An Available Man (28 page)

Edward glanced at the strangers scattered around them, with their street maps and bottled water. They all seemed completely benign—art lovers, sun worshipers, like Olga, like himself. Then he thought back to some of the dates he’d had since Bee’s death. “Yeah, hell just about sums it up.” Of course, that pretty well summed up loneliness, too.

“How long have you and Laurel been together?” Olga asked.

“About a million years, on and off,” he said. Then, “I’m getting hungry, aren’t you? Would you like to go someplace else?”

“Sure. My rear end is starting to get numb, anyway.”

They ended up at one of the bistros Edward had checked out earlier, taking the last empty table. After their drinks came, he said, “So why do you despise the Garden State?”

“I don’t despise it,” she said. “It’s just that I love the city, city life.”

“Don’t you miss nature?”

“What’s wrong with Central Park?” She sounded a little testy, the way she had the first time they met. “I walk through it to work on nice days, on days like this. I get my fill of greenness.”

“Hey, I like the park, too. And I used to live in the city, in Hell’s Kitchen, a long time ago.”

“How about Laurel?”

“She’s in Chelsea now.” He believed she was asking him something else, though. “We lived together for a while when we were much younger,” he said.

She sipped her drink and waited, as if he’d only paused in the middle of a long story, which he had.

“We were going to get married then. But she left me stranded.”

Olga didn’t say anything, and Edward just sat there, taken aback by his own candor—he hardly knew this woman—and that he didn’t feel the usual discomfort attached to that ancient event. That was the thing—it
was
ancient history, just as he’d once reminded Laurel. Then why had he held on to it this long, using it as a shield against her? “Sybil and Henry don’t know about any of that,” he said.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell them. I never give Sybil any ammunition.”

“What do you mean?”

“That she hasn’t given up on
us
as a possibility, that imbecile. That she’d consider your history with Laurel as a strike against her, compared with my immaculate past.”

“Is your past immaculate?” he asked.

“Only in Sybil’s eyes. Of course, I don’t tell her lots of things.”

Now it was Edward’s turn to wait, and it didn’t take long. “Well, for one thing, I dated a married man,” Olga said.

His heart spiked and fell. He remembered Laurel’s blunt statements about her married lover, how she’d gone to his house when his wife was away. “Was that your bad situation, just before we met?” he said.

“Oh, God, no. It was back in graduate school, in Philadelphia, and he was a visiting professor, from the Midwest. He went
home for holiday breaks and on occasional weekends, ostensibly to see his ailing mother. I was so dumb, I didn’t realize for almost a year that he was married.”

“And then you broke it off?”

“Yes.”

Their food was served and Edward looked down at his plate, as if he’d forgotten what he’d ordered.

“I thought you were hungry,” Olga said.

“I was. I
am
.” He picked up his fork and poked at his pasta. “This looks delicious,” he said. But he was picturing Olga, lying in the middle of her bed in a tattered nightgown, singing at the top of her lungs.

Lying in Bed

E
dward spent the weekend in Englewood, this time because Laurel had plans of her own in the city, with a friend visiting from Phoenix. He kept himself busy, puttering around the house and the garden, and even spent a couple of hours down in the basement, examining various fibers under the microscope. A bit of wool pulled from an old sweater appeared crimped and covered with overlapping scales, like a fish. The crimping, he knew, was what caused woolen fabrics to retain air and heat. Olga had said that those ancient tapestries were practical as well as decorative, that they’d also served as insulation against the cold. The sweater felt warm in Edward’s hands.

Lying in bed alongside Laurel on Monday night, while she flipped through the channels on the muted TV, he told her about his visit to the museum, without mentioning his dinner
afterward with Olga. It was beside the point, really, an omission rather than a lie. He expected her to be curious about what he’d seen and learned at the conservation lab, despite her reluctance to go there with him, but her interest lay elsewhere. “Were they both there?” she asked, without glancing away from the flickering screen.

“Elliot and Olga?” he said. “Yes, of course. They gave me the grand tour. It’s pretty amazing, really painstaking work. Like adding another layer to history, one stitch at a time.”

“They seem like a pretty tight couple, don’t they?” Laurel said.

His own assumption about them, fostered by Sybil’s carefully fabricated hints. This time he did lie. “I don’t know,” he said. “We concentrated on the tapestries, not on their personal lives.”

He asked about Laurel’s weekend with her friend. “We hit the usual hot spots,” she said. “The Empire State Building, Chinatown, Bloomingdale’s.”

“Did you buy anything?” Sometimes she gave him a private, provocative little fashion show of new clothing that usually ended up with her purchases, tags still attached, in a pile on the floor, and Laurel naked beside him in bed.

She sighed. “Everything was too expensive,” she said, “and designed for twelve-year-olds.”

“Let me buy you something tomorrow,” he said, “as an advance on your birthday present. I’ll help you pick it out.”

Laurel looked at him. Her birthday was months away, and he hated shopping almost as much as she enjoyed it.

His offer surprised him, too, for the very same reasons, but suddenly he’d been infused with feeling for her. He wanted to please and protect her the way he had when they were young and she’d been unhappy about one thing or another. “You can
try it on for me later, and then you can take it off for me,” he said. He took the remote from her hand and shut off the TV. Then he kissed her, and after a beat or two, she began to kiss him back.

He was aroused, as he always was with her, but for the first time in their long history he was unable to do much about it. “I’m sorry, Lulu,” he said, and heard an echo in his head of his apology to Sylvia Smith on their one misbegotten date. He’d been metaphorical about it then, in his embarrassment, claiming to have lost his “concentration.” And in her disappointment she was both caustic and kind.

Now he said, “Maybe I had too much wine with dinner,” although they’d each had only a single glassful at a local Chinese restaurant. And then, “Do they use MSG in that place?” When she didn’t respond, he added, “Or else old age is catching up with me.”

“My old age, or yours?” she said.

“You’re gorgeous, you know that. I love your body.” A passionate truth, and one she liked to hear. He knew that this was the moment to say something else, something larger and more encompassing, like
I love you
, but he held back. It was too easy and too difficult at once. Instead, he said, “May I have a rain check?” And he tried to kiss her again, but she reached across him to the night table on his side of the bed for the remote and turned the TV back on, without the mute this time.

In the morning, he made up for his failure the night before. He was almost late for work because she held on to him for such a long time afterward. When he was getting dressed, she was still in bed, tangled in the sheets, observing him. “Were you thinking about her?” she asked.

Edward stood still, his hand poised at a button on his shirt. His heart banged against it. “About who?” he said.

“Your wife, of course. Who else?”

“Do you mean when I was making love to you?”

“Yes. And when you couldn’t.”

He hadn’t brought Bee into Laurel’s bed, which would have dishonored both of them. He sat down next to her and took her hand. “No, never,” he said. “I’m with you now.”

“When I was in your house,” Laurel said, “I could feel her presence.”

“Well, that’s only natural. She lived there, it was her home. But there’s nobody here but us chickens.”

She reached up and pulled him down to her. He pressed his mouth to her neck; her skin was warm, almost feverish, and she smelled of sleep and sex. “Play hooky today,
mon cher
,” she whispered. “Stay here with me.”

“You know I can’t,” he said. “I have a roomful of kids dying to hear about the anatomy of the frog. But I’ll see you later, okay?”

That afternoon, he met her at one of the designer shops in Saks, where a couple of other men of a certain age sat on strategically placed upholstered chairs, waiting for their female companions to emerge from the dressing rooms. One old guy, with several shopping bags at his feet, drooped in his seat, snoring softly. Bee had spared Edward this sort of expedition, knowing that it bored him and made him feel self-conscious. And aside from her flea market treasure hunts, she wasn’t that enamored of shopping, either.

After Laurel disappeared with a salesclerk, he plunked himself down in an available chair with his briefcase and watched women rifling through the clothing racks as if they were searching for something they’d misplaced. The snoozing man across from him had slumped even lower, and Edward, who was growing drowsy, himself, in this carpeted, windowless environment,
idly wondered if anybody ever died in one of these places, and if the body was carted discreetly away.

Then his mind drifted to the classroom, to the charts he had pulled down that day of the frog’s highly developed nervous system, so similar to a human’s, and of its digestive and reproductive organs. He’d explained that the male frog has vocal cords enabling him to croak, a noise that attracts the female during the rainy breeding season. “Ribbit, ribbit,” one of the boys had intoned, while a couple of girls snickered and tossed their long hair. Edward’s rambling train of thought struck him as mildly funny in his sluggish state—old men croaking in department stores as they waited for their women to reappear, and frogs croaking in the rain for the attentions of the opposite sex. Boys and girls … Of course he was soon asleep, too.

Laurel tapped him on the shoulder.
“Chéri
,
”
she said. “What do you think of this one?”

Edward opened his eyes. She was wearing a simple shimmery black dress, and she walked slowly up and down before him, like a model on a runway. How pretty she was! “It’s perfect,” he said. “Let’s get it.”

She stepped closer to him, while the saleswoman stood at a tactful distance, and wiggled the price tag near his face.
“Soldes
,
”
Laurel whispered, which meant that the thing was on sale, but still sounded like a foregone conclusion, an auctioneer’s final word. Edward patted his pockets for his reading glasses, but remembered they were in his crowded briefcase, and he didn’t want to fumble through it while Laurel and the saleswoman watched and waited. As he pulled out his credit card and hoped for the best, he noticed that the sleeping old man across from him was gone.

Urgent Personal Business

B
ingo died in his sleep at home—what most people would consider a “good death,” if there actually was such a thing. But even modest canine pleasures, like meals and walks and rolling around in a pile of dry leaves, seemed significant to Edward in their termination. And he felt worse than he’d expected. That terrible sensation of loss after Bee’s death, from which he’d so slowly recovered, was revisited. Not in the same way, of course; the ache was more diffuse and not constant, but it also evoked a second round of grief for her. Without casseroles this time, or a bereavement group, and only a modicum of sympathy from friends. Bingo was just an animal, after all, and he was very old. Nature had taken its course.

It happened on a Wednesday night, and Edward took the rest of the week off from school, citing urgent personal business.
Then he canceled the plans for Thursday and Friday that he’d made with Laurel. “Poor Edward,” she said, when he called with the news.

“Poor Bingo, actually,” he replied, remembering her uneasiness around the dog.