An Available Man (15 page)

“It’s just dinner,” Edward told Amanda. “I don’t think you want to corner Julie there.”

“It will be informal and loving,” Amanda assured him. “Totally constructive.”

“Yeah,” Nick agreed on the extension. “And that girl needs help.”

Before they hung up, he told Edward that he had a little surprise for him, too.

What now?
Edward wondered. He hoped they hadn’t planted another personal ad on his behalf, or intended to place one for Julie in some younger, hipper version of the
NYR
. But he, too, wished she’d get out of that relationship, and maybe it would only happen if she met someone new.

They had a round table at Tung’s, with a lazy Susan at its center, which they rotated slowly to pass the fragrant variety of dishes around. Julie had seemed in low spirits at the beginning of dinner, but she’d perked up by the time the fresh pineapple and fortune cookies were served. Maybe it was all that protein or just being with her family. She’d even tried on her grandmother’s hat, to general acclaim. Gladys said, “You could have modeled at Bamberger’s in my day!”

That’s when Amanda cleared her throat in an attention-getting way. Next, she’d be tapping on her water glass with a knife. Edward tried to forestall her by opening his fortune cookie and reading it aloud, the sort of thing Amanda or Julie was far more likely to do. “Listen to this,” he said. “ ‘Strike iron while hot.’ ” It made him remember ironing Bee’s blouses, but all he said to the table at large was, “So what do you think this means?”

The kids looked at one another, surprised by the question. Then Nick said, “English as a second language?”

“It means you’re still hot, of course,” Julie said.

Edward glanced nervously at Gladys, who was sipping her tea and appeared to be deeply within her own thoughts.

“But maybe not forever,” Nick warned.

Amanda cleared her throat again. “Speaking of hot,” she said. Edward could see the determination in her eyes and the set of her jaw. She would have used anything anyone said to her advantage.

“He could still strike while warm,” Julie said to Nick.

“Yeah, but not
luke
warm,” Nick countered.

“I believe I was speaking,” Amanda said. She hadn’t raised her voice, but everyone grew quiet and turned to her. “Jules,” she said, and Julie, who had just broken open another fortune cookie, let the pieces and her unread fortune drop to the table. “You know we all love you very, very much.”

“Just like a sister,” Nick said, and Amanda put a restraining hand on his arm.

“And we
value
you,” she continued, “more than we think you value yourself.”

“You’re a doll,” Gladys said. “Just look at that hat face.” Obviously she hadn’t been let in on Amanda and Nick’s plan.

“Listen,” Edward said, “there’s a time and a place—”

“What
is
this?” Julie asked.

“You’re much too good for that a-hole,” Nick said. “Sorry, Gladdy.”

“We want to support you in giving Todd up,” Amanda said.

“God, is there a camera hidden somewhere?” Julie looked over at the next table, where the people sitting there looked back at her, their chopsticks poised.

Edward signaled the waiter for the check.

Later, he called Julie at home and tried to put a good spin on Amanda and Nick’s attempt, without condoning it. “It was a
little extreme,” he said. “But they really do love you and want you to be happy.” Another noble experiment.

“They want me to try
speed
-dating,” she said.

“Well, I certainly don’t think—” Edward began.

“And maybe I just will,” Julie said.

After they hung up, Edward took out his birding book and reread his notes for that day. He’d recorded the brilliant weather, the greening of the trees, and the avian commoners he’d spotted. About the purple martin, he’d written “Adult male, on his own.” Hah!

As for Nick’s promised surprise, he’d tucked something into Edward’s breast pocket when they were all saying good-bye in the parking lot at Tung’s. “You’ve got mail, bro,” was all Nick had said at the time.

And Edward forgot about it until he was on his way to bed that night. He went to the closet then and retrieved an envelope from his jacket pocket. It was addressed to Science Guy at the same PO box number as the letters he’d shredded a few days before. The loopy handwriting looked eerily familiar. When he pulled out the note inside, he saw that it was signed, “Yours, Ann.”

Fourth Date: Another Chance

O
f course it wasn’t one of the letters he’d shredded, magically made whole again, but it was from the same Ann who’d signed the previous one. There was no salutation this time; he seemed to recall a simple “Hello” at the beginning of the other letter. Now she’d written, “I was disappointed not to hear from you. I suppose you were besieged by mail—as that rare thing, a single, viable man—but that’s no excuse for overlooking a truly good prospect like me. Please tell me the dog ate my letter.” Well, this one had no shortage of self-confidence. Maybe it was catching; his own ego could certainly use a boost. And she seemed to have a sense of humor.

She went on to say that if he decided to give her (and himself) another chance, they should forgo the usual drink/meal/coffee routine of blind dates and do something less predictable and more active. A walk in the park, perhaps, or a museum visit.
Had he seen the Abramović thing at MoMA? She was a native New Yorker who’d strayed from home for a long while, but had returned recently and wanted to catch up on everything. “Why don’t you call me,” she’d written him, an invitation and a command.

Edward had let his cultural life lapse since Bee’s death. They’d had dual memberships at MoMA and the Museum of Natural History, and a subscription to the New Jersey Philharmonic, none of which he’d renewed when the time came. Once in a while, he bought a single ticket to a concert, or went to a movie by himself or with friends, but his mind always tended to stray.

He’d remember how Bee used to seize his hand during a moving passage of music or a suspenseful moment in a movie’s plot. And he would miss her simply sitting beside him in the darkened auditorium. So he hadn’t seen the “Abramović; thing,” although he’d read opposing reviews of it, and listened to Sybil and Henry argue at dinner one evening about the artistic value of performance art.

Henry was of the old school; he believed that classical materials like canvas and paint and marble couldn’t be replaced by what he called the “whimsy” of using anything at hand, including urine or feces or blood and, now, naked bodies. He said this was madness, not art—just another case of the emperor’s new clothes.

“Or
lack
of clothes,” Sybil said. She agreed with Henry that exhibitionism and a touch of sadomasochism—those ladders of knives!—were at the heart of what Marina Abramović: did, but she believed that artists had to find new ways of expressing themselves, even when that disturbed or perplexed their audience. “Think of Stravinsky,” she told Henry.

“You always bring up Stravinsky,” he said. “But at least his performers were dressed.”

Edward called Ann Parrish and made plans to meet her in MoMA’s lobby the following Saturday at noon. “I’ll be nearer to the Fifty-third Street entrance, at the membership desk,” he told her. “But it gets pretty crowded on the weekend. How will we know each other?”

“Well, I’m on the slim side, medium height, and I have darkish hair and a medically frowned-upon tan.”

“And I’m tall,” Edward said. “What’s left of my hair is blond, or gray, according to the light. Shall I wear a carnation?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll find you,” she said.

The museum lobby was especially crowded, even for a weekend day in the spring. There had been all that buzz about the Abramović exhibit, and a simultaneous show celebrating Tim Burton’s career. So many of the women milling around and seated at the large circular ottoman across the room were dark-haired and slender. A surprising number of them appeared to be suntanned, too.

And how many tall, balding men were standing in Edward’s general vicinity? Easily enough for a Rogaine commercial. It was folly to think they’d recognize each other with such minimal description, and he couldn’t go around asking various women if they were named Ann, like some desperate old lecher. Probably several of them actually were.

They hadn’t exchanged cell phone numbers, another mistake. You would think he’d have gotten the hang of this kind of meeting by now. It was twenty past twelve when someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” she said.

“Ann?” he said. A woman near his own age, an animated
bronze statue. Brunette, as she’d described herself, and slightly weathered, but lovely—in a strange way—as if she’d willed herself to be.

She gazed back at him. “Well, if I’m not, I’m going to pretend I am.”

“Shall we sit down somewhere, have coffee?” he asked.

“Later, maybe,” she said. “Let’s go look at the art first.”

Edward had bought two tickets of admission as soon as he’d come in, and they went straight to the Marina Abramović exhibit, The Artist Is Present. As indeed she was, seated at a table, clothed, slightly hunched and staring ahead, but not directly at the woman sitting opposite her, a museum visitor who’d helped herself to the facing chair.

Edward could never have thrust himself into the spotlight that way. He would feel too shy, and he was already weary of the culture of instant fame. “Could you do that?” he asked Ann. “Just plunk yourself down opposite her?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “But I don’t particularly want to.”

In another room they were assaulted by the images and noise from several screens hanging from the ceiling and set into the walls. It was bedlam, like the dayroom in an asylum, like an orchestra tuning up, readying to play Stravinsky. “Enough,” Ann said—his thought exactly—taking his hand and leading him into the next gallery.

That’s where the nude couple, made famous by art critics and news writers, was standing in a narrow passageway, facing each other, less than a couple of feet apart. They were anatomically correct, but were somehow as neutered as store mannequins, as Barbie and Ken. It seemed that you were expected to sidle between them to continue on in the exhibition. Edward had read somewhere that there was another, conventional way
into the adjacent room, and that the artist had objected in vain to this more conservative option.

According to an item in the
Times
, a man, a patron, had made his way between the naked pair, allegedly patting the male actor on the butt in the process, and had been summarily ejected by one or more of the guards. The accused had also been deprived of his long-standing membership in the museum. Henry said it was entrapment; Sybil called it rough justice.

Edward was looking around for the other way in when Ann dropped his hand and darted as quickly as a hummingbird between the nude sentries. She stood on the other side and said, “Come on, what are you waiting for?”

In a fairy tale, this would be the ultimate test, that defining moment when one could turn out to be the hero of the story or merely an ogreish chump. Wasn’t he too old for this sort of challenge? Didn’t those two nudists ever take a break for a smoke or the restrooms?

Out of nowhere, he thought of the whirling
hora
dancers the night he first met Bee, and how he’d stood on the sidelines, struck by longing, until he was pulled into the swiftly moving circle that became his life. He smiled at Ann, still hesitating, and she called, “Let’s go, Edward. Lighten up!”

It was like a blow to the head of an amnesiac, similar to the one that took his memory, except that this one served to restore it. She was older by thirty-some-odd years and like a sepia negative of her former ethereal, silver-haired self. She bore a different name, for some reason, and the burnishing of age and sunlight, but, God, it was Laurel, it was her! He threw off his inhibitions, like cumbersome garments, and passed through the guarded doorway to the other side.

Payback

F
or the rest of his life, Edward would wonder why he hadn’t just turned away from Laurel and left the museum. He would play that moment over and over in his head without ever coming to a definitive conclusion. When it happened, when she called to him and he followed her into the other gallery, he felt propelled by shock and rage, as well as by something else he couldn’t name. “You!” he cried, when he reached her, that single word ablaze with recrimination. She didn’t cower or even step back, but at least she’d stopped smiling.