How to Talk to a Widower (19 page)

“Hey,” Vanessa says softly, still moving her hips unconsciously against me.

“Yeah,” I say, opening my eyes.

“You're crying.”

“Allergies,” I say, wiping my face with the back of my hand.

Vanessa moves her face to within an inch of mine, and I can see a thin, raised scar that follows the line of her eyebrow. It's faded enough to have come from her childhood, and I wonder how she cut herself. I imagine a young, sweet-faced mother who pressed a wet cloth to her head and rushed her to the doctor and held her hand while they stitched up the wound and felt the pain like it was her own. And then I wonder what made that pretty little girl with the loving mother turn down the road that brought her to this dark club, and my sad, unresponsive lap.

“I'm sorry,” I say, for more than she knows.

“You're not into it,” she says. “What's wrong?”

And before I even know that I'm doing it, I tell her. “I miss my wife,” I blurt out, so violently that our heads knock. “I miss her so much that it's like this cinder block in my chest, crushing my lungs so that I can't breathe.” I point to Dave, still lost in the Asian girl's mountainous cleavage. “And you see that guy over there? I'm fucking his wife, and I never thought I'd be the kind of guy who fucks someone else's wife. And paying a pretty girl to grind on me would be sad under the best of circumstances, but now it's sad because, compared to everything else in my life, a pair of tits in my face is not terribly sad, which of course just makes it that much sadder, and I just want it to stop hurting already, you know? I just want to be able to breathe again. I'm tired of going to sleep every night terrified of waking up, but I'm scared for it to stop hurting, because that will mean I've moved on, and then she'll be gone forever.”

And throughout this entire rant, she never ceases the slow, gentle rocking of her hips, and when I'm done, she runs her hand softly down the side of my face, the flesh of her fingers soft against my angry stubble, and pulls my forehead gently against hers. We sit like that for a moment, as the last bars of the song fade. “Jack,” she says softly.

“Yeah,” I say, looking into her wide green eyes. And in the instant before she speaks, I realize that I already know what she's going to say.

“You want to come with me to the Champagne Room for a private dance?”

28

THERE ARE FOUR VOICE MAILS ON MY CELL PHONE,
all from Laney. I call her back as I'm driving home from the strip club, where I made good my escape soon after my aborted lap dance. She picks up on the first ring.

“Are you still with Mike and the other guys?” she says.

“I just left.”

“Well, Dave just called and he says he's going to be out pretty late.”

I'll bet. “Probably,” I say.

“So.”

“So.”

“I want you in my bed.”

Laney opens the door in a red satin teddy, her long auburn hair cascading wildly around her, and I know I should end this, but she's just so goddamn beautiful and after the strippers this feels positively wholesome, and it suddenly feels like I've been through a war today so I practically fall into her arms. Her bedroom flickers in the light of scented candles, and she sits me down at the edge of the high four-poster bed and undresses me slowly, kissing my chest and stomach, and then my thighs as she pulls off my pants. Once I'm naked she climbs onto my lap, wrapping her legs around me as she opens my mouth with hers, and I try hard not to think about the lap dance I had just an hour ago. Then, without taking her eyes off of me, she shimmies out of the spaghetti straps of her negligee and pulls it down so that her breasts are sudden, twin explosions of flesh in my face as she pulls my head into them. And as my hands reach around to find her ass, I can't help but think of Dave's hands on the stripper's ass, his face hungrily planted between her breasts, and this should feel like justice, but instead it just feels sad, because we're all the same. Dave, the stripper, Laney, and me; all trapped in the same pose, all wanting something other than what we're getting.

When we're done, Laney nods off and I quietly retrieve my clothing from the floor to get dressed. I'm making my way down the carpeted hallway when I hear a toilet flush and I freeze as Laney's daughter, Rebecca, four years old with her mother's red hair, steps out of the bathroom, small and cherubic in her pink pajamas. She looks at me through sleep-fogged eyes and then steps over to me and, inexplicably, lifts her arms to be picked up. “Tuck me back in,” she says sleepily.

When I pick her up, she wraps her arms tightly around me and buries her face in the crook of my neck, her chubby cheek smooth against my jaw. In the dim glow of her Tinkerbell nightlight I can see the pink walls, the plush white comforter with a pattern of pink hearts, the assembly of stuffed animals protectively crowding the perimeter of her bed. I lie her back in the bed and wrap the comforter snugly around her. Then, just before I straighten up, she raises her head, eyes still closed, and kisses the bottom of my chin. “I love you,” she says, before rolling back against the wall, and the hot tremor in my chest rises to my throat. I tiptoe out of the room and down the hall, and hit the first floor running.

         

I get home around midnight to find my mother's car parked in the driveway, and I'm sixteen again, busted coming home after curfew, having been up to no good and wondering how much they know. She's on the living room couch, dozing in front of Leno, cradling a sleeping Claire's head in her lap. Her hair is splayed and flattened against the back of the couch, her makeup smudged in a way that makes her look out of focus. Her left hand is buried in Claire's hair, and in her right is a half-filled wineglass, held miraculously upright against her chest, like she had fallen asleep with the glass on its way to her mouth. There's an empty bottle of Merlot on the table, and no other glasses in evidence, which is good, because it means Claire is being responsible about her pregnancy, but a little sad because it means my mother has polished off the entire bottle herself.

I'm quietly wrapping my fingers around the stem of the wineglass to take it from her when she pulls it away from me. “Get your own,” she murmurs, barely stirring.

“Hey, Ma.”

She opens her eyes. “You smell like sex.”

“What are you doing here?”

She finishes off the wine in her glass and then hands it to me. “But if you were having sex,” she says through a long yawn, “why wouldn't you stay the night?”

“Mom.”

“A few theories come to mind, and none of them bode terribly well for you.”

“I'm fine,” I say, collapsing into an armchair.

“You look fine,” she says sardonically, fixing me with a dour stare. “Come on, Douglas, we have no secrets in this family.”

I laugh. “We have a truckload of secrets in this family.”

“No, we have lies. Families need lies. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to look at each other anymore. But trust me, there are no secrets.”

On the television, a hopped-up Leno whines through his monologue like he's been sucking helium.

“I thought you hated Leno,” I say.

“I'm sitting on the clicker.”

I reach over and turn off the television. “So,” I say. “What brings you here?”

She gently brushes some of Claire's hair off her face. “Claire needed to talk.”

“She called you?”

“Is that really so hard to believe?” she snaps, offended. “She's going through a lot right now, and she wanted her mother.”

“No. I'm sure she did.”

She looks down fondly at Claire. “The poor girl hasn't slept in days. She's always internalized her stress like that, ever since she was a little girl. And when it gets really bad, this is the only way she can fall asleep. I used to come to her apartment in the city, and then to her and Stephen's house. I know how to talk her down.”

“I never knew that.”

“Well, then, it's official. You don't know everything.”

I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, feeling sad and guilty about too many things to quantify. “I'm sorry, Mom. I don't mean to be like this.”

She looks back up at me. “You don't have to apologize to me. You're my little boy. Just be a little kinder. You don't have the market cornered on heartbreak, you know.”

“I know.”

“Good. Now be an angel and freshen my drink.”

I lift up the empty bottle and turn it over. “I think you've had enough.”

“And I think I just told you to be kinder.”

“Are you spending the night?”

“I'll go home at dawn. If your father doesn't see me first thing in the morning, he becomes disoriented.”

“You'll be exhausted.”

“I'll nap in the afternoon. It's good practice for the nursing home.”

She closes her eyes. In the darkened room, her wrinkles are gone, and she looks like my mother again, the woman who would lie in my bed at night and tell me stories that always began, “When I was young and beautiful … ” And I would always interrupt on cue and say, “You still are,” and she would kiss my nose and say, “So just imagine what I looked like back then.” And then, after the stories she would sing me to sleep with show tunes. Sometimes I still hear her singing “Don't Cry for Me Argentina” as I'm drifting off to sleep. And now she's dozing on the couch of her widower son after rocking her divorcing daughter to sleep, before running home to make sure her demented husband doesn't trash the house in a panic.

“Mom,” I say hoarsely, shaking my head.

She opens her eyes. “It's okay, Douglas.”

“It's not okay.”

“It's life, that's all. There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there's not a thing you can do about it.”

“I'm sorry we all turned out like this,” I say. “It must hurt you.”

She shrugs. “If it were all so easy, no one would ever need me, and then what would I do for attention?”

“It's always about you, isn't it?”

“Life's a stage, and I'm the star of the show.”

“You want me to make you up a bed?”

“Just bring me a blanket, I'm going to stay right here,” she says, looking back down at Claire with so much tenderness that I have to look away. “And, Douglas?”

“Yeah?”

“Don't forget about my wine.”

29

WORD THAT THE TOWN WIDOWER HAS BEGUN TO
date spreads like a virus, and soon my machine is filled with messages from friends and neighbors calling to tell me about divorced and widowed women I simply have to meet, single sisters and cousins I would just love. Claire ruthlessly narrows down the field by first deleting any messages that don't meet her criteria, and then by making terse follow-up phone calls asking for ludicrously elaborate physical descriptions, accompanying photos, and detailed relationship histories.

“I'm just trying to avoid any hurt feelings down the road. Now you've got my e-mail address. We'll talk after I see the pictures.”

“You've already told me about what a pretty face she has. I'm asking you about her ass. It's a yes/no question. Listen, put your husband on the phone.”

“And was that by C-section or vaginal delivery? Okay. Find out and get back to me.”

“It's got nothing to do with trusting you. All due respect, Rabbi, but your profession is in no way a guarantee of your aesthetic sensibilities.”

Ultimately, she settles on Suzanne Jasper, a divorcée in her early thirties who is being championed by Mike. She is his next-door neighbor, and he would have dated her himself if he weren't madly in love with Debbie. I'm fast learning that attached men want to set me up with the women they secretly lust after, to date vicariously through me. They would if they could, but they can't so I should. According to Mike, Suzanne's life fell apart a few years ago when the fourteen-year-old girl her husband had met in a chat room and arranged to meet at a motel in Connecticut turned out to be an FBI agent trolling for sexual predators. Judging from her nervous demeanor over dinner at Mineo's Italian Bistro, Suzanne is still getting over the shock of it all. Her smile looks strained, like she's lifting weights under the table, and her laugh, which comes too quickly, is jagged and high-pitched. But she's got piles of long blond hair, smoky blue eyes, and a sharp, self-deprecating wit. And she likes me instantly because I have all my hair, and no ex-wife or competing kids. I have been touched by an act of God. I am appealingly damaged: young, slim, sad, and beautiful.

The problem with dates is that you invariably have to talk about what you do, and for me that will mean talking about my column, which will mean talking about Hailey, which is not something I want to do. So instead we talk about our childhoods and siblings—I can usually get some good mileage out of being a twin—and then we talk about movies, which is fine with me because I've seen everything, then the colleges we attended, and then, scraping the bottom of the conversation barrel, bad date stories.

And things are going fine, or as fine as things can go between two shaky, broken people whose previous lives were shattered overnight, and she's undeniably sexy, in a muted, bug-eyed sort of way, and I'm actually starting to wonder what it would be like to kiss her, and what kind of underwear she wears, when her cell phone rings. “Oh crap,” she says, flipping the phone closed. “Sam's sick.”

Suzanne has two young boys, Sam and Mason, and they seemed cute enough when I came to pick her up at her house an hour ago. But when we walk in now, Sam, the five-year-old, is standing on a chair and puking violently into the kitchen sink, and Mason, the three-year-old, is perched on the kitchen table, crying his head off. The babysitter, a chubby high school girl with a mouthful of braces and dime-sized chin zits, looks panicked and practically throws herself at Suzanne's feet when we walk through the door.

“Oh my God! How could he throw up so much?” Suzanne says, eyeing a large puddle of puke on the hallway floor.

“That was me,” the girl says, embarrassed. “The smell of vomit makes me sick.”

“Perfect,” Suzanne says grimly. She grabs a twenty from her bag. “Go home, Dana.”

“Are you sure?” Dana says, but she's already pocketing the money and heading for the door.

Suzanne runs into the kitchen and puts her hands on Sam's shoulders. “It's okay, baby. Mommy's here.” Sam looks up at her, his face and shirt caked with dried puke, and emits a sad whimper before turning back to the sink to puke. “Oh my God,” Suzanne says, feeling his neck. “He's burning up.”

Meanwhile, Mason's cries are unrelenting, so I take a step toward him, looking to calm him down, but he backs away from me and falls off the table, banging his head on the edge as he goes, and I'd have thought he couldn't get any louder, but Mason's got range, and now he digs deep and lets loose with a bloodcurdling scream that makes the small hairs on my neck stand up. He keeps it going for so long, that I worry he'll stop breathing and pass out, or have some sort of kiddy stroke. Suzanne scoops him up in her arms and says, “Breathe, baby,” while Sam continues to heave over the sink. “It's okay, Mason, the man was just trying to help you.”

“Ice!” Mason cries.

“Could you get him some ice from the freezer?” Suzanne says.

“Sure,” I say. “Although it really wasn't much of a bang.”

“Ice!” Mason screams, glowering at me over his mother's shoulder.

“He likes ice,” Suzanne says, combing his hair back with her fingers.

In the freezer I find a hard blue ice pack, the kind you throw into coolers, and the instant it touches Mason's forehead, he stops crying like someone flipped a switch. Suzanne hands him to me, and, to my surprise, he comes willingly, nestling against my chest, holding the ice pack to his head with solemn urgency. Then she wets a dishtowel and starts rubbing Sam's neck and back with one hand, pulling off his vomit-crusted shirt with the other, whispering and cooing to him as she goes. This display of maternal competency, the effortless blending of compassion and efficiency, is something that I of all people should find attractive, having been married to a single mother myself, but it leaves me cold, although the cloying stench of vomit in the air might have something to do with that.

Sam's running a fever of a hundred and four, and after paging the pediatrician, Suzanne decides to take him to the emergency room. Having prematurely dismissed her nauseated sitter, she's now faced with the unenviable choice of bringing Mason along, or asking me to babysit. “I hate to ask you,” she says, slipping a fresh T-shirt over Sam's head. “But I don't know what else to do.”

“Don't worry about it,” I say. “I'm great with kids.”

“It's way past his bedtime. I'll put him to bed upstairs and you can just hang out in the living room and watch TV. You won't even know he's there.”

“It's fine. I'm happy to help. Just tell me where you keep the mop.”

“The mop?”

“I normally don't mop vomit until the third date, but it just feels like we're clicking.”

She smiles. “I'm sorry about our date. I'll make it up to you, I promise,” she says, and then blanches at what might have been perceived as a sexual innuendo.

“It's fine.”

“You really don't have to clean up.”

“Trust me. I really do.”

She carries Mason back to his bedroom, leaving me in the hallway with Sam, who looks like the world's youngest hangover victim, leaning up against the wall for support, dazedly rubbing his eyes. “I know how you feel,” I say sympathetically. Suzanne emerges a few minutes later, hurriedly throwing a coat on Sam as she hustles him to the door. “Make yourself at home,” she says to me. “Help yourself to anything you want.” And then she's gone.

It takes longer than you'd think to clean up vomit. The mop just seems to be spreading it around the floor, so I switch to paper towels, eventually going through three rolls. Then, after I've mopped again, I gather all the paper towels into a garbage bag and throw it in the garage, along with the mop, which is beyond saving at this point. But even after all of my cleaning and spraying the kitchen floor with Lysol, the smell of vomit seems to be following me, and that's when I discover the stiffened puke stain in the shape of Italy on my pants, just below the knee. I locate Suzanne's washer and dryer in an alcove off the kitchen, pull off my pants, and put them in with a little detergent. After setting the machine on permanent press, I walk around the house in my tighty-whities for a while, examining her pictures—all evidence of her ex-husband has been surgically expunged—and then poke around the pantry and the fridge, looking for a snack. In a cabinet above the fridge I discover a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, and I hesitate for a moment, but I'm anticipating a long night and she did say I should help myself to anything I want, so I pull down the bottle, some Ritz crackers, and a Sesame Street juice box as my chaser, and settle down in the living room to watch some television. She's only got basic cable, which she was wise not to disclose earlier because it may very well have been a deal-breaker. Every channel seems to be showing a medical drama or a police procedural where the well-dressed cops spend half the show in a dim hi-tech lab that looks more like a nightclub, trying to mine drama out of running tests on a piece of clothing fiber, and Suzanne's DVD collection seems to be limited to animated Disney movies. I channel surf fruitlessly for a half hour or so, and before you know it, I'm a third of the way into the Johnnie Walker. When I stand up, the skin of my thighs separates audibly from the leather couch like peeling fruit leather.

Feeling a little woozy, I go to check on my pants. The wash cycle is over, so I throw them into the dryer and then look for the bathroom. There's a sheet of plastic taped over the doorway to the powder room, and through it I can see the stripped walls and exposed studs and wires of a renovation job in progress, so I head upstairs, my socks sinking into the plush carpeting, stirring up static electricity that zaps me through my fingers when I inadvertently touch the wallpaper. The hall bathroom is full of bath toys, and there's a strange, donut-shaped contraption on the toilet seat, ostensibly to keep the boys from falling in when they're crapping, and it doesn't look terribly sanitary so I decide to use Suzanne's bathroom. This means I'll have to go through her bedroom, which could be construed as an invasion of her privacy, but I've mopped the puke off her floors and I'm babysitting her son, so we've got to be past all of that, right? Besides, she specifically told me to make myself at home, and at home I don't crap on a plastic piss-stained hemorrhoid donut with Cookie Monster smiling creepily up at me like a puppet with a bathroom fetish.

Suzanne's bedroom is done in a dark gray, and her king-sized bed has a quilted leather headboard and is covered in a wine-colored satin duvet with matching throw pillows and sheets. It's a sexy bed that causes me to slightly revise my impression of her, as does the presence of not one but two identical vibrators in the drawer of her night table that I accidentally open, indicating that she is a woman who takes her orgasms seriously enough to have a backup plan for her backup plan. “Suzanne!” I say out loud, impressed. Still taking generous sips from the Johnnie Walker bottle, I head into the bathroom, which is a cluttered mess from her pre-date preparations: blow dryer, clips, brushes, eyeliners, lipsticks, and other implements of beauty strewn across every available surface. In my somewhat inebriated state, I'm disproportionately touched by all the trouble she went to just to have dinner with me.

When I come out of the bathroom, I lie down on the bed for a minute, sinking into the pillow mattress, enjoying the sensation of the cool satin against my bare legs. There's a framed picture on the night table, Suzanne and a girlfriend in their bikinis, holding up colorful umbrella drinks by the pool at some tropical resort. I prop the picture up on my chest and look at her for a little bit. I can't help but wonder, had our date gone on as planned, if we'd have ended up back here, in this soft, sexy bed. It hadn't really seemed like an option over dinner, but now that I'm here, I feel like we might have. I close my eyes and try to recall her face over dinner, looking for clues, trying to discern a hidden sensuality, imagining a credible sequence of events that would have led us from stilted dinner conversation to undressing each other and lying down on this crimson softness. Suzanne. There's an old Journey song by that name, I think. I hum a few bars, but can't quite remember the lyrics. Journey was such a long, long time ago.

“Oh my God!” Her voice yanks me out of sleep like a fishhook in the eye, and squinting through the blinding light, I can make out Suzanne standing in the doorway, turning Sam's face into her thighs, her eyes bulging in shock, mouth wide open, jaw trembling.

“Suzanne,” I say, sitting up groggily, and in doing so I knock over the picture on my chest and spill the Johnnie Walker, wedged upright between my thighs in what I will later understand to be a somewhat phallic manner, onto the duvet.

“What the hell are you doing?” she shouts.

“Listen,” I say, rubbing my eyes while the room spins around me like a carousel. “It's okay.”