They ate and drank, wearing just the towels around their waists— Ruth with her breasts defiantly bare. She hoped that her father would walk into the dining room, but he did not. And despite the conviviality of her wining and dining with Scott Saunders, not to mention the seeming success of their highly charged sexual encounter, their dinner-table conversation was strained. Scott told Ruth that his divorce had been “amicable,” and that he enjoyed “an amiable relationship” with his ex-wife. Recently divorced men talked entirely too much about their ex-wives. If the divorce had been truly “amicable,” why talk about it?
Ruth asked Scott to tell her what kind of law he practiced, but he said that it wasn’t interesting; it had something to do with real estate. Scott also confessed to not having read her novels. He’d tried the second one, Before the Fall of Saigon —he thought it might be a war novel. He’d gone to considerable trouble, as a young man, not to be drafted during the Vietnam War—but the book had struck him as what he called a “women’s novel.” The phrase never failed to make Ruth think of a wide array of feminine-hygiene products. “About female friendship, wasn’t it?” he asked. But his ex-wife had read everything Ruth Cole had written. “She’s your biggest fan,” Scott Saunders said. (The ex-wife again !)
Then he asked Ruth if she was “seeing anyone.” She tried to tell him about Allan, without mentioning any names. The issue of marriage existed for her as a subject separate from Allan. Her attraction to marriage was deep, Ruth told Scott, while at the same time her fear of it was stultifying.
“You mean you’re more attracted to it than you are afraid of it?” the lawyer asked.
“How does that passage from George Eliot go? I once liked it so much that I wrote it down,” Ruth told him. “ ‘What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life . . .’ But . . .”
“Did he stay married?” Scott asked her.
“Who?” Ruth said.
“George Eliot. Did he stay married?”
Maybe if I just get up and start doing the dishes, he’ll get bored and go home, Ruth thought.
But when she was loading the dishwasher, Scott stood behind her and fondled her breasts; she felt his hard-on poking against her, through both their towels. “I want to do it to you this way, from behind,” he said.
“I don’t like it that way,” she said.
“I don’t mean in the wrong hole,” he told her crudely. “I mean the right hole, but from behind.”
“I know what you mean,” Ruth told him. He was fondling her breasts so persistently that she had some difficulty getting the wineglasses to fit properly in the top rack of the dishwasher. “I don’t like it from behind—period,” Ruth added.
“How do you like it, then?” he asked her.
It was clear to her that he expected to do it again. “I’ll show you,” she said, “as soon as I finish loading the dishwasher.”
It was no accident that Ruth had left the front door unlocked—or the lights on, in both the downstairs and the upstairs hall. She’d also left the door to her father’s bedroom open, in the receding hope that her father would return and find her in the act of making love to Scott. But this was not to be.
Ruth straddled Scott; she sat on him for the longest time. She nearly rocked herself to sleep in this position. (They’d both had too much to drink.) When she could tell by how he held his breath that he was about to come, she dropped her weight on his chest and, holding tight to his shoulders, rolled him on top of her, because she couldn’t stand to see the look that transformed most men’s faces when they came. (Ruth didn’t know, of course—she would never know—that this had been a manner of making love that her mother had also preferred with Eddie O’Hare.)
Ruth lay in bed, listening to Scott flushing the condom down the toilet in the master bathroom. After Scott had come back to bed—he’d almost instantly fallen asleep—Ruth lay awake listening to the dishwasher. It was in the final rinse cycle, and it sounded to her as if two wineglasses were rubbing against each other.
Scott Saunders had fallen asleep with his left hand holding her right breast. Ruth was not terribly comfortable, but now that Scott was sound asleep and snoring, his hand no longer held her breast; rather, the hand pressed its dead weight against her like a sleeping dog’s paw.
Ruth tried to remember the rest of the George Eliot passage about marriage. She didn’t even know which George Eliot novel the quotation was from, although Ruth distinctly recalled copying the passage into one of her diaries long ago.
Now, as she was falling asleep, it occurred to Ruth that Eddie O’Hare might know which novel the passage was from. At least it would give her an excuse to call him. (In fact, if she’d called Eddie, he wouldn’t have known the passage—Eddie wasn’t a George Eliot fan. Eddie would have called his father. Minty O’Hare, even in his retirement, would have known which George Eliot novel the passage came from.)
“ ‘. . . to strengthen each other in all labor . . .’ ” Ruth whispered to herself, reciting the passage from memory. She had no fear of waking up Scott, not the way he was snoring. And the wineglasses went on grinding together in the dishwasher. It had been so long since the telephone had rung that Ruth felt the world had fallen sound asleep; whoever had been calling (and calling) had given up. “. . . to rest on each other in all sorrow . . .” George Eliot had written about marriage. “ ‘. . .to minister to each other in all pain,’ ” Ruth recited, “ ‘to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting . . .’ ” It sounded like a pretty good idea to Ruth Cole, who finally fell asleep beside an unknown man, whose breathing was as loud as a brass band.
The phone rang almost a dozen times before Ruth heard it. Scott Saunders didn’t wake up until Ruth answered the phone. She felt his paw revive against her breast.
“Hello,” Ruth said. When she opened her eyes, it took her a second to recognize her father’s digital clock. It took a second, too, before the paw on her breast reminded her of where she was, and in what circumstances—and why she hadn’t wanted to answer the phone.
“I’ve been so worried about you,” Allan Albright said. “I’ve been calling and calling.”
“Oh, Allan . . .” Ruth said. It was a little after two in the morning. The dishwasher had stopped. The dryer had stopped long before the dishwasher. The paw against her breast had become a hand again; it cupped her breast firmly. “I was asleep,” Ruth said.
“I thought you might be dead !” Allan told her.
“I had a fight with my father—I haven’t been answering the phone,” Ruth explained. The hand had let go of her breast. She saw the same hand reach across her body and open the top drawer under the night table. The hand chose a condom, another blue one; the hand also removed the tube of jelly from the drawer.
“I tried to call your friend Hannah. Wasn’t she going to be out there with you?” Allan asked. “But I kept getting her answering machine—I don’t even know if she got my message.”
“ Don’t talk to Hannah—I had a fight with her, too,” Ruth told him.