Mrs. Dash had no intentions of swimming before August; she never swam at the school picnics, not even when her husband had been alive. And since her son had graduated from the alternative middle school, his attendance (and Jane’s) at this year’s picnic was more in the spirit of an alumni gathering, a reunion of sorts, which also marked Mrs. Dash’s most public outing in Bridgehampton since she’d become a widow. Some were surprised to see her. Not Eleanor Holt.
“Good for you,” Eleanor said to Jane. “It’s about time you went out in the world again.” That was probably what set Mrs. Dash to thinking. She hardly considered the alternative middle school’s picnic as “the world,” nor did she care to be congratulated by Eleanor Holt.
Jane distracted herself with pleasant observations of her son: how he had grown! And his former schoolmates . . . well, they had grown up, too. Even Eleanor’s troubled daughter was quite a pretty girl, relaxed and outgoing—now that she was in a boarding school and wasn’t living in the same house with the lurid movie of her own birth and her mother’s nuclear missile of pleasure.
Jane also distracted herself by observing the smaller children. She didn’t know many of them, and some of the younger parents were strangers to her as well. The teacher who’d taken away the vibrating dildo came to sit beside Mrs. Dash. Jane didn’t hear what she was saying; the novelist was trying to imagine how to frame her question, and if she dared to ask it. (“When you grabbed hold of the thing, how hard was it shaking? I mean, like a blender, maybe, or a food processor, or was it . . . ah, gentler than that?”) But of course Mrs. Dash would never ask such a question; she just smiled. Eventually the teacher wandered away.
As the afternoon darkened, the younger children shivered with cold. The beach turned an eggshell-brown color, the ocean gray. There were shivering children in the parking lot, too, as Mrs. Dash and her son put their picnic basket and their towels and beach blankets into the trunk of their car. They were parked beside Eleanor Holt and her daughter. Jane was surprised to see Eleanor’s second husband. He was an excessively litigious divorce lawyer who rarely appeared at social events.
A wind came up. The younger children moaned. Something colorful—it looked like a raft—was lifted by the wind. It flew out of the hands of a small boy and landed on the roof of Eleanor Holt’s car. The divorce lawyer reached for the colorful thing, but it flew on. Jane Dash caught it in the air.
It was a partially deflated air mattress, red and blue, and the little boy who’d lost control of it came running up to Mrs. Dash. “I was trying to let the air out of it,” the little boy said. “It won’t fit in the car. Then it got away, in the wind.”
“Well now, let me show you—there’s a trick to this,” Mrs. Dash told the boy. Jane was watching Eleanor Holt bend over. Eleanor knelt down on one knee; she was tying her shoe. Her litigious husband had aggressively positioned himself at the steering wheel. Her mystery-sperm daughter was sitting sullenly alone in the backseat—doubtless returned to her childhood horrors by this reunion.
Jane found a pebble of the right size in the parking lot. She unscrewed the cap that covered the air valve for the red and blue air mattress, and she stuck the pebble into the valve. The pebble pressed the valve needle down. The air hissed out.
“Just push down on the pebble,” Mrs. Dash said. She demonstrated for the small boy. “Like this.” The air escaped the mattress in sudden blasts. “And . . . if you hug the mattress hard, like this, it will deflate faster.”
But when Jane did this, the air rattled the pebble against the valve. Eleanor heard the sound just as she was standing up.
“Zzzt! Zzzt! Zzzt!”
said the red and blue air mattress. The delight in the little boy’s face was apparent. It was quite a wonderful sound, to him. But in Eleanor Holt’s expression was the sudden recognition that she had been exposed. At the steering wheel, her husband turned his face (like a lawsuit) to the sound. Then Eleanor’s daughter turned to face the sound, too. Even Jane Dash’s son, twice introduced to the intimate life of Eleanor Holt, turned in recognition of the thrilling sound.
Eleanor stared at Mrs. Dash, and at the rapidly deflating air mattress, like a woman who’d been undressed before a mob.
“It
is
about time I went out in the world again,” Jane admitted to Eleanor.
Yet, on the subject of “the world”—and what it was, and when it was time for a widow to re-enter it safely—the red and blue air mattress offered only a cautionary word:
“Zzzt!”
Allan at Fifty-Four
Ruth had read aloud in a deadpan voice. Some of the audience seemed disconcerted by her final
“Zzzt!”
Eddie, who’d read the whole book twice, loved the ending of the first chapter, but a portion of the audience briefly withheld their applause; they weren’t sure the chapter had ended. The stupid stagehand stared open-mouthed at the TV monitor, as if he were preparing himself to deliver an epilogue. Not a single word was forthcoming—not even another charmless comment regarding his tireless appreciation of the famous novelist’s “hooters.”
It was Allan Albright who clapped first, even before Eddie. As Ruth Cole’s editor, Allan well knew the
2
“Zzzt!”
with which the first chapter concluded. The applause that eventually followed was generous, and it was sufficiently sustained for Ruth to appraise the solitary ice cube in the bottom of her water glass. The ice had melted enough to provide her with a single swallow.
The questions and answers that followed the reading were a disappointment; Eddie felt bad for Ruth that, after an entertaining performance, she had to suffer through the anticlimax that questions from the audience always engendered. And throughout the entire Q and A, Allan Albright had frowned at Ruth—as if she could have done something to elevate the intelligence of the questions! During her reading, Allan’s animated expressions in the audience had irritated her—as if it were his role to entertain Ruth at her own reading!
The first question was openly hostile; it set a tone that the subsequent questions and answers could not break free of.
“Why do you repeat yourself ?” a young man asked the author. “Or is it unintentional?”
Ruth judged him to be in his late twenties. Admittedly, the houselights were not bright enough for her to see his exact expression—he was seated near the back of the concert hall—but from his tone of voice Ruth had no doubt that he was sneering at her.
After three novels, Ruth was familiar with the charge that her characters were “recycled” from one book to the next, and that there were also “signature eccentricities” that she repeated in novel after novel. I suppose I
do
develop a fairly limited cast of characters, Ruth considered. But, in her experience, people who accused an author of repetition were usually referring to a detail that they hadn’t liked the
first
time. After all, even in literature, if one
likes
something, what is the objection to repeating it?
“I assume you mean the dildo,” Ruth said to the accusing young man. There had been a dildo in her second novel, too. But no dildo had reared its head (so to speak) in her first novel—doubtless an oversight, Ruth thought to herself. What she said was: “I know that many of you young men feel threatened by dildos, but you really needn’t worry that you’ll ever be
entirely
replaced.” She paused for the laughter. Then she added: “And
this
dildo is really not at all the same
type
of dildo as the dildo in my previous novel. Not every dildo is the same, you know.”
“You repeat more than dildos,” the young man commented.
“Yes, I know—‘female friendships gone awry,’ or lost and found again,” Ruth remarked, realizing (only after she spoke) that she was quoting from Eddie O’Hare’s tedious introduction. Backstage, Eddie at first felt awfully pleased; then he wondered if she’d been mocking him.
“Bad boyfriends,” the persistent young man added. (Now
there
was a theme!)
“The boyfriend in
The Same Orphanage
was a decent guy,” Ruth reminded her antagonistic reader.
“No mothers!” shouted an older woman in the audience.
“No fathers, either,” Ruth snapped.
Allan Albright was holding his head in his hands. He had advised her against Q and A. He’d told her that if she couldn’t let a hostile or a baiting remark go—if she couldn’t just “let it lie”—she should not do Q and A. And she shouldn’t be “so ready to bite back.”
“But I
like
to bite back,” Ruth had told him.
“But you shouldn’t bite back the first time, or even the second,” Allan had warned her. His motto was: “Be nice twice.” On principle, Ruth approved of the idea, but she found it hard advice to follow.
Allan’s notion was that you ignored the first
and
the second rudeness. If someone baited you or was plainly hostile to you a
third
time, then you let him have it. Maybe this was too
gentlemanly
a principle for Ruth to adhere to.
The sight of Allan with his head in his hands caused Ruth to resent his demonstrable disapproval. Why was she so frequently in a mood to find fault with him? For the most part, she admired Allan’s habits—at least his
work
habits—and she had no doubt that he was a good influence on her.
What Ruth Cole needed was an editor for her
life
more than for her novels. (Even Hannah Grant would have agreed with her.)
“Next question?” Ruth asked. She had tried to sound cheerful, even inviting, but there was no hiding the animosity in her voice. She’d
not
extended an invitation to her audience; she’d issued a challenge.
“Where do you get your ideas?” some innocent soul asked the author; it was someone unseen, a strangely sexless voice in the vast hall. Allan rolled his eyes. It was what Allan called “the shopping question”: the homey speculation that one
shopped
for the ingredients in a novel.
“My novels aren’t ideas—I don’t have any ideas,” Ruth replied. “I begin with the characters, which leads me to the problems that the characters are prone to have, which yields a story—every time.” ( Backstage, Eddie felt as if he should be taking notes.)
“Is it true that you never had a job, a real job?” It was the impertinent young man again, the one who’d asked her why she repeated herself. She hadn’t called on him; he was at her again, uninvited.
It
was
true that Ruth had never had a “real” job, but before Ruth could respond to the insinuating question, Allan Albright stood up and turned around, doubtless in order to address the uncivil young man in the back of the concert hall.
“Being a writer
is
a real job, you asshole!” Allan said. Ruth knew he’d been counting. By his count, he’d been nice twice.
Medium applause followed Allan’s outburst. When Allan turned toward the stage, to face Ruth, he gave her his characteristic cue—the thumb of his right hand drawn across his throat like a knife. This meant: Get off the stage.
“Thank you, thank you again,” Ruth told the audience. On her way backstage, she stopped once. She turned and waved to the audience; their applause was still warm.
“How come you don’t autograph books? Every other writer signs books!” her persecutor called.
Before she continued on her way backstage, Allan stood and turned again. Ruth didn’t have to watch him; she already knew that Allan would give her tormentor the finger. Allan was extraordinarily fond of giving people the finger.
I really
do
like him—and he really
will
take care of me, she thought. Yet Ruth couldn’t deny that Allan also irritated her.
Back in the greenroom, Allan irritated her again. The first thing he said to her was: “You never mentioned the title of the book!”
“I just forgot,” Ruth said. What was he—
always
an editor?
“I didn’t think you were going to read the first chapter,” Allan added. “You told me you thought it was too comic, and that it didn’t represent the novel as a whole.”
“I changed my mind,” Ruth told him. “I decided I
wanted
to be comic.”
“You were no barrel of laughs in the Q and A,” he reminded her.
“At least I didn’t call anyone an ‘asshole,’ ” Ruth said.
“I gave the guy his two times,” Allan replied.
An elderly lady with a shopping bag of books had negotiated her way backstage. She’d lied to someone who had tried to stop her—she’d said she was Ruth’s mother. She tried to lie to Eddie, too. She found Eddie standing in the doorway of the greenroom; indecisive as always, Eddie was half in, half out. The old woman with the shopping bag mistook him for someone in charge.
“I’ve got to see Ruth Cole,” the elderly lady told Eddie. Eddie saw the books in the shopping bag.
“Ruth Cole doesn’t autograph books,” Eddie warned the old woman. “She never signs.”
“Let me in. I’m her mother,” the old lady lied.
Eddie, of all people, didn’t need to look very closely at the elderly woman—only enough to realize that she was about the same age as Marion would be now. (Marion would be seventy-one.)
“Madam,” Eddie said to the old woman, “you are
not
Ruth Cole’s mother.”
But Ruth had heard someone say she was her mother. She pushed past Allan to the doorway of the greenroom, where the elderly lady seized her hand.
“I brought these books all the way from Litchfield for you to sign,” the old woman said. “That’s in Connecticut.”
“You shouldn’t lie about being someone’s mother,” Ruth told her.
“There’s one for each of my grandchildren,” the old lady said. There were a half-dozen copies of Ruth’s novels in the shopping bag, but before the elderly woman could begin removing the books from the bag, Allan was there—his big hand on the old lady’s shoulder. He was gently pushing her out the door.
“It was announced: Ruth Cole doesn’t autograph books—she simply does not do it,” Allan said. “I’m sorry, but if she signed your books, it wouldn’t be fair to all the other people who also want her signature, would it?”