A Widow for One Year - Page 147

“It’s to Canada, ” Ruth pointed out. “Please be sure you use the right postage.”

“Of course,” the concierge said.

They were in the lobby of the Stanhope, which was dominated by an ornate grandfather’s clock; it had been the first thing Graham recognized when they’d come into the hotel from Fifth Avenue. Now the porter was wheeling their luggage past the imposing face of the clock. The porter’s name was Mel. He’d always been especially attentive to Graham; he’d also been the porter on duty when Allan’s body had been removed from the

hotel. Probably Mel had helped with the body, but Ruth didn’t really want to remember everything .

Graham, holding Amanda’s hand, followed their luggage out of the Stanhope, onto Fifth Avenue, where their limousine was waiting.

“Good-bye, clock!” Graham said.

As the car was pulling away, Ruth called good-bye to Mel.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Cole,” Mel replied.

So that’s who I am! Ruth Cole decided. She’d never changed her name, of course—she was too famous to change her name. She’d never actually become Mrs. Albright. But she was a widow who still felt married; she was Mrs . Cole. I’ll be Mrs. Cole forever, Ruth thought.

“Good-bye, Mel’s hotel!” Graham called.

They drove away from the fountains in front of the Met, and the flapping flags, and the dark-green awning of the Stanhope, under which a waiter was rushing to attend to the only couple who didn’t find the day too cold to be sitting at one of the sidewalk tables. From Graham’s view, sunk into the backseat of the dark limo, the Stanhope reached into the sky—maybe even to heaven itself.

“Good-bye, Daddy!” the little boy called.

Better Than Being in Paris with a Prostitute

Traveling internationally with a four-year-old requires a devout attention to basic idiocies that may be taken for granted at home. The taste (even the color) of the orange juice demands an explanation. A croissant is not always a good croissant. And the device for flushing a toilet, not to mention exactly how the toilet flushes or what sort of noise it makes, becomes a matter of grave concern. While Ruth was fortunate that her son was toilet-trained, she was nonetheless exasperated that there were toilets the boy didn’t dare sit on. And Graham could not comprehend jet lag, yet he had it; the boy was constipated, but he couldn’t understand that this was a direct result of what he refused to eat and drink.

In London, because the cars were on the wrong side of the street, Ruth would not let Amanda and Graham cross a street, except to go to the small park nearby; beyond this unadventuresome expedition, the boy and his nanny were confined to the hotel. And Graham discovered that there was starch in the bedsheets at the Connaught. Was starch alive ? he wanted to know. “It feels alive,” the child said.

As they left London for Amsterdam, Ruth wished that, in London, she’d been half as courageous as Amanda Merton. The forthright girl had achieved a measurable success: Graham was over his jet lag, he was un constipated, and he was no longer afraid of foreign toilets—whereas Ruth had reason to doubt that she’d re-entered the world with even a vestige of her former authority on display.

While she’d previously taken her interviewers to task for not bothering to read her books before they talked to her, this time Ruth had suffered the indignity in silence. To spend three or four years writing a novel, and then to waste an hour or more talking to a journalist who hadn’t taken the time to read it . . . well, if this didn’t demonstrate a sizable lack of self-esteem, what did? (And My Last Bad Boyfriend wasn’t a long novel, either.)

With a meekness that was most uncharacteristic, Ruth had also tolerated an oft-repeated and utterly predictable question, which had nothing to do with her new novel: namely, how was she “coping” with being a widow, and had she found anything in her actual experience of widowhood to contradict what she’d written about being a widow in her previous work of fiction?

“No,” said Mrs. Cole, as she’d begun to think of herself. “Everything is just about as bad as I imagined it.”

In Amsterdam, not surprisingly, a different “oft-repeated and utterly predictable question” was a favorite among the Dutch journalists. They wanted to know how Ruth had conducted her research in the red-light district. Had she actually hidden in a window prostitute’s wardrobe closet and watched a prostitute have sex with a customer? (No, she had not, Ruth replied.) Had her “last bad boyfriend” been Dutch? ( Absolutely not, the author declared. But even as she spoke, she was on the lookout for Wim—she was certain he would put in an appearence.) And why was a so-called literary novelist interested in prostitutes in the first place? (She wasn’t personally interested in prostitutes, Ruth answered.)

It was a shame, most of her interviewers said, that she had singled out de Wallen for such scrutiny. Had nothing else about the city caught her attention?

“Don’t be provincial,” Ruth told her interrogators. “ My Last Bad Boyfriend is not about Amsterdam. The main character isn’t Dutch . There is simply an episode that takes place here. What happens to the main character in Amsterdam compels her to change her life. It’s the story of her life that interests me, especially her desire to change her life. Many people encounter moments in their lives that convince them to change.”

Predictably, the journalists then asked her: What such moments have you encountered? And: What changes have you made in your life?

“I’m a novelist,” Mrs. Cole would say then. “I haven’t written a memoir—I’ve written a novel. Please ask me about my novel.”

Reading her interviews in the newspapers, Harry Hoekstra wondered why Ruth Cole put herself through such tedium and trivia. Why be interviewed at all? Surely her books didn’t need the publicity. Why didn’t she just stay at home and start another novel? But I suppose she likes to travel, Harry thought.

He’d already heard her give a reading from her new novel; he’d also seen her on a local television show, and he’d watched her at a book-signing at the Athenaeum, where Harry had cleverly positioned himself behind a bookshelf. By removing no more than a half-dozen titles from the shelf, he could closely observe how Ruth Cole handled her fans. Her most avid readers had formed a line for her autograph, and while Ruth sat at a table signing and signing, Harry had a largely unobstructed view of her profile. Through the window he’d made in the bookshelf, Harry saw that there was a flaw in Ruth’s right eye—as he’d guessed from her book-jacket photo. And she really did have great breasts.

Although Ruth signed books for more than an hour without complaint, there was one mildly shocking occurrence. It suggested to Harry that Ruth was a lot less friendly than she’d at first appeared; indeed, at some level, Ruth struck Harry as one of the angriest people he’d ever seen.

Harry had always been attracted to people who contained a lot of anger. As a police officer, he’d found that un contained anger was nothing but a menace to him. Whereas contained anger greatly appealed to him, and he believed that people who weren’t angry at all were basically unobservant.

The woman who caused the trouble was in line for an autograph; she was elderly, and at the outset she appeared innocent of any wrongdoing, which is only to say she’d done nothing wrong that Harry could see . When it was her turn, she presented herself at the front of the line and put on the table an English edition of My Last Bad Boyfriend . A shy-looking (and equally elderly) man stood beside her. He was smiling down at Ruth—the old woman was smiling down at Ruth, too. The problem seemed to be that Ruth failed to recognize her.

“Should I inscribe this for you, or for someone in your family?” Ruth asked the old lady, whose smile lessened noticeably.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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