Amid the holiday celebrations, he suffers only a deep and abiding premonition of disintegration of which he cannot speak, not even with Babe. He knows that Babe is concerned about him. Babe doesn’t like to see him this way. Babe already has one drunk on his hands, and does not need another, but Babe remains as solicitous of him as ever. Babe was there for him in the days and weeks after the divorce came through, and Babe was there for him when Teddy died.
Babe will always be there for him.
But Babe cannot understand the fragmentation he is experiencing. Lois and his daughter gave structure to his existence. Just as he requires order in his working environment, so also does he need it in his personal life, and disruption to one inevitably involves a disturbance in the other. The fact that he was largely responsible for fatally undermining his own marriage does not change this. It was the stability, however fragile, of his home life that enabled him to stray: a tension of symmetry. Only in his pictures is he content to let chaos prevail. He abjures it in reality, yet at the same time he is driven to act on instinct, just as on the set of a picture the scripts over which he labors may provide the framework for spontaneity. But one cannot exist without the other: to create artistic discord, he depends upon the consolations of domestic harmony.
The solution, then, to the profound upheaval in his world caused by the divorce is to find a way to restore equilibrium as soon as possible. With his sister-in-law and her children safely situated elsewhere, he tries to convince Ruth to move out of her parents’ house in Watts and join him at South Palm. But Ruth is conscious of appearances. His divorce will not be final for another year, and she does not wish to be the subject of gossip.
We can’t live together, Ruth tells him. People will talk.
In other words, Ruth will fuck him, but she will not live under the same roof as him, or not without company to add the appearance of propriety. And Ruth is entitled to take this position. She has a business of her own, and therefore a reputation both personal and professional to protect.
It is a quandary.