A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  It was after midnight when her father directed her up Madison Avenue; somewhere in the upper nineties, he told her to turn east. They took the F.D.R. Drive to the Triborough; then the Grand Central Parkway to the L.I.E., where her father fell asleep. Ruth remembered that Manorville was the exit she wanted; she didn’t have to wake her father to ask him how to get home.

  She was driving against the holiday traffic—the headlights of the horde returning to the city were constantly in her eyes—but there was almost no one headed in her direction. A couple of times, she opened up the old white Volvo, just to see how fast it could go. She reached eighty-five twice, and ninety once, but at those speeds a shimmy in the front end frightened her. Most of the way, she stuck to the speed limit and thought about the story of how her brothers had died—especially the part about her mother trying to save Timmy’s shoe.

  Her father didn’t wake up until she was driving through Bridgehampton. “How come you didn’t take the back roads?” he asked.

  “I felt like having all the town lights around me, and the headlights of the other cars,” Ruth said.

  “Oh,” her father said, as if he were falling back to sleep.

  “What kind of shoe was it?” Ruth asked.

  “It was a basketball shoe, Timmy’s favorite.”

  “High-tops?” she guessed.

  “Right.”

  “Got it,” Ruth said, turning onto Sagg Main. Although, at that moment, there were no other cars in sight of the Volvo, Ruth put her directional signal on; a full fifty yards before she turned, she put on her blinker.

  “Good driving, Ruthie,” her father told her. “If you ever have a tougher drive than this, I trust you to remember what you’ve learned.”

  Ruth was shivering when she finally got out of the pool. She knew she should warm up before she started playing squash with Scott Saunders, but both her memories of learning to drive and the Graham Greene biography had depressed her. It wasn’t Norman Sherry’s fault, but the Greene biography had taken a turn that Ruth opposed. Mr. Sherry was convinced that, for every major character in a Graham Greene novel, there existed a real-life counterpart. In an interview in The Times, Greene himself had told V. S. Pritchett: “I cannot invent.” Yet, in the same interview, while admitting that his characters were “an amalgam of bits of real people,” Greene also denied taking his characters from real life. “Real people are crowded out by imaginary ones. . . .” he’d said. “Real people are too limiting.” But, for too many pages of the biography, Mr. Sherry went on and on about the “real people.”

  Ruth was particularly saddened by Greene’s early love life. What his biographer called “his obsessional love” for the “ardent Catholic” who would eventually become Greene’s wife was precisely the kind of thing Ruth didn’t want to know about a writer whose writing she loved. “There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer,” Greene had written in A Sort of Life . But in the daily letters that young Graham wrote to Vivien, his wife-to-be, Ruth saw only the familiar pathos of a man who was smitten.

  Ruth had never been smitten. Possibly what contributed to her reluctance to welcome Allan’s proposal of marriage was her awareness of how smitten Allan was with her.

  She’d stopped reading The Life of Graham Greene on page 338, the beginning of the twenty-fourth chapter, which was called “Marriage at Last.” It was a pity that Ruth stopped reading there, for near the end of that chapter she would have found something that might have made her like Graham Greene and his bride-to-be a little better. When the couple had finally married and were on their honeymoon, Vivien presented Graham with a sealed letter that Vivien’s intrusive mother had given her—“a letter on sex instruction”—but Vivien handed it to Greene unopened. He read it and immediately tore it up. Vivien never got to read the letter. Ruth would have appreciated that the new Mrs. Greene decided she could manage well enough without her mother’s advice.

  As for “Marriage at Last,” why did the chapter title—the phrase itself—depress her? Was it the way she would get married, too? It sounded like the title of a novel Ruth Cole would never write, or even want to read.

  Ruth thought she should stick to rereading Graham Greene; she was sure that she didn’t want to know anything more about his life . Here she was, brooding about what Hannah called her “favorite subject,” which was her tireless scrutiny of the relationship between what was “real” and what was “invented.” But the mere thought of Hannah returned Ruth to the present.

  She didn’t want Scott Saunders to see her naked in the pool, not yet.

  She went into the house and dressed in some clean, dry clothes for squash. She put some talcum powder in the right front pocket of her shorts; it would keep her racquet hand dry and smooth—no blisters. She’d already chilled the white wine, but now she arranged the rice in the electric steamer. All she would have to do later was push a button to turn it on. She’d already set the dining-room table—two place settings.

  At last she climbed the ladder to the second floor of the barn, and— after she’d stretched—she began to warm up the ball.

  She fell into an easy rhythm: four forehands down the wall, then she would hit the telltale tin; four backhand rails, and then the tin again. Each time she hit the tin, aiming deliberately low, she hit the ball hard enough so that the resounding tin was loud. In an actual game, Ruth almost never hit the tin; in a tough match, maybe she would hit it twice. But she wanted to be sure that when Scott Saunders arrived, he would hear her hitting the tin. And as he climbed the ladder to come play with her, he would be thinking: For a so-called pretty good player, she sure hits the tin a lot. Then, when they started to play, it would come as quite a surprise to him that Ruth rarely hit the tin at all.

  You could feel a little shiver in the squash court whenever someone climbed the ladder to the second floor of the barn. When Ruth felt that shiver, she counted five more shots—hitting the tin the fifth time. She could easily hit all five shots in the time it took her to say, under her breath, “Daddy with Hannah Grant!”

  Scott tapped twice on the door of the squash court with his racquet; then he cautiously opened the door. “Hi,” he said. “I hope you haven’t been practicing for me.”

  “Oh, just a little bit,” Ruth said.

  Two Drawers

  She spotted him the first five points. Ruth wanted to see how he moved. He was reasonably quick, but he swung his racquet like a tennis player; he didn’t snap his wrist. And he had only one serve: a hard one, right at her. It was usually too high; she could step out of its way and return it off the back wall. And Scott’s return of serve was weak; the ball fell to the floor at midcourt. Ruth could usually kill it with a corner shot. She had him running either from the back wall to the front, or from one back corner to the other.

  Ruth took the first game 15–8 before Scott had figured out how good she really was. Scott was one of those players who overestimated their abilities. When he was losing, his first thought was that his game was a little off; it wouldn’t occur to him, until the third or fourth game, that he was being outplayed. Ruth tried to keep the score close in the next two games, because she enjoyed seeing Scott run.

  She won the second game 15–6 and the third 15–9. Scott Saunders was in very good shape, but after the third game, he needed the water bottle. Ruth didn’t drink any water. Scott was doing all the running.

  He hadn’t quite got his wind back when he faulted the first serve of the fourth game. Ruth could detect his frustration, like a sudden odor. “I can’t believe that your father still beats you,” he said between breaths.

  “Oh, I’ll beat him one day,” Ruth said. “Maybe next time.”

  She won the fourth game 15–5. While he was chasing a drop shot into the front corner, Scott slipped in a puddle of his own sweat; he slid on his hip and hit his head against the tin.

  “Are you okay?” Ruth asked him. “Do you want to stop?”

  “Let’s play one more game,” he snapped at her.

 
; Ruth didn’t like his attitude. She beat him 15–1 in their last game, his only point coming when she tried (against her better judgment) a reverse corner that hit the tin. It was the one time she hit the tin in five games. Ruth was mad at herself for attempting the reverse corner; it confirmed her opinion of low-percentage shots. If she’d just kept the ball in play, she was sure she would have taken the last game 15–0.

  But losing 15–1 had been bad enough for Scott Saunders. Ruth couldn’t be sure if he was pouting or just making an unusually contorted facial expression until he got his wind back. They were leaving the court when a wasp flew in the open door and Scott took an awkward swipe at it with his racquet. He missed. The wasp zigged and zagged. Its erratic, darting flight was on course to the ceiling, where it would safely be out of reach, when Ruth caught the wasp in midair with her backhand. Some say it’s the toughest shot in squash: an overhead backhand volley. The strings of her racquet cut the wasp’s segmented body in two.

  “Good get,” Scott said, as if he were about to be sick.

  Ruth sat on the edge of the deck beside the swimming pool; she took off her shoes and socks, cooling her feet in the water. Scott didn’t seem to know what to do. He was used to taking off all his clothes and stepping into the outdoor shower with Ted. Ruth would have to do it first.

  She stood up and took off her shorts. She pulled her T-shirt off, dreading the potential awkwardness—the usual, unwanted acrobatics—of wriggling out of her sweaty sports bra. But she was able to take the spandex bra off without an embarrassing struggle. She took her underpants off last, and walked into the shower stall without looking at Scott. She’d already soaped herself, and was standing under the running water, when he stepped into the shower stall with her and turned on his showerhead. She had shampooed her hair and was rinsing the shampoo out, when she asked him if he was allergic to shrimp.

  “No, I like shrimp,” he told her. With her eyes closed, rinsing off the shampoo, she guessed that he had to be looking at her breasts.

  “Good, because that’s what we’re having for dinner,” Ruth told him. She shut off her shower and stepped out on the deck; then she dove into the deep end of the pool. When she surfaced, Scott was still standing on the deck; he was looking beyond her.

  “Isn’t that a wineglass at the bottom of the pool?” he asked. “Did you recently have a party?”

  “No, my father recently had a party,” Ruth answered, treading water. Scott Saunders had a bigger cock than she’d first thought. The lawyer dove to the bottom of the deep end and brought up the wineglass.

  “It must have been a moderately wild party,” Scott said.

  “My father is more than moderately wild,” Ruth replied. She floated on her back; when Hannah tried it, she could scarcely manage to make her nipples rise above the surface.

  “You have beautiful breasts,” Scott told Ruth. He treaded water next to her. He filled the wineglass with water, then poured the water on her breasts.

  “My mother probably had better ones,” Ruth said. “What do you know about my mother?” she asked him.

  “Nothing—I’ve just heard some rumors,” Scott admitted.

  “They’re probably true,” Ruth said. “You may know almost as much about her as I do.”

  She swam to the shallow end, and he followed—still holding the wineglass. If he hadn’t been carrying the stupid glass, he would have already touched her. Ruth got out of the pool and wrapped herself in a towel. She saw Scott drying himself, meticulously, before she walked into the house—her towel around her waist, her breasts still bare.

  “If you put your clothes in the dryer, they’ll be dry after dinner,” she called to him. He followed her inside—his towel was around his waist. “Tell me if you’re cold,” she said. “You can wear something of my father’s.”

  “I feel fine in the towel,” he told her.

  Ruth started the rice steamer and opened a bottle of white wine; she poured a glass for Scott and one for herself. She looked pretty good with just the towel around her waist and her breasts bare. “I feel fine in the towel, too,” she told him. She let him kiss her then; he cupped one of her breasts in his hand.

  “I didn’t expect this,” he said to her.

  No kidding! Ruth thought. When she’d made up her mind about somebody, it was the height of boredom to wait for the man to seduce her. She hadn’t been with anybody for four, almost five months; she didn’t feel like waiting.

  “Let me show you something,” Ruth said to Scott. She led him into her father’s workroom, where she opened the bottommost drawer of Ted’s so-called writing desk. The drawer was full of black-and-white Polaroid prints—there were hundreds of them—and about a dozen tubular containers of Polaroid print coater. The print coater gave the whole drawer and all the photographs a bad smell.

  Ruth handed Scott a stack of the Polaroids, without comment. They were the pictures Ted had taken of his models, both before and after he drew them. Ted told his models that the photos were necessary so that he could continue to work on the drawings when the models weren’t there; he needed the photos “for reference.” In fact, he never continued to work on the drawings. He just wanted the photographs.

  When Scott finished looking at one stack of photos, Ruth showed him another. The pictures had that amateur quality which most really bad pornography has; that the models themselves were not professional models was only part of it. There was an awkwardness to their poses that suggested sexual shame, but there was also a sense of haste and carelessness about the photographs themselves.

  “Why are you showing me these?” Scott asked Ruth.

  “Do they turn you on?” she asked him.

  “ You turn me on,” he told her.

  “I guess they turn my father on,” Ruth said. “They’re all his models—he’s fucked every single one of them.”

  Scott was leafing quickly through the photographs without really looking at them; it was hard to look at the photos if you weren’t alone. “There are a lot of women here,” he said.

  “Yesterday, and the day before, my father fucked my best friend,” Ruth told him.

  “Your father fucked your best friend . . .” Scott repeated thoughtfully.

  “We’re what an idiot sociology major would call a dysfunctional family,” Ruth said.

  “ I was a sociology major,” Scott Saunders admitted.

  “What did you learn?” Ruth asked him. She was putting the Polaroids back in the bottommost drawer. The smell from the print coater was strong enough to make her gag. In a way, it was a worse smell than the squid ink. (Ruth had first found the photographs in her father’s bottommost drawer when she was twelve years old.)

  “I decided to go to law school—that’s what I learned from sociology,” the strawberry-blond lawyer said.

  “Have you heard some rumors about my brothers, too?” Ruth asked him. “They’re dead,” she added.

  “I think I heard something,” Scott answered. “Wasn’t it a long time ago?”

  “I’ll show you a picture of them—they were good-looking guys,” Ruth said, taking Scott’s hand.

  She led him up the carpeted stairs. Their bare feet didn’t make a sound. The lid of the rice steamer was rattling; the dryer was running, too—chiefly the sound of something clicking or tapping against the revolving drum of the dryer.

  Ruth took Scott into the master bedroom, where the big bed was in unmade disarray; Ruth could almost see the body imprints of her father and Hannah in the tangled sheets.

  “There they are,” Ruth said to Scott, pointing to the picture of her brothers.

  Squinting at the photograph, Scott tried to read the Latin inscription above the doorway.

  “I guess you didn’t learn Latin as a sociology major,” Ruth said.

  “There’s a lot of Latin in the law,” he told her.

  “My brothers were good-looking guys, weren’t they?” Ruth asked him.

  “Yes, they were,” Scott said. “Doesn’t venite mean come ?” h
e asked her.

  “ ‘Come hither boys and become men,’ ” Ruth translated for him.

  “Now there’s a challenge!” Scott Saunders said. “I liked being a boy better.”

  “My father never stopped being a boy,” Ruth said.

  “Is this your father’s bedroom?” Scott asked her.

  “Check out the top drawer, the drawer under the night table,” Ruth told him. “Go on—open it.”

  Scott hesitated; he was probably thinking that there were more Polaroids in the drawer.

  “Don’t worry. There are no photographs in there,” Ruth said. Scott opened the drawer. It was full of condoms in brightly colored foil wrappers, and there was a large tube of lubricating jelly.

  “So . . . I guess this is your father’s bedroom,” Scott said, looking around nervously.

  “That’s a drawer full of a boy’s stuff, if I ever saw one,” Ruth said. (She’d first discovered the condoms and the lubricating jelly in her father’s night-table drawer when she was about nine or ten.)

  “Where is your father?” Scott asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You’re not expecting him?” Scott asked.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say I was expecting him about midmorning tomorrow,” Ruth said.

  Scott Saunders looked at all the condoms in the open drawer. “God, I haven’t worn a condom since I was in college,” he said.

  “You’re going to have to wear one now,” Ruth told him. She took the towel off from around her waist; then she sat naked on the unmade bed. “If you’ve forgotten how a condom works, I can remind you,” she added.

  Scott picked a condom in a blue wrapper. He kissed her for a long time, and he licked her for an even longer time; she didn’t need any of the jelly in her father’s night-table drawer. She came just a few seconds after he was inside her, and she felt him come only a moment later. Nearly the whole time, but especially when Scott was licking her, Ruth watched the open door of her father’s bedroom; she listened for her father’s footsteps on the stairs, or in the upstairs hall, but all she could hear was the clicking or tapping noise in the dryer. (The lid of the rice steamer wasn’t rattling anymore; the rice was cooked.) And when Scott entered her and she knew she was going to come, almost instantly—the rest of it would be over very quickly, too—Ruth thought: Come home now, Daddy! Come upstairs and see me now !