell her we’ll be graphic but not pornographic,” Ruth said.

“Will you do it?” Max said. “I mean will you do the letter, not will you tell her.”

“I figured that out, Max,” Ruth said.

“We don’t have any letters about sex on file,” said Max.

“I’ll do it,” Ruth said. “Get me the basic information—names, place, et cetera, and some very general details.”

“Thanks,” said Max. “I’ve got only one more question. I’ve dealt with all the regular stuff while you’ve been gone, but we seem to have had more irregular requests than usual since you left.”

“I’ve only been gone for three days,” Ruth said. “What’s the question?”

“Right,” Max said. “The guy in the architect’s office upstairs wants to know if we’ll do a love letter.”

“Well, what’s the problem?” said Ruth.

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L I L Y B R E T T

“He wants to send it to another guy, and I wasn’t sure I could adapt one of the heterosexual love letters we’ve got on file,” said Max.

“I don’t think it should be too difficult,” Ruth said. “They’re all letters from one person in love to another.”

“I’m not sure I can do it,” Max said.

Ruth could tell that it had been a mistake to let Max know where she was. When Max couldn’t contact her Max was fine. She managed the business with surprising efficiency. With access to Ruth, the more indecisive parts of Max flourished.

“I told the architect we did all sorts of letters,” Max said. “I didn’t want him to think we discriminated against minorities.”

“Send me the details of the love letter he wants to send,” Ruth said.

“Thanks a million, Ruthie,” said Max.

Max was the only person, apart from Edek, who called her Ruthie. It had disconcerted her at first, but she was used to it now. She had been right, after all, she decided, to give Max her itinerary. She wasn’t sure that Max could handle a homosexual love letter on her own. Ruth had certain rules about letters that she had tried to drill into Max. “Don’t gush if you’re praising somebody,” she had said to her. “Don’t grovel if you are apologizing. Avoid all philosophizing in a letter of sympathy, and minimize the use of personal pronouns in condolence letters.”

Ruth had devised a different set of rules for business letters. Business letters were more straightforward. Max did most of the business letters now. But Ruth still had to do all of the company’s love letters. Max was too creative with love letters. She injected them with an intensity that appeared ominous. Ruth thought that Max was probably too young to do a good love letter.

Ruth liked writing the love letters. She often made herself cry writing a love letter. She would become so immersed in the letter that she would get a jolt when she realized that the sentiments that were making her cry were of her own fabrication. That the love that she was writing about had nothing to do with her. They were not her love letters. They were, for her, business letters.

Ruth hoped that she would never meet the recipients of some of the longer love letters that she had written. She felt she had shared too intimate an intimacy with these strangers. Ruth had had two particularly intimate T O O M A N Y M E N

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letters to write in the week before she left New York. A letter from a mother to her daughter. The mother wanted the letter to be included in her will. She wanted her daughter to know how much she loved her. The mother was fifty-five and looked in good health, to Ruth. She had noticed Ruth staring at her. “I’m not dying,” she had said. “I’m just making preparations for the event.”

When I am no longer here
, Ruth had written in the letter to the woman’s twenty-two-year-old daughter,
I want you to know that I will still be with
you. Part of me will always be part of you. I have not left you. You have occupied a large part of my heart. The best part of my heart. You will never have
to miss me and you will never have to have regrets. I will be with you. You
gave me all of your heart from the day you were born and you took all of me,
my good and my difficult parts, into your heart. You will have me, forever,
darling. And you will live a good life knowing that you knew me well. There
will be no unanswered questions, nothing unsaid that should have been said.

We had each other, in the best possible way, and we will always have each
other.
The woman had wept when she had picked up the letter. Ruth, to her embarrassment, had wept, too.

The other unusually intimate letter was also, coincidentally, connected with a will. Her client, Graham Long of Graham Long Bridal Designs, a large Long Island bridal wear company, often requested emotional letters.

The bridal business, Ruth had learned, was prone to ardent and overwrought transactions. Mr. Long’s recent request had been for a letter that would explain the discrepancy between the amount he was planning to leave to his daughter, in his will, and the amount that his son would receive.

Mr. Long wanted his daughter to be the main beneficiary of his will. For some strange reason, this had pleased Ruth.

Ruth had no idea why Mr. Long wanted his will to favor his daughter.

Ruth never asked more questions of a client than she needed to. It was partly out of efficiency, but also because she didn’t want to clutter her head with other people’s turmoil. She had enough disarray of her own to deal with.

Ruth encouraged her clients to be bold in all correspondence but particularly in letters to be read after their death. “Once you’re dead you can really say whatever you want to say,” she would say to them. “And you need never know the response.” The religious clients felt that they would be

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present in one form or another, after their death. They would, they felt, hear what was being said about them. An advantage of being religious that Ruth had not previously considered.

The clients mostly took Ruth’s advice. They were direct, and said those things they hadn’t been able to say in person. Mr. Long had told Ruth he felt much more tolerant toward his son, after he had set things out on paper.

“Our relationship is already better,” he said to Ruth.

“Well, you can always discard the letter and change the will if you become best friends,” Ruth had said to him.

“You’re so funny,” he had said. People often said that to Ruth. She didn’t think she was all that funny. She thought that she was just being sensible.

Ruth felt that letters could spread a goodwill that was hard to achieve in person. In a letter, you could eliminate your own awkwardness and the distraction or diversion of the recipient’s response. Letters enabled you to be the best you could be. If you found a lesser part of yourself creeping through, you could censor it.

You could consolidate good feelings, in a letter. You could confirm a warmth and an intimacy that was embarrassing for most people to communicate verbally. And a letter made endings less blunt. The end of a meal, the end of a meeting, the end of an evening, the end of a phone call. Ruth hated the sudden severance of intimacy that endings had. If she had enjoyed a meal with someone, she wanted to call the person as soon as she got home. After an enjoyable phone call she often wanted to call straight back. She restrained herself, most of the time. She didn’t want to look like a lunatic.

It seemed to Ruth that the closeness that could accumulate between people during an evening or a phone call disconnected itself so easily. That it was hard to stay plugged in to that connection. She felt that in the next call, or in the next meeting, the easiness that had developed, dissipated.

And you had to start from scratch.

The problem was probably more pronounced in Manhattan. In Manhattan, people seemed to skirt around each other. This detachment was carried out with considerable friendliness and an excess of endearments.

The word “love” was bandied about with abandon. We love you, I love T O O M A N Y M E N

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you, I love her, she loves me, they love me. You could hear this on the street, in cafés, in restaurants, in offices, and in buses and subways. You would have to be dead to avoid being the recipient of several of these emphatic announcements each day. Everyone spoke like this. It appeared, if you didn’t know any better, that love was in the air in Manhattan.

The truth was that it was hard to progress further than a formal relationship in New York. Further than a casual formality. The sort of formality that is forced upon people who know very little about each other’s lives.

You never knew when you met someone, in New York, what they had been doing or what they had been through since you last met. You didn’t hear about the good things and you didn’t hear about the bad. If you were lucky, you heard their bad news after it had been rectified. In New York, you couldn’t talk about an illness until you had completely recovered. You could talk about the job you lost, as long as you were safely ensconced in a new job. New Yorkers hated bad news. They switched off more easily to bad news than they did when they discovered that someone couldn’t be of use to them. Usefulness, in New York, was often defined as career further-ment.

Ruth liked to know about people’s illnesses and difficulties. It made friends and acquaintances more real to her, more three-dimensional. In New York, it was easy to think of people’s lives as one efficient, if frustrat-ing, transaction after another. She felt bad if she discovered that someone she knew had been ill and alone in his or her apartment. An Australian journalist who lived close by Ruth had been bedridden for two weeks last year with a respiratory infection. “Why didn’t you call?” Ruth had said when the journalist told her she had felt so sick that she had thought she was going to die. “I didn’t want to bother anyone,” the journalist had said.

“Will you promise to call, if it happens again?” Ruth said. “Okay,” the journalist had said. But Ruth knew that she wouldn’t. And she knew that she, too, would remain mute, if she was in trouble. It just seemed to be the way, in New York City.

On the rare occasions in New York when Ruth had felt at home in someone’s company or in someone’s home, she had wanted to stay. Like a child who didn’t want to go home after a party. Or a kid who couldn’t bear to be wrenched away from a friend. But adults couldn’t just say, “Can I stay

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L I L Y B R E T T

with you?” Adults were supposed to be able to separate. Supposed to
be
separate.

Max had had trouble separating from her this morning, Ruth thought.

Max had phoned her three times. The last call seemed really unnecessary.

“We need someone else to do handwritten letters,” Max had said. “I don’t have the time.”

“What about Bern?” Ruth said.

“His handwriting is hopeless,” Max said.

“I’ll think about what to do when I get back,” Ruth had said.

Ruth stopped at the traffic light on the corner of Krakowskie Przedmiescie and Królewska. She had managed to miss every red light so far on her run this morning. She loved missing the red lights. It made her feel lucky.

The lights changed. She started running again. Another ten minutes and she’d be done.

“I can see you do not know still with whom you are speaking,” the voice said. Ruth’s heart started racing. This couldn’t be happening to her again.

“I will make it easy for you,” the voice said. “My name is Rudolf.” Ruth broke into a sweat. Sweat ran down her face. Her whole body felt damp.

She stopped running.

“The name Rudolf is surely familiar, to you,” the voice said. Ruth took off her earphones and looked around her. There was no one there.

“Rudolf,” the voice said. Ruth put her hands over her ears. “You do not hear me through your ears,” the voice said.

Ruth felt as though she was going to vomit. She had felt this feeling of biliousness before, when she had stopped running too suddenly. She was, she decided, tense about her father. There was no one talking to her. There was no voice. There was nothing but a normal Warsaw street.

“I can see that it will be necessary for me to introduce myself,” the voice said. “I am Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss.” Ruth leaned against the building she was standing in front of. Maybe if she did vomit she would feel better. “Rudolf Höss,” the voice said. “Commandant of Auschwitz from 1940