Long ago, before Ruth’s cabinets held towers of canned soup and smaller towers
of tuna and sardines, when her freezer was innocent of frozen diners, in other
words, when Ruth was so young that she could not imagine what her life could
become, Ruth got naked with men.  She took off her clothes as easily and lightly
as now she slips into her pink cotton housecoat.  Naked, she was content to lie
in full light and never wondered if she was found pleasing.  Then Ruth’s body
was untouched by gravity; her thighs, unmarked by veins, might have been
bloodless. But neither vanity nor even self-assurance kept insecurity at bay.
She simply had no time to think about her body.

In bed, Ruth seemed entirely unselfish.  She examined every square centimeter of
her lovers, and followed her gaze with light brushes of fingers and lips.  She
seemed so tender and so passionate they never suspected it was not sex she
wanted, that her touches and kisses were not born of affection, but were a ruse
to hide her inspection of their bodies.

Though sex was not unwelcome, Ruth wanted more from the men she lay with,
sliding into bed with them as soon as they piqued her curiosity.  Only the
youngest die unmarked, Ruth knew as she divided scars into two sorts, accidental
and surgical. All this happened before Lyndon Baines Johnson showed the country
his new surgical scar, lifting the hospital gown for the photographer.  No, then
it was the accidental scars that produced stories of character.  What Ruth
wanted, truthfully, from her lovers were their stories.

These she drew from her lovers by offering little stories of her own.  She
showed them the scar on her palm.  She told them how she had cut her hand
pushing ice into a glass—how she had wanted to shape the world to suit her, and
had a bloody lesson that the world would not accommodate her. She gave them the
bandaged hand throbbing in the movie she’d gone to right after, Psycho, and the
blood in the shower scene forever connected to her own profligate bleeding into
the kitchen sink.  She showed them the cinders embedded in her right knee, and
told how she had slid into third base wearing a skirt because she hadn’t gone
home to change into play clothes after school.  She gave them her mother’s
cigarette smoke rising into her eyes, already stinging with tears of angry
humiliation, her mother’s scolding all the while that she swabbed and bandaged
Ruth’s knee.

Having offered her own stories, she asked easily for theirs.  Not all at once of
course.  She was the sultan to their Scheherezade.  When no more stories were to
be had, she abandoned the body and its owner so kindly, so delicately, each man
would have sworn that he had left her.

And then she met Michael Walker, a wiry man who wanted to be called Mickey.
Ruth thought Mickey looked as though he would have been at home in a taproom
with a pack of Camels rolled into the sleeve of a white tee shirt. It was,
however, deep in the underground library stacks of NYU that she met him.  He was
squatting, looking on the lower shelves for a book on T.S. Eliot, and she was
looking also for a book on Eliot, on the higher shelves.  Ruth, wearing a
fashionable red mini-dress, nearly knocked Mickey over as she leaned above him
to scan the titles.  He didn’t move to accommodate her, but looked up the length
of her body through his rimless glasses, grinned and asked her if he could help
her as she reached for a volume by Kenner that should have been in the reading
room. “I can manage,” she said in a tone he later told her was ungracious, but,
in fact, she could not, and, reaching, lost her balance.

He held up his hand, and, without thinking she took it to steady herself and
held it for a moment longer than absolutely necessary.  “If he had moved over,”
she thought  “I could have done it.  He stayed there on purpose.”  So the first
time they touched was simultaneously the first time she was suspicious of him.
It was a moment of nonpareil intimacy, she thought.

In the next weeks the Village became their guiltless feast.  They ate blonde
brownies and drank coffee at Chock Full O’Nuts; they ate mushrooms and marrow on
toast and drank beer at the English Pub on the Avenue of the Americas; they ate
chocolate rum cake and drank espresso at the Peacock on West Fourth Street.
They shopped at Balducci’s and Babka and carried their food in paper bags down
Ninth street across town to the East Village where they cooked in his apartment
near Avenue B.  The big covered tub in the kitchen was both counter and table
for their dinners.  Some nights they filled the tub with warm water and took
candlelit baths with sandalwood incense burning while they smoked and wondered
what became of the rainbows in the bubbles.  Once in the semi-darknes,s Ruth
could not remember if it was winter or spring.

In the time before they were naked together, Ruth considered Mickey’s penis.  He
was a lapsed Catholic, and though until now her net had been cast wide, it had
been cast, until now, only among what she thought of as Her People.  Her
knowledge of foreskins was limited to marble statuary or paintings of cherubim,
and she wondered if she would find a fleshy foreskin disgusting.  But, after
all, she saw the he had, indeed, been circumcised according to the fashion of
the time and class, and thereafter she gave his penis, which was fairly
unremarkable, no more thought than to the rest of his seemingly perfect body.

That apparent perfection puzzled Ruth.  Many mornings and nights they lay
together on the white cotton sheets of his bed, and her ministrations to him
were minute and considered. But search as she did, his body was, as far as she
could see, unmarked.  She looked for a scar to find the truth it would reveal.
She was relentless in her searches, which invariably resulted in sex.  For would
any normal man expect a woman to undress him and touch and kiss him so
thoroughly here and there and there again if she had not wanted to make love?
And Ruth dared not articulate the object of her minute and increasingly frantic
examinations.

They had told each other the stories one ordinarily tells new lovers, but
because these stories were so ordinary, Ruth was left unsatisfied.  She had
become obsessed with his surface perfection, and she was convinced that someday
she would find the scar that held his secret story.  And because this scar was
kept hidden, she believed the secret it concealed must be terrible and sordid.

She scolded herself for her suspicions, told herself that she had read too much
literature based on the truth of original sin.  But her suspicions persisted,
unresolved.  Nights of troubled sleep left dark circles under her eyes.

Ruth watched as Mickey revealed himself to be the perfect lover.  He kissed her
toes, and her finger-tips, the inside of her wrist, the hollow of her throat. He
smoothed the hair at her temples, traced her cheekbones with his tongue.  He
kissed her eyelids, left and right and left again.  Ruth’s eyes fluttered open,
and she found herself looking into his dispassionate stare. He did not look
away. She might have been gazing into a mirror, and at last she knew his
terrible secret flaw.   Neither of them had reason to see the other again.

Miriam N. Kotzin lives in Philadelphia where she directs Drexel University's Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing. She's a contributing editor of Boulevard.