by John Irving
“Thomas pushed him in a puddle,” Marion told Ruth.
“How old is Timothy with the mud?” Ruth asked.
“He’s your age, honey,” her mother said. “He was just four. . . .”
Eddie knew the next photo, too: Thomas in his hockey uniform, after a game at the Exeter rink. He is standing with his arm around his mother, as if she’d been cold throughout the entire game—but she also looks extremely proud to be standing there with her son’s arm around her. Even though he has taken off his skates and is standing, absurdly, in full hockey uniform but with a pair of unlaced basketball shoes on his feet, Thomas is taller than Marion. What Ruth liked about the photograph is that Thomas is grinning widely, a hockey puck gripped in his teeth.
Just before he fell asleep, Eddie heard Ruth ask her mother: “How old is Thomas with the thing in his mouth?”
“He’s Eddie’s age,” Eddie heard Marion say. “He was just sixteen. . . .” About seven A.M. the phone rang. Marion answered it when she was still in bed. She knew by the silence that it was Mrs. Vaughn. “He’s at the other house,” Marion said; then she hung up.
At breakfast Marion told Eddie: “I’ll make you a bet. He breaks up with her before Ruth gets her stitches out.”
“But don’t the stitches come out on Friday?” Eddie asked. (There were only two days until Friday.)
“I’ll bet he breaks up with her today, ” Marion replied. “Or at least he’ll try. If she’s difficult about it, it may take him another couple of days.”
Indeed, Mrs. Vaughn would be difficult about it. Probably anticipating the difficulty, Ted tried to break up with Mrs. Vaughn by sending Eddie to do it for him.
“I’m going to do what ?” Eddie asked. They were standing by the biggest table in Ted’s workroom, where Ted had assembled a stack of about a hundred drawings of Mrs. Vaughn. Ted had some trouble closing the bulging portfolio; it was the largest portfolio he had, with his initials engraved in gold in the brown leather—T.T.C. (Theodore Thomas Cole).
“You’re going to give her these, but not the portfolio. Just give her the drawings. I want the portfolio back,” Ted instructed Eddie, who knew that the portfolio had been a gift from Marion. (Marion had told Eddie that.)
“But aren’t you going to see Mrs. Vaughn today?” Eddie asked him. “Isn’t she expecting you?”
“Tell her I’m not coming, but that I wanted her to have the drawings,” Ted said.
“She’s going to ask me when you are coming,” Eddie replied.
“Tell her you don’t know. Just give her the drawings. Say as little as you have to,” Ted told the boy. Eddie scarcely had time to tell Marion.
“He’s sending you to break up with her—what a coward!” Marion said, touching Eddie’s hair in that motherly way she had. He was sure she was going to say something about her perpetual dissatisfaction with his haircut. Instead she said, “Better show up early—she’ll still be getting dressed. That way she’ll be less tempted to invite you in. You don’t want her asking you a million questions. The best thing would be to ring the bell and just hand her the drawings. You don’t want to let her get you inside the house, behind closed doors—believe me. Be careful she doesn’t kill you.”
With that in mind, Eddie O’Hare arrived at the Gin Lane address early. At the entrance to the expensively pebbled driveway, he stopped by the impressive barrier of privet to remove the hundred drawings of Mrs. Vaughn from the leather portfolio. He feared it might be awkward to give Mrs. Vaughn the drawings and take back the portfolio while the small, dark woman was standing furiously in front of him. But Eddie had miscalculated the wind. After Eddie put the portfolio in the trunk of the Chevy, he transferred the drawings to the backseat of the car, where the wind blew them into a disorderly pile; he had to close the doors and windows of the Chevy in order to sort through the drawings in the backseat. He couldn’t help but look at the drawings then.
They began with the portraits of Mrs. Vaughn with her angry little boy. The small, tightly closed mouths of the mother and her son struck Eddie as an unkind genetic characteristic. Also, Mrs. Vaughn and her son both had intense, impatient eyes; seated side by side, they made fists of their hands and held them rigidly on their thighs. In his mother’s lap, Mrs. Vaughn’s son appeared to be on the verge of clawing and kicking free of her—unless she, who also appeared to be on the verge, impulsively decided to strangle him first. There were easily two dozen or more such portraits, each conveying chronic discontent and mounting tension.
Then Eddie came to Mrs. Vaughn alone—at first fully dressed, but deeply alone. Eddie instantly grieved for her. If what Eddie had first spotted in Mrs. Vaughn was her furtiveness, which had given way to her submissiveness, which in turn had led her to despair, what he’d missed seeing in her was her mortal unhappiness. Ted Cole had caught this trait even before the woman began to take off her clothes.
The nudes had their own sad progression. At first the fists remained balled up on the tense thighs, and Mrs. Vaughn sat in profile—often with one or the other shoulder blocking her small breasts from view. When at last she faced the artist, her destroyer, she hugged herself to hide her breasts, and her knees were tightly pinched together; her crotch was mostly concealed—her pubic hair, when visible at all, was only the thinnest of lines.
Then Eddie groaned in the closed car; the later nudes of Mrs. Vaughn were as un concealed as the frankest photographs of a cadaver. Her arms hung loosely at her sides, as if her shoulders had been savagely dislocated in a violent fall. Her exposed and unsupported breasts drooped; the nipple of one breast seemed larger and darker and more down-pointed than the other. Her knees were spread apart, as if she’d lost all sensation in her legs—or else she’d broken her pelvis. For such a small woman, her navel was too large, her pubic hair too abundant. Her vagina was gaping and slack. The very last of the nudes was the first pornography that Eddie O’Hare had ever seen, not that Eddie fully understood what was pornographic about the drawings. Eddie felt sick and deeply sorry that he’d seen the drawings, which had reduced Mrs. Vaughn to the hole in her center; the nudes managed to make even less of Mrs. Vaughn than what had remained of her strong smell on the rental-house pillows.
Under the tires of the Chevy, the crunching of the perfect stones in the driveway leading to the Vaughn mansion sounded like the breaking bones of small animals. As Eddie passed a squirting fountain in the circular driveway, he saw the movement of an upstairs curtain. When he rang the doorbell, he nearly dropped the drawings, which he was able to hold only by hugging them with both his arms against his chest. He waited forever for the small, dark woman to appear.
Marion had been right. Mrs. Vaughn had not finished getting dressed, or possibly she’d not completed the exact phase of un dress that she might have been preparing in order to look alluring to Ted. Her hair was wet and lank, and her upper lip seemed rubbed raw; at one corner of her mouth, like a clown’s unfinished smile, remained a trace of the hair-removal ointment that she’d too hastily tried to wipe away. Mrs. Vaughn had been hasty in her choice of a robe as well, for she stood in the doorway in a white terry-cloth thing that resembled a giant, ungainly towel. It was probably her husband’s robe, for it hung over her thin ankles; one edge dragged on the doorsill. She was barefoot. The wet nail polish on her big right toe had been smeared across the top of her right foot in such a way that it looked as if she’d cut her foot and was bleeding.
“What do you want?” Mrs. Vaughn asked. Then she looked past Eddie at Ted’s car. Before Eddie could answer, she asked him: “Where is he? Isn’t he coming? What’s wrong?”
“He couldn’t make it,” Eddie informed her, “but he wanted you to have . . . these.” In the wild wind, he didn’t dare hold out the drawings to her; awkwardly, he still hugged them to his chest.
“He couldn’t make it?” she repeated. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie lied. “But there are all these drawings . . . May I put them down somewhere?” he begged.
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“ What drawings? Oh . . . the drawings ! Oh . . .” said Mrs. Vaughn, as if someone had struck her in the stomach. She stepped back, tripping on the long white robe—she nearly fell. Eddie followed her inside, feeling like her executioner. The polished marble floor reflected the overhanging chandelier; in the distance, through an open pair of double doors, a second chandelier hung above a dining-room table. The house looked like an art museum; the far-off dining room was as big as a banquet hall. Eddie walked (for what seemed to him to be a mile or so) to the table, and put the drawings down, not realizing until he turned to go that Mrs. Vaughn had followed as closely and silently behind him as his shadow. When she saw the topmost drawing—one of her with her son—she gasped.
“He’s giving them to me !” she cried. “He doesn’t want them?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie said miserably. Mrs. Vaughn rapidly leafed through the drawings until she got to the first nude; then she overturned the stack, taking the last drawing off the bottom, which was now the top. Eddie began to edge away; he knew what the last drawing was.
“Oh . . .” Mrs. Vaughn said, as if she’d been punched again. “But when is he coming?” she called after Eddie. “He’s coming Friday, isn’t he? I have the whole day to see him Friday—he knows I have the whole day. He knows !” Eddie tried to keep walking. He heard her bare feet on the marble floor—she was scampering after him. She caught up to him under the big chandelier. “Stop!” she shouted. “Is he coming Friday?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie repeated, backing out the door. The wind tried to keep him inside.
“Yes, you do know!” Mrs. Vaughn screamed. “Tell me!”
She followed him outside, but the wind almost knocked her down. Her robe blew open; she struggled to close it. Eddie would always retain this vision of her, as if to remind himself of what the worst kind of nakedness was—the utterly unwanted glimpse of Mrs. Vaughn’s slack breasts and her dark triangle of matted pubic hair.
“Stop!” she cried again, but the sharp stones in the driveway prevented her from following him to the car. She bent down and picked up a handful of the pebbles, which she threw at Eddie. Most of them struck the Chevy.
“Did he show you those drawings? Did you look at them? Goddamn you—you looked at them, didn’t you?” she cried.
“No,” Eddie lied.
As Mrs. Vaughn bent down to pick up another handful of stones, a gust of wind blew her off balance. Like a gunshot, the front door behind her slammed shut.
“My God. I’m locked out!” she said to Eddie.
“Isn’t there another door that’s un locked?” he asked. (The mansion must have had a dozen doors!)
“I thought Ted was coming. He likes all the doors to be locked,” said Mrs. Vaughn.
“You don’t hide a key somewhere for emergencies?” Eddie asked.
“I sent the gardener home. Ted doesn’t like the gardener to be around,” said Mrs. Vaughn. “The gardener has an emergency key.”
“Can’t you call the gardener?”
“On what phone ?” shouted Mrs. Vaughn. “You’ll have to break in.”
“Me?” the sixteen-year-old said.
“Well, you know how to do it, don’t you?” the small, dark woman asked. “ I don’t know how to do it!” she wailed.
There were no open windows because of the air-conditioning; the Vaughns had air-conditioning because of their art collection, which was also why there were no open windows. By a garden in the back, there were French doors, but Mrs. Vaughn warned Eddie that the glass was of a special thickness and laced with chicken wire, which made it nearly impenetrable. By swinging a rock, which he tied up in his T-shirt, Eddie was finally able to smash the glass, but he still needed to find one of the gardener’s tools in order to rip the chicken wire sufficiently for his hand to fit through the hole and unlock the door from the inside. The rock, which was a centerpiece to the birdbath in the garden, had dirtied Eddie’s T-shirt, which had also been cut by the breaking glass. He decided to leave his shirt, and the rock, in the smashed glass by the now-open door.
But Mrs. Vaughn, who was barefoot, insisted that he carry her into the house through the French doors; she didn’t want to risk cutting her feet on the broken glass. Bare-chested, Eddie carried her into her house—being careful, as he reached around her, not to get his hands on the wrong side of her robe. She seemed to weigh next to nothing, barely more than Ruth. But when he held her in his arms, even so briefly, her strong smell came close to overpowering him. Her scent was indescribable; Eddie couldn’t say what she smelled like, only that the scent made him gag. When he put her down, she sensed his unconcealed revulsion.
“You look as if you’re disgusted,” she told him. “How dare you—how dare you detest me ?” Eddie was standing in a room he’d never been in before. He didn’t know his way to the big chandelier at the main entrance, and when he turned to look for the French doors to the garden, a maze of open doorways confronted him; he also didn’t know how to find the door he’d just come in.
“How do I get out?” he asked Mrs. Vaughn.
“How dare you detest me?” she repeated. “You’re not exactly living an unsordid life yourself—are you?” Mrs. Vaughn asked the boy.
“Please . . . I want to go home,” Eddie told her. It wasn’t until he spoke that he realized he really meant it, and that he meant Exeter, New Hampshire—not Sagaponack. Eddie meant that he really wanted to go home. It was a weakness he would carry with him for the rest of his life: he would always be inclined to cry in front of older women, as he’d once cried in front of Marion—as he now commenced to cry in front of Mrs. Vaughn.
Without another word she took him by his wrist and led him through the museum of her house to the chandelier at the front door. The touch of her small, cold hand was like a bird’s foot, as if a diminutive parrot or a parakeet had grabbed hold of him. When she opened the door and pushed him into the wind, a number of doors slammed in the interior of her house, and as he turned to say good-bye, he saw the sudden whirlwind of Ted’s terrible drawings—the wind had blown them off the dining-room table.
Eddie couldn’t speak, nor could Mrs. Vaughn. When she heard the drawings fluttering behind her, she wheeled around in her big white robe, as if preparing herself for an attack. Indeed, before the front door again slammed shut in the wind, like a second gunshot, Mrs. Vaughn was about to be attacked. Surely she would recognize in those drawings at least a measure of the degree to which she’d allowed herself to be assaulted.
“She threw rocks at you?” Marion asked Eddie.
“They were little stones—most of them hit the car,” Eddie admitted.
“She made you carry her?” Marion asked.
“She was barefoot,” Eddie explained again. “There was all this broken glass!”
“And you left your shirt? Why? ”
“It was ruined—it was just a T-shirt.”
As for Ted, his conversation with Eddie was a little different.
“What did she mean—she has ‘the whole day’ Friday?” Ted asked. “Does she expect me to spend the whole day with her?”
“I don’t know,” the sixteen-year-old said.
“Why did she think you’d looked at the drawings?” Ted asked. “ Did you—did you look at them?”
“No,” Eddie lied.
“Christ, of course you did,” Ted said.
“She exposed herself to me,” Eddie told him.
“Jesus! She did what ?”
“She didn’t mean to,” Eddie admitted, “but she exposed herself. It was the wind—it blew her robe open.”
“Jesus Christ . . .” Ted said.
“She locked herself out of her house, because of you,” Eddie told him. “She said you wanted all the doors locked, and that you didn’t like the gardener to be around.”
“She told you that?”
“I had to break into her house—I smashed in the French doors with a part of the birdbath. I had to carry her through the broken glass,” E
ddie complained. “I lost my shirt.”
“Who cares about your shirt ?” Ted shouted. “I can’t spend the whole day with her Friday! I’ll have you drop me off there the first thing Friday morning, but you must come back to get me in forty-five minutes. Forget that—in half an hour! I couldn’t possibly spend forty-five minutes with that crazy woman.”
“You just have to trust me, Eddie,” Marion told him. “I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do.”
“Okay,” Eddie said. He couldn’t stop thinking about the worst of the drawings. He wanted to tell Marion about Mrs. Vaughn’s smell, but he couldn’t describe it.
“On Friday morning you’re going to leave him at Mrs. Vaughn’s,” Marion began.
“I know!” the boy said. “For half an hour.”
“No, not for half an hour,” Marion informed the sixteen-year-old. “You’re going to leave him with her and not come back to pick him up. It will take him most of the day to get home by himself without a car. I’ll bet you anything that Mrs. Vaughn won’t offer to drive him.”
“But what will he do ?” Eddie asked.
“You mustn’t be afraid of Ted,” Marion reminded him. “What will he do ? It will probably occur to him that the only person he knows in Southampton is Dr. Leonardis.” (Dave Leonardis was one of Ted’s regular squash opponents.) “It will take Ted half an hour or forty-five minutes just to walk to Dr. Leonardis’s office,” Marion continued. “And then what will he do? He’ll have to wait all day, until all of Leonardis’s patients have gone home, before he can get a ride home with the doctor—unless one of Leonardis’s patients is someone Ted knows, or someone who happens to be driving in the direction of Sagaponack.”
“Ted’s going to be furious,” Eddie warned her.
“You just have to trust me, Eddie.”
“Okay.”
“After you drive Ted to Mrs. Vaughn’s, you’re going to come back here and get Ruth,” Marion went on. “Then you’re going to take Ruth to her doctor to get her stitches out. Then I want you to take Ruth to the beach. Let her get wet—let her celebrate having her stitches out.”