A Widow for One Year (51 page)

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.

Clearer than it ever is at home! Ruth was thinking, when the woman at the reception desk said, “Oh—and there’s a fax for you.” The hate mail from the angry widow—for a moment, Ruth had forgotten all about it.

“Willkommen in Deutschland!”
the woman at the desk called to her, as Ruth turned and followed the bellman to the elevator. (“Welcome to Germany!”)

“My dear,” the widow’s letter began, “this time you have gone too far. It may be true, as I have read in one of your reviews, that you have ‘a satirical gift for choreographing an unusual number of society’s ills and human foibles in one book,’ or ‘for gathering the innumerable moral calamities of our time into the life of a single character.’ But not everything in our lives is
comic
material; there are certain tragedies that resist a
humorous
interpretation. You have gone too far.

“I was married for fifty-five years,” the widow continued. (Her late husband was a mortician, Ruth decided.) “When my husband died, my life stopped. He meant the world to me. When I lost him, I lost everything. And what about your own mother? Do you imagine that she found a way to put a comic spin on the death of your brothers? Do you think you were abandoned by a woman who left you and your father to pursue a life in
satire
?” (How dare she? thought Ruth Cole.)

“You write about abortion and childbirth and adoption, but you’ve never even been pregnant. You write about being a divorcée and a widow, but you’ve never even been married. You write about when it’s safe for a widow to re-enter the world, but there is no such thing as a widow for one year. I will be a widow for the rest of my life!

“Horace Walpole once wrote: ‘The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.’ But the
real
world is tragic to those who think
and
feel; it is only comic to those who’ve been lucky.”

Ruth flipped to the end of the letter, and then back to the beginning, but there was no return address; the angry widow hadn’t even signed her name.

Her letter ended as follows: “All I have left is prayer. I will include you in my prayers. What does it say about you that, at your age, you have never been married? Not even once. I will pray for you that you get married. Maybe you will have a child, maybe not. My husband and I loved each other so much that we never wanted children; children might have spoiled it. More important, I will pray that you will truly love your husband—and that you will lose him. What I will pray for you is that
you
become a widow for the rest of your life. Then you will know how untruthfully you have written about the real world.”

In lieu of a signature, the woman had written:
A Widow for the Rest of Her Life.
And there was a P.S., which gave Ruth the shivers: “I have a lot of time for prayers.”

Ruth would fax Allan in New York and ask him if the angry widow’s name or address had appeared on the envelope—or, failing that, from what city or town had the letter been mailed? But the answer would be as disturbing as the letter. The letter had been hand-delivered to the Random House building on East Fiftieth Street. The receptionist could not remember the woman, or if it even was a woman, who’d brought the letter to the editorial floor.

If the praying widow had been married for fifty-five years, she had to be in her seventies—if not in her eighties or her nineties! Maybe the angry old woman
did
have a lot of time for prayers, but she didn’t have a lot of time left to
live
.

Ruth slept for most of the afternoon. The ranting widow’s letter was not
that
upsetting. And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to
someone
. An angry old woman’s letter is not going to ruin my trip, Ruth decided.

She would walk, she would send postcards, she would write in her diary. Except for in Frankfurt at the book fair, where it was impossible to relax, Ruth was determined to restore herself in Germany. Her diary entries and her postcards suggest that, to some degree, she did. Even in Frankfurt!

Ruth’s Diary, and Selected Postcards

Not a bad reading in Freising, but either I or the audience was duller than I expected. Dinner afterward in a former monastery with vaulted ceilings—I drank too much.

Each time I’m in Germany I’m reminded of the contrast, in a place like the lobby of the Vier Jahreszeiten, between the expensively dressed hotel guests—the business class, who are so formal—and the deliberately disreputable appearance of the journalists, who appear to revel in their grubbiness like teenagers intent on offending their parents. A society in ugly confrontation with itself—so much like ours, but at the same time in advance of ours and even more deteriorated.

Either I’m not over the jet lag or a new novel is beginning in the back of my mind—I absolutely cannot read anything without skipping ahead. The room-service menu; the list of the hotel’s amenities; Norman Sherry’s
The Life of Graham Greene,
volume one, which I did not intend to bring with me—I must have put it in my carry-on without thinking. All I can read are the last lines of paragraphs that seem important, those final sentences before space breaks on the page. Only occasionally will there be a sentence in the heart of a paragraph that stands out. And I’m incapable of reading anything consecutively; my mind keeps jumping ahead.

Sherry writes of Greene: “His seeking out of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual and the deviant took him in many directions, as his diary shows.” I wonder if my diary shows it, too. I hope so. It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable) behavior of male writers; it would surely benefit me, as a writer, if I had the courage to seek out more of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant myself. But women who seek out such things are made to feel ashamed, or else they sound stridently ridiculous in defending themselves—as if they’re bragging.

Suppose I paid a prostitute to let me watch her with a customer, to absorb every detail of the most furtive encounters . . . isn’t this, in a way, what a writer should do? Yet there are subjects that remain off-limits for women writers. It’s not unlike that dichotomy which exists regarding one’s sexual past: it is permissible, even attractive, for a man to have had one, but if a
woman
has had a sexual past, she’d better keep quiet about it.

I
must
be beginning a new novel; my distraction is too focused for jet lag. I’m thinking about a woman writer, someone more extreme than I am—more extreme as a writer
and
as a woman. She makes every effort to observe everything, to absorb every detail; she doesn’t necessarily want to be single, but she believes that marriage will impose restraints on her. It’s not that she needs to experience everything—she’s not a sexual adventurer—but she does want to
see
everything.

Suppose
she
pays a prostitute to let her watch her with a customer. Suppose she doesn’t dare do that alone—let’s say she does it with a boyfriend. (A bad boyfriend, of course.) And what transpires with the boyfriend, as a result of observing the prostitute, is so degrading (so shameful) that it’s enough to make the woman writer change her life.

Something happens that’s more than seedy—something
too
sordid,
too
deviant. This novel is a demonstration of one kind of sexual inequality: the woman writer, in her need to observe, goes too far. As for exactly what happens—the specific experience with the prostitute—if the writer were a
man,
there would be no guilt, no degradation.

Norman Sherry, Greene’s biographer, writes of “the novelist’s right—and need—to use his own and others’ experience.” Mr. Sherry thinks there is a ruthlessness to this “right” of the novelist, to this terrible “need.” But the relationship between observation and imagination is more complicated than mere ruthlessness. One must imagine a good story; then one must make the details seem real. It helps, when making the details
seem
real, if some of the details
are
real. Personal experience is overrated, but observation is essential.

It’s definitely not jet lag; it’s a novel. It begins with paying a prostitute, an act traditionally contaminated with shame. No, stupid—it begins with the bad boyfriend! No doubt I’ll make him left-handed. A strawberry-blond boyfriend . . .

I’m so sick of Hannah telling me that I should shut off my biological clock and get married (or not) for the “right” reasons, not “merely” because my body thinks it wants to have a baby. Hannah may have been born without a biological clock, but she certainly responds to all the other things her body thinks it wants—if not a baby.

[In a postcard to Hannah, which was a display of sausages in Munich’s Viktualienmarkt.]

I FORGIVE YOU, BUT YOU FORGIVE YOURSELF A LITTLE TOO EASILY.
YOU ALWAYS HAVE.

LOVE,
RUTH

The drive from Munich to Stuttgart; the pronunciation of
Schwbische Alb;
the farmland with red and blue and green cabbages. In Stuttgart, the hotel is on the Schillerstrasse—a modern hotel with lots of glass. The pronunciation of
Schlossgarten
.

The questions from the young people in the audience, after my reading, are all about the social problems in the United States. Because they see my books as critical of American society, they invite me to express my perceived anti-Americanism. (The interviewers extend the same invitation.) And now—given their pending reunification—the Germans also want to know what I think of
them
. What do Americans, in general, think of Germans? Are we happy about German reunification?

I would rather talk about storytelling, I tell them. They wouldn’t. All I can say is that my lack of interest in what interests them is genuine. They don’t like my answer.

In the new novel, the prostitute should be an older woman—someone not too intimidating to the woman writer. Her bad boyfriend wants a younger, better-looking prostitute than the one the woman writer eventually chooses. The reader should anticipate the boyfriend’s awfulness, but the woman writer doesn’t see it coming. She’s concentrating on her observations of the prostitute—not just on the prostitute’s customer, or least of all on the mechanically familiar act, but on all the surrounding details of the prostitute’s room.