An Available Man (8 page)

When the doorbell rang, Edward tossed the newly opened letters into the trash and shoved the others into the crazy drawer in the kitchen. Then he went to let Sybil, Lizzie, and Joy in. They’d come, at Sybil’s suggestion a few days earlier, to help him dispose of Bee’s belongings. “Don’t you think it’s time, Edward?” she’d asked—a diplomatic rhetorical question. But he could imagine her telling Henry that Edward was becoming morbidly attached to artifacts, straight out of “A Rose for Emily,” and she didn’t even know about the ironing.

And now there she was, armed with two sidekicks and a stack of cartons. “Your cleaning brigade has arrived!” Joy announced gaily in the doorway, as if the three of them were really there to mop up after a wild party. It was only nervousness that made her blurt things out like that, Edward knew. She often put her hand over her mouth right after she spoke, as if to stem the flow of any further faux pas.

Edward squeezed her arm. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “All of you must have better ideas than I do about this stuff.”
This stuff
. He could have clamped his hand over his own mouth. Instead, he took the cartons from Sybil and led the women upstairs to the master bedroom, where he flung open Bee’s closet. “I guess we can start here,” he said, and Joy burst into tears.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, fluttering her hands helplessly before dabbing at her eyes. “It’s just—”

“We
know
,” Sybil said, slapping Joy sharply on the back, as if to dislodge a fish bone from her throat. Then she began pulling hangers off the rack and laying Bee’s clothing out across the bed. The long gray velvet skirt, the pale green silk suit she’d worn to Nick and Amanda’s wedding, the blouses Edward had so carefully ironed falling into a limp, shapeless heap. The other women quickly joined in, Lizzie piling shoes on the floor next to the bed, and Joy gently placing one of Bee’s favorite dresses—with a pattern of violet sprigs—on top of the blouses.

Edward opened the drawers of her dresser and added underwear and panty hose and nightgowns; they slithered so easily through his fingers. From the corner of his vision, he saw Lizzie briefly hold the violet-sprigged dress against her body while glancing into the full-length mirror inside the closet door. “If there’s anything anyone would like to have …,” he began, and then abruptly stopped. He’d had a vivid image of a future dinner party where every woman showed up wearing something of Bee’s.

“No,” Sybil said, yanking the dress from Lizzie’s hands. “No. Bee would have wanted it all to go to some charity. She said something about it once, don’t you remember, Edward? We’ll put the boxes in the garage and you can arrange for a pickup. Maybe we can get them to that flooded area in the Midwest …”

“Yes, perfect,” Edward said, his motives less altruistic than Sybil’s. He just wanted everything to be taken as far away from there as possible.

When they were done, he opened the drawer in the dresser where Bee had kept her costume jewelry in a tangled mass, like a child’s dress-up treasure box. “I know she would have
liked each of you to have something of hers as a keepsake,” he said.

It would be tolerable, he’d decided, to spot one of her Bakelite bangles in a crowd one day, or a string of glass beads that actually might have belonged to anyone. Most of them
had
belonged to someone before Bee. She’d loved to shop at flea markets and garage sales, sometimes speculating on the previous owners of her finds as possible kindred souls.

Each of her friends chose a single piece of jewelry and the rest went into one of the cartons destined for distant strangers. The four of them carried the cartons into the garage, and Sybil gave Edward a list she’d prepared of organizations that might pick them up and distribute them. Edward felt oddly lighter and heavier at the same time.

After the women were gone, he resisted the impulse to go back upstairs and look at the empty closet and drawers. He walked the dog, who’d been confined to the kitchen during the purging, and then Edward went in there and poured himself a stiff shot of vodka on the rocks. He sat on a stool at the counter, sipping his drink and looking through the newspaper he’d already read that morning.

The war, the war. Stalemates in the Middle East and in Congress. There were photos of the flood-ravaged towns Sybil had referred to, where Bee’s clothing would probably be worn in some makeshift shelter rather than at a festive dinner party. Bloomingdale’s was having a white sale. Some eighty-nine-year-old musicologist had died following a fall in his home. It was Saturday and the crossword puzzle looked daunting. Edward put the paper aside and opened the drawer where he’d stashed the letters. There was still time to open a few more before he’d have to start thinking about dinner.

Some of the women sounded nice—quietly friendly, and funnier and more modest than most of those who had placed ads. Lonesome, the way he was. A couple of them seemed slightly insane. He began to put the letters into piles, the way he did sometimes with students’ papers before he graded them: the brainy ones, the hopeless cases, and those that fell somewhere in between.

He opened a can of clam chowder and poured it into a pot. There was a desiccated-looking bagel in the freezer that might be toasted back to edibility. He wasn’t hungry exactly, just kind of restless. How good it once was to prepare dinner for two, to chop onions on the cutting board while Bee shelled the peas and the broth simmered. To set the table, each place mat a mirror image of the other.

He saw that they’d forgotten about Bee’s aprons, still hanging on magnetized hooks at the side of the refrigerator, but they were unisex, really. He tied one around his waist and turned on the heat under the soup.

For over a year Edward hadn’t felt sexually aroused, as if a vital wire between his brain and his penis had been severed. He’d tested himself a couple of months ago with a porn site on the computer, and those women with their absurdly enhanced breasts, their staged expressions of lust, and the choir of moans that might have come from a horror movie all left him unmoved. Now, standing at the stove stirring the soup, he became aware of a halfhearted erection.

What kind of sicko was he that the discarding of Bee’s clothing, or scanning the desperate letters of women he’d never met, or the sea-smell of the canned chowder could turn him on, even weakly, after such a long dry spell? Then he thought of the three women he knew well who had been in his bedroom only hours
ago, with their rustling skirts, their hair, and the fluty chorus of their voices. And he remembered how they’d each embraced him at the garage door before they left, Lizzie going last, after the others had turned away, and that she’d kissed him fully and lingeringly on the lips.

First Date

I
n the darkened AV room, Edward kept telling the kids to settle down. But the title of the video,
Our Sexual Selves
, had been paused on the big plasma screen as they’d come in, sending a ripple of nervous excitement through them, like a wave undulating through the fans in a baseball stadium. There was a lot of laughter and shoving as they scrambled for seats, and pens and pencils clattered to the floor.

It was always like this. The videos had changed over the years, growing more explicit in content and language, along with the sophistication of the students, but their reactions remained the same. Most of the boys had gravitated toward the left side of the room, the girls to the right. They could have been Democrats and Republicans, divided by ideology and an aisle. But the two groups in front of Edward were likely to find
common ground a lot sooner. Some of them, he was pretty sure, already had.

The voice-over on the video was female and friendly, as opposed to the god-like authority of those sonorous male voices in the “sex education” films when Edward was a teenager. One of them, he remembered, was called
How We Got Here
and might have been about Christopher Columbus, or immigration, rather than human reproduction. The first image on the screen then was of a boy and girl shaking hands. The only thing missing in that sanitized version of their supposed attraction was gloves.

The narrator intoned that Tommy and Jane were friends, and that friendship sometimes blossomed into love (an older T. & J.
holding
hands), and love into marriage (rice being thrown at the newlyweds). As Edward recalled, those were the final postnatal human beings in the film, until the cute little baby in Jane’s arms at the end, with Tommy grinning beside them. The rest were medical text illustrations of gonads and ovaries; the age-old story, illustrated with arrows, of the sperm’s journey toward the waiting egg; and the gradual development of the folded, big-headed fetus. No penises, no vaginas, and definitely no foreplay.

There was enough, though, to arouse disgusted and titillated cries from the adolescents in that 1950s classroom: “Eww!” “Gross!” “Whoo-hoo!” Mrs. Grady, Edward’s eighth-grade hygiene teacher, had to rap on her desk with a ruler, calling, “People, people!” as if to remind them that they belonged to a civilized species. Maybe it was only their imaginations and hormones at work. Edward wondered if just the sputtering sounds of an old movie projector could provoke an erotic charge in him.

Our Sexual Selves
had the soft-porn look of a music video. It began with a blast of rock music to which a group of male and female dancers in body stockings stomped and shook. Sex,
the female voice said, as the relentless beat continued in the background, is everywhere in our culture. This was followed by clips from romantic scenes in movies and TV shows, glimpses of nude Roman statuary, suggestively clad fashion models shimmying down a runway, and even a brief view of an ordinary young couple making out on a park bench. One of the boys in the classroom cried out, “No, stop!” in falsetto, as one of them invariably did, to the cheering of his buddies.

Of course the video’s focus, like those of the 16mm films of Edward’s schooldays, was on reproduction, the blending of genetic information—nature’s raison d’être for sex. And words like
scrotum
and
testes
were still good for a laugh.

While stopping short of advocating abstinence, the narrator told her audience that although desire was a normal, healthy part of growing up, it was best to engage in sexual activity when one was mature enough to make wise decisions. The girls trilled and buzzed about that. The boys booed heartily, of course.
Tell it to their testosterone
, Edward thought. And at lunch in the faculty room afterward, when he recounted the video’s caution against mindless sex, his friend Bernie said, “Hmm, mindless sex. Isn’t that a redundancy?”

Later, at home, Edward prepared for his first date in what seemed like a millennium. He showered and shaved and polished his shoes. He used the electric toothbrush, which he hadn’t done for such a long time that his gums bled a little. Then he tried on a couple of sports jackets before deciding on one. No tie, though. The restaurant he’d chosen was supposed to be very good, but casual. Bingo seemed to have picked up on his mood, moving anxiously behind him from room to room. Mildred was going to take him for his walk later, relieving Edward of a curfew.

Almost fifty years before, when he was getting ready for his
very first date, which consisted of changing his T-shirt and taming his unruly blond hair with water, his mother and father were at home but keeping their distance. Back then, he was going to take a girl named Rachel Granby to a school play, a kind of evening version of their daytime lives.

Tonight, he was meeting someone called Karen Leslie at the Paper Moon in Short Hills. She was one of the five correspondents whose replies to the ad he’d held on to. She’d declined his offer to pick her up—either a sign of her independence, or a defense against some potential serial killer knowing where she lived.

After her letter, their communication had been through email. She was fifty-four, she’d informed him, a Jerseyite, too, who worked in finance and had been divorced for a long time. He liked the specificity of her age, her laid-back tone, even the odd fact that she had two first names.
Relax
, she seemed to be saying,
this isn’t going to be a big deal
.