“I don’t know,” Eddie said miserably. Mrs. Vaughn rapidly leafed through the drawings until she got to the first nude; then she overturned the stack, taking the last drawing off the bottom, which was now the top. Eddie began to edge away; he knew what the last drawing was.
“Oh . . .” Mrs. Vaughn said, as if she’d been punched again. “But when is he coming?” she called after Eddie. “He’s coming Friday, isn’t he? I have the whole day to see him Friday—he knows I have the whole day. He knows !” Eddie tried to keep walking. He heard her bare feet on the marble floor—she was scampering after him. She caught up to him under the big chandelier. “Stop!” she shouted. “Is he coming Friday?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie repeated, backing out the door. The wind tried to keep him inside.
“Yes, you do know!” Mrs. Vaughn screamed. “Tell me!”
She followed him outside, but the wind almost knocked her down. Her robe blew open; she struggled to close it. Eddie would always retain this vision of her, as if to remind himself of what the worst kind of nakedness was—the utterly unwanted glimpse of Mrs. Vaughn’s slack breasts and her dark triangle of matted pubic hair.
“Stop!” she cried again, but the sharp stones in the driveway prevented her from following him to the car. She bent down and picked up a handful of the pebbles, which she threw at Eddie. Most of them struck the Chevy.
“Did he show you those drawings? Did you look at them? Goddamn you—you looked at them, didn’t you?” she cried.
“No,” Eddie lied.
As Mrs. Vaughn bent down to pick up another handful of stones, a gust of wind blew her off balance. Like a gunshot, the front door behind her slammed shut.
“My God. I’m locked out!” she said to Eddie.
“Isn’t there another door that’s un locked?” he asked. (The mansion must have had a dozen doors!)
“I thought Ted was coming. He likes all the doors to be locked,” said Mrs. Vaughn.
“You don’t hide a key somewhere for emergencies?” Eddie asked.
“I sent the gardener home. Ted doesn’t like the gardener to be around,” said Mrs. Vaughn. “The gardener has an emergency key.”
“Can’t you call the gardener?”
“On what phone ?” shouted Mrs. Vaughn. “You’ll have to break in.”
“Me?” the sixteen-year-old said.
“Well, you know how to do it, don’t you?” the small, dark woman asked. “ I don’t know how to do it!” she wailed.
There were no open windows because of the air-conditioning; the Vaughns had air-conditioning because of their art collection, which was also why there were no open windows. By a garden in the back, there were French doors, but Mrs. Vaughn warned Eddie that the glass was of a special thickness and laced with chicken wire, which made it nearly impenetrable. By swinging a rock, which he tied up in his T-shirt, Eddie was finally able to smash the glass, but he still needed to find one of the gardener’s tools in order to rip the chicken wire sufficiently for his hand to fit through the hole and unlock the door from the inside. The rock, which was a centerpiece to the birdbath in the garden, had dirtied Eddie’s T-shirt, which had also been cut by the breaking glass. He decided to leave his shirt, and the rock, in the smashed glass by the now-open door.
But Mrs. Vaughn, who was barefoot, insisted that he carry her into the house through the French doors; she didn’t want to risk cutting her feet on the broken glass. Bare-chested, Eddie carried her into her house—being careful, as he reached around her, not to get his hands on the wrong side of her robe. She seemed to weigh next to nothing, barely more than Ruth. But when he held her in his arms, even so briefly, her strong smell came close to overpowering him. Her scent was indescribable; Eddie couldn’t say what she smelled like, only that the scent made him gag. When he put her down, she sensed his unconcealed revulsion.
“You look as if you’re disgusted,” she told him. “How dare you—how dare you detest me ?” Eddie was standing in a room he’d never been in before. He didn’t know his way to the big chandelier at the main entrance, and when he turned to look for the French doors to the garden, a maze of open doorways confronted him; he also didn’t know how to find the door he’d just come in.
“How do I get out?” he asked Mrs. Vaughn.
“How dare you detest me?” she repeated. “You’re not exactly living an unsordid life yourself—are you?” Mrs. Vaughn asked the boy.
“Please . . . I want to go home,” Eddie told her. It wasn’t until he spoke that he realized he really meant it, and that he meant Exeter, New Hampshire—not Sagaponack. Eddie meant that he really wanted to go home. It was a weakness he would carry with him for the rest of his life: he would always be inclined to cry in front of older women, as he’d once cried in front of Marion—as he now commenced to cry in front of Mrs. Vaughn.
Without another word she took him by his wrist and led him through the museum of her house to the chandelier at the front door. The touch of her small, cold hand was like a bird’s foot, as if a diminutive parrot or a parakeet had grabbed hold of him. When she opened the door and pushed him into the wind, a number of doors slammed in the interior of her house, and as he turned to say good-bye, he saw the sudden whirlwind of Ted’s terrible drawings—the wind had blown them off the dining-room table.
Eddie couldn’t speak, nor could Mrs. Vaughn. When she heard the drawings fluttering behind her, she wheeled around in her big white robe, as if preparing herself for an attack. Indeed, before the front door again slammed shut in the wind, like a second gunshot, Mrs. Vaughn was about to be attacked. Surely she would recognize in those drawings at least a measure of the degree to which she’d allowed herself to be assaulted.
“She threw rocks at you?” Marion asked Eddie.
“They were little stones—most of them hit the car,” Eddie admitted.
“She made you carry her?” Marion asked.
“She was barefoot,” Eddie explained again. “There was all this broken glass!”