“And he hung it in his bedroom !” Hannah whispered harshly. “ That’s interesting!”
“What a remarkable memory you have, Hannah,” Ruth said. “You even remember that the photograph of my brothers is in my father’s bedroom!” But Hannah made no response, and Ruth thought again: I’m tired of this conversation. (She was most of all tired of Hannah never saying she was sorry.)
Ruth sometimes wondered if Hannah would still be her friend if Ruth hadn’t become famous. In her own way—in the smaller world of magazines—Hannah was famous, too. She’d first made a name for herself writing personal essays. She’d kept a comedic diary; for the most part, it was a journal of her sexual exploits. But she’d soon tired of autobiography. Hannah had “graduated” to death and devastation.
In her morbid phase, Hannah had interviewed people who were dying; she’d devoted herself to terminal cases. Terminal children had captured her attention for about eighteen months. Later there’d been a piece on a burn ward, and one on a leper colony, too. She’d traveled to war zones, and to countries with widespread famine.
Then Hannah had “graduated” once again; she’d left death and devastation for the world of the perverse and the bizarre. She once wrote about a male porn star who was reputed to have a perpetual hard-on—his name, in the business, was “Mr. Metal.” Hannah had also interviewed a Belgian woman in her seventies who’d performed in over three thousand live-sex shows; her only partner had been her husband, who’d died following a sex performance. The grieving widow had not had sex since. Not only had she been faithful to her husband for forty years; for the last twenty years of their marriage, they’d had sex only in front of an audience.
Now Hannah had transformed herself yet again. Her current interest was famous people, which in the United States meant mainly movie stars and sports heroes and the occasional eccentric who was disturbingly rich. Hannah had never interviewed a writer, although she’d raised the subject of an “extensive”—or had Hannah said “ exhaustive”?—interview with Ruth.
Ruth had long believed that the only interesting thing about herself was her writing. She was deeply leery of the idea of Hannah interviewing her, because Hannah was more interested in Ruth’s personal life than she was in Ruth’s novels. And what did interest Hannah in Ruth’s writing was what was personal—what Hannah would have called “real”—about it.
Hannah will probably hate Allan, Ruth suddenly thought. Allan had already admitted that Ruth’s fame was, if not a burden, a nuisance to him. He had edited a number of famous authors, but he would submit to an interview only on the grounds that his remarks were “not for attribution.” Allan was so private that he didn’t even permit his writers to dedicate their books to him; when one writer had insisted, Allan said, “Only if you use my initials, just my initials.” Thus the book was dedicated: TO A.F.A. It struck Ruth as disloyal that she couldn’t recall what the F. stood for.
“I gotta go—I think I hear him,” Hannah was whispering.
“You’re not going to stand me up in Sagaponack, are you?” Ruth asked. “I’m counting on you to save me from my father.”
“I’ll be there. I’ll get myself there somehow,” Hannah whispered. “I think it’s your father who needs saving from you —the poor man.”
Since when had her father become “the poor man”? But Ruth was tired; she let Hannah’s remark pass.
After she’d hung up the phone, Ruth reconsidered her plans. Since she was not seeing Allan for dinner the next night, she could leave for Sagaponack after her last interview, a day earlier than she’d planned; then she would have one night alone with her father. One night alone with him might be tolerable. Hannah would arrive the next day, and they would have a night together—just the three of them.
Ruth couldn’t wait to tell her father how much she had liked Eddie O’Hare—not to mention some of the things that Eddie had told her about her mother. It would be best if Hannah was not there when Ruth told her father that her mother had thought of leaving him before the boys had been killed. Ruth didn’t want Hannah around for that conversation, because Hannah always stood up for Ruth’s father—maybe just to provoke her.
Ruth was still so irritated with Hannah that she had some difficulty falling back to sleep. Lying awake, she found herself remembering the time she lost her virginity. It was impossible for her to recall the event without considering Hannah’s contribution to the minor disaster.
Although she was a year younger than Ruth, Hannah had always seemed older, not only because Hannah had had three abortions before Ruth managed to lose her virginity but also because Hannah’s greater sexual experience lent her an air of maturity and sophistication.
Ruth had been sixteen, Hannah fifteen when they’d met—yet Hannah had demonstrated greater sexual confidence. (And this was before Hannah had had sex!) In her diary, Ruth once wrote of Hannah: “She projected an aura of worldliness long before she’d been in the world.”
Hannah’s parents, who were happily married—she called them “boring” and “staid”—had brought up their only child in a fine old house on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hannah’s father, a professor at Harvard Law School, had a patrician demeanor; his deportment bespoke a steadfast inclination to remain uninvolved, which Hannah said suited a man who’d married a wealthy and utterly unambitious woman.
Ruth had always liked Hannah’s mother, who was good-natured and gracious to the point of being utterly benign. She also read a great deal—one never saw her without a book. Mrs. Grant had once told Ruth that she’d had only one child because, after Hannah was born, she missed all the time she’d once had to read. Hannah told Ruth that her mother couldn’t wait for Hannah to be old enough to amuse herself so that Mrs. Grant could get back to her books. And “amuse herself,” Hannah did. (Perhaps it was her mother who’d made Hannah the superficial and impatient reader that she was.)
While Ruth thought Hannah was fortunate to have a father who was faithful to his wife, Hannah said that a little womanizing might have made her father less predictable; to Hannah, “less predictable” meant “more interesting.” She claimed that her father’s remoteness was the result of his years in the law school, where his abstract ruminations on the theoretical levels of the law appeared to have distanced him from any appreciation of the practice of law itself. He had a great disdain for lawyers.
Professor Grant had urged the study of foreign languages on his daughter; his highest hope for Hannah was for her to pursue a career in international banking. (International banking had been where the best and the brightest of his students at Harvard Law School had ended up.)
Her father had a great disdain for journalists, too. Hannah was at Middlebury, where she was majoring in French and German, when she decided that journalism was the career for her. She knew this with the same certainty that Ruth had known, at an earlier age, that she wanted to be a novelist. Hannah announced with a most matter-of-fact surety that she would go to New York and make her way in the world of magazines. To that end, upon her graduation from college, she asked her parents to send her to Europe for a year. There she could practice her French and German, and she would keep a journal; her “powers of observation,” as Hannah put it, “would be honed.”
Ruth, who’d applied (and been accepted) to the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Iowa, had been caught off guard by Hannah’s suggestion that Ruth come to Europe with her. “If you’re going to be a writer, you need something to write about, ” Hannah had told her friend.
Ruth already knew that it didn’t work that way—at least not for her. She needed only time to write; what she would write about already awaited her in her imagination. But she deferred her acceptance to Iowa. After all, her father could afford it. And a year in Europe with Hannah would be fun .
“Besides,” Hannah told her, “it’s high time you got laid. If you stick with me, it’s bound to happen.”
It had not happened in London, the first city on their tour, but Ruth was groped by a boy in the bar of the Royal Court Hotel. She’d met him at the National Portrait Gallery, where Ruth had gone to see the portraits of several of her favorite writers. The young man took her to the theater, and to an expensive Italian restaurant off Sloane Square. He was an American who lived in London; his father was a diplomat of some kind. He was the first boy she’d gone out with who’d had credit cards, although Ruth suspected that the cards belonged to his father.
They’d got drunk in the bar of the Royal Court, instead of getting laid, because Hannah was already “using” Ruth and Hannah’s room at the Royal Court by the time Ruth got up the nerve to bring the young man to her hotel. Hannah was noisily making love to a Lebanese she’d picked up in a bank; she’d met him when she was cashing a traveler’s check. (“My first experience in the field of international banking,” she’d written in her journal. “My father would finally have been proud of me.”)
The second city on their European tour was Stockholm. Contrary to Hannah’s prediction, not all Swedes were blond. The two young men who picked up Hannah and Ruth were dark-haired and handsome; they were still at the university, yet they were very sure of themselves, and one of them—the one who ended up with Ruth—spoke excellent English. The slightly better-looking one, who spoke hardly a word of English, had immediately latched on to Hannah.
Ruth’s designated young man drove the four of them to his parents’ house, which was three quarters of an hour from Stockholm. His parents were away for the weekend.
It was a modern house with lots of light-colored wood. Ruth’s young man, whose name was Per, poached a salmon with some dill, which they ate with new potatoes and a salad of watercress and hard-boiled eggs with chives. Hannah and Ruth drank two bottles of white wine while the boys drank beer, and then the slightly better-looking boy took Hannah off to one of the guest bedrooms.