A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  “That’s true,” Rooie answered. “Mostly it’s men, alone. Some couples, maybe once or twice a year.”

  “And women alone?”

  “I can do that, if that’s what you want,” Rooie said. “I do that from time to time, but not often. Most men don’t mind if another woman watches. It’s the women who are watching who don’t want to be seen.”

  It was so warm and airless in the room, Ruth longed to take her leather jacket off. But, in present company, it would be too brazen of her to be wearing just her black silk T-shirt. Therefore, she unzipped her jacket but kept it on.

  Rooie walked over to the wardrobe closet. There was no door. A chintz curtain—in a pattern of fallen autumn leaves, mostly red— hung from a wooden dowel. When Rooie closed the curtain, it concealed the contents of the closet—except for the shoes, which she turned around so that their toes were pointed out. There were a halfdozen pairs of high-heeled shoes.

  “You would just stand behind the curtain with the toes of your shoes pointed out, like the other shoes,” Rooie said. She stepped through the part in the curtain and concealed herself. When Ruth looked at Rooie’s feet, she could hardly tell the shoes that Rooie was wearing from the other shoes; Ruth needed to be looking for Rooie’s ankles in order to see them.

  “I see,” Ruth said. She wanted to stand in the wardrobe closet to see what her view of the bed would be; through the narrow part in the curtain, it might be difficult to see the bed.

  It was as if the prostitute had read her mind. Rooie stepped out from behind the curtain. “Here, you try it,” the redhead said.

  Ruth could not avoid brushing against the prostitute when she slipped through the parted curtain. The entire room was so small that it was next to impossible for two people to move in it without touching.

  Ruth fit her feet between two pairs of shoes. Through the narrow slit where the curtain was parted, she had a clear view of the pink towel centered on the prostitute’s bed. In an opposing mirror, Ruth could also see the wardrobe closet; she had to look closely to recognize her own shoes among the shoes below the bottom hem of the curtain. Ruth could not see herself through the curtain—not even her own eyes, peering through the slit. Not even a portion of her face, unless she moved, and even then she could detect only some undefined movement.

  Without moving her head, just her eyes, Ruth could take in the sink and bidet; the dildo in the hospital tray (together with the lubricants and jellies) was clearly visible. But Ruth’s view of the blow-job chair was blocked by one armrest and the back of the chair itself.

  “If the guy wants a blow job and someone’s watching, I can give him a blow job on the bed,” Rooie said. “If that’s what you’re thinking . . .”

  Ruth hadn’t been in the wardrobe closet for more than a minute; she’d not yet noticed that her breathing was irregular, or that her contact with the gold-colored dress on the nearest hanger had made her neck begin to itch. She was aware of a slight discomfort in her throat when she swallowed—the last vestiges of her cough, she thought, or the coming of a cold. When a pearl-gray negligee slipped off a hanger, it was as if her heart had stopped and she had died where she always imagined she would: in a closet.

  “If you’re comfortable in there,” Rooie said, “I’ll open the window curtains and sit in the window. But this time of day it might take a while to get a guy to come in—maybe half an hour, maybe as much as forty-five minutes. Of course, you’ll have to pay me another seventyfive guilders. This has already taken a lot of my time.”

  Ruth stumbled on the shoes as she rushed out of the wardrobe closet. “No! I don’t want to watch!” the novelist cried. “I’m just writing a story ! It’s about a couple . The woman is my age. Her boyfriend talks her into it—she’s got a bad boyfriend.”

  Ruth saw, with embarrassment, that she’d kicked one of the prostitute’s shoes halfway across the room. Rooie retrieved the shoe; then she knelt at her wardrobe closet, straightening up the other shoes. She returned them all to the usual, toes-in position—including the shoe that Ruth had kicked.

  “You’re a weird one,” the prostitute said. They stood awkwardly beside the wardrobe closet, as if they were admiring the newly arranged shoes. “And your five minutes are up,” Rooie added, pointing to her pretty gold watch.

  Ruth again unzipped her purse. She took three twenty-five-guilder bills out of her wallet, but Rooie was standing close enough to look inside Ruth’s billfold for herself. The prostitute deftly picked out a fifty-guilder bill. “Fifty is enough—for five more minutes,” the redhead said. “Save your small bills,” she advised Ruth. “You might want to come back . . . after you think about it.”

  So quickly that Ruth didn’t anticipate it, Rooie pressed closer to Ruth and nuzzled Ruth’s neck; before Ruth could react, the prostitute lightly cupped one of Ruth’s breasts as she turned away and again seated herself dead-center on the towel protecting her bed. “Nice perfume, but I can hardly smell it,” Rooie remarked. “Nice breasts. Big ones.”

  Blushing, Ruth tried to lower herself into the blow-job chair without letting the chair claim her. “In my story . . .” the novelist started to say.

  “The trouble with your story is that nothing happens,” Rooie said. “So the couple pays me to watch me do it. So what? It wouldn’t be the first time. So what happens then ? Isn’t that the story?”

  “I’m not sure what happens then, but that is the story,” Ruth answered. “The woman with the bad boyfriend is humiliated. She feels degraded by the experience—not because of what she sees, but because of the boyfriend. It’s the way he makes her feel that humiliates her.”

  “That wouldn’t be the first time, either,” the prostitute told her.

  “Maybe the man masturbates while he’s watching,” Ruth suggested. Rooie knew it was a question.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” the prostitute repeated. “Why would the woman be surprised at that?”

  Rooie was right. And there was another problem: Ruth didn’t know everything that could happen in the story because she didn’t know enough about who the characters were and what their relationship was. It wasn’t the first time that she’d made such a discovery about a novel she was beginning; it was just the first time that she’d made the discovery in front of another person—not to mention a stranger and a prostitute.

  “Do you know what usually happens?” Rooie asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Ruth admitted.

  “The watching is just the beginning,” the prostitute told her. “With couples, especially—the watching just leads to something else.”

  “What do you mean?” Ruth asked her.

  “The next time they come back, they don’t want to watch—they want to do something,” Rooie said.

  “I don’t think my character would come back a second time,” Ruth replied, but she considered the possibility.

  “Sometimes, after the watching, the couple wants to do things immediately—like right then,” Rooie said.

  “What kind of things?” Ruth asked.

  “All kinds,” Rooie said. “Sometimes the guy wants to watch me with the woman—he wants to see me get the woman hot. Usually I start with the guy, and the woman watches.”

  “You start with the guy. . . .” Ruth said.

  “Then the woman,” Rooie said.

  “That’s actually happened?” Ruth asked.

  “ Everything’s happened,” the prostitute said.

  Ruth sat in the scarlet-tinged light, which now cast an intensifying, reddish glow throughout the small room; the pink towel on the bed, where Rooie sat, was doubtless a deeper shade of pink because of the scarlet color of the stained-glass lamp shade. The only other light in the room was the muted light that found its way through the window curtains and a dim overhead light that was trained on the door to the street.

  The prostitute leaned forward in the flattering light; in so doing, her breasts appeared ready to slip out of her demi-bra. While Ruth held tightly to the armrests of th
e blow-job chair, Rooie softly covered Ruth’s hands with her own. “You want to think about what happens and come see me again?” the redhead asked.

  “Yes,” Ruth said. She hadn’t meant to whisper, nor could she take her hands out of the prostitute’s hands without falling backward in the awful chair.

  “Just remember— anything can happen,” Rooie told her. “Anything you want.”

  “Yes,” Ruth whispered again. She stared at the prostitute’s exposed breasts; it seemed safer than staring into her clever eyes.

  “Maybe if you watched me with someone—I mean you, alone— you’d get some ideas,” Rooie said in a whisper of her own.

  Ruth shook her head, aware that the gesture conveyed far less conviction than if she’d said sharply, “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Most of the women alone who watch me are young girls,” Rooie announced in a louder, dismissive voice.

  Ruth was so surprised at this that she looked into Rooie’s face without meaning to. “Why young girls?” Ruth asked. “Do you mean they want to know what having sex is like? Are they virgins ?”

  Rooie let go of Ruth’s hands; she pushed herself back on her bed and laughed. “They’re hardly virgins !” the redhead said. “They’re young girls who are thinking about being prostitutes—they want to see what being a prostitute is like!”

  Ruth had never been so shocked; not even the knowledge that Hannah had fucked her father had been this astonishing.

  Rooie pointed to her wristwatch and stood up from her bed exactly at the same time Ruth stood up from the difficult chair. Ruth had to contort herself in order not to make contact with the prostitute.

  Rooie opened the door to a midday sunlight of such sudden brightness that Ruth realized she’d underestimated the dimness of the lighting in the prostitute’s red room. Turning away from the light, Rooie dramatically blocked Ruth’s exit while she bestowed on Ruth’s cheeks three kisses—first on Ruth’s right cheek, then on her left, and then on her right again. “The Dutch way—three times,” the prostitute said cheerfully, with an affection more suitable for old friends.

  Of course Ruth had been kissed this way before—by Maarten and by Maarten’s wife, Sylvia, whenever they’d said their hellos and goodbyes—but Rooie’s kisses had lingered a little longer. And Rooie had also pressed her warm palm against Ruth’s belly, causing Ruth to instinctively tighten her stomach muscles. “What a flat tummy you have,” the prostitute told her. “Have you had any babies?”

  “No, not yet,” Ruth replied. The doorway was still blocked.

  “I’ve had one,” Rooie said. She hooked her thumbs inside the waistband of her bikini panties and lowered them in a flash. “The hard way,” the prostitute added, in reference to the highly visible scar from a cesarean section; the scar was not nearly as surprising to Ruth, who’d already noted Rooie’s stretch marks, as the fact that the prostitute had shaved off her pubic hair.

  Rooie let go of the waistband of her panties, which made a snap. Ruth thought: If I’d rather be writing than what I’m doing, imagine how she feels. After all, she’s a prostitute; she would probably rather be being a prostitute than flirting with me. But she also enjoys making me uncomfortable. Irritated with Rooie now, Ruth just wanted to go. She tried to edge around Rooie in the doorway.

  “You’ll be back,” Rooie told her, but she let Ruth slip into the street without further physical contact. Then Rooie raised her voice, so that anyone passing in the Bergstraat, or a neighboring prostitute, could hear her. “You better zip up your purse in this town,” the redhead said.

  Ruth’s purse was open, an old failing, but her wallet and passport were in place, and—at a glance—whatever else should be there. A tube of lipstick and a fatter tube of colorless lip gloss; a tube of sunscreen and a tube of moisturizer for her lips.

  Ruth also carried a compact that had belonged to her mother. Face powder made Ruth sneeze; the powder puff had long ago been lost. Yet at times, when Ruth looked in the small mirror, she expected to see her mother there. Ruth zipped her purse closed while Rooie smiled ironically at her.

  When Ruth struggled to return Rooie’s smile, the sunlight made her squint. Rooie reached out and touched Ruth’s face with her hand. She was staring at Ruth’s right eye with a keen interest, but Ruth misunderstood the reason. After all, Ruth was more used to people spotting the hexagonal flaw in her right eye than she was used to being punched.

  “I was born with it . . .” Ruth started to say.

  But Rooie said, “Who hit you?” (And Ruth had thought her bruise had healed.) “About a week or two ago, it looks like . . .”

  “A bad boyfriend,” Ruth confessed.

  “So there is a boyfriend,” Rooie said.

  “He’s not here. I’m alone here,” Ruth insisted.

  “You’re only alone until the next time you see me,” the prostitute replied. Rooie had only two ways of smiling, ironically and seductively. Now she was smiling seductively.

  All Ruth could think of saying was: “Your English is surprisingly good.” But this barbed compliment, however true, had a much more profound effect on Rooie than Ruth had anticipated.

  The prostitute lost every outward manifestation of her cockiness. She looked as if an old sorrow had returned to her with near-violent force.

  Ruth almost said she was sorry, but before she could speak, the redhead responded bitterly: “I knew somebody English—for a while.” Then Rooie Dolores went back inside her room and closed the door. Ruth waited, but the window curtains did not open.

  One of the younger, prettier prostitutes was scowling resentfully at Ruth from across the street, as if she were personally disappointed that Ruth should spend her money on an older, less attractive whore.

  There was only one other pedestrian on the tiny Bergstraat—an older man with his eyes cast down. He would not look at any of the prostitutes, but he raised his eyes sharply to Ruth as he passed by. She glared back at the man, whose eyes were fixed on the cobblestones as he walked on.

  Then Ruth walked on, too. Her personal but not professional confidence was shaken. Whatever the possible story was—the most probable story, the best story—she had no doubt that she would think of it. She hadn’t thought enough about her characters; that was all. No, the confidence she’d lost was something moral. It was at the center of herself as a woman, and whatever “it” was, Ruth marveled at the feeling of its absence.

  She would go back to see Rooie again, but that was not what bothered her. She felt no desire to have any sexual experience with the prostitute, who had certainly stimulated her imagination but who had not aroused her. And Ruth still believed that there was no necessity for her, either as a writer or as a woman, to watch the prostitute perform with a customer.

  What bothered Ruth was that she needed to be with Rooie again—just to see, as in a story, what would happen next. That meant that Rooie was in charge.

  The novelist walked quickly back to her hotel, where—before her first interview—she wrote only this in her diary: “The conventional wisdom is that prostitution is a kind of rape for money; in truth, in prostitution—maybe only in prostitution—the woman seems in charge.”

  Ruth had a second interview over lunch, and a third and fourth after lunch. She should have tried to relax then, because she had an early-evening reading, followed by a book-signing and then a dinner. But instead, Ruth sat in her hotel room, where she wrote and wrote. She developed one possible story after another, until the credibility of each felt strained. If the woman writer watching the prostitute perform was going to feel humiliated by the experience, whatever came of the experience sexually had to happen to the woman writer; somehow, it had to be her sexual experience. Otherwise, why would she feel humiliated?

  The more Ruth made an effort to involve herself in the story she was writing, the more she was delaying or avoiding the story she was living . For the first time, she knew what it felt like to be a character in a novel instead of the novelist (the one in charge)—for it
was as a character that Ruth saw herself returning to the Bergstraat, a character in a story she wasn’t writing.

  What she was experiencing was the excitement of a reader who needs to know what happens next. She knew she wouldn’t be able to keep herself away from Rooie. Irresistibly, she wanted to know what would happen . What would Rooie suggest? What would Ruth allow Rooie to do?

  When, if only for a moment, the novelist steps out of the creator’s role, what roles are there for the novelist to step into? There are only creators of stories and characters in stories; there are no other roles. Ruth had never felt such anticipation before. She felt she had absolutely no will to take control of what happened next; in fact, she was exhilarated not to be in charge. She was happy not to be the novelist. She was not the writer of this story, yet the story thrilled her.

  Ruth Changes Her Story

  Ruth stayed after her reading to sign books. Then she had dinner with the sponsors of the signing. And the following evening in Utrecht, after her reading at the university there, she also signed books. Maarten and Sylvia helped Ruth with the spelling of the Dutch names.

  The boys wanted their books inscribed, “To Wouter”—or to Hein, Hans, Henk, Gerard, or Jeroen. The girls’ names were no less foreign to Ruth. “To Els”—or to Loes, Mies, Marijke, or Nel (with one l ). And then there were those readers who wanted their last names included in the inscription. (The Overbeeks, the Van der Meulens, and the Van Meurs; the Blokhuises and the Veldhuizens; the Dijkstras and the De Groots and the Smits.) These book-signings were such arduous exercises in spelling that Ruth left both readings with a headache.

  But Utrecht and its old university were beautiful. Before her reading, Ruth had had an early dinner with Maarten and Sylvia and their grown sons. Ruth could remember when they’d been “little” boys; now they were taller than she was and one of them had grown a beard. To Ruth, still childless at thirty-six, one of the shocks of knowing couples with children was the disquieting phenomenon of how the children grew.