A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  “Ghana,” one of the women said.

  “Where you from?” the other one asked Ruth.

  “The United States,” Ruth replied. The African women murmured appreciatively; rubbing their fingers together, they made the universal request for money.

  “You want anything we can give you?” one of them asked Ruth.

  “You want to come inside?” the other asked.

  Then they laughed uproariously. They suffered from no illusion that Ruth was truly interested in having sex with them. It was simply that the well-known wealth of the United States made it impossible for them not to try to entice Ruth with their abundant wiles.

  “No, thank you,” Ruth said to them. Still smiling politely, she walked away.

  There were only cleaning women in evidence where the Ecuadoran men had strutted their stuff. And on the Molensteeg, where last night there had been more Dominicans and Colombians, there was another African-looking prostitute in a window—this one was very lean—and yet another cleaning woman in another of the cubicles.

  The desertion of the district gave it more of the atmosphere that Ruth had always had in mind; the look of abandonment, which was the look of unwanted sex, was better than the nonstop sex-tourism of the district at night.

  In her all-consuming curiosity, Ruth wandered into a sex shop. As in a traditional video store, each category was afforded its own aisle. There was the spanking aisle, and the aisles for oral and anal sex; Ruth did not explore the excrement aisle, and the red light over the door to a closed “video cabin” prompted her to leave the shop before the customer exited the private viewing box. Ruth was willing merely to imagine his expression.

  For awhile she thought she was being followed. A compact, powerful-looking man in blue jeans and dirty running shoes was always behind or across the street from her—even after she’d circled the same block twice. He had a tough face with the stubble of two or three days’ growth of beard, and a haggard, irritable expression. He wore a loosefitting windbreaker cut like a baseball warm-up jacket. He didn’t look as if he could afford a prostitute; yet he followed her as if he thought she was one. At last he disappeared and she stopped worrying about him.

  She walked in the district for two hours. By eleven o’clock, some of the Thais had returned to the Stoofsteeg; the Africans were gone. And around the Oudekerksplein, the one fat black woman, possibly also from Ghana, had been replaced by a dozen or more brown-skinned women—the Colombians and the Dominicans again.

  By mistake, Ruth turned into a dead-end alley off the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. The Slapersteeg quickly narrowed and ended at three or four prostitutes’ windows, the access to which was a single door. In the open doorway, a big brown prostitute with what sounded like a Jamaican accent grabbed Ruth by her arm. A cleaning woman was still at work inside the rooms, and two other prostitutes were readying themselves in front of a long makeup mirror.

  “Who are you looking for?” the big brown woman asked.

  “No one,” Ruth said. “I’m lost.”

  The cleaning woman kept sullenly to her task, but the prostitutes at the makeup mirror—and the big one who held fast to Ruth’s arm— laughed.

  “ I’ll say you’re lost,” the big prostitute said, leading Ruth out of the alley by her arm. The prostitute firmly squeezed and squeezed Ruth’s arm; it was in the manner of an unasked-for massage, or like the affectionate, sensual kneading of dough.

  “Thank you,” Ruth said, as if she’d truly been lost—as if she’d truly been rescued.

  “No problem, sugar.”

  This time, when Ruth again crossed the Warmoesstraat, she noticed the police station. Two uniformed policemen were in conversation with the compact, powerful-looking man in the windbreaker who’d been following her. Oh, good—they’ve arrested him! Ruth thought. Then she guessed that the thuggish man was a plainclothes cop; he appeared to be giving orders to the two cops in uniform. Ruth was ashamed and hurried on—as if she were a criminal! De Wallen was a small district; in one morning, she’d stood out—she’d looked suspicious.

  And as much as Ruth preferred de Wallen in the morning to what the district became at night, she doubted that it was the right place or time of day for her characters to approach a prostitute and pay her to allow them to watch her with a customer. They might wait all morning for the first customer!

  But now there was barely time to continue past the area of her hotel to the Bergstraat, where Ruth expected to find Rooie in her window; it was just before midday. This time, the prostitute had undergone a milder transformation. Her red hair had a less orange, coppery tone; it was darker, more auburn—almost maroon—and her demi-bra and bikini panties were an off-white, like ivory, which accentuated the whiteness of Rooie’s skin.

  By leaning over, Rooie could open her door without getting off her barstool; thus she was able to sit in her window seat while Ruth poked her head inside. (Ruth made a point of not crossing the threshold.) “I haven’t time to stop and see you now,” Ruth said, “but I want to come back.”

  “Fine,” Rooie said, shrugging. Her indifference surprised Ruth.

  “I looked for you last night, but someone else was in your window,” Ruth went on. “She said you were spending the night with your daughter.”

  “I spend every night with my daughter—every weekend, too,” Rooie replied. “The only time I’m here is when she’s in school.”

  In an effort to be friendly, Ruth asked: “How old is your daughter?”

  “Look,” the prostitute sighed, “I’m not getting rich talking to you.”

  “I’m sorry.” Ruth stepped back from the doorway as if she’d been pushed.

  Before Rooie leaned over and closed her door, she said: “Come see me, when you have the time.”

  Feeling like a fool, Ruth chastised herself for having had such high expectations of a prostitute. Of course money was the main thing on Rooie’s mind—if not the sole thing. Here Ruth was trying to treat the woman as a friend, when all that had really happened was that Ruth had paid her for their first conversation!

  After so much walking without any breakfast, Ruth was ravenous at lunch. She was sure that she gave a disorganized interview. She couldn’t answer a single question regarding Not for Children, or her two earlier novels, without changing the subject to some element of her novel-in-progress: the excitement of starting her first novel in the first-person voice; the compelling idea of a woman who, in an instant of bad judgment, humiliates herself to a degree that she embarks on a whole new life. But as Ruth talked about this, she caught herself thinking: Who am I kidding? This is all about me! Haven’t I made some bad decisions? (At least one, just recently . . .) Aren’t I about to embark on a whole new life? Or is Allan merely the “safe” alternative to a life I’m afraid to pursue?

  At her late-afternoon lecture at the Vrije Universiteit—it was her only lecture, really; she kept revising it, but in essence it stayed the same— her speech sounded disingenuous to her. Here she was, espousing the purity of imagination as opposed to memory, extolling the superiority of the invented detail as opposed to the merely autobiographical. Here she was, singing the virtues of creating wholly imagined characters as opposed to populating a novel with personal friends and family members—“ex-lovers, and those other limited, disappointing people from our actual lives”—and yet the lecture had worked well again. Audiences loved it. What had begun as an argument between Ruth and Hannah had served Ruth, the novelist, very well; the lecture had become her credo.

  She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one—for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story—not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.

  Ruth Cole’s credo amounted to a war against the roman ‡ clef, a putdown of the autobiographical novel,
which now made her feel ashamed because she knew she was getting ready to write her most autobiographical novel to date. If Hannah had always accused her of writing about a Ruth character and a Hannah character, what was Ruth writing about now? Strictly a Ruth character who makes a bad, Hannah-like decision!

  And so it was painful for Ruth to sit in a restaurant and listen to the compliments of her sponsors from the Vrije Universiteit; they were well-meaning but mostly academic types, who favored theories, and theoretical discussions, to the more concrete nuts and bolts of storytelling. Ruth hated herself for providing them with a theory of fiction about which she now had sizable doubts.

  Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn’t, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstances. That wasn’t much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments for her former credo.

  It wasn’t until (in lieu of dessert) she asked for another glass of red wine that Ruth knew she’d had too much to drink. At that instant she also remembered not seeing the beautiful Dutch boy Wim in line for her autograph after her successful but mortifying speech. He’d said he would be there.

  Ruth had to admit that she’d been looking forward to seeing young Wim again—and perhaps drawing him out a little. Truly she hadn’t been planning to flirt with him, at least not in earnest, and she had already decided not to sleep with him. She’d wanted only to arrange a time to be alone with him—possibly a coffee in the morning—to discover what his interest in her was; to imagine him as her admirer, and maybe as her lover; to absorb more of the details of which the beautiful Dutch boy was composed. And then he hadn’t shown up.

  I guess he finally got tired of me, Ruth thought. She could sympathize with him if he had; she had never felt so tired of herself.

  Ruth refused to allow Maarten and Sylvia to accompany her to her hotel. She’d kept them up late the night before; everyone was in need of an early night. They put her in a cab and instructed the driver. Across the street from her hotel, at the taxi stand on the Kattengat, she saw Wim standing under a streetlight—like a lost boy who’d been separated from his mother in a crowd, which had since dispersed.

  Mercy! Ruth thought, as she crossed the street to claim him.

  Not a Mother, Not Her Son

  At least she didn’t sleep with him—not exactly. They did spend the night together in the same bed, but she did not have sex with him—not really. Oh, they had kissed and cuddled; she did permit him to touch her breasts, but she made him stop when he got too excited. And she’d slept the whole night in her panties and a T-shirt; she’d not been naked with him. It wasn’t her fault that he’d taken all his clothes off. She’d gone into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and to change into the panties and the T-shirt, and when she’d come back into the bedroom, he’d already undressed and crawled into bed.

  They’d talked and talked. His name was Wim Jongbloed; he’d read every word she’d written, over and over again. He wanted to be a writer like her, but he’d not approached her after her lecture at the Vrije Universiteit; he’d been devastated by what she’d had to say. He wrote nonstop autobiographical logorrhea—he’d never “imagined” a story or a character in his life. All he did was record his miserable longings, his wretchedly ordinary experience. He’d left her lecture wanting to kill himself, but instead he’d gone home and destroyed all his writing. He’d thrown his diaries—for that’s all he’d written—into a canal. Then he’d called every first-class hotel in Amsterdam until he found out where she was staying.

  They’d sat talking in the hotel bar until it was obvious that the bar was closing; then she’d taken him to her room.

  “I’m no better than a journalist,” Wim said, brokenhearted.

  Ruth winced to hear her own phrase recited to her; it was a line right out of her lecture. What she’d said was: “If you can’t make something up, you’re no better than a journalist.”

  “I don’t know how to make up a story!” Wim Jongbloed complained.

  He probably couldn’t write a decent sentence to save his soul, either, but Ruth felt totally responsible for him. And he was so pretty. He had thick, dark-brown hair and dark-brown eyes with the longest eyelashes. He had the smoothest skin, a fine nose, a strong chin, a heart-shaped mouth. And although his body was too slight for Ruth’s taste, he had broad shoulders and a wide chest—he was still in the process of growing into his body.

  She began by telling him about her novel-in-progress; how it kept changing, how that was what you did to make up a story. Storytelling was nothing more than a kind of heightened common sense. (Ruth wondered where she’d read that; she was sure she hadn’t thought it up.)

  Ruth even confessed that she’d “imagined” Wim as the young man in her novel. That didn’t mean she would have sex with him; in fact, she wanted him to understand that she would not have sex with him. It was enough for her to have fantasized about it.

  He told her that he had fantasized about it, too—for years! He’d once masturbated to her book-jacket photograph. Upon hearing this, Ruth went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth, and changed into a pair of clean panties and a T-shirt. And when she came out of the bathroom, there he was—naked in her bed.

  She’d not once touched his penis, although she felt it poking against her when they hugged; it felt good to hug the boy. And he’d been awfully polite about masturbating, at least the first time. “I just have to do it,” he’d told her. “May I?”

  “All right,” she said, turning her back to him.

  “No, looking at you,” he begged her. “Please . . .”

  She turned over in bed to face him. Once she kissed his eyes, and the tip of his nose, but not his lips. He stared at her so intently that Ruth could almost believe she was his age again. And it was easy for her to imagine that this was how it had been with her mother and Eddie O’Hare. Eddie hadn’t told her this part, but Ruth had read all of Eddie’s novels. She knew perfectly well that Eddie hadn’t invented the masturbation scenes; poor Eddie could invent next to nothing.

  When Wim Jongbloed came, his eyelids fluttered; Ruth kissed him on the lips then, but it was not a lingering kiss—the embarrassed boy ran to the bathroom to wash his hand. When he trotted back to bed, he fell asleep so quickly, his head on her breasts, that she thought: I might have liked to have tried my hand at that, too!

  Then she decided she was glad she hadn’t masturbated. If she had, it would have been more like having sex with him. Ruth found it ironic that she needed to make her own rules and her own definitions. She wondered if her mother had needed to similarly restrain or measure herself with Eddie. If Ruth had had a mother, would she have found herself in such a situation as this?

  She only once pulled back the sheets and looked at the sleeping boy. She could have gone on looking at him all night, but she even restrained or measured how long she looked. It was a good-bye look— and chaste enough, under the circumstances. She resolved that she wouldn’t let Wim in her bed again, and in the early morning Wim made her more determined to keep her resolution. When he thought she was still asleep, he masturbated beside her again, this time sneaking his hand under her T-shirt and holding fast to one of her bare breasts. She pretended to continue sleeping while he ran to the bathroom to wash his hand. The little goat!

  She took him out to a café for breakfast, and then they went to what he called a “literary” café on the Kloveniersburgwal—for more coffee. De Engelbewaarder was a dark place with a farting dog sleeping under one table, and—at the only tables that got any window light—a halfdozen English soccer fans were drinking beer. Their shiny blue soccer shirts lauded a brand of English lager, and when another two or three of their mates would wander in and join them, they would, in salutation, break into a fragment of a rousing song. But not even these desu
ltory outbursts of singing could rouse the dog from its sleep, or keep it from farting. (If de Engelbewaarder was Wim’s idea of a “ literary” café, Ruth would have hated to see what he called a lowlife bar.)

  Wim seemed less depressed about his writing in the morning. Ruth believed she’d made him happy enough for her to expect some further research assistance from him.

  “What kind of ‘research assistance’?” the young man asked the older woman writer.

  “Well.”

  Ruth remembered her shock upon reading that Graham Greene, as a student at Oxford, had experimented with Russian roulette—that suicidal game with a revolver. The information had jarred her image of Greene as a writer who had the greatest control of himself. At the time of his dangerous game, Greene was in love with his younger sister’s governess; the nanny was twelve years older than young Graham and already engaged to be married.

  While Ruth Cole could imagine a young idolater like Wim Jongbloed playing Russian roulette over her, what did she think she was doing when she went with Wim to the red-light district, and almost at random approached first this and then that prostitute with the proposition that she allow them to watch her with a customer? While Ruth had explained to Wim that she was posing this question hypothetically — that she did not truly want to see a prostitute perform the act (or acts)—the prostitutes whom Ruth and Wim talked to either misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted the proposition.

  The Dominican and Colombian women who dominated the windows and doorways in the area of the Oudekerksplein did not appeal to Ruth because she suspected they had a poor understanding of English, which was the case; Wim confirmed that they had a worse grasp of Dutch. There was a tall, stunning blonde in an open doorway off the Oudekennissteeg, but she spoke neither English nor Dutch. Wim said that she was Russian.