Too Many Men

by Lily Brett

  Edek periodically gave Ruth news about Garth.

  Edek always tried to bring up the subject casually. “I did see Garth,” he would say. “He is still by himself. Not married.” Edek’s nonchalance would last less than a minute.

  “You are a stupid girl, Ruthie,” he would say. “What did he do to you that was so bad?”

  “Nothing,” she would say.

  “Why won’t you give him a chance?” Edek would say.

  “For how long does he have to suffer?” Edek had asked the last time he had brought the subject of Garth up.

  “No one is suffering, Dad,” she’d said. “If you love him so much marry him yourself,” she had suddenly shouted. “I’m sick of hearing about him.”

  “Sorry,” Edek had said. “I thought maybe you would see it a bit differently now.” That was two years ago. Her outburst had surprised her and shocked Edek. Edek hadn’t mentioned Garth since.

  “You experience anything that feels bad to you as a permanent situaT O O M A N Y M E N

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  tion,” one of her shrinks had said to her. “If it is raining, you think it will rain forever. If there is noise in a neighbor’s apartment you think it will never stop. You have trouble seeing these situations as transitory. That’s why you can’t forgive people. You think they, like you, are still connected to the incident or the argument or the difficulty that made you both feel bad. They have forgotten, but you haven’t.” There were some things, Ruth thought, when the shrink had finished, that shouldn’t be forgotten.

  Ruth hadn’t thought about Garth this much for years. She had been too attached to Garth. That sort of attachment came affixed to a flood of anxiety for her. She had worried about his well-being. If she woke up, in the middle of the night, she checked that he was still breathing. If he was late to meet her, she envisaged him bloodied and broken, in an ambulance. If he caught a cold, she enlarged the outcome to include bronchial pneumonia or a new strain of flu that had no cure. It was exhausting. Attachments were enervating.

  She had had less anxiety since she had been unattached. She had been on dates with different men over the years. She hated the word “date.”

  Americans used “date” whether they were referring to sixteen- or sixty-year-olds. It was hard to come up with a better word. “Rendezvous” or

  “assignation” suggested a mystery that wasn’t present on most dates. An evening of “social intercourse” was too wordy, although it did possess the stilted quality of many dates. So Ruth, too, used the word “date.”

  Her dates had been, mostly, unmemorable. She found New York men unexpectedly juvenile. They prevaricated over insubstantial issues, small things, like the choice of a cup of coffee, with as much indecision and intensity as a young girl. “I’ll have a café latte with skinny milk and a dust-ing of cinnamon, not chocolate, on the top,” the last man she had gone out with had said. “No, make that a skinny cappuccino and hold the cinnamon,” he had said, before he settled for an iced coffee made with skim milk, and Sweet’n Low, not NutraSweet.

  It was not manly to be that fussy, Ruth thought. But just being a man was enough, in New York. If you were a man, you were desirable and in demand. Possibly this made New York men more self-centered. Maybe if women were in the same position, they would dispense with the need to be thoughtful and interesting, too.

  “Why don’t you like me?” the latte/cappuccino/iced coffee man had

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  L I L Y B R E T T

  said to her when she refused his second invitation. “I’m practicing moderation in my attachments,” she said. “Hey,” he had said, “I’m a long way from asking you to marry me.”

  Ruth felt light-headed. She had walked to the outskirts of Warsaw and back. The outlying areas of Warsaw were as unattractive as the outskirts of any city she had seen. Gray concrete housing projects were everywhere.

  Building after building was the same. Drab, dilapidated, and depressing.

  She was glad to be back near the university. She needed to eat. She stopped at a café full of students. If there were so many students eating there, she thought, the food must be either very good or very cheap.

  Inside, the café was noisy and humid. Ruth stood in line at the buffet.

  She took a large plate of kasha and a bowl of beetroot salad. Kasha, boiled buckwheat, was a dish her mother had often made. She sat at a table with two young women, who smiled when she joined them, and moved over to make more room for her. Ruth felt grateful for their friendliness. She ate the kasha with relish. It was very good.

  Ruth thought about the gypsy woman. “These gypsies are psychic,” the young man had said. If there were psychic people, Ruth thought, why couldn’t they see her skepticism and leave her alone. When she was sixteen, a fortune-teller at a circus had called out to Ruth to tell her she would one day meet a man with a large scar who would play a very important part in her life. It was a small circus, set up in a seaside suburb of Melbourne for the summer. There were holes in the circus tent and the ringmaster’s wig kept slipping. The two circus lions looked moth-eaten and drugged. The fortune-teller sat at a table, near the entrance to the tent. She also sold soft drinks.

  “It is a very large scar,” she had said to Ruth. Ruth exchanged glances with the girlfriend she was with.

  “Oh yeah,” they said to each other. The oh yeah of sarcastic, sophisticated sixteen-year-olds. As Ruth was leaving, the fortune-teller called her back. “I can see it,” she said. “It is on his chest. The scar runs vertically from the top of his rib cage to his waist.” Ruth’s sarcasm was temporarily subdued. “Thank you,” she had said to the fortune-teller. For years Ruth made jokes about scouring the emergency rooms of hospitals to look for the man of her dreams.

  The noise and heat of the student café were too much for Ruth. She fin-T O O M A N Y M E N

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  ished her meal and left. She was, she decided, too old to be with so many young people. She’d go back to the hotel. She looked at her watch. She had enough time for a quick swim.

  The pool at the Bristol was small. Ruth swam up and down. She tried to turn at the end of each lap without stopping. That way she could get some sort of cardiovascular benefit from this swim. It was hard to get your heart-beat rate up by swimming. Unless you were a very good swimmer, and Ruth wasn’t.

  Her mother and father were very impressed when she learned to swim as a child. “Look how she swims,” they said to each other. It was not such a great accomplishment. All Australian schoolchildren were given swimming lessons. But Rooshka and Edek continued to see it as extraordinary. “Look how she swims,” they said to each other and anyone else in the vicinity each time they went to the beach. The excessive admiration bothered Ruth a bit, but she kept quiet. She was pleased that she was pleasing them. Ruth thought that not many people in Poland must have been swimmers. Or maybe it was just Jews who were not at home in the water.

  Something disturbed Ruth’s reverie about her father. It was a voice. “I should tell you my initials,” the voice said. “My initials are R. F. F. H.” Ruth stopped swimming. There was no one else in the pool. There was no one else in the room.

  “Maybe I make it easier for you?” the voice said. “My initials are R. H.”

  Ruth swam to the edge of the pool. She got out. She shook her head.

  She must have water in her ears. Water in her ears often disoriented her.

  She should have worn a cap. She felt sick. Waterlogged ears had left her off-balance and nauseated before. She toweled herself dry.

  She looked around. There was definitely no one in the pool. No one in the room. She started to feel better. There was no voice. It must have been her imagination. “You’ve got more imagination than is good for you,” a schoolteacher had said to her when she was six.

  There was still some water left in her left ear. She leaned over and hopped up and down on one leg. She felt the water trickle out. She looked around again. There was nobody in the room. Her imagi
nation must have been working overtime.

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  L I L Y B R E T T

  She was always imagining things. Imagining lines for other people.

  Inventing sentences for others to say. She did this in her working life, and in her life outside the office. She prepared herself for every encounter by rehearsing the anticipated conversation. She gave her dentist and her doctor dialogue. “I need my head elevated, and I like to sit up between procedures,” she would practice saying to the dentist before every appointment.

  “That’s fine. I know you’re anxious about dental treatment,” was the reply she would make up for the dentist.

  Ruth rehearsed her lines so thoroughly that she often forgot that the real conversation had not yet taken place. And she was shocked, in real life, when others detoured from the dialogue she had given them. And even more shocked when she herself made the departure.

  She had practiced what she was going to say for weeks before she told husband number one that she was leaving him. When he said, “You can’t go, I’ll lie down in front of the car,” she had said, “That’s fine. I’ll drive over you.” She had intended this conversation to be about remaining friends forever.

  Ruth walked back to her room. She had an hour to shower and get dressed before leaving for the airport to pick up her father.

  Chapter Three

  E dek Rothwax emerged from the customs and immigration area. He paused just outside the self-opening doors. He looked around him. A look of bewilderment and anxiety occupied Edek’s face.

  Ruth had spotted the short, anxious movements Edek made with his head, the minute he had come through the door. “Dad,” she called out from behind the roped-off area she was standing in. Edek saw her. His face broke into a smile. It was a smile of relief. The sort of smile you saw on small children who thought they had lost their mothers. He ran toward her, clutching a briefcase and an overnight bag.

  The sight of Edek made Ruth want to cry. She blinked back her tears.

  She had missed him. Most of the time she tried not to let herself know how much she missed Edek. From the other side of the world, she took care of his phone bills, his credit card payments, his health care, and his car insurance. But she knew she wasn’t really looking after him.

  If she really was a good daughter, she would be living closer to him. She wouldn’t be separated by ten thousand miles and delivering her love for him, long distance, in the form of a bit of money and some bookkeeping.

  She bit her lip. She didn’t want to cry. There were two things she was determined not to do on this trip. She was not going to cry and she was not going to feel angry or annoyed with Edek.

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  L I L Y B R E T T

  She looked at Edek. He was trying to overtake a woman in a wheelchair.

  He looked well. He didn’t look like a man who had just flown halfway around the world. Ruth was relieved. She had dreaded seeing a decline in Edek. Dreaded the thought that he might look noticeably older. She hadn’t seen him for almost a year. She moved to the front of the crowd to get closer to him. He was still hemmed in by the wheelchair.

  Edek looked up at Ruth and shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly, the woman in the wheelchair stopped. Edek saw his opportunity. He lost no time. With one nimble, surefooted movement, he propelled himself past the woman. Ruth ran up to him and hugged him.

  “I’m so happy to see you, Ruthie darling,” he said. “Now that I have seen you, I feel much better.”

  “What’s wrong, Dad?” Ruth said.

  “Ach, the little piece where you put your feet up didn’t go up?” Edek said.

  “What little piece, where?” said Ruth.

  “The little piece what you put your feet on. That’s why a person flies business class, to get a little piece,” Edek said.

  “Oh, you mean a footrest.”

  “That’s right. A rest for the feet,” said Edek. “My feet did get no rest on this trip. I had to sit the whole way with my feet just normally on the floor and I paid for my feet to be on this rest.”

  “Your seat didn’t have one?” Ruth said.

  “Of course the seat had one. All the seats in business class have got such a rest. My one didn’t come up. It was stuck,” Edek said.

  “Oh, no, what a drag,” Ruth said.

  “That’s not the end,” said Edek. “They put me in the last row and my chair didn’t go back so much. Other people could nearly sleep in their chair. I couldn’t sleep. I did have to read a book the whole time.”

  “I’ll call up and complain, tomorrow,” Ruth said.

  “No, no, no,” Edek said. “I fixed it. I have to go to the airport manager for the airline, and talk to him.”

  “Now?” Ruth said. “What are you going to talk to him about?”

  “I’m going to talk to him,” Edek said. “You go pick up my suitcase from the luggage place.”

  “Dad, I’ll talk to whoever you want me to talk to tomorrow,” Ruth said.

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  “It’s nine o’clock. We should go to the hotel. You need to get some sleep.”

  “I know what I need,” Edek said. “I need to talk to this manager. My suitcase is brown.”

  “Brown?” Ruth said.

  “You will see it,” Edek said. “I did put some yellow tape what they use for packaging on the handle and around the case. That way I can recognize it straightaway.”

  “Exactly where will we meet?” said Ruth.

  “It’s not such a big airport,” Edek said. “We will meet here where we are standing.”

  “It’s a bit crowded here,” Ruth said. “Let’s meet by that brown bench.”

  “Okay,” Edek said. “You think I won’t see you if you are not next to this brown bench. I will find you.”

  “We’ll meet next to the bench,” she said. “Dad,” she said, “can you believe we’re in Poland, together?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I got to go to the manager’s office.”

  “I love you, Dad,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” he said as he rushed off.

  Ruth heard him ask a guard for directions, in Polish. The two men ges-ticulated for two minutes. The guard pointed to the right, then to the left, and then waved his arm in a motion that indicated distance. Edek thanked him with several short bows. Ruth watched Edek running across the airport. He took the quick little steps she was so familiar with. One small, swift step after another.

  He always ran like this. As though everything was an emergency. He ran to the corner store, if he ran out of milk. He ran to answer the phone. But there was an enthusiasm as well as desperation in his urgency. He looked happy when he was running. If Ruth needed anything bought or picked up and shipped to her, in New York, from Australia, she called Edek. Edek bought, packed, and shipped Australian face creams and body lotion, Australian raincoats and Australian boots, for Ruth. He did administrative tasks and chores such as renewing her Australian driver’s license, and making sure that her name was still on the electoral rolls.

  She called him for small things and big things. Things that had to be done were irresistible to Edek. Ruth knew that her request would be executed with ruthless efficiency. The boots or the creams or the documents

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  L I L Y B R E T T

  would arrive in New York in record time. She knew that her father would drop everything to run an errand.

  He used to run errands for Henia, endlessly. Henia was a New York woman Edek had known in Lódz before the war. “We should be together,”

  she said to him on one of his visits to Ruth. “I knew your Rooshka and you knew my Josl. If we get together, I can talk about my Josl and you can talk about your Rooshka.”

  Ruth had encouraged her father in this liaison. Edek had been so depressed since her mother died. And Henia seemed to have a liveliness and sparkle to her. “It wouldn’t be like with Mum,” Edek had said to Ruth when he finally agreed to leave Austra
lia and move in with Henia.

  “Of course it wouldn’t be the same as your marriage to Mum,” Ruth had said.

  In order for Edek to stay in the United States, he needed a green card.

  Edek and Henia had had to get married. Josl had left Henia a wealthy woman. Her two grown sons were not about to let the wealth be diluted.

  They didn’t want this marriage. But Henia wanted Edek, and she overrode their objections. The sons prepared a thirty-page prenuptial agreement for Edek to sign. “I find that very objectionable,” Ruth had said to Edek. “I wouldn’t sign it.” “What’s the big deal?” he said, and signed the documents. The marriage lasted four years.

  Henia’s seduction of Edek lost some of its gloss after the wedding.

  When Henia was in full pursuit of Edek, she smiled at him and laughed at everything he said. She patted him on the hands and on the head. She blew him kisses in the street. She didn’t play her cards as well once they were married. She criticized Ruth, endlessly. “She is not married. She doesn’t have any children. What sort of life is this?” she said to Edek every time Ruth rang. Edek never answered her.

  Edek and Henia had dinner regularly with her sons and their wives and children. They ate at the older son’s house every Wednesday and Sunday, and with the younger son on Tuesdays. If Ruth invited them out, Henia developed a toothache or a stomachache or a headache. “I make her ache,”

  Ruth said once to Edek. “It is not so funny,” he said. He looked miserable.

  “Look at her,” Henia had said to Edek, the only time she had ever invited Ruth to lunch. “She doesn’t eat.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t like your food?” Edek said.

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  “That’s impossible. My boys love my food,” Henia said. “Anyway, it is not your fault she is like this. Let’s forget about it.”

  “My daughter is fine,” Edek had said.

  “Something is not right with her,” Henia had answered. “She moves her leg under the table. The whole table claps and bumps.”