A Widow for One Year - Page 89

“Good, because that’s what we’re having for dinner,” Ruth told him. She shut off her shower and stepped out on the deck; then she dove into the deep end of the pool. When she surfaced, Scott was still standing on the deck; he was looking beyond her.

“Isn’t that a wineglass at the bottom of the pool?” he asked. “Did you recently have a party?”

“No, my father recently had a party,” Ruth answered, treading water. Scott Saunders had a bigger cock than she’d first thought. The lawyer dove to the bottom of the deep end and brought up the wineglass.

“It must have been a moderately wild party,” Scott said.

“My father is more than moderately wild,” Ruth replied. She floated on her back; when Hannah tried it, she could scarcely manage to make her nipples rise above the surface.

“You have beautiful breasts,” Scott told Ruth. He treaded water next to her. He filled the wineglass with water, then poured the water on her breasts.

“My mother probably had better ones,” Ruth said. “What do you know about my mother?” she asked him.

“Nothing—I’ve just heard some rumors,” Scott admitted.

“They’re probably true,” Ruth said. “You may know almost as much about her as I do.”

She swam to the shallow end, and he followed—still holding the wineglass. If he hadn’t been carrying the stupid glass, he would have already touched her. Ruth got out of the pool and wrapped herself in a towel. She saw Scott drying himself, meticulously, before she walked into the house—her towel around her waist, her breasts still bare.

“If you put your clothes in the dryer, they’ll be dry after dinner,” she called to him. He followed her inside—his towel was around his waist. “Tell me if you’re cold,” she said. “You can wear something of my father’s.”

“I feel fine in the towel,” he told her.

Ruth started the rice steamer and opened a bottle of white wine; she poured a glass for Scott and one for herself. She looked pretty good with just the towel around her waist and her breasts bare. “I feel fine in the towel, too,” she told him. She let him kiss her then; he cupped one of her breasts in his hand.

“I didn’t expect this,” he said to her.

No kidding! Ruth thought. When she’d made up her mind about somebody, it was the height of boredom to wait for the man to seduce her. She hadn’t been with anybody for four, almost five months; she didn’t feel like waiting.

“Let me show you something,” Ruth said to Scott. She led him into her father’s workroom, where she opened the bottommost drawer of Ted’s so-called writing desk. The drawer was full of black-and-white Polaroid prints—there were hundreds of them—and about a dozen tubular containers of Polaroid print coater. The print coater gave the whole drawer and all the photographs a bad smell.

Ruth handed Scott a stack of the Polaroids, without comment. They were the pictures Ted had taken of his models, both before and after he drew them. Ted told his models that the photos were necessary so that he could continue to work on the drawings when the models weren’t there; he needed the photos “for reference.” In fact, he never continued to work on the drawings. He just wanted the photographs.

When Scott finished looking at one stack of photos, Ruth showed him another. The pictures had that amateur quality which most really bad pornography has; that the models themselves were not professional models was only part of it. There was an awkwardness to their poses that suggested sexual shame, but there was also a sense of haste and carelessness about the photographs themselves.

“Why are you showing me these?” Scott asked Ruth.

“Do they turn you on?” she asked him.

“ You turn me on,” he told her.

“I guess they turn my father on,” Ruth said. “They’re all his models—he’s fucked every single one of them.”

Scott was leafing quickly through the photographs without really looking at them; it was hard to look at the photos if you weren’t alone. “There are a lot of women here,” he said.

“Yesterday, and the day before, my father fucked my best friend,” Ruth told him.

“Your father fucked your best friend . . .” Scott repeated thoughtfully.

“We’re what an idiot sociology major would call a dysfunctional family,” Ruth said.

“ I was a sociology major,” Scott Saunders admitted.

“What did you learn?” Ruth asked him. She was putting the Polaroids back in the bottommost drawer. The smell from the print coater was strong enough to make her gag. In a way, it was a worse smell than the squid ink. (Ruth had first found the photographs in her father’s bottommost drawer when she was twelve years old.)

“I decided to go to law school—that’s what I learned from sociology,” the strawberry-blond lawyer said.

“Have you heard some rumors about my brothers, too?” Ruth asked him. “They’re dead,” she added.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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