A Widow for One Year

Ruth Cole’s credo amounted to a war against the roman ‡ clef, a putdown of the autobiographical novel,

which now made her feel ashamed because she knew she was getting ready to write her most autobiographical novel to date. If Hannah had always accused her of writing about a Ruth character and a Hannah character, what was Ruth writing about now? Strictly a Ruth character who makes a bad, Hannah-like decision!

And so it was painful for Ruth to sit in a restaurant and listen to the compliments of her sponsors from the Vrije Universiteit; they were well-meaning but mostly academic types, who favored theories, and theoretical discussions, to the more concrete nuts and bolts of storytelling. Ruth hated herself for providing them with a theory of fiction about which she now had sizable doubts.

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn’t, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstances. That wasn’t much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments for her former credo.

It wasn’t until (in lieu of dessert) she asked for another glass of red wine that Ruth knew she’d had too much to drink. At that instant she also remembered not seeing the beautiful Dutch boy Wim in line for her autograph after her successful but mortifying speech. He’d said he would be there.

Ruth had to admit that she’d been looking forward to seeing young Wim again—and perhaps drawing him out a little. Truly she hadn’t been planning to flirt with him, at least not in earnest, and she had already decided not to sleep with him. She’d wanted only to arrange a time to be alone with him—possibly a coffee in the morning—to discover what his interest in her was; to imagine him as her admirer, and maybe as her lover; to absorb more of the details of which the beautiful Dutch boy was composed. And then he hadn’t shown up.

I guess he finally got tired of me, Ruth thought. She could sympathize with him if he had; she had never felt so tired of herself.

Ruth refused to allow Maarten and Sylvia to accompany her to her hotel. She’d kept them up late the night before; everyone was in need of an early night. They put her in a cab and instructed the driver. Across the street from her hotel, at the taxi stand on the Kattengat, she saw Wim standing under a streetlight—like a lost boy who’d been separated from his mother in a crowd, which had since dispersed.

Mercy! Ruth thought, as she crossed the street to claim him.

Not a Mother, Not Her Son

At least she didn’t sleep with him—not exactly. They did spend the night together in the same bed, but she did not have sex with him—not really. Oh, they had kissed and cuddled; she did permit him to touch her breasts, but she made him stop when he got too excited. And she’d slept the whole night in her panties and a T-shirt; she’d not been naked with him. It wasn’t her fault that he’d taken all his clothes off. She’d gone into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and to change into the panties and the T-shirt, and when she’d come back into the bedroom, he’d already undressed and crawled into bed.

They’d talked and talked. His name was Wim Jongbloed; he’d read every word she’d written, over and over again. He wanted to be a writer like her, but he’d not approached her after her lecture at the Vrije Universiteit; he’d been devastated by what she’d had to say. He wrote nonstop autobiographical logorrhea—he’d never “imagined” a story or a character in his life. All he did was record his miserable longings, his wretchedly ordinary experience. He’d left her lecture wanting to kill himself, but instead he’d gone home and destroyed all his writing. He’d thrown his diaries—for that’s all he’d written—into a canal. Then he’d called every first-class hotel in Amsterdam until he found out where she was staying.

They’d sat talking in the hotel bar until it was obvious that the bar was closing; then she’d taken him to her room.

“I’m no better than a journalist,” Wim said, brokenhearted.

Ruth winced to hear her own phrase recited to her; it was a line right out of her lecture. What she’d said was: “If you can’t make something up, you’re no better than a journalist.”

“I don’t know how to make up a story!” Wim Jongbloed complained.

He probably couldn’t write a decent sentence to save his soul, either, but Ruth felt totally responsible for him. And he was so pretty. He had thick, dark-brown hair and dark-brown eyes with the longest eyelashes. He had the smoothest skin, a fine nose, a strong chin, a heart-shaped mouth. And although his body was too slight for Ruth’s taste, he had broad shoulders and a wide chest—he was still in the process of growing into his body.

She began by telling him about her novel-in-progress; how it kept changing, how that was what you did to make up a story. Storytelling was nothing more than a kind of heightened common sense. (Ruth wondered where she’d read that; she was sure she hadn’t thought it up.)

Ruth even confessed that she’d “imagined” Wim as the young man in her novel. That didn’t mean she would have sex with him; in fact, she wanted him to understand that she would not have sex with him. It was enough for her to have fantasized about it.

He told her that he had fantasized about it, too—for years! He’d once masturbated to her book-jacket photograph. Upon hearing this, Ruth went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth, and changed into a pair of clean panties and a T-shirt. And when she came out of the bathroom, there he was—naked in her bed.

She’d not once touched his penis, although she felt it poking against her when they hugged; it felt good to hug the boy. And he’d been awfully polite about masturbating, at least the first time. “I just have to do it,” he’d told her. “May I?”

“All right,” she said, turning her back to him.

“No, looking at you,” he begged her. “Please . . .”

She turned over in bed to face him. Once she kissed his eyes, and the tip of his nose, but not his lips. He stared at her so intently that Ruth could almost believe she was his age again. And it was easy for her to imagine that this was how it had been with her mother and Eddie O’Hare. Eddie hadn’t told her this part, but Ruth had read all of Eddie’s novels. She knew perfectly well that Eddie hadn’t invented the masturbation scenes; poor Eddie could invent next to nothing.

When Wim Jongbloed came, his eyelids fluttered; Ruth kissed him on the lips then, but it was not a lingering kiss—the embarrassed boy ran to the bathroom to wash his hand. When he trotted back to bed, he fell asleep so quickly, his head on her breasts, that she thought: I might have liked to have tried my hand at that, too!

Then she decided she was glad she hadn’t masturbated. If she had, it would have been more like having sex with him. Ruth found it ironic that she needed to make her own rules and her own definitions. She wondered if her mother had needed to similarly restrain or measure herself with Eddie. If Ruth had had a mother, would she have found herself in such a situation as this?

She only once pulled back the sheets and looked at the sleeping boy. She could have gone on looking at him all night, but she even restrained or measured how long she looked. It was a good-bye look— and chaste enough, under the circumstances. She resolved that she wouldn’t let Wim in her bed again, and in the early morning Wim made her more determined to keep her resolution. When he thought she was still asleep, he masturbated beside her again, this time sneaking his hand under her T-shirt and holding fast to one of her bare breasts. She pretended to continue sleeping while he ran to the bathroom to wash his hand. The little goat!

She took him out to a café for breakfast, and then they went to what he called a “literary” café on the Kloveniersburgwal—for more coffee. De Engelbewaarder was a dark place with a farting dog sleeping under one table, and—at the only tables that got any window light—a halfdozen English soccer fans were drinking beer. Their shiny blue soccer shirts lauded a brand of English lager, and when another two or three of their mates would wander in and join them, they would, in salutation, break into a fragment of a rousing song. But not even these desu

ltory outbursts of singing could rouse the dog from its sleep, or keep it from farting. (If de Engelbewaarder was Wim’s idea of a “ literary” café, Ruth would have hated to see what he called a lowlife bar.)

Wim seemed less depressed about his writing in the morning. Ruth believed she’d made him happy enough for her to expect some further research assistance from him.