I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

  Dr. Mark Hardy does not call back. I have to wait two weeks to see him again. In the middle of the first week I get a letter. It’s from Ruth.

  The envelope is off-white and the paper is soft with a nub. A postage stamp of James Dean. My address in Ruth’s penmanship so perfect as if she’d gone to Catholic school. Just like Ursula Crohn’s letter. The stamp, the stationery. The penmanship. The fancy paper. Who is it that can get their shit together to create a letter like this?

  Ruth Dearden. I expect the worst.

  Inside are three pages handwritten on the same paper as the envelope. The written lines don’t slope or slant or go awry.

  Dear Ben.

  Ruth starts her letter with the first moment she sees me. Sitting in a class room at the Sitka Center at the beach in Otis, Oregon. I walk up to her wearing a red ballcap and a white T-shirt and Levi’s, look her right in the eyes, take her hand and introduce myself. The way I look at her, the way I speak, something new comes alive in her. It’s a way of looking at herself. And she falls in love. Just like that. A big funny man she knows she’ll never have a chance with. Tall and handsome and a New Yorker. Such an exotic creature. Profane, irreverent, passionate in a way she’s never known a man to be. It’s how I smell in the hot classroom that gets to her more than anything. Gay, but the rumors say there’d been lots of women. So there is hope.

  I’m so unlike her ex-husband, her fucking perfect older brother Phillip, so unlike any man she’s ever met.

  The night of the White Party dancing under the moon. When I ask her to dance, how clumsy she gets as if her body has never danced. The song we sing to the moon, a moment so profound she doesn’t go home ’til dawn.

  Over the years, around the writing table, how her love changes. The way I support her, give her room to speak and argue and state her opinion help her have the strength to leave her husband. Along with her therapist, Judith, I’m the one to thank for her new freedom.

  Then about a year ago, she begins to see in me another man. Fragile, afraid, wounded, aloof, impenetrable really. The day in class I cry. She wants so much to give back all that I have given her. She’d give her life if only I could only let her love me. Then the kiss. It pisses her off, the kiss, because it means so much more to her than it does to me. She’s had two weeks to think it over, though. And she’s decided. She hopes someday I can love her back. But whether I can love her or not, whether I can love her at all isn’t important. And then she promises. To love me forever without conditions. Just being around me, taking care of me is all she wants.

  THAT NIGHT I’M lying on my bed vibrating, trying to watch a Cary Grant movie. I think I hear a knock on my door but I’m not sure. Since the Paxil my ears have been ringing. Then it’s Ruth standing in my bedroom doorway holding a vase of purple and yellow flowers. My freaked out body is so startled it slams against the wall, which startles Ruth, who drops the vase of flowers. Broken glass, water. Purple and yellow flowers all over.

  The fiasco. So many fiascos with Ruth. She tells me to stay in bed, she’ll clean it up. My feet are bare but I get up anyway, careful where I walk. I’m leaning down, picking up glass off the floor. That’s the second time Ruth hits me. Knocks me the fuck down. With the broom in the side of my head as she walks in the bedroom. Blood again from a cut on my ass where I land. The cut isn’t bad, it just bleeds a lot. Then it’s Ruth standing in a puddle of water, posies all over the place, me leaning across the bed, fucked up about the blood and AIDS and Ruth. Made her put on rubber gloves. Ruth trying to put one of those large square Band-Aids on my hairy ass. The rubber gloves. Fuck.

  Really, what else can you do but laugh? At least at that point with Ruth and me. Years later, the third time she goes to hit me it won’t be funny at all.

  ONLY TO GO to the doctor do I get out of my pajamas. That night, though, I put on my walking shoes, my khaki pants, a white T-shirt, and my black sweater. My wool overcoat. A red knit cap. My God these old clothes, how they don’t know how to fit. Ruth thinks I’m trying to get away from her. She says, No, I’ll go. You don’t have to go. I’ll clean this mess up and then I’ll go. I don’t tell her what I’m doing because I’m laughing. Ruth thinks I’m laughing at her, and I am, but not just at her. It’s like that song in The Sound of Music. How do you solve a problem like Maria?

  What Ruth doesn’t know is what a relief she is. Even with all the mess and the broom upside the head and the pain in my ass, the way I’d been shaking with that Paxil shit, how my bedroom and my bed had started to look like a horror movie, what Ruth doesn’t know is how happy I was to see her.

  Ruth is doubled up on my couch, crying, her back to me, thinking she’s the clumsiest piece of shit ever. I get the flashlight from under the sink, walk over to the couch. I touch her on the shoulder. Just a touch at first, then lay my palm down flat there.

  “Come with me,” I say. “Walk with me. I want to show you something.”

  RUTH TAKES A long time in the bathroom. When she comes out her face is fresh. A bit of lipstick. She tries to smile but it’s not really a smile. Outside it’s not raining. At least for now it’s not raining. I show Ruth where the tent tarp is on the back porch and we walk, Ruth and I. Ruth with the bundle of tarp and me with the flashlight. I still don’t know how to walk so good. So I’m holding on to Ruth’s arm real tight. The night is partly cloudy. Partly clear. Stars over the city center. Dark clouds over Mount Hood. What a place of sky Portlandia city is. A new moon. Just a little slipper of a moon. Fresh air off the ocean dries the tears and mellows the Paxil buzz.

  Pioneer Cemetery is surrounded by a cyclone fence with barbed wire at the top. I know a place though. At least I think I do. At the gate between a stone pillar and the cyclone fence, there’s a spot so skinny they figure no body could make it through. Believe me, I’ve tried. But that was before I was walking skin and bones.

  I shut the flashlight off. Put it in my back pocket. There’s enough light to see. Ruth steps into the palm of my hand, by that time we’re laughing like hell, and I lift with all my might. Ruth’s a powerhouse, a fucking athlete the way she climbs up the pillar and a little scream when she jumps down. Then me, I slide through the skinny spot with an inch to spare.

  We walk in the dark. We’re giggling and we’re kids, and it feels good to be walking in the place of the dead. I show Ruth where to spread the tarp. I lie down first and then Ruth lies down beside me. At first we lie there strict and straight as corpses. We don’t touch. I take a deep breath and finally:

  “This is my spot,” I say.

  I don’t tell Ruth how much that spot really is mine. That I’ve bought that spot and right in that spot one day my ashes will be under us right where we are lying.

  Tony Escobar. I start to tell Ruth about Tony Escobar. Tony lying right over there, no farther than two shovel lengths away. But I let the dead be.

  Instead, I start talking about Hank Christian. Over the years, Ruth’s heard so much about Hank Christian. He is to her, like he is to me, a Magician, a Titan, a constellation in the sky. The Beloved.

  “Have you heard from him lately?” Ruth asks.

  “I call,” I say, “but he don’t answer. Fucking Barry Hannah, man.”

  “Fucking Barry fucking asshole Hannah,” Ruth says.

  And we’re laughing again, Ruth and I.

  Ruth’s breath comes out her mouth a little spirit. Her body is warm. She puts her hand around my arm, her cheek against my shoulder. And we lie there on the tarp looking up at the stars and the tiny moon. I’m just talking away. Spouting off shit. Really, I’m trying to get to what I really want to say but my body, the Paxil, I’m like some meth freak who can’t think straight and I’m trying to get to the point but when I get to the point, the point isn’t a point it’s a spiral.

  I raise up my head and Ruth puts her arm under my head. When my head rests down against her arm, the Paxil buzz stops, for a moment, two moments, the buzzing stops. A part of me wants to close my eyes and just let go forever.
/>   Instead, I sit up, turn around, sit cross-legged. On the tarp, Ruth is a piece of night with silver edges, lying on the black.

  “Ruth,” I say.

  My lips are doing that strange rubbery thing. I’m glad it’s dark. But then I realize my face has got moon on it and Ruth can see my face. Where is Big Ben when you really need him?

  “I don’t know if I love you the way you want me to love you,” I say, “but you gotta know what pleasure and solace you give me. Really I owe you my life. Plus the way you fucking make me laugh, man.”

  Ruth’s hand reaches up, touches my forehead.

  “I’m a gay man,” I say, “with some long-ago exceptions. And the only way it’s possible that you and I could work is if we’re completely honest. I can’t promise you anything except that I’ll be honest.”

  Ruth’s fingers along my cheek, down to my chin. Somewhere in there I realize she’s tracing the shadows on my face, the moonlight.

  “I don’t want you any other way,” Ruth says. “I love you, Ben, and I’ll always love you no matter what.”

  “I promise,” Ruth says.

  The way Ruth is earnest, fervent. Such abandon in her voice. So much hope. Moments of intimacy and passion how easy it is to promise. I remember smiling to myself. So many times I’ve gone back to that moment when Ruth said I love you, Ben, I promise and I remember smiling. At her innocence. At how much I needed to hear I wasn’t alone, that someone was there. Ruth was there, was promising love.

  I’d told Evie that I loved her. Promised to marry her and married her. I told Bette, too. I love you Bette. And Tony. I love you so fucking much, Tony Escobar. Never did tell Hank.

  And there in that moment, it’s as true as ever I’ve ever said it.

  “I love you too, Ruth,” I say.

  And we kiss.

  THAT FUCKING KISS. So many times over all the years I didn’t speak to Hank or Ruth, and now the years after Hank has died, I think about that kiss. How that kiss ended in so much heartache.

  That night in the Pioneer Cemetery, I kissed Ruth the way a man kisses his lover. Destiny, fate, fucking fortune, whatever, I’ve run it through a million times. But what I come up with is always the same. All I can do is blame it on Big Ben.

  Ruth loved me in all the ways a person can love. She was just there and full of love and ready to jump into the mess. But I didn’t love her that way. I mean all the way, head-over-heels-in-love love. I mean, after all, I was a gay man. I could have kept a boundary. Kept it platonic.

  After all these years, I’ve had all kinds of insights as to the nature, the motivation behind that kiss. But to tell the truth, that night I didn’t have a fucking clue as to why I folded her up in my arms and kissed her with all my heart. I didn’t kiss her with my dick, but I was half dead and didn’t have a dick yet and I guess I figured the dick would come along because I loved this woman Ruth and it was the love that was important. Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, omnisexual, what the fuck. Where the heart goes, the dick goes too, don’t it? The truth was Ruth was the centerpiece of my world. I couldn’t imagine living without her. She meant life to me. Without her I’d die. I was sure of it. And so I kiss her.

  And something else. When I kissed Ruth, for her it was the fairytale prince and the princess. Everything she’d ever wanted with that kiss came true. The way that promise fulfilled made Ruth glow, made me want to glow, too. She was intoxicating. So full of life and passion. I wanted that passion. And so I kiss her.

  And something else. I wanted to give it back. Give life back to her the way she’d given life to me. I’d loved other women. I could love a woman again.

  And so I kiss her.

  IN THE MOONLIGHT on the tarp in Pioneer Cemetery on my spot that is my grave, we kiss. But the way Ruth kisses me is like our first kiss. She just pulls her lips flat against her face.

  The Greatest Sin Ever, I feel like I’m forcing myself on her. So I pull away and look at her. I don’t know really what to say or how. Just two shovel lengths away, over there, Tony Escobar is sitting on his grave. The way yogis sit. He’s naked and he’s smiling. I don’t look over, though. I just go ahead on and try to look into Ruth’s eyes, but her eyes are her big plastic glasses and all I can see is the shadow reflection of the big cedar tree and maybe myself with moonlight on my face trying to look in to see if I can see in her eyes.

  “Ruth,” I say, “is this too fast? Am I being too aggressive?”

  “Not at all,” Ruth says.

  The only thing left I can figure is either she’s scared of getting AIDS or this girl don’t know how to kiss.

  “Are you freaked about AIDS? “ I say. “Kissing is safe.”

  “I’m not freaked,” Ruth says.

  We kiss again and her lips are still flat.

  Then: “No, silly,” I say. “Like this.”

  I take Ruth’s mouth in my hand and pucker up her lips.

  “You know,” I say, “smoochy.”

  And I hold her lips like that, pursed up, and put my lips on them. Our smoochy lips kiss.

  “Better,” I say. “Much better.”

  BACK IN THE house, Ruth and I are cold and wet. I’m shivering. Chills like that when they start sometimes don’t stop. I’ve got my wet clothes off in no time and Ruth turns on the shower. I grab the towel that hangs on my bedpost and wrap it around me. My body is shaking pretty bad, and I wonder if the shower is a good idea. But when I get in the bathroom, the hot water pouring down in the shower and the steam feels good. Ruth wraps her arm around me, pulls me into her.

  “The water’s nice and hot,” she says. “I don’t think it’s too hot.”

  I drop my towel. Ruth steps back and holds out her hand and helps me step in. She pulls the clear plastic curtain closed behind me. Under the hot water I’m all sharp bones and angles shaking and shaking. Ruth asks me how I’m doing but my shaking teeth can’t talk. The hot water comes down and down and I stand bent in with my arms wrapped around myself. Ruth’s just on the other side of the curtain. The shape of her body, hazy through the plastic, the way Ruth’s leaning in and listening, she’s Joan of Arc out there, my protector.

  As soon as I can get my mouth working again I say:

  “You’re cold, too. Why don’t you come and join me?”

  The shower water on the cement shower floor, on the curtain. Through the plastic, I can’t see Ruth anymore. There’s such a long time that nothing happens I wonder if she’s left.

  Ruth pulls back the shower curtain and steps in. She doesn’t look at me. She has her arm over her breasts and her eyes are looking down. Our bodies touch first at the thighs. Ruth’s thighs are voluptuous thighs. And a nice curve up to her waist. I move back away from under the shower so she can have some room. When Ruth lifts her face into the hot water I’m amazed at what I see. Ruth without her plastic glasses, Ruth without the bangs hanging in her face. The water on her long heavy red hair even more red, pushing it back. The silhouette of her face. Her broad forehead, high cheekbones, a fine long straight nose, full lips. And the chin. The chin that makes Ruth’s face Ruth.

  “Is your bandage okay?” she asks.

  She’s blinking water out of her eyes. I wonder what she sees without her glasses.

  “There’s shampoo on the shelf,” I say. “Do you use soap?” “I don’t have a shower,” she says. “Just my big old tub.”

  “Kiehl’s,” I say. “Moisturizing. Okay?”

  I’m rubbing Kiehl’s moisturizing soap across Ruth’s back before she answers.

  Ruth’s shoulders are almost as broad as mine. The muscles of her back, strong. She’s got a booty on her, too, the way her ass flares out. Beautiful skin. Rosy skin that’s never seen a zit. Her legs are long and she’s long in her torso. My feet next to hers at the bottom of the shower looks like a hobbit’s feet.

  “The soap smells great,” she says. “Ben, you’re so thin.”

  “Coriander,” I say. “Turn around, let me get your front.”

  I can see
her take a breath before she turns.

  She turns and there it is, that flush of red across her chest, up her neck, her cheek. This woman is solid. And long. Long legs, long torso, lovely long arms. Nice muscle. Not Madonna muscle, but still firm. The soap goes on her clavicle first. One of the most beautiful places on a woman. Neck, shoulders, clavicle. And just below, the expanse of skin before the pendulous breasts. But really what I’m doing is not looking at her breasts. So I make myself look. Breasts. Wow. A nice slope to them. Full. Pink nipples that are hard. Surprisingly large. I soap down between her breasts, brush over each breasts lightly, avoid her nipples.

  A true redhead, Ruth. The carpet matches the drapes. The tuft of red hair down there, wet, symmetrical like something woven.

  Ruth wants her turn at soaping me, but the hot water goes. We’re in a frenzy drying off, and in four or five great leaps I’m in bed first, then Ruth. The bed is cool but in no time at all we got it warm. Queen Lowlighta, all the low lights make my bedroom glow. Purple and yellow flowers in a mason jar on the nightstand.

  It’s been so long since another body has been in my bed. And a female body. Ruth’s lying on her back and I’m curled into her, my hand on her belly. I miss my body as I touch Ruth’s body. She’s so alive and full of smooth muscle and heft. My heart is pounding, Ruth’s is pounding too. My dick feels full but it ain’t hard. I’ve learned by now not to worry about it. The last time I was hard, I can’t remember. I take a deep breath, try and be present. A Joni Mitchell line runs through my head. Love is touching souls. What I want to do is put my head between her thighs and chew on her clitoris.

  Edith gives good.

  But that ain’t safe.

  “Close your eyes,” I say.

  I reach over, turn the reading lamp on that’s clamped to the bed rail.

  “What are you doing?” Ruth asks.

  “I want to look at you,” I say.

  I take Ruth’s head in my hands, try and turn her head to the light. But she won’t let me.

  “Ruth,” I say, “you’re beautiful. You know you’re really something.”