A Widow for One Year (31 page)

Eddie, who was drinking a Diet Coke—it was all he ever drank— had lost to Jimmy before; naturally he’d been stood up before, too. Eddie had a few close friends in New York, but none of them played squash. He’d become a member of the club only three years earlier, in 1987, upon the publication of his fourth novel,
Sixty Times
. Despite favorable (if tepid) reviews, the novel’s subject matter had not appealed to the only member of the Membership Committee who’d read it. Another member on the committee had confided to Eddie that Eddie’s membership had finally been approved because of his name, not because of his novels. (There had been a long history of O’Hares at the New York Athletic Club, although none of them were related to Eddie.)

Still, despite what Eddie perceived as the selective, grudging friendliness of the club, he enjoyed being a member. It was an inexpensive place to stay whenever he came into the city. For almost ten years now, since the publication of his third novel,
Leaving Long Island,
Eddie came into the city fairly frequently—if only for a night or two. In ’81, he had bought his first and only house—in Bridgehampton, about a fiveminute drive from Ted Cole’s house in Sagaponack. In his nine years as a taxpaying resident of Suffolk County, Eddie had not once driven by Ted’s house on Parsonage Lane.

Eddie’s house was on Maple Lane—so close to the Bridgehampton railroad station that Eddie could walk to the train, which he rarely did. Eddie hated trains. The trains passed so close to his house that Eddie sometimes felt he
lived
on a train. And although the real estate agent herself had admitted to Eddie that his Maple Lane location left something to be desired, the house had been affordable and was not
so
innocuous that Eddie had ever failed to rent it. Eddie hated the Hamptons in July and August; he made an exorbitant amount of money by renting his thoroughly modest house in those lunatic months.

With what he made from his writing and from the summer rentals, Eddie needed to teach only one semester every academic year. At one college or university or another, he was a perpetual visiting writer-in-residence. Eddie was also doomed to travel to various writers’ conferences, and every summer he needed to find a cheaper summer rental than what he charged for his house in the Hamptons. Yet Eddie would never have complained about his circumstances; he was well liked on the teaching-writing circuit, where he could be relied upon
not
to sleep with the students. Not with the
younger
students, anyway.

True to his declaration to Marion thirty-two years ago, Eddie O’Hare had never slept with a woman his own age—or younger. Although many of the writing students who attended the writers’ conferences were older women—divorcées and widows who had turned to writing as a form of therapy—no one thought of these women as innocent or in need of protection from the sexual inclinations of the teaching-writing faculty. Besides, in Eddie’s case, it was always the older women who made the first advances; his reputation preceded him.

All things considered, Eddie was a man who’d made very few enemies; there were only those older women who took offense that he’d written about them. But they were wrong to take Eddie’s older-women characters so personally. He had merely used their bodies and their hair, their gestures and their favorite expressions. And the undying love that each of Eddie’s younger men felt for each of Eddie’s older women was always a version of what Eddie felt for Marion; he had not felt such a love for any of the older women since.

As a novelist, he’d merely borrowed the locations of their apartments and the feel of their clothes; sometimes he used the upholstery of their living-room couches—once the rosebush pattern of a lonely librarian’s sheets and pillowcases, but
not
the librarian herself. (Not exactly, although he
had
borrowed the mole on her left breast.)

And if Eddie had made enemies of these
few
older women who saw versions of themselves in one or another of his four novels, he’d also made lasting friends among
many
older women—including several he had once slept with. A woman once told Eddie that she was suspicious of any man who remained a friend of former lovers; it must mean that he was never much of a lover, or nothing more than a nice guy. But Eddie O’Hare had long ago made peace with himself on the subject of his being “nothing more than a nice guy”; countless women had told Eddie that he could hang his hat on being a nice guy. (There were so few of them, the women said.)

Eddie once more brushed his hair away from his right eye. He looked up at the tap-room mirror in the gloom of the rainy evening and recognized in his reflected countenance a tall, tired-looking man who was, at that moment, extremely short on confidence. He returned his attention to the manuscript pages on the bar; he sipped his Diet Coke. It was a manuscript of almost twenty typed pages that had been much revised by Eddie’s red pen; he called the pen his “teacher’s favorite.” He had also written the squash scores of his games with Jimmy at the top of the first manuscript page: 15–9, 15–5, 15–3. Whenever Eddie had been run ragged by Jimmy, Eddie always imagined that he’d lost again to Ted Cole. Eddie calculated that Ted was now in his late seventies, about Jimmy’s age.

In his nine years in Bridgehampton, it had been no accident that Eddie had not driven past Ted’s house; to live on Maple Lane in Bridgehampton and never once find yourself turning onto Parsonage Lane in Sagaponack required fairly constant forethought. But Eddie was surprised not to have run into Ted at a cocktail party, or at the Bridgehampton I.G.A.—Eddie should have guessed that Conchita Gomez (now also in her late seventies) did all of Ted’s shopping. Ted never shopped.

Regarding the cocktail parties: Eddie and Ted were of different generations; they attended different parties. Also, although Ted Cole’s books for children were still widely read, Ted himself (at seventy-seven) was decreasingly famous—at least in the Hamptons. It pleased Eddie to think that Ted was not nearly the celebrity that his
daughter
was.

But if Ted Cole’s fame was slipping away, Ted’s squash game— especially in his tricky barn—was every bit as tough as Jimmy’s. At seventyseven, Ted would have whipped Eddie as easily in the fall of 1990 as he’d whipped him in the summer of 1958. Eddie was a terrible player, really. Ungainly and slow, he never anticipated where his opponent’s shot was going; he got to the ball late, if he got to it at all, and he rushed his shot accordingly. Nor would Eddie’s lob serve, which was his best serve, have worked in Ted’s barn, where the ceiling was less than fifteen feet from the floor.

Ruth, who was a good enough player to have been third-best on the
boys’
varsity at Exeter, had not yet beaten her father on his infuriating home court; her lob serve was her best, too. Ruth was thirty-six in the fall of 1990, and the
only
reason she ever went home to Sagaponack was that she wanted to beat her father in his barn before he died. But, even at seventy-seven, Ted Cole showed no signs of dying.

Outside the New York Athletic Club, at the corner of Central Park South and Seventh Avenue, the rain beat down on the club’s cream-colored awning; if Eddie had known how many members were already lined up under the awning waiting in turn for a cab, he would long ago have left the tap room and taken his place at the rear of the line. But he went on rereading and revising his overlong, messy manuscript, unaware that he should have been less worried about preparing his speech than he should have been about arriving too late to deliver it.

At Fifty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue, he was too far away from the 92nd Street Y (on Lexington) to walk—especially in the rain, for he had no raincoat or umbrella. And he should have known the effect of rain on the availability of taxis in New York, especially in the early-evening hours. But Eddie was too preoccupied with the flaws in his speech; he had always suffered from defeatist tendencies, and now he wished that he’d never agreed to give such a speech in the first place.

Who am I,
he thought miserably,
to introduce Ruth Cole?

It was the bartender who saved Eddie from missing the dreaded event altogether. “You want another Diet Coke, Mr. O’Hare?” the bartender asked. Eddie looked at his watch. If, at that moment, Marion had been in the tap room observing Eddie’s expression, she would have seen something of a sixteen-year-old’s haplessness in her former lover’s face.

It was 7:20; Eddie was expected at the Y in ten minutes. It was at least a ten-minute cab ride to Lexington and Ninety-second, provided Eddie caught a cab the second he stepped out the door of the club. Instead, he stepped into a lineup of disgruntled members. On the cream-colored awning, the blood-red emblem of the N.Y.A.C.—a winged foot—was dripping rain.

Eddie shifted the books and the manuscript of his speech in his bulky brown briefcase. He would be late if he waited for a cab. He was about to get very wet, but even before Eddie’s encounter with the rain there was an aspect of professorial disarray about his clothes. Notwithstanding the coat-and-tie dress code of the New York Athletic Club, and despite the fact that Eddie was of an age and background that felt comfortable in coats and ties—after all, he was an Exonian—the club doorman always looked at Eddie’s clothes as if they were in violation of the code.

Without a plan, Eddie jogged along Central Park South in what had become a downpour. He wished vaguely, as he approached first the St. Moritz and then the Plaza, that he would discover a string of taxis waiting for the hotel guests at the curb. What he found instead were two lines of determined hotel guests waiting for taxis.

Eddie darted into the Plaza and presented himself at the registration desk, where he asked for change—
lots
of change—for a ten-dollar bill. He could take a bus up Madison Avenue if he had the exact fare. But before he could mumble what he wanted, the woman at the registration desk asked him if he was a guest at the hotel. Sometimes, spontaneously, Eddie was capable of lying, but almost never when he
wanted
to.

“No, I’m not a guest—I just need bus money,” he admitted. The woman shook her head.

“I’d get in trouble if you’re not a guest,” she said.

He had to run up Fifth Avenue before he could cross at Sixtysecond. Then he ran up Madison until he found a coffee shop where he could buy a Diet Coke, solely because he wanted some change. He left the Diet Coke at the cash register, together with a tip of disproportionate generosity, but the woman at the cash register judged the tip to be insufficient. The way she saw it, Eddie had left her with a Diet Coke to dispose of—a task unworthy of her or insurmountable, or both.

“Like I
need
this trouble!” she shouted after him. She must have hated making extra change.

Eddie waited in the rain for the Madison Avenue bus. He was already soaked, and five minutes late. It was now 7:35. The event began at 8:00. The organizers of Ruth Cole’s reading at the Y had wanted Eddie and Ruth to meet backstage, to have a little time to relax—“to get to know each other.” No one, least of all Eddie or Ruth, had said “to get
reacquainted
.” (How does one get
reacquainted
with a four-year-old when she’s thirty-six?)

The other people waiting for the bus knew enough to step back from the curb, but Eddie stood where he was. The bus, before it stopped, splashed dirty water from the flooded gutter onto Eddie’s chest and midsection. Now he was not only wet, but also filthy, and a part of the dirty puddle was sloshing in the bottom of his briefcase.

He’d inscribed a copy of
Sixty Times
for Ruth, although it had been published three years before and if Ruth had been inclined to read it, she would already have done so. Eddie had often imagined Ted Cole’s remarks to his daughter on the subject of
Sixty Times
. “Wishful thinking,” Ted would have said. Or: “Sheer exaggeration—your mother hardly knew the guy.” What Ted had actually said to Ruth is more interesting, and totally true of Eddie. What Ted had told his daughter was: “This poor kid never got over fucking your mother.”

“He’s not a kid anymore, Daddy,” Ruth had replied. “If I’m in my thirties, Eddie O’Hare is in his forties—right?”

“He’s still a kid, Ruthie,” Ted had told her. “Eddie will always be a kid.”

Indeed, as he struggled onto the Madison Avenue bus, Eddie’s accumulated distress and anxiety made him resemble a forty-eight-year-old adolescent. The driver was angry with him for not knowing what the exact fare was, and although Eddie had a bulging fistful of change in his pocket, his pants were so wet that he could retrieve the coins only one at a time. The people standing behind him—most of them still in the rain—were angry with Eddie, too.

Then, in attempting to empty his briefcase of the water from the gutter, Eddie poured a brownish puddle on the shoe of an elderly man who did not speak English. Eddie could not understand the language the man spoke to him; Eddie didn’t even know which language it was. It was also hard to hear on the bus, and impossible to make out the driver’s occasional utterances—the names of the cross streets, the stops or the
potential
stops they were passing?

The reason Eddie couldn’t hear was that a young black man sat in an aisle seat of the bus with a large portable radio and cassette player in his lap. A loud, lewd song throbbed throughout the bus, the only discernible lyrics being a repeated phrase; it was something like, “Ya wouldn’t know da truth, mon, if she sat on ya face!”

“Excuse me,” Eddie said to the young man. “Would you mind turning that down a little? I can’t hear what the driver is saying.”

The young man smiled charmingly and said, “I can’t hear what you sayin’, man, ’cause the
box
is too fuckin’ loud!”

Some of the surrounding passengers, whether out of nervousness or genuine appreciation, laughed. Eddie leaned over a matronly black woman in a nearby seat; he rubbed the fogged-up window with the heel of his hand. Possibly he could
see
the upcoming cross streets. But his bulky brown briefcase slipped off his shoulder—the shoulder strap was as wet as Eddie’s clothes—and the briefcase struck the woman in her face.