“Fucking Vermont!” Hannah said.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” Eddie repeated.
“Me, too,” Hannah told him. “Or did you think I was taking a nap?”
Before Eddie could respond, they glimpsed their first sight of the war memorial in Bennington; it rose like an inverted spike, high above the buildings of the town and the surrounding hills. The Bennington Battle Monument was a flat-sided, chiseled needle that marked the defeat of the British by the Green Mountain Boys. Hannah had always hated it.
“Who could live in this fucking town?” she asked Eddie. “Every time you turn around, there’s that giant phallus standing over you! Every guy who lives here has gotta have a big-cock complex.”
A big-cock complex? Eddie thought. Both the stupidity and the vulgarity of Hannah’s remark offended him. How could he ever have contemplated sharing a house with her?
The current older woman in Eddie’s life—a platonic relationship, but for how much longer?—was Mrs. Arthur Bascom. She was still known to everyone in Manhattan as Mrs. Arthur Bascom, although her late husband, the philanthropic Arthur Bascom, had long ago passed away. Mrs. Arthur Bascom—“Maggie” to Eddie, and to her innermost circle of friends—had continued her late husband’s philanthropy; yet she was never seen at a black-tie function (the perpetual fund-raisers) without the companionship of a much younger, unmarried man.
In recent months, Eddie had played the role of Maggie Bascom’s escort. He’d presumed that Mrs. Bascom had selected him for his sexual inactivity. Lately he wasn’t so sure; maybe it was Eddie’s sexual availability that had attracted Mrs. Arthur Bascom after all, because—especially in his last novel, A Difficult Woman —Eddie O’Hare had described, in loving detail, the sexual attentions paid to the older-woman character by the character of the younger man. (Maggie Bascom was eighty-one.)
Regardless of Mrs. Arthur Bascom’s exact interest in Eddie, how could Eddie have imagined that he could ever invite her to his and Hannah’s house in Sagaponack if Hannah was actually there ? Not only would Hannah be swimming nude, but she would probably invite discussion of the color differences between the ash-blond hair on her head and her darker-blond pubic hair—Hannah had heretofore left the latter alone.
“I suppose I should dye my fucking pubes, too,” Eddie could imagine Hannah saying to Mrs. Arthur Bascom.
What had he been thinking? If Eddie sought the company of older female friends, he surely did so (in part) because they were reliably more refined than women Eddie’s age—not to mention women Hannah’s age. (By Eddie’s standards, not even Ruth was “refined.”)
“So what have you been thinking about?” Hannah then asked him. In half an hour, or less, they’d be seeing Ruth and meeting her cop.
Maybe I should consider this a little more carefully, Eddie thought. After all, at the end of the weekend, he faced a four-hour drive back to Manhattan with Hannah; there would be time enough to broach the subject of them sharing a house together then .
“I forgot what it was I was thinking about,” Eddie told Hannah. “It’ll come back to me, I’m sure.”
“I guess it couldn’t have been one of your more overpowering brainstorms,” Hannah teased him, although the very idea of sharing a house with Hannah impressed Eddie as one of the most overpowering brainstorms he’d ever had.
“On the other hand, maybe it won’t come back to me,” Eddie added.
“Maybe you were thinking about a new novel,” Hannah suggested. With the tip of her tongue, she touched the dark-blond down on her upper lip again. “Something about a younger man with an older woman . . .”
“Very funny,” Eddie said.
“Don’t get defensive, Eddie,” Hannah told him. “Let’s forget, for a moment, your interest in older women. . . .”
“That’s fine with me,” Eddie said.
“There’s another aspect to it that interests me,” Hannah continued. “I wonder if the women you see—I mean the ones in their fucking seventies or eighties —are still sexually active. I mean, do they wanna be?”
“ Some of them are sexually active. Some of them want to be,” Eddie answered warily.
“I was afraid you’d say that—that really gets to me!” Hannah said.
“Do you imagine that you won’t be sexually active in your seventies or eighties, Hannah?” Eddie asked.
“I don’t even wanna think about it,” Hannah declared. “Let’s get back to your interest. When you’re with one of these old gals—Mrs. Arthur Bascom, say . . .”
“I haven’t had sex with Mrs. Bascom!” Eddie interrupted.
“Okay, okay—not yet, you haven’t,” Hannah said. “But let’s say you do, or you will . Or let’s say you do it with some other old lady, some old dame in her seventies or eighties. I mean, what are you thinking ? Are you really looking at her and feeling attracted ? Or are you thinking of someone else when you’re with her?”
Eddie’s fingers ached; he was gripping the steering wheel harder than he needed to. He was thinking of Mrs. Arthur Bascom’s apartment on Fifth Avenue and Ninety-third Street. He was remembering all the photographs—of her as a child, as a young girl, as a young bride, as a young mother, as a not-so-young bride (she was married three times), and as a youthful-looking grand mother. Eddie couldn’t look at Maggie Bascom and not envision her as she was at every phase of her long life.
“I try to see the whole woman,” Eddie said to Hannah. “Of course I recognize that she’s old, but there are photographs—or the equivalent of photographs in one’s imagination of anyone’s life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am— because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn’t always see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her whole life in her. There’s something so moving about someone’s whole life.”
He stopped talking, not only because he’d embarrassed himself but also because Hannah was crying. “No one will ever see me that way,” Hannah said.