“No stitch
es? No needle?” Ruth asked.
“No, Ruthie. Just a bandage.”
“He’s just a little broken, but he’s not going to die—right?” Ruth asked.
“Right,” Ted said.
“Not yet,” the four-year-old added.
“That’s right, Ruthie.”
“There’s just a little blood,” Ruth observed.
“Ruth cut herself today,” Ted explained to Eddie. He showed Eddie the Band-Aid on the child’s heel. “She stepped on a shell at the beach. And then she had a dream. . . .”
Ruth, satisfied with the skinned-knee story and with that photograph, was now looking over her father’s shoulder; something in the bathroom had caught her attention.
“Where are the feet?” the four-year-old asked.
“ What feet, Ruthie?”
Eddie was already moving to block their view of the bathroom.
“What did you did?” Ruth asked Eddie. “What happened to the feet?”
“Ruthie, what are you talking about?” Ted asked. He was drunk; but even drunk, Ted was reasonably steady on his feet.
Ruth pointed at Eddie. “Feet!” she said crossly.
“Ruthie—don’t be rude!” Ted told her.
“Is pointing rude?” the child asked.
“You know it is,” her father replied. “I’m sorry to bother you, Eddie. We have this habit of showing Ruth the photographs when she wants to see them. But, not wanting to intrude upon your privacy . . . she hasn’t seen much of them lately.”
“You can come see the pictures whenever you want,” Eddie said to the child, who kept scowling at him.
They were in the hall outside Eddie’s bedroom when Ted said, “Say ‘Good night, Eddie’—okay, Ruthie?”
“Where are the feet?” the four-year-old repeated to Eddie. She kept staring right through him. “What did you did?”
They went off down the hall with her father saying, “I’m surprised at you, Ruthie. It’s not like you to be rude.”
“I’m not rude,” Ruth said crossly.
“Well.” That was all Eddie heard Ted say. Naturally, after they left, Eddie went straight to the bathroom and removed the scraps of notepaper from the dead boys’ feet; with a wet washcloth he rubbed any trace of the Scotch tape off the glass.
For the first month of that summer, Eddie O’Hare would be a masturbating machine, but he would never again take Marion’s photograph off the bathroom wall—nor would he again consider concealing Thomas’s and Timothy’s feet. Instead, he masturbated almost every morning in the carriage house, where he thought he would not be interrupted—or caught in the act.
On the mornings after Marion had slept there, Eddie was pleased to discover that her scent was still on the pillows of the unmade bed. Other mornings, the feel and smell of some article of her clothing would sufficiently arouse him. In the closet, Marion kept a slip or some sort of nightie that she slept in; there was a drawer with her bras and panties. Eddie kept hoping that she would leave her pink cashmere cardigan in the closet, that one she’d been wearing when he first met her; he often dreamed of her in it. But the cheap apartment above the two-car garage had no fans, and the stifling heat of the place was unrelieved by any worthwhile cross ventilation. While the Coles’ house in Sagaponack was usually cool and breezy even in the warmest weather, the rental house in Bridgehampton was claustrophobic and hot. It was too much for Eddie to hope that Marion would ever have any need of that pink cashmere cardigan there.
Notwithstanding the drives to Montauk and back for the evil-smelling squid ink, Eddie’s job as a writer’s assistant amounted to an easy nine-to-five day, for which Ted Cole paid him fifty dollars a week. Eddie charged the gas for Ted’s car, which was not nearly as much fun to drive as Marion’s Mercedes. Ted’s ’57 Chevy was black and white, which perhaps reflected the graphic artist’s narrow range of interests.
In the evenings, around five or six, Eddie often went to the beach to swim—or else to run, which he did infrequently and halfheartedly. Sometimes the surf casters were fishing; they raced their trucks along the beach, chasing after the schools of fish. Driven ashore by the bigger fish, minnows were flopping on the wet, hard-packed sand—yet another reason why Eddie had little interest in running there.
Every evening, with Ted’s permission, Eddie would drive to East Hampton or Southampton to see a movie or just eat a hamburger. He paid for the movies (and for everything he ate) out of the salary that Ted gave him, and he still saved more than twenty dollars every week. One evening, at a movie in Southampton, he saw Marion.