An Available Man (21 page)

L
aurel left for the noon ferry, as planned. She’d kissed Edward ardently in parting, although his own ardor was on hold. She was living in Chelsea now, and he took all the vital information and promised, without genuine conviction, to contact her soon. To his enormous relief, she hadn’t questioned him about Ellen, as she’d surely have done in the past, when it would have been her right. Laurel seemed to accept that she was the interloper here, reappearing in the middle of his life without warning. That he
had
a life.

After Ellen said, “Sorry, I must have the wrong house,” and hurried down the path to her bicycle and sped away, all that Laurel said to Edward was, “I hope that wasn’t something awkward.” She’d behaved reasonably, for her, another sign that she might have really changed.

But it couldn’t have been more awkward: Laurel at the
door in his pajama top and with her blue toenails, him lurking in the background in his bathrobe. A few of the yellow flowers had been dropped in Ellen’s rush to get away, on the front step and on the path, and after Laurel was gone Edward had walked around picking them up, as if he were removing evidence from a crime scene. But instead of tossing them into the trash, he plunked them into a glass of water, where they hung listlessly over the rim, like spent swimmers.

He didn’t know what to do after that. Ellen wasn’t going to be amenable to an explanation. And what could he say, anyway? The truth was so complicated he could hardly process it himself. He felt guilty and wrongly accused at the same time. He imagined her shutting the door in his face, or not opening it to him at all. A phone call, in which he’d likely suffer a hang-up, seemed cowardly and too impersonal for the situation.

So for several hours he did nothing at all. In the interim, Julie called him again. “Poppy, did you get my message?” Edward only half listened as she flitted from one subject to another. He stared at the drooping flowers and at regular intervals interjected sounds into the phone, like “hmm” and “ah,” as if he’d lost language as well as heart. Julie didn’t seem to notice.

The next call was from Peggy, inviting him to a cookout the following evening. He took comfort from the sound of her voice, but he wasn’t in the mood for ordinary social communion. And what if Ellen turned up there, too? What if she didn’t? He asked Peggy if he could get back to her, he was just on his way out. And then he got on his rented bicycle and rode to Ellen’s place. Her car was in the driveway, her bike lying across the lawn, like a careless teenager’s. A single yellow flower lay next to it and he bent down and picked it up.

She did open the door to him, but she stood squarely in the middle of the threshold and didn’t invite him in. Her body
language wasn’t difficult to read: arms folded tightly across her chest; chin thrust out, but trembling slightly. Edward felt like a character in a sitcom, the husband caught with lipstick on his collar.
Just let me ’splain
,
Lucy
. The only thing missing was the canned laughter. He shredded the flower, which he’d briefly considered handing her as a peace offering.

“
Carpe diem
, right?” Ellen said. “Or maybe I should say seize the man. You’re quite a fast worker, Schuyler.”

“It’s not like that,” Edward said. In all those hours, he hadn’t come up with anything more intelligent or persuasive to say. “It’s a long story.”

“I don’t think I have time for that,” she said.

“Then I’ll make it short,” he said. “She was my old girlfriend, my fiancée once, actually. She just showed up and needed a place to stay.” The
Reader’s Digest
version of his history with Laurel.

“I see,” Ellen said, although that was highly improbable. “Edward, you really don’t owe me anything. We barely know each other. And we had an embarrassing moment, but now it’s over.”

“May I come in?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“May I call you, then?”

“Not right now,” she said. “I have a lot of things to sort out. You probably do, too.”

As he pedaled back to the cottage, he realized that he’d never asked her where she’d been for the last couple of days. How could he?—it would be like trying to make small talk in the middle of a disaster. But he wondered if whatever she had to “sort out” was related exclusively to him. He found himself pumping slowly, doggedly, like a cardiac patient on a stationary bike. God, he couldn’t take all this drama. How he missed Bee
right then, and not just her, but the safety net, the delightful, sane, predictable days of their marriage.

He decided to go to the cookout at Peggy and Ike’s the next night. If Ellen showed up, he might have an opportunity to talk to her again, to ease the residual tension of their doorstep conversation. And if she wasn’t there, he would just try to unwind in the calm, friendly atmosphere of a party. In the meantime, he tried to direct his attention away from himself. He started just after supper with a phone call to Julie, to make up for his earlier distraction.

But she wasn’t home, and he was treated to a voice-mail message he’d never heard before, a few bars of a song by a male vocal group that seemed to go, “Whassup, my brother? Whassup, my sister?” followed abruptly by a beep. Maybe he’d dialed the wrong number. Edward cleared his throat and said, “Well, sorry I missed you. I’ll try again later.” If it was Julie’s phone, she’d recognize his caller I.D., if not his strained voice. And if he’d reached a stranger, his message was suitably anonymous and innocuous.

He called Nick and Amanda next, and the phone rang several times before Nick picked up and said, “
What
.” Edward hadn’t heard that belligerent tone in Nick’s voice since he was a kid. And where was Amanda, who always picked up another extension simultaneously? He hoped he hadn’t called them in the middle of a quarrel. And then he remembered Julie’s news about them trying to have a baby, and realized that he’d probably interrupted them in bed.

Edward thought of all the times Nick or Julie had interrupted him and Bee in the early days of their marriage, how they’d freeze in an embrace behind their locked bedroom door at the sound of knocking, how the children seemed to have some special radar that picked up the first hint of sexual contact.
“What are you doing?” Julie might say, rattling the knob. “The door is stuck.” Nick would want to know where his Walkman or his Pogo Ball was, as if they were hiding it under their mattress.

“It’s Dad,” Edward said into the telephone. Good old Dad, with his perfect timing. Maybe it ran in the family.

“Hey,” Nick said. “We’re just in the middle of … of a movie. Is everything okay up there? Can we get back to you later?”

Why did Edward persist in thinking they all needed him—that his absence, even for a month, left them disorganized and defenseless?

At least he could count on Gladys being home after dark and not too busy to talk to him, unless she was in an emergency room somewhere. There had been another scare, less than a month ago—a fainting spell—another little rehearsal for the real thing. How would it be to go around thinking of your life as a tentative, ironic gift? Why didn’t everyone feel that way all the time? That was the miracle, really, that we live as if we were immortal, that we shout “Hello!” to each other when “Good-bye!” would be so much more appropriate.

But Gladys answered the phone in a robust voice, with other, even livelier voices in the background. “Do you have company?” Edward asked.

“Only Keith Olbermann and that darling Rachel,” she said. “Hold on a minute.”

After a while, the background voices were cut off and Gladys said, “Did you hear the news?”

“Has something happened?” he asked, suddenly filled with apprehension about the larger world he’d left behind.

“Yes!” she said. “Nicky is trying to become a father!”

Well, that certainly hadn’t been on MSNBC. “Did he tell you that?”

“No, no,” Gladys said. “Julie did. But don’t tell anyone, okay? It’s a secret.”

Some secret. If it were up to Julie, it
would
be on the evening news.

Then Gladys said, “So, are you having a nice time, honey?” and he almost burst into tears, or into a babbling confession of his screwed-up love life. But of course he didn’t. He was confident that in Gladys’s mind he still belonged to Bee.

Real Life

E
llen didn’t show up at the Martins’ cookout. Edward mingled with the other guests, trying to be sociable and not seem preoccupied, but he was like Bingo two years earlier, wandering the rooms of the house on Larkspur Lane, looking for Bee. When he finally worked up the nerve to ask about Ellen, as offhandedly as he could, Peggy said, “Oh, she was going to come, but then she canceled last night. She said she was coming down with something, some bug she must have picked up in Connecticut.”

So that’s where she’d been, where she spent the rest of the year in what he now thought of as her real life, where she lived and worked. Edward imagined some real estate transaction, a closing or a mortgage issue, that had required her presence. But then Peggy said, “I think she and her ex had some matters to iron out.” When she saw Edward’s face, she hastily added, “But
she’s back now, and this is probably just some twenty-four-hour virus.”

He immediately saw the double standard of his thinking, the sophistry of the jealous rumbling in his chest. Even if Ellen had unfinished business with her husband, even if sex was a part of it, who was he to complain? Laurel had been in his bed and was still, to his surprise, very much on his mind. In fact, he had decided to call her. Without an emotional investment, he had nothing to lose. Had he reverted to the player he’d been between Laurel and Bee? No, of course not; he was way past all that. And he’d known absolute love since then, which was as good as a conversion. He would always long for it again. This would just be an intermediate dalliance.

That night he did phone Laurel, and she said, “I was afraid you’d forgotten about me,” but not accusingly, or even in a self-pitying tone.

“That would be pretty hard to do,” he said.

Their conversation was friendly and flirtatious.
“Tu me manques
,
”
she said. She missed him, in two languages, and she never asked about the woman with the flowers at the door. Edward was aroused by her voice, by images he’d held of her body, of what they’d done together, recently and long ago. But he would call the shots this time around, keeping it uncomplicated and light. They made a date in the city for the evening after he got back to Englewood.

Then, two days before he left the Vineyard, he ran into Ellen at the checkout counter in the market. His pulse accelerated at the sight of her. They had unfinished business between them, too, although its nature wasn’t entirely clear. “Is the moratorium on phoning you over yet?” he asked.

After a beat, she said, “You’re leaving soon, aren’t you? I am, too. Maybe we can speak after we’re both home. I’ll give you my
number there.” She borrowed a pen from the grocery checker. He started to turn up his palm, but she’d pulled a receipt from a shopping bag and, leaning on the counter, scribbled on it. “Safe trip back,” she said, handing him the receipt.

“You, too,” he answered, and he could swear his palm tingled, as if it had been slapped.

Back in Englewood, in his own real life, there was garden work to do and email to read and answer. He’d had his bills forwarded to the Vineyard, and Mildred had come by to water the plants and check on the house, so things were pretty much in order. But there was a static feeling inside the rooms that couldn’t be dispelled by simply opening the blinds and windows to let in sunlight and air. “Well, we’re home,” he said to Bingo. “What do you think of that?” Although he’d sworn he wouldn’t become one of those geezers who held one-way conversations with their dogs.

Laurel’s third-floor walkup in Chelsea, with its thrown-together, thrift-shop décor, seemed youthful and temporary. It reminded Edward of Julie’s place in Hell’s Kitchen, except Laurel didn’t have a roommate, for which he was very grateful. Minutes after he arrived, still a little winded from the stairs, they were in each other’s arms. Sex first, then a nap, and then a hand-in-hand stroll through the neighborhood, which was filled with a variety of restaurants, to find the perfect place for supper. Edward discovered that he had a great appetite for all of it.

If Ellen entered his thoughts once in a while, and Bee far more often, he kept it to himself and didn’t really feel disloyal to anyone. This was life, with its proverbial, restorative way of going on. He didn’t tell anybody about his reunion with Laurel, either, and didn’t consider himself duplicitous. It was a private matter, the honeymoon he was denied decades ago, only without the wedding, and in Manhattan rather than abroad. You don’t
take anyone else along, even metaphorically, even on a metaphorical honeymoon.

But he didn’t invite her to Englewood, and she didn’t ask to go there. Everything fit neatly into its own compartment: his immutable connection to his family; his friendships in the city and those close to home; and this strange, pleasurable interlude with Laurel. That’s what he told himself it was, because he didn’t really expect it to last. He just wanted to relish it while he could. Despite all the evidence of her new stability and the remorse she’d expressed for the past, he was still being cautious, watching for signs of the old restless and capricious Laurel, the one capable of disappearing as abruptly as she’d reappeared.