“Different folks, different strokes,” Ruth replied tactfully.
“Look, baby, I saw Eddie on Park Avenue and Eighty-ninth—he was pushing an old woman in a wheelchair,” Hannah said. “I also saw him one night in the Russian Tea Room—he was with an old lady in a neck brace !”
“They might have had accidents. They didn’t necessarily succumb to old age,” Ruth responded. “ Young women break their legs—the one in the wheelchair might have been skiing. There are automobile accidents. There’s always whiplash. . . .”
“Baby,” Hannah pleaded. “This old woman was confined to a wheelchair. And the one with the neck brace was a walking skeleton —her neck was too thin to hold up her head!”
“I think Eddie’s sweet,” was all Ruth would say. “You’re going to get old, too, Hannah. Wouldn’t you like to have someone like Eddie in your life then ?”
But even Ruth had to confess that she found A Difficult Woman a serious stretch of the so-called willing suspension of her disbelief. A man in his early fifties, who bears remarkable similarities to Eddie, is the doting lover of a woman in her late seventies. They make love amid a daunting host of medical precautions and uncertainties. Not surprisingly, they meet in a doctor’s office, where the man is anxiously awaiting his first sigmoidoscopy.
“What are you here for?” the older woman asks the younger man. “You look healthy enough.” The younger man admits his anxiety concerning the procedure he is about to undergo. “Oh, don’t be silly,” the older woman tells him. “Heterosexual men are such cowards when it comes to being penetrated. There’s really nothing to it. I must have had a half-dozen sigmoidoscopies. Mind you, be prepared—they do give you a little gas.”
A few days later, the two encounter each other at a cocktail party. The older woman is so beautifully dressed that the younger man doesn’t recognize her. Moreover, she approaches him in an alarmingly coquettish manner. “I last saw you when you were about to be penetrated,” she whispers to him. “How’d it go?”
Stammering, he replies: “Oh, very well, thank you. And you were right. It was nothing to be afraid of !”
“I’ll show you something to be afraid of,” the woman whispers to him, which begins their disturbingly passionate love story, which is over only when the older woman dies.
“For God’s sake,” Allan had said to Ruth about Eddie’s fifth novel. “You’ve got to hand it to O’Hare—nothing embarrasses him!”
Despite his ongoing habit of calling Eddie by his last name, which Eddie intensely disliked, Allan had developed a genuine affection for him, if not for his writing —and Eddie, although Allan Albright was the antithesis of his kind of man, had grown far more fond of Allan than he had thought possible. They’d been good friends when Allan died, and Eddie had not taken his responsibilities at Allan’s memorial service lightly.
Eddie’s relationship with Ruth—especially the limited degree to which he understood her feelings for her mother—was a different matter.
While Eddie had observed the enormous changes in Ruth upon her becoming a mother, he’d not realized how being a mother had persuaded her to take an even more unforgiving view of Marion.
Simply put, Ruth was a good mother. At the time of Allan’s death, Graham would be only a year younger than Ruth had been when Marion had left her. Ruth could not conceive of the lack of love Marion had felt for her daughter. Ruth would sooner die than leave Graham; she could never imagine leaving her son.
And if Eddie was obsessed with Marion’s state of mind—or what he could fathom of it from McDermid, Retired —Ruth had read her mother’s fourth novel with impatience and disdain. (There is a point when sorrow becomes self-indulgent, she thought.)
As a publisher, Allan had done his homework on Marion; he’d found out as much as he could about the Canadian crime writer who called herself Alice Somerset. According to her Canadian publisher, Alice Somerset was not enough of a success in Canada to support herself from her book sales within her own country; however, her French and German translations were far more popular. She made quite a comfortable living from her translations. In addition to maintaining a modest apartment in Toronto, Ruth’s mother spent the worst months of the Canadian winter in Europe. Her German and French publishers were happy to find her suitable apartments to rent.
“An agreeable woman, but somewhat aloof,” Marion’s German publisher had told Allan.
“Charming in a standoffish way,” the French publisher had said.
“I don’t know why she bothers with the nom de plume—she just strikes me as a very private person,” Marion’s Canadian publisher told Al
lan; the publisher also provided Allan with Marion’s Toronto address.
“For God’s sake,” Allan would repeatedly say to Ruth; in fact, he’d had one such conversation with Ruth only a few days before he died. “Here’s your mother’s address. You’re a writer—just write her a letter! You could even go see her, if you wanted to. I’d be happy to go with you, or you could go alone. You could take Graham—surely she’d be interested in Graham !”
“ I’m not interested in her !” Ruth had said.
Ruth and Allan had come into New York for Eddie’s publication party, which was held on an October evening not long after Graham’s third birthday. It had been one of those warm, sunny days that felt like summer—and when the evening came, the night air brought a contrasting coolness that epitomized the very best of autumn. “An unbeatable day!” Ruth would remember Allan saying.
They’d taken a two-bedroom suite at the Stanhope; they’d made love in their bedroom while Conchita Gomez had taken Graham to the hotel restaurant, where the boy was treated like a little prince. They’d all driven into the city from Sagaponack, although Conchita protested that she and Eduardo were too old to spend even a single night apart; one of them might die, and it would be terrible for a happily married person to die alone.
The spectacular weather, not to mention the sex, had made such a favorable impression on Allan that he’d insisted on walking the fifteen blocks to Eddie’s publication party. In retrospect, Ruth would think that Allan had looked a little flushed upon their arrival; but she’d thought at the time it was only a sign of good health or the effect of the cool fall air.
Eddie had been his usual self-deprecating self at the party: he gave a silly speech wherein he thanked his old friends for giving up whatever more entertaining plans they had had for the evening; he gave an overly familiar synopsis of the plot of his new novel; then he assured his audience that they needn’t bother to read the book, now that they already knew the story. “And the main characters will be fairly recognizable . . . from my previous novels, that is,” Eddie had mumbled. “They’ve just grown a little older.”
Hannah was there with an undeniably awful man, a former professional hockey goalie who’d just written a memoir about his sexual exploits—and who took an unsavory pride in the unimpressive fact that he’d never been married. His terrible book was called Not in My Net, and his humor was principally demonstrated by his charmless habit of referring to the women he’d slept with as pucks, thus enabling him to crack the joke “She was a great puck.”
Hannah had met him when she’d interviewed him for a magazine article she was writing; her subject was what jocks did when they retired. As far as Ruth could tell, they tried to be either actors or writers; she’d remarked to Hannah that she liked it better when they tried to be actors.
But Hannah was increasingly defensive on the matter of her bad boyfriends. “What does an old married lady know?” Hannah would ask her friend. Nothing, Ruth would have been the first to admit. Ruth just knew that she was happy. (She knew she was lucky to be happy, too.)