Ted took this moment to admire his waist; at forty-five, he was still a man who could wear a pair of jeans and tuck in his T-shirt and be proud of the overall effect. However, the T-shirt was white and its appearance was not improved by the pronounced grass stains on the left shoulder and the right breast—Ted had fallen on at least two lawns— and his jeans, which were soaked below the knees, continued to drip into his water-filled shoes.
As composed as he could be under the circumstances, Ted emerged from the bathroom and was once more effusively greeted by last-name-only Mendelssohn, who’d already prepared a chair for the visiting author. The chair was drawn up to a table, where a few dozen copies of Ted Cole’s books were waiting to be signed.
But first Ted wanted to make a phone call, actually two. He tried the carriage house to find out if Eddie was there; there was no answer. And of course there was no answer at Ted’s own house—Marion knew better than to answer the phone on this well-rehearsed Friday. Had Eddie crashed the car? The sixteen-year-old had been driving erratically earlier that morning. Doubtless Marion had fucked the boy’s brains out! Ted concluded.
Regardless of how well Marion had rehearsed this Friday, she had been mistaken to think that Ted’s only recourse for a ride home would be to walk all the way to his squash opponent’s office and wait for Dr. Leonardis, or for one of the doctor’s patients, to drive him to Sagaponack. Dave Leonardis’s office was on the far side of Southampton, on the Montauk Highway; the bookstore was not only closer to Mrs. Vaughn’s mansion—it was a much more obvious place for Ted to expect to be rescued. Ted Cole could have walked into almost any bookstore in the world and asked for a ride home.
He promptly did so, no sooner than he’d sat down at the autographing table to sign his books.
“To put it simply, I need a ride home,” the famous author said.
“A ride!” cried Mendelssohn. “Yes, of course! No problem! You live in Sagaponack, don’t you? I’ll take you myself ! Well . . . I’ll have to call my wife. She may be shopping, but not for long. You see, my car is in the shop.”
“I hope it’s not in the same shop my car was in,” Ted told the enthusiast. “I just got mine back from the shop. They forgot to reattach the steering column. It was like that cartoon we’ve all seen—the steering wheel was in my hands but it was not attached to the wheels. I steered one way and the car went off the road in another. Fortunately, all I hit was privet—a vast hedge. Climbing out the driver’s-side window of the car, I was scratched by the bushes. And then I stepped in a goldfish pool,” Ted explained.
He had their attention now; Mendelssohn, poised by the phone, delayed the call to his wife. And the formerly dumbstruck young woman who worked there was smiling. Ted was not generally attracted to what he thought of as her type, but if she offered him a ride home, maybe something would come of it.
She was probably not long out of college; in her no-makeup, straight-hair, no-tan way, she was a precursor of the decade ahead. She was not pretty—truly, she was just plain dull—but her paleness represented a kind of sexual frankness to Ted, who recognized that a part of the young woman’s no-frills appearance reflected an openness to experiences she might call “creative.” She was the kind of young woman who was seduced intellectually. (Ted’s particularly scruffy appearance at the moment might actually have elevated him in her eyes.) And sexual encounters, because the woman was still young enough to find them novel, were doubtless an area of experience she might call “ authentic”—especially with a famous writer.
Sadly, she didn’t have a car. “I use a bicycle
,” she told Ted, “or else I’d take you home.”
Too bad, Ted thought, but he rationalized that he didn’t really like the discrepancy between the thinness of her lower lip and the exaggerated puffiness of her upper.
Mendelssohn fretted because his wife was still out shopping. He would keep calling—she would be back soon, Mendelssohn assured Ted. A boy with an indescribable speech impediment—the only other staff in the bookstore on this Friday morning—offered an apology, for he had lent his car to a friend who’d wanted to go to the beach.
Ted just sat there, slowly signing books. It was only ten. If Marion had known where Ted was, and how close he could be to getting a ride home, she might have panicked. If Eddie O’Hare had known that Ted was autographing books across the street from the frame shop—where Eddie was insisting that the “feet” photograph should be ready for Ruth to take home today—Eddie might have panicked, too.
But there was no cause for Ted to feel any panic. He didn’t know that his wife was leaving him—he still imagined that he was leaving her . And he was safely off the streets; therefore, he was out of immediate harm’s way (meaning Mrs. Vaughn). And even if Mendelssohn’s wife never came home from shopping, it was only a matter of minutes before someone would come into the bookstore who was a devoted Ted Cole reader. It would probably be a woman, and Ted would actually have to buy one of his own autographed books for her, but she would give him a ride home. And if she was good-looking, and so on, and so forth, who knew what might come of it? Why panic at ten o’clock in the morning? Ted was thinking.
He had no idea.
How the Writer’s Assistant
Became a Writer
Meanwhile, in the nearby frame shop, Eddie O’Hare was finding his voice. At first Eddie was unaware of the powerful change within him; he thought he was merely angry. There was reason to be angry. The saleswoman who waited on Eddie was rude to him. She was not much older than he, but she too brusquely estimated that a sixteen-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl asking about the matting and framing of a single eight-by-ten photograph were not high on the list of those well-heeled Southampton patrons of the arts whom the frame shop sought to serve.
Eddie asked to speak to the manager, but the saleswoman was rude again; she repeated that the photograph was not ready. “Next time,” she told Eddie, “I suggest that you call before you come.”
“Do you want to see my stitches?” Ruth asked the saleswoman. “I got a scab, too.”
The saleswoman—a girl, really—clearly had no children of her own; she pointedly ignored Ruth, which raised Eddie’s anger to a higher level.
“Show her your scar, Ruth,” Eddie said to the four-year-old.
“Look . . .” the salesgirl began.
“No, you look,” Eddie said, still not understanding that he was finding his voice. He’d never spoken to anyone in this manner before; now, suddenly, he was unable to stop. His newfound voice continued. “I’m willing to keep trying with someone who’s rude to me, but I won’t have anything to do with someone who’s rude to a child,” Eddie heard himself say. “If there’s no manager here, there must be someone else— whoever it is who does the actual work, for example. I mean, is there a back room where the mats are cut and the pictures are framed? There must be someone here besides you. I’m not leaving without that photograph, and I’m not talking to you.”
Ruth looked at Eddie. “Did you got mad at her?” the four-year-old asked him.
“Yes, I did,” Eddie replied. He felt unsure of who he was, but the salesgirl would never have guessed that Eddie O’Hare was a young man who was often full of doubt. To her, he was confidence itself—he was absolutely terrifying.
Without a word, she retreated to the very same “back room” that Eddie had so confidently mentioned. Indeed, there were two back rooms in the frame shop—a manager’s office and what Ted would have called a workroom. Both the manager, a Southampton socialite and divorcée named Penny Pierce, and the boy who cut the mats and framed (and framed and framed) all day were there.
The unpleasant salesgirl conveyed the impression that Eddie, despite his appearance to the contrary, was “scary.” While Penny Pierce knew who Ted Cole was—and she vividly remembered Marion, because Marion was beautiful—Mrs. Pierce did not know who Eddie O’Hare was. The child, she presumed, was the unlucky little girl Ted and Marion had had to compensate for their dead sons. Mrs. Pierce vividly remembered the sons, too. Who could forget the frame shop’s good fortune? There had been hundreds of photographs to mat and frame, and Marion had not chosen inexpensively. It had been an account in the thousands of dollars, Penny Pierce recalled; the shop really should have rematted and reframed the single photograph with the bloodstained mat promptly. We should probably have done it gratis, Mrs. Pierce now considered.