How to Talk to a Widower (20 page)

“You scumbag! Put on your goddamn pants right now and get the hell out of my house!”

Her face is twisted with rage and disgust, and as I roll off the bed and lurch toward her, she throws her hand up defensively, recoiling in revulsion against the wall. “Stay away from me!” Down the hall, Mason starts to cry. “Oh my God, Mason!” She darts out of the room dragging Sam behind her.

It feels like slow motion as I run downstairs in a dizzy haze, head pounding, thighs quaking, and yank open the dryer door. My pants come out heavy and soaked, and I realize that I never pushed the start button. I pull them on anyway, wet and frigid against my skin, and then run back upstairs. Through Mason's bedroom doorway, I can see Suzanne sitting on his bed, holding both crying children on her lap. “Suzanne,” I say.

The withering look she shoots me carries a nuclear payload that makes every organ in my body contract like a sponge. “Just leave,” she says, and I realize that there will be no fixing this, that there is no explanation she'll be willing to accept. I am now, and forever will be, the guy she found drunk and pantless in her bed. The next time she tells her bad date stories to another man, I will top the list, and as he shakes his head sympathetically, she'll shrug and make a self-deprecating comment about all the scumbags and perverts she seems to attract, and it doesn't seem fair that I should be included in that company, but it's not like I can file an appeal. And so, damage done, there's nothing left but to nod sadly, pull up the sagging waist of my cold, soaked pants, and beat the latest in my fast-growing collection of ignoble retreats.

Driving home, I'm laughing hysterically, or else I'm crying, I'm not exactly sure how to categorize the high, glottal barks erupting like gunfire from my throat, but either way, I can feel sharp, hot pricks on the inside of my chest, the floating jagged edges of all the things in me that are still broken.

         

In the weeks that follow, I have enough lousy first dates to merit a musical montage. Cue the pop song and watch Doug try on different outfits and pose in front of the full-length mirror as Claire directs him, laughing from the bed. Watch Doug escorting various attractive and semi-attractive women from central casting in and out of different restaurants and coffee shops. Fast cuts of different women seated across the table: speaking or not speaking, painstakingly scraping the dressing off a piece of Bibb lettuce, angrily underscoring some clearly salient talking point with a violent jab of her finger, weeping uncontrollably, and sucking up a seemingly endless piece of spaghetti. And then more fast cuts of Doug dropping each of these women off at their homes or apartments, shaking hands, or awkwardly jockeying back and forth between handshakes and chaste goodnight pecks, the camera lingering on them in the background to show on their faces the sad certainty of another man who won't be calling again, and then Doug coming into focus in the foreground as he heads back to his car, his expression bathed in the abject worthlessness of it all. The song choice is key here, something slow, but with a beat, a gruff smoker's voice singing romantic lyrics laced with irony to convey the utter futility of it all; the boredom, the wasted time, the awkward beginnings and endings, the instantly forgettable, canned-date conversation, the sad, damaged lives to which he is now unwittingly privy, a song that ends in fading minor piano chords as Doug drives home with the windows open, his face sadly vacant as he stares blankly at the empty road ahead.

         

Then one sleepless night, I dig out Brooke Hayes's business card from my wallet and dial her cell phone. She picks up on the fifth ring.

“It's Doug,” I say. “Parker.”

“Hi, Doug Parker,” she says drowsily.

“I woke you up. I'm sorry.”

“No. It's okay. What's up?”

“Nothing.”

“What time is it?”

“It's one a.m.”

“Oh.”

“Look, this was stupid. I'm sorry. Go back to sleep.”

“You sound funny.”

“I'm a little drunk.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“I lied. I'm not.”

“What's going on?”

“I've started dating.”

“Oh. That's a positive step, right?”

“I don't know. It just feels wrong and awkward and utterly hopeless.”

“You're dating, all right.”

There's a moment of silence during which I can hear her breathing, still heavy with sleep. “Hi,” she says, after a bit.

“I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to the movies tomorrow, around noon. You know, just in case you were too.”

“Oh. What are you going to see?”

“Whatever you want.”

She laughs and says, “I'll see what I can do.”

30

BROOKE SHOWS UP TO THE THEATER DRESSED IN
a long, flowing bohemian skirt, and a baby T-shirt, her hair pinned up off her face by two bobby pins to reveal the multiple hoops and studs in her crowded earlobes. She looks effortlessly pretty, poised and relaxed, and I have to quell the urge to reach out and run my fingers down the side of her face.

“I was raped.”

She tells me this with no preamble, in the middle of the movie, a zombie flick that is a remake of some other classic zombie flick, because, apparently, there are no new zombie stories to tell. Brooke picked it, and we're the only ones in the theater.

“What?” I say.

“You wanted to know my secret,” she says nonchalantly, reaching over to take a sip from my soda. “I was raped. About two years ago.”

I turn to look at her, but she's staring resolutely at the screen, where the zombies are pressed up against the glass doors of the mall where the last surviving humans are holed up.

“You want to get out of here?” I say. “Go somewhere and talk?”

“No,” she says. “Here's fine.”

“It's hard to hear you above the machine guns.”

“I like it that way.”

“What happened?”

“It was this guy from my yoga class. Benny. He was one of those big weight lifter types, you know? He used to walk me home after class if Greg couldn't pick me up.”

“Greg?”

“My fiancé.”

“Oh.”

“Benny was always flirting with me, but in a harmless way. I thought he looked at me more like a kid sister, always looking out for me and being protective. I mean, he was practically twice my age. And he'd been doing yoga for years. Not that that matters, but you just don't think of people who practice yoga as closet rapists. Then one night he walked me home and asked if he could come up to my apartment to use the bathroom. I didn't think anything of it, but as soon as we walked through the door, he pushed me up against the wall and told me he loved me and he needed to show me. When I told him to stop he ignored me, and when I tried to push him off of me he smacked me, not too hard, but with the threat of hardness behind it, you know? Like the next one could take my head off. I mean, he was a big guy, bigger than most of the trainers. And then he looked me right in the eye and smacked me again, to let me know that the first one hadn't been an accident. And then he took my hand like a boyfriend and led me into my bedroom and raped me.”

“Jesus,” I say.

She nods. “You wanted to know.”

“So, what happened to Greg? He couldn't handle it?”

“Oh, he was okay with me getting raped.” She turns to look at me. “Not okay, but he was ready to deal with it. What he couldn't deal with was that I didn't fall apart over it.”

“What do you mean?”

She sighs. “I guess I just wasn't a very good rape victim. I was supposed to have all these as-seen-on-TV symptoms of posttraumatic stress: nightmares, crying jags, weight loss, paranoia. But I got over all of that pretty quickly. I wasn't in denial. I knew what had happened to me. But I hadn't gotten hurt or pregnant, I had a lot of good friends, I was in love, and life was good, you know. I was sad for a few days, then I chalked it up to bad luck, like a car accident, and moved on. I thought that was a pretty healthy attitude—I still do—but Greg couldn't handle it. It was like he was being cheated out of his role as the supportive boyfriend. And then he became angry, and decided that I must have enjoyed it on some level, that maybe I'd even seduced Benny into raping me. And it became this big thing where he wouldn't sleep with me, acting like I'd somehow betrayed him, and after a while I actually found myself wondering if he might be right, which was like getting raped all over again. We just became trapped in this downward spiral of inescapable irony. The only way he could get over my being raped was if I couldn't get over it.”

“So you broke up?”

She nods. “And of course, only after the fact did I figure out that I had, in fact, been traumatized, that I was furious with Greg for not being there to protect me, and my great attitude had actually been his punishment because I knew it would ultimately drive him insane. And once he was gone, the reality of what had happened to me kind of hit home, and that's when it all happened, the nightmares, the crying for days on end, all that good stuff. I had a little breakdown, I guess.”

“So what brought you to New Radford?”

“He owned the apartment and I couldn't afford to rent my own. So I moved back home.” She grins. “Twenty-seven and still living with my parents. Aren't I a great role model for the kids?”

“Has there been anyone since Greg?”

She shakes her head. “A few false starts. But at some point I always felt obligated to tell them about the rape, and then they either got weird about touching me, or else they got all macho and stupid. So I tried not telling a few, but then I felt distant, like I was hiding something.”

“Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.”

“I just need to be able to tell someone who will understand without it changing the way they look at me.”

“You told me.”

“But we're not dating.”

“Couldn't this be a date?”

“A zombie matinee and popcorn?”

“I didn't say it was a good date.”

She turns sideways in her seat and looks at me for a long moment. The explosions on the screen reflect like shooting stars across her dark eyes, and her knowing smile is warm enough to melt things in my chest. Something I didn't notice before: just at the edge of Brooke's upper lip, a bit to the left, is a small crater in her skin, an old acne scar that eats slightly into the meat of her upper lip, disrupting its curve, forming a small swirl of off-color scar tissue there. But that works just fine for me. Perfection is plastic, cold, and unyielding. Real beauty is a current that has to be grounded, and it's these little defects that do it. You need context, a reference point. Her scarred upper lip is the hook, the default nucleus from which everything else radiates. “No,” she says. “I'm pretty sure this isn't a date, because if it was, we'd be holding hands.”

She watches me as I slowly reach over, and then spreads her fingers to weave them through mine, running her thumb softly up and down the back of my hand as she leans her head on my shoulder. “Let's pick a different movie,” she says.

“Which one?”

“Whichever one's the longest.”

She never lets go of my hand, even in the harsh lighting of the multiplex hallway as we're switching theaters, and I take that to be a good sign.

31

I COME DOWNSTAIRS THE NEXT MORNING TO FIND
Claire already dressed in a blazer, skirt, and heels, hurriedly checking her makeup in the hall mirror.

“Why are you all dressed up?” I say, sitting down on the bottom stair.

“This isn't dressed up,” she says, still looking at her reflection. “It's just well dressed. Not all of us can pull off your slept-in-my-jeans-and-T-shirt look.” She makes an imperceptible adjustment to her hair, and then does that reverse pout that women do after putting on lipstick, folding her lips in on each other so that they disappear for a second. Sitting on the stairs in my boxers, I feel like a kid again, watching my mother prepare to go out on an audition. She would stay at the mirror long after she'd finished her makeup, and I'd run lines with her, reading from scripts I didn't understand, and she'd study her reflection and tweak her expressions and head movements as she spoke. Then she'd say, “Wish me luck,” and I'd say, “Break a leg,” and she'd kiss the air near my cheek and head out the door, and I'd offer up a little prayer that this would be the one she landed, and it would make her a star, and we'd move to Hollywood, and I'd be one of those cool Hollywood kids, dressing funky, going to premieres, and hanging out with beautiful troubled girls at night clubs. And now, watching Claire, I'm shocked to realize how much she looks like our mother, and I almost tell her, but although our mother's beauty is a matter of public record, I'm still not entirely sure she'd take it as a compliment.

“Where are you going?”

“I've got an appointment to see my obstetrician.”

“Everything okay?”

“It's just a routine prenatal checkup and ultrasound.”

“Why do you have to look so good for your doctor?”

“I get waxed for my doctor. I look good for me.”

“You want me to come with?”

“Nah. I'm late already.”

“I can be ready in five minutes.”

She turns and runs her fingers through my grimy, sleep-sculpted hair. “You'll need ten minutes just to get your bed head under control.”

“Seriously.”

“I am serious,” she says, flashing me a smile from the door. “Have you seen your hair?”

But after she's gone I replay the conversation and something in her tone bothers me, so I dial Debbie's cell phone number. “I'm walking into a meeting,” she says in a low voice.

“Walk back out, I need to ask you something.”

“Call me later.”

“Should I have gone with Claire to her obstetrician appointment?”

“What?”

“She just left.”

“Hold on a minute … ” There's some muffled noise and the sound of a door slamming, and then Debbie comes on the phone again. “She went alone?”

“She said it was no big deal.”

“Of course it's a big deal. How long ago did she leave?”

“Just now.”

“Do you know who her doctor is?”

“No.”

“I'll call Mom and find out. Then I'll meet you there.”

“What about your meeting?”

“Doug,” she says, sighing. “Claire is a mess, or haven't you noticed?”

I think of Claire curled up on the couch like a little girl, her head in my mother's lap as she slept, and it occurs to me that I may have missed a few things. “Crap,” I say, feeling like a schmuck.

“Doug,” Debbie says softly.

“I know,” I say, cutting her off. “I'm trying.”

“Try harder. She needs you.”

“Yeah.”

“And so do I.”

“Pooh,” I say, but she's already gone.

         

An hour later, Debbie and I are in a medical suite at Lenox Hill Hospital. The suite serves a practice of five doctors, whose names are screened onto the opaque glass door, and the waiting room is a crowded sanctum of hushed women with silent, patient smiles. I've never been to an OB/GYN office before, and you can almost see fractal bends in the air from all of the estrogen floating around in here. Like Claire, all of the women are well dressed and made up, and it strikes me as both sweet and odd that they feel the need to look good for anyone who's going to get into their pants, even under these clinical conditions. Many of the women are in various degrees of pregnancy, and seated awkwardly next to some of them are restless-looking men who fidget like children, checking their watches, reading newspapers, tapping aimlessly on wireless devices, or holding muted conversations with their wives, who flip calmly through women's health magazines, responding without looking up, humming along quietly to the soft rock being piped in through discreetly mounted speakers.

A little while later, we're still trying to talk our way past the bitchy receptionist, when my mother comes bustling through the door, flushed and slightly out of breath. “Mom,” I say, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“Where's Claire? Did I miss it?”

“We're working on it,” Debbie says, turning back to the receptionist, a sullen-eyed girl with fake eyelashes, more lipstick than lip, a tiny diamond stud like a sparkling pimple in the pocket of her nostril curve, and hooked fingernails like painted claws.

“I'm not allowed to take anyone back there once the exam is in progress,” the girl says firmly.

“I understand,” Debbie says, matching her tone. “But we are her family and she wants us there. We're just a little late.”

“She didn't say nothing to me about it. I can only take the father back.”

“The father is out of the picture for now,” Debbie says. “For all intents and purposes, she is a single mother, and I'm sure you can see how she might need our support right now.”

“I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do.”

My mother steps over to the desk to look down at the girl. “I am Claire's mother.”

The girl nods, unimpressed, and then picks up a ringing phone. “Doctor's office,” she says, still meeting my mother's gaze.

My mother looks at her for a long moment, then she nods slowly, smiling sweetly, and, without breaking off eye contact, shouts “Claire!” at the top of her lungs and the girl practically falls back off her seat in shock. Rather than wait for her to recover, my mother turns and marches down the long hallway leading to the examination rooms.

Everyone in the waiting room looks up, and the receptionist jumps to her feet and calls after her, “Hey, lady, you can't do that!”

“Claire!” my mother shouts again, disappearing down the hall.

Debbie and I look at each other and quickly follow her, with the receptionist in hot pursuit. “You're not allowed back there!” she calls out, grabbing Debbie's elbow. Debbie turns on her like a whip, eyes blazing. “Are you absolutely positive you won't be needing that hand anymore?” she says.

The girl pulls her hand off and steps back with a defensive shrug. “Whatever,” she says.

A guy about my age in scrubs and a badge that says “Medical Technician” steps out of one of the examination rooms and sees us. “Excuse me,” he says, turning to face us. “Can I help you?”

“Claire!” my mother shouts in his face.

“Hey!” he shouts back at her.

And then, from behind one of the doors, comes Claire's voice. “Mom?”

“Claire, honey?”

“Mom!”

I step past the technician in the direction of Claire's voice and throw open a door. A half-naked woman in stirrups screams. The doctor working between her legs like a mechanic pokes his head up and slides back on his stool, granting me a cross-sectional view of the vagina that will from this day forward haunt my dreams like a demon spirit. “Wrong room,” I say, slamming the door on her outraged cries as the technician pulls me back.

My mother opens the next door and there is Claire, lying supine on the table in a paper gown with her belly exposed, craning her head to stare at the monitor as the doctor, holding the transducer against her belly, turns to face us. “Hello,” he says, bemusedly. “Can I help you?”

“They're my family,” Claire says, and then, without prelude, bursts into tears.

“Baby!” my mother says, running over to hug her, getting blue gel all over her blouse.

“It's okay, Will,” the doctor says, and the medical technician releases me. “Come on in.”

We all gather around Claire as the doctor resumes the ultrasound. “So,” he says. “I was just showing Claire her baby's heart.” On the screen, there's a widening triangle of light, like someone opened a trapdoor into a basement. In the field of light are what appear to be two white threads crossing, and between them is a small throbbing bean. The doctor slides a second device over Claire's belly and the room fills with the rhythmic hiss of rushing water, followed by a fast, staccato tapping.

“Oh, Claire,” my mother says, putting her hand on Claire's shoulder, her eyes welling up with tears.

“I know,” Claire wails, still crying.

“Listen to the little guy go,” Debbie says, taking Claire's hand.

The doctor adjusts the transducer and suddenly we can see the fetus in profile, the round, oversized head, the bud of a nose, the thin arms reaching forward, clasped in prayer.

“Oh my God,” Debbie squeals.

“You're about twelve weeks in,” the doctor says.

“I'm having a baby,” Claire says, staring in wonder at the screen.

And looking at the screen, I'm suddenly overwhelmed by an uncharacteristic certainty that I could do this too. That I could conceive a baby and watch it grow in the womb, be there waiting for it when it entered the world perfect and untouched, and then devote myself to keeping it that way for as long as possible. That there are bigger, deeper things to feel than happy or sad, and I know that I'm a mess right now, but maybe, with time, all of this pain and uncertainty will add up to some small measure of wisdom that would make me a good father. And for the first time I can remember, it seems like a very viable option, and not a prospect that will make me break out in a clammy sweat even at the hypothetical stage.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” I say.

“I can't tell in this position,” the doctor says.

“It's a girl,” Claire says, looking up at me, smiling through her tears.

“How do you know?”

“Because I'm naming her Hailey, so if it's a boy, he'd better learn how to fight.”

And then everything goes blurry as Claire reaches for me and pulls me toward her, and I close my eyes so that there's nothing but the sound of that brand-new, still-forming heart, filling the room with the relentless rhythm of its tiny, hungry life.