“You always order the arugula,” Allan said to her now.
“I like arugula,” Ruth told him. “It’s not always available.”
To Eddie, they sounded as if they’d been married for years. Eddie wanted to talk to Ruth about Marion, but he would have to wait. When he excused himself from the table—to go to the men’s room, when he didn’t really need to go—he hoped that Ruth would take this as an opportunity to visit the women’s; they could at least have a few words together, if only in a corridor. But Ruth stayed at the table.
“My God,” Allan said, when Eddie was gone. “Why was O’Hare the introducer?”
“I thought he was fine,” Ruth lied.
Karl explained that he and Melissa often asked Eddie O’Hare to be the introducer. Because he was reliable, Karl said. And he’d never refused to introduce anybody, Melissa added.
Ruth smiled to hear this about Eddie, but Allan said, “My God—‘ reliable’? He was late ! He looked like he’d been run over by a bus !”
He had gone on a little too long, Karl and Melissa agreed; they’d never heard him go on too long before.
“But why did you want him to introduce you?” Allan asked Ruth. “You told me you liked the idea.” (In fact, Eddie had been her idea.)
Who was it who said that there was no better company for an especially personal revelation than the company of virtual strangers? (Ruth herself had written that—in The Same Orphanage .)
“Well.” Ruth was aware that Karl and Melissa were the “virtual strangers” in this case. “Eddie O’Hare was my mother’s lover,” she announced. “It was when he was sixteen and my mother was thirty-nine. I haven’t seen him since I was four, but I’ve always wanted to see him again. As you might imagine . . .” She waited.
No one said a word. Ruth knew how hurt Allan would be—that she’d not told him before, and that when she’d finally told him, it was in front of Karl and Melissa.
“May I ask,” Allan began—formally, for him, “if the older woman in all of O’Hare’s novels is your mother?”
“No, not according to my father,” Ruth replied. “But I believe that Eddie truly loved my mother, and that his love for her, as an older woman, is in all of his novels.”
“I see,” Allan said. He’d already picked some of Ruth’s arugula off her salad plate with his fingers. For a gentleman, which he was—and a lifelong New Yorker, a sophisticated man—Allan’s table manners were atrocious. He ate off everybody’s plate—he was not above expressing his dislike of your food after he’d eaten it, either—and food had a way of getting caught between his teeth.
Ruth glanced at him now, expecting to see a telltale flag of arugula in the vicinity of one of his overlong canines. He had a long nose and a long chin, too, but they conveyed a remote elegance, which was offset by a broad, flat forehead and a closely cropped head of dark-brown hair. At fifty-four, Allan Albright showed no signs of baldness; he had not a single gray hair, either.
He was almost handsome except for his long teeth, which lent him a lupine appearance. And although he was quite lean and fit, he ate with gusto. He occasionally drank with a little too much gusto, Ruth worried, assessing him. Now, always, it seemed, she was assessing him—and too often unkindly. I should sleep with him and make up my mind, she thought.
Then Ruth remembered that Hannah Grant had stood her up. Ruth had intended to use Hannah as her excuse for not sleeping with Allan—that is, Hannah would be Ruth’s excuse this time. She was going to tell Allan that she and Hannah were such old friends that they always stayed up all night and talked and talked.
When Ruth’s publisher wasn’t paying for her accommodations in New York, Ruth usually stayed with Hannah; Ruth even had her own set of keys to Hannah’s apartment.
Now, without Hannah there, Allan would suggest that Ruth come back to his apartment, or he would ask to see her suite at the Stanhope, which Random House had provided for her. Allan had been very patient with her reluctance to sleep with him; he’d even construed her reluctance to mean that she was taking his affection for her with the utmost seriousness, which she was . It just hadn’t occurred to Allan that Ruth was reluctant because she thought she might hate sleeping with him. It had something to do with his habit of taking food off other people’s plates, and the haste with which he ate.
It wasn’t because of his reputation as a former ladies’ man. He’d told her frankly that “the right woman,” which she apparently was, had changed all that; she had no reason not to believe him. It wasn’t his age, either. He was in better shape than many younger men; he didn’t look fifty-four, and he was intellectually stimulating. They had once stayed up all night—much more recently than Ruth and Hannah had stayed up all night—reading their favorite passages of Graham Greene to each other.
Allan’s first present to Ruth had been volume one of the Norman Sherry biography of Graham Greene. Ruth had been reading it with a deliberate slowness, both savoring it and afraid of what she might learn about Greene that she wouldn’t like. It disturbed her to read biographies of writers she loved; she preferred not to know anything unlovable about them. Thus far, the Sherry biography had treated Greene with the honor Ruth thought Greene deserved. But Allan was more impatient with her for reading Norman Sherry slowly than he was impatient with her for her sexual reticence. (Allan had observed that Norman Sherry was sure to publish the second volume of The Life of Graham Greene before Ruth finished reading the first.)
Now, with Hannah not present, Ruth realized that she could use Eddie O’Hare as her reason for not sleeping with Allan tonight. Before Eddie returned from the men’s room, Ruth said: “After dinner—I hope none of you will mind—I want to have Eddie all to myself.” Karl and Melissa waited for Allan to respond, but Ruth pressed ahead. “I can’t imagine what my mother saw in him,” Ruth said, “except that, at sixteen, I’m sure he must have been awfully pretty.?
??
“O’Hare is still ‘awfully pretty,’ ” Allan growled. Ruth thought: Oh, God—don’t tell me he’s going to be jealous !
Ruth said: “My mother may not have cared for him as much as he cared for her. Even my father can’t read Eddie O’Hare’s books without failing to comment that Eddie must have worshiped my mother.”
“Ad nauseam,” said Allan Albright, who couldn’t read a book by Eddie O’Hare without failing to make comments of that kind.
“Please don’t be jealous, Allan,” Ruth said. It was her reading-aloud voice, her inimitable deadpan, which they all knew. Allan looked stung. Ruth hated herself. In one evening she’d said “Fuck you” to a grandmother, and to the old lady’s grandchildren, and now she’d wounded the only man she’d ever considered marrying.
“Anyway,” Ruth told them at the table, “a chance to be alone with Eddie O’Hare is exciting for me.”
Poor Karl and Melissa! Ruth thought. But they were used to writers and had doubtless been exposed to more inappropriate behavior than hers.