An Available Man (9 page)

He realized that he wanted the company of a woman—a shared meal and conversation—but beyond that, he told himself, he had no plans, no intentions. The near future was a peaceful blank. He tried not to think about Bee, about the past, about anything at all. But his mind kept returning to the video he’d shown at Fenton that afternoon with its underlying message that sex was for procreation, not recreation.

All those years ago, when he’d sat next to Rachel in their junior high school auditorium as the houselights dimmed, he was excruciatingly aware of their elbows almost touching on the armrests. Did the hair on his arm actually stand up to graze the amber down on hers? She had breasts as tiny as teacups he could sip from. He’d felt swamped by a surfeit of that normal, healthy desire. What a dirty biological trick it was to inflame barely socialized kids with such burning lust.

Karen Leslie was sitting at the bar in the Paper Moon, drinking a martini, when he got there. He knew who she was by the way she turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow in appraisal. Her crossed legs were long and muscular. He went over and shook her hand, like a business acquaintance, like Tommy in the sex ed film of his youth.

She was good looking in a hard-edged, female-action-figure sort of way. Walking behind her and the hostess to the table, Edward realized that the two women were almost interchangeable, with their artful makeup and twitching short black skirts. They had the same self-possessed carriage, too, but only one of them was carrying menus.

They sat down and Karen said, “So, who are you?” The question caught him by surprise. He’d already told her about himself in their email exchange: his marriage and widowhood, his job, the stepchildren—but maybe all that was only the dating equivalent of giving his name, rank, and serial number.

He’d grown to be, post-Laurel, fairly confident with women, whether or not there was sexual tension between them. There was tension at this table, but he wasn’t sure of its nature. Suddenly he wasn’t sure of anything, least of all what he was doing there.
I’m heartbroken
, he might have said,
and I’m horny
. There was an icebreaker for you.

Instead, he caught the eye of the waiter and ordered two martinis. In his head, Bee whispered:
You are what you are
,
Edward
, as if she were giving him dating pointers from beyond. “I guess I’m just a guy trying to make a good impression,” he told Karen Leslie. “What about you?”

“Let me see,” she began. “I’m a fiscal conservative; I’ve been divorced twice. My older son doesn’t talk to me. Should we look at the menus? I’m starving.”

“Sure,” he said, but she had already raised and opened hers,
so that her face was hidden. He could still see the pale shadow of her cleavage, that sweet place. Her fingernails were long and crimson. This was a mistake; he didn’t like her—she was cold and tough—and yet he wanted her. Or the hostess. Or another woman, blond and chubby, sitting at the bar clinking glasses with a friend. Jesus. It was an even dirtier trick to allow those long past the age of procreation to want to go on fucking, maybe forever, even without the gentling grace of love.

“I’ll have the striped bass,” Karen Leslie said.

They got through dinner discovering that they didn’t care for any of the same movies or music or books. If they were a couple, Edward thought, they would always cancel out each other’s vote. And if one of those matchmaking services had set them up, they’d have just cause for a refund, if not a lawsuit.

But his own cynicism disturbed him. Bee used to say that he had a gift for bringing out the best in people, a natural empathy. Had he lost that when he’d lost her? “What happened between you and your son?” he asked Karen.

“He’s decided to be gay,” she said.

“That’s not really a decision,” Edward said.

She clicked her fingernails against the side of her espresso cup for a moment, and then she said, “You don’t do this very often, do you?”

“Have dinner?” he said. “Nearly every night.”

“Funny,” she said mirthlessly.

So he’d blown it. A least they’d come to the restaurant in separate cars and could part ways in the parking lot without too much discomfort.

When he’d walked Rachel Granby home from their date, he’d ventured to take her hand and she let him, after moving a balled-up Kleenex to her other one. The play had been
Our Town
, that perennial favorite of the school’s Drama Department,
and Rachel had snuffled and wiped her eyes throughout the performance. Edward had to swallow several times, but managed to hold back his own tears. Love and death, that incomparable duo; a good-night kiss seemed built into the scenario. He remembered to moisten his lips, while Rachel dried hers with the back of her hand. Then he moved closer and she met him halfway.

In the parking lot of the Paper Moon, Edward walked Karen Leslie to her BMW. “This was nice,” he found himself saying as she pressed the remote to unlock the doors. The headlights blinked and the horn beeped, and he leaned over to kiss her cheek. He almost lost his balance when she grabbed the lapels of his jacket and pulled him toward her, crushing her mouth against his—tongue, teeth, pelvis, the works.

Then she released him just as quickly, slid into the driver’s seat, and asked if he wanted to get in beside her or follow her home. Edward stood there, regaining his breath, his equilibrium. First Lizzie’s furtive smooch in the garage, and now this—Bee’s reluctant prophecy for him coming true. So why didn’t he feel elated, at least below the belt? He patted the roof of the car and said, “Karen, thank you, but you’re right, I am still new at this. And I’m not quite ready yet.” When she slammed the door and sped away, he inhaled a lungful of exhaust as if it were pure oxygen.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

E
ven as a child, Edward, who enjoyed school, had looked forward to the freedom of summer. By May, he was already distracted by the balmy air and the occasional housefly or gnat that drifted in through the open classroom windows, by the promise of all the unstructured days that lay ahead. His father had worked for the post office and always took his two-week vacation time in July. The family would go on a short trip somewhere—to camp out up at Lake George; to visit a historic site, like Colonial Williamsburg; or to stay at a small hotel in upstate New York. Edward had shown an early propensity for science in school, but his love affair with nature began during those summers, with the discovery of nearly invisible life among the blades of grass, and the mysterious humming and chirring from the trees and ponds at night.

As a young teacher, he’d gone off to Europe in the summertime,
like most of his colleagues. He and Laurel had planned a monthlong honeymoon in Venice and Trieste; she’d littered their apartment with travel guides and brochures. His honeymoon with Bee was a three-day weekend in Provincetown, while Gladys took care of Nick and Julie. Every year after that, until Bee’s illness, they’d rented the same house on Lake Tashmoo, in Vineyard Haven, for the month of July.

Now those intoxicating spring breezes and yet another generation of insects floated just outside the closed windows of Edward’s air-conditioned classroom at Fenton Day, and his students were already glancing away from the lesson on the blackboard toward escape. But so much leisure time—that bonus of teaching envied by other, much higher-paid professionals—loomed as a threat to the sanctity of Edward’s daily routine. And summer itself was booby-trapped with memories.

July 8 would be the first anniversary of Bee’s death. In the bereavement group, Amy Weitz had warned against the particular pain of holidays and birthdays and anniversaries. Somehow, Edward had gotten through Bee’s birthday in September with the diversons of the new school term, and the winter holidays seemed like a blur in retrospect, an emotional snowstorm through which he’d somehow found his way.

But how would he get through ten long weeks without any plans? He couldn’t go back to the Vineyard without Bee, to the borrowed house they’d both loved, and face fresh condolences from their neighbors there. And he didn’t think he could occupy himself at home; he certainly wasn’t eager to try dating again anytime soon. So he went to the guidance office at school in early May and found a private tutoring job two days a week with a seventh-grader who wasn’t in any of his classes.

Nathaniel Worth was failing science and falling behind in almost everything else. According to his guidance counselor,
Jenny Greene, Nathaniel had been a “late surprise,” born when his parents were in their mid-forties. His older brother and sister had both breezed through Fenton years before, earning him an automatic place there. He’d been tested by a psychologist and a learning specialist, and was deemed intelligent but with low self-esteem, and with issues about his organizational and social skills. He didn’t have many friends, Jenny said, and had been nicknamed, with the cruel marksmanship of children, “Worthless.” There was some concern that he might fall somewhere on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum.

The Worths lived across town from Fenton Day in an imposing prewar building that faced the East River. Margo Worth came to the door when Edward arrived for her son’s first tutoring session. She led him through stately rooms to what must have been a study or an office, where Nathaniel sat at a large, gleaming desk, gnawing like a beaver on a yellow pencil. Kids always looked smaller to Edward outside of school, and this scrawny boy was dwarfed by the desk and the leather executive’s chair on which he was perched. His summer buzz cut made his ears stand out.

In a quick survey of the room, Edward saw law books on the shelves, punctuated by trophies of some kind, and a couple of seascapes that he thought might be by Winslow Homer. The rug under his feet was Persian and beautifully worn. Jenny had told him that both Margo and Johnson Worth were corporate attorneys.

“Here’s Dr. Schuyler,” Margo Worth said. “Take that thing out of your mouth and say hello.” Nathaniel let the ravaged pencil drop from his teeth onto the surface of the desk, and, without looking up, lifted his hand in a brief, languid salute—a wary Indian greeting the white stranger.

“Hi, Nathaniel,” Edward said. “It looks as if school has followed
you home.” He put his briefcase on the floor. “Would you like to work in here?”

The boy’s head and shoulders twitched in something between a shrug and a nod; maybe he had a tic, or had simply taken a vow of silence.

“Where are your manners?” his mother asked, and Edward said, “Thanks, this looks fine,” as if he were the one she’d been scolding.

As soon as she left the room, Nathaniel retrieved his pencil and put it back in his mouth. There were yellow flecks of wood on his lips, and Edward imagined that he must have been tasting graphite by then. “You were in Mrs. Wheeler’s class this year, weren’t you?” he asked, as he reached into the briefcase for study materials.

The boy removed the saliva-slick pencil. “Yeah,” he said in a voice that sounded as if it needed oiling.

Maureen Wheeler was considered a tough, humorless teacher, given to sarcasm and onslaughts of pop quizzes. Her lab was referred to, by students and faculty, as “the dungeon.” She was famous for ignoring raised, even frantically waving, hands, and for asking students if they were sitting on their brains. Through the sadism of chance, shy underachievers like Nathaniel often landed in her classroom, and the school’s policy was to categorically deny parental requests for transfers. Not that Edward was aware of the Worths ever requesting one.

He sat down on another, smaller chair, across the desk from Nathaniel, as if he were applying to him for a job. The idea made him smile, but the boy had dropped his pencil again, and was under the table, retrieving it.
What I did on my summer vacation
, Edward thought glumly before shuffling through his papers. He’d been given copies of some of Nathaniel’s failing tests, but hadn’t brought those with him. Instead he had the worksheets
for the material Maureen Wheeler had covered the previous term, including the life cycles of butterflies, mosquitoes, and earthworms.

She was one of those teachers who concentrated on the memorization of facts, many of which seemed to slip from Nathaniel’s head almost as soon as he read or heard them. Edward handed him a page to study and then asked a few questions about it. The boy appeared to merely scan the text, and his answers were mostly wildly improbable guesses, delivered without affect or hope. After about ten minutes of this futile exercise, Edward gathered the papers and returned them to his briefcase. He sat back and said, “So, what do you like to do for fun?”

Nathaniel seemed to consider this question as tricky as the ones about larvae and pupae. He swiveled back and forth in the leather chair and finally said, “Stuff. I don’t know.”

He was such a lackluster child. Asperger’s? Edward wondered. Depression? “Do you have any pets?” he asked. He was thinking of bringing Bingo along for their next session.

“Uh-uh. I’m allergic.”

Of course
, Edward thought. “Do you want to take a walk?” he said. “Should we go ask your mother?”