A Widow for One Year - Page 61

And Ruth distanced herself from not a few of her more avid readers by admitting that she’d never had an abortion. It was insulting to some of her readers who’d had abortions that Ruth had “just imagined” having one. “I’m certainly not opposed to having an abortion, or to anyone else having one,” Ruth said. “In my case, it just never came up.”

As Ruth well knew, an abortion “came up” on two more occasions for Hannah Grant. They had applied to the same colleges—only the best ones. When Hannah didn’t get into most of them, they’d attended Middlebury. What mattered to both of them, or so they said, was staying together, even if it meant spending four years in Vermont.

In retrospect, Ruth wondered why “staying together” had mattered to Hannah, who had spent most of her time at Middlebury with a hockey player with a removable false tooth; he got her pregnant twice, and when they broke up, he tried to date Ruth. It had prompted Ruth’s now-notorious remark to Hannah on the subject of “rules for relationships.”

“ What rules?” Hannah had asked. “There are no rules among friends, surely.”

“Rules among friends are especially necessary,” Ruth had told her friend. “For example, I don’t go out with anyone who ever went out with you—or who asked you first.”

“And vice versa?” Hannah had asked.

“Well.” (It was a habit Ruth had picked up from her father.) “That’s your choice,” she’d told Hannah, who had never tested the rule—at least not that Ruth knew. For Ruth’s part, she’d stuck to her own rule absolutely.

And now Hannah was late! While Ruth tried to watch the TV monitor, where Eddie O’Hare was struggling on and on, she was aware that the sneaky-looking stagehand was watching her. He was the kind of guy Hannah would have called “cute”; doubtless Hannah would have flirted with him, but Ruth rarely flirted. Besides, he was not her type— if she had a type. (She did have a type, and the type bothered her about herself more than she could say.)

Ruth looked at her watch. Eddie was still talking about her first novel. With two more novels to go, we’ll be here all night! Ruth was thinking, as she again watched Eddie drink her water. And if he’s got a cold, I’ll catch it, she thought to herself.

Ruth considered trying to get Eddie’s attention. Instead she looked up at the stagehand, who was ogling her breasts. If Ruth had to pick one thing that most men were utterly stupid about, it was that they didn’t seem to know that it was obvious to a woman when a man was staring at her breasts.

“I wouldn’t say that was my pet peeve with men,” Hannah had told Ruth. Hannah’s breasts were rather small—at least in Hannah’s estimation. “With boobs like yours, what else are men going to stare at?” Hannah had asked Ruth.

Yet, whenever Ruth and Hannah were together, men generally looked at Hannah first. She was tall and blond; she had a slinky figure. She was sexier than Ruth, Ruth thought.

“It’s just my clothes—my clothes are sexier,” Hannah had told her. “If you’d try dressing like a woman, men might notice you more.”

“It’s enough that they notice my boobs,” Ruth had replied.

Maybe they’d managed so well as roommates, and had on numerous occasions traveled together, which is even harder than being roommates, because they wouldn’t—indeed, couldn’t —wear the same clothes.

It was not because she had grown up without a mother that Ruth Cole preferred to wear men’s clothes; as a child, she’d been dressed in an exceedingly girlish fashion by Conchita Gomez, who had sent Ruth off to Exeter with a trunk full of little-girl skirts and dresses, which Ruth hated.

She liked jeans, or pants that fit her as

snugly as jeans. She liked T-shirts, and boys’ or men’s dress shirts—not turtlenecks, because she was short and had no neck to begin with, and not sweaters, which were too bulky and made her look fat. She was not fat and she only seemed short. Regardless, Ruth had tested the dress code at Exeter by conforming to the dress code for boys; since then, it had become her style.

Now, of course, her jackets—even if they were men’s jackets—were tailored to fit her figure. For black-tie occasions, Ruth wore a woman’s tuxedo, which was tailored to her figure, too. She did own the so-called standard little black dress, but Ruth never (except on the hottest summer days) wore a dress. Her most frequent substitute for a dress was a navy-blue pinstriped pantsuit, which she preferred for cocktail parties and fancy restaurants; it was her uniform for funerals, too.

Ruth spent a fair amount of money on clothes, but they were always the same clothes. She spent more money on shoes. Because she liked a low, sturdy heel—something that made her ankles feel almost as secure as they did in her squash shoes—her shoes tended to have a sameness about them, too.

Ruth let Hannah tell her where to get her hair cut, but she wouldn’t listen to Hannah’s advice that she should grow her hair longer. And aside from lip gloss and a certain kind of colorless lipstick, Ruth didn’t wear makeup. A good moisturizer, the right shampoo, and the right deodorant—these would do. She let Hannah buy her underwear, too. “Jesus, it kills me to buy you your goddamn thirty-four D!” Hannah would complain. “Both of my boobs could fit in one of your fucking cups!”

Ruth thought that she was too old to consider breast-reduction surgery. But as a teenager she’d begged her father to allow her to have the operation. Not just the size but the weight of her breasts had bothered her; Ruth despaired that her nipples (and the surrounding areolae) were too low and too large. Her father would hear none of it; he said it was nonsense to “mutilate” her “God-given good figure.” (Breasts could never be too large for Ted Cole.)

Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! Ruth thought angrily, as the gaze of the single-minded stagehand remained riveted to her breasts.

She sensed that Eddie O’Hare overpraised her; he said something about her well-publicized claim that she did not write autobiographical fiction. But Eddie was still mired in Ruth Cole’s first novel. This was the longest introduction in the world! By the time it was her turn, the audience would be fast asleep.

Hannah Grant had told Ruth that she should get off her high horse about not writing autobiographical fiction. “For Christ’s sake, aren’t I autobiographical?” Hannah had asked her. “You always write about me !”

“I may borrow from your experiences, Hannah,” Ruth had replied. “After all, you’ve had many more experiences than I’ve had. But I assure you, I do not write ‘about’ you. I make up my characters and their stories.”

“You make me up again and again,” Hannah had argued. “It may be your version of me, but it’s me —always me. You’re more autobiographical than you think you are, baby.” (Ruth hated Hannah’s usage of “baby.”)

Hannah was a journalist. She presumed that all novels were substantially autobiographical. Ruth was a novelist; she looked at her books and saw what she had invented. Hannah looked at them and saw what was real—namely, variations of Hannah herself. (The truth, of course, lay somewhere in between.)

In Ruth’s novels, there was usually a woman character who was an adventurer—the Hannah character, Hannah called her. And there was always another woman character who held herself back; the less-bold character, Ruth called her—the Ruth character, Hannah said.

Ruth both admired and was appalled by Hannah’s boldness. For her part, Hannah both looked up to Ruth and constantly criticized her. Hannah respected Ruth’s success while at the same time she reduced Ruth’s novels to a form of nonfiction. Ruth was extremely sensitive to her friend’s Ruth-character, Hannah-character interpretations.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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