“I think I heard something,” Scott answered. “Wasn’t it a long time ago?”
“I’ll show you a picture of them—they were good-looking guys,” Ruth said, taking Scott’s hand.
She led him up the carpeted stairs. Their bare feet didn’t make a sound. The lid of the rice steamer was rattling; the dryer was running, too—chiefly the sound of something clicking or tapping against the revolving drum of the dryer.
Ruth took Scott into the master bedroom, where the big bed was in unmade disarray; Ruth could almost see the body imprints of her father and Hannah in the tangled sheets.
“There they are,” Ruth said to Scott, pointing to the picture of her brothers.
Squinting at the photograph, Scott tried to read the Latin inscription above the doorway.
“I guess you didn’t learn Latin as a sociology major,” Ruth said.
“There’s a lot of Latin in the law,” he told her.
“My brothers were good-looking guys, weren’t they?” Ruth asked him.
“Yes, they were,” Scott said. “Doesn’t venite mean come ?” h
e asked her.
“ ‘Come hither boys and become men,’ ” Ruth translated for him.
“Now there’s a challenge!” Scott Saunders said. “I liked being a boy better.”
“My father never stopped being a boy,” Ruth said.
“Is this your father’s bedroom?” Scott asked her.
“Check out the top drawer, the drawer under the night table,” Ruth told him. “Go on—open it.”
Scott hesitated; he was probably thinking that there were more Polaroids in the drawer.
“Don’t worry. There are no photographs in there,” Ruth said. Scott opened the drawer. It was full of condoms in brightly colored foil wrappers, and there was a large tube of lubricating jelly.
“So . . . I guess this is your father’s bedroom,” Scott said, looking around nervously.
“That’s a drawer full of a boy’s stuff, if I ever saw one,” Ruth said. (She’d first discovered the condoms and the lubricating jelly in her father’s night-table drawer when she was about nine or ten.)
“Where is your father?” Scott asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You’re not expecting him?” Scott asked.
“If I had to guess, I’d say I was expecting him about midmorning tomorrow,” Ruth said.
Scott Saunders looked at all the condoms in the open drawer. “God, I haven’t worn a condom since I was in college,” he said.
“You’re going to have to wear one now,” Ruth told him. She took the towel off from around her waist; then she sat naked on the unmade bed. “If you’ve forgotten how a condom works, I can remind you,” she added.
Scott picked a condom in a blue wrapper. He kissed her for a long time, and he licked her for an even longer time; she didn’t need any of the jelly in her father’s night-table drawer. She came just a few seconds after he was inside her, and she felt him come only a moment later. Nearly the whole time, but especially when Scott was licking her, Ruth watched the open door of her father’s bedroom; she listened for her father’s footsteps on the stairs, or in the upstairs hall, but all she could hear was the clicking or tapping noise in the dryer. (The lid of the rice steamer wasn’t rattling anymore; the rice was cooked.) And when Scott entered her and she knew she was going to come, almost instantly—the rest of it would be over very quickly, too—Ruth thought: Come home now, Daddy! Come upstairs and see me now !
But Ted didn’t come home in time to see his daughter as she would have liked him to see her.
Pain in an Unfamiliar Place
Hannah had used too much soy sauce in the marinade. Also, the shrimp had languished in the marinade for more than twenty-four hours; they didn’t taste like shrimp anymore. But this hardly stopped Ruth and Scott from eating them all, and all the rice and the stir-fried vegetables—and all of some kind of cucumber chutney that had seen better days. They also drank a second bottle of white wine, and Ruth opened a bottle of red wine to have with the cheese and fruit. They finished the bottle of red wine, too.