A Widow for One Year

Even Hannah would have acknowledged that Ruth’s marriage to Allan had worked. If Ruth would never have confessed that their sex life had been only tolerable at the start, she later would have described even this aspect of her life with Allan as something she’d learned to enjoy. Ruth had found a companion she could talk to, and he was someone she liked to listen to as well; furthermore, he was a good father to the only child she would ever have. And the child . . . ah, her whole life had changed because of Graham, and for that, too, she would always love Allan.

As an older mother—she was thirty-seven when Graham was born— Ruth worried about her son’s safety more than younger mothers did. She also spoiled Graham, but it had been her choice to have an only child. What are only children for, if not for spoiling? To dote on Graham had become the most sustaining part of Ruth’s life. The boy was two before Ruth went back to being a writer.

Now Graham was three. His mother had finally finished her fourth novel, although she continued to describe the novel as un finished—for the expressed reason that she’d not yet thought the book was finished enough to show to Allan. Ruth was being disingenuous, even to herself, but she couldn’t help it. She was worried about Allan’s reaction to the novel—for reasons that had nothing to do with how finished or un finished the book was.

It had long been her understanding with Allan that she would never show him anything she’d written until she believed it was as finished as she could make it. Allan had always urged his authors to do this. “I can best be an editor only when you think you’ve done everything you can,” he’d tell his writers. (How could he urge an author to take another step if the author was still walking? Allan always said.)

If she’d fooled Allan into accepting that her novel was not yet ready to show him because she said it was not quite finished, Ruth hadn’t fooled herself. She’d already rewritten the novel as much as she could; she sometimes doubted she could re read the book, much less pretend that she was still re writing it. Nor did she doubt that it was a good novel; she believed it was her best work.

In truth, the only thing that bothered Ruth about her newest novel, My Last Bad Boyfriend, was her fear that the book would insult her husband. The main character of the book was entirely too close to one aspect of Ruth herself before she was married: her main character was prone to involving herself with the wrong sort of man. Furthermore, the titular bad boyfriend in her novel was an unlikely and unlikable combination of Scott Saunders and Wim Jongbloed. That this sexual lowlife persuades the Ruth character (as Hannah would doubtless call her) into watching a prostitute with a customer might be less disturbing to Allan than the fact that the so-called Ruth character is uncontrollably overcome with sexual desire. And the resultant shame she feels—for sexually losing control of herself—is what convinces her to accept a marriage proposal from a man who is sexually unexciting to her.

How could Allan not be insulted by what Ruth’s new novel implied about the author’s reasons for marrying him ? That her marriage to Allan had been the happiest four years of her life, which Allan surely knew, did not mitigate what Ruth feared was her novel’s more cynical message.

Ruth had fairly accurately imagined everything that Hannah would conclude from My Last Bad Boyfriend: namely, that her less adventurous friend had had a fling with a Dutch boy, who’d fucked her brains out while a prostitute watched ! It was a brutally humiliating scene for any woman, even for Hannah. But Ruth wasn’t worried about Hannah’s reaction; Ruth had a history of ignoring or rejecting Hannah’s interpretations of her fiction.

Yet here Ruth was: she’d written a novel that would surely offend many readers and critics—especially the women among them—but so what? The only person she cared about not offending, Allan, might be the very person whom My Last Bad Boyfriend was most likely to offend!

The night of Eddie’s publication party struck Ruth as the best possible time for her to confess her fears to Allan. She had even gone so far as to imagine that she was getting up the nerve to tell Allan what had happened to her in Amsterdam. Ruth believed her marriage was that unassailable.

“I don’t want to have dinner with Hannah,” she whispered to her husband at Eddie’s party.

“Aren’t we having dinner with O’Hare?” Allan asked her.

“No, not even with Eddie—not even if he asks us,” Ruth had replied. “I want to have dinner with you, Allan—just you.”

From the party, they’d caught a cab uptown to the restaurant where Allan had so gallantly left her alone with Eddie O’Hare—that seemingly long-ago night after her reading at the 92nd Street Y, and Eddie’s never-ending introduction.

There was no reason for Allan not to drink a lot of wine; they’d already had sex, and neither of them had to drive. But Ruth silently wished that her husband wouldn’t get drunk. She didn’t want him to be drunk when she told him about Amsterdam.

“I’m dying for you to read my book,” she beg

an.

“I’m dying to read it—when you’re ready,” Allan told her. He was so relaxed. It really was the perfect time to tell him everything.

“It’s not just that I love you and Graham,” Ruth said. “It’s that I will appreciate forever the life you’ve spared me from, the life I had . . .”

“I know—you’ve told me.” He sounded slightly less patient with her now, as if he didn’t want to hear her say, again, how she’d repeatedly got herself in trouble as a single woman; how, until Allan, her judgment (when it came to men) was not to be trusted.

“In Amsterdam . . .” she tried to say, but then she thought that, to be honest, she should begin with Scott Saunders and the squash game— not to mention the aprés-squash game. But her voice had stopped. “It’s just more difficult to show you this novel,” she began again, “because your opinion means so much more than it ever did, and your opinion has always meant a lot.” Already she was evading what she wanted to say! She felt as crippled by cowardice as she had in Rooie’s wardrobe closet.

“Ruth, relax, ” Allan told her, holding her hand. “If you think having another editor would be better for you—I mean for our relationship . . .”

“No!” Ruth cried. “That’s not what I mean!” She’d not meant to pull her hand away, but she had. Now she tried to take back his hand, but he’d put it in his lap. “I mean that it’s all because of you that I’ve had my last bad boyfriend—it’s not just a title, you know.”

“I know—you’ve told me,” he said again.

What they’d ended up talking about was the scary and oft-repeated subject of who Graham’s guardian should be, should anything happen to both of them. It was so unlikely that anything could happen to both of them that would leave Graham an orphan; Graham went absolutely everywhere with them. If their plane crashed, the boy would die, too.

But it was a matter that Ruth couldn’t let rest. As it stood, Eddie was Graham’s godfather, Hannah his godmother. Neither Ruth nor Allan could imagine Hannah as anybody’s mother. Her devotion to Graham notwithstanding, Hannah had a life that made being a parent unthinkable. While she’d impressed both Ruth and Allan by her attentiveness to Graham—in that eager manner that women who’ve chosen not to have children of their own can sometimes exhibit with other people’s children—Hannah was not a good choice for Graham’s guardian.

And if Eddie had shunned younger women, he seemed not to know (in the slightest) what to do with children. He behaved awkwardly, even foolishly, in Graham’s company. Eddie was so nervous around Graham that he made Graham nervous, and Graham was not a nervous child.

By the time they got back to the Stanhope, Allan and Ruth were both drunk. They kissed their baby boy good night. (Graham was asleep on a roll-away bed in their bedroom.) They bid Conchita Gomez good night, too. Before Ruth had finished brushing her teeth and readying herself for bed, Allan was already sleeping soundly.

Ruth noticed that he’d left the window open. Even if the air that night was special, it was never a good idea to leave a window open in New York—the noise of the early-morning traffic would wake the dead. (It would not wake Allan.)

In every marriage there are designated chores; there is always someone who is largely responsible for putting out the trash, and someone who is principally in charge of not running out of coffee or milk or toothpaste or toilet paper. Allan was in charge of temperature: he opened and closed the windows, he fiddled with the thermostat, he built up the fire or he let it die down. And so Ruth left the window open in their bedroom at the Stanhope. And when the early-morning traffic woke her at five, and when Graham crawled into bed between his parents, because he was cold, Ruth said: “Allan, if you close the window, I think we can all go back to sleep.”