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Ruby
January 13, 2007
My thoughts this morning are scattered. Last night, we left Harry’s New York Bar on Rue Daunou well after midnight. The streets were frosted with a thin sheet of snow like the top layer of a cake. Cars sat at the curb with windows blocked by white, roofs slick with ice. She held my arm tightly, her face pressed against the cold wool of my overcoat as I tried to keep us both steady. We’d been drinking but weren’t drunk. We’d been laughing but weren’t hysterical. We’d been dancing around this night for most of her life, though not for most of mine. We were in love.
At the corner, we found a cab; the Metro had stopped running for the night.
In the backseat, she turned to me, her lips wine-red from either lipstick or merlot, but which one, I did not know. They were like fresh-bitten berries in the snow, begging to be kissed. But kiss her I did not. Not there on the black leather seat of a car with hot air blowing and a man named Bernard watching us shiftily in the rearview mirror.
Her apartment was a walk-up on the third floor of an old building with a keypad for security. She punched in the code with frozen fingers, her teeth chattering as she glanced at me, laughing each time she messed up the code. Again, she was not drunk, just nervous. As was I.
But how did we get here? Not two days earlier we’d argued along the Seine, her raking long, narrow fingers through her short, dark hair, eyes wild with fire as she accused me of leading her on.
“We cannot do this,” I argued with a firm shake of my head. “Cannot. It would be wrong on every level.”
"Why are you doing this to me?"
"Doing what?" I had no idea what she was talking about.
"Just look, Jack. You're here, standing with me by the river, discussing whether or not we should be together. If you don't want anything from me, then just go away. Go." She gestured at the walkway and waited, daring me to leave.
I did not leave.
She jabbed a red nail into my chest. It was cold that day but not raining or snowing, and her breath puffed out before her. “I don't know if you want this to happen. I need to know you want this as much as I do."
I shook my head, but no words came out. This was frustrating and confusing. This woman--once a girl who everyone, including me, had called Petite Chou--was arresting. I wanted everything from her but could ask for nothing. I'd somehow allowed myself to cross into dangerous territory, and the opposing factors outside of the two of us were enormous.
“Wanting something to happen and thinking that it should happen are two different things.”
Her face fell. “What if it’s destiny?”
“What if it’s just us wanting to write our own rules?”
“Who writes the rules anyway?” She turned her back on me, stalking a few feet away, arms folded over her chest.
Now we were just arguing semantics.
“I’m married,” I called out to her. A man sat on a bench with a cane at his side. He glanced my way without registering shock or curiosity and I ignored him. Perhaps he did not even speak English. “I have two young daughters. I’m a senator. The rules are already written for me.”
She spun around, eyes wild again. “And me? I’m a woman on the cusp of thirty. Single. In love with you.”
“Don’t say that.” I held up a hand to stop the words, though they were already out. “You’re not.”
She huffed. Her face was angry. “You don’t get to decide that. I’ve loved you for a decade—maybe more.”
My chest. The feeling inside: was it inflating with the helium of deep emotion, or constricting with the pain of denying that emotion? I could not tell.
She walked back to me, putting two cold hands against my chest as she looked up into my eyes. “I’ve loved you since the day you pulled me from the water. That day on the boat. Remember?”
I remembered. Her brother—my best friend—and I had taken his teenage sister and her friends out on a boat for the afternoon, and she’d fallen into the water after two glasses of champagne. It wasn’t that she couldn’t swim, it was more that I’d wanted to be a hero in someone’s eyes. I’d felt important as I heaved her up and out of the water, trying not to think of the fact that my hands were digging into the soft flesh of an eighteen-year-old girl’s buttocks. For some men, this would be the stuff of fantasy; for me it was a careful exercise in chaste gallantry. Sometimes in life I've felt as though I've known from birth that I was bound for a life in politics, and as such, I'veweighed nearly every choice and action through the lens of someone who might be observed and judged for his behavior.
Except for this one. This choice I did not weigh carefully--or rather, not carefully enough. To escort Etienne home from the bar on Rue Daunou on the night of her thirtieth birthday was to step through a door into a different universe. I woke up yesterday as one person, believing I'd stick to my guns and hold firm with the words I'd said to her along the Seine: "We cannot do this. I'm married. The rules are already written for me."
And then I woke up this morning in an entirely different world, with a beautiful, warm, pensive woman standing at the end of the bed wearing nothing but an oversized sweater, staring at me as her eyes asked the questions that her mouth could not: What now? Who are we to each other? What does this mean?
I didn't have answers this morning, and I do not now. All I know is that the man I was yesterday is a different man than the one who writes this at a table in a cafe on Rue Boissiere this afternoon. I am changed. I am conflicted. I am loved by two women. I have two daughters to consider. I am a senator. And I am not sorry--for any of it.
Ruby sets the leather-bound journal on the beach towel next to her and looks out at the waves, stricken by the words she's just read. The words of her late husband. The admission of his feelings for Etienne Boucher, the woman who had birthed him a son while she, Ruby Hudson, had sat at home ignorantly, with no idea that as she combed their daughters' hair and had lunch with important people who would help Jack on his way to the White House, that he was nibbling on another woman's cherry-red lips in the snow.
