A Widow for One Year - Page 15

She was alone in the audience, and she was wearing the pink cashmere cardigan. It was not a night when it was her turn to stay in the carriage house, so it was not likely that the pink cashmere cardigan would end up in the closet of the seedy apartment above the two-car garage. Yet after that sighting of Marion alone, Eddie would look for her car in both Southampton and East Hampton. Although he spotted it once or twice, he never saw Marion in a movie theater again.

She went out nearly every evening; she rarely ate with Ruth and she never cooked for herself. Eddie presumed that if Marion was going out to dinner, she was eating in a better class of restaurant than he usually chose. He also knew that if he started looking for her in the good restaurants, his fifty dollars per week wouldn’t last long.

As for how Ted spent his nights, it was clear only that he couldn’t drive. He kept a bicycle at the rental house, but Eddie had never seen him ride it. Then one night, when Marion was out, the phone rang in the Coles’ house and the nighttime nanny answered; the caller was the bartender of a bar and restaurant in Bridgehampton, where (the bartender said) Mr. Cole ate and drank almost every night. On this particular night, Mr. Cole had looked atypically unsteady on his bicycle when he’d left. The bartender was calling to express his hope that Mr. Cole was now safe at home.

Eddie drove to Bridgehampton and followed the route he guessed Ted would take to the rental house. Sure enough, there was Ted, pedaling at first in the middle of Ocean Road, and then—as Eddie’s headlights illuminated him—veering off the road onto the soft shoulder. Eddie stopped the car and asked if he wanted a ride. Ted had less than a half-mile to go.

“I have a ride!” Ted told him, waving him on.

And one morning, after Ted had slept in the carriage house, there was another woman’s smell on the bedroom pillows; it was much stronger than Marion’s scent. So he has another woman! Eddie thought, not yet knowing Ted’s pattern with the young mothers. (The pretty young mother of the moment came to model three mornings a week— at first with her child, a little boy, but then alone.)

In explanation of his and Marion’s separation, all Ted had said to Eddie was that it was unfortunate that his coming to work had to coincide with “such a sad time in such a long marriage.” Although the statement implied that the so-called sad time might pass, the more the boy saw of the distance that Ted and Marion maintained, the more he believed that the marriage was finished. Besides, Ted had claimed only that it was a “long” marriage; he hadn’t said the marriage was ever good or happy.

Yet, if only in the many photographs of Thomas and Timothy, Eddie saw that something had been both good and happy, and that the Coles had once had friends. There were pictures of dinner parties with other families, couples with children; Thomas and Timothy had had birthday parties with other children, too. Although Marion and Ted made infrequent appearances in the photographs—Thomas and Timothy (even if only their feet) were the main subject of every photo— there was sufficient evidence that Ted and Marion had once been happy, if not necessarily happy with each other. Even if their marriage had never been good, Ted and Marion had had a multitude of good times with their boys.

Eddie O’Hare could not personally remember as many good times as he saw excessively depicted in those photographs. But what had happened to Ted and Marion’s friends? Eddie wondered. Excepting the nannies, and the models (or model), there was never anyone around.

If, as a four-year-o

ld, Ruth Cole already understood that Thomas and Timothy now inhabited another world, as far as Eddie was concerned, those boys had come from another world as well. They’d been loved.

Whatever Ruth was learning to do, she was learning it from her nannies; for the most part, the nannies had failed to impress Eddie. The first one was a local girl with a thuggish-looking boyfriend who was a local, too—or so Eddie, from his Exonian perspective, assumed. The boyfriend was a lifeguard who possessed the essential imperviousness to boredom that all lifeguards must have. The thug dropped the nanny off every morning, glowering at Eddie if he chanced to see him. This was the nanny who regularly took Ruth to the beach, where the lifeguard was tanning himself.

In the first month of that summer, Marion, who usually drove the nanny and Ruth to the beach and later picked them up, asked Eddie to perform the chore only once or twice. The nanny had not spoken to him, and Ruth—to Eddie’s shame—had asked him (once again), “Where are the feet?”

The afternoon nanny was a college girl who drove her own car. Her name was Alice, and she was too superior to Eddie to speak to him— except to say that she’d once known someone who’d gone to Exeter. Naturally he’d graduated from the academy before Eddie had started, and Alice knew only his first name, which was either Chickie or Chuckie.

“Probably a nickname,” Eddie had said stupidly.

Alice had sighed and looked pityingly upon him. Eddie feared that he had inherited his father’s penchant for saying the obvious—and that he would soon be spontaneously dubbed with a name like Minty, which would stick to him for the rest of his life.

The college-girl nanny also had a summer job in one of the restaurants in the Hamptons, but it was not a place where Eddie ever ate. She was pretty, too, so that Eddie could never look at her without feeling ashamed.

The nighttime nanny was a married woman whose husband had a daytime job. She sometimes brought her two kids, who were older than Ruth but played respectfully with Ruth’s innumerable toys—mostly dolls and dollhouses, which were largely ignored by the four-year-old. Ruth preferred to draw, or to have stories read to her. She had a professional artist’s easel in her nursery; the easel had the legs sawed off. The only doll Ruth was attached to was a doll missing a head.

Of the three nannies, the nighttime nanny was the only one who was friendly to Eddie, but Eddie went out every night. And when he was home, he tended to stay in his room. His guest bedroom and bathroom were at the far end of the long upstairs hall; when Eddie wanted to write letters to his mom and dad, or just write in his notebooks, he was almost always left alone there. In his letters home, he neglected to tell his parents that Ted and Marion were separated for the summer—not to mention that he regularly masturbated to Marion’s scent while clinging to her slinky clothes.

On the morning when Marion caught Eddie in the act of masturbating, Eddie had elaborately arranged upon the bed a veritable reassembly of Marion herself. There was a peach-colored blouse of a thin, summer-weight material—suitable for the stifling carriage house— and a bra of a matching color. Eddie had left the blouse unbuttoned. The bra, which was positioned roughly where one would expect a bra to be, was partially exposed but still caught up in the blouse—as if Marion were in this specific stage of undress. This gave to her clothes the appearance of passion, or at least of haste. Her panties, which were also peach-colored, were placed the right way (waist up, crotch down) and they were the correct distance from the bra—that is, if Marion had actually been wearing the bra and the panties. Eddie, who was naked— and who always masturbated by rubbing his penis with his left hand against the inside of his right thigh—had pressed his face into the open blouse and bra. With his right hand, he stroked the unimaginable silky softness of Marion’s panties.

Marion needed only a fraction of a second to realize that Eddie was naked, and to recognize what he was doing—and with what visual and tactile aids!—but when Eddie first spotted her, she was neither entering nor leaving the bedroom. She was standing as still as an apparition of herself, which Eddie must have hoped she was; also, it was not exactly Marion herself but rather her reflection in the bedroom mirror that Eddie saw first. Marion, who could see Eddie in the mirror and Eddie himself, had been given the unique opportunity of seeing two of him masturbate at once.

She was gone from the doorway as quickly as she’d appeared. Eddie, who had not yet ejaculated, knew not only that she’d seen him, but also that, in a split second, she’d understood everything about him.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” Marion was saying from the kitchen, as he struggled to put away her clothes. “I should have knocked.”

When he’d dressed himself, he still didn’t dare leave the bedroom. He half-expected to hear her footsteps on the stairs down to the garage—or, more mercifully, to hear her Mercedes driving away. Instead she was waiting for him. And since he hadn’t heard her footsteps come up the stairs from the garage, he knew that he must have been moaning.

“Eddie, it’s my fault,” Marion was saying. “I’m not angry. I’m just embarrassed.”

“I’m embarrassed, too,” he mumbled from the bedroom.

“It’s all right—it’s natural, ” Marion said. “I know boys your age. . . .” Her voice trailed away.

When he finally got up his nerve to go to her, she was sitting on the couch. “Come here—at least look at me!” she said, but he stood frozen, staring at his feet. “Eddie, it’s funny . Let’s call it funny and leave it at that.”

“It’s funny,” he said miserably.

“Eddie! Come here!” she ordered.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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