‘What’s the actual issue?’ David said professionally, taking one from her and settling back in the sofa.
‘She wants to drop out of her acting course. Well, change to a teaching programme. And I don’t think it’s the best idea she’s had.’
‘You know, I came to see you once when I wanted to change courses. I stayed behind after a lecture. I’m sure you don’t remember.’
David had always wondered if she recalled their conversation, and now he saw she didn’t, although she wasn’t going to admit it. She walked to the balcony door and looked out.
‘Of course I remember. You were going to switch courses…’
‘You were very supportive. You said I should do the thing I thought was right for—’
‘Oh, I know but, David, this is my daughter. You were some…’
She couldn’t choose a noun and her indecision seemed to spark something unpleasant in her: she cried, ‘Oh, be realistic!’ and waved a hand at the window, the walls, anything that might be secretly encroaching on her life. David, mortified, stared hard at the arm of the sofa. He had become Bridget’s surrogate in the argument. Ruth sighed, then added softly, as if it should be a comfort, ‘I wouldn’t have cared what you did. I didn’t even know you.’
She was upset. And even though he hadn’t for a moment thought her version of their chat would coincide with his, he felt her admission as humiliation. Here was his pedigree, here was his rating. He could go ahead and fuck his talent in the ear, he could give up art, teach English, but the meagre flame of Bridget’s gift should be somehow sheltered from the buffetings of salaries and standardizing test results, from buses and marking papers and the merciless alarm clock. A still, clear moment in his life. A kind of emotional vertigo—becoming suddenly aware of someone’s real opinion. Unsteadily, he set his glass on the carpet and stood up. Ruth was staring out of the window as he walked over to the shelving unit with its untidy stacks of books, piles of prints and photographs. As lightly as he could, he said, ‘I know that, of course. I just mean that maybe, you know, you should listen to her arguments and then—’
‘Her arguments consist of telling me I don’t know what the world is like. Look, David, I didn’t mean I didn’t care. I just meant—’
‘No, of course, I understand. It’s fine.’ He grinned enthusiastically, multiplying chins.
‘She has this thing,’ Ruth continued, swerving back to her own road, ‘that she wants to teach inner-city kids and change to an education major—she’s just spent the last three years in drama.’
‘Is this her?’ He’d lifted a small photograph off a pile of four or five of them on the top shelf. A stringy girl with long chestnutcoloured centre-parted hair. She had her hands in the praying position and was sitting cross-legged on top of a picnic table. Behind her, the columnar trunks of vast redwoods formed a solid backdrop.
‘God, no. That’s about twenty-five years old. Those are flares, David. That’s Jessica. You remember. She lives in New York. Her partner Ginny edits that journal—you should send some reviews there.’
‘She was very pretty.’
He set it back on the pile. She had told him once about sharing a flat in the Latin Quarter with a girl named Jess.
‘Oh, she still is. Bridge is too, but even darker, like her father. Dark and mean.’
She sat down neatly on the sofa and pulled her legs up, hugging her knees to her chest. David had just realized that there was no sign of food preparation, no preheating oven, nothing. He felt his stomach tense. It was listening very carefully as he asked, ‘What about dinner?’
‘Ah, that’s the other thing. Can we cut out and grab something?’
Ruth had seen a little Chinese place, the Peking Express, not far from her flat and wanted to try it. That they were the sole customers became apparent only after entering. David wanted to leave but Ruth had already settled on a table in the corner, beside the aquarium. The tank was coffin-long and faintly stagnantlooking, and as various fish twisted their sad eyes to David, he got the definite impression that he was there for their entertainment and not the other way round. In greeting he parted and closed his lips at the glass. A scarlet fantail jerked away, billowing flamenco skirts.
Just as the waitress arrived at their table Ruth was telling David about Bridget’s mad plan to marry her boyfriend, Rolf, and she lifted the palm of her hand to ensure quiet until she’d finished. The waitress, a Chinese girl of about seventeen, dutifully stood there, head down, as David tried to shoot her a pleading, apologetic look. When Ruth delivered the kicker—And I said, darling, I remember what it’s like to be twenty, but no feeling’s for ever—the waitress palmed a small gold lighter from a pocket in her skirt and lit the stubby candle, then gave a neutral lethal smile.
‘I think we need another minute.’
Ruth had a knack for touching on questions that encouraged self-examination, and over dinner she asked about David’s relationship with his parents. He found himself talking about rejection, about disappointment and resentment. Ruth interrogated softly, and as he was speaking he realized he was actually learning certain things about his life.
He didn’t think her interest was compensation for her earlier, peremptory response. Unlike David, she couldn’t feign successfully, or not for long. She was not nice, that damning adjective, and her curiosity, when it came, was undiluted by politeness. Instructed since birth in the cardinal virtues by a joyless Calvinist mother, David barely knew what interested him any more. He was sure of how he should behave, of the questions he should ask, of suitable responses. But he’d had enough of that. At least if Ruth appeared intrigued by something, it was simply because she found it intriguing. She might be a slave to her id, to insistent desires, but she wasn’t boring. There was no ritual in her conversation and no taboo. Nothing was beyond analysis and articulation—over dinner she told him that she thought his mother probably hated him on some subconscious level because he tied her to his father. David felt Ruth and he were pulling close, aligning themselves, and the fit was remarkably good.
This was why men went mad for her. She looked at David with such intensity that he could believe he was the centre of her universe. It was not need: that would have been off-putting. But she gifted him the rare belief that he was special. He was the millionth visitor. He was the only one who understood, the only one she wanted, the only one to save her.
Her continuous low-level anxiety was brought to the surface by the usual liberal flashpoints. The environment. Her own ageing and death. American foreign policy. She assumed his politics, of course, as she assumed most things, but he didn’t mind. The waitress appeared with more wine and her assassin’s smile. David watched two tiny neon-blue fish dart like courtiers around a large black catfish. It slowly turned its ribbed underbelly towards their table and began grubbing on the dirt that clouded the glass.
As they left the restaurant, the two waiting staff and three chefs lined up like the hosts at a wedding (‘Goodbye, we see you soon’). Ruth had insisted on leaving the change from her fifty, which meant the staff got a tip of fourteen pounds eighty. The food was completely average, but if the mood took her, she could be crazily generous—although her absent-mindedness, more often than not, left a wake of insulted and unthanked, the doored-in-the-face. She may have lacked intent, but culpability resides also in neglect: David was sure of that. He felt several things about her simultaneously. Her worries and concerns were all near the brim, so he found he forgot how fucked up and desirous, how petty