It Will Come to Me (23 page)

But here was Ricia, standing in line at the counter. Ruth simply hadn't picked her out from the others. She looked anonymous this afternoon, small and ordinary, like any number of the young and youngish women waiting to order and receive their frothy coffee drinks, each of which seemed to take at least three minutes to assemble. She was wearing a backpack; no doubt the manuscript was in there. Her copper-penny curls were dully translucent under the track lighting, and for the first time it occurred to Ruth that their color might not be natural, that they might be dyed and need recoloring.

Ruth lifted a tentative hand in greeting. No reaction; Ricia seemed to be making a point of looking away. She'd been brisk and noncommittal on the phone. That needn't be taken as a bad sign, Ruth reminded herself. It could just as easily portend a happy outcome. How many times had she kept her own expression scrupulously neutral when she first sat down with a promising student, the better to offer the gift of relief when she pronounced a positive judgment? And when she had bad news to deliver, didn't she prattle on evasively about this and that until she could no longer postpone the process of lowering herself into her critique by degrees?

But even if Ricia didn't approve of her work, would that really matter very much? In recent years she had come to think of herself as a tube. Good or bad, experiences loomed into view. Good or bad, they passed through her and out the other end. The future was food, the past was the fungible product of its metabolic processing. There was nothing, it seemed, she couldn't digest. Well, there was something, but it wasn't likely to come along for a while. Or was it?

Ricia had made her way to the front of the line where she was
paying, Ruth could see now, for a bottle of water. No coffee drink meant no delay, no grace period, and Ruth was suddenly quite overwhelmingly anxious. Her fingers had gone cold and her heart was fluttering in her throat. This panic was nothing new. It came over her every time some verdict was about to be delivered, and its intensity bore no necessary relation to the importance of what was to be disclosed. It would pass, but she did wish she'd remembered to bring something to read, something impressive to hide behind, like the new translation of
Swann's Way
Ben had picked up at a used bookstore on his last trip to Toronto. Ricia was paying for her bottle of water and now she was walking toward Ruth, her expression unreadable. She shrugged off her backpack and settled herself into the other armchair. How tiny she looked in it, like Alice after she'd drunk the potion.

“I didn't like it,” she said.

“You didn't like the novel?” Ruth asked, stupidly.

“I didn't.”

“Ah,” said Ruth. “You didn't like it.” To disguise the idiocy of this reiteration she tilted her head and squinted, as if to subject Ricia's pronouncement to careful consideration. After a moment she raised her eyes and said, “Why?”

“It disappointed me. It struck me as an attempt to write your first book over again. Your first books. At first I thought you'd meant it to be a sequel to the trilogy and I thought: A sequel to a trilogy? That's got to be a letdown for your readers. Then I thought, no, you couldn't have intended that. You didn't, did you?

“No,” said Ruth.

“It was certainly funny in places. I laughed. But somehow I
got the sense
you
weren't amused. You wrote it—what?—twenty years after the trilogy?”

“Yes,” said Ruth, though it had been more like twenty-two.

“Excuse me for this. It didn't strike me as the book of somebody twenty years older. Or twenty years wiser. That wouldn't be a problem if you really still were that twenty-years-ago self, or even if you weren't but you managed to pass yourself off successfully as that person. But there's a new element in the new book. There's a depth in it that speaks of sadness. More than sadness: a deep melancholy. But it's in there without recognizing itself, if that makes sense. It's hiding behind the laugh lines. It throws off your timing, your comic timing. Funny writers aren't usually happy people, but there's a threshold past which you can't be comic anymore. If you're that sad, then your business is with sadness, not comedy. The book is hobbled. The whole book has a limp.

The two of them sat in silence for a moment. Ruth turned away and ducked her head so that Ricia could not see her expression, a very complicated and inward-turned smile—a smirk. “I hope I haven't been too harsh,” said Ricia. “Ruth?”

“Excuse me,” said Ruth. “I need the …” She heaved herself up from her armchair, stepped down from the wooden platform with an exaggerated gingerliness that drew glances from the coffee drinkers, and made her way around a collection of tables and past the counter and down a dim hallway to the women's room, which was kept dark by the ecology-conscious management. She fumbled for the light switch. There she was, peering into her own pouchy eyes in the mirror over the sink. The walls in here had been painted with a wraparound mural of an underwater scene in
shades of green and blue. Under the fluorescent light these piscine colors made Ruth herself look like a great flounder, nosing up against the glass wall of an aquarium. She backed away, lowered the open toilet seat cover, sat down.

The reaction she'd fled to the bathroom to conceal seemed to have dried up the moment she got behind a closed door. What she felt now was nothing like the gut-punched breathlessness she'd felt out there. She felt acutely self-conscious but mobilized and composed, ready to make a plan. The first order of business was to get herself out of the bathroom and past Ricia and into her car with as little loss of face as possible. To that end she stood up and reexamined herself in the mirror. Her hair needed attention. She took it down, brushed it out energetically, put it up again with pins and a barrette. She applied fresh lipstick. Once she got home she could allow herself to react to Ricia's critique. (But would she? It had been years since she'd felt much of anything but anger and embarrassment. Was that a condition subject to change, or would she plod through the rest of her days like an ancient dry-eyed tortoise?)

But now she heard a small noise, a kind of soft scrabbling. A mouse? One of those mouse-sized roaches that roamed freely in Spangler? She looked down at her feet. Nothing but gritty black-and-white tile and shreds of toilet paper.

“Ruth?”

“Just a minute,” said Ruth. “I'll be out in a minute.”

“I'm so sorry,” Ricia whispered urgently through the door. “That must have come out sounding brutal. I got it backward. I meant to tell you … May I come in?”

“I'll be out in a minute,” Ruth repeated. Somehow it seemed unthinkable to open the door and confront Ricia, standing out
there in the hall. She needed to be driven back into the main room of the coffeehouse, so that Ruth would have room to maneuver around her. “I'll be out in a minute,” she said for the third time. “I'll join you out there.”

Had she locked the door? Before she could reach it Ricia pushed her way in and closed it behind her. Inappropriately, Ruth giggled. What was this, high school? Whispering in the girls’ room? Some obscure territorial imperative made her back away from Ricia and sit down again on the toilet. “Oh Ruth,” said Ricia. “I've upset you. I'm so sorry. I got it backward. You understand, don't you, that what I was saying comes from a fan? That's why I felt free to be so blunt. I would never talk this way to a writer I didn't respect. A writer I didn't look up to.”

“Oh, please,” said Ruth.

“No, I do,” said Ricia. “You can't for a minute think I consider myself… I've found a popular vein, that's all, and my publisher has a genius for marketing. You're something else. You're a real writer. I hope to be one myself some day. When I tell you I didn't like your book, I'm speaking as a reader, not as a critic.”

Ricia was squatting at Ruth's feet now, looking up imploringly. How clear her eyes are, thought Ruth irrelevantly. How clear her skin. No tweezing the upper lip for her. Looking down at the wedge of light that was Ricia's face, she saw that she'd been wrong. Ricia
was
beautiful. She understood better the dogged-ness of Charles's devotion. The thing she'd learned about youthful beauty, now that she was no longer young, was that it inspires not just lust but love. The hem of Ricia's flounced peasant skirt was spread out on the filthy bathroom floor. “You probably don't want to do that,” Ruth pointed out. “It's not very clean.”

“Oh, I don't care,” said Ricia, glancing down scornfully. “I
just want to get it across to you how much I admire your work and how much … sympathy I have for whatever the circumstance was—”

Evidently some busybody had put her in the picture. “Who told you?” Ruth asked, her voice sharper than she'd intended.

“Ah,” said Ricia, pausing for a moment as if to consider and override a qualm. “It was someone in the department.”

“Who?”

“Ellen Treacher.”

The timid interim chair with the three strands of pearls who'd turned down Ruth's applications for part-time teaching for the past five years. “I hate her,” said Ruth. “She's such a vicious little conciliator.” All of a sudden she was feeling quite pleasantly reckless.

“I hate her too,” said Ricia, throwing back her head and flinging her arms wide. “I hate the whole department. I hate the whole university. That's an exaggeration. I like the kids. I like some of the faculty. Actually, I don't hate anyone. It's just that everyone's so cautious and pussyfooting around and there's all this Byzantine backstory I can't begin to know about and I'm always having to pull my punches. That's part of the reason I was so rude with you. I've been so frustrated and for once I thought I could be candid. I was so relieved to be talking to a real writer, not some academic playing at being one. One thing I've learned in the last few weeks is that I'm not cut out to teach in a university.”

Ruth nodded. “I've never for a moment felt I belonged,” she said. “But it's my home. All my life academia has been home for me. I wouldn't know where else to go. I feel like an egg that hatched in the wrong nest. I feel like one of those birds that rides around on the backs of hippopotamuses.”

Ricia sank into a lotus position, tucking her skirt in around her knees. “Sometimes I think we're in some new dark age where everything is being sucked back into the universities, the way everything was sucked back into the monasteries in the twelfth century, or whenever it was.” She seemed content to let this speculation hang in the air. The two of them sat for a moment in a silence that had begun to feel companionable.

“What exactly did she tell you?” Ruth said.

“She said you have a problem with your son. She said he has—how did she put it?—mental-health issues. She said he moved out and now he's homeless. How old is he?”

“He's twenty-four. Would you like to see a picture?” She reached into her bag and extracted her wallet. “He's three here. Three and a half.”

“Oh my,” said Ricia. She held the tiny curled snapshot on the flattened palm of her hand, like an archaeologist examining a newly unearthed coin. “Such a lovely boy. So solemn. I see your husband around his mouth. Around the eyes he's all you.”

Ricia returned the photograph. Ruth put it away. Tears were welling now. “You say he's twenty-four,” said Ricia.

Ruth nodded.

Ricia said, “I hope this doesn't offend you, but the first thing that pops into my mind is that he isn't dead. I'm sorry. What I mean to say is that it's not
as if
he's dead. I mean he's homeless, not dead. Maybe it's my blue-collar background, but these academic families put so much stock in their children's success. If they don't turn out to be lawyers it's as if they'd died. Of course the parents would never admit it …”

Ruth sat quietly for a moment, trying to absorb this new idea.
He's not dead.
It struck her as a kind of Zen koan, a deceptively
simple observation that somehow presents a challenge to comprehension.

“I mean,” said Ricia, “please tell me if I'm treading on thin ice here, but it seems to me the real problem with him—what is his name?”

Isaac.

“The hardest time with Isaac must have been when he was living at home. He's grown now. He's an adult.”

“I suppose so,” said Ruth. This had seemed a small point, an obstructive technicality. “He doesn't want anything to do with us. Somebody's been looking after him, in a minimal kind of way, but we haven't been able to help. Except with money.”

“Is he a danger to himself or others?”

“No. Not really.”

“So what can you do?”

“Nothing. Wait.”

“You could write.”

“I've been
stuck”
said Ruth.

“Yes,” said Ricia. “That's it exactly.
Whole Lives Devoured
is a very
stuck
book.”

“Stuck,” said Ruth again, as if puzzled by the word. The two of them sat in silence. Unaccountably, Ruth's shoulders began to shake. Ricia looked up at her with concern, leaned forward to lay a hand on her wrist. But Ruth wasn't weeping; she was laughing. This had happened several times before, most memorably when she was pregnant, during a Lamaze class. Eventually the instructor asked Ben to escort her out to the hall. These fits were caused, Ruth believed, by a kind of neuronal storm, itself the result of a collision of two emotional fronts. Given the right conditions, almost
anything could set them off. The present episode had been occasioned by the newly alien word “stuck,” which had gotten caught somehow in the craw of her mind.

“Hey,” said Ricia, drawing away a little. “Ruth. Ruth? Are you all right?”

“Stuck!” gasped Ruth. Ricia continued to stare at her, but now the corners of her mouth were quivering. She paused, gazed off into the middle distance. Nodding faintly, like a dancer picking up the beat, she produced a few forced exhalations and then she was laughing too, artificially at first, but soon enough genuinely and contagiously. As if following some choreographic signal, Ruth and Ricia staggered to their feet and flung themselves around the narrow high-ceilinged bathroom, wheeling in circles and caroming off walls, trying desperately to expend the energy of the convulsion. At last breathlessness forced them into opposite corners to rest. Ricia was limber enough to slide to the floor with her legs extended straight in front of her. Ruth contented herself with leaning her cheek against the stucco-painted wall. After a moment's restorative panting they glanced at each other and burst into wild laughter once again.