A Widow for One Year

In Ruth’s second novel, Before the Fall of Saigon (1985), the so-called Ruth and Hannah characters are roommates at Middlebury during the Vietnam War. The Hannah character, who is boldness personified, makes a deal with her boyfriend: she’ll marry him and have his baby, so that when he graduates and his student draft deferment expires, he will be protected from the draft under his new draft status—3A, married with child. She makes him promise that, if the marriage doesn’t work out, he’ll divorce her—on her terms. (She gets custody of the child; he pays child support.) The problem is, she can’t get pregnant.

“How dare you call her ‘the Hannah character’?” Ruth demanded of Hannah repeatedly. “You went through college trying not to get pregnant while managing to get pregnant every minute!” But Hannah said that the character’s “capacity for risk-taking” was entirely hers.

In the novel, the woman who can’t get pregnant (the Hannah character) makes a new deal—this time with her roommate (the Ruth character). The Hannah character convinces the Ruth character to sleep with the Hannah character’s boyfriend and get pregnant with the boyfriend’s baby; the deal is that the roommate (the Ruth character) will then marry the Hannah character’s boyfriend, thus keeping him out of Vietnam. When the war (or the draft) is over, the dutiful roommate, who is a virgin before this dreadful experience, will divorce the boyfriend; he will immediately marry the Hannah character, and together they will raise the roommate’s baby.

How Hannah dared to call the virgin roommate “the Ruth character” was vexing to Ruth, who had not lost her virginity at college— much less got herself pregnant by means of Hannah’s boyfriend! (And Hannah Grant was the only one of Ruth’s friends who knew how and when Ruth had lost her virginity, which was another story.) But Hannah said that the roommate’s “ anxiety about losing her virginity” was entirely Ruth’s.

In the novel, naturally, the Ruth character despises her roommate’s boyfriend and is traumatized by their single sexual encounter; the boyfriend, on the other hand, falls in love with his girlfriend’s roommate and balks at divorcing her when the Vietnam War is over.

The fall of Saigon, in April ’75, is the background to the end of the novel, when the roommate (who agrees to have her roommate’s boy-friend’s baby) realizes that she can’t give the baby up. Her loathing of her baby’s father notwithstanding, she accepts joint custody of their child upon their divorce. The Hannah character, who has instigated the match between her boyfriend and her best friend, loses both the boyfriend and the baby—not to mention the friendship with her former roommate.

It is a sexual farce, but with bitter consequences, and its comic touches are offset by the darker rifts between the characters—which is a microcosm of how the country itself was divided by the war in Vietnam, and (for Ruth’s generation of young men) by what to do about the draft. “A woman’s quaint perspective on dodging the draft,” one male reviewer wrote of the novel.

Hannah had told Ruth that she had slept with this particular reviewer at one time or another; she also happened to know his draft-dodging story. The man had claimed psychological damage from having sex with his mother. His mother had substantiated the claim; the telling of the lie had been the mother’s idea in the first place. And as a result of successfully evading the draft in this fashion, the man eventually had had sex with his mother.

“I guess he knows a ‘quaint perspective’ when he encounters one,” Ruth had said. It irritated Hannah that Ruth didn’t rail against her negative reviews as vociferously as Hannah railed against them. “Reviews are free publicity,” Ruth liked to say. “Even the bad ones.”

It was a measure of Ruth Cole’s international stature and renown that the anticipation of her third and most recent novel was so keen in those European countries where she was translated that two translations were being published simultaneously with the British and American editions.

Following her reading at the Y, Ruth was spending a day in New York; she’d agreed to several interviews and to some related publicity. Then she was spending a day and a night in Sagaponack with her father, before leav

ing for Germany and the Frankfurt Book Fair. (After Frankfurt, and the promotion of the German translation, she was expected in Amsterdam, where the Dutch translation had just been published.)

Ruth’s visits with her father in Sagaponack were few, yet she was frankly looking forward to this one. Doubtless there would be a little squash in the barn, and much arguing—about nearly everything—and even some rest. Hannah had promised to come to Sagaponack with her. It was always better for Ruth if she avoided spending time with her father alone; with a friend—even if it was one of Ruth’s infrequent but consistently ill-chosen boyfriends—there was someone to run interference.

But Hannah flirted with Ruth’s father, which made Ruth cross. Ruth suspected Hannah of flirting with him because it made Ruth cross. And Ruth’s father, who knew of no other way to behave with women, flirted back.

It had been Hannah to whom Ruth had made her vulgar remark about her father’s attractiveness to women—in which Ruth had said: “You could hear the women’s panties sliding to the floor.”

When Hannah had first met Ted Cole, she’d said to Ruth: “What is that sound? Do you hear it?” Ruth rarely saw a joke coming; her first thought, always, was that everyone was totally serious.

“ What sound? No, I don’t hear it,” Ruth had replied, looking around.

“Oh, it’s just my panties sliding to the floor,” Hannah had told her. It had become a code between them.

Whenever Ruth was introduced to one of Hannah’s many boyfriends, if Ruth liked him, she would ask Hannah: “Did you hear that sound?” If Ruth didn’t care for the boyfriend, which was often the case, Ruth would say: “I didn’t hear a thing. Did you ?”

Ruth was reluctant to introduce her boyfriends to Hannah because Hannah always said: “What a racket! Boy, did something wet just hit the ground, or am I imagining things?” (Wetness was a carryover in Hannah’s sexual vocabulary; it went all the way back to their Exeter days.) And Ruth was generally not proud of her boyfriends; she rarely wanted anyone to meet them. Nor were Ruth’s boyfriends usually in her life long enough for Hannah to have to meet them.

Yet now, as Ruth sat on a stool, enduring the stares of the stagehand who was enamored of her breasts— and enduring Eddie’s laborious introduction to her life’s work (poor Eddie was now bogged down in her second novel)—she thought again of her exasperation with Hannah for being late to her reading, or for not showing up at all.

Not only had they talked with such excitement about the prospect of meeting Eddie O’Hare, but in the case of Ruth’s present boyfriend, Ruth had very much wanted Hannah to meet him. Ruth felt, for once, that she actually needed to hear Hannah’s opinion. There’d been so many times when Ruth wished that Hannah had withheld her opinion. Now, when I need her, where is she? Ruth wondered. Doubtless fucking her brains out, as Hannah would say—or so Ruth imagined.

She sighed deeply; she was aware of the rise and fall of her breasts, and of the idiot stagehand’s rapt attention to this detail. She could have heard the lecherous young man sigh in response, if Eddie hadn’t been droning on and on. Out of boredom, Ruth met the young stagehand’s stare and held it until he looked away. He had one of those wispy half-beards, a goatee-in-progress and a mustache as insubstantial as soot. If I neglected my regular wax job, Ruth thought, I could grow a better mustache than that.

She sighed again, daring the letch to take another look at her breasts, but the scruffy young man had suddenly grown self-conscious about staring at her. Therefore, Ruth made a concentrated effort to stare at him. She soon lost interest. His jeans were ripped open at one knee— probably the pair he preferred for public appearances. What was likely a food spill had left an oily stain on the chest of his dark-brown turtleneck, which was stretched out of shape; bulges the size of tennis balls hung at the elbows.

But as soon as Ruth turned her attention to her pending reading— indeed, the second she opened her new novel to the passage she’d chosen to read—the stagehand’s feral gaze once more fell upon her heralded breasts. Ruth thought that he had confused eyes; they were alert but puzzled, a little like a dog’s—given to a slavish loyalty, bordering on fawning.

Then Ruth changed her mind about the passage she’d selected to read; she would read the first chapter instead. She hunched forward on the stagehand’s stool and held her open book in front of her, as she might have held a hymnal from which she was about to sing; thus she obscured her breasts from the stagehand’s view.

It was a relief to Ruth that Eddie was finally addressing the subject of her third and most recent novel—“a variation on Ms. Cole’s familiar theme of female friendships gone awry,” Eddie was saying.

More unmitigated sophistries! Ruth thought to herself. But there was a grain of truth to Eddie’s thesis; Ruth had already heard a similar analysis from Hannah. “So . . . this time,” Hannah had told her, “the Ruth character and the Hannah character start out as enemies. In the end, we become friends. I agree it’s different, but not very different.”

In Ruth’s new novel, the Ruth character was a recent widow—a novelist named Jane Dash. It was the first time that Ruth had written about a writer; she was letting herself in for more autobiographical interpretations, of the very kind she loathed.

The Hannah character, who begins the novel as Mrs. Dash’s enemy and ends the book as the widow’s best friend, is named Eleanor Holt. The women, who have long antagonized each other, are brought together much against their wills by their grown children; their son and daughter, respectively, fall in love and marry each other.