A Widow for One Year (8 page)

If Ted’s publisher hadn’t felt such sympathy for Ted because of what had happened to his children, the book might have been rejected. The reviewers were almost unanimously
un
sympathetic to the book, which sold about as well as Ted’s other books, anyway; his popularity appeared to be of that unassailable kind. Dot O’Hare herself had said that it would be an act of indecency bordering on child abuse to read that book aloud to any child. But Eddie was thrilled by
The Door in the Floor,
which, in fact, enjoyed a kind of cult status on college campuses—it was
that
reprehensible.

On the ferry, Eddie thumbed through
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls
. He’d read it so many times that he didn’t read a word of it again; he looked only at the illustrations, which he liked more than most book reviewers had. At best reviewers would say the illustrations were “ enhancing” or “not obtrusive.” More often the commentary was negative, but not
that
negative. (Such as: “The illustrations, while not detracting from the story, add little. They leave one hoping for more next time.”) Yet Eddie liked them.

The imaginary monster was crawling between the walls; there it was, with its no arms and no legs, pulling itself along with its teeth, sliding forward on its fur. Better still was the illustration of the scary dress in Mommy’s closet, the dress that was coming alive and trying to climb down off the hanger. It was a dress with one foot, a naked foot, protruding below the hem; and a hand, just a hand with a wrist, wriggled out of one sleeve. Most disturbing of all, the contours of a single breast seemed to swell the dress, as if a woman (or only some of her parts) were forming
inside
the dress.

Nowhere in the book was there a comforting drawing of a
real
mouse between those walls. The last illustration showed the younger of the boys, awake in bed and frightened of the approaching sound. With his small hand, the boy is hitting the wall—to make the mouse scurry away. But not only is the mouse not scurrying away; the mouse is disproportionately
huge
. It is not only bigger than both boys together; it is bigger than the headboard of the bed—bigger than the entire bed
and
the headboard.

As for Eddie’s favorite book by Ted Cole, he removed it from his duffel bag and read it once more before the ferry landed. The story of
The Door in the Floor
would never be a favorite of Ruth’s; her father had not told it to her, and it would be a few years before Ruth was old enough to read it for herself. She would hate it.

There was a tasteful but stark illustration of an unborn child inside its mother’s womb. “There was a little boy who didn’t know if he wanted to be born,” the book began. “His mommy didn’t know if she wanted him to be born, either.

“This is because they lived in a cabin in the woods, on an island, in a lake—and there was no one else around. And, in the cabin, there was a door in the floor.

“The little boy was afraid of what was under the door in the floor, and the mommy was afraid, too. Once, long ago, other children had come to visit the cabin, for Christmas, but the children had opened the door in the floor and they had disappeared down the hole, under the cabin, and all their presents had disappeared, too.

“Once the mommy had tried to look for the children, but when she opened the door in the floor, she heard such an awful sound that her hair turned completely white, like the hair of a ghost. And she smelled such a terrible smell that her skin became as wrinkled as a raisin. It took a whole year for the mommy’s skin to be smooth again, and for her hair not to be white. And, when she’d opened the door in the floor, the mommy had also seen some horrible things that she never wanted to see again, like a snake that could make itself so small that it could sneak through the crack between the door and the floor—even when the door was closed—and then it could make itself so big again that it could carry the cabin on its back, as if the snake were a giant snail and the cabin were its shell.” (
That
illustration had given Eddie O’Hare a nightmare—
not
when Eddie was a child, but when he was a sixteen-year-old!)

“The other things under the door in the floor are so horrible that you can only imagine them.” (There was an indescribable illustration of these horrible things as well.)

“And so the mommy wondered if she
wanted
to have a little boy in a cabin in the woods, on an island, in a lake—and with no one else around—but especially because of everything that might be under the door in the floor. Then she thought: Why not? I’ll just tell him not to open the door in the floor!

“Well, that’s easy for a mommy to say, but what about the little boy? He still didn’t know if he wanted to be born into a world where there was a door in the floor, and no one else around. Yet there were also some beautiful things in the woods, and on the island, and in the lake.” (Here there was an illustration of an owl, and of the ducks that swam ashore on the island, and of a pair of loons nuzzling on the still water of the lake.)

“Why not take a chance? the little boy thought. And so he was born, and he was very happy. His mommy was happy again, too, although she told the little boy at least once every day, ‘Don’t you ever, not
ever
— never, never,
never
—open the door in the floor!’ But of course he was only a little boy. If
you
were that boy, wouldn’t you want to open that door in the floor?”

And
that,
thought Eddie O’Hare, is the end of the story—never realizing that, in the
real
story, the little boy was a little girl. Her name was Ruth, and her mommy
wasn’t
happy. There was another kind of door in the floor that Eddie didn’t know about—not yet.

The ferry had come through Plum Gut. Orient Point was now clearly in sight.

Eddie took a good look at the jacket photographs of Ted Cole. The author photo on
The Door in the Floor
was more recent than the one on
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls
. In both, Mr. Cole struck Eddie as a handsome man, suggesting to the sixteen-year-old that a man of the advanced age of forty-five could still move the hearts and minds of the ladies. A man like that would be sure to stand out in any crowd at Orient Point. Eddie didn’t know that he should have been looking for Marion.

Once the ferry was secured in the slip, Eddie scanned the unimpressive gathering on shore from the vantage of the upper deck; there was no one who matched the elegant jacket photos. He’s
forgotten
about me! Eddie thought. For some reason, this inspired Eddie to think spiteful thoughts about his father—so much for Exonians!

From the upper deck, however, Eddie did see a beautiful woman waving to someone on board; she was so striking that Eddie didn’t want to see the man she might be waving to. (He assumed that she must have been waving to a man.) The woman was so distractingly gorgeous, she made it difficult for Eddie to keep looking for Ted. Eddie’s eyes kept coming back to
her
—she was waving up a storm. (From the corner of his eye, Eddie saw someone drive off the ferry into the stony sand of the beach, where the car instantly stalled.)

Eddie was among the last of the stragglers to disembark, carrying his heavy duffel bag in one hand, and the lighter, smaller suitcase in the other. He was shocked to see that the woman of such breathtaking beauty was standing exactly where she’d been when he’d first spotted her, and she was still waving. She was dead-ahead of him—and she appeared to be waving at
him
. He was afraid he was going to bump into her. She was close enough for him to touch her—he could smell her, and she smelled wonderful—when, suddenly, she reached out and took the lighter, smaller suitcase from his hand.

“Hello, Eddie,” she said.

If he died a little whenever his father spoke to strangers, Eddie now knew what it meant to
really
die: his breath was gone, he couldn’t speak.

“I thought you’d never see me,” the beautiful woman said.

From that moment on, he would never
stop
seeing her, not in his mind’s eye—not whenever he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. She would always be there.

“Mrs. Cole?” he managed to whisper.

“Marion,” she said.

He couldn’t say her name. With his heavy bag, he struggled to follow her to the car. So what if she wore a bra? He had noticed her breasts nonetheless. And in her sleek, long-sleeved sweater, there was no knowing if she shaved her armpits. What did it matter? The coarse hair of Mrs. Havelock’s armpits that had once so thoroughly engaged him, not to mention her floppy tits, had receded into the distant past; he felt only a mute embarrassment at the very idea that someone as
ordinary
as Mrs. Havelock had ever stirred an iota of desire in him.

When they arrived at the car—a Mercedes-Benz the dusty red of a tomato—Marion handed him the keys.

“You can drive, can’t you?” she asked. Eddie still couldn’t speak. “I know boys your age—you love to drive every chance you get, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

“Marion,” she repeated.

“I was expecting Mr. Cole,” he explained.

“Ted,” Marion said.

These weren’t Exeter rules. At the academy—and, by extension, in his family, because the
atmosphere
of the academy was where he had truly grown up—it was “sir” and “ma’am” to everyone; it had been Mr. and Mrs.
Everybody
. Now it was Ted and Marion; here was another world.

When he sat in the driver’s seat, the accelerator and brake and clutch pedals were the perfect distance away from him; he and Marion were the same height. The thrill of this discovery was immediately moderated, however, by his awareness of his immense erection; his hugely evident hard-on brushed the bottom of the steering wheel. And then the clam truck drove slowly past—the driver had noticed Marion, too, of course.

“Nice job if you can get it, kid!” the clam-truck driver called.

When Eddie turned the key in the ignition, the Mercedes gave a responsive purr. When Eddie stole a look at Marion, he saw that she was evaluating him in a way that was as foreign to him as her car was.

“I don’t know where we’re going,” he confessed to her.

“Just drive,” Marion told the boy. “I’ll give you all the directions you need.”

A Masturbating Machine

For the first month of that summer, Ruth and the writer’s assistant rarely saw each other. They did not meet in the kitchen of the Coles’ house, largely because Eddie ate none of his meals there. And although the four-year-old and the writer’s assistant slept in the same house, their bedtimes were considerably different, their bedrooms far apart. In the morning, Ruth had already eaten her breakfast, with either her mother or her father, before Eddie got up. By the time Eddie was awake, the first of the child’s three nannies had arrived, and Marion had already driven Ruth and the nanny to the beach. If the weather was unsuitable for the beach, Ruth and her nanny would play in the nursery, or in the virtually unused living room of the big house.

That the house was vast made it immediately exotic to Eddie O’Hare; he had first grown up in a small faculty apartment in an Exeter dormitory—later, in a not much larger faculty house. But that Ted and Marion had
separated
—that they never slept in the same house together—was an unfamiliarity of far greater magnitude (and cause for speculation) for Eddie than the size of Ted and Marion’s house. That her parents had separated was a new and mysterious change in Ruth’s life as well; the four-year-old had no less difficulty adjusting to the oddity of it than Eddie had.

Regardless of what the separation implied to Ruth and Eddie about the future, the first month of that summer was chiefly confusing. On the nights when Ted stayed in the rental house, Eddie had to go fetch him with the car in the morning; Ted liked to be in his workroom no later than ten
A.M.,
which gave Eddie time to drive to the Sagaponack General Store and post office en route. Eddie picked up the mail, and coffee and muffins for them both. On the nights when Marion stayed in the rental house, Eddie still picked up the mail but he got breakfast only for himself—Ted had eaten earlier with Ruth. And Marion could drive her own car. When he wasn’t running errands, which he did frequently, Eddie spent much of his day working in the empty rental house.

This work, which was undemanding, varied from answering some of Ted’s fan mail to retyping Ted’s handwritten revisions of the extremely short
A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound
. At least twice a week, Ted added a sentence or deleted one; he also added and deleted commas—he changed semicolons to dashes and then back to semicolons. (In Eddie’s opinion, Ted was going through a punctuation crisis.) At best, a brand-new paragraph would be raggedly created— Ted’s typing was terrible—and then instantly and messily revised in pencil. At worst, the same paragraph would be cut entirely by the next evening.

Eddie did not open or read Ted’s mail, and most of the letters that Eddie retyped for Ted were Ted’s replies to children. Ted would write to the mothers himself. Eddie never saw what the mothers wrote to Ted, or Ted’s responses to them. (When Ruth would hear her father’s typewriter at night—
only
at night—what she was hearing, more often than a children’s-book-in-progress, was a letter to a young mother.)

The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child. Notwithstanding that the four-year-old Ruth would witness her mother being mounted from behind by a sixteen-year-old boy, Ruth’s parents would never raise their voices in anger toward, or in hatred of, each other—nor would her mother or her father ever speak truly ill of the other to Ruth. In this aspect of their destroyed marriage, Ted and Marion were models of decent behavior. Never mind that the arrangements concerning the rental house were as seedy as the unfortunate dwelling itself. Ruth never had to inhabit that house.