Saturday Night Widows (32 page)

After lunch, Dawn napped on the beach while the rest of us talked and read. Distracted, I swam a few laps in a pool that overlooked the sound. When I came up for air, I saw an affectionate
tableau: Tara and Will leaning against the railing, looking out to sea, their arms around each other, wrapped in matching red-and-white striped towels. They looked just like a couple to me. How quickly that had happened. Problem solved.

Then I checked myself. I remembered how irritated I got when people assured me that finding Mr. Right would put a happy cap on my own story of widowhood, as if that alone would erase all that had happened before. The ol’ man trap: thinking a man was a cure-all. Will alone wasn’t making Tara happy, I was certain. He was a reward she’d earned for making herself happy.

Anyway, I knew from experience that there were any number of trip wires not visible in that tableau—children, geography, stubborn patterns of behavior developed over decades of adulthood. Not to cast doubts on their prospects, but blending two lives at our age was a project to rival the subprime mortgage bailout. I knew that it took more to seal a midlife romance than a kiss and a set of matching towels. Or a kiss and a plate of risotto, for that matter.

chapter
TWENTY-THREE

a
truly exceptional cook, Bob fed me the scallop risotto the night he invited me to his house, the first of many delights over the next few months. He fed me his signature pasta bolognese. He fed me butterflied leg of lamb stuffed with olives and rosemary that he rolled and hogtied like a rodeo star. He fed me chocolate chip cookies with a double dose of chips. He pulled off showstopping feats in the kitchen, his and mine, and I ate like a starving person. I had dreaded the thought of anyone needing me again. It had never occurred to me that someone might feed me rather than need me, and that he’d take such pleasure in it himself.

Bob stirred other appetites in me, of course, deep, nearly forgotten cravings, long suppressed and ready to ripen. Later, he liked to kid me about my hopeless effort to sleep in the wee hours of that first night. He’d glance over and see my eyes fixed on the ceiling with a zombie stare. I’m no prude, but the realization that I was lying there next to a man who wasn’t my husband was too freaky to allow me rest. Besides, I think sleep implied a level of surrender I
wasn’t yet ready to embrace. But the other embraces that night were remarkably easy, and I’m not an easy girl, as you know.

After I formed my group of widows, we often found ourselves talking about how, once we took the plunge, we felt scandalously free about our sexuality. There was something about being wounded … it had made us vulnerable, but it was profoundly freeing, too. Having lived through the worst, we found it was hard to take mere inhibitions and insecurities seriously. Having been without pleasure, we reveled in it now. The sex, it turned out, was even better than the food.

Bob and I zipped past all the other milestones of a new relationship. I learned that, left unchecked, he’d slather piri-piri sauce on just about anything. He learned that I read the Sunday Styles section first. I discovered that six in the morning was doggy wake-up time, when persistent white paws tugged at any blankets trailing off the bed. Bob learned that I got my best ideas in the shower. I met his parents; he met my mom. “I guess this makes you the official boyfriend now,” I said. We were the talk of gatherings where we got to know each other’s friends. Everyone who’d seen me through the last few years of pitiful circumstances was thrilled for me now, as if I were one of those Hollywood stars up for an Oscar after a spell in rehab.

We established a staccato existence. Since Bob’s daughter, Lily, stayed with him half the time, I’d see him alternate weeks. During off weeks, I had my autonomy and my social life with my friends. The perfect setup—my previous full plate, with a satisfying dollop of love, in handy portion-controlled servings. Aside from the sensation of defenses falling (maybe crashing?), something felt extraordinarily right.

After a couple months of this, it was time to meet Lily. Call me
naive, call me inexperienced with children, but I expected this passage to be as easy as all the others with Bob. I’d never had children, to my regret, and as a result, they seemed a bit alien to me, but manageable, kind of like Wink. When the dog first graced my apartment with his presence, I repeatedly started at sudden encounters with a wild animal as he brazenly made himself at home around the place, but I soon learned to regard myself as his humble servant, fixing his dinner or scratching his ears on request. Besides, he was Bob’s responsibility, not mine. So was Lily. By the only account that mattered—Bob’s—she was a father’s dream: sweet, loving, never a spot of worry to her dad.

Bob invited me to dinner in Connecticut one night when Lily was there. An inveterate researcher, I had studied up on this—in contrast to younger children, teenagers were the most averse to new love interests of their parents. Lily had just turned fourteen. Atoms were about to collide.

Petite, with luxurious dark hair, Lily was a perfect lady that evening, polite and agreeable, displaying a zany sense of humor. I was utterly charmed. The three of us were in stitches through much of the meal. She tactfully didn’t say a word when Bob nervously overcooked the steak, and after I left, chastely, on a late-night train, she gave him a thumbs-up on his choice of me. This was too easy! But over the next weeks and months, when I showed up for a weekend, I never knew which version of Lily would meet me there. Sometimes we’d review geometry homework or play a lightning round of Monopoly; other times that quaint little house felt like a particle accelerator for all the moody collisions going on. There were entire weekends when Lily wouldn’t look at me and referred to me only when necessary as “She” and “Her,” as in, “When is She going to
leave?” or “Are we eating dinner with Her?” Bob and I were careful not to show affection in front of her, but still she wedged herself between us when the three of us walked anywhere and plunked down in the middle if we nestled on the couch. When we went to a restaurant or a movie, she sat as far from me as if I were the source of West Nile virus.

I couldn’t blame her. She had witnessed the disintegration of her family in a divorce, and any change in the dynamics with her dad now would likely set off new distress. She felt threatened, of course. What if her dad ran off to New York with this vixen; what would become of her? I knew Bob’s devotion was too fierce to allow for that, but divorced parents do such things, everyone knows. I found her mood swings poignant. I was the adult here; I understood what was going on; and she was, after all, Bob’s responsibility, not mine.

At the same time, where did that leave me? Genuinely intimidated by a ninety-pound schoolgirl. It was possible that I had come this far in a quest for love only to fall short because I couldn’t finesse somebody who still watched cartoons in happy-face pajamas. I was the adult here, but the adult wasn’t in control.

Once Bob tried to discuss the situation with Lily when I wasn’t around. “Someday you will grow up and have your own life, and I’ll be here by myself,” he said. “Do you want me to be alone for the rest of my life?”

“Yes.”

Bob wasn’t easily deterred. He asked me to join him for a five-day getaway to Paris eight months after we met. Paris had been one of those zingers, a place where Bernie and I had enjoyed such dreamy escapes that I hadn’t been able to consider returning without him. On the first afternoon there with Bob, we shook off
jet lag to stroll arm-in-arm across the Pont des Arts, our tummies filled with buttery croques monsieurs. It was a warm June day, and sun sparkled off the fast-rushing waters of the Seine below and the limestone edifice of the Louvre across the way. I leaned close to him and breathed in my incredible good luck. I could have lived out my remaining decades alone, a proper widow nursing memories of love until my fading years, but this marvelous man had somehow appeared and opened my heart again. I had defied expectations, my own and everyone else’s. I had pulled myself up from the depths of grief, surrounded myself with caring friends, continued my work—not ideal work, mind you, but a paying job at a newspaper when such a thing was hard to come by—and I had held out for a man who made me truly happy. Now I was in Paris again.

I gave an approving once-over to Bob, who was taking in the Parisian spectacle with similar contentment. He returned my admiring gaze, and his expression shifted. It was the skittish look again, the one I hadn’t seen since our first days together, but there was tenderness as well.

“Get a look at this view,” he said. “I’m inspired.” He draped an arm across my shoulders as we turned upriver toward Notre Dame and the Île Saint-Louis, and he spoke into my ear. “What do you think about getting married?”

That’s what he said—
What do you think about getting married?—
but it sounded more like static until the words reconfigured in my mind as I turned to see that he’d meant them. Still, I didn’t respond, and I could tell it unnerved him.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

It was everything I’d hoped for, everything I feared. I struggled to compose an answer.

“I don’t see how we can,” I finally said. “Where would we live?”

“We’ll figure it out.” He was incorrigible—that temperament again. It fell to me to be the cautious one. Where to start?

“You can’t move out of Connecticut,” I began gently. “I know you wouldn’t leave Lily—I wouldn’t love you if you could. But
I
don’t want to leave New York, for all kinds of reasons. I couldn’t get to my job from Connecticut, for one. And I don’t
want
to live in Connecticut. My life is elsewhere.” A rush of feeling pulled me toward the dream of permanence that marriage would provide, but an opposing current spun me another way. If I’d gained any wisdom from the last few years, it was that friends and work and autonomy mattered, too. I’d be sacrificing all that if I uprooted myself for him, but it made me heartsick to not say yes, a blind, unthinking yes, the way they do in the movies.

“We’ll figure it out,” Bob urged, maddeningly, again. For the rest of our stay, Paris served as the backdrop of an ongoing game of Rubik’s cube, as we puzzled for a configuration that allowed all the pieces to fit, but they never did. We weighed the possibility of Bob moving to the city, where Lily could visit on weekends and holidays.

“That won’t work. We have to be realistic,” I said in despair. “She’s a teenager, and she’ll want to spend weekends with her friends. I hate to say it, but we can’t get married, we can’t even live together. You really have to stay put until Lily is finished with school. She has to come first.”

Where did that come from? This was a curious twist—Lily had become my responsibility, too. And what was best for her, I knew, was for me and her father to live apart, to remain single, to continue our herky-jerky back-and-forth. It wasn’t the full enchilada, but it
would have to be enough for me, and I hoped it would be enough for Bob.

D
AWN
’
S CHILDREN
had a blast at a camp for kids who’d experienced the death of someone close, a bit like our adult group without the lingerie and champagne. On a bright, clear August Saturday, we volunteered to work there behind the scenes. While the Blossoms, as even I was beginning to call us, set out glue, glitter, and crepe paper for arts and crafts in the dining hall, we didn’t have much chance to catch up with each other, but that no longer mattered. By now, we stayed in touch between meetings, as friends do, and that month there was much to tell.

Tara had updated me on her last moments in the old house when we met for lunch a week after she left it. Once the movers hoisted everything out, Tara, all alone, had picked her way through the detritus left behind—broken reading glasses, shoes without mates, coffee-stained napkins scrunched up by customers of the furniture sale. “Nothing was left in that house but dirt and crap,” she said. She herself was filthy as a chimneysweep, crud encrusted under her nails, her white linen pants imprinted with grime. She wished she could collapse in the shower, but there wasn’t a single towel in the house.