A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  In Which Eddie and Hannah Fail to Reach an Agreement

  By the time his KLM flight arrived in Boston, the former Sergeant Hoekstra was looking forward to putting a little distance between himself and the ocean. He’d lived his whole life in a country that was below sea level; Harry thought that the mountains of Vermont might be a welcome change.

  It had been only a week since Harry and Ruth had parted company in Paris. As a best-selling author, Ruth could afford the dozen or more transatlantic phone calls that she’d made to Harry; yet, given the length of their conversations, it was already an expensive relationship—even for Ruth. For Harry, although he’d not made more than a half-dozen calls from the Netherlands to Vermont, a long-distance relationship that required this much dialogue would soon bankrupt him; at the very least, he feared his retirement would be short-lived. Thus, even before Harry arrived in Boston, he’d already proposed to Ruth—in his anticlimactic fashion. It was Harry’s first proposal of marriage; he had no experience with it.

  “I suppose we should get married,” he’d told her, “before I’m completely broke.”

  “Okay—if you really mean it,” Ruth had replied. “Just don’t sell your apartment, in case it doesn’t work out.”

  Harry had thought this was a sensible idea. He could always rent his apartment to a fellow policeman; especially from an absentee landlord’s perspective, the former Sergeant Hoekstra believed that cops would be more reliable than most other tenants.

  In Boston, Harry had to pass through U.S. Customs; not seeing Ruth for a week, and now this rite of passage in a foreign country, gave him his first twinge of doubt. Not even young lovers got married in the giddy aftermath of fucking their brains out for only four or five days, and then missing each other for only a week! And if he was having doubts, what was Ruth feeling?

  Then his passport was stamped and handed back to him. Harry saw a sign that said the automatic door was out of order, but the door opened nonetheless, admitting him into the New World, where Ruth was waiting for him. The instant he saw her, his doubts vanished, and in the car she said to him: “I was having second thoughts, until I saw you.”

  She was wearing a fitted olive-green shirt; it clung to her in the manner of a long-sleeved polo shirt, but it was more open at the throat, where Harry could see the cross of Lorraine that he’d given her—the two crosspieces glinting in the brilliant autumn sun.

  They drove west for close to three hours, across most of Massachusetts, before turning north into Vermont. That mid-October, the fall foliage was at its peak in Massachusetts, but the colors were more muted—just past their prime—as Ruth and Harry headed north. It struck Harry that the low, wooded mountains reflected the melancholy of the changing season. The faded colors heralded the coming dominance of the bare, mouse-brown trees; soon the evergreens would be the only color against the mouse-gray sky. And in six weeks or less, the changing fall would change again—soon the snow would come. There’d be days when shades of gray would be the only colors amid a prevailing whiteness, which would be brightened by intermittent skies of purplish slate or blue.

  “I can’t wait to see the winter here,” Harry told Ruth.

  “You’ll see it soon enough,” she replied. “The winter here feels like forever.”

  “I’ll never leave you,” he said.

  “Just don’t die on me, Harry,” Ruth told him.

  Because Hannah Grant hated to drive, she had been involved in more than one compromising relationship. She also loathed spending her weekends alone, which meant that she’d often left Manhattan on a weekend, to visit Ruth in Vermont, in the company of one bad but car-driving boyfriend or another.

  At the moment, Hannah was between boyfriends, a condition she rarely tolerated for long, and so she’d asked Eddie O’Hare to be her designated driver for the weekend, even though he would first have to come into Manhattan to pick her up. Hannah believed she was justified in asking Eddie to drive her to Vermont—Hannah always believed she was justified. But Ruth had invited her and Eddie for the weekend, and Hannah had long believed that there was no such thing as a detour too prolonged or inconvenient to suggest.

  She’d been surprised at how easily Eddie was persuaded, but Eddie had a reason of his own to think that a four-hour drive in the same car with Hannah might be beneficial—even providential. Naturally the two friends (if you could call Hannah and Eddie “friends”) were dying to talk to each other about what had befallen their mutual friend, for Ruth had sincerely shocked both Hannah and Eddie by her announcement that she was in love with a Dutchman, whom she intended to marry—not to mention that the Dutchman was an ex-cop, whom she’d known for less than a month!

  When she was between boyfriends, Hannah dressed what she called “down,” which is to say she dressed almost as plainly as Ruth, who would never have described Hannah as dressing down. But Eddie noted that Hannah’s lank hair had an atypically oily, unwashed look to it, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup, which was a sure sign that Hannah was between boyfriends. Eddie knew that Hannah would never have called him and asked him for a ride if she’d had a boyfriend— any boyfriend.

  At forty, Hannah had lost little of her sexual rawness, which her tired-looking eyes only enlarged. Her tawny, amber-blond hair had turned ash-blond (with Hannah’s help), and the pale hollows under her prominent cheekbones served to exaggerate her aura of a constant, predatory hunger. It was a decidedly sexual hunger, Eddie thought, glancing sideways at Hannah in the car. And that it had been a while since she’d waxed her upper lip was sexually enhancing. The blond down on her upper lip, which Hannah had the habit of exploring with the tip of her tongue, gave her an animalistic power that provoked in Eddie an unexpected and unwanted sense of arousal.

  Eddie O’Hare had never been sexually attracted to Hannah Grant, nor was he attracted to her now; but when Hannah paid less attention to her appearance, her sexual presence announced itself with more brutal force. She’d always been long-waisted and thin, with high, small, shapely breasts, and when she gave in to her slovenliness, it heightened that aspect of herself of which she was (finally) least proud: chiefly, Hannah looked born to be in bed with someone—and with someone else, and someone else—again and again. (All in all, she was sexually terrifying to Eddie—and never so much as she was when she was between boyfriends.)

  “A fucking Dutch cop! Can you imagine?” Hannah asked Eddie.

  All that Ruth had told the two of them was that she’d first seen Harry at one of her book-signings, and that he’d later introduced himself to her in the lobby of her hotel. It infuriated Hannah that Ruth had been nonchalant about Harry being a retired policeman. (Ruth had been more expressive on the subject of Harry being a reader .) He’d been a street cop in the red-light district for forty years, but all that Ruth had said was that Harry was her cop now.

  “Exactly what kind of relationship does a guy like that have with those hookers?” Hannah asked Eddie, who just kept driving, as best he could; he found it impossible not to look at Hannah from time to time. “I hate it when Ruth lies to me, or when she doesn’t tell the whole truth, because she’s such a good liar,” Hannah said. “It’s her fucking business to make up lies, isn’t it?”

  Eddie stole another look at her, but he would never interrupt her when she was angry—Hannah angry was a sight that Eddie loved to behold.

  Hannah slouched in her seat, the seat belt noticeably parting her breasts while at the same time flattening her right breast into virtual nonexistence. Glancing at her sideways again, Eddie saw that Hannah wasn’t wearing a bra. She had on a slinky, soft-looking silk pullover, which was frayed at both cuffs—the turtleneck had lost what elasticity it had ever had. Hannah’s thinness was exaggerated by how the turtleneck drooped around her throat. The outline of her left nipple was clearly visible where the seat belt stretched the pullover against her breast.

  “I’ve never heard Ruth sound so happy,” Eddie said unhappily; his memory of how positively ecstatic she’d been on t
he phone nearly caused him to shut his eyes in pain, but he remembered he was driving. To him, the burnt-ochre color of the dead and dying leaves was a morbid reminder that the foliage season was over. Was his love for Ruth dying, too?

  “So she’s gaga about the guy—that’s fucking obvious,” Hannah said. “But what do we know about him? What does Ruth really know about him?”

  “He could be one of those male gold diggers,” Eddie suggested.

  “No shit!” Hannah cried. “Of course he could be! Cops don’t make any money unless they’re corrupt.”

  “And he’s as old as Allan was,” Eddie said. Hearing Ruth sound that happy had half-convinced Eddie that he wasn’t in love with her, or that he’d fallen out of love with her. It was confusing. Eddie wouldn’t really know how he felt about Ruth until he saw her with the Dutchman.

  “I never went out with a Harry, ” Hannah said. “It’s not like I’m utterly without standards.”

  “Ruth said that Harry was truly excellent with Graham,” Eddie countered. “Whatever that means.” Eddie knew that he’d failed Ruth in his insufficient efforts with Graham. He was Graham’s godfather in name only. (Ever since he’d spent a whole day with Ruth when she was a child, and doubtless because it was also the day Ruth’s mother left, Eddie had felt completely devastated in the presence of children.)

  “Ruth could be seduced by anyone who was ‘truly excellent’ with Graham,” Hannah rejoined, but Eddie doubted that the tactic would ever have worked for him—even if he could have mastered the tactic.

  “I understand that Harry has taught Graham how to kick a soccer ball,” Eddie offered, in faint praise.

  “American kids should learn to throw balls,” Hannah replied. “It’s those fucking Europeans who like to kick them.”

  “Ruth said that Harry was very well read,” Eddie reminded her.

  “I know that,” Hannah said. “What is he—a writers’ groupie ? At her age, she shouldn’t be vulnerable to that!”

  At her age? thought Eddie O’Hare, who was fifty-three but looked older. The problem was partly his height—more accurately, his posture—which made him appear slightly stooped. And the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes extended across the pale indentations of his temples; while Eddie’s hairline had not receded, his hair was entirely silver-gray.

  In a few years, Eddie’s hair would turn white.

  Hannah looked sideways at him and his crow’s-feet; the latter gave Eddie the appearance of someone who was chronically squinting. He had kept himself thin, but Eddie’s thinness added to his age. He was nervously thin, unhealthily thin. He looked like someone who was too worried to eat. And that he didn’t drink caused Hannah to think of Eddie as the epitome of boredom.

  Still, she would have liked it if he occasionally made a pass at her; that he didn’t struck Hannah as indicative of his sexual apathy. I must have been nuts to ever imagine Eddie was in love with Ruth! Hannah now thought. Maybe the unfortunate man was in love with old age itself. For how long had he ridiculously carried a torch for Ruth’s mother?

  “How old would Marion be now?” Hannah asked Eddie, seemingly out of the blue.

  “Seventy-six,” Eddie answered, without needing to think about it.

  “She might be dead,” Hannah suggested cruelly.

  “Certainly not!” Eddie said, with more passion than he expressed on most subjects.

  “A fucking Dutch cop!” Hannah exclaimed again. “Why doesn’t Ruth just live with him for a while? Why does she have to marry the guy?”

  “Search me,” Eddie replied. “Maybe she wants to be married because of Graham.”

  Ruth had waited almost two weeks—that is, with Harry actually in the Vermont house—before she’d allowed Harry to fall asleep in her bed. She’d been nervous about Graham’s reaction to finding Harry there in the morning. She’d wanted the boy to get to know Harry first. But when Graham had finally found Harry in his mother’s bed, the boy had matter-of-factly climbed in between them.

  “Hi, Mommy and Harry!” Graham had said. (It broke Ruth’s heart, because of course she could remember when the boy had said, “Hi, Mommy and Daddy!”) Then Graham had touched Harry and reported to Ruth: “Harry’s not cold, Mommy.”

  Of course, Hannah was jealous in advance of Harry’s alleged success with Graham; in her own way, Hannah was good at playing with Graham, too. In addition to Hannah’s distrust of the Dutchman, Hannah’s innate competitiveness had been aroused by the very idea of a cop capturing her godson’s trust and affection—not to mention that the cop had captured Ruth’s trust and affection, too.

  “God, isn’t this drive fucking interminable ?” Hannah now asked.

  Because he’d started in the Hamptons, Eddie thought of saying that the drive was two and a half hours more fucking interminable for him, but all he said was: “I’ve been thinking about something.” Indeed he had!

  Eddie had been preoccupied with the thought of buying Ruth’s house in Sagaponack. For all the years Ted Cole had lived there, Eddie had studiously avoided Parsonage Lane; he’d not once driven past the house, which was a landmark of the most exciting summer of his life. But after Ted’s death, Eddie had gone out of his way to drive on Parsonage Lane. And since the Cole house had been for sale, and Ruth had enrolled Graham in preschool in Vermont, Eddie had taken every opportunity he had to turn onto the lane, where he slowed his car to a crawl. He was not above riding his bicycle past Ruth’s Sagaponack house, too.

  That the house hadn’t yet been sold gave him only the slimmest hope. It was a prohibitively expensive piece of property. Real estate on the ocean side of the Montauk Highway was too pricey for Eddie, who could afford the Hamptons only if he continued to live on the wrong side of the highway. To make matters worse, Eddie’s two-story, gray-shingled house on Maple Lane was not more than a couple of hundred yards from the remnant of the Bridgehampton railroad station. (While the trains were still in service, all that remained of the station house was the foundation.)

  Eddie’s view was of his neighbors’ porches and their browning lawns, their competing outdoor barbecues and their children’s bicycles; it was hardly an ocean view. Eddie couldn’t hear the thump of the surf as far inland as Maple Lane. What he heard were screen doors slamming and children fighting and parents shouting angrily at their children; what he heard were dogs, barking dogs. (In Eddie’s opinion, there were entirely too many dogs in Bridgehampton.) But what Eddie heard, most of all, were the trains.

  The trains passed so near to his house, on the north side of Maple Lane, that Eddie had given up using his small backyard; he kept his barbecue on the front porch, where a grease fire had scorched a section of shingles and blackened the porch light. The trains passed so near that Eddie’s bed shook when he was sound asleep, which he rarely was, and he’d installed a door on the cabinet where he kept his wineglasses, because the vibrations caused by the trains would shake the glasses off the shelves. (Although he drank nothing but Diet Coke, Eddie preferred his Diet Coke in a wineglass.) And the trains passed so near to Maple Lane that the neighborhood dogs were always being killed; yet these dogs were replaced with seemingly louder, more aggressive dogs, who barked at the trains with a keener level of complaint than the dead dogs had ever managed.

  Compared to Ruth’s house, Eddie owned a kennel by the railroad tracks. How it grieved him: not only that Ruth was moving away, but that the monument to the sexual zenith of his life was for sale and he couldn’t buy it. He would never have presumed on Ruth’s friendship or her sympathy; he hadn’t even dreamed of asking her, as a personal favor, to lower her price.

  What Eddie O’Hare had dreamed about—what had preoccupied his waking hours, too—was asking Hannah to buy the house with him. This dangerous combination of fantasy and desperation was sadly in keeping with Eddie’s character. He didn’t like Hannah, nor did she like him; yet Eddie wanted the house badly enough that he was about to propose sharing it with her!

  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!