I Loved You More (43 page)

I've got the blankets and the towels and the boombox and the sunblock. The beach is crowded. The sun on the sand makes my eyes hurt. The way my head, my whole body feels thick – going on a month now without any antidepressants – I can feel the thickness so much more here in this new place. Really, where can you run to when you are what you're running from?

Your adrenals or your pituitary gland or whatever the fuck that's been strained to the max, there's just some places now you just can't go. Inside that store or that restaurant it's too jammed with people and noise and activity. Forget the fucking mall. It's the strangest feeling. It's as if a force actually pushes against you when you walk in. Like this hot bright beach. Dizzy. Try walking in a world that bounces with each step. The way that upsets you. Dizzy ain't the word for it.

FINALLY, WE FIND
a clump of willows and some shade, a place not too close to any other people. Ruth's never been naked in public before and with every piece of clothing she takes off, she gets more liberated, more excited.
I'm taking off my shorts! I'm taking off my shirt! I'm taking off my bra! I'm taking off my panties!
Really, being with Ruth sometimes, how everything could seem extraordinary.

Lying naked in the sun is a wonder. Big Ben gets up the gumption and I go out where the sand is hard and do
tai chi
on the beach. Ruth takes a thousand photos of me. When I finish my
tai chi
, I go back to our blanket and Ruth is sleeping. Just like that, she's sleeping.

Sleeping. Ordinary people, Ruth, can just lay their body down, rest their head on their arm, even on a blanket in the sand in the sun, and fall asleep.

Sleep man, fucking sleep.

There's a moment when the sun has gone gold and the shadows are long. Everything seems to get quiet. The lapping of the water on the beach. The seagulls. Off somewhere, a Jet Ski. I'm lying on my belly and the sun is on my back. I turn my head and Ruth's face is right there. She's awake and alive and so in heaven. On the boombox Ella Fitzgerald is singing
dream when you're feeling blue
. Ruth loves the sun and her body is in the sun and she's with me, her man, and the song is sweet and it's a beautiful summer day. I see it all in her blue eyes.

THAT NIGHT IN
bed, after Ruth's massage, I feel so relaxed and in the world. I look down at my thumb and Big Ben reminds me. What are you so afraid of, Mr. Propinquity?

I pull myself up and lean my back against the bed. Ruth's blue eyes are deep blue almost purple. Sweat on the skin of her neck and chest. We kiss, I keep expecting that erotic pull in my balls, but there's nothing. Still if I can't feel pleasure, maybe Ruth can.

“Come here,” I say. “And lean against me.”

Ruth takes her glasses off, folds them, puts them on the nightstand. Slowly, her body settles in between my legs, her back to me. My arms come round to the front of her just under her arms. Surprising, my skinny arms are no bigger around than Ruth's. But there's something smaller around about her chest, the otherness of her, then her breasts, full and heavy, the way they hang. Nothing on my body like her breasts, their firmness and their jiggle. I reach my legs out and hook them around Ruth's legs, pull her legs open wide. My legs, more olive in the skin, hairy, around Ruth's smooth pink hairless legs. Ruth's head falls against my shoulder. Her thick red hair, silk against my face. A deep sound in her throat. Laughter. My heart's beating just behind her heart. I want to do this right. I reach down, rub my hands across her breasts. Full and round, the weight of them, how they are alive and move and bounce. Her nipples, ten times the size of my nipples. Hard nubs big as the end of my little finger. My tongue around and around the channels of Ruth's ear, my breath. The way our hearts are close. Ruth turns her head, her mouth to my ear. So quiet I barely hear:

“Ben.”

I spit on my thumbs and index fingers, move my fingers around her nipples slow then pinch her nipples hard. The sound that comes out of Ruth could be a sound that comes out of me.

Between her legs, Ruth's hair is soft, not pubic hair wiry. Wet. My God, the mysteries of a cunt. The way it scares me how
overwhelmingly deep and complex it is. How her cunt could swallow me up. Folds and folds. The wetter it gets the larger it becomes. Right there in the center, the ecstatic mound of flesh. I try and touch her the way I feel when she massages me. That's what I think as I touch her clit, how Ruth can stop the pain. And I put that intention, that heart strength into my hand, and my fingers pull up slow back and forth along the sides. I rub and pinch and stroke her clit with all my heart. It is a prayer. My chin on her shoulder, my legs curled over her legs clamping them down. My hand inside her is wet up to the wrist. The smell of peat moss burning. Ruth's arms are above us, pulling on my hair. Her back arches and arches. There's not a sound coming out of her.

When she comes, I mean really comes, she holds her arms up to the sky. Her long slender hands waving. I put my hand over her cunt, my fingers inside her. She pushes up against my hand and up and up. Screams so lovely, so long, the pain, the transcendence of pain. My other arm's around her holding her to earth. She comes like a rock.

It fucks me up the way she comes. The way she's alive and comes and comes. I get really sad and start to cry. And Ruth sees I'm crying and she thinks it's because I'm full of joy. But we promised to tell the truth, so I tell Ruth it isn't joy why I am crying. I'm just jealous, man. The way she is alive, I'm fucking jealous.

NOW THERE'S A
moment.
The
moment, right there. Where things start to fall apart for Ruth and me. I mean not right off. It takes months and months. But for sure, that evening, Ruth waving her hands in the air screaming her delicious scream was when it all started. The worm had started to turn and face its asshole.

What I mean to say is, after all these years of trying to figure out Hank and Ruth and me, what happened and how and why it happened, that night that I felt jealous of Ruth, her orgasm, the lifeforce she had a hold of, was the first time. Before that night,
as far as I can remember, Ruth and I got along just fine. I mean I wasn't sleeping and I was irritable and the fucking world felt like it was out to get me, but I never made it Ruth's fault. Of course, there were little things. Her long red hair in the bathtub. Her rocks and feathers and pieces of wood all over the place. Her crazy fucking car. But I didn't let it bother me. Ruth was always there, helping me out, and I was grateful.

Strange how quickly gratitude can turn.

For example, in September, I take a gig teaching a six-hour Saturday writing workshop at the Sitka Center. Lord knows I'm too fucked up to teach a class that long, but I really need the money. Ruth, of course, teaches with me, I mean how could I manage a class like that alone. And she could use the money, too. Plus we get a free hotel room in Cannon Beach to spend the night and we have the next day on the beach to relax. The prospect of the weekend makes Ruth crazy happy. Me, all I can think about is all the shit that can go wrong. Ruth drives us to the coast because I can't drive.

The class is eleven middle-aged women and one young man, a poet. Andy, Andy Gronik, I think. In a wood-paneled room with windows facing the Salmon River Estuary and the Pacific Ocean. Sitting in a circle of wooden chairs. The kind of chair you can pull the panel up from the side and make a writing desk.

Pretty much you can figure on at least one asshole in a class of twelve. But this class is great. As we're going around, introducing ourselves, each woman has a story to tell. Marriage, divorce, child-bearing. These women have been through the wars. All eleven of them, one after another, are hungry to talk. When it comes Andy's turn, I have to ask him to speak up because we can't hear him. All he can say is his name and how old he is, twenty-one, and that he likes poetry. I feel a kinship with him right off. Bad skin, curly hair he's pasted down. Thick black horn-rimmed glasses. Bitten fingernails. An old leather briefcase next to his feet on the floor. Pointy black shoes. Pink socks.

But what's important about the class that day is what
happened between Ruth and me. Three different things. Things that had never have happened before.

The first is sometime after lunch. We're on the fourth student, a woman named Edna. She's written a piece about being fat and how her husband has had an affair. It's during that discussion I notice it. Ruth is finishing my sentences. I stop and check myself to see if I'm just making this shit up, but I'm not. I start a sentence and Ruth finishes it. I mean not every time, but most of the time. Then I wonder if Ruth has always been finishing my sentences and I'd just never noticed it before. So I start speaking up so she'll stop speaking for me. But it ain't easy.

By the sixth or seventh student, Ruth and I are dueling banjoes. I say something, then Ruth says more, then I say more. Then she says more. This back and forth between us just won't stop. Unless I stop. It happens with three different women, three times in a row. Ruth has to have the last word.

At the afternoon break, two-thirty, Ruth goes out to stand on the deck. The bright sun brings out the highlights in her hair. Usually, when I see Ruth beautiful like this, I'd put my arm around her, or touch her hand, but I'm angry and don't understand why I'm angry, and I'm feeling like a shit because I'm angry. Just as I stand myself next to her, a gust of ocean wind blows back her hair. Ruth turns and gives me a smile. Still, I don't touch her. Just stand, lean up against the porch railing.

“What's going on?” I say.

“Doesn't the breeze feel great?” Ruth says.

“It feels weird today,” I say. “Between you and me.”

“It must be the long drive,” Ruth says. “Why don't you rest for a while. I can take over.”

“Take over?”

“You know, silly,” Ruth says. “Take a little rest, then you can come back feeling refreshed.”

The thing I promised Ruth, the only thing I promised, was that I would be truthful, so I take a deep breath, try and make
my mouth move to say the hardest thing. When I speak, my voice is the high-pitched Catholic boy.

“Ruth,” I say, “why is it that I feel that you're one-upping me?”

“What?”

“I feel like I'm competing with you to be heard.”

“You mean now?”

“Here,” I say. “
Now
, right in class, the last four students.”

The flush of red up her throat and onto her chin. Ruth pushes her glasses up onto her nose, then covers her neck and chin with her hand. She looks straight ahead, out to the ocean.

“Ben!” Ruth says. “I don't know what to say.”

The ocean wind on our faces, the sun, October and there's sun, Ruth and me leaning against the cedar rail, not touching. It's hard to keep my eyes on Ruth. They keep wanting to look away like she's looking away but I make myself look at her.

“It kind of makes me crazy to say it,” I say, “but I just had to.”

Ruth doesn't say anything for a long time. The flush has her whole face red. Pretty soon, her shoulders are shaking and her chest is going up and down. In a moment, one long tear streams out, tear duct to chin. Ruth turns, quick puts her arm around my neck, pulls me close in. Her stomach muscles tight, little bumps of sobs against my belly.

“I'm really really sorry, Ben,” Ruth says. “I was only trying to help.”

“I know,” I say. “Maybe I'm just being a bitch.”

“Do you have a tissue?”

I go back inside the classroom. How closed-in and stuffy the room feels. I grab a couple tissues from the Kleenex box in the middle of the circle, then close the sliding doors behind me. When Ruth takes the tissues from my hand, her fingers stay touching my hand for a moment.

“You're probably right,” Ruth says. “I think I'm just used to handling my own class.”

The wind in my ears. The wind in Ruth's hair is wild. The
way the wind has pitted the cedar railing. Ruth's blowing her nose. The end of her nose is scarlet red.

“I shouldn't have even said anything,” I say.

Ruth cries and then stops crying then cries again. I'm pretty sure I'm crying too. We stand for a long time, holding on tight to each other. Waves crashing on the beach sound. It takes a prayer or two, and some deep deep breaths, but after a while our regular breath comes back. I take Ruth's face in my hands. Really look at her the way she lets me look at her now. Both of us are just so fucking relieved. Nose to runny nose, arms wrapped around arms. What I say next surprises even me.

“Loudmouth bitch,” I say.

Then it's Ruth's chance to surprise herself.

“You men are all alike,” she says.

Just like that we're laughing our asses off, Ruth and me, and the world that only minutes ago looked so dark and full of trouble now is bright, cloudless as the sky and fucking free.

“Thank you,” Ruth says.

“For what?”

“Keeping your promise,” she says.

THREE O'CLOCK, ON
the deck that afternoon, after Ruth and I pull ourselves back together, when we go back inside the classroom, when we're the fourteen of us all in circle again, it's Andy's turn to read. Andy pulls a stack of paper from his old leather briefcase. Passes the pages around the room. It's a poem full of shit and romance.