Eddie took a deep breath before he rushed into what he had to say. “How about we split Ruth’s house, fifty-fifty? Actually,” he added quickly, “if you can afford to pay two thirds, I think one third might be more realistic for me than half.”
“I can afford two thirds,” Marion told him. “Also, I’m going to die and leave you, Eddie. Eventually I’ll leave my two thirds to you !”
“You’re not dying now, are you?” Eddie asked her—for it panicked him to think it might have been Marion’s impending death that had brought her back to him, just to say good-bye.
“Goodness, no! I’m fine. At least I’m not dying of anything I know about, except old age. . . .”
This was their inevitable conversation; Eddie had anticipated it. After all, he’d written this conversation so many times that he knew the dialogue by heart. And Marion had read all his books; she knew what the character of the devoted younger man said to the older-woman character in all of Eddie O’Hare’s novels. The younger man was eternally reassuring.
“You’re not old, not to me, ” Eddie began. For so many years—and five books!—he had rehearsed this moment. Yet he was still anxious.
“You’re going to have to take care of me, maybe sooner than you think,” Marion warned him.
But for thirty-seven years Eddie had hoped that Marion would let him take care of her. If Eddie felt astonished, it was only because he’d been right the very first time—he’d been right to love Marion. Now he had to trust that she’d come back to him as soon as she could. Never mind that it had taken her thirty-seven years. Maybe she’d needed that long to make peace with her grief for Thomas and Timothy—not to mention making peace with whatever degree of ghost Ted had doubtless conjured up, just to haunt her.
Here was a whole woman—for, true to her character, Marion had brought Eddie her entire life to contend with and to love. Was there anyone as capable of the task? The fifty-three-year-old author had loved her both in the literal and in the literary sense for all these years!
One can’t blame Marion for telling Eddie all the times of the day and the week she avoided. For instance, when children got out of school—not to mention all museums, all zoos. And parks in any decent weather, when the children would be sure to be there with their nannies or their parents; and every daytime baseball game—all Christmas shopping, too.
What had she left out? All summer and winter resorts, the first warm days of the spring, the last warm days of the fall—and every Halloween, of course. And on her list of things never to do: she never went out for breakfast, she gave up ice cream . . . Marion was always the well-dressed woman alone in a restaurant—she would ask for a table at the latest time they served. She ordered her wine by the glass and ate her meals with a novel.
“I hate eating alone,” Eddie commiserated with her.
“Eating with a novel is not eating alone, Eddie—I’m mildly ashamed of you,” she told him.
He couldn’t help but ask her if she’d ever thought of picking up the phone.
“Too many times to count,” Marion replied.
And she’d never expected to make even a modest living from her books. “They were only therapy,” she said. Before the books, she had got from Ted what her lawyer had demanded: enough to live on. All Ted had wanted in return was that she let him have Ruth to himself.
When Ted died, it had been too tempting to call. Marion had had her telephone disconnected. “And so I gave up the phone,” she told Eddie. “It was no harder to give up than weekends.” She’d stopped going out on weekends long before she gave up the phone. (Too many children.) And whenever she traveled, she tried to arrive after dark—even on Maple Lane.
Marion wanted a drink before she went to bed. And she didn’t mean a Diet Coke—a can of which Eddie had been clutching in one hand, although it was empty. There was an open bottle of white wine in Eddie’s refrigerator, and three bottles of beer (in case someone stopped by). There was also a bottle of better stuff, a single-malt Scotch whiskey, which Eddie kept under the kitchen sink—for those more favored guests and his only occasional female company. He’d first and last had a drink of the good stuff in Ruth’s Sagaponack house, following Ted’s memorial service; on that occasion, he’d been surprised by how much he’d enjoyed the taste. (He kept a little gin on hand, too, although even the smell of gin made him gag.)
In any case—in a wineglass, which was Eddie’s only glassware— Eddie offered Marion a drink of the single-malt whiskey. He even had a drink himself. Then, as Marion used the bathroom first and readied herself for bed, Eddie scrupulously washed the wineglasses in warm water and dish detergent (before redundantly putting the glasses in the dishwasher).
Marion, in an ivory-white slip, and with her hair unpinned—it was shoulder-length, and of a whiter shade of gray than Eddie’s—surprised him in the kitchen by putting her arms around his waist and hugging him while his back was turned to her.
For a while, this was the chaste position they maintained in Eddie’s bed, before Marion allowed her hand to stray to Eddie’s erection. “Still a boy!” she whispered, while she held him by what Penny Pierce had once called his “intrepid penis”—long ago, Penny had also made reference to his “heroic cock.” Marion would never have been so silly or so crass.
Then they faced each other in the dark, and Eddie lay, as he’d once lain with her, with his head against Marion’s breasts; her hands ran through his hair as she clasped him to her. Thus they fell asleep, until the westbound 1:26 woke them.
“Merciful heavens!” Marion cried, because the westbound early-morning train was probably the loudest of all the trains. Not only is one often dead asleep at twenty-six minutes past one in the morning, but the westbound train passed Eddie’s house before it reached the station. One not only felt the bed shake, and heard the rumbling of the train—one also heard the brakes.
“It’s just a train,” Eddie reassured her, holding her in his arms. So what if her breasts had shriveled and sagged? Only a little! And at least she still had breasts, and they were soft and warm.
“How can you get a penny for this house, Eddie? Are you sure you can sell it?” Marion asked.
“It’s still the Hamptons,” Eddie reminded her. “You can sell anything out here.”
In the pitch-dark night, and now that they were wide-awake again, Marion’s fears about seeing Ruth surfaced. “Does Ruth hate me?” Marion asked him. “I certainly have given her every reason to. . . .”
“I don’t think Ruth hates you,” Eddie told her. “I think she’s just angry.”
“Anger is all right,” Marion said. “You can get over anger more easily than you can get over some other things. But what if Ruth doesn’t want us to have the house?”
“It’s still the Hamptons,” Eddie said again. “Regardless of who she is, and who you are, Ruth is still looking for a buyer.”