"Even so. I saw you that way tonight and I felt a wall between us and this is the one way through it."
"That’s pretty cute. You just want it, really." She yearns to hit out at him, to tell him to go. But that time is past.
He repeats, "Is it so awful for you?"
"Well it is because you think it is."
"Maybe I don’t."
"Look, I’ve loved you."
"Well I’ve loved you."
"And now?"
"I don’t know. I want to still."
Now those damn tears again. She tries to hurry the words out before her voice crumbles. "That’s good of you. That’s heroic."
"Don’t be smart. Listen. Tonight you turned against me. I need to see you on your knees." (p. 174)
Harry and Ruth, out for the evening, meet up with someone out of Harry’s past school days, a rival of sorts. Ruth knows the man too; from her life as a hooker.
So the stage is set here for Harry to fight one of his battles, his own sense of helplessness and hopelessness. But he will use Ruth, demean her by asking her for a blowjob because he knows she’s given that to the other man, because he needs to see himself at least at that level of the other man in her eyes.
And Ruth cannot deny him. For Ruth, as well as the reader, knows something that Harry does not. That ties her to him in a subservient manner that has taken away her own sense of freedom. Strangely enough, the freedom that Harry found in her she must give up herself.
Men do see a reinforcing of power, control, self confidence in the sexual act. Harry, at least here, is being honest about it. And the sex must be of a different manner, leaving us to assume that in the relationship with Ruth, as in his marriage to Janice, plain old sex had lost its worth as a tool. (No pun intended.)
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology