Richard’s lack of vocation, he did do things: build bookcases, refinish furniture, grow tomatoes and lettuce and pumpkins, go musselling. He helped Sally bring their old colonial farmhouse into a state of polished modernity; dozens of touches in the house were his. Often at home all day, he gave Sally, what Ruth envied, an audience for her housework. Though it strained his good eye, he read, and read books women read – novels,biographies, psychology. He saw the raising of children as a kind of problem, where Jerry saw none: he was the original, and in the children God had made some reproductions which in time would be distributed. Jerry loved duplication and its instruments – cameras, printing presses – but did that make Ruth one? Richard, half-blind as he was, saw through her, to a secret no one else had seen since Martha, the fat black woman her mother had hired to cook and clean in the days of the Buffalo parish. In her reign the kitchen had become a haven, a cave of what only had been whispered inside her before. ‘Ruthie,’ Martha would sigh, ‘you’re a magical girl but the world’s going to do you in. You don’t fear the right things.’ The more dire the pronouncement, the more cherished Ruth had felt. Richard, too, saw through her to some doom. And she saw through him, to the truth that Sally was hard on him, made him pay for her beauty; with her cool painterly vision Ruth watched him clown and drink and be a fool and saw that she could have eased him in a way he was not being eased, though the Mathiases did share a love of parties and the things money bought and a certain callowness that was reflected in the faces of their children, which were lifted towards their parents like bright empty plates. Yet he would talk Piaget and Spock and Anna Freud with Ruth, and Iris Murdoch and Julia Child, and furniture and cooking and style. He noticed her clothes, sometimes with a compliment, sometimes with an insult. He complained when she cut her hair; Jerry had asked her to, and had wanted it even shorter, ‘to show off her skull.’
Why should he want to show off her skull? Dancing with her at a party, Richard stroked, not patted, herbuttocks and told her he had always thought she had the sexiest bottom in town. ‘He talks to me woman to woman,’ Ruth replied, when Jerry complained of how much time she spent with Richard at parties; she knew as she said it that this was the first deliberate lie of her married life. At another party Richard invited her to have lunch with him, and even named the restaurant, a Chinese one towards Cannonport. She thanked him, and refused. She wondered afterwards if it had been proper to thank him. To be grateful seemed to be half-willing. Again, she having told him (why?) that she was distressed by Jerry’s ‘religious crisis’, Richard had offered to make a date with her so they could discuss it fully. ‘He sounds neurotic as hell, and I’ve read some books.’ She was sorry, she thought not. He didn’t press her. She liked that. His propositions were like a rather flat joke that, through being repeated, comes to be funny; she came to look forward to the moment at parties when Richard, his slightly pinched and lipless mouth prim with earnestness and his head atilt like a lame god’s, would put the jaded question to her.
But away from parties, in hours of sudden privacy, in the weird solitude she would awake to in the middle of the night, as if in answer to a shout, Richard became an incubus upon her. She felt him fumbling and butting his way towards a secret that ached to be discovered. The unpleasant frost in his eye, where other people had a black point feeding on the light, chilled her; defensively a wild towering love for Jerry would rise up. She would give his dead body a hug, and he would stir, rotate, and fall asleep again. They slept differently; Jerrywas an insomniac and slept deeply and late, Ruth fell asleep without effort and woke too early.
If there was a
Why should he want to show off her skull? Dancing with her at a party, Richard stroked, not patted, herbuttocks and told her he had always thought she had the sexiest bottom in town. ‘He talks to me woman to woman,’ Ruth replied, when Jerry complained of how much time she spent with Richard at parties; she knew as she said it that this was the first deliberate lie of her married life. At another party Richard invited her to have lunch with him, and even named the restaurant, a Chinese one towards Cannonport. She thanked him, and refused. She wondered afterwards if it had been proper to thank him. To be grateful seemed to be half-willing. Again, she having told him (why?) that she was distressed by Jerry’s ‘religious crisis’, Richard had offered to make a date with her so they could discuss it fully. ‘He sounds neurotic as hell, and I’ve read some books.’ She was sorry, she thought not. He didn’t press her. She liked that. His propositions were like a rather flat joke that, through being repeated, comes to be funny; she came to look forward to the moment at parties when Richard, his slightly pinched and lipless mouth prim with earnestness and his head atilt like a lame god’s, would put the jaded question to her.
But away from parties, in hours of sudden privacy, in the weird solitude she would awake to in the middle of the night, as if in answer to a shout, Richard became an incubus upon her. She felt him fumbling and butting his way towards a secret that ached to be discovered. The unpleasant frost in his eye, where other people had a black point feeding on the light, chilled her; defensively a wild towering love for Jerry would rise up. She would give his dead body a hug, and he would stir, rotate, and fall asleep again. They slept differently; Jerrywas an insomniac and slept deeply and late, Ruth fell asleep without effort and woke too early.
If there was a
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