Too Many Men

by Lily Brett

  They ate in their well-pressed suits. Not one of the men removed his jacket for the meal. Their shirts were crisp and creaseless and their shoes perfectly shined.

  Ruth couldn’t take her eyes off the table of Germans. They were graciously polite with each other. They lacked the chumminess of American or Australian men. They were lavishly well-mannered with the waiters and waitresses. They nodded their heads and said thank you to every ounce of tea poured and every dish removed. A politeness so excessive it bordered on caricature. All that courtesy and restraint made Ruth want to fart or burp loudly. She decided to go for a walk. She had seven hours to kill until her father arrived.

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  Ruth walked. She wasn’t walking anywhere in particular. She was just walking. Warsaw was an ordinary city, she thought. Apart from the perfectly reconstructed old town, built from scratch after the war, there was not a lot to look at. She knew she was close to the University of Warsaw. She walked in the general direction of the university.

  She passed a Wedel chocolate shop. Her father was always talking about Wedel chocolate. He spoke of it in the same exalted terms that he used to describe Polish ham. “Polish ham is out of this world. Sweet like anything,” he would say. Wedel’s chocolate was, in Edek’s opinion, “out of this world.”

  You would have thought his life in Poland was composed of slices of ham and blocks of chocolate. Maybe in Edek’s mind it was. It was certainly easier to dwell on ham and chocolate than a dead mother and father and sister and brothers. They were truly out of this world, Ruth thought.

  Edek always looked transported when he recalled the taste of the ham or the chocolate. Ruth looked at the chocolate in the window. It did look good, but then most chocolate looked good to her. She thought that the sight of a whole shop full of Wedel’s chocolate would definitely make the trip from Australia worthwhile for her father.

  Ruth bought Edek blocks of chocolate whenever she traveled. She had sent him Mexican chocolate, English chocolate, French chocolate, and chocolate from Bermuda. She regularly shipped packets of Hershey’s semi-sweet dark chocolate to him from New York. She understood Edek’s love of chocolate. She felt that way about cakes. Poppy seed cakes and cheesecakes.

  Warsaw had wonderful cake shops. Cake shops that had the cakes of her childhood. When she was growing up they didn’t have apple pies or jam tarts or custard or vanilla slices or other Australian cakes in the house.

  They had strudel and sponge cakes and marzipan and cheesecakes. The cakes of the past. The cakes that Ruth could see all around her now.

  She was gazing at a large poppy seed strudel on the counter of a small cake stall in a pedestrian underpass close to the university, when she felt a tug at the hem of her coat. Ruth looked down. A woman was sitting cross-legged on the ground, almost lost in the throng of students.

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  It was hard to tell how old she was. Her skin was dull with ingrained dirt and her eyes were flat with weariness. The multilayered cotton gar-ments she wore were smudged and clouded with grime and dust. A large, once brightly colored scarf was wound in intricate circles around her head.

  She tugged at Ruth’s coat again, and looked up imploringly. Ruth slid the strap of her backpack off her shoulder. She had to give this woman some money. She had seen several gypsy women in Warsaw. Most of them were begging. Ruth smiled at the woman.

  In between the folds of the woman’s clothes, something moved. Buried in a grubbiness it should never have been a part of was a baby. The baby was attached to one of the woman’s breasts. Ruth looked at the baby. It seemed inert. Almost lifeless. The breast, a brown, wrinkled flat bag of a breast, looked as though it couldn’t contain any nourishment. Ruth wanted to cry. She opened her purse. The woman held out her hand. It was a surprisingly young hand. Ruth gave her fifty zlotys.

  Fifty zlotys was a bit less than twenty dollars. Ruth knew it wasn’t much.

  She wanted to give the woman more, but she felt too embarrassed. She didn’t want to emphasize the discrepancy in their financial positions. What an imbecile she was, she thought. As though it wasn’t obvious that she had more money.

  She got out another fifty zlotys and gave it to the woman. The woman smiled. If she hadn’t had so many teeth missing it would have been a very sweet smile. The woman said something to her. “Nie mówie˛ dobrze po po l-sku, ” Ruth said.

  Ruth could say Nie mówie˛ dobrze po po l sku, I don’t speak Polish very well, very well. It confused people. “You have a perfect accent,” several people said to her. If only she could say more in this perfect accent it would be useful.

  The woman repeated what she said. Ruth shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. She had no idea what the woman was saying. The woman repeated herself, slowly enunciating each word.

  “It means ‘too many men,’ ” a young man passing by said to Ruth.

  “She is saying to you, you have too many men in your life.” Ruth laughed.

  Too many men. She didn’t have any men in her life. The gypsy woman looked agitated. She stabbed the air with her finger and repeated what she had said.

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  “She says you have too many men in your life,” the young man said.

  “These gypsies are psychic,” he said. “They have a God-given psychic power.” Ruth was irritated. Why were Poles so fixated on God? “God-given?” she said. “If there is a God, he could have given them food and shelter.”

  The young man raised his eyebrows in the manner of someone of an older generation, and crossed himself. “You don’t need to protect yourself,” Ruth said to him. “It was my blasphemy.”

  “Do widzenia,” she said to the woman. Ruth could say good-bye well, too.

  “Do widzenia,” the woman said.

  Ruth wondered how the gypsy baby was going to survive. The baby had no future at all. Ruth felt depressed. She felt that she should be able to do something about the gypsy woman and her baby. Something about all gypsy women and their babies.

  She felt the same way about the homeless in New York. In her first few years she had given money to every homeless person she had passed. Now, she donated money, annually, to several charities. But she felt that it wasn’t enough. The money that she gave didn’t really make a dent in her lifestyle.

  Middle-class people like her were always puffing themselves up with what they did for others. The reality was that most of them did very little.

  Ruth looked at the students around her. This part of Warsaw, with its student population, had more life to it. It had a vivacity and a vigor that was missing from the rest of the city. The students had the earnestness and joyfulness of students anywhere. They talked and laughed and argued with each other with passion and intensity. She was glad she was walking in the middle of them.

  She thought about the gypsy woman. Too many men. What did she mean? It sounded like a joke. A New York joke. In New York, single women regularly bemoaned the lack of available men in the city. There did seem to be a shortage of men in New York. And those who were there considered themselves highly desirable commodities.

  Ruth didn’t want too many men. She wasn’t that comfortable with men.

  She wasn’t that comfortable with anyone. The only man she had truly felt comfortable with went back to his wife. He was separated when he met Ruth. And Ruth was newly divorced. One day his wife decided she wanted him back. His wife cried and screamed and drove her car through a restau-

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  rant window to show him how much she needed him. He went back to her.

  He called Ruth, often, after that. He said he loved her, but he was frightened of what his wife might do to herself if he wasn’t around.

  Being left for someone else left Ruth feeling awful. It gave her a second-rate feeling about herself. As though she was a runner-up and not good enough to get the prize. She knew that that ima
ge of herself with a man as a prize was a retrograde thought. No woman should think of a man as a prize.

  She wasn’t thinking very clearly when she met him. She knew he was still married. But, two days after she met him, thirty-four hours after she met him, to be exact, she was mad about him. She was wildly in love and understood, for the first time in her life, why it was called wild. They were both twenty-nine. He was a painter. He painted large, almost monastic, medita-tive abstract paintings. Gray and black strokes quietly placed on the canvas.

  She loved to watch him paint. He painted the mystical marks with rough, firm gestures. When he used color, it was muted and elegant. Pale aqua oblong ellipses, interspersed with shadows of themselves, swam like fish across a bare background. Ruth found his paintings surprisingly calming.

  Painting, art, of any sort, was not part of her world before she had met Garth Taylor. He was not as self-contained as his paintings. He touched and laughed and cried. He was unself-conscious. His clothes were not the carefully chosen, studiedly casual working-class clothes of the art world.

  He dressed more like a moderately successful accountant. He wore gabar-dine trousers and plain shirts. But he was unlike any accountant Ruth knew.

  He was unlike most other people she knew. He was tactile and sensual.

  He allowed mango juice to drip down his face when he ate the fruit. He pulled lobsters apart with his fingers and sucked the flesh out of the claws.

  The filaments of fish or intestines or liquid that sometimes sprayed out at him left him unperturbed.

  “I’ve never loved anybody so utterly,” Garth Taylor said to her, days after they met. He seemed to love all of her. He loved her body. Nobody, including Ruth, had ever loved her body. When Garth told her she was beautiful, she pointed out the lack of proportion between the top half of her and the bottom. “I love the feel of you,” he said to her over and over again. “I’m too fat,” she replied.

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  “She is fat,” was the worst thing Rooshka Rothwax could say about another female. Fat men were not quite in the same category. “She is so slim,” was her mother’s highest accolade. It didn’t appear to matter if the slim girl or woman was clever or stupid or kind or arrogant. If she was slim, she was to be admired. Edek also derided fat people. He didn’t seem to notice he was one of them himself. He had spent most of his adult life twenty to thirty pounds overweight. He was still a bit chubby now.

  Ruth’s mother’s slim figure was admired by everyone. “I was always a slim girl,” Rooshka Rothwax used to say. “I was never fat.” Ruth thought that her mother saw greed and lack of self-control stitched into every fat cell in existence. “In the ghetto I never ate my bread straightaway,” her mother would say to her. “I was a human being. Not a pig. Even when I was starving.” “In Auschwitz,” Rooshka would say, “if someone was fat you knew that they were doing something that was making the lives of the other Jews worse.”

  The Nazis caricatured Jews as short and fat. Rooshka Rothwax spent the rest of her life, after the war, determined to be tall and thin. She added two and a half inches to her height and never overate. “Are you sure you’re five foot four?” Ruth had asked her mother once. Ruth was nine, at the time. They had measured Ruth’s height at school. “You’re five foot two,”

  the gym teacher had said to Ruth. “I can’t be,” Ruth had said. “I’m taller than my mother and she’s five foot four.” “I am five foot four,” Rooshka Rothwax had said in answer to Ruth’s question. “I am tall for a woman,”

  her mother had said. “You are too tall. You are so tall because you eat so many sweets.” Ruth had thought her mother hadn’t known about the sweets. Rooshka had never mentioned the assorted sweet wrappers Ruth left lying around.

  When Ruth reached five foot nine, she tried to stop eating sweets. She was already taller than all of the boys in her class. She ate no sweets or chocolate for a week. She didn’t shrink. She went back to her two packets of musk Lifesavers after school, and the bag of chocolate-coated broken biscuits she bought in the grocery store every morning. She remained at five foot nine.

  Ruth wasn’t too tall for Garth Taylor. She wasn’t too anything. He toler-

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  ated all of her idiosyncrasies. He was amused by them. “You’re so funny,”

  he would say to her. Garth hadn’t come from a funny past. His mother was English and his father was Irish. Alcoholic, illiterate, and Irish. Ruth couldn’t understand Garth’s lack of connection to his parents until she met them. There was a mocking cruelty to his father and an indifference in his mother. Garth’s stories about being beaten up by his father and having to protect his mother from similar beatings made sense to Ruth when she met the Taylors.

  Ruth had wondered why Garth bothered to keep in contact with his parents at all. They didn’t seem to love him. “You were born nothing and you’ll die nothing,” Garth’s father had said to him the day Garth introduced Ruth to them. Ruth had squirmed and wished she hadn’t asked to meet the Taylors. Ruth knew that Garth had had very little as a child. She hadn’t realized how little. She knew that he had walked the three miles to school and back, in bare feet, until he was twelve. His parents’ lack of warmth and apparent lack of interest overwhelmed Ruth. She couldn’t wait to leave their house.

  The Taylors still lived in the same small fibrous cement house, in an outer suburb of Sydney, that Garth grew up in. Garth had moved on. He had moved into the middle-class world of art and literature. He wrote art reviews for a national newspaper and had regular exhibitions of his paintings in galleries around the country. “I’d rather have all the combined neu-roses of every Jewish parent than have your parents,” Ruth had said to Garth after they left his parents’ place. “They’re very cold,” she said.

  “They tried their best,” he said. “My mother was sixteen when she had me and my father was nineteen.”

  “They don’t have to be so cruel,” she said.

  “They can’t help it,” he said.

  “Why aren’t you angry with them?” she had said to him.

  “I’m just not,” he said. “I feel sorry for them.”

  Garth found it hard to be angry. He couldn’t even make a dismissive comment about anyone he knew. He went out of his way not to hurt or offend anybody. Ruth was rude for him. She had a sharp tongue and she used it liberally. Resentments and irritations flew out of her. Garth laughed at them.

  Garth laughed a lot. And Ruth laughed with him. They laughed at how T O O M A N Y M E N

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  happy they were with each other. And Garth wept. He wept with joy. Ruth, who had barely been able to cry, even when she was in pain, wept with him.

  He didn’t seem to mind her anxiety or her fear. “I’m freeing you of the need to feel those things,” she joked with him. “You can feel them vicari-ously through me.” He smiled at her. His smile lifted her. It lifted her spirits and overrode many of her fears. She had never been so happy. She knew it had to end. It ended the day his wife called to say she wanted him back.

  He had married someone he didn’t like very much and he had stayed married to her while she humiliated him by laughing at him in his yellow nylon pajamas, or by lying to him about the various men she took on as lovers.

  “She bought me the pajamas,” Garth said to Ruth.

  “Why did you wear them?” Ruth asked.

  “I thought they were just pajamas,” he said. Garth spoke about his wife with kindness and understanding. “She’s not a bad person,” he said. “She just has some problems.”

  “The humiliation of her affairs must have reminded you of the humiliation your father made you feel,” Ruth said to him. “The humiliation and the degradation must have felt like love.”

  When Garth’s wife drove through the restaurant window, he came to see Ruth. “She really needs me,” he said to Ruth, weeping. “I’m worried about what she’ll do to herself if I’m
not there.”

  “Well, you better be there,” Ruth had said.

  “You should have fought for him,” her girlfriend Cathy had said.

  “I don’t want anyone who doesn’t want me,” Ruth said.

  “He does want you,” she said. “He just needs help extricating himself from her.”

  “Then he doesn’t want me enough,” Ruth said. She left for New York two months later.

  Garth had called Ruth several times in the last few years. Three years after he went back to his wife he had left for good. He had given her the house and the car that had replaced the one that she had smashed. Whenever Garth called, Ruth made sure that she exuded friendliness and warmth. But she gave him no information about her life. She gave him nothing but politeness. And she made sure that she was the one to say good-bye first.

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  Sometimes when Ruth stayed in expensive hotels she thought of Garth.

  He loved cheap motels. She understood this. There was an immediacy to a cheap motel. Everything was what it appeared to be. Nothing was dressed up or masked behind a multitude of pillows and bolsters or sleep masks, slippers, and shoehorns. The kettle was there to boil water, not to show you that the management cared. There were the grunts and coughs of the other guests and, sometimes, someone else’s pubic hair on your blanket. But she understood why Garth preferred this world of lodgings to the five-star circuit she was on now.

  In expensive hotels, guests never acknowledged each other. No one spoke at breakfast, unless it was to someone they already knew. It seemed to be an unwritten rule. If you broke the rule and said good morning, you were viewed with suspicion. The wealthy and the successful, it seemed to Ruth, indicated their status and power by a lack of friendliness. An affecta-tion intended, Ruth thought, to let the world know that they already knew too many people. As if a sign of interest in a stranger might reveal a vulner-ability or a curiosity that could disqualify them from their own ranks.

  Why was she thinking about Garth now? Ruth thought. Probably because she knew that her father still saw him. Edek and Garth spoke on the phone now and then, and had dinner together once or twice a year.