An Available Man (12 page)

Yet who was he to talk about readiness? On New Year’s Eve, he’d finally agreed, under pressure from Sybil and Henry, to drop in on their supper party, arriving alone on the late side and
fleeing before midnight, like Cinderella, without leaving behind what he’d thought of as his glass heart. At least Lizzie hadn’t come on to him again.

“Very hard,” Roberta agreed. “We were married for thirty-four years, six weeks shy of thirty-five.” She fumbled in her purse, for a Kleenex, Edward assumed, but she pulled out a cell phone instead. Was she going to leave, call for a cab?

She fiddled with the phone for a moment and then passed it to Edward. “Our wedding,” she said. He stared at a photo of a younger Roberta, swathed in white, gazing up at a tall guy in a tux.

“You were a handsome couple,” he said, passing the phone back to her. She fingered some buttons and handed it back to him. “Our kids,” she said. Edward saw three children sitting under a beach umbrella, everyone and everything in faded colors. “They’re much older than that now, of course,” Roberta said. “But they all live in different states, so I like to remember when they were little and everybody was together.” She asked how many children Edward had.

“Two, plus a daughter-in-law,” he said. “They were Bee’s, my wife’s, kids, but I inherited them.”

“Tell me about your wife,” Roberta said huskily, leaning toward him, and he was struck dumb, sideswiped by emotion. “Do you have any pictures?” she asked.

Edward had never kept photos of anyone on his cell phone or in his wallet. “No,” he said. He looked down at his plate, where the folded eggs were congealing next to an orange slice. “Not on me.” And then, suddenly, there was a whole slideshow of pictures going through his head.
Help me
, he thought, and Bee said,
Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

“What can I say?” he told Roberta.
That she was my one true love? That she hated brunch?
“We had a very good life together,” he said.

“Oh, we did, too!” Roberta said. “We met in high school, we were high school sweethearts.” And she went into a précis of the years since then. Edward only took in the highlights of what she was saying—college, the army, first apartment, first baby—before he stopped listening. He pushed his food around on the plate, the way Nick used to do, hoping it would somehow disappear. Roberta seemed to come out of her reverie. “Don’t you like what you ordered?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” he said, taking a bite of toast and washing it down with a swig of coffee. “I’m just not as hungry as I’d thought.”

She sighed. “I guess I’m used to a man with a big appetite,” she said. “Vince always cleaned his plate.”

Edward was reminded of the bereavement group, where the dead were praised for everything from good penmanship to good teeth before the survivors’ defenses gave way, and they admitted to their loved ones’ human flaws. He waited for something similar to happen to Roberta, but it never did. It was like attending a memorial brunch for someone he’d never met, alongside the not-so-merry widow.

He tried to change the subject without making too great a leap, and he mentioned a book he’d read about disturbances in the food chain as species were facing extinction. It seemed to work. They talked about books for a while—she belonged to a reading club—and then Edward brought up his birding. “Birds!” she exclaimed. “I love them, too!” She pulled out the phone again and showed him a close-up of two budgies in a gilded cage. “That’s Alice and Petey,” she said. “I’ve taught them to hop right onto my finger.”

She held her left hand up, perch-style, and Edward noticed that she was wearing a wedding ring. He tried to remember when he’d stopped wearing his. Not long after he had given Bee’s clothes away. And right after Sybil had chided him about
it, he’d erased Bee’s message from their voice mail by taping a new one over hers. “This is Edward Schuyler,” he said into the mike. “Please leave a message.”

When he played it back, he sounded affectless, almost robotic. On the second try, he coughed and had to do it all over again. The whole process seemed haunted by the past, but at last he got it right. Two days later, Julie called him. “What happened to Mom’s message?” she asked before breaking into tears. It seemed that she’d been calling the number, the way he had, just to hear her mother’s voice. “Dear, we have to let go,” he said, as much to himself as to her, and then listened in silence while she wept.

“And I’ve taught them to talk, too,” Roberta was saying proudly, startling him back into the moment. “Petey is up to six words now.”
No bird imitations
,
please
, he silently begged.
And no more pictures
.

As he drove Roberta home, he remembered Karen Leslie’s unexpected, almost violent kiss in the parking lot of the Paper Moon. He was pretty sure nothing like that would happen this time, nor did he want it to, but what if she asked him to come inside, out of simple courtesy? Edward was courteous, as well, and he wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings. But he didn’t think he could chance it. She might have a shrine to her dead husband in there, replete with flickering votives and a whole gallery of photos. And he didn’t want to see or hear her caged birds, positive now that
Vince
was one of the six words in Petey’s vocabulary.

He needn’t have worried. When he escorted Roberta up the steps to her town house, she said she’d had a wonderful time, flashed a brave smile, and gave him another little hug. Then she went inside, shutting the door firmly behind her.

What Women Want

“N
ever again,” Edward said. He was in another busy restaurant, this one a long, dim room on Columbus Avenue, filled with the vibrant conversation of adults recently released from the company of children. Bruno’s was more of a bar, really, but they served halfway decent food from a limited menu, and this was where several members of Fenton’s faculty, and the faculties of a couple of nearby public schools, often hung out on Friday afternoons and evenings.

When Bee was still alive, Edward had only occasionally joined them; he’d preferred to start the weekend back in Englewood with her. And for several months, those dark, antisocial months after her death, he still hardly ever showed up at Bruno’s. But gradually he was lured into that after-school ritual, and the company of other people who weren’t in a hurry to get home, either.

He was sitting in a booth, sharing a pitcher of beer and a bowl of popcorn shrimp with Frances Hartman and Bernie Roth, in whom he’d begun to confide a little about his adventures in the dating world. They were both unattached. Frances, in her early or mid-fifties now, had been married and divorced years before and seemed to have sworn off men recently. At just past sixty, slight, dapper Bernie had managed to remain single, and had a reputation for superficial, short-lived affairs—something like Edward’s love life between Laurel and Bee. Bernie’s crack about mindless sex probably had an element of personal truth in it.

Edward didn’t offer any information to his stepchildren about the dates that had evolved from the ad they’d placed, even when they hinted or asked outright, except to say that there was nothing to report. And he chose not to talk to the friends he’d shared with Bee about any of it, either. His reticence also extended to Gladys, who, he was sure, would be terribly hurt by his attempts with women, even though they had failed.

“Never say never,” Frances told Edward.

“Your problem, my friend,” Bernie said, “is the whole meal deal—the commitment to spending hours with someone you’ve never met. What’s wrong with just a drink or a cup of coffee?”

“You’re a cheapskate, Bern, and a drive-by lover,” Frances said. “Edward is a gentleman, maybe the last of his kind. Inviting a woman to dinner is a sign of good faith.”

“Is
that
what women want?” Bernie asked. “Signs? Gentlemen? A free dinner?”

“Don’t start,” Frances warned.

Bernie was of the opinion, often and freely given, that what women really wanted was the same thing he and most other men wanted—a little companionship and sexual pleasure. On the European plan, which might include breakfast.

“I can’t get used to the way people meet now,” Edward said.
“It seems so programmed, so, I don’t know
 … desperate
. We used to leave things to chance, didn’t we?”

“Some enchanted evening,” Frances sang, hoarsely and slightly off key, “you will see a stranger—”

“Across a crowded Internet,” Bernie croaked. “You can’t stop progress, darling,” he added when she made a face. Although most of his own brief relationships began in bars.

“Progress!” Frances said. “It’s a business, and the death of romance.”

“Yeah,” Bernie said. “And the death of printed books and retail stores and—”

“I met Bee at a wedding,” Edward said. “We danced. I didn’t have to send her a CV.”
Bésame
,
bésame mucho. Hold me
,
my darling
,
and say that you’ll always be mine
.

“You fell in love,” Frances said.

“Yes,” Edward agreed. “Not immediately, but yes.”

“Love,” Bernie said. He glanced around the room.

Frances followed his gaze. “Most men want younger women,” she said. “I think it’s a biological set, something to do with the perpetuation of the species.”

“Is that right, Doctor?” Bernie asked Edward. “Or is it just the firmer T and A?” He popped a shrimp into his mouth.

“Have you looked at your ass lately?” Frances said. It occurred to Edward, not for the first time, that something might have gone on once between Frances and Bernie.

“I don’t want a younger woman,” Edward said, and he had a flash of Laurel walking naked across his bedroom, as if to make a liar out of him.

“The thing is, you could probably get one,” Frances said, without apparent rancor. “That’s the way the world works.”

“ ‘Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty!’ ” Bernie recited. “ ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’ ”

“How can you hold all that poetry inside your head and still be such a Neanderthal?” Frances said.

“ ‘Poetry makes nothing happen,’ ” Edward said. Bee had once read that to him from something. “Who said that?”

“You just did,” Frances said.

“Auden,” Bernie said. “Good for you. And good for him.”

“What?” Frances said. “You don’t believe poetry changes people?”

Bernie tapped his chest. “Only in here,” he said

“Didn’t you ever want to get married?” Edward asked.

“No,” Bernie said. “My parents saw to that.”

“Were they divorced?”

“No, even worse; they stayed together out of spite.”

“Edward, dear, really,” Frances said, “don’t give up. You need to be with someone.”

“I was with someone,” he said.

“Exactly,” Frances said. “And now you have to start all over again.”

“I don’t think I have the energy.”

“Yes, you do. Do you want to spend the rest of your Fridays in Bruno’s bullshitting about what women want? Or do you want to find out for yourself, out in the field?”

“Or in a bed,” Bernie said. “What you need, my friend, is to get laid.” As usual, he had the last word.

Two Telephone Calls

T
he phone rang in the middle of the night.
Bad news
, Edward thought, thrust into wakefulness. This was how he’d learned about his father’s death twelve years earlier—the shrill alarm of the phone and then his sobbing mother, who had found her darling Bud, lying still beside her and already cool to the touch. Like that woman, Claire, in the bereavement group, Evelyn Schuyler had sometimes checked her husband’s vital signs as he slept. He had already survived two heart attacks.

“Daddy is gone!” she’d cried, as if Edward were a child rather than a fifty-year-old man. And in those first shocked moments, that was exactly how he’d felt. Then Bee was there with her arms flung around him, restoring him to his grown-up, newly sorrowful self.

This time a stranger’s voice was on the line, a woman asking for Beatrice Schuyler. There was a clamor in the background—someone shouting, someone laughing—and Edward wondered if she was calling from a bar. “Who is this?” he demanded. The woman said that she was a nurse in the emergency room at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, and she repeated her request to speak to Beatrice Schuyler.