It Will Come to Me Read Free

had gone off duty. She saw him leaning insouciantly against a wall, a napkin drapped over his forearm. Not a crumb of cheesecake either. Across the table some anorexic had abandoned hers after taking two bites.
    All through Old Joe's address her consciousness flickered, but she came to for long enough to register his rhetorical strategy. He was plowing through the arts, detailing the ways that each “keeps us human.” She dropped off again, jolted awake at intervals by the muted detonation of one thuddingly inevitable phrase after another. Universal language. Vibrant tapestry. Enrich our spirit. But what really kept her from sleeping soundly through the after-dinner harrumphing and speechifying was an idiot voice that kept piping up inside her. What about me? this voice demanded. I know about
you
, Old Joe, but what about
me?
    At last there came a gentle rain of applause. Ben was standing at her back, a hand on her shoulder. Groggy and enraged, Ruth shrugged it off. It was the polite clapping that infuriated her, and Ben's complicity. How could these people sit still for this? They should be hurling water glasses, overturning tables. It wasn't just that Old Joe had subjected them to a collection of dozy platitudes. He'd also insulted their intelligence with his assumption that the arts serve a merely restorative function. Not that her dinner partner would object. And not, come to think of it, thatshe'd be any happier if the speaker had reversed his ordering of the importance of the arts and sciences. She was no arts booster. The ones she knew were irritating in their own right. There were many flavors of academic dullness; at this university it happened that the flintily dull taste of science predominated.
    The guests rose. The president bellowed out his farewell and a reminder to guests to check under their chairs for the numbered sticker that matched the one on each table's floral centerpiece. Ruth won, as she often did. Clutching her prize she followed Ben through the crowd and out the door into the clarifying air of the evening. She had a throbbing white-wine headache, and on the way to the parking lot she hissed her complaints. Holding her arm tightly, Ben hustled her along, smiling tightly as they passed people they knew. Once the car doors were closed he turned to her and told her in a low steady voice how angry he was that she'd spoiled his pleasure in this occasion—which was, after all, intended to honor him. “You know what?” he said. “I don't like you when you drink.”
    I t was true. Drinking made her angry. That was more readily apparent now than it had been fifteen years ago when she was angry all the time. These days she was relatively calm. Since menopause had taken her off the wheel of premenstrual instability she no longer shrieked at Ben for breathing audibly or flossing his teeth in front of the television. In some ways she'd gotten crankier, but it was a broad, level, abstract kind of crankiness. She could see a long way, standing here on this high plain of middle-aged equanimity, and what she saw disappointed her.
    The fact was that she actually drank less than she used to, orat least less often, partly because now there was a physiological price to pay—heartburn, disturbed sleep, a flattened depression the following day. She knew a few women her age who had given up drinking entirely, but somehow it seemed essential to keep her hand in. Most nights she abstained entirely. But once a week, occasionally twice, she drank, always a little more than she should. She might drink a big martini, for example, followed by a beer. Or she might drink four glasses of wine. Or two beers followed by two glasses of wine, or the other way around. Many permutations, but always the same result: the genie of grandiosity was born in her chest. You're too intense, it told her, too original, too
brave
for these careful people. This meant Ben, so she picked a fight with him.
    Time for another beer. She moved over to