Talk Before Sleep (13 page)

“She does have the right to change her mind,” Andrew says now.

“And if she does I’m sure she’ll tell you.” I realize my voice has gotten loud, and I return to a quieter one, saying, “We’re taking good care of her, you know. Someone’s with her all the time.”

“I know that,” he says, and I suddenly have an image of him staring out his window, seeing a Christmas morning when he and Ruth sat cross-legged in their pajamas, ripping open presents. I see his hand go deep into his pocket, seeking the comfort of spare change.

“I mean, this party thing,” I say. “She really did suggest it. I think the notion of a lot of her friends around—”

Ruth is up out of bed and standing at the entrance to her living room. “Who’s that?” she asks, rubbing one eye.

“Your brother.” I hand her the phone.

“Andy-man,” she says, sitting down and drawing her flannel shirt around her tighter. It’s a deep-blue plaid, makes her eyes stand up and salute. “Hi, sweetie, how are you?”

A long pause. I go back into the kitchen, put my finger to my lips, sit at the table and eavesdrop with all
my might. As does everyone else. Helen’s teacup is in midair.

“Oh, no,” we hear her saying. “No, I don’t think I want to, Andy.”

Long pause.

“I know you do, I know you would. But I want to stay here.”

Longer pause, then Ruth’s voice, hesitant, “Yes, I have thought about that. But they’re taking good care of me. I’m all right.”

“Goddamn him,” L.D. says.

“Shhhh!” the rest of us say.

But Ruth is talking too low for us now, and she does, after all, deserve some privacy in her own house. We return to the guest list. “So. No guys, right?” L.D. says. The air has changed, and, like oath takers, together the rest of us solemnly answer, “Right.”

When Ruth is off the phone, she comes into the kitchen. The phone rings again. She sighs, asks L.D. to get it for her.

“It’s Joel somebody,” L.D. says. “Do you want to talk?”

Ruth sucks in a breath, lays a hand across her chest. “Joel? Really? Joel
Fratto?”

L.D. shrugs.

Ruth goes into the living room, and we hear her say, “Is this Joel Fratto?” Then she nearly yells, “No! No! I don’t believe this! How did you find me?”

“Who’s that?” Sarah asks.

I don’t know, and neither does L.D., but Helen says, “That’s her old boyfriend, the one she had before she married Shithead.”

“The artist?” I ask.

Helen nods. “He was really handsome. She’s got a picture somewhere. He’s on a motorcycle, with no shirt.”

I feel a blip of jealousy—I’ve never seen that picture.

“I wonder why he’s calling,” I say. “Do you think he knows?”

Ruth comes into the kitchen, flushed and wide-eyed. “He’s coming over here,” she says. “I’ve got a fucking
date!”

“Who is this guy?” L.D. asks.

Sarah stands up to give Ruth her chair. “Are you sure you feel okay to see him?”

Ruth pushes a pile of insurance forms on the kitchen table out of the way, sits there. “This is the fourth day in a row I’ve felt absolutely fine,” she says. “God, Joel Fratto!”

“What the hell kind of name is that?” L.D. asks.

“He was so wonderful,” Ruth answers.

“What about this party, Ruth?” L.D. wants to know. “Do you still want a party? I think we should talk about that.”

“I still want everything,” Ruth says. “I just remembered. I still do. Where’s my wig? Where’s my boobs? Help me. I want to do my eyes, too.”

L.D. is frowning, Sarah looks a little worried, Helen is beaming, and I’m confused. We’ve been talking codicils. We’ve been visiting graveyards. Now we’ve got to find Ruth’s mascara so she can get ready for a date.

She goes into the bathroom to fill up the tub, and
Helen and Sarah follow her, suggesting things they can do to help. Their sounds are soft and overlapping and full of a kind of subdued cheerfulness, like birds before they go to sleep. L.D. and I are sitting at the kitchen table, immobilized by irritation and astonishment respectively. L.D. tips her chair back on two legs, puts her hands behind her head. “Well. Maybe we should go buy her some protection. I saw some condoms in the drugstore the other day with fireworks on the box.” She moves a toothpick she’s been chewing on to the other side of her mouth, raises her eyebrows up and down.

“Is this … real?” I ask.

She shrugs. “What the hell difference does that make?”

O
nce, a couple of years after Ruth had moved out, she went out of town to visit a friend, and I stayed in her apartment for a night. I told Joe it was to keep an eye on things, but I think he knew I wanted to try it on.

At first, I loved it. I changed into one of Ruth’s beautiful silk robes, so smooth against my skin I could barely feel it. Then I turned the radio on to a classical station and made dinner for myself in her little blue-and-white kitchen—breast of chicken and mushrooms in white wine sauce, wild rice, green beans—all cooked in copper pans. For dessert I had a huge piece of apple pie with ice cream, eaten off a pottery plate. It was so
pretty I had to keep picking it up to inspect it from all angles while I ate.

Then I walked around looking at things. It was so calm, her apartment, so carefully thought out. I examined the artwork on the walls: watercolors of nasturtiums on a windowsill and one of a turtle, head raised expectantly and eyes revealing a kind of patient wisdom. On the bedroom wall was a large print that showed a group of women sleeping outside in a field, some of them with the tops of their dresses loosened to reveal their cleanly white breasts, their soft stomachs. Some of the women lay flat; some were on their sides, and their arms made pillows for themselves or hung relaxed at their sides, and their hands were idle and defenseless and beautiful. Looking at that print, you could feel the warmth of the pale-yellow sun on bare shoulders, you could smell the grass, you could know the exquisite relief of the passing breezes and the presence of other women who lay down with you. I knew that print was Ruth’s favorite, and it was mine, too. Once, when we were looking at it together, I said, “How can they do that? Don’t they have to go to the grocery store and get stuff for dinner?”

“They feed each other,” Ruth said. “They don’t need a thing.”

I turned on the television, then turned it off. I looked through the stack of tapes by the stereo: Mozart. George Strait. Glenn Gould and Glen Miller. The Rolling Stones. In the bathroom, I looked in the medicine chest and saw a neat line of aspirin and Tylenol and cough syrup. There was a box of invisible Band-Aids and a nail clipper and a prescription bottle half full of diuretics.
What was that for, I wondered. Weight loss? Could she be so silly?

There were several boxes of bubble bath on a shelf over the tub, and I picked one up to use, but found it empty. All of the others were too, all but one, which I suddenly felt I couldn’t use. It was an illusion of riches, all those boxes. I couldn’t take from her when in truth she had so little. I made my luxury be the hotness of the water, the depth of it.

When I had finished bathing, I went back into her bedroom and stood in the center of the room for a while, looking out the window, watching the clouds move across a full moon. There was the faint sound of someone on the phone next door, and nothing else. It was distressingly quiet in that apartment. Even the music I’d put on the radio seemed unable to penetrate a kind of bubble that had formed around me.

I opened Ruth’s top dresser drawer. I felt guilty looking in it, but I suddenly needed to know something, though I didn’t know what. Ruth’s socks were rolled up and organized according to color. She had underpants stacked up in two piles, one pair directly on top of the other. There was a stack of the tiny cotton T-shirts she wore, folded precisely into fours. I thought, why are these like this? Who has time to do this? And then I realized that what I was seeing was not an obsessive kind of neatness, but loneliness. I got dressed, dried and put away the dishes I’d washed after dinner, and then I went home.

Later that night, I lay beside Joe as he watched the news. We didn’t talk. But I knew everything had changed. I believe he knew, too.

N
ot long afterward, on a bright spring day when Ruth and I were sitting out on her balcony, she said, “I’ve been living here for two years now.” Then, rather suddenly, “I want to go home.”

“You want to go home?” I asked. “Is that what you said?”

She nodded, staring straight ahead.

“To Eric, you mean?”

“Well, to Michael mostly, I think is what it is. You know, I miss making him breakfast, giving him snacks after school. I’m beside myself when he’s sick. Last time he had the flu, I called him a million times. I kept waking him up.”

“Maybe he should live with you.”

“I can’t afford a big enough place. And anyway, it’s more than that. I want … I miss the routine of three people, you know? Do you know how pathetic it is to do laundry for one? I used to think laundromats were interesting, even romantic. But now I think they’re only filthy.”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know what to say. Michael will be going to college next year. And think of what Eric was like, really. Do you want that again?”

“He was good when I was sick. I never told you that. He brought me little flowers on my bed tray. And I … he wasn’t the only one at fault.”

“I know. I know that.”

“I want to go home,” she said again, her voice
simultaneously determined and beaten. “I don’t like living alone. I needed to live alone to find that out. Funny, huh?” She stood, walked over to the edge of her balcony and I had a crazy thought that she might jump.

“Maybe you should talk to Eric,” I said. “Tell him.”

“I did.” She leaned far over the balcony, and I started to get up, then stopped. “I put on some makeup and some great underwear and I went to see him and said I was sorry, that I thought I’d made a huge mistake and I wanted to try again. I said I understood a lot about what went wrong, that I thought we could fix it. I said we could learn to give each other happiness, that I’d come back next weekend, how about that, and I told him what I wanted to make for dinner that night. I even said we could go out and buy some new sheets together, to get
ready
, you know.”

“Well,” I sighed. “I’ll miss this place. It’s so pretty. I love to come here.”

She straightened up, turned around to face me. “Oh, I’m not going back. He has a girlfriend. The paralegal he’s been dating. He said they’re ‘informally engaged.’”

“What? Are you kidding?”

“Nope.”

“Does Michael know?”

“Not yet. When they tell him, it’ll be formal. They were thinking they’d wait till this summer, when Michael graduates. Then he can have time to think about things, spend some time with both of them together. He can get to know her real well, so they can be pals.” She sat down in her chair, leaned back and closed
her eyes, pointed her chin toward the sun. “I think she’s about twelve years old. Gonna start her period any day now.”

“My God,” I said. “I had no idea.”

“Me neither. Obviously.”

I sighed hugely, then asked, “Well, what’s her stupid name?”

Ruth opened her eyes, turned to look at me. “
Jani
. With ani.”

“Give me a break.”

“That’s what I said.” Ruth smiled. “And you know what Eric said? He said, ‘I won’t tolerate your insulting her.’”

“Fuck him.”

“I suggested that,” Ruth said. “He declined. He feels nothing for me anymore. Before, even when he was terrible to me, at least there was … something. Even if it was only anger. Now there’s this sort of … I don’t know, impatient tolerance. I think he only talks to me at all because of Michael.”

“Listen,” I said. “You’ve been through so much lately. You got told you have cancer; they stole your breasts, you went through chemotherapy and radiation therapy…. Don’t you think your wanting to go home is just a move toward some false sense of security?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you didn’t get cancer till you left him. You want to be back there because that was the place where you didn’t have it. You just want to feel safe.”