Saturday Night Widows (27 page)

We had spent a morning of intimacy with trusted friends. But if anyone wanted sex, and it seemed most everyone did, she would have to plunge into the unknown, the emotional unknown. It would take more than some sassy posturing in a negligee to make the leap.

chapter
NINETEEN

h
ere we were, twenty-first-century women with healthy libidos and post-sexual-revolution attitudes. Yet when some of us started seeing men, we conducted chaste, old-fashioned courtships. If you caught sight of me or Tara out to dinner on a first date, you’d think you were witnessing the comeback of Doris Day, any suggestion of sex more forbidden than deep-fried carbs. I invariably deployed the frumpiest of outfits, right down to underpinnings that would be perfectly appropriate in the presence of Dr. Vogel, my dermatologist. My attire was armor against the intimacy I feared. What exactly were we afraid of?

“You worry about what you’re going to look like naked,” Lesley announced. We were seated at brunch, bags of new va-va-voom lingerie tucked safely beneath the seats. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but there were hearty nods all around. Lesley looked perfectly shapely to me, yet all she could think about was how much thinner she had been when she met Kevin, her husband, at seventeen.

“You know, it’s not true that only size-two women get laid,” I argued. “Men past a certain age don’t look perfect either. And most of them have lost a fair amount of their near vision anyway. Give them naked, and they’re happy. That can’t be all that bothered you.”

Lesley considered the question again. Now that she had five months of living with Craig under her belt, she felt more responsible than ever for guiding the others through tricky terrain. Sex with a relative stranger was a conundrum that called for her expertise, and she took it seriously. “You’re right,” she said. “You also think, ‘Am I going to be able to separate myself from my husband?’ How can you close off that part of your mind?” The rest of us leaned in. “Sex has many different meanings to people. I was so young when I met Kevin, I never had a lot of casual sex. I need to be committed in a certain way emotionally. It doesn’t have to mean I’m in love, but it might have to be heading in that direction.”

Everyone listened intently, each with her own perspective. Denise and Marcia, who had yet to meet the right man. Tara, who might have just met him and had to decide how far to take him. Dawn, who had met someone but couldn’t seem to make it work. And, of course, me. I remembered all too well my struggles over how deeply to engage myself in the messiness of recoupling.

Tara agreed with Lesley. “For me,” she said, “it’s not enough to have a physical attraction. I’d have to have a mental and emotional attraction.”

“That’s the way I felt,” I said. “I had no moral objection to casual sex. But when I was married to Bernie, I was making love with the man who was my closest friend, my most intimate confidant. Sex and comfort went together. Believe me, I had the urge for sex after
he died, but the idea of a one-night stand was just too depressing. I’d had the whole package, and I wanted it again.”

“And there’s also the fear—am I picking the wrong guy?” Dawn added. “There’s this danger that you might latch onto somebody because you think you may never find anybody else.”

I could feel the anxiety ratcheting up. Everybody started reaching for Lesley’s side dish of fries. She pushed it to the center of the table.

“I tore an article out of the newspaper about a scientific study,” I said. “They put a woman in an MRI machine and gave her little electric shocks. They could see parts of her brain light up with anxiety. Then they asked the woman’s husband to hold her hand, and they could see the anxiety go down. When a stranger held the hand, it didn’t have the same effect. There’s something about affection from someone you trust—it’s soothing.”

“After Martin died,” said Marcia, “someone asked me if I relied on my husband. Did I depend on him? At first I thought no, because I’m very independent. But when I stopped and thought about it, I realized how much I leaned on him. It was emotional. I trusted him completely. I could say anything to him. He had my best interests at heart.”

“He had your back,” said Lesley.

That was it. No one wanted to get on her back with somebody who didn’t have her back.

Lesley, we knew, had met Craig on Match.com. On a number of dates, they laughed themselves silly, conducted some serious talks about their families, and gingerly held hands, but it took a while for them to get seriously physical. “You feel guilt,” she said, “not about sex itself, but about allowing yourself pleasure with someone else.
Because you still essentially feel married. You’re thinking, I’m about to make love to a man who is not my husband.
What am I doing?
”

Not to mention the practical issue: does my body still work? Everyone in our group had gone through a long hiatus, and everyone had heard the admonition: use it or lose it. We shifted uncomfortably. Lesley said she had been worried, too. She had felt no sexual desire for almost two years. “I was dead inside. My daughter offered to buy me a vibrator. I didn’t even have the desire for that.”

It wasn’t only sex. Lesley had stopped doing everything she’d loved when Kevin was alive—gardening, listening to music, taking walks, cooking. She couldn’t bear to enjoy any of it without him. It was only after she began to find pleasure again in everything else that the desire to make love reasserted itself.

Lesley painstakingly planned her first sleepover with Craig. “I tell you, the first time I thought I was going to get naked in front of somebody else, I thought it would be devastating,” she said. A friend took her to buy new lingerie, and she was so addled that she didn’t realize until she saw the bill that she had paid fifty dollars for one pair of little black panties. She had a daughter living at home during a break from college, and Craig had his son, so they booked a hotel room. It was the night of her oldest daughter’s engagement party, and the panties showed through her dress, so Lesley switched to something else and threw the panties in her purse. She also made sure to have a drink to calm her nerves. “I was still carrying too much weight,” she said.

“Now we know how you lost it,” interjected Dawn.

“When it was time to get busy,” Lesley said, she changed in the bathroom and came out holding the fifty-dollar underpants in front of her chest, breaking the tension with a laugh. “I told him I spent
fifty dollars for these, so he’d better appreciate them. So that’s how I spent fifty dollars for panties I never wore. Worth every penny.”

As it turned out, Lesley needn’t have worried. Emotions counted for more than physical perfection. “You know, you think, next time around I’m going to get the hottest guy. He’s going to have a twenty-four-pack, never mind a six-pack. But Craig’s got this little tummy. He needs to lose some weight, but when you meet a person and you fall for him, none of that matters.”

“All those details, all those lists you make go out the window,” Dawn said.

“The companionship,” Lesley said, “just sharing your life with someone—you thought you’d never feel it again. It’s something to be grateful for.”

Even so, it took courage. Perhaps that was hard for anyone to understand outside our circle, but we recognized that Lesley had taken a risk, a risk with her heart. Our hearts were like eggshells. Lesley had removed hers from lockdown, and we respected her for that. We wondered how she’d found the nerve.

She answered us without having to think, echoing something she’d said the first time we met. “Because the thing that I was most afraid of had already happened.”

K
NOWING
L
ESLEY SOONER
after Bernie died would have given me a much-needed shot of courage. And to think I had nearly excluded her from our group. I’d been talking to a woman who ran an adventure travel company, and she suggested I meet Lesley, everyone’s favorite traveling companion on a trip to India the year
before. I agreed to see her mostly to be polite. Lesley had already been widowed nearly two and a half years, longer than anyone else who was joining me. She was already dating Craig, whereas none of the others were seeing anyone then. And she was so randy and resolutely cheerful that I couldn’t imagine what she had to gain by dredging up issues of grieving that she would probably rather forget. Yet once I heard her story over lunch at a restaurant near her home, I realized how much the rest of us could learn from Lesley about tenacity and resilience, even as she kept us in stitches.

Kevin’s death hadn’t been her only misfortune. Back in South Africa, she grew up in a tumultuous household. “My father beat the crap out of my mother,” she said with the resignation of long forbearance. He left the family when Lesley was eighteen, and it was a relief, but her mother contracted ovarian cancer five years later, and Lesley watched her die over the course of a year. She still had her brother, who was fourteen months older. Everyone loved and admired him, but no one took the diminutive Lesley seriously or thought she would become successful, and she pretty much believed them. After high school, she found work as a secretary.

“People would ask me how I did it,” she said, speaking of the loss of both her parents. “What was the choice?”

When she was seventeen, a friend fixed her up with a twenty-two-year-old guy who needed a date for a wedding while his steady girlfriend was out of town. When he turned a corner to meet Lesley, all she could say was, “Okay, this is cool.” Kevin was breathtaking, absurdly handsome, tall, dark, with a forthright jaw and level eyes. They had such a good time that she was sure after one evening that she wanted to marry him. First she had to persuade him to drop the girlfriend, a quiet fellow student at his law school, a polar opposite from the boisterous, less-educated Lesley.

The tall lawyer and the pixie-sized dynamo married three years later, when Lesley was twenty, and they had three daughters while he launched a career in securities trading. Then tragedy found her again. Lesley’s brother was killed in a car crash when she was twenty-eight. Kevin spared her by identifying the body—she could depend on him that way. All of her original family gone, she devoted herself to her children and her traditional marriage. Her job was to run the household and orchestrate a busy social life, while Kevin was the breadwinner and a weekend athlete who cycled, climbed mountains, and rowed for a national team. Lesley had to cut more roots when they left South Africa and moved to the United States for Kevin to set up an office. Lonely and friendless, only thirty years old, she gradually adjusted.

“We became even closer here in the States,” she said. “We had just each other and our kids. We were great friends, and we had great passion. I swear I became crazier about my husband as we got older.”

The last person anyone would expect to take his own life, Kevin was successful, active, a rock for his family. Lesley thought something must have gone amiss in his brain chemistry around the time he turned fifty and she forty-five. He couldn’t sleep. He quit his job without discussing it with her first. He lost twenty pounds. “Suddenly, he dwindled away, and I had to keep it together, which was so different. I’d always been the precious one, you see. I didn’t even know how to pay a bill online.” Lesley discovered him organizing matters of family business, laying it all out clearly.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked him.

“You never know,” he said. “I’m under a lot of stress. I could have a heart attack.”

On the September morning when he killed himself, the house
was quiet. Their youngest had only recently started her freshman year away at college. Kevin knew Lesley was leaving for her facial appointment, and he put in his request for her to pick up a sandwich. Right before she left, she was standing at the top of the stairs, and he said, “Do you want to come down for a little bit and talk to me?”

“I’m running late,” she said. “We’ll talk when I get back.”

Lesley always kissed Kevin good-bye, and he would make fun of her for it, but she explained by saying, “You never know. I could get knocked over by a bus.” That morning, in her hurry, she forgot the kiss. When she arrived home, she passed his study, a dark-paneled room lined with photos of Kevin scaling mountains and winning races. He wasn’t there, but she spotted his wristwatch, which he never removed, propped on the desk. There was something about the way it rested there that made Lesley think something horrible had occurred. She ran to the basement and found him, his pulse still faint.