“Good driving, Ruthie,” her father told her. “If you ever have a tougher drive than this, I trust you to remember what you’ve learned.”
Ruth was shivering when she finally got out of the pool. She knew she should warm up before she started playing squash with Scott Saunders, but both her memories of learning to drive and the Graham Greene biography had depressed her. It wasn’t Norman Sherry’s fault, but the Greene biography had taken a turn that Ruth opposed. Mr. Sherry was convinced that, for every major character in a Graham Greene novel, there existed a real-life counterpart. In an interview in The Times, Greene himself had told V. S. Pritchett: “I cannot invent.” Yet, in the same interview, while admitting that his characters were “an amalgam of bits of real people,” Greene also denied taking his characters from real life. “Real people are crowded out by imaginary ones. . . .” he’d said. “Real people are too limiting.” But, for too many pages of the biography, Mr. Sherry went on and on about the “real people.”
Ruth was particularly saddened by Greene’s early love life. What his biographer called “his obsessional love” for the “ardent Catholic” who would eventually become Greene’s wife was precisely the kind of thing Ruth didn’t want to know about a writer whose writing she loved. “There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer,” Greene had written in A Sort of Life . But in the daily letters that young Graham wrote to Vivien, his wife-to-be, Ruth saw only the familiar pathos of a man who was smitten.
Ruth had never been smitten. Possibly what contributed to her reluctance to welcome Allan’s proposal of marriage was her awareness of how smitten Allan was with her.
She’d stopped reading The Life of Graham Greene on page 338, the beginning of the twenty-fourth chapter, which was called “Marriage at Last.” It was a pity that Ruth stopped reading there, for near the end of that chapter she would have found something that might have made her like Graham Greene and his bride-to-be a little better. When the couple had finally married and were on their honeymoon, Vivien presented Graham with a sealed letter that Vivien’s intrusive mother had given her—“a letter on sex instruction”—but Vivien handed it to Greene unopened. He read it and immediately tore it up. Vivien never got to read the letter. Ruth would have appreciated that the new Mrs. Greene decided she could manage well enough without her mother’s advice.
As for “Marriage at Last,” why did the chapter title—the phrase itself—depress her? Was it the way she would get married, too? It sounded like the title of a novel Ruth Cole would never write, or even want to read.
Ruth thought she should stick to rereading Graham Greene; she was sure that she didn’t want to know anything more about his life . Here she was, brooding about what Hannah called her “favorite subject,” which was her tireless scrutiny of the relationship between what was “real” and what was “invented.” But the mere thought of Hannah returned Ruth to the present.
She didn’t want Scott Saunders to see her naked in the pool, not yet.
She went into the house and dressed in some clean, dry clothes for squash. She put some talcum powder in the right front pocket of her shorts; it would keep her racquet hand dry and smooth—no blisters. She’d already chilled the white wine, but now she arranged the rice in the electric steamer. All she would have to do later was push a button to turn it on. She’d already set the dining-room table—two place settings.
At last she climbed the ladder to the second floor of the barn, and— after she’d stretched—she began to warm up the ball.
She fell into an easy rhythm: four forehands down the wall, then she would hit the telltale tin; four backhand rails, and then the tin again. Each time she hit the tin, aiming deliberately low, she hit the ball hard enough so that the resounding tin was loud. In an actual game, Ruth almost never hit the tin; in a tough match, maybe she would hit it twice. But she wanted to be sure that when Scott Saunders arrived, he would hear her hitting the tin. And as he climbed the ladder to come play with her, he would be thinking: For a so-called pretty good player, she sure hits the tin a lot. Then, when they started to play, it would come as quite a surprise to him that Ruth rarely hit the tin at all.
You could feel a little shiver in the squash court whenever someone climbed the ladder to the second floor of the barn. When Ruth felt that shiver, she counted five more shots—hitting the tin the fifth time. She could easily hit all five shots in the time it took her to say, under her breath, “Daddy with Hannah Grant!”
Scott tapped twice on the door of the squash court with his racquet; then he cautiously opened the door. “Hi,” he said. “I hope you haven’t been practicing for me.”
“Oh, just a little bit,” Ruth said.
Two Drawers
She spotted him the first five points. Ruth wanted to see how he moved. He was reasonably quick, but he swung his racquet like a tennis player; he didn’t snap his wrist. And he had only one serve: a hard one, right at her. It was usually too high; she could step out of its way and return it off the back wall. And Scott’s return of serve was weak; the ball fell to the floor at midcourt. Ruth could usually kill it with a corner shot. She had him running either from the back wall to the front, or from one back corner to the other.
Ruth took the first game 15–8 before Scott had figured out how good she really was. Scott was one of those players who overestimated their abilities. When he was losing, his first thought was that his game was a little off; it wouldn’t occur to him, until the third or fourth game, that he was being outplayed. Ruth tried to keep the score close in the next two games, because she enjoyed seeing Scott run.
She won the second game 15–6 and the third 15–9. Scott Saunders was in very good shape, but after the third game, he needed the water bottle. Ruth didn’t drink any water. Scott was doing all the running.
He hadn’t quite got his wind back when he faulted the first serve of the fourth game. Ruth could detect his frustration, like a sudden odor. “I can’t believe that your father still beats you,” he said between breaths.
“Oh, I’ll beat him one day,” Ruth said. “Maybe next time.”
She won the fourth game 15–5. While he was chasing a drop shot into the front corner, Scott slipped in a puddle of his own sweat; he slid on his hip and hit his head against the tin.
“Are you okay?” Ruth asked him. “Do you want to stop?”
“Let’s play one more game,” he snapped at her.
; Ruth didn’t like his attitude. She beat him 15–1 in their last game, his only point coming when she tried (against her better judgment) a reverse corner that hit the tin. It was the one time she hit the tin in five games. Ruth was mad at herself for attempting the reverse corner; it confirmed her opinion of low-percentage shots. If she’d just kept the ball in play, she was sure she would have taken the last game 15–0.
But losing 15–1 had been bad enough for Scott Saunders. Ruth couldn’t be sure if he was pouting or just making an unusually contorted facial expression until he got his wind back. They were leaving the court when a wasp flew in the open door and Scott took an awkward swipe at it with his racquet. He missed. The wasp zigged and zagged. Its erratic, darting flight was on course to the ceiling, where it would safely be out of reach, when Ruth caught the wasp in midair with her backhand. Some say it’s the toughest shot in squash: an overhead backhand volley. The strings of her racquet cut the wasp’s segmented body in two.
“Good get,” Scott said, as if he were about to be sick.
Ruth sat on the edge of the deck beside the swimming pool; she took off her shoes and socks, cooling her feet in the water. Scott didn’t seem to know what to do. He was used to taking off all his clothes and stepping into the outdoor shower with Ted. Ruth would have to do it first.
She stood up and took off her shorts. She pulled her T-shirt off, dreading the potential awkwardness—the usual, unwanted acrobatics—of wriggling out of her sweaty sports bra. But she was able to take the spandex bra off without an embarrassing struggle. She took her underpants off last, and walked into the shower stall without looking at Scott. She’d already soaped herself, and was standing under the running water, when he stepped into the shower stall with her and turned on his showerhead. She had shampooed her hair and was rinsing the shampoo out, when she asked him if he was allergic to shrimp.
“No, I like shrimp,” he told her. With her eyes closed, rinsing off the shampoo, she guessed that he had to be looking at her breasts.