by John Irving
Allan’s notion was that you ignored the first and the second rudeness. If someone baited you or was plainly hostile to you a third time, then you let him have it. Maybe this was too gentlemanly a principle for Ruth to adhere to.
The sight of Allan with his head in his hands caused Ruth to resent his demonstrable disapproval. Why was she so frequently in a mood to find fault with him? For the most part, she admired Allan’s habits—at least his work habits—and she had no doubt that he was a good influence on her.
What Ruth Cole needed was an editor for her life more than for her novels. (Even Hannah Grant would have agreed with her.)
“Next question?” Ruth asked. She had tried to sound cheerful, even inviting, but there was no hiding the animosity in her voice. She’d not extended an invitation to her audience; she’d issued a challenge.
“Where do you get your ideas?” some innocent soul asked the author; it was someone unseen, a strangely sexless voice in the vast hall. Allan rolled his eyes. It was what Allan called “the shopping question”: the homey speculation that one shopped for the ingredients in a novel.
“My novels aren’t ideas—I don’t have any ideas,” Ruth replied. “I begin with the characters, which leads me to the problems that the characters are prone to have, which yields a story—every time.” ( Backstage, Eddie felt as if he should be taking notes.)
“Is it true that you never had a job, a real job?” It was the impertinent young man again, the one who’d asked her why she repeated herself. She hadn’t called on him; he was at her again, uninvited.
It was true that Ruth had never had a “real” job, but before Ruth could respond to the insinuating question, Allan Albright stood up and turned around, doubtless in order to address the uncivil young man in the back of the concert hall.
“Being a writer is a real job, you asshole!” Allan said. Ruth knew he’d been counting. By his count, he’d been nice twice.
Medium applause followed Allan’s outburst. When Allan turned toward the stage, to face Ruth, he gave her his characteristic cue—the thumb of his right hand drawn across his throat like a knife. This meant: Get off the stage.
“Thank you, thank you again,” Ruth told the audience. On her way backstage, she stopped once. She turned and waved to the audience; their applause was still warm.
“How come you don’t autograph books? Every other writer signs books!” her persecutor called.
Before she continued on her way backstage, Allan stood and turned again. Ruth didn’t have to watch him; she already knew that Allan would give her tormentor the finger. Allan was extraordinarily fond of giving people the finger.
I really do like him—and he really will take care of me, she thought. Yet Ruth couldn’t deny that Allan also irritated her.
Back in the greenroom, Allan irritated her again. The first thing he said to her was: “You never mentioned the title of the book!”
“I just forgot,” Ruth said. What was he— always an editor?
“I didn’t think you were going to read the first chapter,” Allan added. “You told me you thought it was too comic, and that it didn’t represent the novel as a whole.”
“I changed my mind,” Ruth told him. “I decided I wanted to be comic.”
“You were no barrel of laughs in the Q and A,” he reminded her.
“At least I didn’t call anyone an ‘asshole,’ ” Ruth said.
“I gave the guy his two times,” Allan replied.
An elderly lady with a shopping bag of books had negotiated her way backstage. She’d lied to someone who had tried to stop her—she’d said she was Ruth’s mother. She tried to lie to Eddie, too. She found Eddie standing in the doorway of the greenroom; indecisive as always, Eddie was half in, half out. The old woman with the shopping bag mistook him for someone in charge.
“I’ve got to see Ruth Cole,” the elderly lady told Eddie. Eddie saw the books in the shopping bag.
“Ruth Cole doesn’t autograph books,” Eddie warned the old woman. “She never signs.”
“Let me in. I’m her mother,” the old lady lied.
Eddie, of all people, didn’t need to look very closely at the elderly woman—only enough to realize that she was about the same age as Marion would be now. (Marion would be seventy-one.)
“Madam,” Eddie said to the old woman, “you are not Ruth Cole’s mother.”
But Ruth had heard someone say she was her mother. She pushed past Allan to the doorway of the greenroom, where the elderly lady seized her hand.
“I brought these books all the way from Litchfield for you to sign,” the old woman said. “That’s in Connecticut.”
“You shouldn’t lie about being someone’s mother,” Ruth told her.
“There’s one for each of my grandchildren,” the old lady said. There were a half-dozen copies of Ruth’s novels in the shopping bag, but before the elderly woman could begin removing the books from the bag, Allan was there—his big hand on the old lady’s shoulder. He was gently pushing her out the door.
“It was announced: Ruth Cole doesn’t autograph books—she simply does not do it,” Allan said. “I’m sorry, but if she signed your books, it wouldn’t be fair to all the other people who also want her signature, would it?”
The old woman ignored him. She had not let go of Ruth’s hand. “My grandchildren adore everything you’ve written,” she told Ruth. “It will take you just two minutes.”
Ruth stood as if frozen.
“Please,” Allan said to the lady with the shopping bag, but the old lady, with surprising quickness, put down her bag of books and knocked Allan’s hand off her shoulder.
“Don’t you dare push me,” the old woman said.
“She’s not my mother, is she?” Ruth asked Eddie.
“No, of course not,” Eddie told her.
“Look—I’m asking you to sign these books formy grandchildren ! Your own books!” the elderly lady said to Ruth. “I bought these books . . .”
“Madam, please . . .” Allan said to the old woman.
“What on earth is the matter with you, anyway?” the old woman asked Ruth.
“Fuck you and your grandchildren,” Ruth said to her. The old lady looked as if she’d been slapped.
“ What did you say to me?” she asked. She had an imperiousness that Hannah would have called “generational,” but which Ruth thought was more a matter of the obnoxious old woman’s wealth and privilege; surely the woman’s pushiness wasn’t strictly a matter of her age.
Ruth reached into the shopping bag and took out one of her own novels. “Do you have a pen?” she asked Eddie, who fumbled inside his damp jacket and produced a red pen—his teacher’s favorite.
As Ruth inscribed the old woman’s book, she repeated aloud the words as she wrote them: “Fuck you and your grandchildren.” She put the book back in the bag and would have withdrawn another—she would have inscribed them all in that fashion, and left them all unsigned—but the old woman grabbed the shopping bag away from her.
“How dare you?” the elderly lady cried.
“Fuck you and your grandchildren,” Ruth repeated flatly. It was her voice for reading aloud. She went back inside the greenroom, saying to Allan, in passing, “ Fuck being nice twice. Fuck being nice once .”
Eddie, who knew that his introduction had been too long and too academic, saw a way to atone. Whoever the old woman was, she was about Marion’s age; Eddie did not look upon women of Marion’s age as “old.” They were older women, of course, but they were not elderly—not in Eddie’s opinion.
Eddie had seen a printed bookplate on the inside title page that Ruth had inscribed for the aggressive grandmother.
ELIZABETH J. BENTON
“Mrs. Benton?” Eddie asked the older woman.
“What?” Mrs. Benton said. “Who are you?”
“Ed O’Hare,” Eddie said, offering the older woman his hand. “That’s an admirable brooch you have.”
Mrs. Benton stared at the lapel of her plum
-colored suit jacket; her brooch was a scallop shell of silver, studded with pearls. “It was my mother’s,” the older woman told Eddie.
“Isn’t that interesting?” Eddie said. “ My mother had one just like it— in fact, she was buried with it,” Eddie lied. (Eddie’s mom, Dot O’Hare, was still very much alive.)
“Oh . . .” Mrs. Benton said. “I’m sorry.”
Eddie’s long fingers seemed suspended above the older woman’s intensely ugly brooch. Mrs. Benton, swelling her breast in the direction of Eddie’s hovering hand, allowed him to touch the scallop shell of silver; she let him finger her pearls.
“I never thought I’d see a brooch like this again,” Eddie said.
“Oh . . .” Mrs. Benton said. “Were you very close to your mother? You must have been very close.”
“Yes,” Eddie lied. (Why can’t I do this in my books ? he wondered. It was a mystery where the lies came from, and why he couldn’t summon them when he wanted them; it was as if he could only wait and hope for a good enough lie to appear at the opportune moment.)
Minutes later, Eddie had walked the older woman to the stage-entrance door. Outside, in the steady rain, a small but determined gathering of young people were waiting for a glimpse of Ruth Cole—and to ask her to sign their books.
“The author has already left. She went out the front door,” Eddie lied. It amazed him that he’d been incapable of lying to the woman at the registration desk in the Plaza. If only he’d been able to lie to her, he’d have got change for the bus a little sooner; he might even have had the good luck to catch an earlier bus.
Mrs. Benton, who was more in command of her capabilities as a liar than Eddie O’Hare, basked for a moment longer in Eddie’s company before she bid him a lilting good night; she made a point of thanking him for his “gentlemanly behavior.”
Eddie had volunteered to get Ruth Cole’s autograph for Mrs. Benton’s grandchildren. He’d persuaded the older woman to leave her shopping bag of books with him, including the book that Ruth had “spoiled.” (That was how Mrs. Benton thought of it.) Eddie knew that if he couldn’t get Ruth’s signature, he could at least provide Mrs. Benton with a reasonably convincing forgery.
Eddie would have confessed to a fondness for Mrs. Benton’s boldness: her assertion that she was Ruth’s mother notwithstanding, Eddie had admired the way she’d stood up to Allan Albright. There was also something bold about Mrs. Benton’s amethyst earrings—something too bold, perhaps. They were not quite right with the more muted plum color of her suit. And the big ring that hung a little too loosely from her right middle finger . . . perhaps it had once fit the ring finger of that hand.
Eddie had a soft spot for the thinning and caving-in of Mrs. Benton’s body, too—for he could tell that Mrs. Benton still thought of herself as a younger woman. How could she not think of herself as younger, sometimes? How could Eddie not be moved by her? And, like most writers (Ted Cole excluded), Eddie O’Hare believed that a writer’s autograph was intrinsically unimportant. Why not do for Mrs. Benton what he could?
What did it matter to Mrs. Benton that Ruth Cole’s reasons for avoiding public book-signings were well founded? Ruth hated how exposed she felt when she was signing books for a mob. There was always someone who just stared at her; often it was someone standing to one side of the line, usually without a book.
Publicly, Ruth had said that when she was in Helsinki, for example, she would sign books—her Finnish translations—because she couldn’t speak Finnish. In Finland, or in many other foreign countries, there was nothing she could do but autograph her books. But in her own country, she would rather read to an audience, or just talk to her readers— anything rather than sign books. Yet, in truth, she didn’t like talking to her readers, either, as had been painfully apparent to anyone observing her agitation during the disastrous Q and A at the Y. Ruth Cole was afraid of her readers.
She’d had her share of stalkers. Usually Ruth’s stalkers were creepy young men. They presumed they already knew her, because of how obsessively they’d read her novels. They presumed they would be good for her, in some way—as lovers, they often implied, or merely as like-minded literary correspondents. (Many of them were would-be writers, of course.)
Yet the few women who’d stalked her had upset Ruth more than the creepy young men. They were often women who wanted Ruth to write their stories; they thought they belonged in a Ruth Cole novel.
Ruth wanted her privacy. She traveled frequently; she could happily write in hotels, or in a variety of rented houses and apartments, surrounded by other people’s photographs and furniture and clothes, or even caring for other people’s pets. Ruth owned only one home—an old farmhouse in Vermont, which she was halfheartedly restoring. She’d bought the farmhouse only because she needed to have a place to keep coming back to, and because a caretaker had virtually come with the property. A tireless man and his wife and family lived nearby on a working farm. They were a couple with a seemingly uncountable number of children; Ruth tried to keep them busy with odd jobs, and with the larger task of “restoring” her farmhouse—one room at a time, and always when Ruth was traveling.
For four years at Middlebury, Ruth and Hannah had complained about the isolation of Vermont—not to mention the winters, because neither of them was a skier. Now Ruth loved Vermont, even the winters, and she enjoyed having a house in the country. But she liked going away, too. Her traveling was the simple answer she gave to the question of why she hadn’t married, and why she didn’t want children.
Allan Albright was too smart to accept the simple answer. They had talked and talked about Ruth’s more complex reasons for saying no to marriage, and to children; except with Hannah, Ruth had never before discussed the more complex reasons. She particularly regretted that she’d never discussed them with her father.
Back in the greenroom, Ruth thanked Eddie for his welcome and timely interference with Mrs. Benton.
“It seems I have a way with her age group,” Eddie admitted— without irony, Ruth observed. (She’d also observed that Eddie had returned with Mrs. Benton’s bag of books.)
Even Allan managed some gruff congratulations, which amounted to his overmanly approval of Eddie’s heroics with the relentless autograph-seeker.
“Well done, O’Hare,” Allan heartily exclaimed. He was one of those bluff men who called other men by their last names. (Hannah would have cited the last-name usage as a distinguishing habit of Allan’s “generation.”)
Finally it had stopped raining. As they left by the stage-entrance door, Ruth told Allan and Eddie how grateful she was to them.
“I know that you both did your best to save me from myself,” she told them.
“It’s not yourself you need saving from,” Allan said to Ruth. “It’s the assholes.”
No, it’s myself I need saving from, Ruth thought, but she just smiled at Allan and squeezed his arm. Eddie, who was silent, was thinking that Ruth needed saving from herself and from the assholes—and possibly from Allan Albright.
Speaking of assholes, there was one waiting for Ruth on Second Avenue between Eighty-fourth and Eighty-fifth; he must have guessed the restaurant they were going to, or he’d been clever enough to follow Karl and Melissa there. It was the impudent young man from the rear of the concert hall, the one with the needling questions.
“I want to apologize,” he said to Ruth. “It wasn’t my intention to make you angry.” He didn’t sound very apologetic.
“You didn’t make me angry at you, ” Ruth told him, not entirely truthfully. “I get angry with myself every time I go out in public. I shouldn’t let myself go out in public.”
“But why is that?” the young man asked.
“You’ve asked enough questions, fella,” Allan told him. When Allan called someone “fella,” he was willing to pick a fight.
“I get angry with myself when I expose myself in public,” Ruth said. Suddenly she added: “Oh, God—you’re a journalist, aren’t you?”
“You d
on’t like journalists, do you?” the young journalist asked.
Ruth left him outside the restaurant, where he went on arguing with Allan for an interminable amount of time. Eddie stayed with Allan and the journalist, but only briefly. He then came into the restaurant and joined Ruth, who was sitting with Karl and Melissa.
“They’re not going to get into a fight,” Eddie assured Ruth. “If they were going to have a fight, they already would have.”
It turned out that the journalist was someone who’d not been granted an interview with Ruth the following day. Apparently the publicist at Random House hadn’t thought he was important enough, and Ruth always put a limit on how many interviews she would do.
“You don’t have to do any, ” Allan had told her, but she’d yielded to the publicity people.
Allan was notorious at Random House for undermining the efforts of the publicity people. His idea of a novelist—even of a best-selling novelist, like Ruth Cole—was that he or she should stay home and write. What his authors appreciated about Allan Albright was that he didn’t burden them with all the other expectations publishers have. He was devoted to his authors; sometimes Allan was more devoted to his authors’ actual writing than the authors themselves were. Ruth never doubted that she loved that aspect of Allan. But that he was unafraid to criticize her, about anything, was an aspect of Allan that Ruth did not so wholeheartedly adore.
While Allan was still out on the sidewalk, arguing with the aggressive young journalist, Ruth quickly signed the books in Mrs. Benton’s shopping bag, including the one she had “spoiled.” (On that one she wrote “Sorry!” in parentheses.) Then Eddie hid the shopping bag under the table, because Ruth told him that Allan would be disappointed in her for signing the self-assertive grandmother’s books. The way Ruth said it, Eddie surmised that Allan took more than an editorial interest in his renowned author.
When Allan at last joined them at the table, Eddie was alert to Allan’s other interest in Ruth. Ruth was alert to Allan’s other interest in her, too.