An Available Man (25 page)

“Don’t we know any attractive women?” he said, in a feeble
try at levity, a bid for time. And when Sybil didn’t deign to answer, he sighed and went on. “Laurel’s an old friend, from Fenton, another teacher. I ran into her at MoMA a while back.” Remembering how he’d run
away
from her that day, he had to suppress a laugh.

“Well, bring her Saturday night. Ollie’s bringing Elliot, of course, and it will be just the six of us—casual and cozy. Is there anything I should know about her?”

Plenty
, he thought, before he said, warily, “What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean? Is she a vegan? Is she lactose-intolerant, or allergic to shellfish?”

Two things came into Edward’s mind at once: Laurel sucking the meat out of a lobster claw in the Vineyard, and a stray line from Sylvia Plath:
I eat men like air
. “No, she’s easy to please.”

“Ah,” Sybil said, whatever
that
meant. “Good. Seven o’clock, then.” And she hung up.

Easy to please
seemed like an understatement once he’d told Laurel about the invitation. She practically whooped with joy. “What should I wear?” she asked. “Should I bring them something?”

“It’s just a dinner party in the stultifying suburbs,” he said. “Casual and cozy.” But he was only playing dumb. The thing that thrilled her was the incursion into his other life. They had a brief back-and-forth about travel, in which he finally prevailed. He would stay at her place after school on Friday and drive her out to Englewood in time for dinner. Then they’d drive back to the city, where he’d stay until school on Monday morning. If she asked to stop off to see his house, he would think of something to deter her. The place was being painted; it was a mess; it was late; he didn’t want to fall asleep at the wheel. Not tonight, dear, I have a heartache.

•  •  •

She got too dressed up; it made Edward sad and filled him with affection for her. He was carefully tactful. “Why don’t you wear that blue sweater,” he said. “I love it on you.” Maybe the word
love
, which he hadn’t uttered once since their reconciliation, not even in the final spasms of sex, moved her to change into a less formal outfit. Whenever she said,
“Je t’aime
,
”
which she’d started to do again occasionally, he told himself it didn’t count in French, as if it were merely one of those idiomatic expressions you can’t really translate and that don’t require a response. So far, she hadn’t called him on it.

Olga and Elliot were already there when Edward and Laurel arrived. They were nibbling on olives and cheese and drinking a deeply hued red wine. Henry was something of an oenophile. “Just some tonic on the rocks for me,” Edward said after the greetings and introductions. “We’re going back to the city tonight.”

“Too bad,” Elliot said. “This is an excellent burgundy. Ollie and I are staying over,” he added, and took a hearty swallow of his wine. For the first time, he seemed annoyingly smug.

“We could, too, couldn’t we?” Laurel asked Edward. “At your house, I mean. It’s not far, is it?”

There was an almost palpable charge in the room while everyone waited for his answer. It was like one of those long pauses in a drawing room comedy, with all its attendant sexual innuendo. Edward found himself speculating about Olga and Elliot’s sleeping arrangements. “I hate Sunday traffic,” he said finally, as if everyone else was fond of it. Who was writing his lines? “But you have some wine,” he told Laurel. “I’m the designated driver.”

Sybil smirked into her glass while Henry went to fetch the drinks, but Laurel didn’t appear disconcerted. “What a
pretty room this is,” she said. She walked to the French doors and looked out at the backyard, where fairy lights were strung through the trees. “And no wonder they call this the Garden State.” Did Olga snicker then or just cough?

The main course—a stew of beef and harvest vegetables, as if to herald the change of seasons—was delicious, and Edward relaxed into the conversation, which glided from Olga and Elliot’s work to the midterm elections to recent medical discoveries. Edward was curious about the restoration of those ancient tapestries. Where did they find wool to match the original fibers? Was the repair done on looms? Elliot explained some of the process, and Olga said that Edward and Laurel were welcome to visit the museum lab one day, and see it for themselves.

Later, someone brought up a news item about tests to predict who might develop Alzheimer’s disease in the future. With all of their faculties intact, they began to discuss the hazards and benefits of knowing such a thing. Not surprisingly, Henry’s take was clinical: an early diagnosis made you an ideal candidate for any new therapy down the road.

“You mean an ideal guinea pig,” Edward said. “First trials are just to find out how much it takes to poison, not cure you.”

Henry grudgingly agreed. “So, I’d try to get into a later one,” he said.

“How about trying to avoid the whole thing in the first place?” Laurel said. “You know, use it or lose it? Some people swear that if you do the crossword every day, if you keep engaging your brain …”

Edward thought of Gladys and her jigsaw puzzles, and then of Iris Murdoch, philosopher and writer, who suddenly became lost in her native London. “It may be inevitable,” he said. “Written into your DNA.”

“Then I wouldn’t want to know,” Laurel said. “I’d choose to be happy until the last possible moment.” His little hedonist.

Elliot agreed, but Olga said, “You might want to make plans for the future that you’d be incapable of making later.”

“Like what?” Laurel asked.

“Finances, caretaking, a living will, even suicide. It’s a terminal disease, after all, but one that takes away freedom of choice.”

Sybil darted a nervous glance at Edward, but he smiled at her. “Olga’s right,” he said. “There are things to decide. When Bee was dying …,” he began and then stopped to test his own ability to go on. “When Bee was dying, we—she had to decide about dubious experimental treatments, about when to tell people, about what to do with her last days.” He made it sound like a calm, sane period, without storms of weeping and irrational wishes—the terrible struggle to decide anything at all.

The whole table had grown silent. Henry looked solemn, Sybil close to tears. Edward had ruined the mood of their party, but at least he’d brought Bee back—if only briefly—to this room where she, too, had once enjoyed delicious food and vigorous, theoretical arguments among friends. He felt strangely relieved, even celebratory. He would have loved a glass of that wine right then. “Well,” he said to Sybil, “what’s for dessert?”

“I’d like to see your house,” Laurel said as soon as they were in the car again.

“It’s out of the way and it’s late. I want to get on the road.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said, her tone turning it into a variant of
Lighten up
,
Edward
. “Just a quick look inside, and then we’ll go.”

There was no reasonable argument against it. So he drove the half mile or so in the opposite direction of the bridge to 31
Larkspur Lane. He parked in the driveway, thinking for a moment of leaving the motor running. The motion sensor lights blinked on as they went past the garage and up onto the porch. Somebody else’s vigilant dog barked in the distance, but Edward’s own house was silent. Mildred was keeping Bingo at her apartment for the weekend.

He couldn’t help it: he saw everything through Laurel’s eyes. At home by himself, he was hardly aware of the furnishings, which were always dependably in place and comfortable. He could find his way around with his eyes shut. When Bee was still alive, she’d point out the need for new slipcovers every few years, or that a fraying lamp shade should be replaced, and he’d agree. They both treasured what was familiar, though, and never made any radical changes.

But as soon as Laurel walked ahead of him into the living room, he saw a clump of dog hairs on the throw rug, and the way the cushions on the couch sagged from want of fluffing, or perhaps some extra filling. The seascape hanging above it was crooked. He had to keep himself from crossing the room to adjust it. She wasn’t a prospective buyer or renter. He didn’t care what she thought. Laurel turned to him then and said, “It’s really very nice, Edward. Homey. And now I can picture you here when I’m not with you. Is that your favorite chair?” She pointed to his deep, plush Morris chair that still faced Bee’s chintz-covered affair in a conversational pose.

Before he could answer, there was the scraping of a key in the lock and a woman’s singsong voice, calling “Hello?” Mildred. She must have forgotten the dog treats, or the drops for Bingo’s infected ear. But Laurel seemed stricken at the sounds, and Edward thought of that moment in
Fiddler on the Roof
when the shade of a woman whose husband plans to remarry demands, “How can you allow it? Live in my house? Carry my keys?”

After the introductions were made, and the eardrops retrieved, Laurel yawned and stretched like Goldilocks in the bears’ house, and Edward knew she was going to make another case for staying overnight as soon as Mildred and Bingo were gone. He could imagine some of her contentions: She was so sleepy, wasn’t he? All that heavy food. There’d be hardly any trucks on Sunday. And it looked like rain. His defenses were down. Even without the numbing effects of wine, he couldn’t think as fast as she did.

But then, Mildred, the psychic, said, “It was starting to drizzle when we were walking here. Would you mind giving us a ride home?”

Edward wanted to hug her. Instead, he said, “Sure. No problem. It’s on our way to the bridge.”

Lost and Found

O
n Monday, Laurel tried to coax Edward into staying on at her place for a few more days, but there were errands and chores he had to get to at home, like taking the dog to the vet to check out his ear, refilling the bird feeders, and catching up on the raking. During the remainder of the weekend at Laurel’s, she’d mentioned his house a couple of times—how charming it was, how peaceful his street seemed compared with the chaos of the city. She was hinting at being invited back without asking directly. He was tempted; they’d had a good time together—she’d been especially sweet and sexy—and despite his fears, her brief visit to Larkspur Lane hadn’t proved traumatic or even unpleasant. But he didn’t take the bait; he really did have things to do on his own.

Dr. Sacco said that Bingo’s infected ear was slowly healing, but that his heart had fallen into a serious arrhythmia. He let
Edward listen through his stethoscope to the erratic sounds, the booming drum and the flutter, and he prescribed medication that might help to control the condition without curing it. Surgery was available, too, but such an elderly dog probably wouldn’t survive any extreme measures. “Sometimes,” the vet said, “it’s best to let nature take its course.”

In the late afternoon, Edward put on a pair of old chinos to do the garden work. He found some twine in the crazy drawer to tie back a straggling viburnum. When he was putting it into his pocket, he felt something there—a piece of paper, crinkled and stiff. He often forgot to empty his pockets before doing the laundry. Once, a single Kleenex had caused a snowfall of lint he had to pick off his dark socks for days. Another time, he’d found a twenty-dollar bill that had survived the washer and dryer in a worn, but still spendable state.

Now he withdrew the crumpled paper and saw that it was a grocery receipt. He put it on the counter and smoothed it with his hand. The few items listed were faded but still legible: milk, peaches, Pond’s cold cream. He put his hand to his chest, found his own rapid, steady heartbeat. Bee had used that stuff, the Pond’s. He remembered the green-lidded white jar on her dressing table, the smell of roses on her gleaming face and throat. How old
was
this receipt? The date wasn’t readable, but the name of the store in the Vineyard was. Then he flipped the thing over and saw the telephone number scrawled there. It was only slightly blurry. That must have been a permanent marker rather than a pen that Ellen had borrowed from the checker.

Julie would say that this was a sign, and Mildred would probably back her up. Edward remained a pragmatist, though, even after finding what he had no longer been seeking, as if it had been seeking him. Serendipity brought about by mere random chance. Yet he remembered Laurel leaning toward him at
the movie theater, asking if there was someone else, and he felt spooked by the notion of female intuition.

Bingo shuffled into the kitchen, and Edward reached down to stroke his head, careful not to touch the bad ear. “So, should I call her?” he said. He still hadn’t resorted to conversing with animals; he was really only talking to himself, although he didn’t appear to be any better than Bingo at coming up with an answer. So much time had gone by since he’d last seen Ellen. Maybe he’d missed his chance with her. He put the receipt back into his pocket and went out into the yard to work.

Crouching to lift and bag a pile of leaves, he remembered that when he was a boy and spent his allowance too quickly or foolishly, his father would say, “That money was burning a hole in your pocket.” That was how Edward felt about the grocery receipt with Ellen’s telephone number on it. It generated heat against his thigh, demanding his attention.