It was one of those moments when Eddie should have lied, but he couldn’t speak. No one ever would see Hannah that way. Eddie tried to imagine her at sixty, not to mention seventy or eighty, when her raw sexuality would be replaced by . . . well, by what ? Hannah’s sexuality would always be raw!
Eddie took one hand off the steering wheel and touched Hannah’s hands. She was wringing them in her lap, and when Eddie touched her, she said: “Keep two hands on the fucking wheel, Eddie. I’m just between boyfriends, at the moment . . .”
Sometimes it was his capacity for pity that got Eddie into trouble. In a dangerously enlarged part of his heart, Eddie believed that what Hannah truly needed was not another boyfriend but a good friend.
“I’ve been thinking that we might try sharing a house together,” Eddie proposed. (It was a good thing he was at the wheel, and not Hannah—she would have driven off the road.) “I was thinking that, together, we could buy Ruth’s house in Sagaponack. Of course I don’t imagine that we would . . . um, overlap there together very much of the time.”
Naturally Hannah was unsure of exactly what Eddie was proposing. In her vulnerable state of mind, Hannah’s first reaction was that Eddie was making more than a pass; it sounded to her as if he wanted to marry her. But the more Eddie went on, the more confused Hannah became.
“ ‘Overlap’?” Hannah asked him. “What does fucking ‘overlap’ mean?”
Eddie, seeing her confusion, could not suppress his panic. “You could have the master bedroom!” he blurted. “I’d be happy in the bigger of the guest bedrooms, the one all the way down the hall. And what used to be Ted’s workroom, and Allan’s office, could very well become a downstairs bedroom. I’d be happy with that, too.” He paused only for a breath before blurting on: “I know your feelings about the barn, the former squash court. I could work there—that is, make it my office. But the rest of the house—you know, the whole house—we’d share. Of course, in the summer we’d have to haggle about weekend guests. You know—your friends or mine! But if you basically liked the idea of a house in the Hamptons, I think that—between the two of us—we could afford it. And Ruth would be happy.” He was babbling now. “After all, she and Graham could come visit us. It would mean—for Ruth, I mean—that she wouldn’t have to give up the house altogether. Ruth and Graham and the cop, I mean,” Eddie added, because he couldn’t tell from Hannah’s stricken expression if she was still confused by his suggestion or suddenly carsick.
“You mean we’d be fucking roommates ?” Hannah asked.
“Fifty-fifty!” Eddie cried out.
“But you’d live there full-time, wouldn’t you?” Hannah asked, with a shrewdness that Eddie was unprepared for. “How do you figure it’s ‘fifty-fifty’ if I come out for the summer, and for occasional weekends, and you live there fucking full-time?”
I should have known! Eddie thought. Here he’d tried to regard Hannah as a friend and she was already negotiating with him! It would never work! If only he’d kept his mouth shut! But what he said was: “I couldn’t afford it if you didn’t pay half. Probably both of us can’t afford it, anyway.”
“That stupid house can’t be worth that much!” Hannah said. “What’s it cost?”
“A lot,” Eddie replied, but he didn’t know the answer. More than he could afford by himself—that was all he knew.
“You wanna buy it and you don’t know how much it costs?” Hannah asked.
At least she’d stopped crying. Hannah probably made much more money than he did, Eddie reflected. She was increasingly successful as a journalist, if not renowned; many of her topics were too trashy to bring her renown . She’d recently done a cover story for a major magazine (not that Eddie believed any magazine was “major”) about the failure to rehabilitate the inmates in state and federal prisons. In addition to the controversy created by the article, Hannah had been briefly involved with an ex-convict; in fact, the ex-convict had been Hannah’s last bad boyfriend, which possibly explained her present wrecked condition.
“You could probably afford to buy the whole house by yourself,” Eddie told Hannah morosely.
“What would I want with that house?” she asked him. “It’s not exactly a fucking treasure trove of memorabilia for me !”
I’ll never get the house, but at least I won’t have to live anywhere with her ! Eddie was thinking.
“Jesus, you’re weird, Eddie,” Hannah said.
It was only the first weekend in November, but all along the dirt road that led uphill past Kevin Merton’s farm to Ruth’s house, the trees had lost their leaves. The bare branches of the stone-gray maples and the bone-white birches seemed to be shivering in anticipation of the coming snow. It was already cold. When they got out of the car in Ruth’s driveway, Hannah stood hugging herself while Eddie opened the trunk. Their suitcases and their coats were in the trunk; they’d not needed their coats in New York.
“Fucking Vermont!” Hannah said again, her teeth chattering.
The sound of someone splitting wood drew their attention. Two or three cords of unsplit hardwood were dumped in the yard by the kitchen entrance; beside them was a smaller, neater woodpile-in-progress. At first Eddie thought that the man splitting wood and stacking the split logs was Ruth’s caretaker, Kevin Merton—that’s who Hannah thought he was, too, until something about the wood-splitter invited her to give him a closer look.
He was so intent on his task that he’d not noticed the arrival of Eddie’s car. The man, in just a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, was working hard enough so that he didn’t feel the cold; in fact, he was sweating. And he had a system for splitting and stacking the wood. If a log wasn’t too big around, he would set it vertically on the chopping block and split it lengthwise with an ax. If it was too big—and he knew this at a glance—he would set the log on the block and then split it with a wedge and a maul. Although handling the tools seemed to be second nature to him, Harry Hoekstra had been splitting wood for only a week or two; he’d never done it before.
Harry loved doing it. With each powerful stroke of his ax or his maul, he envisioned the fires he would build. And he appeared to Hannah and Eddie to be both strong enough and sufficiently engaged by his task to have gone on splitting wood all day. He looked as if he could go on doing anything all day—or all night, Hannah thought. She suddenly wished she’d waxed her lip, or at least washed her hair and put on a little makeup; she wished she’d worn a bra, and some better clothes.
“It must be the Dutchman, Ruth’s cop!” Eddie whispered to Hannah.
“No shit,” Hannah whispered back. She momentarily forgot that Eddie didn’t know her private game with Ruth. “Didn’t you hear that sound?” Hannah asked Eddie, who looked bewildered—as usual. “My panties, sliding to the ground,” Hannah told him. “ That sound.”
“Oh,” Eddie said. What a vulgar woman Hannah was! Thank God he wouldn’t be sharing a house with her!
Harry Hoekstra had heard their voices. He dropped his ax and approached them; they stood like children, afraid to stray from the car, as the ex-cop walked up and took Hannah’s suitcase from her shivering hand.
“Hello, Harry,” Eddie managed to say.
“You must be Eddie and Hannah,” Harry said to them.