I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

  “You call this daylight?”

  “Ultraviolet,” Hank says, “is my enemy.”

  In my driveway, my green Volkswagen was covered with a canvas and at least two years of leaves. I hadn’t driven that car in months. No idea if it would start. In fact, it didn’t. Had to push it out from the driveway and get it pointed down the hill. Hank and I pushed, then I jumped in and popped the clutch. Never fails on a Volkswagen. Unless the generator’s bad. Hank didn’t ask me no questions about my expired driver’s license. He just got in the car, slammed the door. Drizzling rain. Crazy fucking windshield wipers moving like paraplegics. Cigarette butts in the ashtray from years back. No heat. The exhaust backfiring. The driver’s door won’t stay shut and I have to hold it closed with my armpit. Hank and me driving up Hawthorne Blvd., Hawthorne to SE 60th, then onto Pine. Thank God they’re both left turns or I’d have lost the door completely. Plus I’d forgotten. The horn honks whenever you make a right turn and more times than not, the horn got stuck.

  Quite an adventure getting to Ruth’s house. To meet our destiny.

  Ruth’s brick house is on a hill and it’s just as I pull up in front and pull the emergency brake that I realize I’ve never driven myself to Ruth’s house before. It’s always been in Ruth’s Honda Civic, Ruth who drove.

  So the only time I drive to Ruth’s house is the only time I have Hank with me.

  Years later now, of course, I can see what I couldn’t see then. I dusted off my old Volkswagen, pushed it down the hill, jumpstarted it, then drove across town illegally, in the rain, the windshield wipers not working, the windshield covered in steam, holding the door closed with my armpit because of some pages Ruth could have sent me in the mail? And this from a guy who was still afraid to leave his house.

  The truth is I wanted Hank and Ruth to meet. For a bunch of reasons I didn’t have a clue about. I mean, really, no doubt about it, Ruth and I had gone through the wringer. Over two years of trying to make sense of what was going on between us, we’d fucked each other up pretty good. And by that time we were only speaking when we had to talk about the edits. Still, no matter what I say about her, I have to admit it. Ruth was the one who went through the wars with me. Day by day, man. Nobody else, family or friends, had made that kind of commitment. Yeah, there was Ephraim, but he was seven hundred miles away.

  So I guess I wanted Hank to meet the only other person who was still alive I had a strong connection with. Even if that strong connection was full of shit and resentment.

  Then, too, I knew how much Ruth wanted to meet Hank. Like with all my students, the way I’d talked up Hank Christian over the years, Hank was a literary John Lennon to her. The truth is, I wanted to be there, in the moment, when I presented my hero, my beloved, to Ruth, in the flesh. It was a way of proving that it wasn’t all talk, that I really knew the famous Hank Christian, and here he is and ain’t I cool.

  And something else that was more difficult to see. Took me years. Ruth’s care for me had been a mother’s care. Most men with women get past the mother thing and miraculously somehow turn it around and then want to fuck the mother. I’ll never understand how they do it, but that’s how it goes.

  The truth is, deep down, the way Hank was suffering, some part of me wanted to introduce him to a woman he could trust, a woman with the healing powers of a mother, Ruth Dearden, the woman who had saved my life.

  And Ruth: the man I couldn’t be for her, had just arrived in the flesh.

  I didn’t even call first to see if Ruth was home. Just all of a sudden knew in my heart it was right and Hank and I were out the door.

  RUTH’S FRONT DOOR was locked but we could hear the music. The soundtrack from Living Out Loud. The key was usually under the bienvenue mat in the alcove, but when I looked under the mat, the key wasn’t there.

  Hank and I walk around to the back of the house. Nobody walks along the side much, so it’s overgrown with ivy. Tall dead flowers. That’s where Hank steps in the dog shit. Only we don’t know it. Ruth’s back door has a glass window and it’s painted white. Something scrapes at the bottom when I open it. I don’t for a minute think about that door, what it means that I am opening it.

  Inside, I call out to Ruth. The music’s way too loud, so Hank and I let ourselves in. We walk through Ruth’s white kitchen, Hank’s dog shit shoes across Ruth’s white tiled floors, into her Craftsman dining room with the wood paneling. Two six-top banquet tables side to side take up almost the whole room. I remember thinking: this is where Ruth teaches her class.

  On the table, a manila envelope with the last pages of my novel in it. Ruth’s black cat, Maupassant, walks right up to me, slides her body against my leg.

  “A fucking cat,” Hank says.

  But Maupassant doesn’t want anything to do with Hank. That cat ain’t dumb. Hank’s shoe is covered in dog shit.

  The music is coming from the back bedroom. Ruth’s banging around in there with Queen Latifah. As I knock on the bedroom door, Queen Latifah is in the middle of “Lush Life.”

  Ruth opens the door with a paint roller in one hand, cornflower blue dripping off it. The floor of the room is covered with newspaper. She’s got a red bandana pulling back her red hair and she’s not wearing a blouse. She’s just in her bra and Levi’s. A pink bra same color as her pink skin.

  Those too-blue eyes of Ruth’s, her pink lingeried breasts, her thin waist, her full hips, the voluptuosity, her red hair pulled back off her forehead, strands of blonde in the red, luminous her white skin, the thick blue paint dripping down, the smell of the room, cornflower blue and sweat, Queen Latifah: and there I’ll be while I rot with the rest/of those whose lives are / lonely too. Hank Christian didn’t know what the fuck hit him.

  Ruth’s startled, suddenly modest, goes to cover up her breasts, then not modest. She pulls her arms back and sucks in her breath. Her breasts get even larger.

  “Ben?” she says.

  “Ruth,” I say, “this is.”

  “Who stepped in dog shit?” Ruth says.

  “Hank,” I say.

  HANK LEAVES HIS dark glasses on and his shoes outside. They’re those kind of tennis shoes with traction and the dog shit is imbedded. Ruth pulls on a paint-stained large old Columbia T-shirt of mine and, for the longest time, she and Hank do a dance trying to see who can get the dog shit up on the floor first so the other doesn’t have to clean it up.

  Tea. Ruth always has rose hip tea. Hank and I sit on the loveseat under the big dining room windows. Gray rain hitting the glass behind us. On the end table, Ruth’s deco lamp of a woman bending backwards, holding up a globe. Ruth’s taken off the red handkerchief from her hair. Her hair is that perfect tousled look, the strands of blonde. She sits at the table in her teacher chair. Two heads higher than Hank and me. The way we’re sitting, Hank and I are schoolboys. Ruth is Mother Superior. Hank loves every minute of it.

  I. Fucking. Hate. It.

  What was I thinking. I can’t wait to get out of there. The manila envelope is in my lap and I’m slurping my rose hips like mad. Hank hasn’t even touched the cup to his lips. That’s when Ruth starts in. Does that thing she always does. You know, takes over. In nothing flat, she and Hank are deep into it. Writing, William Faulkner, Denis Johnson, Ray Carver, Jeske, Padgett Powell, Cynthia Ozick, Cormac McCarthy. When Hank tells Ruth he studied with Barry Hannah, that moment, just so only I can see, Ruth’s too blue eyes give me a look.

  “Barry Hannah!” Ruth says, “Awesome!”

  Then fuck, Hank’s just got to say it.

  “Yeah, Barry and I used to armwrestle,” Hank says. “Beat him two times out of three.”

  “Really?” Ruth says. “Barry Fucking Hannah.”

  I can’t help it. I spit rose hip tea across the two banquet tables. Splashes of rose hip tea onto the manila envelope. Fucking Ruth Dearden, man. After all the shit we’ve been through, still she can make me laugh.

  Of course, then Hank thinks we’re laughing at him. I don’t know what else to do, so I
fess up. I tell Hank about the Barry Fucking Hannah joke Ruth and I have going.

  “I was stink eye,” I say. “There’s no other excuse. I was jealous that you went all the way to Florida for this Barry Hannah guy.”

  “I didn’t go to Florida for Barry Hannah,” Hank says. “Well, not just for him. They gave me a scholarship.”

  What I figure is coming next is some straight guy talk that wants to stay away from anything to do with affection between men. But then Hank surprises me. He takes his dark glasses off, folds them, puts them in the pocket of his hoodie.

  “You’re the one who’s in my heart,” Hank says. “You know that. From the very beginning.”

  Ruth’s face right then. Hank’s face. Mine. With Hank’s sunglasses off, it’s the first time that each one of us is present, and we all actually see each other.

  Ruth has folded her long legs up into her big teacher chair. She’s in heaven, you can tell, to be in the rarified air between Hank Christian and Ben Grunewald. And in that moment, she’s smiling way too big. Hank’s taken his sunglasses off and she can see Hank’s black eyes and the intimacy in Hank’s voice has just knocked the breath out of her.

  Hank’s pulling his shoulders down, straightening his neck, pulling his chest up and out, flexing his biceps. His sweet lips are a matter-of-fact flat line under his Roman nose. The cleft in his chin. It’s pride what he’s filling himself up with, and the way his right eye rolls out a bit, his feelings are hurt.

  Who knows what my face looks like. You’re the one in my heart went straight to my heart and my heart went right up into my throat. So I probably look a lot like Ruth. Trying to find breath. My big face red as a beet, my Catholic-boy smile.

  Such a long long moment. In Ruth’s dining room, the day after Christmas. Hank in his black pants, T-shirt, and black hoodie, his knee against my knee on the loveseat. Our cups of rose hip tea. Ruth above us in the large blue and red Columbia T-shirt, just one of her long legs away from Hank, curled up in her teacher chair.

  Sit. We just sit. The rain on the windows, the smell of paint. Rose hip tea on my tongue and throat. The manila envelope rose hip wet I’ve tried to wipe off. Before that moment, it was the two of us, Hank and me. The two of us, Ruth and me. Now after, all of us are different.

  We’re three. Then we’re two again.

  If three doesn’t find four, then three goes back to two.

  Hank and Ruth.

  The moment Hank saw Ruth in her pink bra, the smell of paint and sweat, dripping cornflower blue and that red hair, “Lush Life”: Hank was in love.

  The moment of Hank’s voice, how simple and clear he’d spoken: you’re the one who’s in my heart: from a straight man to a gay man, from Hank Christian to Ben Grunewald, Ruth was in love.

  Of course, it would be a while before we all know this. I mean it’s like that Jeske thing. We knew but couldn’t quite yet know that we knew. But the way that moment lasted long and long, there’s no doubt about it. We all got it. Something real, so real it was going to fuck us up, had just happened.

  Ruth, of course, is the one who saves us.

  “So, Hank,” Ruth says, “Ben says you might come teach writing classes with us here in Portland.”

  Just like that, Hank’s black eyes go far away and Hank Christian leaves the planet. I sit there and watch the phenomenon. The way Hank pulls his cards in, holds his cards close to his chest. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out his sunglasses. I think for sure he’s going to put them on, but he doesn’t.

  “Hard to make any plans these days,” Hank says. “But let’s keep talking about it. I’d love to teach with you and Gruney.”

  That’s when Maupassant decides to jump up on the loveseat, right onto Hank’s lap. That fucking cat knew. Hank never had any intention of living where the sun don’t shine, teaching something that wasn’t tenure track and involving a university. You got to remember, Hank’s a Capricorn. Who needed a health plan.

  Still, though, it got my hopes up, Hank and me teaching together again.

  Hank jumps up and out of the loveseat like a man on fire. Maupassant goes screaming. Hank’s all the way across the room and his sunglasses are back on before he speaks.

  “Fucking cats, man. Sorry,” Hank says. “Ever since the cancer I’ve been allergic.”

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, I’m trying to make a dream come true. The two young men Hank and I were in Manhattan, Wednesday nights, after the West Side Y, sitting in our booth at the café on Columbus Circle, our buddy Silvio waiting on us, Hank and me eating our hamburgers, our French fries and ketchup, dreaming our dreams. That our words would be true and because they were true, and the voice that spoke them so unusual, so full of character, our words would go straight to the reader’s heart, and our books would go down in history.

  The way I was proud to introduce Hank to Ruth, I wanted to expand that pride, expand the glory, the adulation, and introduce Hank to all the writing students with a big bang in Portland’s finest Italian restaurant.

  The table is a feast. Anything Italian you can imagine. Big loaves of ciabatta and focaccia, saucers of olive oil, plates of fettuccini, rigatoni, oven-baked pizza. Lamb roast, veal chops, pan-fried oysters, prosciutto y meloni, smoked salmon, fresh halibut, sand dabs. So many savory smells: roasted garlic, fresh tomatoes, baked pizza crust, basil and oregano. The table is lined with bottles of wine – Frascati, Amarone, Barbaresco, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.

  All around us, people talking talking. It’s too loud for my whanged-out ears, but fuck it. There’s a wonderful sense of celebration. Even I can feel it. The writing students at the table, almost twenty of them, are drunk and happy and they all want a piece of him. The legendary Hank Christian sitting at the head of the table.

  Believe me, it took everything I had to get this gig together. And a lot of Xanax. But I did it without Ruth.

  There’s a moment. One of those moments I’ll keep forever. Nothing really happens, I’m just sitting there adjacent to Hank, my starched white napkin folded in my lap, the heavy shiny silverware, my hand around a fluted glass filled with Prosecco. Yeah, I’m sipping the sparkly. I’m wearing my vintage tweed suit, the new tie I bought and the white shirt I had washed and starched at the laundry. In my glass, the way the light hits the bubbles, how the bubbles stay in my throat, the solid way my heart is in my chest. And my butt, how it’s sitting in the chair. There’s no place else in the world I want to be. I’m so full of pride for Hank. I’m proud of my students too.

  All around me the room is spinning. Sounds like dogs barking. Just at that moment, under the table, Hank’s knee pushes against my knee. So I look over. Hank’s black corduroy shirt is buttoned at the top button. His face is rosy with wine and yeah his hair is purple. He’s sitting in a saffron, ornately upholstered Italian chair. Behind him a heavy, wine-red brocade curtain. Hank’s sweet smiling lips.

  Hank lifts his glass, I lift mine. The little sound of two fluted glasses touching. That smile is exactly what I wanted. Hadn’t seen Hank smile like that since the olden days. That smile says look around, Gruney, I told you all our dreams would come true.

  Hank’s black glass eye, the glass eye they replaced his real eye with, because from behind his real eye, they had to remove a tumor the size of plum. The tumor, the hole in his head it made, the ruined eye. Lying in a hospital room on fire with radiation. Hank alone with his cancer and his radiation and his chemotherapy thinking about his lost son and crazy girlfriend, did he do the right thing.

  Human suffering, man, fucks you up.

  Fluted glass to fluted glass I know exactly what to say and say it out loud with Hank at the same moment he says it.

  Porca Miseria, man.

  Porca fucking miseria.

  IT’S WHEN I tap my fluted glass with my knife, and stand up. Before I speak, I do that thing in my throat I always do in a public place to make myself be heard. Suddenly, everybody watching me. It’s when I’m trying with all my might to make my lips move the way I want them to mov
e. I won’t cry. I won’t cry. It’s just as I say There’s a great man among us that Ruth Dearden walks in.

  I’m not surprised to see her. She always seems to pop up at moments like this. Besides, I invited her myself. Hank made sure I did. Ruth’s blue contacts and her too-blue eyes look right at me. Her red hair is down and it’s long again, to her shoulders. A pearl barrette pulls the hair off her forehead. Ruth’s dress is tiny with a scooped neck and its black velvet. A string of pearls around her neck. The flush of red on her throat.

  When the students at the table see Ruth, those of them who know her get real quiet. Ruth’s is a dramatic entrance and every group has its drama. Especially this group when it’s Ruth Dearden. The woman their gay teacher had an affair with.

  Fucking affair, man. That word. If people only knew.

  Ruth is aware of the dish that’s going to fly. The first thing I think is how much courage it’s taken for Ruth to show up. But then Ruth has never been lacking in courage. And you know, come on, it’s Hank Christian.

  I go on with my little speech. Talk about the young men Hank and I were in Manhattan. How Hank has always been my friend, my writing teacher, my companion. At the other end of the table, someone is pouring Ruth a glass. When we all stand and raise our glasses to Hank, Ruth’s is full of prosecco.

  “Welcome to Portland,” I say.

  “Welcome to Portland, Hank,” everybody says together. Because we all got the email.

  LOVELY AND A little decadent how the evening progresses. I hang in there. One fucking glass of bubbly and I’m totally drunk. So I just sit and enjoy alcoholism while it lasts. Don’t think about the bad night’s sleep coming up. Because it’s all perfect. I’m sitting next to Hank Christian and he’s at the head of the table in his saffron Italian throne and Ruth’s still at the other end of the table and it’s all just perfect.

  After dessert and espressos, people walk outside to have a smoke. I want to go outside and smoke and smoke, too. But I don’t. I just sit in my starched white shirt and new tie and my tweed suit trying to look like Jimmy Joyce, or Billy Faulkner. I think on it for a while and decide I look more like Faulkner than Joyce. Nothing Irish about me. Ruth’s pulled her hair behind her ear, that one long strand of blonde. A single pearl earring. We’ve all pitched in and paid the bill and I’ve made sure we’ve over-tipped.