An Available Man (11 page)

In Julie’s case, not all that well. She’d been in therapy a couple of times but quickly dropped out, using one excuse or another: It was a total waste of time, she had better things to do, it was too hard talking to a stranger. She preferred getting help closer to home. And her mother had been her mainstay—listening, commiserating, counseling—the one girlfriend who would never kick her to the door.

Edward felt like a substitute teacher, a babysitter, really, who didn’t know the curriculum but valiantly tried to fake it. What if he turned the tables on Julie and said,
So, I went out with this woman I met through that ad? And she was like those mean girls at school? But I wanted her anyway, and then, when I could have her, I said no, thanks. And wait, that’s not all
—
a couple of months later
,
I nearly screwed my friend’s wife. What is my problem?

Of course he didn’t. And unlike Julie, he’d outgrown or cast off his problem, falling back into the chaste, secure routine of school and home, while time flitted by the way it did in that affecting Kurt Weill ballad:
September
,
November
 … He said, “Jules, Todd is a jerk.” This opinion, rendered before, was based
on previous reports from Julie that Todd had complained that her breasts were too small, or that he’d advised her to get over herself.

“I
know
,” she moaned. “I’m like this
magnet
for jerks.”

He couldn’t disagree with that; Todd was just the latest in a series of losers in Julie’s life. “Pretty women often are,” he said.

“I wish my face was more symmetrical,” she said. “I wish my boobs were bigger.”

I hate that word
, Edward thought.
Todd is a boob. Your father is a boob. They’re a real pair of boobs
. His stomach growled, and he looked at the clock. Not even eight thirty, and it was Saturday. “Well, you can’t have everything,” he said, which seemed to stop Julie cold. Her mother would have gone on reassuring her, he knew.

But Edward felt weary, as though he hadn’t slept at all. He tried to imagine how his dream might have continued had he not been awakened, and if it would have offered some consolation, or insight into the mystery of non-being. Well, he’d never know. “Listen,” he said into the phone. “I’m going to Greenbrook later to check up on the birds. Do you want to come?” It was a perfunctory invitation. Julie didn’t “get” birding, although the stillness and the patience it required might be good for her. It might even take her out of her own unhappiness for a while, as it did him.

“No, thanks,” Julie said. “But have fun,” she added doubtfully.

Bee hadn’t truly gotten birding, either. They didn’t do everything together, as other couples professed to do. She hadn’t gone to nature preserves with him, and he’d never joined her on her flea market treasure hunts. It was the coming together after their separate outings that had been so pleasurable. Sometimes
he wondered how Sybil and Henry could spend almost all their time in each other’s company. Or how Ned and Lizzie worked out their “don’t ask, don’t tell” protocol. And how did Bruce Silver manage to sleep at night?

Before they hung up, Julie asked Edward if he had any social plans for the rest of the weekend, an only slightly veiled allusion to the personal ad, and Edward admitted that he hadn’t made any. “I have some papers to grade,” he told her, as if that were a project requiring days to complete. The truth was, he didn’t want to be with anybody, least of all any of the prospective dates waiting for him in the crazy drawer. Yet he hadn’t gotten rid of the letters.

There were no organized nature walks nearby in the sanctuary, and no other birders in sight. It was a dank, cold November morning, as Edward noted in his journal, with the promise of winter in the air, and in the thinned-out foliage of the oak forest. It had rained the night before, so the ground cover of leaves hardly crunched beneath his boots. Through his binoculars, he spotted a pair of yellow-rumped warblers on a high, bare branch. No melodic warbling this time of year, though; only their soft, mechanical chipping. You could count the bars.

Bee once read aloud something Emily Dickinson had said to a friend: “I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.” Maybe he should have urged Bee to come here with him, just once. It was beautiful, with the Hudson rushing past hundreds of feet below. But he’d always prized his solitude in the forest, as opposed to the loneliness he felt now at home.

There was only a little visible activity in the trees: some winter wrens and white-throated sparrows. A single dark-eyed junco. The improbability of animals, as someone once observed. Edward recorded those sightings in his journal, along with the
variety of spongy mushrooms pushing up among the fallen leaves. He’d dressed warmly, but there was some wind now, and the damp chill permeated the layers he wore.
Getting older
, he thought, and in a rare instance of registering personal data, he wrote that down, too. He’d leave soon, and maybe he would call Julie back after he’d graded his papers, and take her someplace festive for dinner.

As he looked down once more at the river, he sensed a dark cloud descending—a storm? And suddenly there was an enormous flock of European starlings—hundreds and hundreds of them flying in formation, putting on a private air show as they circled above him. It was thrilling; he’d forgotten about the rapturous quality of nature in his pursuit of quietude. Edward watched until the starlings changed direction and flew off into the distance. Then he walked back through the woods toward the parking lot.

When he got home, Bingo was still out with Mildred on their afternoon walk. Edward picked up the telephone in the kitchen, but instead of calling Julie, he called Bruce Silver, whose number he’d found in Bee’s Rolodex, the unfinished business of their children still between them when she died. Bruce answered the phone himself. Edward could hear a television playing in the background—cartoon squeals—and the voices of young children. “This is Edward Schuyler,” he said. “Bee’s husband.”

“Hold on a minute,” Bruce said, and then he shouted, away from the mouthpiece, “Turn that down, will you? I’m on the phone! What can I do for you, Ed?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Edward said. “But you can do something for your daughter, for Julie.”

“What? Is she okay?”

“Yes,” Edward said. “She’s fine. She misses her mother.”

“I know,” Bruce said. “Tough break.”

There it was, like the sparest of elegies, after fifteen years of marriage and two kids: tough break.

“Why didn’t you come to Bee’s funeral?” Edward asked. “The children expected you.”

There was a pause in which he could hear Bruce breathing, maybe even thinking. “I wanted to,” he finally said. “I intended to. But it was … awkward, you know. All her friends, her mother. They blamed me for what happened between Bee and I.”

Between Bee and
me, Edward immediately, pedantically thought, but stopped himself from saying. “Well, whose fault was it?” he said.

“I don’t like to assign blame,” Bruce said. “It’s complicated. Things happen in a marriage.”

Yes
, Edward said to himself,
one person dies
.

“So what about Julie?” Bruce asked.

Edward was going to say that Julie was fragile, that she needed Bruce, had always needed him, and especially now, in her mother’s absence. That all of her relationships were tainted by his failure as a parent. But if the man had to ask, he wouldn’t really understand. That boob. That clueless prick. “Call her once in a while, she misses you, too,” Edward said.

“Sure thing,” Bruce said, sounding relieved. “Will do.” At least Edward had not asked him to behave like a father.

Mildred and the dog came back to the house soon after the phone call. It was drizzling by then, and Bingo’s coat and Mildred’s rain bonnet were both wet. While she was rubbing the dog dry with an old towel, Edward invited her in for a cup of tea. “Do you want me to read the leaves for you?” she asked, with a flicker of hope on her face. “On the house?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m not into the occult.” His polite word for hokum. “And besides, I only have tea bags.”

The essays Edward graded later were about the patterns of evolution. His brightest student, an eighth-grader named Shelby Marks, had written, in conclusion, “We humans always think in terms of our own survival. We truly can’t imagine that, like most species that have ever lived on earth, we, too, might become extinct someday. The others died out because they couldn’t adapt to the changing environment. Poor us!”

“Indeed!” Edward wrote under that last line, before scrawling a big, red A at the top of the first page. Then he thought, in a flash of spiteful satisfaction, of Bruce Silver, still selling paper in a digital age.

Second Date

E
dward was looking in the crazy drawer for a rubber band when he came across the letters in response to the personal ad. Not that he had forgotten about them. He’d only kept them tucked away, out of sight, while he tried to keep his increasing loneliness out of mind. Now he laid the letters out on the kitchen counter and contemplated them, while he flexed the rubber band over and over again until it shot from his fingers across the room.

Roberta Costello was an amiable woman, practically the antithesis of Karen Leslie. Edward had chosen her letter because it exuded warmth and an appealing modesty. “Hello!” she’d written. “Am I the zillionth woman to write to you? I hope not.” She described herself as a widow, “average” in most respects, including her height and weight and even her looks.

She was actually quite pretty, with graying black hair and
dark eyes. And she gave him a big smile and a little hug when he picked her up at her town house in Teaneck, not far from the restaurant she had suggested for Sunday brunch. “The best omelets in the world,” she’d promised. “We always went there.”

Although Edward had made a reservation, it wasn’t honored. The place was mobbed when they arrived, and they found themselves in the midst of a noisy, impatient crowd of couples and families waiting for tables. Bee, Edward remembered, had resisted the popular restaurant brunch, which she claimed was “just breakfast, only later, and in public.” She’d preferred eating eggs in their bathrobes, exchanging sections of the Sunday paper across the kitchen table. This was just the sort of scene she had probably wanted to avoid.

“Shall we try going somewhere else?” Edward asked Roberta. A baby was crying nearby, and he had to shout a little to be heard.

“Well, if you want to,” she said, but he detected a note of disappointment in her voice. So he didn’t offer the next suggestion that came to mind—that they stop at a deli and buy all the ingredients for a meal and bring them back to her place. She might have taken it as an inappropriate move on his part, when what he really wanted was a quiet meal in a domestic setting. He would have even done the cooking, as he’d often done on Sundays at home.

When they were finally seated and handed menus, the waitress greeted Roberta as if they were old friends, and she gave Edward the once-over, which felt like a severe assessment. “Did I pass muster, do you think?” he asked after the waitress left, and Roberta smiled and said, “Oh, Wynona’s just being a little protective. Vince was a big favorite around here.”

Roberta had been widowed about the same time as Edward, but her husband had lingered for two years, breathless
from emphysema, she said, and mad as hops. Edward imagined that he might have taken his anger out on Roberta—there was a resigned weariness about her, in the corners of her eyes and mouth, whenever she forgot to smile. But she said that he’d only railed against his bad luck, his lifetime smoking habit, the crappy, poisonous air in industrial New Jersey.

He had worked, she told Edward, as an account executive at an oil refinery in Linden, having risen up through the ranks from the pipelines on merit and perseverance. Roberta had been an adjuster for a large insurance company, work she’d once enjoyed. But she had retired soon after Vince died. He’d left her well provided for—his main concern—and she had lost interest in her job, anyway.

Edward was grateful that he had stayed on at Fenton. At first the mere routine of going to work had helped to sustain him, but now his old excitement about teaching had revived. Even the mild spark he’d struck in Nathaniel Worth during their tutoring sessions had provided some gratification. He told Roberta that each new crop of students was a challenge and a joy.
Tabula rasa
. She said that she had grandchildren about to start school; she hoped they’d find dedicated teachers like Edward.

After their omelets were served, she said, “Vince always had the western with a side of sausage,” and her eyes filled with tears. Edward put his fork down and touched her hand. “It’s hard, I know,” he said. And he did know. The stages of grief weren’t so neatly arranged or easily disposed of. And as that pharmacist’s widow had said in her letter, dating after death wasn’t easy. But why had Roberta responded to the ad if she didn’t feel ready? Or even read the personals in the first place.