Eve's Apple - Softcover

Rosen, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312424361 ISBN 13: 9780312424367

Verlag: Picador, 1900

Inhaltsangabe

Ruth Simon is beautiful, smart, talented, and always hungry. As a teenager, she starved herself almost to death, and though outwardly healed, inwardly she remains dangerously obsessed with food. For Joseph Zimmerman, Ruth's tormented relationship with eating is a source of deep distress and erotic fascination. Driven by his love for Ruth, and haunted by his own secrets, Joseph sets out to unravel the mystery of hunger and denial. This gripping debut novel is a powerful exploration of appetite, love, and desire.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Rosen

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Eve's Apple

A Novel

By Jonathan Rosen

Picador

Copyright © 1997 Jonathan Rosen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-312-42436-7

CHAPTER 1

Winter

The first thing Carol Simon does when she enters a room is water the plants. It doesn't matter whose house it is, she runs around sticking her fingers in flowerpots, and, if things are dry, she finds the kitchen and emerges carrying a glass of water. She's like an animal staking out territory. And because I was living with her daughter, she may have felt a special urge to lay a claim to our place. Her daughter, Ruth, sat glowering beside me with a shawl over her shoulders — huddled, shy, enraged.

"Mother, sit down," she said between her teeth. "You're being rude."

"Not at all," her mother said. "I'm doing you a favor. I've never seen plants in such terrible shape — it may be too late for them."

The plants were indeed starved. The coleus had lost its purple, the leaves of the ferns were edged with brown, and the spider plant, in its crisp dying, looked alert, as if it had been watered with coffee.

"I hope you don't treat him like the plants," she said, stretching out her arms and dragging the cat toward her. The plants were Ruth's. The cat, Max, was mine.

"No," said Ruth, "Max eats like a horse. I don't think he's really a cat. I think he's some other animal in disguise."

Max could eat the cream cheese off a bagel in the time it took to answer the telephone. He would jump over the serrated tops of shopping bags and land face-first in the groceries as soon as the bags were set on the floor. And Ruth hated him for it. He was like her hunger gone out of her — prowling in the kitchen, nosing in the cabinets, leaping on the table at dinnertime. He gave away the secret of her appetite. And if I had learned anything about Ruth in the time we were together, it was this appalling mystery that at first I refused to believe — that she was always hungry.

Max's gray bulk lay purring on Mrs. Simon's lap, and as she stroked him she talked about movies. Mrs. Simon had recently finished a PhD in film theory, and much of her time was spent in screening rooms.

She was an attractive, energetic woman with abundant, unruly red hair. It was, Ruth had assured me, her natural color, and though I preferred the muted fire of Ruth's own auburn wavelets, there was something mesmerizing about her mother's high-voltage hair. She had a strong, faintly freckled face and her gaze was keen and attentive — the kind of absorbed, giving gaze professors focus on in class and direct their lectures to. Apparently more than one professor had focused on it in the last twelve years, and the list of her affairs had grown longer than the course catalog.

Movies and sex. To hear Ruth tell it, ever since her mother gave up being a housewife to go back to graduate school when Ruth was a little girl, her mother seldom came out of the dark. Her degree coincided almost perfectly with her divorce, so that by the time her dissertation was approved the final papers were ready for her signature at the lawyer's, and she was ready for a new life.

Despite lost time, she obviously had a good career ahead of her. She was in her mid-forties, having married right out of college, and though Ruth remembered days from childhood when her mother could not get out of bed, she was clearly full of energy now. Carol Simon had played field hockey at Wellesley and there was a restless athleticism about her, a vitality that recalled for me a photo Ruth had of her mother, taken in the early sixties, that showed her at a team practice. Wielding her hockey stick like a scythe, hair aflame, she looked, in her high socks and pleated skirt, more like a Highland warrior than a college sophomore. The picture stirred in Ruth the same ambivalent admiration that most of her mother's achievements evoked.

It was hard not to admire Carol Simon. The glow of success was on her. Her dissertation, "Here's Looking at You, Kid: Images of Women in the Cinema," had been published by Harvard University Press. Her position at a small college in Boston was untenured but secure. As she immodestly told us, "I virtually am the film department." She attended conferences all over the country and received invitations to film festivals in France, Austria, Venice, from which she returned looking younger, more exotically intellectual, and, despite hours of consecutive viewing in dark theaters, as tan as her fair complexion allowed. She even wrote a column, "Talking Pictures," which appeared in a small journal once a month.

And how did Ruth feel about her mother's academic adventure?

"She wanted to have her kids and eat them, too," she told me once, bitterly. "She wanted to escape, which is fine, except that I had already been born. How could I compete with Katharine Hepburn when I was only five?"

Ruth could not forgive her mother for abandoning her to frozen dinners, to public transportation, to an empty house when school was over. And she could not forgive herself for not forgiving her mother. She wanted a mother who was educated. She wanted a mother who worked. She wanted a mother who was independent — after all, she wanted these things for herself: was it fair to deprive her mother? But try as she might, she could not root out an implacable longing for a storybook mother, someone who would love her above all, who would fill the kitchen with warm food smells, who would tuck her in, who would convert her own suffering into love energy. And that was why she wanted me.

I had mastered the ability to banish the ghost of sadness from my own life, and Ruth no doubt sensed this power in me. People have always valued me for my calm exterior, for my carefully cultivated optimism. In my self-persuading cheerfulness I brushed aside all Ruth's fears and warnings. Little did she realize that darker desires lurked in me as well. I did not know it myself. Ruth's illness seemed the sole obstacle to our happiness, not the source of my fascination. It was only much later that I came to see that Ruth, hoping for health, unleashed the opposite in me. At the time I would not have believed it. I told myself I was an ordinary young man and in large measure that was true. The tormented, the obsessed, the needy filled me with fear. But Ruth filled me with desire.

Even as she sat at the table fighting the demons riding on her fork, weighing down her food and giving her face a damned and distant look, even then I could not take my eyes off her. She suffered during every meal, I knew it deep in my gut, and I monitored her with unnatural attention. I felt her moods the way a blind man feels a face — some part of me was pressed up close against her, always, reading her, feeling the contours of her emotions, her thoughts, her moods, her hunger. She shrank at times from the grope of my intuition, but at other times she posed for it, holding herself up for my inspection, baring her misery like nudity that has put aside shame.

Not tonight, though. Ruth barely spoke during the meal with her mother. She sat hunched over her food, focused on her plate, staring at the troubled surface of her own reflected beauty. Her face wore a look of complete and painful absorption, unappeasable and unappeasing. When she looked at me that way my blood froze. But she had no eyes for me at all during dinner.

She looked down as if she were enchanted, working her food slowly across her plate, slowly onto the fork, slowly into her mouth, observing a thousand invisible rituals I could only guess at. Her face had grown very white, as if...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Picador
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1900
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312424361
• ISBN 13: 9780312424367
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 324
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland