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Message-ID: <36203asstr$1019340602@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
From: Selena Jardine <selenajardine@yahoo.com>
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Subject: {ASSM} Ruthie's Hair
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2002 18:10:02 -0400
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Ruthie's Hair
By Selena Jardine


Ruthie's Hair
By Selena Jardine


There are moments of loss that are common to half the
world, losses millions can understand.  Everyone knows what
it's like to lose a tooth, to search with the tongue for a
part of the self that is no longer there.  There is that
moment when the penis finally slides out of the vagina,
still warm and wet but softening now:  a momentary,
incalculable sense of searching and loss.  The first time I
lost Ruth Adamson, it was a common loss, like these, a dull
ache that mirrored thousands of others.  

This time, when I left her apartment at midnight, her scent
on my skin, her taste in my mouth, the hole, the search
were different.  This time, it was the singular loss that
can never be repaired or replaced, never be consoled.

And now I lie on my bed in the dark, and wait.  I dare not
hope for a happy ending.  Happy endings are sentimental,
and Ruth was always too sharp to allow that.  She has cut
all that away.  So instead of thinking about the ending, I
think about the beginning, and I wait.

++++++  

Calls like the one I got from Ruthie usually come in the
middle of the night.  At least, that's what I understand
from the movies.  This one, my call, came at three-fifteen
on the medium-cloudy afternoon of February fifth.  I picked
up the phone and said, "Hello?" glancing at the caller ID
screen.  Doing a double-take.  Becoming very still. 
Looking at the telephone as if it would tell me more than
the name did, on the screen.  Ruth Adamson.  Ruth Adamson? 
Really?

"Hello?"  I repeated, more carefully.  There was a breath
on the other end of the phone,   and then someone cleared
her throat.  I almost hung up.  It would have been logical;
if I hadn't had caller ID, I would already have given up on
someone who hadn't spoken for so long.  

Then a voice.  "Naomi?"  Yes.  Ruth.  No one calls me Naomi
any more.  My name is Emma, and most people call me Em,
except my niece Dorothy, because I refuse to play any role
in her over-the-rainbow fantasies.  But for a few years in
high school, I was such close friends with a girl named
Ruth that she called me Naomi, in imitation of the Biblical
pair of women who vowed never to leave or forsake their
friendship.  Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou
lodgest, I will lodge...  We had thought we were
inseparable.  

"Naomi?"  Ruthie's voice sounded unsure.

"Ruthie.  Yes.  It's Em."  I knew what to say next:  Hi! 
God, it's great to hear your voice!  What have you been
doing with yourself?  God, we have to get together, girl,
where have you *been*?  It stuck in my throat somehow. 
Ruthie's voice--my name, my old name, repeated twice--did
not seem to invite class-reunion exchanges.  What now?  I
thought, a little desperately.

"Naomi, can you come over?"

"What?"  I sat down on the couch without looking behind me.
 I hadn't seen Ruth Adamson in eight--no, ten years, and
she wanted--what?  A sleepover?  

"Please.  Please, Naomi.  I need."  She broke off, covered
the phone with her hand and coughed, and then came back. 
"I need a haircut."

I laughed, a little shrilly.  "What?"  But I remembered.  I
had always cut her hair in those days.  I never let her
touch mine, fragile blonde stuff that it was; it needed a
professional touch if it was ever going to look decent,
sculpted with infinite care into the curls and puffs I
craved.  But Ruthie's mother was half Cherokee, and
Ruthie's hair fell with lightless, waveless purity from her
scalp to her narrow hips, so black it was blue, so blue it
was impossible of description.  Night-girl hair, she called
it, and braided it carelessly, or twisted it out of her way
in a heavy knot at the nape of her neck, or let it hang and
swing in a thick curtain that begged to be lifted, weighed,
examined, touched.  She could hide in it, if she wanted to,
but she almost never did.  Not Ruthie.

"It doesn't make sense for me to pay twenty bucks for some
stranger to cut a straight line in hair like mine," she'd
said the first time, when I'd protested that I didn't know
how to cut hair.  "Just cut it, for chrissake."  So I did,
using a ruler with infinite anxious care.  "Thanks," she'd
said afterwards, not even looking at it in the mirror I
offered her, just grinning at me, while I looked in awe at
my handiwork, the perfect black rectangle falling down
Ruthie's shoulders.

"Naomi?"  And through the veil of ten years I thought I
heard need there, something blind and choked.

"Yes, okay, Ruth," I said.  "I'll come."

I put down the phone after I got her address, hesitated a
moment, then picked it back up and called Stephen.  He and
I had been dating for a year now, friends for six months
before that, and I thought we were probably heading into
the wary arena where we might eye each other for another
six months before getting engaged.  I was supposed to meet
him for a movie tonight, but the sound of Ruthie's voice...

"Okay," said Stephen, sounding cheerful and interested. 
"Jesus, really?  Ruth, your high school friend?  Just
called you totally out of the blue?  Did you even know she
lived in town?"

"No, I didn't.  Maybe she just moved back or something. 
Listen, are you sure you don't mind?"

"No, that's fine, you go ahead and see her.  I'll, um,
watch Texas Ranger or something you hate, okay?"

"Yuck," I said, grinning despite myself.  "I'll make it up
to you later, all right?"

"Oh, boy," Stephen said happily, "will I ever call you
later," and I hung up smiling.

The smile had faded long before I got to Ruthie's apartment
on the other side of town.  I didn't know why I had agreed
to go over and see her, and I was uneasy.  Ten years since
we'd last seen each other was too long, I thought, too long
to do something like this on impulse, too long even to know
why she asked it.  I couldn't assume I knew her voice any
more, couldn't assume that what I heard as need really was
anything of the kind.

We'd thought we were Ruth and Naomi, inseparable.  But are
teenage girls ever really inseparable?  I don't know one
person who's still best friends with the person she loved
best in high school; one or two still keep in touch by
letter or phone, but most have moved on, lost those selves
gladly or reluctantly to the passage of time.  

Ruth and I were closer than most, maybe.  We'd met in tenth
grade when we were assigned to the same group in English
class.  Ruth Adamson was skinny, ferocious, sarcastic with
her lampblack hair swinging in her face; I was blonde and
shy, ill at ease with my body always developing one step
ahead of my expectations, the seriocomic Wile E. Coyote and
Roadrunner effect of breasts and hips and menstruation.  So
I was shocked as only the ritualistic young can be shocked
when Ruth came up to me after class one day and said, "I
really liked what you said about that poem."

"The what?" I said, and immediately winced, wishing I had
said something brilliant.  Something *poetic*.

"That poem we read, the Billy Collins one.  I liked the way
you talked about foolish beauty.  Most of the beautiful
people around here are complete fools."  She grinned and
looked around us.  I found myself grinning back.  "Listen,"
she was saying.  "You want to have lunch with me?"  As if
we were going to a little bistro somewhere instead of the
cafeteria.

"Sure," I said,  "but talk about foolish."

"I prefer to call it boundless pluck," answered Ruth. 
"Carpe cafeteriem." 

We were immediately inseparable, part of a loose group of
friends that developed that year, girls who were fierce and
smart and loyal and funny as hell.  Ruthie and I spent time
with those girls, Meg and Kirsten and Heather and Tamara. 
We did different things with our time:  she wrote for the
newspaper, I was in the band.  We both had boyfriends, on
and off, and they were mostly good guys when we had them; I
dated Carl Simmons for most of eleventh grade, and he was
sweet and pretty smart and he had a great ass.  

But Ruthie and I were the core, for each other.  We did
most of the usual things--notes stuffed into lockers,
cruising in my car (Ruthie didn't drive), those anxious
quarterly haircuts.  But mostly we talked.  God, how we
talked.  It seems impossible now; can any two human beings
really have that much to talk about?  Poetry (on which we
agreed), religion, philosophy, politics (on which we often
disagreed), guys, teachers, books.  On the weekends they
couldn't drag us apart.  We became a familiar school sight,
like the baseball team practicing:  Ruth scowling at the
ground, Emma expostulating; Emma laughing like a maniac,
Ruth mimicking the biology teacher; Ruth and Emma, Emma and
Ruth, relying on each other, deeper and deeper. 

It was near the end of tenth grade that she read the Book
of Ruth, almost as a joke.  It was even the King James
version.  Ruthie never did anything by halves.  When
someone asked her, sneering, why she was reading the Bible,
she just showed the chapter title and shrugged.  "It's my
book, I better read it," she said.  Later, after school,
she called me.

"Em, you're not going to believe this!"  Her voice was
excited, urgent, spilling over.  "This is the most
beautiful thing I've ever heard, I never, it's just like,
listen!"

"Ruth!"  I was laughing.  "Calm down, Ruthie, I'm
listening, geez Louise, this is the Bible we're talking
about here, you'd think it was--"

But she was interrupting, her voice running over mine,
intent and focused.  "Shut up, shut up and listen, quit
trying to be funny.  This is serious.  There's these two
women, right?  Naomi and her daughter-in-law, Ruth.  And
mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law don't normally get
along too well, do they?  But these two, listen to what
they said, what they promised each other, even after Ruth's
husband died and she could have gone back to her own
people."  

And then, over the phone, into the silence that had fallen,
she said those ancient, perfect words.  "Whither thou
goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy
people will be my people, and thy God, my God:  where thou
diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.  The Lord do
so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and
me."

When she had finished, my eyes were full of tears. 
"Ruth--"

"And Naomi.  That's you, from now on.  Naomi."  And so it
was.  For all of high school, with all its work and stupor
and melodrama unfolding in the halls and locker rooms, I
was Naomi to her Ruth.  We went everywhere together,
practically lived in each other's rooms, studied together
and wept together and loved each other's families. 
Whenever we slept overnight together, we shared a bed.  I
was taller and heavier than Ruth, and I held her cradled in
my arms, lying awake long after she had fallen asleep,
listening to her breathing, light and rapid as a child's. 
Once I woke to find her breast in my hand, her lithe body
pressed against mine.  After one startled moment, we
laughed so hard we thought we'd die.  We thought we were
inseparable, all right.  We had promised it.

Someone's horn blared on my left, startling me out of this
deep memory.  I grimaced.  I hadn't been paying attention;
it was lucky I hadn't driven miles past where I wanted to
go in the end-of-day traffic.  I glanced at the address
Ruthie had given me, and pulled into the parking lot of a
fairly new apartment building on Weston Avenue.  Ruthie
must be doing okay if she could afford to live here; no way
I could.  But then, Princeton grads usually did do okay.

Ruthie had gone to Princeton.  Her grades were better than
mine, though not by a lot.  What was really different for
her was the ambition, that sharp hunger that had somehow
been left out of me.  I went to the University of Virginia,
not a shabby choice by any means.  "Alma mater of a
nation," I said, cheerfully.  

"You have to write me, Naomi," Ruth said.

"Duh," I said.  "Of course.  And call."  I took it for
granted that this would be the case.  And at first, we both
did write and call, nearly as often as we had at home. 
Then we did less, because we were so busy, and our
schedules were different.  Then, gradually, like fading,
like bleaching, we did less, because we didn't know each
other as well, and we couldn't bear the silences, and we
couldn't bear to say so.  And then, finally, we didn't
write at all.  

This isn't so uncommon with high-school friends.  Hometown
honeys, as we called the boyfriends and girlfriends who
arrived in little silver frames with the incoming freshmen,
seldom lasted past Thanksgiving break.  Hometown best
friends lasted a little longer, usually until the deadly
distinction, "She's my best friend *from high school*,"
appeared, identifying the poor hapless girl as a phase,
something to be grown out of.  I never said that sentence,
but I kept myself so busy among UVA's maple trees and green
lawns and sorority girls and fraternity guys that I
scarcely allowed myself to realize how much I missed Ruth
Adamson.  Like a tooth, perhaps.  Maybe even like several
teeth.  But they were back teeth, molars, nothing visible
to others.  A dull ache, a common loss.

And now, ten years later, I was at her apartment, to give
her a haircut.  However silly this was, however
irrationally frightened I might feel, I was going to go
through with it.  I was an adult woman, completely capable
of handling myself in this kind of situation.  I raised my
gloved hand and knocked at the door.  A moment later, it
opened.  I found myself looking down at the girl I had
loved enough to promise to die wherever she died, and I had
to put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from making the
terrible noise I felt rising in my chest.

Ruthie's left eye was swollen shut, purple-blue.  The
eyebrow above it was neatly stitched, seven or eight
stitches.  Her right cheekbone was stitched, too, the skin
around the wound angry and red and scabbed.  Her lower lip
was swollen on the left side, as if it had been mashed
against her teeth.  Against the pale skin of her throat,
purple bruises showed in the shape of someone's fingers. 
Only her hair was the same, falling in that identical pure
night around that ruin of a face.

And she was smiling.

"Jesus Christ, Naomi, you look grim," she said. "Fuck you
and the hearse you rode in on."  

I could feel my face breaking up into a grin I never
intended.  "Ruth, goddammit," I said, and my voice was
horribly shaky, and then I stepped across her threshold and
we were in each other's arms.  She smelled of lemon and
bourbon and I held her very close, my eyes shut.

"Ooh, hey, careful," she said, after one moment, and I
stepped away from her hastily.  "Ribs a little sprung," she
explained.  "Hurts like a mad bastard when I laugh.  Don't
make me laugh, okay, Naomi?"

"Ruth--" I felt disoriented, swept into the past.  "What
the hell happened to you?"

She looked at me.  Night was falling outside her apartment;
lights were coming on all over the city.  "I think I need a
drink to tell you about that," she said, and went into the
kitchen.

   
While she was fixing drinks, I looked around me.  Young
professional apartment, beige carpet, white furniture, some
lithographs on the walls that were probably not
reproductions.  It looked like she was usually a neat
freak; the place was incredibly clean, but there was a
certain amount of surface clutter--glasses, mostly--that
spoke of someone who hadn't been able to bother in the past
couple of days.  There was a notepad on the table next to
me next to the phone.  It said, in letters so deep the pen
had nearly gone through the paper, "Greg you fucking
bastard motherfucker fuck him fuck him fuck you" and then,
some way under that, it had my telephone number, no name.

I looked up as Ruthie came back into the room.  She still
looked awful, and wonderful, and herself, and not.  One of
her wrists was bandaged, though since she was carrying a
drink in that hand, it couldn't be broken or even really
badly sprained.  I took it from her and took a sip, felt
the warmth spread.  Bourbon.  Really good bourbon, not much
water.  I watched Ruthie down about a third of hers, and
then I said, knowing it was going to be bad, "Okay, Ruthie.
 Now.  What happened?"  She didn't answer.  She just sat
next to me, her hair falling around her face, down her
shoulders to her narrow waist.  I reached out, unable to
resist, and brushed it back.  "Ruthie.  Tell me why you
need a haircut."

She looked up at me, her eyes dry and angry, her mouth
oddly twisted.  "Three days ago, I was walking home from
the bookstore at nine-thirty at night.  Two guys, big
fucking guys, jumped out at me from behind a parked car and
grabbed me and beat the shit out of me and took my purse
and ran."

"Oh, Ruth, oh no."  I wanted to ask a dozen questions; I
wanted to be so close to her that I knew all the answers
already.  "Did they--I mean, they didn't try to--"

"No, they weren't interested in raping me.  They just
wanted to hurt me, and get my money, and mission fucking
accomplished as far as that was concerned."  Ruthie drained
her glass.  "But I didn't answer your question.  I run
marathons, Naomi.  I should have been able to outstrip
those big stupid motherfuckers.  But he--they grabbed me by
the hair."  Even ten years after I had last seen her, I
could tell that Ruth, Ruth the fierce, the brave, the
mordant, Ruth Adamson was struggling not to cry.  "They
grabbed my hair, and they stole from me, and they beat me. 
And now I need a haircut.  It's all coming off, Naomi.  I
never want to see it again."

++++++
 
I didn't argue.  No one ever could, with Ruth.  A few
minutes later, we were sitting in her bathroom, she on a
stool, I holding a pair of silver scissors.

"How much do you want off?" I asked, noncommittally.    

She turned around to look at me, and her eyes were cold. 
"I told you.  All of it.  This is not a fucking trim,
Naomi."

"Okay, all right."  I took a deep breath, let it out. 
"Take off your shirt, then.  I don't want to get hair all
over you.  This is going to be messy."  

She did as she was told, unbuttoning the oversized shirt
she was wearing with her right hand alone and slipping out
of it.  She wasn't wearing a bra underneath.  I don't know
why that surprised me; it would probably be awkward to
fasten if your wrist was sore.  Standing there before me in
her jeans and nothing else, she was impossibly lovely to
some inner eye I had not known would open.  Her collarbones
stood out over those perfect small breasts, her thick
night-girl hair falling over one brown nipple.  The raven's
wings of bruises along her ribs were like tattoos, totems,
emblems.  I wanted to touch them.  Instead, I closed my
eyes for a moment, then put her back on the stool and
opened the scissors.

Snip, snip, is the traditional noise of a barbershop.  In
reality, hair crunches when you cut it, as if it were bone
or leaf or muscle.  I cut Ruth Adamson's hair that night,
scissors then razor, and felt as if I were cutting a living
creature, as if the blue-black pool at our feet were blood.
 Several times I tried to stop my task--jaw-length,
ear-length, close-cropped--but Ruth would have none of it. 
"All, Naomi," she said, and I obeyed.  Whither thou goest. 


In the end, Ruthie's hair was all on the floor, all of it
gone, all that lightless curtain lost.  Silently, I led her
into the bedroom, where there was a full-length mirror, and
I stood behind her and looked.  Her brow rose, higher and
higher, uninterrupted, suddenly pallid where it had never
seen the sun.  A quarter of an inch of black stubble dotted
the white skin, naked scalp peeking through, Ruthie's
vulnerable head there before me, her sharp intelligent
brown eyes still looking out of her wreck of a face.  I
wasn't aware that tears were streaming down my own face
until Ruthie turned and reached up and wiped them away.

"Naomi," she was saying in distress, "oh Naomi, don't,
don't," and that was when I kissed her.

I kissed the corner of her mouth, where there was no
bruise, where the chiselled line still showed me the Ruthie
I had known.  It was warm and soft, and so close to her, I
could smell a faint hint of citrus and bourbon.  She didn't
say anything, only looked at me.  And I kissed her again,
taking her face in my hands, not thinking of anything but
the comfort of skin on skin.  I kissed the corner of each
eye, and the tip of her nose, and her chin, every inch of
skin I could find where there was no bruise or scrape or
set of stitches.  I kissed the corner of her jaw, and my
thumbs traced inward and down.

There was no sound from Ruth, no response, and I pulled
back.  I was ready to let her go, maybe try to laugh it
off.  And then I felt Ruthie's arms go around me, and
letting go became impossible.  

Tentatively, I traced her throat with my fingertips,
brushing upward toward her ear, toward that fuzz of stubble
on her scalp.  She shivered, and her hands tightened on my
back, and she lifted her face to me, her eyes open.  I
looked at her, and I kissed her mouth, gently, softly, this
time flicking her lips with my tongue.  And this time, I
felt her kiss me back, felt her begin to explore.  It was
my turn to shiver, and then to stifle a laugh:  the first
time I'd kissed a boy, I'd been desperately wondering where
the noses went.  By this time, I knew that part.  Now I was
wondering where all the breasts were supposed to go.

I bent my head to Ruthie's slender neck and kissed it where
her warm pulse beat, an open-mouth kiss that left a moist
trail on her skin.  Down and down, my hands on her bare
pale shoulders, kissing between her breasts.  I turned my
head, listening to her heartbeat, and took her right nipple
in my mouth.  She sucked her breath in through her teeth,
and I felt her hands tighten on my shoulders.  Oh,
delicious, I thought, delicious, and I reached for her left
breast with my right hand, rubbing that nipple into
hardness as well.  My other hand ran down her side, bumping
over her ribs to her waist.  Ruth's hands, light as birds,
rested on my head, tangling restlessly in my hair, and I
realized that the sound in the room was coming from me, my
mouth on Ruthie's hard nipple.  

We stumbled to the bed.  I fumbled at the button of her
jeans and pulled them off her narrow hips, watching the way
the curve of her ass appeared and disappeared as she raised
it off the bed, jeans and black underwear off in a tangle. 
I was still fully-dressed; Ruthie hadn't made any move to
take my clothes off, so I took them off myself, pulling my
sweater off over my head and shucking my khakis impatiently
into a corner.  The idea of my skin on hers obsessed me.  I
just wanted to touch her, run my palms over her, feel that
fine-grained skin under my fingers.

But when I stood near the bed again, I hesitated.  I
thought fleetingly of ten years gone, and of scars and
bruises, and of Stephen.  I looked at Ruthie.  Her pupils
were huge in that bruised face, her eyes almost black, and
her breasts were rising and falling quickly.  I could see
the pulse beating in her neck, near the perfect indigo
imprint of a man's finger.  So I reached out with my own
index finger and touched her there, traced the bruise, and
then leaned in and kissed it, and was lost. 

Hollows and curves.  I kissed the high curve of her
velveted head, the shadowed hollow between the points of
her collarbone, traced the curve under her left breast,
circled her nipple with my tongue.  Her small breasts were
surprisingly heavy, solid in my hands.  I fit my fingers
into the winged bruises along her ribs, and carefully
stroked her there, applying no pressure but feathering
along the skin, and she shivered under my touch.  I kissed
the dent at her waist and the hollow of her navel, the
smooth warm curved skin of her belly, and there I caught
the first rich scent of her pussy.  I felt dizzy for a
moment, wet beyond description, full of adrenaline and
spreading warmth, my own skin vividly aware of scraping
along the cotton bedspread where it was not sliding against
Ruthie's hot skin.  I looked up at her.  Her eyes were
closed, and she was almost panting, but she made no sound. 
Whither thou goest.

Lower.  And now I was kissing her tightly-curled pubic
hair, the air around me redolent with her smell, and now I
was tasting something new and not new, something rich and
strange and utterly Ruth.  I suddenly could not understand
why so many men--why Stephen, in fact--tended to use their
tongue as an eleventh finger of a kind, to stiffen it and
use it to manipulate.  Surely it should be used as what it
was:  an organ of taste.  I wanted to be everywhere,
everywhere.  It was like licking raw silk, silk that had
been dipped and dipped in water, smooth and yet subtly
textured, and oh, the glorious novelty:  the soft-over-hard
of Ruthie's clit, the way I could tug at the hood with my
lips (again, again, again), the springing juices, the soft
sweet folds.  And now Ruthie was making noise:  high cries
with no articulate words in them that matched the way her
pussy was clenching, clenching.  I was pressing my thighs
together over and over, grinding my pussy against the bed,
coming in tiny sharp bursts, but all my sensation was in my
mouth and nose, all my being was focused on the hot sweet
quivering loveliness of Ruthie's pussy.  My tongue, soft
and flat, passed over her again and again, tasting her,
taking her in.  I never wanted it to end.

It had to, of course.  After endless minutes of my mouth on
that sweet hot skin, endless minutes of Ruthie coming under
me, I felt a light hand on the back of my head.  I stopped
moving my tongue and rested a moment, then kissed that
crinkle of blue-black hair and moved back up beside her.  I
wanted to kiss her, even with my tired jaw, but I had a
hair on my tongue and her lovely sticky scent all over my
face and hand, and I didn't know the etiquette.  I wouldn't
have minded it from Stephen, but surely these things took
time to find out.  I smiled at her a little tentatively. 
She was so beautiful in the light coming from the bathroom,
even with that bruised and swollen face and even with her
lovely hair gone.  She was flushed deep pink from her
orgasm, and her pupils were dilated.  Instead of kissing
her, I lay down next to her on the bed, that warmth still
spreading inside me the way the bourbon had.  She didn't
say anything.  After a moment, she closed her eyes, and so
did I.

I must have fallen asleep for an hour or so.  The next
thing I was aware of was that Ruthie was gone from the bed.
 I felt drugged from the short sleep, disoriented,
unaccountably happy.  

And then I heard a low, passionate voice coming from the
bathroom, a voice so full of agony, so close to breaking
that my heart almost stopped.  "--motherfucker, Greg you
goddamned bastard, look what you've done, you fuck, you
fuck, you fuck--"  There was a tearing sob.  I got up
quickly and quietly from the bed and went to the bathroom,
standing out of the light of the doorway.  I could see
Ruth, standing in front of the mirror, naked, bald, pitiful
in the harsh fluorescent light.  She was crying.  "Fucker,
fuck cuntlicker bastard, Greg you dogshit motherfucking
asshole," she was saying, and her voice was full of pain.

"Ruth," I said, and she whirled to face me.  My voice was
unexpectedly harsh, echoing off the bathroom walls.  "Ruth,
did you tell the police that he did this?"

"What are you talking about?" she asked slowly, and there
was no trace of inflection in her voice, no hint of the
vivid hurt of a moment ago.

"Your boyfriend.  Or husband.  The man who did this to you.
 Did you report this?  Tell me you wouldn't cover this up,
Ruth.  Not something like this.  You wouldn't really be as
stupid as that, not a brilliant woman like you."  Oh, God. 
Not that, no, Emma, you are not her judge and jury, not
after ten years.  Her face was frozen.  Try again.  "Do you
need help?  Do you need to get away from him?"  The words
were spilling out of me.  I didn't know where they were
coming from:  Law and Order, ABC Afterschool Specials, the
Lifetime channel.  "You don't have to ever see him again. 
You can come and stay with me if you want to."  A beat, my
furious heart pounding.  "You didn't have to *lie* to me,
Ruthie."  Another denunciation, another barrier, my voice
still sharp and jagged.  She was silent.  The words lay
where they had fallen, accusatory, pointing.

I looked at her icy stare, and somewhere I knew what was
coming, but I told her the angry, helpless truth:  "I love
you."

She looked at me for a moment, expressionless, naked, the
tears still wet on her face.  "I think you should leave
now, Emma," she said, and I watched the door swing closed
in her eyes. 

So I left, mute and appalled by the sound of my own words
still echoing in my ears.  I didn't have the courage to be
a Ruth, to say, I will not fail you nor forsake you,
whither thou goest I will go.  I didn't have the courage to
brave those chilly eyes.  I left that apartment building
with her scent on my skin and her taste on my mouth and I
knew that this time there could be no possible consolation.
 This time, the loss of Ruth Adamson was irreparable,
unique to me, something no one else could ever understand. 

++++++

Now I am lying in my bed in the dark, by myself.  I am
waiting for the telephone to ring for the first time on the
morning of this freezing February sixth.  I do not know
whether it will be Stephen, or whether it will be Ruth, or
whether I will be able to answer it in either case.  The
night outside my window is so black it is blue, so blue it
is impossible of description, and Ruthie could hide in it
if she wanted to.

"I know what kind of love this is," whispers the radio,
here with me in the darkness.  "After all, I was there when
we made it."  I place my bladed hand between my thighs, and
wait for Ruth.  

May the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death
part thee and me.  




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