A Widow for One Year - Page 16

He shuffled slowly in her direction, his eyes still downcast.

“Sit!” she commanded, but the best he could do was perch rigidly at the far end of the couch—away from her. “No, here .” She patted the couch between them. He couldn’t move.

“Eddie, Eddie—I know boys your age,” she said again. “It’s what boys your age do, isn’t it? Can you imagine not doing it?” she asked him.

“No,” he whispered. He started to cry—he couldn’t stop.

“Oh, don’t cry !” Marion insisted. She never cried now—she had cried herself out.

Then Marion was sitting so close to him that he felt the couch cave in, and he found himself leaning against her. He kept crying while she talked and talked. “Eddie, listen to me, please, ” she said. “I thought one of Ted’s women was wearing my clothes—sometimes my clothes looked wrinkled, or they were on the wrong hangers. But it was you, and you were actually being nice —you even folded my underwear! Or you tried to. I never fold my panties or my bras. I knew Ted wasn’t touching them,” she added, while Eddie wept. “Oh, Eddie—I’m flattered . Really, I am ! It’s not been the best summer—I’m happy to know that someone is thinking about me.”

She paused; she seemed suddenly more embarrassed than Eddie. She quickly said: “Oh, I don’t mean to assume that you were thinking about me. Goodness, that’s rather conceited of me, isn’t it? Maybe it was just my clothes. I’m still flattered, even if it was just my clothes. You probably have lots of girls to think about . . .”

“I think about you !” Eddie blurted out. “Only you.”

“Then don’t be embarrassed,” Marion said. “You’ve made an old lady happy !”

“You’re not an old lady!” he cried.

“You’re making me happier and happier, Eddie.” She stood up quickly, as if she were about to go. At last he dared to look at her. When she saw his expression, she said, “Be careful how you feel about me, Eddie. I mean, take care of yourself,” she warned him.

“I love you,” he said bravely.

She sat down beside him, as urgently as if he’d begun to cry again. “ Don’t love me, Eddie,” she said, with more gravity than he’d expected. “Just think about my clothes . Clothes can’t hurt you.” Leaning closer to him, but not flirtatiously, she said: “Tell me. Is there something you especially like—I mean something that I wear ?” He stared at her in such a way that she repeated, “Just think about my clothes, Eddie.”

“What you were wearing when I met you,” Eddie told her.

“Goodness!” Marion said. “I don’t remember . . .”

“A pink sweater—it buttons up the front.”

“ That old thing!” Marion shrieked. She was on the verge of laughter; Eddie realized that he’d never seen her laugh. He was totally absorbed by her. If at first he hadn’t been able to look at her, now he couldn’t stop looking. “Well, if that’s what you like,” Marion was saying, “maybe I’ll surprise you!” She stood up again—again quickly. Now he felt like crying because he could see that she was going to go. By the door to the stairs, she took a tougher tone. “Not so serious, Eddie—not so serious.”

“I love you,” he repeated.

“Don’t,” she reminded him. Needless to say, he would have a distracted day.

And not long after their encounter, he returned one night from a movie in Southampton to find her standing in his bedroom. The nighttime nanny had gone home. He knew instantly, with a broken heart, that she was not there to seduce him. She began talking about some of the photographs in his guest bedroom and bathroom; she was sorry to intrude, but—out of respect for his privacy—she didn’t allow herself to come in his room and look at the pictures unless he was out. She had been thinking about one of the pictures in particular—she wouldn’t tell him which one—and she had stayed to look at it a little longer than she’d intended.

When she said good night, and left him, he was more miserable than he’d thought humanly possible. But just before he went to bed, he realized that she’d folded his stray clothes. She’d also taken a towel from its customary position on the shower-curtain rod, and she’d returned it, neatly, to the towel rack, where it belonged. Finally, although it was the most obvious, Eddie noticed that his bed was made. He never made it—nor, at least at the rental house, did Marion ever make her own!

Two mornings later, after he deposited the mail on the kitchen table of the carriage house, he started to make coffee. While the coffee was brewing, he entered the bedroom. At first he thought it was Marion on the bed, but it was only her pink cashmere cardigan. ( Only ! ) She had left the buttons unbuttoned and the long sleeves of the sweater pulled back,

as if an invisible woman in the cardigan had clasped her invisible hands behind her invisible head. Where the buttons were open, a bra showed itself; it was a more seductive display than any arrangement of her clothing Eddie had made. The bra was white—as were the panties, which Marion had placed exactly where Eddie liked them.

Come Hither . . .

In that summer of ’58, Ted Cole’s young mother of the moment—the furtive Mrs. Vaughn—was small and dark and feral-looking. For a month, all Eddie had seen of her was in Ted’s drawings. And Eddie had seen only those drawings where Mrs. Vaughn was posed with her son, who was also small and dark and feral-looking, which strongly suggested to Eddie that the two of them might be inclined to bite people. The elfin features of Mrs. Vaughn’s face and her too-youthful pixie haircut could not conceal something violent, or at least unstable, in the young mother’s temperament. And her son seemed on the verge of spitting and hissing like a cornered cat—maybe he didn’t like to pose.

When Mrs. Vaughn first came to model alone, her movements—from her car to the Coles’ house, and back to her car again—were especially furtive. She shot a glance toward any sound and in every direction like an animal anticipating an attack. Mrs. Vaughn was on the lookout for Marion, of course, but Eddie, who didn’t yet know that Mrs. Vaughn was posing nude —not to mention that it was Mrs. Vaughn’s strong smell that he ( and Marion) had detected on the pillows in the carriage-house apartment—mistakenly concluded that the little woman was nervous to the point of derangement.

Besides, Eddie was too consumed by his thoughts of Marion to pay much attention to Mrs. Vaughn. Although Marion had not repeated the mischief of creating that replica of herself so alluringly arranged on the bed in the rental house, Eddie’s own manipulations of Marion’s pink cashmere cardigan, which was redolent of her delectable scent, continued to satisfy the sixteen-year-old to a degree that he had never been satisfied before.

Eddie O’Hare inhabited a kind of masturbatory heaven. He should have stayed there—he should have taken up permanent residence. As Eddie would soon discover, to have more of Marion than what he already possessed would not content him. But Marion was in control of their relationship; if anything more was to happen between them, it would happen only upon Marion’s initiation.

It began by her taking him out to dinner. She drove, without asking him if he wanted to drive. To his surprise, Eddie was grateful to his father for insisting that he pack some dress shirts and ties and an “ all-purpose” sports jacket. But when Marion saw him in his traditional Exeter uniform, she told him that he could dispense with either the tie or the jacket—where they were going, he didn’t need both. The restaurant, in East Hampton, was less fancy than Eddie had expected, and it was clear that the waiters were used to seeing Marion there; they kept bringing her wine—she had three glasses—without her having to ask.

She was more talkative than Eddie had known her to be. “I was already pregnant with Thomas when I married Ted—when I was only a year older than you are,” she told him. (The difference in their ages was a recurrent theme for her.) “When you were born, I was twenty-three. When you’re my age, I’ll be sixty-two,” she went on. And twice she made a reference to her gift to him: the pink cashmere cardigan. “How did you like my little surprise?” she asked.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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