A Widow for One Year

“I know that,” Hannah said. “What is he—a writers’ groupie ? At her age, she shouldn’t be vulnerable to that!”

At her age? thought Eddie O’Hare, who was fifty-three but looked older. The problem was partly his height—more accurately, his posture—which made him appear slightly stooped. And the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes extended across the pale indentations of his temples; while Eddie’s hairline had not receded, his hair was entirely silver-gray.

In a few years, Eddie’s hair would turn white.

Hannah looked sideways at him and his crow’s-feet; the latter gave Eddie the appearance of someone who was chronically squinting. He had kept himself thin, but Eddie’s thinness added to his age. He was nervously thin, unhealthily thin. He looked like someone who was too worried to eat. And that he didn’t drink caused Hannah to think of Eddie as the epitome of boredom.

Still, she would have liked it if he occasionally made a pass at her; that he didn’t struck Hannah as indicative of his sexual apathy. I must have been nuts to ever imagine Eddie was in love with Ruth! Hannah now thought. Maybe the unfortunate man was in love with old age itself. For how long had he ridiculously carried a torch for Ruth’s mother?

“How old would Marion be now?” Hannah asked Eddie, seemingly out of the blue.

“Seventy-six,” Eddie answered, without needing to think about it.

“She might be dead,” Hannah suggested cruelly.

“Certainly not!” Eddie said, with more passion than he expressed on most subjects.

“A fucking Dutch cop!” Hannah exclaimed again. “Why doesn’t Ruth just live with him for a while? Why does she have to marry the guy?”

“Search me,” Eddie replied. “Maybe she wants to be married because of Graham.”

Ruth had waited almost two weeks—that is, with Harry actually in the Vermont house—before she’d allowed Harry to fall asleep in her bed. She’d been nervous about Graham’s reaction to finding Harry there in the morning. She’d wanted the boy to get to know Harry first. But when Graham had finally found Harry in his mother’s bed, the boy had matter-of-factly climbed in between them.

“Hi, Mommy and Harry!” Graham had said. (It broke Ruth’s heart, because of course she could remember when the boy had said, “Hi, Mommy and Daddy!”) Then Graham had touched Harry and reported to Ruth: “Harry’s not cold, Mommy.”

Of course, Hannah was jealous in advance of Harry’s alleged success with Graham; in her own way, Hannah was good at playing with Graham, too. In addition to Hannah’s distrust of the Dutchman, Hannah’s innate competitiveness had been aroused by the very idea of a cop capturing her godson’s trust and affection—not to mention that the cop had captured Ruth’s trust and affection, too.

“God, isn’t this drive fucking interminable ?” Hannah now asked.

Because he’d started in the Hamptons, Eddie thought of saying that the drive was two and a half hours more fucking interminable for him, but all he said was: “I’ve been thinking about something.” Indeed he had!

Eddie had been preoccupied with the thought of buying Ruth’s house in Sagaponack. For all the years Ted Cole had lived there, Eddie had studiously avoided Parsonage Lane; he’d not once driven past the house, which was a landmark of the most exciting summer of his life. But after Ted’s death, Eddie had gone out of his way to drive on Parsonage Lane. And since the Cole house had been for sale, and Ruth had enrolled Graham in preschool in Vermont, Eddie had taken every opportunity he had to turn onto the lane, where he slowed his car to a crawl. He was not above riding his bicycle past Ruth’s Sagaponack house, too.

That the house hadn’t yet been sold gave him only the slimmest hope. It was a prohibitively expensive piece of property. Real estate on the ocean side of the Montauk Highway was too pricey for Eddie, who could afford the Hamptons only if he continued to live on the wrong side of the highway. To make matters worse, Eddie’s two-story, gray-shingled house on Maple Lane was not more than a couple of hundred yards from the remnant of the Bridgehampton railroad station. (While the trains were still in service, all that remained of the station house was the foundation.)

Eddie’s view was of his neighbors’ porches and their browning lawns, their competing outdoor barbecues and their children’s bicycles; it was hardly an ocean view. Eddie couldn’t hear the thump of the surf as far inland as Maple Lane. What he heard were screen doors slamming and children fighting and parents shouting angrily at their children; what he heard were dogs, barking dogs. (In Eddie’s opinion, there were entirely too many dogs in Bridgehampton.) But what Eddie heard, most of all, were the trains.

The trains passed so near to his house, on the north side of Maple Lane, that Eddie had given up using his small backyard; he kept his barbecue on the front porch, where a grease fire had scorched a section of shingles and blackened the porch light. The trains passed so near that Eddie’s bed shook when he was sound asleep, which he rarely was, and he’d installed a door on the cabinet where he kept his wineglasses, because the vibrations caused by the trains would shake the glasses off the shelves. (Although he drank nothing but Diet Coke, Eddie preferred his Diet Coke in a wineglass.) And the trains passed so near to Maple Lane that the neighborhood dogs were always being killed; yet these dogs were replaced with seemingly louder, more aggressive dogs, who barked at the trains with a keener level of complaint than the dead dogs had ever managed.

Compared to Ruth’s house, Eddie owned a kennel by the railroad tracks. How it grieved him: not only that Ruth was moving away, but that the monument to the sexual zenith of his life was for sale and he couldn’t buy it. He would never have presumed on Ruth’s friendship or her sympathy; he hadn’t even dreamed of asking her, as a personal favor, to lower her price.

What Eddie O’Hare had dreamed about—what had preoccupied his waking hours, too—was asking Hannah to buy the house with him. This dangerous combination of fantasy and desperation was sadly in keeping with Eddie’s character. He didn’t like Hannah, nor did she like him; yet Eddie wanted the house badly enough that he was about to propose sharing it with her!

Poor Eddie. He knew that Hannah was a slob.

Eddie detested messiness to the degree that he paid a cleaning woman not only to clean his modest house once a week but also to replace (not merely wash) the pot holders when they were stained. The cleaning woman was also instructed to wash and iron the dish towels. And Eddie hated Hannah’s boyfriends, long in advance of those predictable moments when Hannah herself would grow to hate them.

He’d already envisioned Hannah’s clothes (not to mention her under clothes) deposited everywhere about the house. Hannah would swim naked in the pool and use the outdoor shower with the door open. Hannah would throw away or eat Eddie’s leftovers in the refrigerator— while her leftovers would grow green and fuzzy before Eddie would take it upon himself to get rid of them. Hannah’s half of the phone bill would be appalling, and Eddie would have to pay it all because she would be on assignment in Dubai (or some such place) whenever any of the bills arrived. (Besides, Hannah’s checks would bounce.)

Hannah would also fight with Eddie over the use of the master bedroom, and win—on the grounds that she needed the king-size bed for her boyfriends and the extra closet space for her clothes. But Eddie had rationalized that he would be happy to use the larger of the guest bedrooms at the end of the upstairs hall. (After all, he’d slept with Marion there.)

And given the advanced age of most of Eddie’s female friends, Eddie assumed that he would have to convert what was once Ted Cole’s workroom (and later Allan’s office) into a downstairs bedroom—for some of Eddie’s more fragile and infirm older women could not be expected to climb stairs.

Eddie intuited that Hannah would allow him to use the former squash court in the barn as his office; that it had been Ruth’s office appealed to him. Since Ted had killed himself in the squash court, the barn was off-limits to Hannah. It wasn’t that Hannah had a conscience, but she was superstitious. Besides, Hannah would use the house only on weekends or in the summer, whereas Eddie would live there full-time. That Eddie hoped Hannah would be away a lot was the main reason he could delude himself into thinking that he could share the house with her at all. But what an enormous risk he was taking!

“I said I’ve been thinking about something,” Eddie said again. Hannah hadn’t been listening.

As she looked at the passing landscape, Hannah’s expression hardened from an abject indifference to an overt hostility. When they crossed the border into Vermont, Hannah glared at the very memory of her undergraduate years at Middlebury, as if both the college and the State of Vermont had done her some unpardonable disservice— although Ruth would have said that the chief cause of Hannah’s four years of turmoil and depression at Middlebury had been Hannah’s promiscuity.