Excerpt From James Loves Ruth (Novel in Progress)

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Excerpt From James Loves Ruth (Novel in Progress) Jacinda Townsend (bio) XXIII. James James sat slumped in his chair, watching Trevor Noah yet terrifically aware of his own wandering thoughts. Enix had come back taller—not physically, but emotionally. His only child had taken their first day back with him and chosen to dash it against the rocks of a school dance. With Enix gone, he kept reliving the words to Goodnight, Moon. Goodnight room, he thought. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow, jumping over the moon. They were away at the dance with their friend Hannah, no doubt gathered with two or three other girls in front of a large plastic punch bowl, all of them looking no doubt for Kevin, of whom James had heard tell while spying on Enix's TikTok. Kevin always got his face too close to his cell phone and looked into its camera eye as if he were a pirate, and James hated him without knowing much else. He imagined this Kevin under mylar balloons and streamers, looking for Enix, shooting his piratey gaze across the gymnasium. Goodnight clocks, and goodnight socks. His wife, his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Ruth, was gone, out West, following some crazy trail to her past. Enix had texted him from places with names like Ogallala and Winnemucca, places whose names he felt might properly be the province of absurdist literature. But then, that's what they were now living, in the wreckage of the pandemic, in the time of Ruth''s disappearance. Enix had told him Ruth's whole backstory, the one Ruth had managed to keep from him over the course of three decades and the bump of a new millennium. There was no Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, no farm in Metcalf County. Ruth's baby brother had died of a mysterious childhood disease, Enix told him; and her mother had then died of actual heartbreak; her father, crucified by the local police. That Ruth's dad had been a CPA had been a special shock—of all the details she'd fabricated about her past, the lie that her father had been a custodian at the local community college now seemed especially inventive. "Mom just built herself out of thin air," Enix had explained, and he'd been surprised to find not anger, but tenderness. Getting to know Ruth, now, would have been like learning to walk all over again, but he was perfectly willing to try. He imagined Ruth as a wide-eyed, redheaded kid, watching so much sadness spool out in front of her, and he couldn't explain it, not even to himself, because he was supposed to hate her—he'd spent twenty thousand dollars already opposing her in court—but he loved her even more. In fact, he wanted, after Enix told him the story, to hold Ruth in his arms. He wanted to wedge his hand in the curls of her hair, and undo every bad thing that had ever happened to her. Every single solitary thing, including himself. [End Page 72] But he knew how it was now. They'd go to the prove-up and stand before Judge Martinez and agree to dissolve their marriage. They'd walk out of the courtroom and into the hall looking like a couple of zombies, and some young law student maybe standing on the wall with his stack of file folders would look at them and wonder, as James had all those years ago, how two people who once loved each other enough to be married, two people who'd literally been inside each other numerous times, two people who'd listened to each other spit and fart and weep in the shower, how these two people could walk out of a courtroom separately, no longer speaking, having cleaved their fortunes into two neat parcels. Goodnight, little mouse. And goodnight house. He'd been lectured by George, at George's retirement party, where George was supposed to be yukking it up with his teenaged grandchildren. "You need to start loosening your grip," George had said. George had a cold and so had overshot his own voice, and ended up sounding...