I Loved You More (58 page)

HANK'S BEEN IN
Portland for over a week and I had no idea.

They make it like a surprise. I come walking into the crowd of people in Ruth's living room and
ta da!
Hank jumps out from behind the dining room door and everybody laughs.

Really, that moment, the way Hank just jumped out like that. The guy that told
Ruth
, the guy that didn't tell
me
he doesn't feel close to me like he used to. Ruth's visit to Florida, and now he's a whole fucking week in town. How that might make me feel. That's the moment right there I got it. The three of us, the fucking endless nuanced painful maze it was. A bull in my china shop, man. Hank Christian didn't have a clue.

Hank grabs a hold of me and actually picks me up in his arms and holds me the way Mary held Jesus. I only weigh maybe a hundred seventy-five pounds, still it's weird, a grown man, being held like a child. Hank makes a big deal about kissing me on the lips in front of everybody.

I felt like a gay circus ride.

The day is so warm, Ruth wants to have the class outside. I don't care how warm it is, I'm always freezing, but I don't say anything. Hank and Ruth and me, everything feels so delicate, so I just go along with the plan. On the picnic tables in Ruth's backyard, the sun shining down through the dogwood branches, there's chips and dip and dried fruit and pasta salad and three bean salad, coleslaw, three stinky cheeses and dill pickles.
Paper plates and plastic forks and decorated napkins. A decanter of French press and assorted coffee cups.

Hank and Ruth and I sit at one end of the picnic tables. Ruth's on one side of me, Hank on the other. Hank's still heavy, trying to slim down, all in black. Ruth's skinnier than ever. Her hair so long she can pull it into a rope and tie it up on top of her head. She's wearing the blue taffeta vintage dress I bought her years ago, the pink sweater with the pearls on it.

Look at us. The three of us. Hank and Ruth and me and ten students sitting around two picnic tables in the springtime in the sun. Above us, pink dogwood blooms. Hank's got his dark black sunglasses on. Ruth's sunglasses are white, and the glass is dark too, like Hank's. Ruth is talking. She has to talk loud because her voice is small in the big bright day. The flush up her neck, onto her cheek. Old friends, new friends of the new millennium. Behind my back, Ruth's hand and Hank's hand are clasped together. In the middle of my back I can feel Ruth holding on tight to Hank. Along the side of my leg, it's Ruth's black cat, Maupassant. Sun. A warm sunny spring day in April. I'm wearing my winter coat and stocking cap. When I close my eyes and look at the sun, on the backs of the lids of my eyes, all I see is red.

THE CLASS WAS
a success and the money was good, so Ruth comes up with another idea. In the summer, we'd schedule another workshop. Hank would be finished with his dissertation by July and the class would be a good excuse for him to get away from the Florida summer. Hank's all for it. I'm not so sure. In that point of time, the Hank Ruth Ben dance, I was confused to say the least, and all I wanted was for everything to work out. One thing for sure was we could all use the money. So we schedule the class. On one condition, we hold the class at my house.

But in June, there's some problem with Hank's dissertation, and Hank has to cancel.

You'd think I'd have a lot of memories about that weekend. Ruth in my house again, sitting across the table from her again,
the dueling banjos. The rich history of shit between Ruth and me and all the new shit that was going down with her and Hank. But there's only two things I remember. I mean two things I'll never forget.

It was nothing new for Ruth and me, teaching the workshop. It was during the afternoon break on the last day. All the students were away from the table. Ruth had just sat down in her chair with a fresh cup of hot tea. More than likely, I was eating my sardines. It was the way she said it and how it came out of nowhere:

“You know,” Ruth said, “I've got twelve people in my regular Thursday class and not one of them have any idea who Ben Grunewald is.”

I looked over at Ruth. She was still wearing her dark sunglasses. Her hair down past her shoulders. Hank Christian loved long hair on women. Maybe it was because the light from the floor lamp was behind her, or maybe it was my tired eyes. Whatever it was, even though I knew Ruth Dearden was the person sitting right across the table from me, except for the scarlet flush on her neck and up her chin, I never would've recognized her.

The other thing happened later that afternoon at the end of class. Five o'clock and the students were gone. The lights were out, the paper recycled, and I'd just locked the basement door.

Back in the old days, that last day, after Ruth and I'd finished teaching, we always gave ourselves a little time and space to talk to each other about the class. That afternoon, as I was walking up the stairs, I remember looking forward to checking in with Ruth.

Upstairs, Ruth was on the phone. In my kitchen, at my kitchen table, on my telephone, in front of me. Ruth was laughing and talking all about the class she'd just taught.

To Hank.

For a moment, I think she'll hand the phone over to me.

But then she hangs up.

EARLY SEPTEMBER. HANK
calls me from Florida and leaves a message that he'll be in Portland for a month.
It's been too long, Dear Heart
, Hank says,
We'll get to spend some quality time together, man. I promise
.

In my kitchen that day, after my shower, making up my tuna salad sandwich, I'm standing with a piece of toast in my hand. My special wheatless bread toast. On the table, the bowl of tuna salad, the lettuce, my glass of sparkling water. One-fifteen, I'm listening to Hank's voice on my voicemail.

He'd called when he knew I'd be in yoga.

Still, I was surprised.
Dear Heart
and
I promise
. Fucking Hank Christian, man. Really, it was great to hear his voice again.

Since the
ta da!
moment last April when he stepped out from behind Ruth's dining room door – for about a month after that, when he got back to Florida, Hank had called me a bunch of times. But I didn't call him back. The truth is, I can fold up my cards, too, and disappear. It's survival, man.

So that day of the voice message, after hearing Hank's voice, I get to thinking. Since Ruth and I'd finished up the edits, for several months now, we hadn't talked at all. And Hank and I weren't talking. Everything had got so confused. And I think what the fuck. Really, things didn't seem they could get much worse. All that weird silence. I was so far away from Hank, and it was pretty clear I wasn't going to get any of Hank without Ruth, so I figured it was time I held up a white flag. I mean the shit was piling up in me.

It's almost Ruth's birthday, so I call Ruth up and ask her out to lunch.

“Out to lunch?!” Ruth says. “Ben, are you all right?”

Ruth knows me pretty well, too. Lunch to me is a nightmare. Lunch is about bread and bread is about wheat. Or lunch is about salad and salad is about not enough protein. Lunch for me is either the expensive fish dish at the bottom of the menu, or it's some kind of fucking grilled chicken breast. And fuck me,
if I never eat another fucking grilled chicken breast again, I'll be just fine.

“For your birthday,” I say. “Let's go down the street to your favorite restaurant.”

THAT NEXT WEDNESDAY,
Ruth and I meet in the restaurant just three blocks from me. Ruth's favorite restaurant where the following September Ruth and Hank will get married and I won't be invited to the wedding.

Ruth is late. She breezes in the restaurant with her sunglasses on in an off-white summer dress. As she walks toward me through the tables, the sun's behind her. I can see the silhouette of her naked legs. Her sandals have a low heel and no strap on the back. The sandals snap against the bottom of her feet. She's carrying a shopping bag from Nordstrom's.

But the most amazing thing. Ruth has done something to her hair. Her hair and all of its unruly thick curls is totally straight. It hangs down almost to the middle of her back. The incredible weight of it, the shine. The blonde highlights are gone and the red of her hair is almost copper. She sets the Nordstrom's bag down, tucks her dress in, and sits down on the chair across the table. She takes off her sunglasses, folds them, and puts them in a case, and puts the case in her purse, one of those new huge designer leather purses, puke green.

Really, I don't think I've ever seen Ruth look so beautiful. For a moment I think she's had some face work done. Then I realize she's so thin, the shape of her face has changed. She now has major cheekbones. And there's something new about her makeup, around her eyes. Mascara, eyeliner, dyed eyelashes, I can't figure. I'm looking close but can't look too close. Ruth is watching me look at her. Her too-blue eyes jump out at me like never before.

Ruth pulls her chair closer to the table. Then she does what I've seen so many beautiful women do. She moves her head, lifting her chin, so her mass of copper hair swings to behind her
shoulder. She sits up, lifts her chest, her new Wonderbra, checks the bra strap and the scooped neckline of her dress with her fingers. She brings both hands up to her forehead, and with her fingers along her hairline, pulls her new straight hair behind her ears. Gold hooped earrings. Her long thin white arms. On her right wrist an expandable gold bracelet with dangly gold charms.

Hank always did love his women, gold and silver on their arms.

Gorgeous. Ruth is fucking gorgeous. But there's something, I don't know, something so
done
about her. A way a lot of women were beginning to look those days. Polished, finished. Sleek. Ready to get down to business.

The waiter comes to the table, stocky, clean-shaven, blonde. He's shiny, too, like Ruth. Straight white teeth, gay. He doesn't look at me. He's staring at Ruth's hair. He says
good afternoon
, puts the water glasses down, gives us each a menu, walks off.

Ruth pays no attention to him. Since she's sat down, her too-blue eyes, that new thing about her eyes, that gaze right into me.

“Happy Birthday,” I say.

What Ruth says next, how she says it, is a challenge. Right off, a fuck you Ben Grunewald.

“I just read my horoscope,” Ruth says. “According to what it says about being born on this day, a year from now you won't even recognize me.”

It takes my breath away, really, her power.
I'm beautiful and young and healthy and you aren't. Daddy loves me more than you
.

I almost throw my glass of water in her face. But I take a breath. Really, if we could just get to the bottom of all this. If we could start talking about what was really going on, maybe there would be a chance.

I take the chance. The only way I know how. I start talking about my feelings. After I broke it off with Ruth, all those hundreds of hours I sat and listened to her, how she was hurt, how she wasn't good enough, what could she do to change so that I
would love her. I figured now it was my turn to talk, Ruth's turn to listen.

The Catholic boy with a big apology, my voice is high at first, but then I settle in. I'm just at the part where I'm telling Ruth how left out I feel, just about to mention the last time Hank was in Portland, the whole week he was here and how I didn't even know about it, when Ruth, the slender arm with the expandable gold bracelet with dangly gold charms, waves her hand and that arm and the dangly gold in between us, eye level. It's a gesture the way a mother shuts up her child or the principal when she catches you daydreaming, or when your sister lorded it over you that she was the only thing that stood between you and your crazy mother and your fucked up father.

It's right then I realize Ruth and I are sitting only one table away from where we sat the night in that very same restaurant, how long ago was it now, that Buster Bangs came in high and kissed me. And I'd left with him, leaving Ruth alone in front of everybody.

“For Chrissakes, Ben,” Ruth says, “let's be sensible.”

And with that, all those hundreds of hours of Ruth talking my ear off, the payback I think I deserve, all goes down the drain. This time, I'm the fool. And I fucking hate it. I look for the flush of scarlet up her neck, but there is no flush of scarlet. When I throw my menu down, I knock my water glass over. I don't stop to see the damage I've done.

As Big Ben walks out the door, he's got only one thing to say to Ruth. Well, two.

“Fuck you, Ruth.”

“
And
your fucking hair.”

HANK FLIES INTO
town that night. After the lovely birthday lunch with Ruth, I don't expect to see him. But that night I get a call. It's from Ruth. But I don't want to talk to Ruth and I ask for Hank and Ruth tells me Hank's too angry to talk. I tell Ruth to tell Hank I'm tired of talking to him through his beautiful corporate
assistant and if he don't want to talk to me personally then he ain't going to talk to me at all. Hank tells Ruth that I should get my fucking ass over there to Ruth's fucking house. I tell Ruth to tell Hank to get fucked and he's got to haul his sorry fucking ass over to my house if he wants to talk so bad.