Too Many Men (6 page)

Ruth had wondered why Garth bothered to keep in contact with his parents at all. They didn’t seem to love him. “You were born nothing and you’ll die nothing,” Garth’s father had said to him the day Garth introduced Ruth to them. Ruth had squirmed and wished she hadn’t asked to meet the Taylors. Ruth knew that Garth had had very little as a child. She hadn’t realized how little. She knew that he had walked the three miles to school and back, in bare feet, until he was twelve. His parents’ lack of warmth and apparent lack of interest overwhelmed Ruth. She couldn’t wait to leave their house.

The Taylors still lived in the same small fibrous cement house, in an outer suburb of Sydney, that Garth grew up in. Garth had moved on. He had moved into the middle-class world of art and literature. He wrote art reviews for a national newspaper and had regular exhibitions of his paintings in galleries around the country. “I’d rather have all the combined neu-roses of every Jewish parent than have your parents,” Ruth had said to Garth after they left his parents’ place. “They’re very cold,” she said.

“They tried their best,” he said. “My mother was sixteen when she had me and my father was nineteen.”

“They don’t have to be so cruel,” she said.

“They can’t help it,” he said.

“Why aren’t you angry with them?” she had said to him.

“I’m just not,” he said. “I feel sorry for them.”

Garth found it hard to be angry. He couldn’t even make a dismissive comment about anyone he knew. He went out of his way not to hurt or offend anybody. Ruth was rude for him. She had a sharp tongue and she used it liberally. Resentments and irritations flew out of her. Garth laughed at them.

Garth laughed a lot. And Ruth laughed with him. They laughed at how T O O M A N Y M E N

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happy they were with each other. And Garth wept. He wept with joy. Ruth, who had barely been able to cry, even when she was in pain, wept with him.

He didn’t seem to mind her anxiety or her fear. “I’m freeing you of the need to feel those things,” she joked with him. “You can feel them vicari-ously through me.” He smiled at her. His smile lifted her. It lifted her spirits and overrode many of her fears. She had never been so happy. She knew it had to end. It ended the day his wife called to say she wanted him back.

He had married someone he didn’t like very much and he had stayed married to her while she humiliated him by laughing at him in his yellow nylon pajamas, or by lying to him about the various men she took on as lovers.

“She bought me the pajamas,” Garth said to Ruth.

“Why did you wear them?” Ruth asked.

“I thought they were just pajamas,” he said. Garth spoke about his wife with kindness and understanding. “She’s not a bad person,” he said. “She just has some problems.”

“The humiliation of her affairs must have reminded you of the humiliation your father made you feel,” Ruth said to him. “The humiliation and the degradation must have felt like love.”

When Garth’s wife drove through the restaurant window, he came to see Ruth. “She really needs me,” he said to Ruth, weeping. “I’m worried about what she’ll do to herself if I’m not there.”

“Well, you better be there,” Ruth had said.

“You should have fought for him,” her girlfriend Cathy had said.

“I don’t want anyone who doesn’t want me,” Ruth said.

“He does want you,” she said. “He just needs help extricating himself from her.”

“Then he doesn’t want me enough,” Ruth said. She left for New York two months later.

Garth had called Ruth several times in the last few years. Three years after he went back to his wife he had left for good. He had given her the house and the car that had replaced the one that she had smashed. Whenever Garth called, Ruth made sure that she exuded friendliness and warmth. But she gave him no information about her life. She gave him nothing but politeness. And she made sure that she was the one to say good-bye first.

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L I L Y B R E T T

Sometimes when Ruth stayed in expensive hotels she thought of Garth.

He loved cheap motels. She understood this. There was an immediacy to a cheap motel. Everything was what it appeared to be. Nothing was dressed up or masked behind a multitude of pillows and bolsters or sleep masks, slippers, and shoehorns. The kettle was there to boil water, not to show you that the management cared. There were the grunts and coughs of the other guests and, sometimes, someone else’s pubic hair on your blanket. But she understood why Garth preferred this world of lodgings to the five-star circuit she was on now.

In expensive hotels, guests never acknowledged each other. No one spoke at breakfast, unless it was to someone they already knew. It seemed to be an unwritten rule. If you broke the rule and said good morning, you were viewed with suspicion. The wealthy and the successful, it seemed to Ruth, indicated their status and power by a lack of friendliness. An affecta-tion intended, Ruth thought, to let the world know that they already knew too many people. As if a sign of interest in a stranger might reveal a vulner-ability or a curiosity that could disqualify them from their own ranks.

Why was she thinking about Garth now? Ruth thought. Probably because she knew that her father still saw him. Edek and Garth spoke on the phone now and then, and had dinner together once or twice a year.

Edek periodically gave Ruth news about Garth.

Edek always tried to bring up the subject casually. “I did see Garth,” he would say. “He is still by himself. Not married.” Edek’s nonchalance would last less than a minute.

“You are a stupid girl, Ruthie,” he would say. “What did he do to you that was so bad?”

“Nothing,” she would say.

“Why won’t you give him a chance?” Edek would say.

“For how long does he have to suffer?” Edek had asked the last time he had brought the subject of Garth up.

“No one is suffering, Dad,” she’d said. “If you love him so much marry him yourself,” she had suddenly shouted. “I’m sick of hearing about him.”

“Sorry,” Edek had said. “I thought maybe you would see it a bit differently now.” That was two years ago. Her outburst had surprised her and shocked Edek. Edek hadn’t mentioned Garth since.

“You experience anything that feels bad to you as a permanent situaT O O M A N Y M E N

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tion,” one of her shrinks had said to her. “If it is raining, you think it will rain forever. If there is noise in a neighbor’s apartment you think it will never stop. You have trouble seeing these situations as transitory. That’s why you can’t forgive people. You think they, like you, are still connected to the incident or the argument or the difficulty that made you both feel bad. They have forgotten, but you haven’t.” There were some things, Ruth thought, when the shrink had finished, that shouldn’t be forgotten.

Ruth hadn’t thought about Garth this much for years. She had been too attached to Garth. That sort of attachment came affixed to a flood of anxiety for her. She had worried about his well-being. If she woke up, in the middle of the night, she checked that he was still breathing. If he was late to meet her, she envisaged him bloodied and broken, in an ambulance. If he caught a cold, she enlarged the outcome to include bronchial pneumonia or a new strain of flu that had no cure. It was exhausting. Attachments were enervating.

She had had less anxiety since she had been unattached. She had been on dates with different men over the years. She hated the word “date.”

Americans used “date” whether they were referring to sixteen- or sixty-year-olds. It was hard to come up with a better word. “Rendezvous” or

“assignation” suggested a mystery that wasn’t present on most dates. An evening of “social intercourse” was too wordy, although it did possess the stilted quality of many dates. So Ruth, too, used the word “date.”

Her dates had been, mostly, unmemorable. She found New York men unexpectedly juvenile. They prevaricated over insubstantial issues, small things, like the choice of a cup of coffee, with as much indecision and intensity as a young girl. “I’ll have a café latte with skinny milk and a dust-ing of cinnamon, not chocolate, on the top,” the last man she had gone out with had said. “No, make that a skinny cappuccino and hold the cinnamon,” he had said, before he settled for an iced coffee made with skim milk, and Sweet’n Low, not NutraSweet.

It was not manly to be that fussy, Ruth thought. But just being a man was enough, in New York. If you were a man, you were desirable and in demand. Possibly this made New York men more self-centered. Maybe if women were in the same position, they would dispense with the need to be thoughtful and interesting, too.

“Why don’t you like me?” the latte/cappuccino/iced coffee man had

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L I L Y B R E T T

said to her when she refused his second invitation. “I’m practicing moderation in my attachments,” she said. “Hey,” he had said, “I’m a long way from asking you to marry me.”

Ruth felt light-headed. She had walked to the outskirts of Warsaw and back. The outlying areas of Warsaw were as unattractive as the outskirts of any city she had seen. Gray concrete housing projects were everywhere.

Building after building was the same. Drab, dilapidated, and depressing.

She was glad to be back near the university. She needed to eat. She stopped at a café full of students. If there were so many students eating there, she thought, the food must be either very good or very cheap.

Inside, the café was noisy and humid. Ruth stood in line at the buffet.

She took a large plate of kasha and a bowl of beetroot salad. Kasha, boiled buckwheat, was a dish her mother had often made. She sat at a table with two young women, who smiled when she joined them, and moved over to make more room for her. Ruth felt grateful for their friendliness. She ate the kasha with relish. It was very good.

Ruth thought about the gypsy woman. “These gypsies are psychic,” the young man had said. If there were psychic people, Ruth thought, why couldn’t they see her skepticism and leave her alone. When she was sixteen, a fortune-teller at a circus had called out to Ruth to tell her she would one day meet a man with a large scar who would play a very important part in her life. It was a small circus, set up in a seaside suburb of Melbourne for the summer. There were holes in the circus tent and the ringmaster’s wig kept slipping. The two circus lions looked moth-eaten and drugged. The fortune-teller sat at a table, near the entrance to the tent. She also sold soft drinks.

“It is a very large scar,” she had said to Ruth. Ruth exchanged glances with the girlfriend she was with.

“Oh yeah,” they said to each other. The oh yeah of sarcastic, sophisticated sixteen-year-olds. As Ruth was leaving, the fortune-teller called her back. “I can see it,” she said. “It is on his chest. The scar runs vertically from the top of his rib cage to his waist.” Ruth’s sarcasm was temporarily subdued. “Thank you,” she had said to the fortune-teller. For years Ruth made jokes about scouring the emergency rooms of hospitals to look for the man of her dreams.

The noise and heat of the student café were too much for Ruth. She fin-T O O M A N Y M E N

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ished her meal and left. She was, she decided, too old to be with so many young people. She’d go back to the hotel. She looked at her watch. She had enough time for a quick swim.

The pool at the Bristol was small. Ruth swam up and down. She tried to turn at the end of each lap without stopping. That way she could get some sort of cardiovascular benefit from this swim. It was hard to get your heart-beat rate up by swimming. Unless you were a very good swimmer, and Ruth wasn’t.

Her mother and father were very impressed when she learned to swim as a child. “Look how she swims,” they said to each other. It was not such a great accomplishment. All Australian schoolchildren were given swimming lessons. But Rooshka and Edek continued to see it as extraordinary. “Look how she swims,” they said to each other and anyone else in the vicinity each time they went to the beach. The excessive admiration bothered Ruth a bit, but she kept quiet. She was pleased that she was pleasing them. Ruth thought that not many people in Poland must have been swimmers. Or maybe it was just Jews who were not at home in the water.

Something disturbed Ruth’s reverie about her father. It was a voice. “I should tell you my initials,” the voice said. “My initials are R. F. F. H.” Ruth stopped swimming. There was no one else in the pool. There was no one else in the room.

“Maybe I make it easier for you?” the voice said. “My initials are R. H.”

Ruth swam to the edge of the pool. She got out. She shook her head.

She must have water in her ears. Water in her ears often disoriented her.

She should have worn a cap. She felt sick. Waterlogged ears had left her off-balance and nauseated before. She toweled herself dry.

She looked around. There was definitely no one in the pool. No one in the room. She started to feel better. There was no voice. It must have been her imagination. “You’ve got more imagination than is good for you,” a schoolteacher had said to her when she was six.

There was still some water left in her left ear. She leaned over and hopped up and down on one leg. She felt the water trickle out. She looked around again. There was nobody in the room. Her imagination must have been working overtime.

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L I L Y B R E T T

She was always imagining things. Imagining lines for other people.

Inventing sentences for others to say. She did this in her working life, and in her life outside the office. She prepared herself for every encounter by rehearsing the anticipated conversation. She gave her dentist and her doctor dialogue. “I need my head elevated, and I like to sit up between procedures,” she would practice saying to the dentist before every appointment.

“That’s fine. I know you’re anxious about dental treatment,” was the reply she would make up for the dentist.

Ruth rehearsed her lines so thoroughly that she often forgot that the real conversation had not yet taken place. And she was shocked, in real life, when others detoured from the dialogue she had given them. And even more shocked when she herself made the departure.