“I’m afraid I am not taking very good care of you,” ABC says.
Ruth says, “Oh, phooey, honey. Who cares? I’m dying, and hopefully soon. You have a life to live. Anyway, there’s only one thing I can’t do for myself. I can’t drive to Newton and buy my grass.”
“The house is dirty. I will clean all day. It’ll look better,” ABC says.
“God, the hours of my life I spent cleaning,” Ruth says. “Some of the only hours I regret. I was a housewife. They used to call us that. And I cleaned so much, as if it was the only way to demonstrate my value to the world.”
“Well, this is no way to live,” ABC says. “You deserve better.”
“I’m done living,” Ruth says. “And I am not trying to be dramatic here.”
“I understand,” ABC says. “We went to see my friend’s dad at the Mayflower. He’s gotten a kind of dementia that comes and goes. He’s a lot younger than you. It doesn’t seem like a dignified way to go. I wouldn’t want to go that way.”
“Gill,” Ruth says.
“You know him?”
“They don’t let people go in a dignified way anymore,” Ruth says. “You promise me, if you find me on death’s door one morning, you won’t call 911? You give me some weed, maybe some painkillers—or whiskey if that’s all you have—and don’t call a soul until you are sure I am gone.”
“I got it.”
“This is the one major kindness the young can do for the old, yet they are all afraid to let it happen. They call 911, and you get six months of medical care and a month of hospice instead of an easy way out.”
ABC looks at Ruth, whose eyes have taken on a dark sheen, the pupils overwhelming the deeply blue, almost purple, irises.
“Okay,” ABC says, although she isn’t sure she could do what has just been asked of her.
“You see?” Ruth says. “This is why I like you more than anybody else. When I give you the straight dope, you don’t reel off some optimistic bullshit.”
“I understand wanting out,” ABC says.
Ruth pats ABC’s hand.
“I’ve lived a full life,” Ruth says. “A very full life indeed,” she says.
Anytime Ruth says “a very full life” in a dreamy whisper, ABC will stop whatever she’s doing and sit down and listen to the story at hand. On this particular morning, Ruth talks not of a trip to Europe with her husband, or something she’d studied in college, when she was the first woman from her small town in Minnesota to ever go away to college, but of something that happened later in life.
Often, Ruth begins her story by asking ABC a question. “Your friend Philly. Was she your first lover?”
“It was something new to us. It had just happened. We’d been friends first.”
Ruth nods slowly. ABC is afraid Ruth will fall asleep. She wants to talk more, wants desperately for Ruth to remember this conversation, to bring her some insight and meaning, two things she feels are perhaps no longer existent in the world. Certainly none of the events of the last year indicated that insight is a real possibility, or that meaning is something one could discover.
“We grieve for lovers differently than we grieve for friends or parents,” Ruth says. “The physical separation—it can be unbearable.”
ABC feels as if she can hardly move, or as if something inside her body will turn to water, will liquify and turn to nothing. And she’ll cease to exist. She feels—there was no other way to say it—suddenly unsolid.
“The way that you carry your grief,” Ruth says, “it’s the look of passion, taken away before it had run its course.”
“Yes,” ABC says. “We’d just begun.”
“Do you only like girls?” Ruth says. It is funny, the way she says it, laced with bluntness and naiveté all at once. If some frat boy had phrased it that way, ABC would be offended and angry. But she understands that to Ruth it is a real question, a desire to know her better; girls was a generational term. To Ruth, ABC is so young. A girl.
“I don’t know,” ABC says. “I loved her. I wanted her to be my lover. I have not loved a woman like that before.”
“Or anybody?” Ruth says.
“No.”
“Do you love Don?” Ruth says.
“When I am near him, if I fall asleep near him, I still have those dreams of Philly, you know, emerging from that body of water. Only if he is here, only after we smoke pot and lie down together, do I dream of Philly. Those are the only times I get her in a dream.”
Ruth stares off into the dark corner of the room, as if she can see something there, and then her face lights with recognition. Ruth says, “Oh, I see. He’s a vessel.”
Ruth has gone pale and her voice is almost inaudibly hoarse. And then, just as swiftly, she perks up and resumes talking in her usual way.
“Ruth, are you okay?”
“Your generation, all of this shame!” Ruth says. “My generation—our parents didn’t think about us much. And if they did, they whacked us when we were in trouble. But ever since your generation’s parents gave up spanking? They’ve shamed their children into submission. Even the very good people in your generation, especially the very good people, just have so much shame. Everything you do makes you feel guilty.”
“True,” ABC says.
“I was over fifty,” Ruth says. “Can you believe it?”
ABC smiles, but she doesn’t follow.
“When I took my first lover, other than my husband. When I finally had a second lover, I was practically an old lady.”
“Wow.”
“How many lovers have you had?” Ruth says.
“There was only one who mattered.”
“Hmm,” Ruth says. “I think that is a good thing, sweetie. I loved my husband, loved him since we met the summer I turned twenty, wanted to have a family with him, wanted to feel him next to me each night. We had a good life, but, well, when the kids left, there was some distance, and I was, I was too old to consider the dangers of it. I’d always wanted a lover, deep down; somehow I knew I would take one if an opportunity arose. I wasn’t looking for it though, and assumed it would happen only if something happened to John.”
She gets teary for a moment, dabs at her eyes with a tissue. “And he had his. I am sure Mr. Manetti had his. Back then, it was different. In the seventies, professors did that sort of thing. With students. He traveled with one girl and I could see the sadness in his face when the trip was over. A conference in England. He said he had gone alone.”
ABC, suddenly exhausted, shrugs. “I’m sorry.” What else can she say? She stands up and thinks she might put some soup on the stove for lunch. Ruth is tired. She’ll nap soon and probably forget the entire conversation.
“I was slender, still, and walked every morning, and I did my weights and exercises, my hair was still dark, not as black as it had been, but with the exercise, which back then, was not a very common thing to do, and the hair, and my figure—my hips had always attracted men. I was so sad when I broke one a few years ago. I had always considered my hips my best attribute. I used to wear the dresses and blue jeans that flattered them. I was somewhat vain! It’s hard to believe, right, with this afghan on my lap, my hair a whitened bird’s nest.”
ABC finds a brush in the junk drawer. “Should I brush it?”
“Sure,” Ruth says and ABC stands behind Ruth, behind her chair, and brushes as gently as she can. The old woman feels as if her neck is easily breakable, as if brushing might take out her remaining hair.
“It was a summer morning, and I was walking, briskly,” she says, “dumbbells in hand, out on the path that goes behind the observatory, and I met a young man, a new professor, dashing—that’s the only way to describe him.
“I would see him out there every morning and our nods and hellos soon became friendly exchanges. It was summer. He’d just arrived, hadn’t taught his first class yet, and one day, I just . . .”
Ruth smiles.
“What?” ABC says, still brushing.
“I blew him
,” Ruth says.
ABC shrieks with a kind of shock and begins to laugh. Ruth’s slender shoulders shake with laughter too, silent laughter. It takes ABC almost five minutes to recover.
“In some ways, it’s terrible, but now, it’s just, well, it’s just a fact.”
“Where did you blow him? Right there on the path? Oh my God!”
“That’s what they said then. It was 1982. They said ‘blow job.’ They said, ‘She blew him.’ Isn’t that still what they say?”
“I guess so. Sometimes we say oral sex.”
“Oral sex? Sounds clinical.”
ABC smiles.
“Did you have oral with Philly?” Ruth says.
ABC says, “That’s private.”
“I did always wonder about that. I always thought a woman would know just what to do.”
ABC smiles. “Yeah, pretty much. So, oh my God, you just blew this guy?”
ABC wants details before Ruth loses her energy and clarity.
“I didn’t just blow him. The kids were gone by then. Away. Grown. And John was at a conference in London, was spending most of the summer there. John annoyed me. It was hard to get used to being a couple without kids around. Everything he did annoyed me. And I think it was mutual. I wanted time away from him, just away from his snoring and the slurping of cereal and the general noise of him. It was the first time I’d ever lived alone in my life, that summer.
“And so, one day, on the path, this man, this shirtless beautiful man, was tying his shoe when I passed him. And so we got to talking. He was new to town, to the college, he said, and I invited him for coffee, I said I could tell him about life in Grinnell, and he looked at me, looked at my breasts, my face, my hips, and I felt him looking at me, and he said he’d finish his run and take a shower and come over.”
“And you did? Then?”
“All summer, we kept it up, and then John returned and school resumed, and it was different. He found a young woman to marry. He stayed on in the English department, and so I would see him, from time to time, and yet it was actually never that awkward. It was kind of, I don’t know, compartmentalized? It didn’t feel like my real life. It felt like some self-contained interlude . . . Jesus, I’m tired, ABC. All of a sudden I need to sleep.”
ABC helps her to bed.
As Ruth starts to fade, ABC asks, “When did all of this happen?”
Ruth, now smiling, closes her eyes, lets out a sigh. “Oh, years ago. Three decades ago. 1982, it was.”
“1982?”
“Yes. He wrote me some letters that fall. He disguised them by using envelopes he had stolen from the Presbyterian church. My husband always thought I was just getting the Presbyterian Women newsletter.”
“Clever,” ABC says.
Ruth, dozing now, murmurs, “He always wrote wonderful letters. I have some of them still. We should get rid of them, you know. Before I die. Remind me tomorrow.”
“Is this why your kids don’t talk to you anymore?” ABC says, though she’s already figured this out from the tears that flood Ruth’s eyes. “Your kids are lucky to have a mom like you,” ABC says. “You think they’d be more forgiving, you know?”
“Mothers have secrets,” Ruth says. “I mean, all women do. But mothers? Oh, they die full of secrets. There are certain things nobody wants mothers to say, to think, or to feel. There are restrictions, rules. And if those secrets get out? Unforgivable.”
JULY 7,
97 DEGREES
It is sweltering and Don and ABC are on the porch when a letter arrives by certified mail. They’ve taken to sitting in the heat, drinking cold beer, and then going into the house, blasting the AC, and getting stoned. It is a way to pass the day.
Don knows the mailman, Ron, who usually will stop and chat a bit with Don and then continue on his way. ABC has seen it happen a few times, and has always found it pleasant—the small talk of a small community going about simple business. But today Ron delivers a certified letter and as soon as Don signs the letter, Ron brisk-walks back to his truck. He has not even so much as smiled or nodded at ABC.
“What is it?” ABC says and Don already knows as he opens it. The return address is from a family law firm in Iowa City, the envelope marked confidential and urgent.
Don takes the letter from the envelope, a thick sheaf of pages.
“She filed for divorce,” Don says. “I’ve just been served.”
ABC breathes deep, puts a hand on Don’s shoulder. She feels as if there is the vibration of shattering plates coming from inside his body.
“Don Lowry,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
He doesn’t want to talk about it until they are inside, in the hazy smoke, and then all he says is this: “I want to kill myself too.”
“No, you don’t. You have a lot to live for,” she says.
“And you don’t?”
“It’s different for me, Don,” she says. “You have kids.”
“I’m like my father, ABC. People are better off without me now that I’ve hit this point.”
“That’s so not true,” ABC says. She knows he’s feeling bad about himself, and that he is scared, and she wants to let him vent.
“You don’t believe me,” Don says. “But I do. I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?”
“Watch Claire leave me for someone else? Watch my kids live with someone else? Watch my kids realize what a loser their father really is?”
“A loser father is better than a dead father, Don Lowry,” ABC says. “And you’re not a loser.”
“I want to be dead. Just like you.”
“Don Lowry.”
“Let’s make a pact. We’ll pick a date. We’ll find a place. We’ll go down together, make it look like an accident. That way the kids will get my life insurance.”
ABC doesn’t want to tell him yes, but she does. They shake on it. She wants him to wait for her to be ready, and before then, she’s sure, she can talk him out of it. Maybe she can save him. Maybe she can save his marriage. Maybe that is how she will find Philly again. Maybe if she saves Don Lowry’s life, Philly will come back to hers.
JULY 8,
89 DEGREES
Charlie finds, in a cabinet beneath the bookshelves of his father’s study, nine manuscript boxes hidden behind hundreds of back issues of The New Yorker.
He’d been browsing through the magazines, thinking he might try to sell them on eBay or maybe just keep them. He had the idea that he might read each one of them, cover to cover, and keep a journal about the experience. It would be one of those self-imposed regimens he’d been longing for and when he finished he imagined he would emerge smarter and less ignorant and better disciplined. But it is after he removes the first stack of magazines that he discovers the boxes, each one labeled with the word BOOK, in all capital letters and black marker. In smaller letters beneath the word BOOK, there are numbers, each box labeled with a digit one through nine. Nine boxes.
He opens the first one.
The top page reads: “Novel, Draft One.”
He takes out the manuscript, which has been typed, not printed, and is beginning to yellow somewhat with age. The manuscript is bound with a spiral, obviously a professional job, something his father had deliberately organized and collated and preserved and he opens the book at random and reads this line:
Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—
It’s a good line. A hell of a good line, and his heart rises a moment, thinking that he has found, perhaps, the manuscript that his father had worked on for decades.
He flips to another page and reads:
He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was runni
ng down like an overwound clock.
He’s found the manuscript! His father had, in fact, written a book and Charlie already wonders how he might go about finding a publisher to look at it. It appears to be a novel. Excited, he randomly grabs the fifth box, sees the “Untitled by Gill Gulliver” on the cover page and opens the manuscript randomly again.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
And then, as swiftly as his enthusiasm rose, his doubts come rushing into his mind: what does it matter? What if his father had written a decent book, had not wasted those long hours in the study, weekend upon weekend. What does it change? Charlie doesn’t know. It will change something, he believes that. Maybe it will even change his financial position in the world. Maybe his father’s story will be one of those stories you heard about on public radio, the story of an eccentric man, now dead, or gravely ill, who had been crafting a masterpiece, the Great American Novel he was too afraid to show anyone.
Charlie grabs the ninth box; it must be the final, or at least the latest draft, he thinks, the one he will have to work to get published. He begins to think of the afterword he might pen. He’d recently read the journals of John Cheever and found his son’s introduction to be one of the most fascinating things about the book. What if Charlie’s father had been a tortured genius like Cheever? What if there are journals? What if he can publish even the letters eventually? He thinks for a moment that he may even make a career of it, of bringing meaning to his father’s life, which is not parasitic but clarifying, an endeavor to provide context for a complicated life.
For the first time in a long time, he’s excited about something that has nothing to do with sex.
He opens the ninth box. This manuscript is printed on a laser printer, clearly newer than the papers in the first box. This is a more recent draft. It reads on the title page: “Unfinished Project, Ninth Draft, February 2010.”
This will be it. This will be the manuscript. He will go and see his father again. He will take a copy to his father and ask him about it. His father might remember something and he might weep with gratitude. His mind will flicker with magnificent recognition and he will thank Charlie for caring, for finding the life’s work that Gill Gulliver’s mind, at the end, was too cloudy to finish. Gill Gulliver’s career had been one of endlessly obsessive revision, but Charlie will put the final punctuation on it. He will bring it clarity. Gill Gulliver will look at Charlie and understand that he has squandered his time with his son, that he has not been present enough, and he will feel unworthy of the gesture that Charlie is about to make: Charlie will finish his father’s work, will secure his legacy so that even after Gill Gulliver has forgotten everything, the world will not forget him. What a perfect son. Charlie is fundamentally wonderful; this will be Gill’s bittersweet, final moment of clarity, his last grounded thought.
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