“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 strained 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.