by John Irving
In London, because the cars were on the wrong side of the street, Ruth would not let Amanda and Graham cross a street, except to go to the small park nearby; beyond this unadventuresome expedition, the boy and his nanny were confined to the hotel. And Graham discovered that there was starch in the bedsheets at the Connaught. Was starch alive ? he wanted to know. “It feels alive,” the child said.
As they left London for Amsterdam, Ruth wished that, in London, she’d been half as courageous as Amanda Merton. The forthright girl had achieved a measurable success: Graham was over his jet lag, he was un constipated, and he was no longer afraid of foreign toilets—whereas Ruth had reason to doubt that she’d re-entered the world with even a vestige of her former authority on display.
While she’d previously taken her interviewers to task for not bothering to read her books before they talked to her, this time Ruth had suffered the indignity in silence. To spend three or four years writing a novel, and then to waste an hour or more talking to a journalist who hadn’t taken the time to read it . . . well, if this didn’t demonstrate a sizable lack of self-esteem, what did? (And My Last Bad Boyfriend wasn’t a long novel, either.)
With a meekness that was most uncharacteristic, Ruth had also tolerated an oft-repeated and utterly predictable question, which had nothing to do with her new novel: namely, how was she “coping” with being a widow, and had she found anything in her actual experience of widowhood to contradict what she’d written about being a widow in her previous work of fiction?
“No,” said Mrs. Cole, as she’d begun to think of herself. “Everything is just about as bad as I imagined it.”
In Amsterdam, not surprisingly, a different “oft-repeated and utterly predictable question” was a favorite among the Dutch journalists. They wanted to know how Ruth had conducted her research in the red-light district. Had she actually hidden in a window prostitute’s wardrobe closet and watched a prostitute have sex with a customer? (No, she had not, Ruth replied.) Had her “last bad boyfriend” been Dutch? ( Absolutely not, the author declared. But even as she spoke, she was on the lookout for Wim—she was certain he would put in an appearence.) And why was a so-called literary novelist interested in prostitutes in the first place? (She wasn’t personally interested in prostitutes, Ruth answered.)
It was a shame, most of her interviewers said, that she had singled out de Wallen for such scrutiny. Had nothing else about the city caught her attention?
“Don’t be provincial,” Ruth told her interrogators. “ My Last Bad Boyfriend is not about Amsterdam. The main character isn’t Dutch . There is simply an episode that takes place here. What happens to the main character in Amsterdam compels her to change her life. It’s the story of her life that interests me, especially her desire to change her life. Many people encounter moments in their lives that convince them to change.”
Predictably, the journalists then asked her: What such moments have you encountered? And: What changes have you made in your life?
“I’m a novelist,” Mrs. Cole would say then. “I haven’t written a memoir—I’ve written a novel. Please ask me about my novel.”
Reading her interviews in the newspapers, Harry Hoekstra wondered why Ruth Cole put herself through such tedium and trivia. Why be interviewed at all? Surely her books didn’t need the publicity. Why didn’t she just stay at home and start another novel? But I suppose she likes to travel, Harry thought.
He’d already heard her give a reading from her new novel; he’d also seen her on a local television show, and he’d watched her at a book-signing at the Athenaeum, where Harry had cleverly positioned himself behind a bookshelf. By removing no more than a half-dozen titles from the shelf, he could closely observe how Ruth Cole handled her fans. Her most avid readers had formed a line for her autograph, and while Ruth sat at a table signing and signing, Harry had a largely unobstructed view of her profile. Through the window he’d made in the bookshelf, Harry saw that there was a flaw in Ruth’s right eye—as he’d guessed from her book-jacket photo. And she really did have great breasts.
Although Ruth signed books for more than an hour without complaint, there was one mildly shocking occurrence. It suggested to Harry that Ruth was a lot less friendly than she’d at first appeared; indeed, at some level, Ruth struck Harry as one of the angriest people he’d ever seen.
Harry had always been attracted to people who contained a lot of anger. As a police officer, he’d found that un contained anger was nothing but a menace to him. Whereas contained anger greatly appealed to him, and he believed that people who weren’t angry at all were basically unobservant.
The woman who caused the trouble was in line for an autograph; she was elderly, and at the outset she appeared innocent of any wrongdoing, which is only to say she’d done nothing wrong that Harry could see . When it was her turn, she presented herself at the front of the line and put on the table an English edition of My Last Bad Boyfriend . A shy-looking (and equally elderly) man stood beside her. He was smiling down at Ruth—the old woman was smiling down at Ruth, too. The problem seemed to be that Ruth failed to recognize her.
“Should I inscribe this for you, or for someone in your family?” Ruth asked the old lady, whose smile lessened noticeably.
“To me, please,” the old woman said.
She had an innocuous American accent. But there was a false sweetness to the “please.” Ruth waited politely . . . no, perhaps a little impatiently . . . for the woman to tell her what her name was. They went on looking at each other, the recognition not coming to Ruth Cole.
“My name is Muriel Reardon,” the old lady finally said. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“No, I’m sorry,” Ruth said. “I don’t.”
“I last spoke to you at your wedding,” Muriel Reardon continued. “I’m sorry for what I said at the time. I’m afraid I wasn’t myself.”
Ruth went on looking at Mrs. Reardon, the color in her right eye changing from brown to amber. She hadn’t recognized the terrible old widow who’d been so certain of herself in her attack, five years ago, for two understandable reasons: she’d had no expectations of ever running into the harpy in Amsterdam, and the old hag had remarkably improved her appearance. Quite the opposite of being dead, as Hannah had declared, the wrathful widow had restored herself very nicely.
“It’s one of those coincidences that can’t be merely a coincidence,” Mrs. Reardon was saying, in a way that suggested she was newly religious. She was. In the five years since she’d assaulted Ruth, Muriel had met and married Mr . Reardon, who was still beaming beside her, and both Muriel and her new husband had become avid Christians.
Mrs. Reardon continued: “Begging your forgiveness was strangely foremost on my mind when my husband and I came to Europe—and here, of all places, I find you! It’s a miracle!”
Mr. Reardon overcame his shyness to say: “I was a widower when I met Muriel. We’re on a tour to see the great churches and cathedrals of Europe.”
Ruth went on looking at Mrs. Reardon in what seemed to Harry Hoekstra an increasingly un friendly way. As far as Harry was concerned, Christians always wanted something. What Mrs. Reardon wanted was to dictate the terms of her own forgiveness!
Ruth’s eyes had narrowed to the point where no one could have spotted the hexagonal flaw in her right eye. “You remarried,” she said flatly. It was the voice she read aloud in—curiously deadpan.
“Please forgive me,” Muriel Reardon said.
“What happened to being a widow for the rest of your miserable life?” Ruth asked.
“Please . . .” Mrs. Reardon said.
Mr. Reardon, after fumbling in the pocket of his sports jacket, produced an assortment of note cards with handwriting on them. He seemed to be searching for a specific card, which he couldn’t find. Undaunted, he began to read spontaneously. “ ‘For the wages of sin is death,’ ” Mr. Reardon read, “‘but the gift of God is eternal life. . . .’”
“Not that one!” Mrs. Reardon cried. “
Read her the one about forgiveness !”
“I don’t forgive you,” Ruth told her. “What you said to me was hateful and cruel and untrue.”
“‘For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace,’” Mr. Reardon read from another card. Although it was not the quotation he was looking for, either, he felt obliged to identify the source. “These are from Paul’s letter to the Romans.”
“You and your Romans, ” Mrs. Reardon snapped.
“Next!” Ruth called—for the next person in line had every reason to be impatient with the delay.
“I don’t forgive you for not forgiving me!” Muriel Reardon cried out, an un -Christian venom in her voice.
“Fuck you and both your husbands!” Ruth shouted after her, as her new husband struggled to lead her away. He’d returned the biblical quotations to his jacket pocket—all but one. Possibly it was the quotation he’d been searching for, but no one would ever know.
Harry had assumed that the somewhat shocked-looking man seated beside Ruth Cole was her Dutch publisher. When Ruth smiled at Maarten, it wasn’t a smile Harry had seen on Ruth’s face before, but Harry correctly interpreted the smile as indicative of a renewed self-confidence. Indeed, it was evidence that Ruth had re-entered the world with some of her former assertiveness intact.
“Who was that asshole?” Maarten asked her.
“Nobody worth knowing,” Ruth replied. She paused then, in mid-signature, and looked around as if she were suddenly curious about who might have overheard her uncharitable remark—meaning all her uncharitable remarks. (Was it Brecht who said that sooner or later we begin to resemble our enemies? Ruth thought.)
When Harry saw that Ruth was looking at him, he withdrew his face from the window he’d made in the bookshelf, but not before she’d seen him.
Shit! I’m falling in love with her! Harry thought. He’d not fallen in love before; at first he suspected he was having a heart attack. He abruptly left the Athenaeum; he preferred to die on the street.
When the line for Ruth Cole’s autograph had dwindled to only two or three remaining diehards, one of the booksellers asked: “Where’s Harry? I saw him here. Doesn’t he want his books signed?”
“Who’s Harry?” Ruth inquired.
“He’s your biggest fan,” the bookseller told her. “He also happens to be a cop. But I guess he’s gone. It’s the first time I’ve seen him at a signing, and he hates readings.”
Ruth sat quietly at the table, signing the last copies of her new novel.
“Even cops are reading you!” Maarten said to her.
“Well . . .” Ruth replied. She couldn’t say more. When she looked at the bookshelf, where she’d seen his face, the window that had been opened amid the books was closed. Someone had replaced the books. The cop’s face had vanished, but it was a face she’d never forgotten— the plainclothes cop who’d followed her through the red-light district was following her still!
What Ruth liked best about her new hotel in Amsterdam was that she could get to the gym on the Rokin very easily. What she liked least about it was its proximity to the red-light district—she was less than half a block from de Wallen .
And it was awkward for Ruth when Amanda Merton asked if she could take Graham to see the Oude Kerk. (Amsterdam’s oldest church, which is thought to have been built in about 1300, is situated in the middle of the red-light district.) Amanda had read in a guidebook that the climb to the top of the Oude Kerk tower was recommended for children—the tower afforded a splendid view of the city.
Ruth had postponed an interview in order to accompany Amanda and Graham on the short walk from their hotel; she’d also wanted to see if climbing the church tower was safe. Most of all, Ruth had wanted to guide Amanda and Graham through de Wallen in a way that would provide her four-year-old son with the least opportunity of seeing a prostitute in her window.
She thought she knew how to do it. If she crossed the canal at the Stoofsteeg, and then walked nearer the water than the buildings, Graham could scarcely glimpse those narrow side streets where the women in their windows were close enough to touch. But Amanda wanted to buy a souvenir T-shirt that she’d spotted in the window of the Bulldog café; hence Graham got a good look at one of the girls, a prostitute who had briefly left her window on the Trompetterssteeg to buy a pack of cigarettes in the Bulldog. (A very surprised Amanda Merton got an inadvertent look at her, too.) The prostitute, a petite brunette, wore a lime-green teddy with a snap crotch; her high heels were a darker shade of green.
“Look, Mommy,” Graham said. “A lady, still getting dressed.”
The view of de Wallen from the tower of the Oude Kerk was indeed splendid. From the high tower, the window prostitutes were too far away for Graham to discern that they were wearing only their underwear, but even from such a height Ruth could pick out the perpetually loitering men.
Then, as they were leaving the old church, Amanda turned the wrong way. On the horseshoe-shaped Oudekerksplein, several South American prostitutes were standing in their doorways, talking to one another.
“More ladies getting dressed,” Graham said absently; he couldn’t have cared less about the near-nakedness of the women. Ruth was surprised by his lack of interest; the four-year-old was already of an age where Ruth would no longer let him take a bath with her.
“Graham won’t leave my breasts alone,” Ruth had complained to Hannah.
“Like everyone else,” Hannah had said.
For three consecutive mornings, in his gym on the Rokin, Harry had watched Ruth work out. After she’d spotted him in the bookshop, he’d been more careful in the gym. Harry kept himself busy with the free weights. The heavier barbells and dumbbells were at one end of the long room, but Harry could keep track of Ruth in the mirrors; he knew what her routine was.
She did a series of abdominal exercises on a mat; she did a lot of stretching, too. Harry hated stretching. Then, with a towel around her neck, she rode a stationary bike for half an hour, working up a pretty good sweat. When she was finished with the bike, she did some light lifting, never anything heavier than the two- or three-kilo dumbbells. One day she would work her shoulders and arms, her chest and back the next.
All in all, Ruth worked out for about an hour and a half—a moderately intense, sensible amount of exercise for a woman her age. Even without knowing her squash history, Harry could tell that her right arm was a lot stronger than her left. But what particularly impressed Harry about Ruth’s workout was that nothing distracted her, not even the awful music. When she was riding the bike, she had her eyes closed half the time. When she worked out with the weights and on the mat, she seemed to be thinking of nothing at all—not even her next book. Her lips would move as she counted to herself.
In the course of her workout, Ruth drank a liter of mineral water. When the plastic bottle was empty, she never threw it in the trash without screwing the cap back on—a small but distinguishing feature of a compulsively neat person. Harry had no trouble getting a clear fingerprint of her right index finger from one of the water bottles she’d thrown away. And there it was: the perfectly vertical slash. No knife could have cut her so cleanly; it had to have been glass. And the cut was so small and thin that it had almost disappeared; she must have done it when she’d been much younger.
At forty-one, Ruth was ten or more years older than any of the other women in the Rokin gym—nor did Ruth wear the stretched-tight workout gear that the younger women favored. She wore a tucked-in T-shirt and the kind of loose-fitting athletic shorts that are made for men. Ruth was conscious of having more of a belly than she’d had before Graham was born, and her breasts were lower than they used to be, although she weighed exactly what she had when she was still playing squash.
Most of the men in the gym on the Rokin were at least ten years younger than Ruth, too. There was only one older guy, a weight lifter whose back was usually turned to her; what she’d seen of his tough-looking face was partial, briefly glimpsed in t
he mirrors. He was very fit-looking, but he needed a shave. On the third morning, she recognized him as she was leaving the gym. He was her cop. (Since seeing him in the Athenaeum, Ruth had begun to think of him as her very own policeman.)
Thus—in the lobby of the hotel, upon returning from the gym— Ruth was ill prepared to encounter Wim Jongbloed. After three nights in Amsterdam, she’d almost stopped thinking about Wim; she’d begun to believe he might leave her alone. Now here he was, with what appeared to be a wife and a baby, and he was so fat that she’d not known who he was until he spoke. When he tried to kiss her, she made a point of shaking his hand instead.
The baby’s name was Klaas. He was in the blob phase of babyhood, his bloated face like something left underwater. And the wife, who was introduced to Ruth as “Harriët with an umlaut,” was similarly swollen; she carried some excess fat from her recent pregnancy. The stains on the new mother’s blouse indicated that she was still nursing, and that her breasts had leaked. But Ruth quickly judged that Wim’s wife had been made more wretched by this meeting. Why? Ruth wondered. What had Wim told his wife about Ruth?
“You have a beautiful baby,” Ruth lied to Wim’s unhappy-looking wife. Ruth remembered how wrecked she’d felt, for a full year after Graham was born. Ruth had great sympathy for any woman with a new baby, but her lie about Klaas Jongbloed’s alleged beauty had no discernible effect on the baby’s miserable mother.
“Harriët doesn’t understand English,” Wim told Ruth. “But she’s read your new book in Dutch.”
So that was it! Ruth thought. Wim’s wife believed that the bad boyfriend in Ruth’s new novel was Wim, and Wim had done nothing to discourage this interpretation. Since—in Ruth’s novel—the older woman writer is overcome with desire for her Dutch boyfriend, why would Wim have discouraged his wife from believing that ? Now here was the overweight Harriët with an umlaut, with her leaking breasts, standing beside a very trim and fit Ruth Cole—a very attractive older woman, who (Wim’s wretched wife believed) was her husband’s former lover!