Eddie and Ruthie

[breathedout]

On one of her trips “home” to Texas–she was still in her teens–Pat made friends with a married couple in El Paso, a city on the Texas-Mexican border just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez. The woman, Eddy, was a very masculine horse-trainer, and the man, Ruthie, was an exceedingly effeminate dress designer. They were both homosexual and had married each other, Pat wrote approvingly, for cover. (Eddy and Ruthie’s behavior in gay bars was so outrageous that their marriage was “urgently advisable.”) Even better, Eddy and Ruthie had married in order to wear each others’ clothes. Pat was enthralled.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 10: Alter Ego, Part 1)

If Highsmith was in her late teens, the date of this anecdote would have been circa 1938-1940.

And she’s not the only one enthralled by this lavender marriage! I’m slightly desolate that she never wrote Eddy and Ruthie and their queer, clothing-sharing, gay-bar-scandalizing El Paso existence into a novel. (Though given the geography of Highsmith Country, one or both of their fictional avatars would no doubt have ended up dead.)