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

said.
    “You should have fought for him,” her girlfriend Cathy had said.
    “I don’t want anyone who doesn’t want me,” Ruth said.
    “He does want you,” she said. “He just needs help extricating himself from her.”
    “Then he doesn’t want me enough,” Ruth said. She left for New York two months later.
    Garth had called Ruth several times in the last few years. Three years after he went back to his wife he had left for good. He had given her the house and the car that had replaced the one that she had smashed. Whenever Garth called, Ruth made sure that she exuded friendliness and warmth. But she gave him no information about her life. She gave him nothing but politeness. And she made sure that she was the one to say good-bye first.

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    L I L Y B R E T T
    Sometimes when Ruth stayed in expensive hotels she thought of Garth.
    He loved cheap motels. She understood this. There was an immediacy to a cheap motel. Everything was what it appeared to be. Nothing was dressed up or masked behind a multitude of pillows and bolsters or sleep masks, slippers, and shoehorns. The kettle was there to boil water, not to show you that the management cared. There were the grunts and coughs of the other guests and, sometimes, someone else’s pubic hair on your blanket. But she understood why Garth preferred this world of lodgings to the five-star circuit she was on now.
    In expensive hotels, guests never acknowledged each other. No one spoke at breakfast, unless it was to someone they already knew. It seemed to be an unwritten rule. If you broke the rule and said good morning, you were viewed with suspicion. The wealthy and the successful, it seemed to Ruth, indicated their status and power by a lack of friendliness. An affecta-tion intended, Ruth thought, to let the world know that they already knew too many people. As if a sign of interest in a stranger might reveal a vulner-ability or a curiosity that could disqualify them from their own ranks.
    Why was she thinking about Garth now? Ruth thought. Probably because she knew that her father still saw him. Edek and Garth spoke on the phone now and then, and had dinner together once or twice a year.
    Edek periodically gave Ruth news about Garth.
    Edek always tried to bring up the subject casually. “I did see Garth,” he would say. “He is still by himself. Not married.” Edek’s nonchalance would last less than a minute.
    “You are a stupid girl, Ruthie,” he would say. “What did he do to you that was so bad?”
    “Nothing,” she would say.
    “Why won’t you give him a chance?” Edek would say.
    “For how long does he have to suffer?” Edek had asked the last time he had brought the subject of Garth up.
    “No one is suffering, Dad,” she’d said. “If you love him so much marry him yourself,” she had suddenly shouted. “I’m sick of hearing about him.”
    “Sorry,” Edek had said. “I thought maybe you would see it a bit differently now.” That was two years ago. Her outburst had surprised her and shocked Edek. Edek hadn’t mentioned Garth since.
    “You experience anything that feels bad to you as a permanent situaT O O M A N Y M E N
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    tion,” one of her shrinks had said to her. “If it is raining, you think it will rain forever. If there is noise in a neighbor’s apartment you think it will never stop. You have trouble seeing these situations as transitory. That’s why you can’t forgive people. You think they, like you, are still connected to the incident or the argument or the difficulty that made you both feel bad. They have forgotten, but you haven’t.” There were some things, Ruth thought, when the shrink had finished, that shouldn’t be forgotten.
    Ruth hadn’t thought about Garth this much for years. She had been too attached to Garth. That sort of attachment came affixed to a flood of anxiety for her. She had worried about his well-being. If she woke up, in the middle of the night, she checked that he was still