A Widow for One Year - Page 19

“I wasn’t thinking of the colors,” Eddie admitted. “I liked the . . . lace.” But his eyes betrayed him; he was looking at the décolletage of the camisole, and he couldn’t remember the word for it. Cleavage came to his mind, although he knew that wasn’t the right word.

“The décolletage?” Marion prompted.

“Yes,” Eddie whispered.

Marion raised her eyes above the bed to the image of her happy sons: Huc venite pueri (come hither boys) ut viri sitis (and become men). Eddie had suffered through his second year of Latin; a third year of the dead language loomed ahead of him. He thought of the long-standing joke at Exeter about a more fitting translation of that inscription. (“Come hither boys and become weary .”) But he could sense that Marion was in no mood for a joke.

Looking at the photograph of her boys on the threshold of manhood, Marion said to Eddie: “I don’t even know if they had sex before they died.” Eddie, remembering that picture of Thomas kissing a girl in the ’53 yearbook, would have guessed that Thomas had. “Maybe Thomas had,” Marion added. “He was so . . . popular. But surely not Timothy—he was so shy. And he was only fifteen. . . .” Her voice trailed away and her glance fell back to the bed, where the pink and lilac combination of her sweater with her lingerie had earlier caught her eye. “Have you had sex, Eddie?” Marion asked abruptly.

“No, of course not,” Eddie told her. She smiled at him—pityingly. He tried not to look as wretched and unlovable as he was convinced he was.

“If a girl died before she had sex, I might say she was lucky,” Marion continued. “But for a boy . . . my goodness, it’s all boys want, isn’t it? Boys and men,” she added. “Isn’t it true? Isn’t it all you want?”

“Yes,” said the sixteen-year-old despairingly.

Marion stood by the bed and picked up the lilac-colored camisole with the incredible décolletage; she picked up the matching panties, too, but she pushed the pink cashmere cardigan to the far side of the bed. “It’s too hot,” she said to Eddie. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t wear the sweater.”

He stood there frozen, his heart pounding, while she began to unbutton her blouse. “Close your eyes, Eddie,” she had to tell him. With his eyes closed, he was afraid he might faint. He felt himself weaving from side to side; it was all he could do not to move his feet. “Okay,” he heard her say. She was lying on the bed in the camisole and the panties. “My turn to close my eyes,” Marion said.

Eddie undressed clumsily—he had to keep looking at her. When she felt his weight on the bed beside her, she turned on her side to face him. When they looked into each other’s eyes, it gave Eddie a pang. In Marion’s smile, there was more that was motherly than what he had dared to hope he might see there.

He didn’t touch her, but when he began to touch himself, she gripped the back of his neck and pulled his face against her breasts, where he hadn’t even dared to look. With her other hand, she took his right hand and firmly placed it where she had seen him put his hand the first time—against the crotch of her panties. He felt himself explode into the palm of his left hand, so quickly and with such force that he flinched against her. Marion was so surprised that she flinched in response. “Goodness— that was fast!” she said. Holding his cupped palm in front of him, Eddie ran into the bathroom before he made a mess.

When he’d washed himself, he came back to the bedroom, where he found Marion still lying on her side, almost exactly as he had left her. He hesitated before lying down beside her. But without moving on the bed or looking at him, she said, “Come back here.”

They lay looking into each other’s eyes for what seemed to Eddie to be a never-ending time—at least he never wanted the moment to end. All his life, he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete . No one could possibly deserve to feel any better.

“Do you know Latin?” Marion whispered to him.

“Yes,” he whispered back.

She rolled her eyes upward, above the bed, to indicate the photograph of that important passage, which her sons had not navigated. “Say it in Latin for me,” Marion whispered.

“Huc venite pueri . . .” Eddie began, still whispering.

“Come hither boys . . .” Marion translated in a whisper.

“ . . . ut viri sitis,” Eddie concluded; he’d noticed that Marion had taken his hand and again placed it against the crotch of her panties.

“. . . and become men,” Marion whispered. Again she gripped the back of his neck and pulled his face against her breasts. “But you still haven’t had sex, have you?” she asked. “I mean not really .”

Eddie closed his eyes against her fragrant bosom. “No, not really,” he admitted. He was worried, because he didn’t want to sound as if he were complaining. “But I’m very, very happy,” he added. “I feel complete .”

“I’ll show you complete, ” Marion told him.

The Pawn

Regarding sexual capacity, a sixteen-year-old boy is capable of an astonishing number of repeat performances in what Marion, at thirty-nine, would attest was a remarkably short period of time. “My goodness !” Marion would exclaim, to the perpetual and nearly constant evidence of Eddie’s erections. “Don’t you need time to . . . recover ?” But Eddie required no recovery; paradoxically, he was both easily satisfied and insatiable.

Marion was happier than she’d been at any time she could remember since her sons had died. For one thing, she was exhausted; she was sleeping more soundly than she had in years. And for another thing, Marion took no pains to conceal her new life from Ted. “He wouldn’t dare complain to me, ” she told Eddie, who was nonetheless anxious that Ted might dare complain to him.

Poor Eddie was understandably nervous about the obviousness of their thrilling affair. For example, whenever their lovemaking had marked the sheets in the carriage-house apartment, it was Eddie who was in favor of doing the laundry—

lest Ted should see the telltale stains. But Marion always said, “Let him wonder if it’s me or Mrs. Vaughn.” (When there were stains on the bedsheets in the master bedroom of the Coles’ house, where Mrs. Vaughn could not have been the cause, Marion said, more to the point, “Let him wonder.”)

As for Mrs. Vaughn, whether or not she knew of the strenuousness of Marion’s exertions with Eddie, her more subdued relationship with Ted had changed. While Mrs. Vaughn had once epitomized furtiveness by her hesitant and darting movements in the driveway—both on her way to model and on her way back to her car—she now approached every new opportunity to pose with the resignation of a dog submitting to a beating. And when Mrs. Vaughn left Ted’s workroom, she staggered to her car with a carelessness that implied her pride was irretrievable; it was as if the particular pose of the day had defeated her. Mrs. Vaughn had clearly passed from the degraded phase, as Marion had called it, into the final phase of shame.

Ted had never been in the habit of visiting Mrs. Vaughn at her summer estate in Southampton more than three times a week. But the visits were less frequent now, and of notably shorter duration. Eddie knew this because he was always Ted’s driver. Mr . Vaughn spent the workweek in New York. Ted was happiest in the Hamptons during the summer months, when so many young mothers were there without their commuting husbands. Ted preferred the young mothers from Manhattan to the year-round residents; the summer people were on Long Island just long enough—“the perfect length of time for one of Ted’s affairs,” Marion had informed Eddie.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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