An Available Man (19 page)

Back in bed, he tried to remember exactly what Julie had said about Laurel’s call. Julie was so trusting, she’d probably offered his phone number at the cottage, and with very little effort Laurel could find his cell phone number, too. But it had been days since her call to Julie, and he hadn’t heard from her yet. Maybe she was just playing out some fantasy about contacting him again. Or she might have changed her mind. God knew she was unpredictable.
What if
—he wondered, and couldn’t complete the thought. Maybe his brain had fried from all that conjecture.
Oh
,
just go to sleep
, he commanded himself, and before long he did.

An Unavailable Man

I
n the morning, Edward began thinking about asking Ellen to have dinner with them that evening. Julie had triggered the idea with her starry-eyed talk the day before about his having a “girlfriend.” He decided that she’d enjoy meeting someone friendly and pretty who just might fit that title, and that Ellen probably wouldn’t mind the invitation. He checked with Julie at breakfast, and she said, “That sounds great.”

So he called Ellen’s number, long transcribed from his palm to his cell phone speed dial, but her message said that she’d be off-island for a couple of days, and would return calls as soon as she was back. Edward was disappointed, and curious about where she’d gone. “Sorry I missed you. I miss you,” he said. Did that sound weird? He was always unprepared for a taped message when he expected a live human voice.

That afternoon, he and Julie visited Peggy and Ike. “Now I feel as if I’m really here,” Julie said after the hug fest was over, which gave Edward a jealous twinge. It was the place as well as the people, he reasoned. This was where Julie and Nick had often played with the Martins’ three children, and where they’d hung out as teenagers.

But when they stepped out onto the veranda, and Julie looked across at the yellow house, she started to sob. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she wailed. At least nobody said that they knew how she felt. Edward put his arms around her, and Peggy went inside for some Kleenex. While Julie dried her eyes and blew her nose, Ike asked if she’d like to go out with him in his kayak.

Edward, watching them glide by on the lake like figures on a picture postcard, was relieved now that Ellen wasn’t available for dinner. Despite Julie’s playful hints about his love life, memories of their summers on the Vineyard as an intact family would have pervaded the evening, making it gloomy and uncomfortable. This wasn’t the right time or place to introduce her to a new woman he was seeing. In some ways, he was still an unavailable man.

And he was right about Julie—she wanted to talk about her mother during dinner. That view of their old rental house had unleashed whatever she’d been suppressing. “Two years!” she said, as if Edward wasn’t aware of the passage of time since Bee died, or that an eternity without her awaited them both. He didn’t shy away from the subject—how could he?—but he tried to emphasize the happiness they’d all once known, and the astonishing privilege of it. “Mom used to say how lucky we were.” He didn’t add what Bee usually had, about enjoying their luck while they could, that someday they’d be coming up here with their attendants and walkers.

The thing was, they’d expected to grow old together, as if
that was their due, especially after their late start as a couple. “Do you remember the Wexlers?” Edward asked Julie.

Of course she did. Herb and Belle, the elderly pair down the street in Englewood, were the standard-bearers for the horrors of aging, with their diminished faculties and mobility, their loss of patience with each other. They fought over the wattage of lightbulbs and the expiration date on milk, about which one of them had left the water running or put the pot scrubber in the freezer. They always accused each other of deliberately mumbling. And all of their friends had predeceased them. The Wexlers split up and got back together again almost as often as Julie and Todd.

Except that neither of them had anywhere else to go besides separate corners of their house, where they fell into twin soliloquies of silence. Until one day Belle would say, out of forgetfulness or forgiveness, “Do you want me to reheat the chicken for dinner?” or Herb would offer to set the table, and that particular battle was over.

“We were terrified of becoming like them,” Edward told Julie. He meant old beyond the possibility of pleasure, and frightened and angry. Sometimes, when Edward misplaced his glasses or keys, Bee would say, “Uh-oh, Herb.” And if she yelled “What?” from another room, he’d yell back something about her needing Belle’s ear trumpet. Someday, Bee predicted, Edward would refuse to throw the neighbors’ kid’s ball back over the fence. And she would serve shrunken, stale “old lady” ice cubes to guests, who would surreptitiously spit them back into their flat seltzer. “We’ll be so decrepit by then,” she said, “our deaths won’t seem tragic to anyone but ourselves.”

“You wouldn’t have been like the Wexlers—you
loved
each other,” Julie said.

“We did, very much. But maybe Herb and Belle were in love once, too, and all of their losses ground them down.”

“So, are you saying it’s better to die young?” Julie asked.

“No, no, of course not.” Then what
was
he saying? “It’s just that you should choose someone to spend your life with who’s likely to wear well, someone kind and with a sense of humor.”
The un-Todd
, he thought, but didn’t say.

As soon as Julie left on the ferry the next day, Edward felt available again. He wondered once more when Ellen was returning to the Vineyard, and he anticipated her call. He even checked his phone once or twice to make sure it was working. In the afternoon, he bought a couple of lobsters and a bottle of Sancerre, and when he got back to the cottage he lay down on the couch and began to read the second novel in the Stieg Larsson trilogy. He and Ellen had talked about
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
—how intelligent the characters were, how sex seemed more of a natural aspect of life in Sweden than it did in the United States. That was before their second kiss and her gentle rejection—a postponement, really. And this was now.

He fell asleep wearing his glasses, and with the book open across his chest. When he woke, he was slightly surprised by his surroundings, and then by the way the light in the room had begun to fade. He looked at his watch and at the mute phone on the table next to him. Hours had gone by. The Sancerre was still cooling in the refrigerator next to the live, seaweed-wrapped lobsters. Like Herb and Belle, bound together until their demise. How long could you keep lobsters alive in there? If he’d brought his computer with him he could have Googled the answer or fired off some emails. Where the hell was Ellen?

Edward wasn’t exactly hungry, but he stood in the light of the open fridge eating crackers and cheese, washing them down
with orange juice right from the carton. Then he showered and shaved for the second time that day, grabbed his book, and went out to the patio. His backyard neighbors, unseen behind the stockade fence, were having a party. Music, voices, and outbursts of laughter kept interfering with the words on the page. Sweden and New Jersey seemed equally distant and foreign. It was like being on the other side of life itself.

He went back into the house. It was too late to make other plans for dinner and too early to go to bed. The nap had left him wide awake, yet unrefreshed. He opened the refrigerator again, browsing for food he didn’t really want. This was how so many lonely people must become obese. It occurred to him to cook the lobsters while he still could, and make a salad out of them the next day, when Ellen would have surely returned.

He had set a big pot of water to boil when he heard a knock on the door. Can the heart actually lift? Of course not, but it can beat madly, like a bird’s wings before flight.
Just in time
, he was going to say.
Welcome back
,
I hope you’re hungry!
And—in a reprise of his clumsy phone message—
I missed you
. But when he threw off his apron and opened the door, Laurel was standing there.

Therapy

“W
hat are you doing here?” Edward said. He was so stunned and let down at once that he might have added,
And what have you done with Ellen?

“I came to talk to you. You wouldn’t listen to me on the phone.”

“God, Laurel, I told you there’s nothing to talk about.”

Her shoulders, all of her, seemed to droop. If she melted into a little puddle right there on the step, he wouldn’t have been surprised. “Edward, I’m dying,” she said.

“What!”

“I mean inside, I mean emotionally.” He sighed in exasperation and she said, “Look, could I just come in?”

He saw then that there was a car parked behind his in the driveway—a dusty red Fiesta, too scruffy to be a rental. She
must have taken the Woods Hole ferry. Well, she could turn right around and take the next one back.

“I have to use your bathroom, anyway,” she said. “Please.”

He hesitated and then stepped aside, letting her go past him into the house.

She glanced around. “What a dump,” she said, Bette Davis–style.

He looked at her coldly. “The bathroom’s down the hall on the right. Second door.”

The water in the lobster pot was boiling, and he turned off the jet. The telephone rang and rang, but he didn’t answer it. He could hear the toilet flushing, and then the water in the bathroom sink run, and screech as it was turned off. The plumbing in the cottage was particularly noisy, as exaggerated as the sound effects in a school play.

When Laurel came out of the bathroom, he was waiting by the front door, with Bingo beside him, to usher her out. The dog, almost completely deaf now, had been asleep in the kitchen when Laurel had knocked on the door and come into the house. But he’d probably been awakened by the raucous plumbing, and had loped in to see what was happening.

When Laurel saw him, she stepped back, and Edward remembered that she was afraid of dogs. She had been bitten by a stray when she was a little girl, or had claimed to have been, anyway. He held on to the dog’s collar and said, loudly, “Bingo, stay.”

Laurel, somewhat emboldened now, said, “Bingo? Edward, really!”

“My daughter named him,” he said. “She was just a child.” Why was he offering her an explanation? Why was he talking to her at all? “He won’t hurt you,” he said, in an affectless tone. “You can leave.”

She still stood a few feet from him with her hands clasped at her waist, like a nervous student about to recite in class. “I know what I did,” she said. “It was terrible, it was worse than terrible. It was criminal. Over the years, whenever I let myself think about it, I wanted to die.”

“But you’re still here, I see,” he said.

“I’m a coward, too,” she said, and attempted to smile.

“I told you that I’m over it. It was ages ago.”

“After I left Joe, I actually got married.”

“Congratulations.”

“Edward, don’t,” she said. “It was spur-of-the-moment—a justice of the peace—or I wouldn’t have gone through with it. Allen Parrish, a nice enough guy. I stayed for about a month.”

“I don’t want to hear the story of your life,” he said. He looked at his watch. “And I’m expecting somebody.”

“I did try to kill myself. But I screwed that up, too.”

He was silent and she said, “I took pills and put a plastic bag over my head. The kind that’s stamped
THIS IS NOT A TOY
? Maybe I didn’t take enough pills, but I began to suffocate and I pulled the bag off.” Her hand went to her throat. Despite all the lies she had told him, he knew she was telling the truth about this.

“I went into therapy with this shrink in Phoenix, Aaron Steinman. He wanted to put me into the hospital, but I promised I wouldn’t do anything to myself and that I would show up every day. And I did—at seven
AM
, five days a week. Do you want to hear his diagnosis?”

Edward shook his head; he already knew that, or at least the gist of it. “How long did you see him?” he asked.

“For six years straight. And then on and off for booster sessions. I had a teaching job out there, decent health insurance. It strapped me anyway. But I finally found out why I was the way I
was. Why I had to leave everybody before they left me. Starting with my parents, but they got the last word.”