A Widow for One Year - Page 82

“Oh . . .” Scott Saunders said. “Maybe we could play tomorrow, just the two of us.”

“I want to beat my father first,” Ruth said.

She knew that Allan Albright was the next person she should sleep with, but it troubled her that she’d needed to remind herself of Allan—and of what she should do. Historically, Scott Saunders was more her kind of guy.

The strawberry-blond lawyer had parked his car near the Little League field in Bridgehampton; he and Ruth, burdened by her luggage, had to walk about two hundred yards. Scott drove with the windows open. As they turned onto Parsonage Lane in Sagaponack, they were moving due east with the elongated shadow of the car running ahead of them. To the south, the slanting light turned the potato fields a jade-green color; the ocean, offset against the faded blue of the sky, was as brilliant and as deep a blue as a sapphire.

For everything that was overesteemed and corrupted about the Hamptons, the end of an early-fall day could still be dazzling; Ruth permitted herself to feel that the place was redeemed, if only at this time of year and at this forgiving hour of the late afternoon. Her father would have just finished his squash; he and his defeated opponent might now be showering or swimming naked in the pool.

The towering horseshoe-shaped barrier of privet that Eduardo had planted in the fall of ’58 completely shaded the pool from the late-afternoon light. The hedges were so thick, only the thinnest rays of the sun could penetrate; these small diamonds of light dappled the dark water of the pool, like phosphorescence—or gold coins that floated on the surface instead of sinking. And the wooden deck overhung the water; when someone was swimming in the pool, the water sounded like the water of a lake slapping against a dock.

When they arrived at the house, Scott helped Ruth carry her bags into the front hall. The navy-blue Volvo, which was her father’s only car, was in the driveway, but her father didn’t answer when Ruth called.

“Daddy?”

As he was leaving, Scott said, “He’s probably in the pool—it’s that time of day.”

“Yes,” Ruth said. “Thank you!” she called after him. Oh, Allan, save me! she thought. Ruth was hoping she’d never see Scott Saunders, or another man like him, again.

She had three bags: a big suitcase, a garment bag, and a smaller suitcase that was her carry-on bag for the plane. She started by taking the garment bag and the smaller suitcase upstairs. Some years ago, when she was nine or ten, she’d moved her room from the nursery that shared her father’s master bathroom to the biggest and farthest-away of the guest bedrooms; it was the room that Eddie O’Hare had occupied in the summer of ’58. Ruth liked it because of its distance from her father’s room, and because it had its own bathroom.

The door to the master bedroom was ajar, but her father wasn’t in his bedroom—Ruth called “Daddy?” again as she passed the slightly open door. As always, the photographs in the long upstairs hall commanded her attention.

All the bare picture hooks, which she remembered better than the photos of her dead brothers, were covered now; there were hundreds of uninspired photographs of Ruth, at every phase of her childhood and throughout her young womanhood. Sometimes her father was in the photo, but usually he was the photographer. Frequently, Conchita Gomez was in the picture with Ruth. And there were the endless privet pictures. These measured her growth, summer by summer: Ruth and Eduardo, solemnl

y posed before the implacable privet. No matter how much Ruth grew, the unstoppable hedge grew faster, until—one day— it had more than doubled Eduardo’s height. (In several of the photographs, Eduardo looked a little afraid of the privet.) And of course there were some recent photographs of Ruth with Hannah.

Ruth was walking barefoot down the carpeted stairs when she heard the splashing from the swimming pool, which was behind the house. She couldn’t see the pool from the staircase, or from any of the bedrooms upstairs. All the bedrooms faced south; they were designed to have an ocean view.

Ruth hadn’t noticed another car in the driveway—only her father’s navy-blue Volvo—but she assumed that his present squash opponent lived near enough to have ridden a bicycle; she wouldn’t have noticed a bicycle.

The degree to which Scott Saunders had tempted her left Ruth feeling familiarly unsure of herself. She didn’t want to see another man today, although she seriously doubted that any of her father’s other squash opponents could possibly have attracted her as strongly as the strawberry-blond lawyer.

In the front hall, she got a good grip on her remaining suitcase—the big one—and started upstairs with it, purposely avoiding that view of the swimming pool which was available to her as she passed the dining room. The sound of splashing followed her only halfway up the stairs. By the time she unpacked, the guy, whoever he was, would be gone. But Ruth was a veteran traveler; it took her very little time to unpack. When she’d finished, she put on her swimsuit. After her father’s squash opponent was gone, Ruth thought she would jump in the pool. That always felt good, after being in the city. Then she would see about dinner. She would make her daddy a good dinner. Then they would talk.

She was still barefoot, padding down the upstairs hall, past the partially open door to her father’s bedroom, when a sea breeze blew the door shut. Thinking she would find a book or a shoe, something to hold the door ajar, Ruth opened the door to the master bedroom. The first thing that caught her eye was a woman’s high-heeled shoe of a beautiful salmon-pink color. Ruth picked it up. It was very good leather; the shoe had been made in Milan. Ruth saw that the bed was unmade—a small black bra lay on top of the tangled sheets.

So . . . her father was not in the pool with one of his squash opponents. Ruth took a closer, more critical look at the bra. It was a push-up bra, an expensive one; it would have been utterly gratuitous for Ruth to wear a push-up bra, but the woman in the pool with her father must have thought she needed one. The woman had small breasts—the bra was a 32B.

That was when Ruth recognized the open suitcase on the floor of her father’s bedroom. It was a well-worn brown leather suitcase distinguished by its much-traveled appearance and its practical compartments and its useful, efficient straps. It had been Hannah’s carry-on bag for as long as Ruth had known Hannah. (“The bag made Hannah look like a journalist before she was a journalist,” Ruth had written in her diary—she couldn’t remember how many years ago.)

Ruth stood as still in her father’s bedroom as she would have stood if Hannah and her father had been naked in bed in front of her. The sea breeze blew through the bedroom window again; it blew shut the door behind her. Ruth felt as if she’d been locked in a closet. If something had brushed against her (a dress on a hanger), she would have fainted or screamed.

She struggled to summon that state of calm in which she composed her novels. Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.

When Ruth was afraid, she had difficulty breathing. Fear paralyzed her; as a child, the sudden proximity of a spider would freeze her on the spot. Once, behind a closed door, an unseen dog had barked at her; she’d not been able to remove her hand from the doorknob.

Now the thought of Hannah with her father took her breath away. Ruth had to make an enormous effort just to move. At first she moved very slowly. She folded the small black bra and put it in Hannah’s open suitcase. She found Hannah’s other shoe—it was under the bed—and she put the pair of salmon-pink shoes alongside the suitcase, where they could not be missed. In what Ruth knew would be the haste of things to come, she wanted Hannah not to leave any of her sexy little items behind.

Before Ruth left her father’s bedroom, she looked at the photograph of her dead brothers in the doorway of the Main Academy Building. She considered that Hannah’s memory was not as remarkable as she’d supposed when they’d talked on the phone.

So . . . Hannah stood me up because she was fucking my father, Ruth thought. She walked into the upstairs hall, taking off her swimsuit as she went. She looked in the two smaller guest bedrooms. Both beds were made, but one was dented with the shape of a slender body, and the pillows were bunched up against the headboard of the bed. The phone, normally on the night table, sat on the side of the bed. It had been from this guest bedroom that Hannah had phoned her, whispering, so as not to wake Ruth’s father—after she had fucked him.

Ruth was naked now; she trailed the swimsuit behind her as she continued down the hall to her room. There she dressed herself in more characteristic clothes: jeans, one of the good bras Hannah had bought for her, a black T-shirt. For what she was about to do, she wanted to be in her uniform.

Then Ruth went downstairs into the kitchen. Hannah, a lazy cook but an adequate one, had been planning to stir-fry some vegetables; she’d cut up a red and a yellow pepper and had tossed them in a bowl with some broccoli florets. The vegetables were sweating slightly. Ruth tasted one of the pieces of the yellow pepper. Hannah had sprinkled the vegetables with salt and sugar to make them bleed a little. Ruth recalled showing Hannah how to do that on one of the weekends they’d spent together at Ruth’s house in Vermont—complaining about bad boyfriends, as Ruth now remembered it.

Hannah had also peeled a gingerroot, and mashed it; she’d set out the wok and the peanut oil, too. Ruth looked in the refrigerator and saw the shrimp marinating in a bowl. She was familiar with the dinner Hannah was preparing; Ruth had made this same dinner for Hannah, and for various boyfriends, many times. The only thing that wasn’t ready to cook was the rice.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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