“I don’t know where we’re going,” he confessed to her.
“Just drive,” Marion told the boy. “I’ll give you all the directions you need.”
A Masturbating Machine
For the first month of that summer, Ruth and the writer’s assistant rarely saw each other. They did not meet in the kitchen of the Coles’ house, largely because Eddie ate none of his meals there. And although the four-year-old and the writer’s assistant slept in the same house, their bedtimes were considerably different, their bedrooms far apart. In the morning, Ruth had already eaten her breakfast, with either her mother or her father, before Eddie got up. By the time Eddie was awake, the first of the child’s three nannies had arrived, and Marion had already driven Ruth and the nanny to the beach. If the weather was unsuitable for the beach, Ruth and her nanny would play in the nursery, or in the virtually unused living room of the big house.
That the house was vast made it immediately exotic to Eddie O’Hare; he had first grown up in a sma
ll faculty apartment in an Exeter dormitory—later, in a not much larger faculty house. But that Ted and Marion had separated —that they never slept in the same house together—was an unfamiliarity of far greater magnitude (and cause for speculation) for Eddie than the size of Ted and Marion’s house. That her parents had separated was a new and mysterious change in Ruth’s life as well; the four-year-old had no less difficulty adjusting to the oddity of it than Eddie had.
Regardless of what the separation implied to Ruth and Eddie about the future, the first month of that summer was chiefly confusing. On the nights when Ted stayed in the rental house, Eddie had to go fetch him with the car in the morning; Ted liked to be in his workroom no later than ten A.M., which gave Eddie time to drive to the Sagaponack General Store and post office en route. Eddie picked up the mail, and coffee and muffins for them both. On the nights when Marion stayed in the rental house, Eddie still picked up the mail but he got breakfast only for himself—Ted had eaten earlier with Ruth. And Marion could drive her own car. When he wasn’t running errands, which he did frequently, Eddie spent much of his day working in the empty rental house.
This work, which was undemanding, varied from answering some of Ted’s fan mail to retyping Ted’s handwritten revisions of the extremely short A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound . At least twice a week, Ted added a sentence or deleted one; he also added and deleted commas—he changed semicolons to dashes and then back to semicolons. (In Eddie’s opinion, Ted was going through a punctuation crisis.) At best, a brand-new paragraph would be raggedly created— Ted’s typing was terrible—and then instantly and messily revised in pencil. At worst, the same paragraph would be cut entirely by the next evening.
Eddie did not open or read Ted’s mail, and most of the letters that Eddie retyped for Ted were Ted’s replies to children. Ted would write to the mothers himself. Eddie never saw what the mothers wrote to Ted, or Ted’s responses to them. (When Ruth would hear her father’s typewriter at night— only at night—what she was hearing, more often than a children’s-book-in-progress, was a letter to a young mother.)
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child. Notwithstanding that the four-year-old Ruth would witness her mother being mounted from behind by a sixteen-year-old boy, Ruth’s parents would never raise their voices in anger toward, or in hatred of, each other—nor would her mother or her father ever speak truly ill of the other to Ruth. In this aspect of their destroyed marriage, Ted and Marion were models of decent behavior. Never mind that the arrangements concerning the rental house were as seedy as the unfortunate dwelling itself. Ruth never had to inhabit that house.
In the real estate parlance of the Hamptons in 1958, it was a socalled carriage house; in reality, it was an airless one-bedroom apartment that had been hastily assembled and cheaply furnished over a two-car garage. It was on Bridge Lane in Bridgehampton—not more than two miles from the Coles’ house on Parsonage Lane in Sagaponack—and, by night, it sufficed as a place for Ted or Marion to sleep far enough away from the other. By day, it was where the writer’s assistant worked.
The kitchen of the carriage house was never used for cooking; the kitchen table—there was no dining room—was stacked with unanswered mail or letters-in-progress. It was Eddie’s desk by day, and Ted took his turn at that typewriter on the nights he stayed there. The kitchen was supplied with all sorts of booze, and with coffee and tea— period. The living room, which was simply an extension of the kitchen, had a TV and a couch, where Ted would periodically pass out while watching a baseball game; he never turned on the television unless there was a ball game or a boxing match. Marion, if she couldn’t sleep, would watch late-night movies.
The bedroom closet contained nothing but an emergency ration of Ted’s and Marion’s clothes. The bedroom was never dark enough; there was an uncurtained skylight, which often leaked. Marion—both to keep out the light and to restrain the leak—tacked a towel over the skylight, but when Ted stayed there, he took the towel down. Without the skylight, he might not have known when to get up; there was no clock, and Ted often went to bed without knowing when or where he’d taken off his watch.
The same maid who cleaned the Coles’ house would stop at the carriage house, too, but only to vacuum it and change the linen. Maybe because the carriage house was within smelling distance of the bridge where the crabbers fished for crabs—usually with raw chicken parts for bait—the one-bedroom apartment had a permanent odor of poultry and brine. And because the landlord used the two-car garage for his cars, Ted and Marion and Eddie would all comment on the permanence with which the odor of motor oil and gasoline lingered in the air.
If anything improved the place, albeit slightly, it was the few photographs of Thomas and Timothy that Marion had brought along. She’d taken the photos from Eddie’s guest bedroom in the Coles’ house, and from the adjoining guest bathroom, which was also his. (Eddie couldn’t have known that the small number of picture hooks left in the bare walls was a harbinger of the greater number of picture hooks that would soon be exposed. Nor could he have predicted the many, many years he would be haunted by the image of the noticeably darker wallpaper where the photographs of the dead boys had been hung and then removed.)
There were still some photographs of Thomas and Timothy left in Eddie’s guest bedroom and bathroom; he looked at them often. There was one with Marion that he looked at the most. In the photo, which had been taken in the morning sunlight in a hotel room in Paris, Marion is lying in an old-fashioned feather bed; she looks tousled and sleepy, and happy. Beside her head on the pillow is a child’s bare foot— with only a partial view of the child’s leg, in pajamas, disappearing under the bedcovers. Far away, at the other end of the bed, is another bare foot—logically belonging to a second child, not only because of the sizable distance between the bare feet but also because of a different pair of pajamas on this second leg.
Eddie could not have known that the hotel room was in Paris—it was in the once-charming Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, where the Coles stayed when Ted was promoting the French translation of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls . Nevertheless Eddie recognized that there was something foreign, probably European, about the bed and the surrounding furnishings. Eddie also assumed that the bare feet belonged to Thomas and Timothy, and that Ted had taken the photograph.
There are Marion’s bare shoulders—only the shoulder straps of her slip or camisole are showing—and one of her bare arms. A partial view of its armpit suggested that Marion kept her armpits cleanly shaven. Marion must have been twelve years younger in the photograph—still in her twenties, although she looked much the same to Eddie now. (Only not so happy.) Maybe it was the effect of the morning sunlight slanting across the pillows of the bed that made her hair appear more blond.
Like all the other photographs of Thomas and Timothy, it was an eight-by-ten enlargement that had been expensively matted and framed under glass. By removing the photograph from the wall, Eddie could prop it on the chair beside his bed in such a way that Marion was facing him as he lay on the bed and masturbated. To enhance the illusion that her smile was meant for him, Eddie had only to remove from his mind the children’s bare feet. The best way to accomplish this was to remove their bare feet from his sight as well; two scraps of notepaper, which he affixed to the glass with Scotch tape, did the trick.
This activity had become his nightly ritual when, one night, Eddie was interrupted. Just as he’d begun to beat off, there was a knock on the bedroom door, which had no lock, and Ted said, “Eddie? Are you awake? I saw the light. May we come in?”
Eddie, understandably, scrambled. He jumped into a still-wet and exceedingly clammy bathing suit that had been drying on the arm of the bedside chair, and he hastily rushed into the bathroom with the photograph, which he crookedly returned to its place on the bathroom wall. “Coming!” he cried. Only as he opened the door did he remember the two scraps of notepaper that were still taped to the glass, hiding from view the existence of Thomas’s and Timothy’s feet. And he’d left the door to the bathroom open. It was too late to do anything about it; Ted, with Ruth in his arms, was already standing in the doorway of the guest bedroom.
“Ruth had a dream,” her father said. “Didn’t you, Ruthie?”
“Yes,” the child said. “It wasn’t very nice.”
“She wanted to be sure that one of the photographs was still here. I know it isn’t one that her mommy took to the other house,” Ted explained.
“Oh,” said Eddie, who could feel the child staring right through him.
“There’s a story to every picture,” Ted told Eddie. “Ruth knows all the stories—don’t you, Ruthie?”
“Yes,” the child said again. “There it is!” the four-year-old cried, pointing to the photograph that hung above the night table, near Eddie’s rumpled bed. The bedside chair, which had been pulled close to the bed (for Eddie’s purposes), was not where it should have been; Ted, holding Ruth, had to step awkwardly around it in order to look more closely at the photograph.
In the picture, Timothy, who has skinned his knee, is sitting on the countertop in a large kitchen. Thomas, demonstrating a clinical interest in his brother’s injury, is standing beside him, a roll of gauze in one hand, a roll of adhesive tape in the other, playing doctor to the bloody knee. Maybe Timothy (at the time) was a year older than Ruth. Maybe Thomas was seven.
“His knee is bleeding, but he’s going to be all right?” Ruth asked her father.
“He’s going to be fine—he just needs a bandage,” Ted told the child.