An Available Man (5 page)

Then Sybil herself was coming toward him, pulling the plant woman along by the hand. “Oh, Edward,” she said, as if they’d just run into each other in the street. “I want you to meet my most favorite cousin, Olga Nemerov. Ollie, this is our old, dear friend, Edward Schuyler.” The woman scowled at Sybil
and then at Edward, who contained his impulse to scowl back as Sybil skittered away from them like a sand crab toward other guests.

Instead, he managed a stilted smile that this Olga Nemerov didn’t bother to return. Was she really Sybil’s cousin or merely some minor, sour character plucked from Chekhov? “Do you live in New Jersey?” he asked idiotically.

“God, no,” she said, with what he perceived as a tiny shudder. She was a slight, bespectacled person in a prickly-looking tweed suit. Among the other colorful and scented women at the party, she was like a cactus in a rose garden. Bee would have intuitively shown up by now and rescued him.

“Well, it’s not
that
bad,” Edward said, thinking that it actually was that bad, that everywhere was. He wanted to ask her why she was so angry, before he realized that she, too, had understood why they’d both been invited and thrust together. “This wasn’t my idea, you know,” he said.

“My cousin is incurably romantic,” she answered. “She’s been doing this to me since we were teenagers.”

And it never took
,
did it
, Edward thought. “Sybil means well,” he said, insincerely—another brilliant remark—and Olga actually snorted.

When Henry boomed that dinner was served and that everyone could sit anywhere, Edward and Olga quickly separated, as if they’d been demagnetized, and headed for opposite ends of the table.

During the rest of the evening, Edward felt as if he were under a light anesthesia, from which he was roused from time to time to exchange a few words with his neighbors, to eat a little of the food. He couldn’t even bestir himself to become irate with Sybil for being so insensitive to him and disloyal to Bee’s memory. It would have been useless, anyway. She would either baldly
deny having tried to set him up, or scold him for yielding his zest for life, Bee’s best and most contagious quality.

Finally, the ordeal was over. There were more handshakes and kisses, and farewells: “Good night, drive carefully, call me, good night!” Even Sybil’s unsmiling cousin offered her hand at the door and Edward took it, surprised that it was soft rather than bristling with thorns. And then, mercifully, he was released back into his own care.

The Misery of Company

T
here was only one other man in the grief counselor’s living room, and he looked up with something like relief in his eyes when Edward came in. A woman with a notebook on her lap smiled and said, “You must be Edward Schuyler. I’m Amy Weitz. Welcome, and take a seat.” Five other women sitting there glanced at Edward with varying degrees of attention. The only remaining seat was between two of them on a deep sofa, where he slowly sank, as if into a downy trap.

As he’d told Bee, he wasn’t partial toward groups of strangers. He wasn’t a member of Kiwanis, the Rotarians, or even the National Education Association. And unlike Bee, he’d never joined a bridge or book club. They’d played bridge with their friends, and reading seemed to him like the last stronghold of privacy in a group-crazed society. Why had she ever thought he could abandon his natural reserve in a situation like this?

But Edward felt intolerably bad, and his friends kept clucking over him. At least there was school on weekdays, somewhere to go that was more or less programmed and predictable, something he had to get out of bed to do. When he’d first returned to Fenton in September, many of his students had looked at him shyly, almost fearfully. They knew about Bee; that kind of news spread easily in a school community, even during vacation months. Should they say something to him? What should they say?

He felt sorry for them in their awkwardness—everything was so much harder in one’s early teens—so he spared them the remarks they dreaded as much as he did by jumping right into the work at hand. As they entered the classroom, he was writing on the blackboard in great, scrawling letters: “Welcome back! Start thinking again! Why is science important? What are the principles of good science?”

His encounters with colleagues were brief and manageable. Those he was closest to, Frances Hartman in math and Bernie Roth in English, had come to the funeral and to the house afterward, and had expressed their regrets about Bee and their affectionate concern for him. Now they took their cues from Edward, and although he caught some worried glances between them, they kept their conversations with him bearably neutral.

But weekends and evenings had become increasingly difficult. He didn’t want company, and solitary pursuits like birding in the Palisades or performing lab experiments in the basement required energy he couldn’t seem to muster. He’d declined all invitations since the Morgansterns’ dinner—there were several during the holidays—and Henry told him that his withdrawal was unhealthy; perhaps he needed some outside help. And then his internist seconded the motion when Edward came to him for a prescription or two: something to help him sleep at night,
something to keep him functioning better during the day. In addition to a mild sedative, Dr. Fiedler scribbled a couple of names on his prescription pad.

Amy Weitz, MSW, CSW, whose iron-gray hair and excellent posture reminded Edward of the teachers of his childhood, asked each of them to say who they were and why they were there. It wasn’t like those 12-step programs where only first names and addictions are given, followed by a chorus of greetings. The prevailing mood in the room was like Edward’s own—tentative and sad.

Most of them had lost spouses. The two women who flanked Edward, Claire Broido and Lucy James, were both recent widows whose husbands had succumbed, respectively, to a damaged heart and a major stroke. A third woman’s husband had committed suicide. And the wife of the other man, Charlie Ryan, had died of lung cancer. But one of the women, who appeared to be in her early sixties, was mourning the loss of her aged mother, and another the death of her only child, an eleven-year-old boy.

When it was Charlie Ryan’s turn to speak, he said, bitterly, “She didn’t even
smoke
!” A murmur rippled through the room. There was a collective sense of outrage, in addition to the pall of sorrow, and Amy Weitz asked Charlie if it might be easier if there was someone or something to blame.

Charlie admitted that it probably would be, and Edward silently agreed. If you didn’t believe in God, for instance, you couldn’t rail against his injustice or his mysterious ways. Without faith or the tobacco industry, there was just nature and chance and everyone growing seasick in the same rocky boat. There was, in the end, only the mandate of biology. As he warned his new students, year after year, while they fiddled with their pens and looked out the window: everything that lives dies. But he
didn’t say any of that now. He just listened as the others told their torturous stories.

The almost elderly, unmarried orphan had always lived with her mother. And what could she say about a ninety-year-old woman who had died? That she was crippled by arthritis and nearly blind. That she had once been a dancer and had greatly loved her daughter, Helene, who was now clearly bereft. The mother of the dead child leaned over and patted her hand.

Then it was Edward’s turn. He repeated his name and said, “I was married for almost twenty years. My wife’s name was Beatrice—Bee. She died of pancreatic cancer.” It sounded, to his own ears, like a paid death notice, with an eye to the cost per word. But he couldn’t talk about Bee in more intimate terms here. Even if he were so inclined, it might take twenty more years to describe her, to convey a compendium of moments in their life together. And he wasn’t petitioning for anyone’s sympathy, anyway. He’d had lots of that from people close to him, and it was like a mild analgesic salve applied to a critical wound.

He was surprised by how few tears were shed at this gathering of the newly bereaved. He had feared outbursts of weeping and keening, an epidemic of despair. Maybe, like him, they were all cried out. Even Gabby Lazard, the dead boy’s mother, was able to tell what happened without falling apart, although her eyes glistened while she spoke and others sniffled and blew their noses.

It was an accident, Gabby said. Her boy, Ethan, had been playing outdoors with a couple of his friends in their wooded suburban neighborhood. They were chasing one another around some trees when Ethan tripped and was impaled on the sharp arm of a fallen branch. His femoral artery had been punctured and he’d bled to death while the other boys ran to get help.

“Fucking trees!” Charlie Ryan blurted. “Pardon my French,” he added softly, with a nod toward the women.

Fucking trees
,
indeed
, Edward thought,
and fucking cancer
,
too
. After Bee died, he’d smashed dishes and kicked the stuffing out of her beloved chintz chair. But he’d had the chair repaired, and he found that anger, one of the five purportedly necessary stages of grief, only left him spent and shamefaced. What were the other stages? He could only remember two of them now: bargaining and acceptance, neither of which he’d experienced.

As if she had been reading his mind, Amy said, “Anger is one of the five stages of grief Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about. You all might want to take a look at her book, if you haven’t already. Or read Sherwin Nuland.”

Like a dutiful, eager student, Helene took out a pad and pencil and made notes. Edward had read Nuland’s book
How We Die
several years before, mostly out of intellectual curiosity. What still stuck in his mind was a single phrase: “The majority of people die peacefully.” Had he misremembered or taken it out of context? In any event, that notion may have helped some survivors find their own peace. It didn’t work for him. Nor did the word
closure
that a few of the mourners said they hoped to achieve. Edward believed that they thought of it as a door closing softly on their grief, but he was afraid it might shut out more than they’d bargained for, memories of love and pleasure as well as of loss.

The personal stories continued and expanded. Gabby told them that Ethan had been into Harry Potter, magic, and the band Green Day, and that her marriage had broken up after his death. In a way, she said, he had released her and her husband from a state of chronic unhappiness. The first signs of Oscar James’s stroke was a drooping eye and a slurred complaint about
a bad haircut. Only days after his death did Lucy realize he’d been trying to tell her that he had a bad headache.

Judith Frank, the widow of the suicide, said that she’d missed some vital signs, too. After years of depression, her husband’s gloom had miraculously dissipated. It hadn’t occurred to her that he’d become euphoric because he’d finally planned a way out. Claire Broido confessed that she had often secretly felt for Al’s pulse while he slept. She said that she’d buried two husbands in ten years. Charlie, the class clown, muttered, “Remind me not to marry you,” and there was actually a smattering of laughter.

No one spoke ill of the departed, who seemed to have all been good looking and generous to a fault, and Edward began to find some of the encomiums suspect. Didn’t any of the husbands have a short temper, or leave the toilet seat up, or kiss his wife’s best friend in the kitchen during a dinner party? Did Helene really never see her mother’s love as a stranglehold that had deprived her of an independent life? And surely Judith Frank had to recognize the punitive aspect of her husband’s suicide. The man had shot himself, at home, where she would be sure to find him. Even little Ethan must have committed some crime of childhood, like cruelty to an animal or bullying a classmate.

Which brought Edward to his own canonization of Bee, who’d had habits that irked him: the way she’d start reading something to him when he was trying to read, himself; the books she had always left lying open, facedown, sometimes cracking their spines; her enjoyment of some inane television shows. And what about her failed first marriage? He had only ever heard her side of that story.

Then, as if in another instance of telepathy, Charlie Ryan revealed that although his wife had never smoked, she often
drank like a fish. And Lucy admitted that she and Oscar had been in marriage counseling because of his infidelity. Amy gently probed those sore spots, but sorrow and forgiveness seemed to triumph over disappointment and rage. Denial, Edward remembered, was another of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, but this easy absolution of the dead wasn’t what she’d meant. Maybe they got away with everything, he decided, simply because they’d gotten away.

Toward the end of the session, deathbed scenes were recalled—releasing a wave of withheld tears—and last words repeated, none worthy of anthology, but all precious to the teller. Bee had whispered, “Edward, wait,” which he didn’t share with the group. It might sound self-serving or like something he’d made up. And it was also what she’d sometimes said after sex when she wanted to keep him inside her. Instead, he told them that Luther Burbank’s final words were “I don’t feel good.”