"Yes," Eddie replied.
"Besides," the clamtruck driver philosophized, "he's probably just worried about you. It don't sound easy to me, being no writer's assistant. I don't get what it is you're supposed to do ."
"I don't get it, either," Eddie confessed.
"You wanna beer?" the driver offered, but Eddie politely declined; now that he was feeling better, he didn't want to turn green again.
There were no women or girls worth looking at on the upper deck, Eddie thought; his observation was apparently not shared by the clamtruck driver, who proceeded to roam the ferry, looking intently at all the women and girls. There were two girls who had driven a car on board; they were full of themselves, and despite being not more than a year or two older than Eddie, or only Eddie's age, it was evident that they regarded Eddie as too young for them. Eddie looked at them only once.
A European couple approached him and asked in heavily accented English if he would take their picture as they stood at the bow--it was their honeymoon, they said. Eddie was happy to do it. Only afterward did it occur to him that the woman, being a European, might have had unshaven armpits. But she'd been wearing a long-sleeved jacket; Eddie also hadn't been able to tell if she was wearing a bra.
He returned to his heavy duffel bag and the smaller suitcase. Only his "all-purpose" sports jacket and his dress shirts and ties were in the suitcase; it weighed next to nothing, but his mother had told him that his "good" clothes, as she called them, would be sure to arrive unwrinkled that way. (His mom had packed the suitcase.) In the duffel was everything else--the clothes he wanted, his writing notebooks, and some books that Mr. Bennett (by far his favorite English teacher) had recommended to him.
Eddie had not packed Ted Cole's entire oeuvre . He'd read it. What was the point of carrying it with him? The only exceptions were the O'Hare family's copy of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls --Eddie's father had insisted that Eddie get Mr. Cole's autograph--and Eddie's personal favorite among Ted's books for children. Like Ruth, Eddie had a personal favorite that was not the famous mouse between the walls. Eddie's favorite was the one called The Door in the Floor; it frankly scared the shit out of him. He hadn't paid close enough attention to the copyright date to realize that The Door in the Floor was the first book Ted Cole had published following the death of his sons. As such, it must have been a difficult book for him to write at all; it certainly reflected a little of the horror that Ted was living in those days.
If Ted's publisher hadn't felt such sympathy for Ted because of what had happened to his children, the book might have been rejected. The reviewers were almost unanimously un sympathetic to the book, which sold about as well as Ted's other books, anyway; his popularity appeared to be of that unassailable kind. Dot O'Hare herself had said that it would be an act of indecency bordering on child abuse to read that book aloud to any child. But Eddie was thrilled by The Door in the Floor, which, in fact, enjoyed a kind of cult status on college campuses--it was that reprehensible.
On the ferry, Eddie thumbed through The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls . He'd read it so many times that he didn't read a word of it again; he looked only at the illustrations, which he liked more than most book reviewers had. At best reviewers would say the illustrations were " enhancing" or "not obtrusive." More often the commentary was negative, but not that negative. (Such as: "The illustrations, while not detracting from the story, add little. They leave one hoping for more next time.") Yet Eddie liked them.
The imaginary monster was crawling between the walls; there it was, with its no arms and no legs, pulling itself along with its teeth, sliding forward on its fur. Better still was the illustration of the scary dress in Mommy's closet, the dress that was coming alive and trying to climb down off the hanger. It was a dress with one foot, a naked foot, protruding below the hem; and a hand, just a hand with a wrist, wriggled out of one sleeve. Most disturbing of all, the contours of a single breast seemed to swell the dress, as if a woman (or only some of her parts) were forming inside the dress.
Nowhere in the book was there a comforting drawing of a real mouse between those walls. The last illustration showed the younger of the boys, awake in bed and frightened of the approaching sound. With his small hand, the boy is hitting the wall--to make the mouse scurry away. But not only is the mouse not scurrying away; the mouse is disproportionately huge . It is not only bigger than both boys together; it is bigger than the headboard of the bed--bigger than the entire bed and the headboard.
As for Eddie's favorite book by Ted Cole, he removed it from his duffel bag and read it once more before the ferry landed. The story of The Door in the Floor would never be a favorite of Ruth's; her father had not told it to her, and it would be a few years before Ruth was old enough to read it for herself. She would hate it.
There was a tasteful but stark illustration of an unborn child inside its mother's womb. "There was a little boy who didn't know if he wanted to be born," the book began. "His mommy didn't know if she wanted him to be born, either.
"This is because they lived in a cabin in the woods, on an island, in a lake--and there was no one else around. And, in the cabin, there was a door in the floor.
"The little boy was afraid of what was under the door in the floor, and the mommy was afraid, too. Once, long ago, other children had come to visit the cabin, for Christmas, but the children had opened the door in the floor and they had disappeared down the hole, under the cabin, and all their presents had disappeared, too.
"Once the mommy had tried to look for the children, but when she opened the door in the floor, she heard such an awful sound that her hair turned completely white, like the hair of a ghost. And she smelled such a terrible smell that her skin became as wrinkled as a raisin. It took a whole year for the mommy's skin to be smooth again, and for her hair not to be white. And, when she'd opened the door in the floor, the mommy had also seen some horrible things that she never wanted to see again, like a snake that could make itself so small that it could sneak through the crack between the door and the floor--even when the door was closed--and then it could make itself so big again that it could carry the cabin on its back, as if the snake were a giant snail and the cabin were its shell." ( That illustration had given Eddie O'Hare a nightmare-- not when Eddie was a child, but when he was a sixteen-year-old!)
"The other things under the door in the floor are so horrible that you can only imagine them." (There was an indescribable illustration of these horrible things as well.)
"And so the mommy wondered if she wanted to have a little boy in a cabin in the woods, on an island, in a lake--and with no one else around--but especially because of everything that might be under the door in the floor. Then she thought: Why not? I'll just tell him not to open the door in the floor!
"Well, that's easy for a mommy to say, but what about the little boy? He still didn't know if he wanted to be born into a world where there was a door in the floor, and no one else around. Yet there were also some beautiful things in the woods, and on the island, and in the lake." (Here there was an illustration of an owl, and of the ducks that swam ashore on the island, and of a pair of loons nuzzling on the still water of the lake.)
"Why not take a chance? the little boy thought. And so he was born, and he was very happy. His mommy was happy again, too, although she told the little boy at least once every day, 'Don't you ever, not ever -- never, never, never --open the door in the floor!' But of course he was only a little boy. If you were that boy, wouldn't you want to open that door in the floor?"
And that, thought Eddie O'Hare, is the end of the story--never realizing that, in the real story, the little boy was a little girl. Her name was Ruth, and her mommy wasn't happy. There was another kind of door in the floor that Eddie didn't know about--not yet.
The ferry had come through Plum Gut. Orient Point was now clearly in sight.
Eddie took a good look at the jacket photographs of Ted Cole. The author photo on The Door in the Floor was more recent than the one
on The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls . In both, Mr. Cole struck Eddie as a handsome man, suggesting to the sixteen-year-old that a man of the advanced age of forty-five could still move the hearts and minds of the ladies. A man like that would be sure to stand out in any crowd at Orient Point. Eddie didn't know that he should have been looking for Marion.
Once the ferry was secured in the slip, Eddie scanned the unimpressive gathering on shore from the vantage of the upper deck; there was no one who matched the elegant jacket photos. He's forgotten about me! Eddie thought. For some reason, this inspired Eddie to think spiteful thoughts about his father--so much for Exonians!
From the upper deck, however, Eddie did see a beautiful woman waving to someone on board; she was so striking that Eddie didn't want to see the man she might be waving to. (He assumed that she must have been waving to a man.) The woman was so distractingly gorgeous, she made it difficult for Eddie to keep looking for Ted. Eddie's eyes kept coming back to her --she was waving up a storm. (From the corner of his eye, Eddie saw someone drive off the ferry into the stony sand of the beach, where the car instantly stalled.)
Eddie was among the last of the stragglers to disembark, carrying his heavy duffel bag in one hand, and the lighter, smaller suitcase in the other. He was shocked to see that the woman of such breathtaking beauty was standing exactly where she'd been when he'd first spotted her, and she was still waving. She was dead-ahead of him--and she appeared to be waving at him . He was afraid he was going to bump into her. She was close enough for him to touch her--he could smell her, and she smelled wonderful--when, suddenly, she reached out and took the lighter, smaller suitcase from his hand.
"Hello, Eddie," she said.
If he died a little whenever his father spoke to strangers, Eddie now knew what it meant to really die: his breath was gone, he couldn't speak.
"I thought you'd never see me," the beautiful woman said.
From that moment on, he would never stop seeing her, not in his mind's eye--not whenever he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. She would always be there.
"Mrs. Cole?" he managed to whisper.
"Marion," she said.
He couldn't say her name. With his heavy bag, he struggled to follow her to the car. So what if she wore a bra? He had noticed her breasts nonetheless. And in her sleek, long-sleeved sweater, there was no knowing if she shaved her armpits. What did it matter? The coarse hair of Mrs. Havelock's armpits that had once so thoroughly engaged him, not to mention her floppy tits, had receded into the distant past; he felt only a mute embarrassment at the very idea that someone as ordinary as Mrs. Havelock had ever stirred an iota of desire in him.
When they arrived at the car--a Mercedes-Benz the dusty red of a tomato--Marion handed him the keys.
"You can drive, can't you?" she asked. Eddie still couldn't speak. "I know boys your age--you love to drive every chance you get, don't you?"
"Yes, ma'am," he replied.
"Marion," she repeated.
"I was expecting Mr. Cole," he explained.
"Ted," Marion said.
These weren't Exeter rules. At the academy--and, by extension, in his family, because the atmosphere of the academy was where he had truly grown up--it was "sir" and "ma'am" to everyone; it had been Mr. and Mrs. Everybody . Now it was Ted and Marion; here was another world.
When he sat in the driver's seat, the accelerator and brake and clutch pedals were the perfect distance away from him; he and Marion were the same height. The thrill of this discovery was immediately moderated, however, by his awareness of his immense erection; his hugely evident hard-on brushed the bottom of the steering wheel. And then the clam truck drove slowly past--the driver had noticed Marion, too, of course.
"Nice job if you can get it, kid!" the clamtruck driver called.
When Eddie turned the key in the ignition, the Mercedes gave a responsive purr. When Eddie stole a look at Marion, he saw that she was evaluating him in a way that was as foreign to him as her car was.
"I don't know where we're going," he confessed to her.
"Just drive," Marion told the boy. "I'll give you all the directions you need."
A Masturbating Machine
For the first month of that summer, Ruth and the writer's assistant rarely saw each other. They did not meet in the kitchen of the Coles' house, largely because Eddie ate none of his meals there. And although the four-year-old and the writer's assistant slept in the same house, their bedtimes were considerably different, their bedrooms far apart. In the morning, Ruth had already eaten her breakfast, with either her mother or her father, before Eddie got up. By the time Eddie was awake, the first of the child's three nannies had arrived, and Marion had already driven Ruth and the nanny to the beach. If the weather was unsuitable for the beach, Ruth and her nanny would play in the nursery, or in the virtually unused living room of the big house.
That the house was vast made it immediately exotic to Eddie O'Hare; he had first grown up in a small faculty apartment in an Exeter dormitory--later, in a not much larger faculty house. But that Ted and Marion had separated --that they never slept in the same house together--was an unfamiliarity of far greater magnitude (and cause for speculation) for Eddie than the size of Ted and Marion's house. That her parents had separated was a new and mysterious change in Ruth's life as well; the four-year-old had no less difficulty adjusting to the oddity of it than Eddie had.
Regardless of what the separation implied to Ruth and Eddie about the future, the first month of that summer was chiefly confusing. On the nights when Ted stayed in the rental house, Eddie had to go fetch him with the car in the morning; Ted liked to be in his workroom no later than ten A.M., which gave Eddie time to drive to the Sagaponack General Store and post office en route. Eddie picked up the mail, and coffee and muffins for them both. On the nights when Marion stayed in the rental house, Eddie still picked up the mail but he got breakfast only for himself--Ted had eaten earlier with Ruth. And Marion could drive her own car. When he wasn't running errands, which he did frequently, Eddie spent much of his day working in the empty rental house.
This work, which was undemanding, varied from answering some of Ted's fan mail to retyping Ted's handwritten revisions of the extremely short A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound . At least twice a week, Ted added a sentence or deleted one; he also added and deleted commas--he changed semicolons to dashes and then back to semicolons. (In Eddie's opinion, Ted was going through a punctuation crisis.) At best, a brand-new paragraph would be raggedly created-- Ted's typing was terrible--and then instantly and messily revised in pencil. At worst, the same paragraph would be cut entirely by the next evening.
Eddie did not open or read Ted's mail, and most of the letters that Eddie retyped for Ted were Ted's replies to children. Ted would write to the mothers himself. Eddie never saw what the mothers wrote to Ted, or Ted's responses to them. (When Ruth would hear her father's typewriter at night-- only at night--what she was hearing, more often than a children's-book-in-progress, was a letter to a young mother.)
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child. Notwithstanding that the four-year-old Ruth would witness her mother being mounted from behind by a sixteen-year-old boy, Ruth's parents would never raise their voices in anger toward, or in hatred of, each other--nor would her mother or her father ever speak truly ill of the other to Ruth. In this aspect of their destroyed marriage, Ted and Marion were models of decent behavior. Never mind that the arrangements concerning the rental house were as seedy as the unfortunate dwelling itself. Ruth never had to inhabit that house.
In the real estate parlance of the Hamptons in 1958, it was a socalled carriage house; in reality, it was an airless one-bedroom apartment that had been hastily assembled and cheaply furnished over a two-car garage. It was on Bridge Lane in Bridgehampton--not more than two miles from the Coles' house on Parsonage Lane in S
agaponack--and, by night, it sufficed as a place for Ted or Marion to sleep far enough away from the other. By day, it was where the writer's assistant worked.
The kitchen of the carriage house was never used for cooking; the kitchen table--there was no dining room--was stacked with unanswered mail or letters-in-progress. It was Eddie's desk by day, and Ted took his turn at that typewriter on the nights he stayed there. The kitchen was supplied with all sorts of booze, and with coffee and tea-- period. The living room, which was simply an extension of the kitchen, had a TV and a couch, where Ted would periodically pass out while watching a baseball game; he never turned on the television unless there was a ball game or a boxing match. Marion, if she couldn't sleep, would watch late-night movies.
The bedroom closet contained nothing but an emergency ration of Ted's and Marion's clothes. The bedroom was never dark enough; there was an uncurtained skylight, which often leaked. Marion--both to keep out the light and to restrain the leak--tacked a towel over the skylight, but when Ted stayed there, he took the towel down. Without the skylight, he might not have known when to get up; there was no clock, and Ted often went to bed without knowing when or where he'd taken off his watch.
The same maid who cleaned the Coles' house would stop at the carriage house, too, but only to vacuum it and change the linen. Maybe because the carriage house was within smelling distance of the bridge where the crabbers fished for crabs--usually with raw chicken parts for bait--the one-bedroom apartment had a permanent odor of poultry and brine. And because the landlord used the two-car garage for his cars, Ted and Marion and Eddie would all comment on the permanence with which the odor of motor oil and gasoline lingered in the air.
If anything improved the place, albeit slightly, it was the few photographs of Thomas and Timothy that Marion had brought along. She'd taken the photos from Eddie's guest bedroom in the Coles' house, and from the adjoining guest bathroom, which was also his. (Eddie couldn't have known that the small number of picture hooks left in the bare walls was a harbinger of the greater number of picture hooks that would soon be exposed. Nor could he have predicted the many, many years he would be haunted by the image of the noticeably darker wallpaper where the photographs of the dead boys had been hung and then removed.)