A Widow for One Year (82 page)

Poor Eddie. He knew that Hannah was a slob. Eddie detested messiness to the degree that he paid a cleaning woman not only to clean his modest house once a week but also to
replace
(not merely wash) the pot holders when they were stained. The cleaning woman was also instructed to wash
and iron
the dish towels. And Eddie hated Hannah’s boyfriends, long in advance of those predictable moments when Hannah herself would grow to hate them.

He’d already envisioned Hannah’s clothes (not to mention her
under
clothes) deposited everywhere about the house. Hannah would swim naked in the pool and use the outdoor shower with the door open. Hannah would throw away or eat Eddie’s leftovers in the refrigerator— while
her
leftovers would grow green and fuzzy before Eddie would take it upon himself to get rid of them. Hannah’s half of the phone bill would be appalling, and Eddie would have to pay it all because she would be on assignment in Dubai (or some such place) whenever
any
of the bills arrived. (Besides, Hannah’s checks would bounce.)

Hannah would also fight with Eddie over the use of the master bedroom, and win—on the grounds that she needed the king-size bed for her boyfriends and the extra closet space for her clothes. But Eddie had rationalized that he would be happy to use the larger of the guest bedrooms at the end of the upstairs hall. (After all, he’d slept with Marion there.)

And given the advanced age of most of Eddie’s female friends, Eddie assumed that he would have to convert what was once Ted Cole’s workroom (and later Allan’s office) into a
downstairs
bedroom—for some of Eddie’s more fragile and infirm older women could not be expected to climb stairs.

Eddie intuited that Hannah would allow him to use the former squash court in the barn as his office; that it had been Ruth’s office appealed to him. Since Ted had killed himself in the squash court, the barn was off-limits to Hannah. It wasn’t that Hannah had a conscience, but she was superstitious. Besides, Hannah would use the house only on weekends or in the summer, whereas Eddie would live there full-time. That Eddie hoped Hannah would be away
a lot
was the main reason he could delude himself into thinking that he could share the house with her at all. But what an enormous risk he was taking!

“I said I’ve been thinking about something,” Eddie said again. Hannah hadn’t been listening.

As she looked at the passing landscape, Hannah’s expression hardened from an abject indifference to an overt hostility. When they crossed the border into Vermont, Hannah glared at the very memory of her undergraduate years at Middlebury, as if both the college and the State of Vermont had done her some unpardonable disservice— although Ruth would have said that the chief cause of Hannah’s four years of turmoil and depression at Middlebury had been Hannah’s promiscuity.

“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.

It was one of those moments when Eddie
should
have lied, but he couldn’t speak. No one ever
would
see Hannah that way. Eddie tried to imagine her at sixty, not to mention seventy or eighty, when her raw sexuality would be replaced by . . . well, by
what
? Hannah’s sexuality would
always
be raw!

Eddie took one hand off the steering wheel and touched Hannah’s hands. She was wringing them in her lap, and when Eddie touched her, she said: “Keep two hands on the fucking wheel, Eddie. I’m just between boyfriends, at the moment . . .”

Sometimes it was his capacity for pity that got Eddie into trouble. In a dangerously enlarged part of his heart, Eddie believed that what Hannah truly needed was not another boyfriend but a
good
friend.

“I’ve been thinking that we might try sharing a house together,” Eddie proposed. (It was a good thing he was at the wheel, and not Hannah—she would have driven off the road.) “I was thinking that, together, we could buy Ruth’s house in Sagaponack. Of course I don’t imagine that we would . . . um,
overlap
there together very much of the time.”

Naturally Hannah was unsure of exactly
what
Eddie was proposing. In her vulnerable state of mind, Hannah’s first reaction was that Eddie was making more than a pass; it sounded to her as if he wanted to
marry
her. But the more Eddie went on, the more confused Hannah became.

“ ‘Overlap’?”
Hannah asked him. “What does fucking
‘overlap’
mean?”

Eddie, seeing her confusion, could not suppress his panic. “You could have the master bedroom!” he blurted. “I’d be happy in the bigger of the guest bedrooms, the one all the way down the hall. And what used to be Ted’s workroom, and Allan’s office, could very well become a
downstairs
bedroom. I’d be happy with that, too.” He paused only for a breath before blurting on: “I know your feelings about the barn, the former squash court. I could work there—that is, make it my office. But the rest of the house—you know, the
whole
house—we’d share. Of course, in the summer we’d have to haggle about weekend guests. You know—your friends or mine! But if you basically liked the idea of a house in the Hamptons, I think that—between the two of us—we could afford it. And
Ruth
would be happy.” He was babbling now. “After all, she and Graham could come visit us. It would mean—for
Ruth,
I mean—that she wouldn’t have to give up the house altogether. Ruth and Graham
and
the cop, I mean,” Eddie added, because he couldn’t tell from Hannah’s stricken expression if she was still confused by his suggestion or suddenly carsick.

“You mean we’d be fucking
roommates
?” Hannah asked.

“Fifty-fifty!” Eddie cried out.

“But you’d live there full-time, wouldn’t you?” Hannah asked, with a shrewdness that Eddie was unprepared for. “How do you figure it’s ‘fifty-fifty’ if I come out for the summer, and for occasional weekends, and you live there fucking full-time?”

I should have known! Eddie thought. Here he’d tried to regard Hannah as a friend and she was already
negotiating
with him! It would never work! If only he’d kept his mouth shut! But what he said was: “I couldn’t afford it if you didn’t pay half. Probably
both
of us can’t afford it, anyway.”

“That stupid house can’t be worth
that
much!” Hannah said. “What’s it cost?”

“A lot,” Eddie replied, but he didn’t know the answer. More than he could afford by himself—that was all he knew.

“You wanna buy it and you don’t know how much it costs?” Hannah asked.

At least she’d stopped crying. Hannah probably made much more money than he did, Eddie reflected. She was increasingly successful as a journalist, if not renowned; many of her topics were too trashy to bring her
renown
. She’d recently done a cover story for a major magazine (not that Eddie believed
any
magazine was “major”) about the failure to rehabilitate the inmates in state and federal prisons. In addition to the controversy created by the article, Hannah had been briefly involved with an ex-convict; in fact, the ex-convict had been
Hannah’s
last bad boyfriend, which possibly explained her present wrecked condition.

“You could probably afford to buy the whole house by yourself,” Eddie told Hannah morosely.

“What would I want with that house?” she asked him. “It’s not exactly a fucking treasure trove of memorabilia for
me
!”

I’ll never get the house, but at least I won’t have to live anywhere with
her
! Eddie was thinking.

“Jesus, you’re weird, Eddie,” Hannah said.

It was only the first weekend in November, but all along the dirt road that led uphill past Kevin Merton’s farm to Ruth’s house, the trees had lost their leaves. The bare branches of the stone-gray maples and the bone-white birches seemed to be shivering in anticipation of the coming snow. It was already cold. When they got out of the car in Ruth’s driveway, Hannah stood hugging herself while Eddie opened the trunk. Their suitcases
and
their coats were in the trunk; they’d not needed their coats in New York.