by John Irving
“No, Ruthie,” he’d told her. “It’s when you are married that I’ll start worrying about you.”
“Yeah, why get married?” Hannah had said. “You can have all the guys you want.”
“All men are basically unfaithful, Ruthie,” her father had said. He’d already told her that—even before she went to Exeter, when she’d been fifteen!—but he found a way to repeat it, at least semiannually.
“However, if I want a child . . .” Ruth had said. She knew Hannah’s opinion of having a child; Hannah didn’t want one. And Ruth was well aware of her father’s point of view: that to have a child was to live in constant fear that something would happen to your child—not to mention the evidence that Ruth’s mother had (in her father’s words) “failed the mother test.”
“ Do you want to have a child, Ruthie?” her father had asked her.
“I don’t know,” Ruth had admitted.
“There’s a lot of time to stay single, then,” Hannah had told her.
But now she was thirty-six; if Ruth wanted a child, there was not a lot of time left. And when she’d merely mentioned Allan Albright to her father, Ted Cole had said: “What is he? Twelve, fifteen years older than you are, isn’t he?” (Because her father knew everything about everyone in publishing. Ted may have stopped writing, but he kept up with the business of writing.)
“Allan is eighteen years older than I am, Daddy,” Ruth had acknowledged. “But he’s like you. He’s very healthy.”
“I don’t care how healthy he is,” Ted had said. “If he’s eighteen years older than you are, he’s going to die on you, Ruthie. And what if he leaves you with a young child to raise? All by yourself . . .”
The specter of raising a young child by herself had haunted her. She knew how lucky both she and her father had been; Conchita Gomez had virtually raised Ruth. But Eduardo and Conchita were her father’s age, the difference being that they looked it. If Ruth didn’t have a baby sometime soon, Conchita would be too old to help her raise it. And how could Conchita help Ruth raise a baby, anyway? The Gomezes still worked for her father.
As usual, when it came to the subject of marriage and children, Ruth had put the cart before the horse; she was jumping ahead to the question of having a child before she’d answered the question of whom, or whether, to marry. And Ruth had no one she could talk to about this, except Allan. Her best friend didn’t want a child—Hannah was Hannah—and her father was . . . well, her father. Now, even more than when she’d been a child, Ruth wanted to talk to her mother.
Damn her, anyway! Ruth thought. Ruth had long ago resolved that she would not go looking for her mother. Marion was the one who’d left. Either Marion would come back or she wouldn’t.
And what sort of man had no male friends? Ruth reflected. She’d once put the accusation to her father directly.
“I have male friends!” her father had protested.
“Name two, name just one !” Ruth had challenged him.
To her surprise, he’d named four. They were unfamiliar names to her. He’d boldly listed his current squash opponents; their names changed every few years because Ted’s opponents invariably grew too old to keep up with him. His present opponents were Eddie’s age or younger. Ruth had met the youngest of them.
Her father had the swimming pool he’d always wanted, and the outdoor shower—much as he’d described his image of them to Eduardo and Eddie in the summer of ’58, on the morning after Marion had left. There were two showers in a single wooden stall, side by side—“locker room–style,” Ted called it.
Ruth had grown up watching naked men, and her naked father, running out of the outdoor shower and jumping into the pool. As sexually inexperienced as she was, Ruth had seen a lot of penises. It was perhaps this image, of unknown men showering and swimming naked with her father, that had caused Ruth to question Hannah’s assumption that bigger was necessarily better .
It had been a year ago last summer when she’d “met” her father’s youngest squash opponent of the moment, a lawyer in his late thirties—Scott Somebody. She’d come out on the deck of the swimming pool to dry her beach towel and her swimming suit on the line, and there were her father and his young opponent in their aprés-squash or aprés-shower nakedness.
“Ruthie, this is Scott. My daughter, Ruth . . .” Ted had started to say, but Scott saw her and dove into the pool. “He’s a lawyer,” her father had added, while Scott was still underwater. Then Scott Somebody had surfaced in the deep end, where he began to tread water. He was a strawberry blond and built like her father. He had a medium-size schlong, she thought.
“Nice to meet you, Ruth,” the young lawyer had said. He had short, curly hair and freckles.
“Nice to meet you, Scott,” Ruth had replied, going back inside the house.
Her father, still standing naked on the deck, had remarked to Scott: “I can’t decide whether to go in or not. Is it cold? It was quite cold yesterday.”
“It’s pretty cold,” Ruth had heard Scott say. “But it’s okay, once you’re in.”
And these ever-changing squash opponents were what passed for Ted’s only male friends! Nor were her father’s opponents very good squash players; her father didn’t like to lose. His most frequent opponents were good athletes who were relatively new to the game. In the winter months, Ted found a lot of tennis players who wanted the exercise; they had a feeling for racquet sports, but squash strokes are not tennis strokes—squash is a game you play with your wrist. In the summer, when the tennis players would return to their tennis, they would discover that their game had deteriorated—you can’t play tennis with your wrist. Then Ted might have a convert to squash on his hands.
Her father chose his squash opponents as selfishly, and with as great a degree of calculation, as he chose his lovers. Maybe they were his only friends. Was her father invited to their homes for dinner? Did he hit on their wives? Did her father have any rules? Ruth wanted to know.
She was standing on the south side of Forty-first Street, between Lexington and Third, waiting for the jitney that would take her to the Hamptons. Once she arrived in Bridgehampton, she would call her father to pick her up.
Ruth had already tried to call him, but her father was out, or not answering the phone, and he’d left his answering machine off. Ruth had a lot of luggage—all the clothes she would need in Europe. She was thinking that she should have called Eduardo or Conchita Gomez. If they weren’t doing something for her father, or actually working at her father’s house, the Gomezes were always home. Thus her mind was beset with the trivia of last-minute travel when her father’s youngest squash opponent approached her on the sidewalk of Fortyfirst Street.
“Going home?” Scott Somebody asked her. “You’re Ruth Cole, aren’t you?”
Ruth was used to being recognized. At first she mistook him for one of her readers. Then she noted his boyish freckles and his short, curly hair; she’d not known many strawberry blonds. Besides, he was carrying nothing but a slim briefcase and a gym bag; two squash racquets protruded from the half-open zipper of the bag.
“Oh, it’s the swimmer, ” Ruth said. It was strangely satisfying to see him blush.
It was a warm, sunny Indian Summer day. Scott Somebody had removed his suit jacket and looped it through the shoulder strap of his gym bag; his tie was loosened, and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up above his elbows. Ruth was aware of the greater size and muscularity of his left forearm, even as he held his right hand out to her.
“It’s Scott, Scott Saunders,” he reminded her, shaking her hand.
“You’re left-handed, aren’t you?” Ruth asked him. Her father was a lefty. Ruth didn’t like to play left-handers. Her best serve was to the left-hand court; a lefty could return that serve with his forehand.
“Got your racquet with you?” Scott Saunders asked her, after admitting he was left-handed. He’d noticed all her luggage.
“I’ve got three racquets with me,” Ruth replied. “They’re packed.�
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“Staying with your dad for a while?” the lawyer asked.
“Only two nights,” Ruth said. “Then I’m going to Europe.”
“Oh,” Scott said. “Business?”
“Translations—yes.”
She already knew they were going to sit together on the bus. Maybe he had a car parked in Bridgehampton; then he could drive her ( and all her luggage) to Sagaponack. Maybe his wife was meeting him and they wouldn’t mind dropping her off. In the pool, his wedding ring had reflected the late-afternoon sunlight as he’d treaded water. But when they were seated beside each other on the jitney, his wedding ring was gone. Among Ruth’s rules for relationships, one of the inviolable ones was this: no married men.
There was the shattering sound of an airplane overhead—the bus was passing LaGuardia—when Ruth said, “Let me guess. My father has converted you from tennis to squash. And with your complexion . . . you’re very fair, you must burn easily . . . squash is better for your skin, anyway. It keeps you out of the sun.”
He had a wicked, secretive sort of smile; it suggested his suspicion that nearly everything could lead to litigation. Scott Saunders was not a nice guy. Ruth felt pretty sure of that.
“Actually,” he began, “I gave up tennis for squash when I got divorced. As part of the settlement, my ex-wife got to keep the countryclub membership. It meant a lot to her,” he added generously. “And besides, there were the children’s swimming lessons.”
“How old are your children?” Ruth asked him dutifully.
Hannah had told her long ago that it was the first question you should ask a guy who’s divorced. “It makes divorced men feel like good fathers to talk about their kids,” Hannah had said. “And, if you’re gonna get involved with the guy, you want to know if it’s a three-year-old or a teenager you might have to deal with—it makes a difference.”
As the jitney moved eastward, Ruth had already forgotten the ages of Scott Saunders’s children; she was more interested in how his squash game compared to her father’s.
“Oh, he usually wins,” the lawyer admitted. “After he wins the first three or four games, he sometimes lets me win one or two.”
“You play that many games?” Ruth asked. “Five or six?”
“We play for at least an hour, often an hour and a half,” Scott said. “We don’t really count the number of games.”
You wouldn’t last an hour and a half with me, Ruth decided. The old man must be slipping. But all she said was: “You must like to run.”
“I’m in pretty good shape,” Scott Saunders said. He looked in very good shape, but Ruth let his remark pass; she gazed out the window, knowing that he was taking this moment to evaluate her breasts. (She could see his reflection in the bus window.) “Your father says you’re a very good player, better than most men,” the lawyer added. “But he says he’s still better than you—for a few more years.”
“He’s wrong,” Ruth said. “He’s not better than I am. He’s just smart enough to never play me on a court of regulation size. And he knows his barn—he never plays me anywhere else.”
“There’s probably something psychological about his advantage,” the lawyer said.
“I’ll beat him,” Ruth said. “Then maybe I’ll stop playing.”
“Maybe we could play sometime,” Scott Saunders said. “My kids are only around on the weekends. Today is Tuesday . . .”
“You don’t work Tuesdays?” Ruth asked.
She watched the bright flicker in his smile again—like a secret he wanted you to know existed, but which he would never tell. “I’m enjoying divorce leave,” he told her. “I take as much time out of the office as I need.”
“Do they really call it ‘divorce leave’?” Ruth asked.
“That’s what I call it,” the lawyer said. “When it comes to the office, I’m pretty independent.” He said it in the way he’d said he was in pretty good shape. It could mean that he’d just been fired, or that he was some killer lawyer with uncounted successes.
Here I go again, Ruth knew. She considered that the wrong guys always attracted her because they were so transparently short-term.
“Maybe we could play a little round-robin,” Scott suggested. “You know, the three of us. You play your father, your father plays me, then I play you . . .”
“I don’t play round-robin,” Ruth said. “I just play one-on-one, for a long time. About two hours,” she added, purposely staring out the window so he was left looking at her breasts.
“Two hours . . .” he repeated.
“Just kidding,” she told him. Turning to face him, she smiled.
“Oh . . .” Scott Saunders said. “Maybe we could play tomorrow, just the two of us.”
“I want to beat my father first,” Ruth said.
She knew that Allan Albright was the next person she should sleep with, but it troubled her that she’d needed to remind herself of Allan—and of what she should do. Historically, Scott Saunders was more her kind of guy.
The strawberry-blond lawyer had parked his car near the Little League field in Bridgehampton; he and Ruth, burdened by her luggage, had to walk about two hundred yards. Scott drove with the windows open. As they turned onto Parsonage Lane in Sagaponack, they were moving due east with the elongated shadow of the car running ahead of them. To the south, the slanting light turned the potato fields a jade-green color; the ocean, offset against the faded blue of the sky, was as brilliant and as deep a blue as a sapphire.
For everything that was overesteemed and corrupted about the Hamptons, the end of an early-fall day could still be dazzling; Ruth permitted herself to feel that the place was redeemed, if only at this time of year and at this forgiving hour of the late afternoon. Her father would have just finished his squash; he and his defeated opponent might now be showering or swimming naked in the pool.
The towering horseshoe-shaped barrier of privet that Eduardo had planted in the fall of ’58 completely shaded the pool from the late-afternoon light. The hedges were so thick, only the thinnest rays of the sun could penetrate; these small diamonds of light dappled the dark water of the pool, like phosphorescence—or gold coins that floated on the surface instead of sinking. And the wooden deck overhung the water; when someone was swimming in the pool, the water sounded like the water of a lake slapping against a dock.
When they arrived at the house, Scott helped Ruth carry her bags into the front hall. The navy-blue Volvo, which was her father’s only car, was in the driveway, but her father didn’t answer when Ruth called.
“Daddy?”
As he was leaving, Scott said, “He’s probably in the pool—it’s that time of day.”
“Yes,” Ruth said. “Thank you!” she called after him. Oh, Allan, save me! she thought. Ruth was hoping she’d never see Scott Saunders, or another man like him, again.
She had three bags: a big suitcase, a garment bag, and a smaller suitcase that was her carry-on bag for the plane. She started by taking the garment bag and the smaller suitcase upstairs. Some years ago, when she was nine or ten, she’d moved her room from the nursery that shared her father’s master bathroom to the biggest and farthest-away of the guest bedrooms; it was the room that Eddie O’Hare had occupied in the summer of ’58. Ruth liked it because of its distance from her father’s room, and because it had its own bathroom.
The door to the master bedroom was ajar, but her father wasn’t in his bedroom—Ruth called “Daddy?” again as she passed the slightly open door. As always, the photographs in the long upstairs hall commanded her attention.
All the bare picture hooks, which she remembered better than the photos of her dead brothers, were covered now; there were hundreds of uninspired photographs of Ruth, at every phase of her childhood and throughout her young womanhood. Sometimes her father was in the photo, but usually he was the photographer. Frequently, Conchita Gomez was in the picture with Ruth. And there were the endless privet pictures. These measured her growth, summer by summer: Ruth and Eduardo, solemnl
y posed before the implacable privet. No matter how much Ruth grew, the unstoppable hedge grew faster, until—one day— it had more than doubled Eduardo’s height. (In several of the photographs, Eduardo looked a little afraid of the privet.) And of course there were some recent photographs of Ruth with Hannah.
Ruth was walking barefoot down the carpeted stairs when she heard the splashing from the swimming pool, which was behind the house. She couldn’t see the pool from the staircase, or from any of the bedrooms upstairs. All the bedrooms faced south; they were designed to have an ocean view.
Ruth hadn’t noticed another car in the driveway—only her father’s navy-blue Volvo—but she assumed that his present squash opponent lived near enough to have ridden a bicycle; she wouldn’t have noticed a bicycle.
The degree to which Scott Saunders had tempted her left Ruth feeling familiarly unsure of herself. She didn’t want to see another man today, although she seriously doubted that any of her father’s other squash opponents could possibly have attracted her as strongly as the strawberry-blond lawyer.
In the front hall, she got a good grip on her remaining suitcase—the big one—and started upstairs with it, purposely avoiding that view of the swimming pool which was available to her as she passed the dining room. The sound of splashing followed her only halfway up the stairs. By the time she unpacked, the guy, whoever he was, would be gone. But Ruth was a veteran traveler; it took her very little time to unpack. When she’d finished, she put on her swimsuit. After her father’s squash opponent was gone, Ruth thought she would jump in the pool. That always felt good, after being in the city. Then she would see about dinner. She would make her daddy a good dinner. Then they would talk.
She was still barefoot, padding down the upstairs hall, past the partially open door to her father’s bedroom, when a sea breeze blew the door shut. Thinking she would find a book or a shoe, something to hold the door ajar, Ruth opened the door to the master bedroom. The first thing that caught her eye was a woman’s high-heeled shoe of a beautiful salmon-pink color. Ruth picked it up. It was very good leather; the shoe had been made in Milan. Ruth saw that the bed was unmade—a small black bra lay on top of the tangled sheets.