Free A Widow for One Year by John Irving

He’s forgotten about me! Eddie thought. For some reason, this inspired Eddie to think spiteful thoughts about his father—so much for Exonians!
    From the upper deck, however, Eddie did see a beautiful woman waving to someone on board; she was so striking that Eddie didn’t want to see the man she might be waving to. (He assumed that she must have been waving to a man.) The woman was so distractingly gorgeous, she made it difficult for Eddie to keep looking for Ted. Eddie’s eyes kept coming back to her —she was waving up a storm. (From the corner of his eye, Eddie saw someone drive off the ferry into the stony sand of the beach, where the car instantly stalled.)
    Eddie was among the last of the stragglers to disembark, carrying his heavy duffel bag in one hand, and the lighter, smaller suitcase in the other. He was shocked to see that the woman of such breathtaking beauty was standing exactly where she’d been when he’d first spotted her, and she was still waving. She was dead-ahead of him—and she appeared to be waving at him . He was afraid he was going to bump into her. She was close enough for him to touch her—he could smell her, and she smelled wonderful—when, suddenly, she reached out and took the lighter, smaller suitcase from his hand.
    “Hello, Eddie,” she said.
    If he died a little whenever his father spoke to strangers, Eddie now knew what it meant to really die: his breath was gone, he couldn’t speak.
    “I thought you’d never see me,” the beautiful woman said.
    From that moment on, he would never stop seeing her, not in his mind’s eye—not whenever he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. She would always be there.
    “Mrs. Cole?” he managed to whisper.
    “Marion,” she said.
    He couldn’t say her name. With his heavy bag, he struggled to follow her to the car. So what if she wore a bra? He had noticed her breasts nonetheless. And in her sleek, long-sleeved sweater, there was no knowing if she shaved her armpits. What did it matter? The coarse hair of Mrs. Havelock’s armpits that had once so thoroughly engaged him, not to mention her floppy tits, had receded into the distant past; he felt only a mute embarrassment at the very idea that someone as ordinary as Mrs. Havelock had ever stirred an iota of desire in him.
    When they arrived at the car—a Mercedes-Benz the dusty red of a tomato—Marion handed him the keys.
    “You can drive, can’t you?” she asked. Eddie still couldn’t speak. “I know boys your age—you love to drive every chance you get, don’t you?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
    “Marion,” she repeated.
    “I was expecting Mr. Cole,” he explained.
    “Ted,” Marion said.
    These weren’t Exeter rules. At the academy—and, by extension, in his family, because the atmosphere of the academy was where he had truly grown up—it was “sir” and “ma’am” to everyone; it had been Mr. and Mrs. Everybody . Now it was Ted and Marion; here was another world.
    When he sat in the driver’s seat, the accelerator and brake and clutch pedals were the perfect distance away from him; he and Marion were the same height. The thrill of this discovery was immediately moderated, however, by his awareness of his immense erection; his hugely evident hard-on brushed the bottom of the steering wheel. And then the clam truck drove slowly past—the driver had noticed Marion, too, of course.
    “Nice job if you can get it, kid!” the clam-truck driver called.
    When Eddie turned the key in the ignition, the Mercedes gave a responsive purr. When Eddie stole a look at Marion, he saw that she was evaluating him in a way that was as foreign to him as her car was.
    “I don’t know where we’re going,” he confessed to her.
    “Just drive,” Marion told the boy. “I’ll give you all the directions you need.”

A Masturbating Machine
    For the first month of that summer, Ruth and the writer’s assistant rarely saw each other. They did not meet in the kitchen of the