Too Many Men by Lily Brett Read Free Book Online Page A

nine.
    Ruth wasn’t too tall for Garth Taylor. She wasn’t too anything. He toler-

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    ated all of her idiosyncrasies. He was amused by them. “You’re so funny,”
    he would say to her. Garth hadn’t come from a funny past. His mother was English and his father was Irish. Alcoholic, illiterate, and Irish. Ruth couldn’t understand Garth’s lack of connection to his parents until she met them. There was a mocking cruelty to his father and an indifference in his mother. Garth’s stories about being beaten up by his father and having to protect his mother from similar beatings made sense to Ruth when she met the Taylors.
    Ruth had wondered why Garth bothered to keep in contact with his parents at all. They didn’t seem to love him. “You were born nothing and you’ll die nothing,” Garth’s father had said to him the day Garth introduced Ruth to them. Ruth had squirmed and wished she hadn’t asked to meet the Taylors. Ruth knew that Garth had had very little as a child. She hadn’t realized how little. She knew that he had walked the three miles to school and back, in bare feet, until he was twelve. His parents’ lack of warmth and apparent lack of interest overwhelmed Ruth. She couldn’t wait to leave their house.
    The Taylors still lived in the same small fibrous cement house, in an outer suburb of Sydney, that Garth grew up in. Garth had moved on. He had moved into the middle-class world of art and literature. He wrote art reviews for a national newspaper and had regular exhibitions of his paintings in galleries around the country. “I’d rather have all the combined neu-roses of every Jewish parent than have your parents,” Ruth had said to Garth after they left his parents’ place. “They’re very cold,” she said.
    “They tried their best,” he said. “My mother was sixteen when she had me and my father was nineteen.”
    “They don’t have to be so cruel,” she said.
    “They can’t help it,” he said.
    “Why aren’t you angry with them?” she had said to him.
    “I’m just not,” he said. “I feel sorry for them.”
    Garth found it hard to be angry. He couldn’t even make a dismissive comment about anyone he knew. He went out of his way not to hurt or offend anybody. Ruth was rude for him. She had a sharp tongue and she used it liberally. Resentments and irritations flew out of her. Garth laughed at them.
    Garth laughed a lot. And Ruth laughed with him. They laughed at how T O O M A N Y M E N
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    happy they were with each other. And Garth wept. He wept with joy. Ruth, who had barely been able to cry, even when she was in pain, wept with him.
    He didn’t seem to mind her anxiety or her fear. “I’m freeing you of the need to feel those things,” she joked with him. “You can feel them vicari-ously through me.” He smiled at her. His smile lifted her. It lifted her spirits and overrode many of her fears. She had never been so happy. She knew it had to end. It ended the day his wife called to say she wanted him back.
    He had married someone he didn’t like very much and he had stayed married to her while she humiliated him by laughing at him in his yellow nylon pajamas, or by lying to him about the various men she took on as lovers.
    “She bought me the pajamas,” Garth said to Ruth.
    “Why did you wear them?” Ruth asked.
    “I thought they were just pajamas,” he said. Garth spoke about his wife with kindness and understanding. “She’s not a bad person,” he said. “She just has some problems.”
    “The humiliation of her affairs must have reminded you of the humiliation your father made you feel,” Ruth said to him. “The humiliation and the degradation must have felt like love.”
    When Garth’s wife drove through the restaurant window, he came to see Ruth. “She really needs me,” he said to Ruth, weeping. “I’m worried about what she’ll do to herself if I’m not there.”
    “Well, you better be there,” Ruth had