An Available Man (2 page)

F
or a very long time, following a disastrous affair, Edward believed he would never marry. He had gone out with many women, but like his father he’d fallen in love—in what promised to be a fatal and final way—with only one of them. Her name was Laurel Ann Arquette, and she’d taught French just down the hall from his lab at Fenton Day, a private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Another teacher had introduced them at lunch on Laurel’s first day.

He stood and said, “Hello, and welcome to perdition.” The spoon he’d been stirring his coffee with clanged to the floor, making her laugh, a bell that chimed from the top of his head to the pit of his belly. Her abundant hair was prematurely white, silver really, and her face was actually heart-shaped. She was as slender as a schoolgirl, for whom she might be mistaken, if not for that hair and her knowing presence. “Edward,” she said in
return, as if she were naming or anointing him, and she let her hand be swallowed by his.

It was 1974. They were both in their mid-twenties then and each school day became an agony of hours until they could meet at his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and make raw and exhausting love. They were very prudent at Fenton, though, sitting discreetly apart in the faculty room, never even accidentally touching in the corridors, and resisting the temptation to exchange loaded glances.

But everyone, from the overstimulated students to the amused lunch ladies, knew anyway, somehow. One morning, he confiscated a note between two seventh-graders in his homeroom: “Does Dr. S. couche avec Mademoiselle A.?”
Oui!
Yes, he did, every chance he could, and he might as well have worn a sandwich board advertising his ardor. Even ripping up that silly note and frowning severely at the giggling transgressors didn’t quell their excitement.

But once Edward and Laurel announced their engagement, right after their second spring break together, they became as boring to the students as their own parents, and somewhat less interesting to everyone else. Still, the engaged couple were consumed by their new status, and began to make wedding plans. He’d hoped for something simple, but Laurel wanted the whole show, in an almost unconscious act of defiance against her divorced parents, who had eloped to Maryland with Laurel already on board.

Edward thought she was conflating the lavishness of a reception with the success of a marriage, but he went along with her. She’d been such a miserable child, passed back and forth between her depressed mother and angry father like a hand grenade that might suddenly go off. Once, she told Edward, her parents had an argument that threatened to become physical,
and Laurel, stepping between them, was accidentally knocked to the ground. She claimed her hair had turned white as a result of all that early tension. “You can’t imagine,” she said, and he couldn’t.

His own parents had stuck it out, their early passion having metamorphosed into something lower-key but lasting, a soufflé collapsed into a comforting soup of days. They were as dazzled as Edward was by Laurel, and would have remortgaged their house in Elmont to buy her happiness, and thereby their son’s. As it turned out, they only had to dig into their retirement fund to come up with the lion’s share of the wedding expenses.

Edward swore that he would pay them back someday. There was nothing offered from the bride’s side; money, squandered and lost, was one of the many contentions between the still-contentious elder Arquettes. Laurel had been estranged from both of them, and only after Edward urged her did she send them invitations.

Edward didn’t want a church service—he wavered between atheism and agnosticism, between science and the unknown. But Laurel, a nonbeliever herself, insisted that they had to hedge their bets. When the arrangements began to get out of hand, they quarreled. “You don’t care what I want,” she accused him, unfairly, in the sweetly suffocating, refrigerated breath of the florist’s shop.

She wanted a couturier gown and fountains of Cristal. She wanted to have tiny, speckled yellow orchids that might have been plucked from some mossy jungle placed at every table in the Rainbow Room, and there were too many tables. How could she complain about feelings of isolation and still list more than 150 friends who had to be invited? He’d only met a few of them.

He came back at her with, “You don’t even
know
what you really want.” But he gave in, finally, to everything, perversely
pleased that she seemed more outraged than hurt by his resistance. She’d been hurt enough in her life. He wanted to protect and defend her, even before their official vows, to make up for her stolen happiness. And although he knew better—biology was his subject, after all—the heat between them seemed as if it might never die.

A week before the wedding, they lay in their usual post-sexual stupor. Edward was still marveling at her body, the bold and innovative ways she used it, the way she looked—those small breasts, as tender as if they’d only recently budded; the springy, surprisingly dark hair of her bush. Words from Human Anatomy 101 struck him with new poignancy.
Scapular. Clavicle
. She extricated herself, turning away from him, and, instead of her usual, throatily whispered “
Je t
’
aime
,” or “Again, please,” she said, “I almost got married once before, you know.”

He hadn’t known; she’d never mentioned it. His heart was just slowing, and he hoped she couldn’t feel the way it began to leap against the curve of her spine. “To David?” he asked, as casually as he could. David had been her previous boyfriend. She and Edward, after they’d declared their love for each other, had exchanged romantic histories—it was a ritual of intimacy that was painful but necessary; Laurel said so. And everyone in her past, as in his, seemed ephemeral, anyway, like people encountered in a dream.

“No,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by her pillow. “It was Joe.”

“Joe? Who’s Joe?” Edward said.

“This guy, Joe Ettlinger. Before I was with David.”

“Are you making this up?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told you.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “You should have.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, less distinctly.

“What happened?” he asked.

“We fell out.”

“Over what?” Edward said, imagining rare orchids and sparkling Cristal at the heart of the story.

“This and that, I don’t really remember. We just fell out of love.”

He couldn’t picture that kind of falling, a plunge out of love, like a film about diving played in reverse. “For good?” he said.

“Yes, of course,” she answered, after a lengthy pause. “I’m almost asleep,” she said then. “Let’s stop talking now, okay?”

Despite that cautionary conversation, he was still taken by surprise when she didn’t show up at the church the following Saturday. He waited for her in the vestry for what seemed like years, but was actually less than two hours. Mysteriously, she had decided to spend the previous night in her mother’s apartment, which Edward had taken as a good omen. Peace on earth, goodwill toward everyone!

And there were her mother and his sitting in front rows on opposite sides of the satin-swathed aisle, the two of them looking sisterly in their elaborate hats, their long gloves and trembling corsages. But Mrs. Arquette said, when asked about it later, that she hadn’t seen or spoken to Laurel in weeks.

Edward went into a kind of emotional hibernation after Laurel’s defection, staving off sympathy because it embarrassed and pained him—as if someone were touching his fevered skin—and he managed to numb his own sense of anguished disgrace. At least Laurel had left Fenton as well as Edward. He kept telling himself he’d get over it; it wasn’t a death, even if it felt like one.

That turned out to be true. Slowly, he began to recover, to see the world without her as an interesting place again, to even date a little. There seemed to be available, attractive women everywhere. And so he became a bachelor, that title nothing like
the euphemism people once used for gay men such as Edward’s uncle Lewis. Everyone had referred to Lewis, his mother’s brother, as a “confirmed” bachelor, a man who adored women, really, but just couldn’t be tied down. Lewis was called into service to escort homely cousins to their high school proms, and later as a “walker” for widowed and spinster aunts, but he’d never introduced the love of his life to anyone in the family.

Edward, on the other hand, assiduously played the field. Whenever a relationship threatened to become serious, he was the one to break it off, to move on. And he’d finally thrown away the letter Laurel had sent from Tucson about running into Joe Ettlinger accidentally, about the doubts and fears she’d been suppressing, and the sixth sense she’d had about Edward’s own lack of commitment.

Maybe she was right, maybe he’d only been kidding himself. He had caught her out in several little senseless lies during their courtship that he’d written off to her “high-strung” nature, and refused to see her neediness or mood swings as pathology. And he had known all along that prematurely white hair was usually just a genetic tendency or some hormonal imbalance that reduces melanin, but he’d indulged her fantasies, and even entered them, letting desire trump science and just plain common sense. He was never quite that trusting or romantic again, until he met Bee.

The Beginning

S
he wasn’t his type; he could see that right away. Even after all this time—almost fifteen years!—and how terribly Laurel had wounded and humiliated him, she had remained Edward’s physical ideal. He chalked this up to some sort of brain thing, a primordial imagery beyond his control. Beatrice Silver was full-breasted, with curly brown hair; her hips, like her smile, were a little too wide. Childbirth must have altered her figure, of course. She was dancing the cha-cha with her little daughter—that was his first sight of her—at the wedding reception of a mutual friend, Sue Cooper, a colleague of Edward’s and a former neighbor of Bee’s. It had never occurred to Sue, a notorious matchmaker, to introduce them to each other.

One day, Bee would confide that she wasn’t instantly attracted to Edward, either. He’d looked too standoffish, she said, too
patrician
, hanging back on the sidelines of the dance
floor like that, with his hands in his pockets. Good looking, she conceded, like one of those fair-haired Fitzgerald heroes. But not hot-blooded enough, like her gorgeous, swarthy, rotten ex-husband, from whom she’d only recently been divorced. No more men, she thought,
cha-cha-cha!

Edward still didn’t enjoy going to weddings. He no longer had any conscious feelings for Laurel, not even residual anger or yearning, but the whole setup, of solemn vows and extravagant toasts—the pomp and the circumstances—always made him want to be somewhere else. And this was a Jewish wedding, where the bride and groom were lifted on tilting, teetering chairs above the chanting crowd, with only a skimpy silk handkerchief joining them—their brand-new union, their very lives, already seemingly imperiled.

Then there was all that communal dancing, wild and fast, to the piercing, joyful cries of the clarinets. Not Edward’s sort of thing, really, although for some reason he found his eyes brimming with tears as the dancers sped by, faster and faster to the escalating music, like horses on a carousel. And then his hand was grabbed and he was pulled into the maelstrom before he could protest. No, he
did
protest: he was just watching, he didn’t know the steps, but who could hear him in all that jubilant noise? And both of his hands were tightly clutched by then, on one side by the little girl who’d danced with her mother, and on the other by an older woman in a jaunty red hat, a kind of lopsided fez, who kicked up her heels like a chorus girl. They both held on as if he belonged to them, to Julie and her grandmother, Gladys, as he one day would.

Edward liked children—their natural curiosity, how truly funny and intuitive they could be, the elastic possibilities of their minds. Teaching had never been boring, even though so much of the core curriculum hardly ever changed. He might have had
kids of his own if he’d married when he was younger—although Laurel wasn’t keen about it—but he was in his forties now and didn’t long for them, not anymore. At least his sister, Catherine, and her husband, Jim, who lived in San Diego, had made grandparents out of their mother and father.

And Bee’s children—there were two of them, he soon found out—didn’t immediately make him regret his own childless state. The boy, Nick, about twelve, Edward guessed, was seated at the almost abandoned children’s table in the reception hall. Julie, who hadn’t relinquished Edward’s hand after the frenetic
hora
finally ended, pulled him in that direction; it might have been just another phase of the dance. “This is my brother,” she announced, like a miniature docent showing off a prized painting.

Nick, his shirttails half out of his pants, his teeth caged in metal, ignored her. He was busy bombarding another boy, sitting across from him, with pellets of the ceremonial challah, which were quickly sent flying back. The whole table looked like the aftermath of a minor war. One chair had been knocked over. And there were spilled Cokes, beheaded centerpiece flowers, and bits of food all over the stained pink tablecloth, although some of the plates seemed untouched.