by John Irving
After the hot shower, the pool felt cold at first, but the water was silky-smooth and much warmer than the night air. It was a clear night; there must have been a million stars. Ruth hoped it would be as clear the next night, when she had to fly to Europe. But she was too tired to think more about her trip than that; she let the ice numb her.
She was sitting so still that a small frog swam right up to her; she cupped it in her hand. She reached out and let the frog go on the deck, where it hopped away. Eventually, the chlorine would have killed it. Then Ruth rubbed her hand under the water until the sensation of the frog’s slipperiness was gone; the slime had reminded her of her too-recent experiences with the lubricating jelly.
When she heard the washing machine stop, she got out of the pool and transferred her wet laundry to the dryer. She went to bed in her own room, and lay in her clean sheets, listening to the comfortingly familiar tap or click of something spinning around and around in the dryer.
But later, when she had to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, it hurt her to pee, and she thought about the unfamiliar place—far inside her—where Scott Saunders had poked her. It also hurt there. The latter pain was not sharp. It was an ache, like the onset of her cramps— only it wasn’t time for her cramps, and it wasn’t a place where she’d ever felt pain before.
In the morning, she called Allan before he left for the office.
“Would you love me any less if I gave up squash?” Ruth asked him. “I don’t think I’ve got many more games in me—that is, not after I beat my father.”
“Of course I wouldn’t love you any less,” Allan told her.
“You’re too good for me,” she warned him.
“I told you I loved you,” he said.
God, he really must love me! Ruth thought. But all she said was: “I’ll call you again, from the airport.”
Ruth had examined the fingerprint bruises on her breasts; there were fingerprint and thumbprint bruises on her hips and buttocks, too, but Ruth couldn’t see all of them because she could see only out of her left eye. She still refused to look at her face in a mirror. She knew without looking that she should continue to put ice on her right eye, which she did. Her right shoulder was stiff and sore, but she was tired of icing her shoulder. Besides, she had things to do. She’d just finished packing when her father came home.
“My God, Ruthie—who hit you?”
“It’s just a squash injury,” she lied.
“Who were you playing?” her father asked.
“Mostly myself,” she told him.
“Ruthie, Ruthie . . .” her father said. He looked tired. He didn’t look seventy-seven, but Ruth decided that he looked like someone in his sixties. She loved the smooth backs of his small, square hands. Ruth found herself staring at the backs of his hands, because she couldn’t look him in the eye—not with her swollen-shut right eye, anyway. “Ruthie, I’m sorry,” her father began. “About Hannah . . .”
“I don’t want to hear about it, Daddy,” Ruth told him. “You can’t keep your pecker in your pants, as they say—it’s the same old story.”
“But Hannah, Ruthie . . .” her father tried to say.
“I don’t even want to hear her name,” Ruth told him.
“Okay, Ruthie.”
She couldn’t stand to see how sheepish he was; she already knew he loved her more than he loved anyone else. Worse, Ruth knew that she loved him, too; she loved him more than she loved Allan, and certainly more than she loved Hannah. There was nobody Ruth Cole loved or hated as much as she loved and hated her father, but all she said to him was: “Get your racquet.”
“Can you see out of that eye?” her father asked her.
“I can see out of the other one,” Ruth told him.
Ruth Gives Her Father a Driving Lesson
It still hurt her to pee, but Ruth tried not to think about it. She quickly got into her squash clothes; she wanted to be in the court, warming up the ball, before her father was ready to play. She also wanted to erase the blue smudge of chalk that marked the dead spot on the front wall. Ruth didn’t need the chalk mark to know where the dead spot was.
The ball was already warm, and very lively, when Ruth felt that almost imperceptible shudder in the floor—her father was climbing up the ladder in the barn. She sprinted once to the front wall, then turned and sprinted to the back—all before she heard her father tap his racquet twice and open the squash-court door. Ruth felt only a twinge of pain in that unfamiliar place where Scott Saunders had poked her the wrong way. If she didn’t have to run too hard, she would be okay.
That she couldn’t see out of her right eye was a bigger problem. There were going to be moments when she wouldn’t be able to see where her father was. Ted didn’t crash around the court; he moved as little as he had to, but when he moved, he glided. If you couldn’t see him, you didn’t know where he was.
Ruth knew it was crucial to win the first game. Ted was toughest in the middle of a match. If I’m lucky, Ruth thought, it will take him a game to locate the dead spot. When they were still warming up, she caught her father squinting at the front wall of the court, looking for that missing smudge of blue.
She took the first game 18–16, but by then her father had pinpointed the dead spot and Ruth was picking the ball up late on his hard serve— especially when she received his serve in the left-hand court. With no vision in her right eye, she practically had to turn to face him when he served. Ruth lost the next two games, 12–15 and 16–18, but—although he was leading 2–1 in games—it was her father who needed the water bottle after their third game.
Ruth won the fourth game 15–9. Her father hit the tin in losing the last point; it was the first time that either of them had hit the tin. They were tied 2–2 in games. She’d been tied with her father before—she’d always lost. Many times, just before the fifth game, her father would tell her: “I think you’re going to beat me, Ruthie.” Then he would beat her. This time he didn’t say anything. Ruth drank a little water and took a long look at him with her one good eye.
“I think I’m going to beat you, Daddy,” she told him. She won the fifth game 15–4. Once again, her father hit the tin in losing the last point. The telltale sound of the tin would ring in her ears for the next four or five years.
“Good job, Ruthie,” Ted said. He had to leave the court to get the water bottle. Ruth had to be fast; she was able to pat him on the ass with her racquet as he was going out the door. What she wanted to do was give him a hug, but he wouldn’t even look her in her one good eye. What an odd man he is! she thought. Then she remembered the oddness of Eddie O’Hare trying to flush his change down the toilet. Maybe all men were odd.
She’d always thought it strange that her father found it so natural to be naked in front of her. From the moment that her breasts began to develop, and they had developed most noticeably, Ruth had not felt comfortable being naked in front of him. Yet showering together in the outdoor shower, and swimming naked together in the pool . . . well, weren’t these activities merely family rituals? In the warm weather, anyway, they seemed to be the expected rituals, inseparable from playing squash.
But, upon his defeat, her father looked old and tired; Ruth couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him naked. Nor did she want him to see the fingerprint bruises on her breasts, and the thumbprint and fingerprint bruises on her hips and buttocks. Her father might have believed that her black eye was a squash injury, but he knew more than enough about sex to know that she couldn’t have got her other bruises playing squash. She thought she would spare him those other bruises.
Of course he didn’t know he was being spared. When Ruth told him that she wanted a hot bath instead of a shower and a swim, her father felt he’d been rebuffed.
“Ruthie, how are we ever going to put the Hannah episode behind us if we don’t talk about it?”
“We’ll talk about Hannah later, Daddy. Maybe after I’m back from Europe.”
For twenty years, she’d been trying to
beat her father at squash. Now that she’d finally defeated him, Ruth found herself weeping in the bathtub. She wished she could feel even the slightest elation at her moment of victory; instead Ruth wept because her father had reduced her best friend to an “episode.” Or was it Hannah who’d reduced their friendship to something less than a fling with her father?
Oh, don’t pick it apart—just get over it! Ruth told herself. So they had both betrayed her—so what?
When she got out of her bath, she made herself look in the mirror. Her right eye was a horror—a great way to begin a book tour ! The eye was puffy and closed, the cheekbone swollen, but the discoloration of the skin was the most striking aspect of her injury. For an area roughly the size of a fist, her skin was a dark reddish-purple—like a sunset before a storm, the vivid colors tinged with black. It was such a lurid bruise, it was half comical. She would wear the bruise for the duration of her ten-day tour in Germany; the swelling would go down and the bruise would finally fade to a sallow yellow color, but the injury might still be discernible on her face the following week in Amsterdam, too.
She intentionally hadn’t packed her squash clothes, not even her shoes. She’d purposely left her racquets in the barn. It was a good time to give up squash. Her German and Dutch publishers had arranged matches for her; they would have to cancel them. She had an obvious (even a visible) excuse. She could tell them her cheekbone was broken, and that she’d been advised by a doctor to let it heal. (Scott Saunders might very well have broken her cheekbone.)
Her black eye didn’t look like a squash injury; if she’d been hit that hard by her opponent’s racquet, she would have had a cut—and stitches— in addition to the bruise. The story should be that she was struck by her opponent’s elbow . In order for that to happen, Ruth would have had to have been standing too close to her opponent—crowding him from behind. In such a circumstance, Ruth’s imaginary opponent would have to have been a left-hander—in order to hit her in her right eye. (To tell a believable story, the novelist knew, you just have to get the details right.)
She could imagine it being funny in the interviews that lay ahead of her: “Traditionally, I’ve had a hard time with left-handers.” Or: “There’s always something with lefties that you don’t see coming.” (For example, they fuck you from behind, after you tell them you don’t like it that way, and they slug you when you tell them it’s time to leave—or they fuck your best friend.)
Ruth felt familiar enough with left-handed behavior to make up a pretty good story.
They were in heavy traffic on the Southern State Parkway, not far from the turnoff to the airport, when Ruth decided that she’d not defeated her father to her satisfaction. For fifteen years or more, whenever they drove anywhere together, Ruth usually drove. But not today. Back in Sagaponack, as he was putting her three bags in the trunk, her father had said to her: “Better let me drive, Ruthie. I can see out of both eyes.”
Ruth hadn’t argued. If her father drove, she could say anything to him, and he wouldn’t be permitted to look at her—not while he was driving.
Ruth had begun by telling him how much she’d liked Eddie O’Hare. She’d gone on to say that her mother had already thought of leaving before the boys were killed; it had not been Eddie who’d given Marion the idea. And Ruth told her father that she knew he had planned her mother’s affair with Eddie; he had set them up, realizing how vulnerable Marion might be to a boy who reminded her of Thomas and Timothy. And of course it had been an even easier assumption, on her father’s part, that Eddie would fall hopelessly in love with Marion.
“Ruthie, Ruthie . . .” her father started to say.
“Keep your eyes on the road, and in the rearview mirror,” she told him. “If you even think about looking at me, you better pull over and let me drive.”
“Your mother was terminally depressed, and she knew it,” her father told her. “She knew she would have a terrible effect on you. It’s an awful thing for a child to have a parent who’s always depressed.”
Talking to Eddie had meant so much to Ruth, but everything Eddie had told her meant nothing to her father. Ted had a fixed idea of who Marion was, and why she’d left him. Indeed, Ruth’s meeting with Eddie had failed to make any impression on her father. That was probably the reason that the desire to devastate her father had never been as strong in Ruth as it was when she began to tell him about Scott Saunders.
Clever novelist that she was, Ruth first led her father into the story by mis leading him. She began with meeting Scott on the jitney, and their subsequent squash match.
“So that’s who gave you the black eye!” her father said. “I’m not surprised. He charges all over the court, and he takes too big a backswing—he’s a typical tennis player.”
Ruth just told the story, step by step. When she got to the part about showing Scott the Polaroids in her father’s bottommost drawer, Ruth began to speak of herself in the third person. Her father hadn’t known that Ruth knew about those photographs—not to mention his night-table drawer full of condoms and the lubricating jelly.
When Ruth got to the part about her first sexual experience with Scott—and how she’d hoped, when Scott had been licking her, that her father would come home and see them through the open door of the master bedroom—her father took his eyes off the road, if only for a half-second, and looked at her.
“You better pull over and let me drive, Daddy,” Ruth told him. “One eye on the road is better than no eyes.”
He watched the road, and the rearview mirror, while she went ahead with her story. The shrimp hadn’t tasted much like shrimp, and she hadn’t wanted to have sex a second time. Her first big mistake was to straddle Scott for so long. “Ruth fucked his brains out” was how she put it.
When she got to the part about the phone ringing, and Scott Saunders entering her from behind—even though she’d told him that she didn’t like it that way—her father took his eyes off the road again. Ruth got angry with him. “Look, Daddy, if you can’t concentrate on the driving, you’re not fit to drive. Get off the road. I’ll take over.”
“Ruthie, Ruthie . . .” was all he could say. He was crying.
“If you’re upset and you can’t see the road, that’s another reason to pull over, Daddy.”
She described her head banging against the headboard of the bed, how she’d had no other choice but to push her hips back against him. And, later, how he’d hit her— not with a squash racquet. (“Ruth thought it was a straight left—she never saw it coming.”)
She’d just curled up and hoped that he wouldn’t keep hitting her. Then, when her head had cleared, she’d gone downstairs and found Scott’s squash racquet. Her first shot took out his right knee. “It was a low backhand,” she explained. “Naturally with the racquet face sideways.”
“You took his knee out first?” her father interrupted her.
“Knee, face, both elbows, both collarbones—in that order,” Ruth told him.
“He couldn’t walk ?” her father asked.
“He couldn’t crawl, ” Ruth said. “He could walk, with a limp.”
“Jesus, Ruthie . . .”
“Did you see the sign for Kennedy?” she asked him.
“Yes, I saw it,” he said.
“You didn’t look like you saw it,” Ruth told him.
Then she told him how it still hurt her to pee, and that there was a pain in an unfamiliar place—inside her. “I’m sure it will go away,” she added, dropping the third person. “I’ve just got to remember to stay out of that position.”
“I’ll kill the bastard!” her father told her.
“Why bother?” Ruth asked. “You can still play squash with him— when he’s able to run around again. He’s not very good but you can get a halfway decent workout with him—he’s not bad exercise.”
“He virtually raped you! He hit you!” her father shouted.
“But nothing’s changed,” Ruth insisted. “Hannah’s still my best friend. You’re still my father.
”
“Okay, okay—I get it,” her father told her. He tried to wipe the tears off his face with the sleeve of his old flannel shirt. Ruth loved this particular shirt because her father had worn it when she was a little girl. Still, she was tempted to tell him to keep both his hands on the wheel.
Instead she reminded him of what airline she was taking, and the terminal he should be looking for. “You can see, can’t you?” she asked. “It’s Delta.”
“I can see, I can see. I know it’s Delta,” he told her. “And I get your point—I get it, I get it.”
“I don’t think you’ll ever get it,” Ruth said. “Don’t look at me—we’re not stopped yet!” she had to tell him.
“Ruthie, Ruthie. I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .”
“Do you see where it says ‘Departures’?” she asked him.
“Yes, I see it,” he said. It was the way he’d said, “Good job, Ruthie,” after she’d beaten him in his goddamn barn.
When her father finally stopped the car, Ruth said, “Good driving, Daddy.” If she’d known then that it would be their last conversation, she might have tried to patch things up with him. But she could see that, for once, she’d truly defeated him. Her father was too badly beaten to be uplifted by a simple turn in their conversation. And besides, the pain in that unfamiliar place inside her was still bothering her.
In retrospect, it would have to suffice that Ruth remembered to kiss her father good-bye.
In the Delta Crown Room, before she boarded the plane, Ruth called Allan. He sounded worried on the phone, or as if he were being less than candid with her. It gave her a pang to imagine what he might think of her if he ever knew about Scott Saunders. (Allan would never know about Scott.)