by John Irving
“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.
“Fucking Vermont!” Hannah said again, her teeth chattering.
The sound of someone splitting wood drew their attention. Two or three cords of unsplit hardwood were dumped in the yard by the kitchen entrance; beside them was a smaller, neater woodpile-in-progress. At first Eddie thought that the man splitting wood and stacking the split logs was Ruth’s caretaker, Kevin Merton—that’s who Hannah thought he was, too, until something about the wood-splitter invited her to give him a closer look.
He was so intent on his task that he’d not noticed the arrival of Eddie’s car. The man, in just a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, was working hard enough so that he didn’t feel the cold; in fact, he was sweating. And he had a system for splitting and stacking the wood. If a log wasn’t too big around, he would set it vertically on the chopping block and split it lengthwise with an ax. If it was too big—and he knew this at a glance—he would set the log on the block and then split it with a wedge and a maul. Although handling the tools seemed to be second nature to him, Harry Hoekstra had been splitting wood for only a week or two; he’d never done it before.
Harry loved doing it. With each powerful stroke of his ax or his maul, he envisioned the fires he would build. And he appeared to Hannah and Eddie to be both strong enough and sufficiently engaged by his task to have gone on splitting wood all day. He looked as if he could go on doing anything all day—or all night, Hannah thought. She suddenly wished she’d waxed her lip, or at least washed her hair and put on a little makeup; she wished she’d worn a bra, and some better clothes.
“It must be the Dutchman, Ruth’s cop!” Eddie whispered to Hannah.
“No shit,” Hannah whispered back. She momentarily forgot that Eddie didn’t know her private game with Ruth. “Didn’t you hear that sound?” Hannah asked Eddie, who looked bewildered—as usual. “My panties, sliding to the ground,” Hannah told him. “ That sound.”
“Oh,” Eddie said. What a vulgar woman Hannah was! Thank God he wouldn’t be sharing a house with her!
Harry Hoekstra had heard their voices. He dropped his ax and approached them; they stood like children, afraid to stray from the car, as the ex-cop walked up and took Hannah’s suitcase from her shivering hand.
“Hello, Harry,” Eddie managed to say.
“You must be Eddie and Hannah,” Harry said to them.
“No shit,” Hannah said, but her voice was uncharacteristically little-girlish.
“Ruth said you’d say that!” Harry told her.
Okay, now I get it—who wouldn’t get it? Hannah was thinking. I wish I’d met him first! Hannah was really thinking. But a part of her, which always undermined her outward and only seeming self-confidence, told Hannah that even if she had met Harry first, he wouldn’t have been interested in her—at least not for more than one night.
“It’s nice to meet you, Harry,” was all that Hannah was able to say.
Eddie saw Ruth coming outside to greet them, her arms wrapped around herself in the cold. She’d spilled some flour on her jeans, and there was a touch of flour on her forehead, where she’d pushed aside her hair with the back of her hand.
“Hi!” Ruth called to them.
Hannah had never seen Ruth look like this; it was something beyond being happy.
It’s what love is, Eddie realized; he’d never felt so depressed. Looking at Ruth, Eddie wondered what had ever made him think she resembled Marion—how had he even imagined he could be in love with her?
Hannah glanced back and forth; at first covetously, at Harry—then enviously, at Ruth. They’re in fucking love! she realized, hating herself.
“You’ve got flour on your forehead, baby,” Hannah told Ruth, kissing her. “Did you hear that sound?” Hannah whispered to her old friend. “My panties, sliding to the ground—no, actually hitting the ground!”
“Mine, too,” Ruth told her, blushing.
Ruth’s got it, Hannah thought—the life she’s always wanted. She’s got it. But all Hannah said to Ruth was: “I gotta wash my hair, baby. And maybe put on a little makeup.” (Hannah had stopped looking at Harry—she simply couldn’t look at him.)
Then Graham burst out the kitchen door and ran to them. He grabbed Hannah around her hips, almost knocking her down; it was a welcome distraction. “Who’s this brat?” Hannah cried. “This can’t be my very own godkid —he’s too big! Who is this brat!”
“It’s me! It’s Graham !” Graham yelled.
“ You can’t be Graham—you’re too big !” Hannah told him, picking hi
m up and kissing him.
“Yeah, it’s me—it’s Graham!” Graham shouted.
“Say ‘yes’ not ‘yeah,’ baby,” Hannah whispered to the boy.
“Yes, it’s me—it’s Graham!” the boy repeated.
“Come show me to my room, Graham,” Hannah said to him. “And help me turn on the shower, or the bathtub—I gotta wash my hair.”
“Have you been crying, Hannah?” the boy asked. Ruth looked at Hannah, who looked away. Harry and Eddie were standing by the kitchen door, admiring Harry’s woodpile-in-progress.
“Are you okay?” Ruth asked her friend.
“Yeah. Eddie just asked me to live with him, only he didn’t mean it that way,” Hannah added. “He just wanted me to be his roommate.”
“That’s odd,” Ruth remarked.
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it!” Hannah told her, kissing Graham again.
Graham felt heavy in Hannah’s arms—she wasn’t used to carrying a four-year-old. Hannah turned toward the house to find her room, to take a shower or a bath, to soak herself in her freshest memory of what love looked like—just in case it might one day happen to her.
It wouldn’t happen, Hannah knew.
A Happy Couple, Their Two Unhappy Friends
Ruth Cole and Harry Hoekstra were married on Thanksgiving morning in the hardly used living room of Ruth’s Long Island house. Ruth could think of no better way to say good-bye to the house than to get married in it. The front and upstairs halls were lined with stacks of cardboard boxes, which were labeled for the movers. Every piece of furniture was tagged with either a red or a green tag; red meant that the movers should leave it, green meant they should take it to Vermont.
In the event that the Sagaponack house was still not sold by the summer, Ruth would rent it. She’d tagged most of the furniture to stay; she didn’t even like most of it. The house in the Hamptons had never been a happy one for Ruth, except when she’d lived there with Allan. (She rarely associated Allan with the Vermont house, which was just as well.)