A Widow for One Year

“I don’t want to worry you,” he said.

“Then don’t fax it to me!” Ruth said. Then she added, because the thought suddenly occurred to her: “Is this a stalking widow or just an angry one?”

“Look, I’ll fax it to you,” he told her.

“Is this something you should show to the FBI—is it like that ?” Ruth asked him.

“No, no—not really. I don’t think so,” he said.

“Just fax it,” she told him.

“It’ll be there when you arrive,” Allan promised her. “Bon voyage!”

Why was it that women were absolutely the worst readers when it came to something that touched upon their personal lives? Ruth thought. What made a woman presume that her rape (her miscarriage, her marriage, her divorce, her loss of a child or a husband) was the only universal experience that there was? Or was it merely the case that most of Ruth’s readers were women—and that women who wrote to novelists, and told them their personal disaster stories, were the most fucked-up women of all?

Ruth sat in the Delta Crown Room, holding a glass of ice water against her black eye. It must have been her faraway expression, in addition to her obvious injury, that prompted a fellow traveler—a drunken woman—to speak to her. The woman, who was about Ruth’s age, had a hardened expression on her pale, drawn face. She was too thin—a chain-smoker with a raspy voice and a southern accent, thickened by booze.

“Whoever he was, sweetie, you’re better off without him,” the woman told Ruth.

“It was a squash injury,” Ruth replied.

“He hit you with a squash ?” the woman slurred. “Shit, it must have been a hard one!”

“It was pretty hard,” Ruth admitted, smiling.

On the plane, Ruth quickly drank two beers. When she had to pee, she was relieved that it hurt a little less. There were only three other passengers in first class, and no one in the seat beside her. She told the flight attendant not to serve her any dinner, but she asked to be awakened for breakfast.

Ruth reclined in her seat; she covered herself with the thin blanket and tried to make her head comfortable on the small pillow. She would have to sleep on her back, or on her left side; the right side of her face was too sore to sleep on. Her last thought, before she fell asleep, was that Hannah had been right again: I am too hard on my father. (After all, as the song goes, he’s just a man.)

Then Ruth was asleep. She would sleep all the way to Germany, trying in vain not to dream.

A Widow for the Rest of Her Life

It was Allan’s fault. Ruth would never have dreamt all night about her other hate mail, or her occasional stalkers, if Allan hadn’t told her about the angry widow.

There’d been a time when she’d answered all her fan mail. There was so much of it—after her first novel, especially—but she’d made the effort. Oh, she’d never bothered with the bitchy letters; if the tone of any letter was even partially pissy, Ruth threw it away without answering it. (“For the most part—your incomplete sentences notwithstanding—I was mildly enjoying your book, but the repeated inconsistencies with serial commas and your misuse of the word ‘hopefully’ eventually wore down my tolerance. I stopped on page 385, where the most egregious example of your grocery-list style stopped me and sent me looking for better prose than yours.”) Who would bother to answer a letter like that?

But the objections to Ruth’s writing were more often complaints about the content of her novels. (“What I detest in your books is that you sensationalize everything. In particular, you exaggerate the unseemly.”)

As for the so-called unseemly, Ruth knew that it was of sufficient offense to some of her readers that she even contemplated it—not to mention that she exaggerated it. Nor was Ruth Cole entirely sure that she did exaggerate the unseemly. Her worst fear was that the unseemly had become so commonplace that one couldn’t exaggerate it.

What got Ruth in trouble was that she used to answer her good mail; but it was the good mail that you had to be most careful about not answering. Particularly dangerous were those letters in which the letter writer claimed not only that he or she had loved a book by Ruth Cole but that the book had changed his or her life.

There was a pattern. The letter writer always professed an undying love for one or more of Ruth’s books; usually there was some personal identification with one or more of Ruth’s characters, too. Ruth would write, thanking the person for his or her letter. The second time the person wrote to Ruth, the letter writer was much more needy; often the second letter was accompanied by a manuscript. (“I loved your book; I know you’re going to love mine”—that kind of thing.) Commonly, the letter writer would suggest a meeting. The third letter would express how hurt the letter writer felt, because Ruth hadn’t responded to the second letter. Whether Ruth responded to the third letter or not, the fourth letter would be the angry one—or the first of many angry ones. That was the pattern.

In a way, Ruth thought, her former fans—those fans who were disappointed that they couldn’t get to know her personally—were more frightening than the creeps who hated her from the beginning. The writing of a novel demanded privacy; it called for a virtually isolated existence. In contrast, the publication of a book was an alarmingly public experience. Ruth had never been good at the public part of the process.

“Guten Morgen,” the flight attendant whispered in her ear. “Fr¸hst¸ck . . .” Ruth was wrecked by her dreams, but she was hungry and the coffee smelled good.

Across the aisle, a gentleman was shaving. He sat leaning over his breakfast, peering into a small hand-held mirror; the sound of his electric razor droned like an insect against a screen. Below the breakfast eaters lay Bavaria, growing greener as the clouds lifted; the fog was burned away by the first

rays of the morning sun. It had rained overnight; the tarmac would still be wet when the plane landed in Munich.

Ruth liked Germany, and her German publishers. It was her third trip; as always, everything on her itinerary had been explained to her beforehand. And her interviewers would actually have read her book.

At the registration desk in her hotel, they were expecting her early arrival; her room was ready. The publisher had sent flowers—and photocopies of her early reviews, which were good. Ruth’s German was not good, but she could at least understand her reviews. At Exeter, and at Middlebury, it had been her only foreign language. The Germans seemed to like her for trying to speak their language, even though she spoke it badly.

This first day, she would force herself to stay awake until noon. Then she would take a nap; two or three hours were about right for the jet lag. Her first reading was that evening—it was out in Freising. Later that weekend, after her interviews, she would be driven from Munich to Stuttgart. Everything was clear.