An Available Man (31 page)

“Well, I got a really strange phone call a little while ago.”

“Who from?” he asked, although he was sure he already knew the answer.

“From your … from Laurel.”

Edward had imagined getting a call from her in which she would threaten suicide. He’d told himself that it would be pure histrionics, readying his defenses before the fact. Yet now an image of her gasping inside that plastic bag filled his head. His own breath became short and ragged. When he could speak again, he said, “How bad did she sound?”

But Bernie answered his question with a question. “What the hell’s going on between you two?”

“Nothing, it’s over,” Edward said, wondering if it ever would be.

“Yeah, that’s what she told me. But I couldn’t believe she’d do it to you again.”

Edward ignored that last. “What did she say?” he asked, picturing Laurel shouting into her cell phone from a windswept bridge, slurring from the depths of an overdose. But why would she call Bernie?

“Here’s the kicker, man. She wanted to have dinner.”

“What?” Edward said.

“That’s what the lady said. Did I want to meet her for dinner tomorrow night.”

Edward flopped backward onto the bed, felled by relief and confusion. “So, what did you say?”

“Are you kidding?” Bernie said. “First of all, I don’t mess with anyone else’s woman, ex or otherwise. Even I have some standards. And dinner with Laurel—well, somebody’s gonna be devoured, right? And I have a pretty good idea who it would be.”

“But how did she sound?” Edward said.

“I don’t know. Fine, I guess. Flirty, a little funny. Like herself.”

“And after you turned her down?”

“She didn’t stay on too long after that. But she seemed cool with it. Like, whatever, as our most eloquent students would say.” Edward was silent. “You still there?” Bernie asked. “Maybe I shouldn’t have even told you about this.”

“No, it’s okay, really, I’m glad you did.” And he was.

This was the word he’d been waiting for all day, that Laurel had calmed down, that she wasn’t suicidal, after all, that she was following her old pattern of looking for a new man to replace the one she’d lost, or felt in danger of losing. She was still attractive, and beguiling, in her way. Bernie wasn’t going to take her on, but sooner or later someone else probably would. Edward was free.

Fifth Date

H
e felt the same unsettling mix of anticipation and dread he’d had before those blind dates resulting from the ad in
The New York Review
. But so much more was at stake here, and of course he already knew Olga—by heart, he thought, although they had met only a few times. The anticipation came from his desire to see her again and to declare himself, the dread from his fear of being rejected.

The phone call had been awkward enough. Whatever he had intended to say flew out of his head at the sound of her voice. “Ollie, I want to see you,” he’d blurted, and then filled the ticking silence that followed by saying, “I need your advice about something.” Where had that brainstorm come from? But she agreed to have dinner with him that evening, at an Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue.

They came from opposite directions in the midst of a cloudburst,
and almost collided in a sudden gust of wind at the restaurant’s entrance. Her umbrella blew inside out, and Edward fumbled to right it. He wanted to embrace, to enfold, her then, but settled for a wet handclasp—with the umbrella between them, dripping on their shoes—before they went inside. The room was brightly lit and noisy—not the most romantic of settings. But she had chosen it after he’d said, “Pick someplace you like in your neighborhood,” and this was clearly a neighborhood favorite.

After they’d been seated and ordered wine and listened to the specials, she said, “I suppose you’re not in the market for a medieval tapestry, and I don’t know much about investments or used cars. So, are you after some advice to the lovelorn?”

Exactly
, he thought, but only said, “In a way.” She waited and he continued. “Laurel and I have broken things off.”

“Ah,” she said. A noncommittal response in which he heard nothing he could interpret as surprise or pleasure or regret or sympathy.

“And I find I have feelings for you,” he said. The racket in the background seemed to soften and recede as she looked back at him from behind her glasses with all of her attention. “I’m as surprised as you must be,” he said. Why didn’t she say something—anything? No, not anything; just the words he wanted to hear. But she didn’t speak and he was forced to go on. “I think of you all the time.” This was a truth he hadn’t quite known until he said it.

“I think of you, too,” she said. He waited for her to add
but just as a friend
, or
only not in that way
. She didn’t, though, and the table between them became a snowy expanse he could have sprung across. Instead, he reached for her hand and looked at it as carefully as a fortune-teller, or a doctor about to remove a splinter. Her nails were short and unpolished. There were little
nicks in her fingers that he imagined came from the needle he’d watched her ply at the museum. He gazed down at her palm with its crisscrossed lines of life and fate and pressed his lips against it.

“Oh,” she said, that single word floating from her mouth like a perfect smoke ring.

The waiter brought the wine, and a busboy came with a basket of bread and a dish of olives. Edward and Olga glanced at each other through the blur of activity between them. No one who happened to observe them at that moment would have thought they were new lovers, or about to be. They would more easily be taken for an older married couple, out celebrating an anniversary or a birthday, or even some good news about a biopsy. But Edward
felt
new—younger, and flooded with expectation.

Over dinner, he told her something about his history with Laurel, calling it a
folie à deux
, revisited, with a slight pang about the use of that French expression. Then he spoke about Bee: the way they’d met, their marriage, her mother and the children, her illness and death. It sounded to his own ears like a crude abridgement of a long, complex novel. But Olga seemed to intuit whatever he’d omitted. “Bee sounds wonderful,” she said. And, “You’ve been in deep mourning, and everyone expected you to just snap out of it.”

“Yes,” he said. “I hoped, I really
tried
, to snap out of it, myself, but it doesn’t work that way.”

“And you still love her.”

“I do, in remembrance. But this—you—it’s like the beginning of a new lifetime. Mildred, the woman who used to walk my dog, doubles as a psychic—a sort of suburban mystic. She believes in literal past lives. Who knows, maybe I’ve loved many women over the centuries.”

Olga smiled. “Now you’re making me jealous,” she said.

She told him that she’d never come close to what he’d had with Bee, although there’d been affairs that had seemed loaded with promise before they fizzled. “I don’t know why, exactly. Bad choices, bad timing, bad vibes—or maybe it was bad karma, as your friend Mildred might say. Sometimes, I think that I’ve missed out on everything. Other times, I just think of it as my life.”

“Your past life,” he amended.

“Yes.”

They kissed as soon as they were back out on the street, briefly, as if they were sealing a contract. A moment with more tenderness than heat. Then they walked the few blocks in the rain to the brownstone where she lived on the second floor. He’d forgotten that she had a dog, but recognized the scratching and whimpering, that renewable excitement, behind the door to her apartment when she put her key into the lock.

“Don’t worry, she’s friendly,” Olga said as the door opened and the pug leapt from one of them to the other, snorting and wheezing and bestowing affection, her curled tail quivering with happiness.

“There’s an understatement,” Edward said. He missed Bingo right then, but what a sweet dog Josie was, so instantly trusting. Maybe he’d been Napoleon in one of his former lives.

Olga set out the dog’s dinner, and then she led Edward into her bedroom. She removed her eyeglasses and placed them on one of the nightstands before she turned to him. How undefended her naked face seemed. This time their kiss sent a shock directly to his groin.

He’d had some quick impressions of the room when they first came in, that it was smallish and uncluttered, with a faint scent of cedar in the air. Later, he would remember the glow
of the bedside lamps, like moonlight; the thick, silky quilt; and the welcoming give of her bed when they lay down together. Edward had thought, had fantasized, about making love to her. Somehow he’d expected it to be good, but not sizzling—more like the modest charge of a small domestic appliance. She wasn’t his type, because he no longer had a type. But her body was marvelous in its urgency against his, and his own surge of passion took him by surprise.

Afterward, still entwined, they shared a few moments of stunned, happy silence. Then he said, “You don’t really hog the bed, you know.” He marveled at how little space she seemed to take up.

“Just you wait,” she said, but it was more of a promise than a threat.

“So, here we are,” he said. “How did this happen?”

“I’m not sure. Do you think we’ve been possessed?”

“I have, anyway,” he said. “When I remember you at Sybil and Henry’s that first time—”

“Don’t.” She held one finger to his mouth. “I was such a bitch.”

“Yes, you were. And I was an insufferable prick.”

“That’s true. But now we’ve both been transformed.”

“Restored to our better selves,” Edward said, and he realized that this was what he had missed more than anything, this easy, intimate talk before sleep that seemed to send you gently drifting off, away from the shore of the day.

When he was almost there, Olga stirred in his arms. She reached from under the quilt and groped for her glasses. Then she put them on and turned to him again, propping herself up on one elbow

“What are you doing?” he asked drowsily.

“I’m looking at you,” she said.

“Not too closely, I hope.”

“Why not?” she said. “You have a very good face.”

“And you … you are entirely beautiful.”

“Oh, Edward, that’s just post-coital dementia.”

“No,” he said. “It’s love.”

The Seal of Approval

C
hanel appeared as delighted to see Edward as Olga’s pug had been a few weeks before. But in the puppy’s wild excitement, she tugged his shoelaces open, nipped at the hems of his trousers, and peed a little on his shoes. “You bad girl,” Amanda said, making it sound as warmly indulgent as praise. She even slipped Chanel a treat, while handing Edward a Kleenex for his shoes and inviting him to feel her belly, which had grown astoundingly since he’d last seen her. It felt like a basketball, freshly pumped with air and bounce.

Then she and Nick gave Edward a tour of the nursery, which he dutifully admired, although he was taken aback by the black-and-white color scheme. Amanda, who’d been researching prenatal development, explained that stark contrasts would help the baby’s eyes to focus. She was already enhancing the fetus’s brain by reading children’s books aloud, listening to
classical music, and eating foods high in choline and omega-3. They’d decided not to learn the baby’s sex in advance, so they could greet it without what Amanda called “gender-ghettoizing preconceptions.”

“Very nice,” Edward said about everything, although the mobile suspended over the crib had the dizzying effect of an Escher maze.

When they were sitting in the living room, drinking coffee, Nick said, “So, what are you up to, Professor? You haven’t been around for a while.”

Edward couldn’t have asked for a better opening, and he grabbed it. “I’ve been seeing someone,” he said. What people usually said about casual dating, he realized, or about consulting a psychotherapist.

They both stared at him for a moment before Amanda punched Nick’s arm and said, “I told you that ad would work!”

“Ow,” Nick said. “You mean seeing, like in going out with?” he asked Edward.

“Well, more than that,” Edward said, embarrassed by his own sudden shyness.