Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2006 | Page 79

When Fiction Becomes Reality Ru t h : Te d : Ru t h : Te d : Ru t h : Te d : 75 And they're under the ground? Their bodies are. Yes. Tell me what ‘dead’ is. When you look at the photographs o f Thomas and Timothy, do you remember the stories o f what they‘re doing? Yes. Well, Tom and Timmy are alive in your imagination. Then, into the triangle of Ted, Marion, and Ruth Cole steps Eddie O’Hare (Jon Foster), a junior at Philips Exeter Academy. Like the central figure in coming-of-age films such as Sophie's Choice, O’Hare will most assuredly learn more from living with the Coles than he will from his job, correcting the punctuation in Ted Cole’s newest story, "A Sound Like Someone Trying Not To Make a Sound.” O’Hare’s father, an English professor who remembers Thomas and Timothy Cole from their time at Exeter, wants his son to work as Ted Cole’s apprentice, although ultimately O’Hare spends more time as Cole’s driver (Cole had lost his license three months before for driving while drunk) than he does learning the craft of writing. The 16-year-old, who was hired by Ted Cole to spend the summer as his assistant, falls in love immediately with the sad, sensitive, maternal, perceptive, withholding Marion Cole, who picks him up at the ferry. He becomes their messenger and translator; rarely do Ted and Marion Cole appear together in a scene, and O’Hare often serves as a conduit for information. While Marion Cole temporarily escapes the memory of her sons’ violent death—one son’s leg was severed at the hip, and she picks up his shoe from the wreckage without realizing the shoe is attached to his leg—her husband finds refuge from her inability to engage with him and refuge from his own grief by drawing and subsequently seducing women in the community. As Irving explains in his novel, the models go through several stages—innocence, modesty, degradation, and shame—that precede Ted Cole’s ultimate and inevitable abandonment of the women. At the heart of the film is Ted Cole’s children’s tale The Door in t