It Will Come to Me (17 page)

“Hey,” said Ben. “Fortieth. That's something. Congratulations. Nova Scotia's beautiful, I hear. I've never been, myself.” The image of Bobby's member returned to him, unsummoned this time, closer up and exponentially more vivid. It was followed by a rapid interior slide show of childishly dirty pictures, all variations
on the theme of small creatures copulating in surprising ways with much larger ones. He shook his head and it passed. Dolores had told him, he remembered now, that the Mitten-Kurzes were a particularly devoted couple.

A hand fell on his shoulder. “Ben,” said Alfred Jovanovich of political science. “Can you come over here for a minute? We've got a little dispute and we need an ethicist to settle it.”

I
t just hit me like a bolt from the blue after our … talk … at your potluck the other night, how absolutely perfect you'd be,” said Mitten-Kurz. “Considering your special expertise.”

“I'm a little embarrassed about that,” said Ruth. “I think I came on kind of strong.”

“Ah no no no no
no
no no,” said Mitten-Kurz. “Don't apologize. You're a woman who's got a lot to say, Ruth. Perhaps you haven't been afforded enough opportunities to say it.” She shot a dark look in Ben's direction. “We'd like to help however we can.

“Well, thank you,” said Ruth. “I'll certainly try. When is this meeting?”

“This coming Monday, I'm afraid. I know it's terribly short notice. I do wish you'd seen the letter. I'm sure I've left out some details in all this noise and crush.”

“I have an appointment in the afternoon.”

“Ah, well it's in the
morning,”
said Mitten-Kurz. “Perfect! So you'll come?”

“I'll try,” said Ruth once again, intending to do no such thing.

“I'm so pleased,” said Mitten-Kurz. She was wearing a long
pale-green-and-salmon satin kimono over a matching pair of wide-legged pants and cowl-necked tunic. Where did she find these clothes, in size twenty-eight or whatever? “I'll e-mail the details, care of Ben. You'll have to excuse me now. I see Bobby's been abandoned.” She squeezed Ruth's hand and began to move away. “Oh by the way,” she called back over her shoulder. “Would you have any interest in helping out with the phones for the WNNP fund-raiser? I could see if I could get you in.”

“Thanks,” Ruth shouted. “That's nice of you. Let me think about it.” Mitten-Kurz's eyebrows rose and quivered. A place on the local NPR affiliate's on-air fund-raising phone bank was a plum. Faculty wives waited years for it. Ruth had never even sent in a contribution, though several times she'd intended to.

Apparently Ben had moved on. Ruth struck out on a diagonal across the tent, hoping to find him or to spot Charles and Ricia. Lee Wayne Dreddle was still in place, she saw, still surrounded by a tight cordon of society people, the men guffawing at the punch line of some story, the women doing their best to modify the frozen smiles in which multiple surgical procedures had fixed their faces. In photographs in the
Advocate
they looked normal enough, if a little blurry and blank, but in person some of them were quite monstrous—noses shrunken or collapsed, cheekbone implants gone lopsided, lips half inverted by swelling, brows paralyzed by Botox, eyes darting like desperate fish.

A waiter appeared. Ruth took another mojito and soldiered on. A second waiter offered a tray of hors d'oeuvres. She stopped and considered, chose a fardel of grilled asparagus wrapped in prosciutto and a cocoon of puff pastry stuffed with something she couldn't identify. These items and the drink and the requisite napkins were more than she could manage without a surface to
put them on, so she sat down at a table populated by three elderly women, refugees from the ceaseless flux and yammer of the reception, and a text-messaging adolescent girl. The grill marks on the asparagus were purely cosmetic, she discovered; it was quite raw and too fibrous to chew. The puff pastry was stuffed with something fishy and salty and creamy she'd have spat out into the sink if she'd been at home. Under what she took to be the censorious gaze of one of the three elderly women she made a neat pile of her semi-masticated leavings on a napkin and wrapped that up in another napkin and the whole thing in yet another napkin and twisted all the ends together to create something like a grimly utilitarian party-favor bag. Just as she was about to rise and look for a trash basket, Fran Tevis sat down next to her.

Fran was a potter and jewelry maker, married to a historian. She was the mother of Isaac's last recorded friend and, truth to tell, she'd been Ruth's last friend as well. It was a measure, she realized, of just how malcontented and misanthropic she'd grown in recent years that Fran was the only person she'd encountered at this gathering she was glad to see, though she'd certainly have taken evasive action if she'd seen Fran first. They embraced, separated, took long assessing arm's-length looks at each other, impulsively embraced again.

“I
thought
that was you, Ruth,” said Fran, who after eight or nine years was still exactly herself, still small and keenly focused and warm, though her curly hair had gone gray. Ruth had always gravitated toward people like Fran, take-charge extroverts who earned her gratitude by cutting through her shyness and passivity. Fran's son Malcolm had been in Isaac's sixth-grade class. The two of them were placed in the same advanced section of math. Actually Malcolm took advanced everything and Isaac was as-signed
to the B group in all subjects but math and was removed from the classroom three times a week for remedial reading. At any rate, they were inseparable for an academic year. They lolled around in each other's rooms playing video games, pitched a tent in the backyard on warm autumn nights. When Ruth drove Isaac to his various appointments, Malcolm came along and did his homework in waiting rooms, and then she picked them up and drove them to novel destinations like the rink, the miniature golf course, the movie theater, the soft-serve ice-cream stand.

How wonderfully ordinary it was to see the boys climb off the school bus together, deep in talk, to hear snorts of preadolescent laughter as she walked down the hall past Isaac's room. Ruth even found a mildly pornographic flip-book, the kind of thing that passes from hand to hand in the schoolyard, under his bed. No clinician had prescribed the friendship between Isaac and Malcolm, no committee had recommended it. It had simply happened, like rain falling on parched ground, and she and Ben stood at the sink with their backs turned, hardly able to breathe for delight and gratitude as the boys ate macaroni and cheese at the kitchen table. (Ben whispered, “See? What did I tell you?”) As it happened, Malcolm was a nice boy, but he needn't have been. What mattered to Ruth and Ben was only that he was entirely normal, if a little undersized and newt-like. For one charmed school year he made their lives normal too.

It wasn't that they expected the friendship to last forever, they assured each other as they lay in bed conducting one of their endless discussions of Isaac's development. The point was that Isaac had showed himself capable of friendship, and surely that meant he'd find other friends. That was what they told themselves when Malcolm grew two inches over the summer and joined the swim
team. Soon it became clear that he was hovering on the periphery of the popular group and that the price of full admittance was abandonment of Isaac. In spite of all the strategizing Ruth and Fran did on their morning walks, there was no way to save the friendship, and of course that was the end of the friendship between Ruth and Fran as well.

“How's Malcolm?” she asked now. It was inevitable that they'd talk about the boys: she might as well seize whatever preemptive advantage she could.

“Ah,” said Fran, hesitating for a telltale moment. “We worry. He's been out of law school two years now and he hasn't even begun to settle down.”

“What's he doing?”

“He's in D.C., clerking for a judge.”

A Supreme Court justice, no doubt.

“We keep hoping he'll find someone,” Fran went on. “He was actually engaged to the sweetest girl for a while and all of a sudden she was gone. We'd gotten close and then she was out of our lives and there was nothing I could do. I'd started having fantasies about grandchildren. It's so frustrating when you have no influence …” Here she trailed off, and the two of them sat in silence.

“So what do you think of all this?” Fran waved a vague hand at the reception. “Have you ever seen so many worked-over women? What do you think of all these money people? What do you think this means for Lola?”

“I don't know,” said Ruth. She did know, actually, and under other circumstances she might have gone on at some length about it, but now she was fixed on getting the painful part of this conversation over. “Oh look,” said Fran. “There's Cindy Deaver. She's gotten so heavy. Do you know her?”

Ruth didn't.

“Tell me,” said Fran after a long moment, placing a warm hand on Ruth's. “How is Isaac?”

Isaac is a filthy street person. Isaac never graduated high school, never went to college, never had a job. We haven't seen him in years, haven't heard from him since he mailed us his tooth and it's Malcolm's fault for deserting him. No, it's
your
fault. “Isaac's at loose ends,” Ruth said, slowly withdrawing her hand. “He's unemployed at the moment.”

“Living at home?”

“No.”

“Well, that's a mercy!” said Fran. Both of them smiled conventionally at this entirely conventional gambit. “These kids,” Fran added, shaking her head and looking down at her folded hands on the table. Ruth could see that she was weighing the merits of pushing her inquiry further, considering the angles like a cat planning a leap onto a kitchen counter. A furrowing of her brow told Ruth she was moving into position now, preparing to spring. “Well well Fran,” Ruth said, rising to her feet and extending her arms. “It's been so good to see you. I was thinking you're just about the only person here I'd have wanted to see.” Fran stood and they embraced. Each swore to call the other, to find a day to meet for lunch and catch up.

Ruth plunged back into the reception, cutting a new diagonal through the crowd. Ah, there was Ben, only a few yards to her right, talking to a fuzzy-haired woman in leggings and a sleeveless tunic. A particularly dense clot of people blocked her way to him, all of them howling with laughter and evidently drunk enough not to mind or even notice when she put her head down and swam her way through, parting the human tide with her arms.

“But don't you think there has to be some spirit or influence or
something?
Do you think the universe just
happened?
Do you think it's just by
chance we're
here?” Apparently this woman was oblivious to Ruth's arrival. Ben, as always, failed to introduce her, though he shot her a quick look of entreaty. This was all too familiar a situation; once again he'd been trapped by an interlocutor in whom some lever had been pulled or button pushed the moment he mentioned that he taught philosophy.

“Many people,” he was saying, “certainly do believe there's something. It's just that as philosophers we have to ask
why we
believe that.” Ruth took his arm. “I think we should get
going,”
she shouted in the general direction of his ear. “I think I left something in the
oven.”
The woman continued to tip her rapt face up into Ben's. He was riveted like a mongoose caught in the gaze of a python, beyond any help Ruth could offer.

Just out of Ruth's reach a waiter was threading his way through the crowd with a tray of mojitos. A fourth? she asked herself. Why not? Why ever not? They seemed weak enough, and her capacity seemed to have grown fairly limitless in recent weeks. She followed him, but he kept a few feet ahead, his hips twitching as he slalomed around human impediments. Just as she had gotten within tapping distance of his shoulder she saw that Barbara and Noah and Joel and Ariel Bachman were bearing down upon her. They'd all joined hands to form a human chain and Ariel was crying out, “I think I see him! I think I see Daddy!” Ruth dodged quickly to the left, then to the right, escaping the Bachmans, but losing the waiter.

It was time to get out of this tent, she decided, and she struck out for the square of light that was the only means of ingress and egress. It seemed very far, but a general exodus had begun
and soon enough she was flushed from the tent in a wave of others, everyone blinking and squinting in the hazy brightness of an ordinary Friday afternoon. For a moment she stood uncertainly while the crowd eddied around her. Should she wait for Ben? Go to his office? Drive home? But there, standing under the brick arch of the library colonnade, looking pale and vulnerable and seminude in this broad light, was Ricia Spottiswoode. She was wearing a tiny skirt and a skimpy flesh-colored leotard festooned with shreds of multicolored fabric. On either side of her were two of the oldest and mossiest members of the Lola board of trustees, both of them evidently fascinated by her and both deep in their cups. The tableau reminded Ruth of something. What was it? Oh yes!
Susannah and the Elders.

As she approached, she saw that one of these old sports had moved behind Ricia and had actually laid his hands on her bare shoulders. Ruth felt a small shock of maternal indignation: how dare he! But now Charles appeared. He must have been hovering nearby. The trustee was leaning in so that his withered lips were moving a quarter of an inch away from Ricia's pearly ear. “I got to ask you, honey,” he was croaking. “You say you a
memwa-ist.
Now dunnat make you a
nah
sussist?”

Charles moved in closer. “Look who's here, Ricia,” he announced in his deepest, most carrying voice. “It's Ruth Blau. Finally the two of you meet.”

“Ah,” said Ricia, her face lighting up with what even Ruth could see was genuine interest. She shrugged off the hands of the trustee and moved toward Ruth, extending her own hand. “I've been looking forward to this. I read your trilogy years ago and now I'm having the pleasure of reading your new novel. I was hoping we might get together soon and talk.”