"And ketchup," Ruth said.
Marion tried to give Eddie a ten-dollar bill for lunch.
"I have money," Eddie told her, but when he turned his back on her to help Ruth into the Chevy, Marion stuck the ten-dollar bill into the right rear pocket of his jeans, and he remembered what it had felt like the first time she'd pulled him to her by tugging the waist of his jeans--her knuckles against his bare stomach. Then she'd unsnapped his jeans and unzipped his fly, which he would remember for about five or ten years--every time he undressed himself.
"Remember, honey," Marion said to Ruth. "Don't cry when the doctor takes out your stitches. I promise--it's not going to hurt."
"Can I keep the stitches?" the four-year-old asked.
"I suppose . . ." Marion replied.
"Sure you can keep them," Eddie told the child.
"So long, Eddie," Marion said.
She was wearing tennis shorts and tennis shoes, although she didn't play tennis, and a floppy flannel shirt that was too big for her--it was Ted's. She wasn't wearing a bra. Earlier that morning, when Eddie was leaving to pick up Ted at the carriage house, Marion had taken his hand and put it under her shirt and held it against her bare breast; but when he tried to kiss her, she drew away, leaving Eddie's right hand with the feel of her breast, which he would go on feeling for about ten or fifteen years.
"Tell me all about the stitches," Ruth said to Eddie, as he made a left turn.
"You won't really feel them very much when the doctor takes them out," Eddie said.
"Why not?" the child asked him.
Before he made the next turn, a right, he had his last sight of Marion and the Mercedes in the rearview mirror. She would not be turning right, Eddie knew--the movers were waiting straight ahead of her. The left side of Marion's face was illuminated by the morning sun, which shone brightly through the driver's-side window of the Mercedes; the window was open, and Eddie could see the wind blowing Marion's hair. Just before he turned, Marion waved to him (and to her daughter), as if she were still intending to be there when Eddie and Ruth returned.
"Why won't it hurt to take the stitches out?" Ruth asked Eddie again.
"Because the cut is healed--the skin has grown back together," Eddie told her.
Marion was now gone from view. Is that it ? he was wondering. "So long, Eddie." Were those her last words to him? "I suppose . . ." were Marion's last words to her daughter. Eddie couldn't believe the abruptness of it: the open window of the Mercedes, Marion's hair blowing in the wind, Marion's arm waving out the window. And only half of Marion's face was in the sunlight; the rest of her was invisible. Eddie O'Hare couldn't have known that neither he nor Ruth would see Marion again for thirty-seven years. But, for all those years, Eddie would wonder at the seeming nonchalance of her departure.
How could she? Eddie would think--as one day Ruth would also think about her mother.
The two stitches were removed so quickly that Ruth didn't have time to cry. The four-year-old was more interested in the stitches themselves than in her almost perfect scar. The thin white line was discolored only slightly by traces of iodine, or whatever the antiseptic was--it had left a yellow-brown stain. Now that she could get her finger wet again, the doctor told her, this stain would be removed by her first good bath. But it was of greater concern to Ruth that the two stitches, which had each been cut in half, were saved in an envelope-- and that the crusted scab, near the knotted end of one of the four pieces, not be damaged.
"I want to show my stitches to Mommy," Ruth said. "And my scab."
"First let's go to the beach," Eddie suggested.
"Let's show her the scab first, then the stitches," Ruth replied.
"We'll see . . ." Eddie began. He paused to consider that the doctor's office in Southampton was not more than a fifteen-minute walk from Mrs. Vaughn's mansion on Gin Lane. It was now a quarter to ten in the morning; if Ted was still there, he would already have been with Mrs. Vaughn for more than an hour. More likely, Ted was not with Mrs. Vaughn. But Ted might have remembered that Ruth was having her stitches removed this morning, and he might know where the doctor's office was.
"Let's go to the beach," Eddie said to Ruth. "Let's hurry."
"First the scab, then the stitches, then the beach," the child replied.
"Let's talk about it in the car," Eddie suggested. But there is no straightforward negotiation with a four-year-old; while not every negotiation needs to be difficult, there are few that don't require a considerable investment of time.
"Did we forgot the picture?" Ruth asked Eddie.
"The picture?" Eddie said. "What picture?"
"The feet!" Ruth cried.
"Oh, the photograph--it's not ready," Eddie told her. "
That's not very nice!" the child declared. "My stitches are ready. My cut is all fixed up."
"Yes," Eddie agreed. He thought he saw a way to distract the four-year-old from her desire to show her scab and stitches to her mother before going to the beach. "Let's go to the frame shop and tell them to give us the picture," Eddie suggested.
"All fixed up," Ruth added.
"Good idea!" Eddie proclaimed. Ted would never think of going to the frame shop, Eddie decided; the frame shop was almost as safe as the beach. First make a fuss about the photograph, he was thinking; then Ruth won't remember about showing her scab and stitches to Marion. (When the child was watching a dog scratching itself in the parking lot, Eddie put the envelope with the precious scab and stitches into the glove compartment.) But the frame shop was a little less safe than Eddie had supposed.
Ted had not remembered that Ruth was having her stitches removed this morning; Mrs. Vaughn hadn't given Ted the time to remember very much. Less than five minutes after his arrival at her door, Ted was chased into the courtyard and up Gin Lane by Mrs. Vaughn, who was brandishing a serrated bread knife while shrieking at him that he was "the epitome of diabolism." (He vaguely recalled that this was the title of a dreadful painting in the Vaughns' regrettable art collection.)
The gardener, who had watched "the artist" (as he witheringly thought of Ted) make his trepid approach to the Vaughn mansion, was also witness to Ted's intrepid retreat across the courtyard, where the artist was nearly driven into the murky fountain by the relentless slashes and stabs that Mrs. Vaughn made in the nearby air with her knife. Ted had bolted down the driveway and into the street with his former model in passionate pursuit.
The gardener, terrified that one or the other of them might run headlong into his ladder, which was a fifteen-footer, clung precariously to the top of the high privet hedge; from that height, the gardener was able to observe that Ted Cole could and did outrun Mrs. Vaughn, who gave up the chase a few driveways short of the intersection of Gin Lane and Wyandanch. There was another high barrier of privet near the intersection, and--from the gardener's elevated but distant perspective--Ted had either disappeared into the hedges or turned northward onto Wyandanch Lane without once looking back. Mrs. Vaughn, still in a fury and still decrying the artist as "the epitome of diabolism," returned to her own driveway. Spontaneously--to the gardener it seemed involuntarily --she still slashed and stabbed the air with the serrated knife.
A period of intense quiet fell over the Vaughn estate and descended on Gin Lane. Ted, tangled deep in a dense mass of privet, could hardly move enough to see his watch; the privet was a maze of such density, not even a Jack Russell terrier could have penetrated the hedge, which had scratched Ted's hands and face and left him bleeding. Yet he had escaped the bread knife and, for the moment, Mrs. Vaughn. But where was Eddie? Ted waited in the privet for his familiar '57 Chevy to appear.
The gardener, who had begun his chore of retrieving the shredded drawings of his employer and her son a full hour or more before Ted made his appearance, had long ago stopped looking at what he could see of the remains of the drawings. Even piecemeal, the content of the drawings was too disturbing. The gardener already knew his employer's eyes and her small mouth, and the rest of her strai
ned face; he already knew her hands, and the unnatural tension in her shoulders. Worse, the gardener had vastly preferred to imagine Mrs. Vaughn's breasts and her vagina; the reality of what he had seen of her nakedness in the ruined drawings was uninviting. Moreover, he had been working at a great pace--for although he well understood why Mrs. Vaughn would have wanted to dispose of the drawings, he could not conceive of what insanity had possessed her to rip up the pornographic exposure of herself in a windstorm with all the doors open. On the ocean side of the house, the scraps and shreds had stuck in the barrier of beach roses, but some partial views of Mrs. Vaughn and her son had found their way along the footpath and were now blowing up and down the beach.
The gardener did not especially like Mrs. Vaughn's son; he was a haughty boy who'd once peed in the birdbath and then denied it. But the gardener had been a faithful employee of the Vaughn family since before the brat's birth, and he felt some additional responsibility to the neighborhood. The gardener could think of no one who would enjoy even these partial views of Mrs. Vaughn's private parts; yet the pace at which he worked to clean up the mess was arrested by his fascination with what had become of the artist--namely, was the artist hiding in a neighbor's hedge or had he escaped toward town?
At half past nine in the morning, when Eddie O'Hare was already an hour late, Ted Cole crawled out of the privet on Gin Lane and cautiously walked past the driveway of the Vaughn estate--to give Eddie every opportunity to see him, should Eddie (for some reason) have been waiting for Ted at the west end of Gin Lane, which intersected South Main Street.
In the gardener's opinion, this was an unwise, even a reckless move. From the third-floor turret of the Vaughn mansion, Mrs. Vaughn could see over the privet. If the wronged woman was in the turret, she would have a commanding view of all of Gin Lane.
Indeed, Mrs. Vaughn must have had such a view, for not seconds after Ted had passed her driveway--and begun quickening his pace along Gin Lane--the gardener was alarmed to hear the roar of Mrs. Vaughn's car. It was a glistening black Lincoln and it shot out of the garage at such speed that it slid on the stones in the courtyard and nearly crashed into the darkened fountain. In a last-second effort to miss the fountain, Mrs. Vaughn veered too near the privet; the Lincoln clipped the bottom of the gardener's ladder, leaving the distraught man clinging to the top of the high hedge. "Run!" the gardener called to Ted.
That Ted would live to see another day must be credited to the regular and rigorous exercise he gained on the squash court that was designed to give him an unfair advantage. Even at forty-five, Ted Cole could run. He cleared some rosebushes without breaking stride and raced across a lawn, in full view of a gawking but silent man who was vacuuming a swimming pool. Ted was then chased by a dog, fortunately a small and cowardly dog; by grabbing a woman's bathing suit off a clothesline and lashing the dog in the face with it, Ted drove the craven animal away. Naturally Ted was hollered at by several gardeners and maids and housewives; undeterred, he climbed three fences and scaled one fairly high stone wall. (He trampled only two flower beds.) And he never saw Mrs. Vaughn's Lincoln cut the corner of Gin Lane onto South Main Street, where she flattened a road sign in the eagerness of her pursuit; however, through the slats of a wooden fence on Toylsome Lane, Ted saw the black-as-a-hearse Lincoln rush parallel to him as he traversed two lawns, a yard full of fruit trees, and something resembling a Japanese garden--where he stepped into a shallow pool of goldfish, soaking his shoes and his jeans (to his knees).
Ted doubled back on Toylsome. Daring to cross that street, he saw the flicker of the black Lincoln's brake lights and feared that Mrs. Vaughn had spotted him in her rearview mirror and was stopping to double back on Toylsome herself. But she hadn't spotted him--he'd lost her. Ted entered the town of Southampton, looking much the worse for wear but walking boldly into the heart of the shops and the stores on South Main Street. If he hadn't been so energetically on the lookout for the black Lincoln, he might have seen his own '57 Chevy, which was parked by the frame shop on South Main; but Ted walked right past his car without recognizing it, and entered a bookstore diagonally across the street.
They knew him in the bookstore; they knew Ted Cole in every bookstore, of course, but Ted made periodic visits to this particular bookstore, where he routinely autographed however many copies of his backlist titles were in stock. The bookseller and his attendant staff were not used to seeing Mr. Cole look quite as bedraggled as he appeared before them on this Friday morning, but they had known him to be unshaven--and he was often dressed more in the manner of a college student, or a workingman, than in whatever fashion was customary among best-selling authors and illustrators of children's books.
It was chiefly the blood that lent a novelty to Ted's appearance. His scratched and bleeding face, and the dirtier blood on the backs of his hands, where he had clawed his way into and out of a hundred-year-old hedge, indicated mishap or mayhem to the surprised bookseller, whose name (inexplicably) was Mendelssohn. He was no relation to the German composer, and this Mendelssohn either overliked his last name or disliked his first so much that he never revealed it. (When Ted had once asked him his first name, Mendelssohn had said only: "Not Felix.")
On this Friday, whether it was the sight of Ted's blood that excited him, or the fact that Ted's jeans were dripping on the floor of the bookstore--Ted's shoes actually squirted water in several directions whenever Ted took a step--Mendelssohn grabbed Ted by the dirty tails of his untucked and unbuttoned flannel shirt and exclaimed in a too-loud voice: "Ted Cole!"
"Yes, it is Ted Cole," Ted admitted. "Good morning, Mendelssohn."
"It's Ted Cole--it is, it is !" Mendelssohn repeated.
"I'm sorry I'm bleeding," Ted told him calmly.
"Oh, don't be silly--it's nothing to be sorry about!" Mendelssohn shouted. Then he turned to a dumbstruck young woman on his staff; she was standing nearby, with a look of both awe and horror. Mendelssohn commanded her to bring Mr. Cole a chair. "Can't you see he's bleeding ?" Mendelssohn said to her.
But Ted asked if he could use the washroom first--he'd just been in an accident, he solemnly said. Then he shut himself in a small bathroom with a sink and toilet. He assessed the damage in the mirror, while composing--as only a writer can--a story of surpassing simplicity regarding what sort of "accident" he'd just had. He saw that a branch of the evil hedge had lashed one eye and left it weepy. A deeper scratch was the source of the bleeding from his forehead; a scrape that bled less but looked harder to heal stood out on one cheek. He washed his hands; the cuts stung, but the bleeding from the backs of his hands had largely stopped. He removed his flannel shirt and tied the muddy sleeves--one had also been dipped in the goldfish pool--around his waist.
Ted took this moment to admire his waist; at forty-five, he was still a man who could wear a pair of jeans and tuck in his T-shirt and be proud of the overall effect. However, the T-shirt was white and its appearance was not improved by the pronounced grass stains on the left shoulder and the right breast--Ted had fallen on at least two lawns-- and his jeans, which were soaked below the knees, continued to drip into his water-filled shoes.
As composed as he could be under the circumstances, Ted emerged from the bathroom and was once more effusively greeted by last-name-only Mendelssohn, who'd already prepared a chair for the visiting author. The chair was drawn up to a table, where a few dozen copies of Ted Cole's books were waiting to be signed.
But first Ted wanted to make a phone call, actually two. He tried the carriage house to find out if Eddie was there; there was no answer. And of course there was no answer at Ted's own house--Marion knew better than to answer the phone on this well-rehearsed Friday. Had Eddie crashed the car? The sixteen-year-old had been driving erratically earlier that morning. Doubtless Marion had fucked the boy's brains out! Ted concluded.
Regardless of how well Marion had rehearsed this Friday, she had been mistaken to think that Ted's only recourse for a ride home would be to walk all the way to his squash opponen
t's office and wait for Dr. Leonardis, or for one of the doctor's patients, to drive him to Sagaponack. Dave Leonardis's office was on the far side of Southampton, on the Montauk Highway; the bookstore was not only closer to Mrs. Vaughn's mansion--it was a much more obvious place for Ted to expect to be rescued. Ted Cole could have walked into almost any bookstore in the world and asked for a ride home.
He promptly did so, no sooner than he'd sat down at the autographing table to sign his books.
"To put it simply, I need a ride home," the famous author said.
"A ride!" cried Mendelssohn. "Yes, of course! No problem! You live in Sagaponack, don't you? I'll take you myself ! Well . . . I'll have to call my wife. She may be shopping, but not for long. You see, my car is in the shop."
"I hope it's not in the same shop my car was in," Ted told the enthusiast. "I just got mine back from the shop. They forgot to reattach the steering column. It was like that cartoon we've all seen--the steering wheel was in my hands but it was not attached to the wheels. I steered one way and the car went off the road in another. Fortunately, all I hit was privet--a vast hedge. Climbing out the driver's-side window of the car, I was scratched by the bushes. And then I stepped in a goldfish pool," Ted explained.
He had their attention now; Mendelssohn, poised by the phone, delayed the call to his wife. And the formerly dumbstruck young woman who worked there was smiling. Ted was not generally attracted to what he thought of as her type, but if she offered him a ride home, maybe something would come of it.
She was probably not long out of college; in her no-makeup, straight-hair, no-tan way, she was a precursor of the decade ahead. She was not pretty--truly, she was just plain dull--but her paleness represented a kind of sexual frankness to Ted, who recognized that a part of the young woman's no-frills appearance reflected an openness to experiences she might call "creative." She was the kind of young woman who was seduced intellectually. (Ted's particularly scruffy appearance at the moment might actually have elevated him in her eyes.) And sexual encounters, because the woman was still young enough to find them novel, were doubtless an area of experience she might call " authentic"--especially with a famous writer.