Saturday Night Widows (35 page)

“Then why do you say there is with us?” I pressed.

“Maybe because there are more older widows, the word just reads as
old
.”

A big coyote, I thought, one that hasn’t eaten in weeks.

“Yes, with us it’s a positive,” Toby weighed in. “We are way up on the hierarchy of singles.” He gestured, one hand several inches above the other.

From my slot at the bottom of the hierarchy, I felt my hopes of any love matches arising from the evening deflate. You had to
respect the men for their … um, candor, but it wasn’t weaving any magic on our women. Their expressions ranged from bemusement to distaste.

“So many of the women I meet cry when I tell them,” Toby continued, with a touch of sheepish gratification. “Years ago, when I was single, they didn’t cry.”

“When I tell my story to women I’ve dated, they become very emotional,” said Bryan. “I always feel a little guilty. I had a woman straight out ask me once, ‘How much sympathy sex have you had?’ ”

Mitchell and Toby laughed, and Mitchell said, “Never enough.”

“Sympathy sex—I’m not familiar with the term,” I said. “Women offer you sympathy sex?”

“Yeah, okay, there were a couple.” Bryan had the grace to appear embarrassed, and Toby shrugged his assent.

This was a new one on us. We’d fielded many reactions from men to the news that we were widows, from “I’m sorry” to “Creepy” to “You don’t look that sad,” but none of us had received an offer of a charitable dip in the sack.

Then Lesley posed a question that had haunted many of us. “With all this pressing the flesh, do you ever feel guilty?”

“No,” the men answered, like a Greek chorus, all of them except Glenn.

The women eyed each other, a fleeting pantomime that expressed equal parts “It figures” and “Why couldn’t
we
pull that off?”

Toby hedged a bit. “I don’t feel guilty,” he said, “but there are echoes that make me think: how would my wife feel about this?”

Just then—you couldn’t make this up—a flash of lightning streaked across the sky, accompanied by a sonic boom. Gathering clouds, unnoticed, had blocked the sunset, and now we realized
they’d converged into towering thunderheads. The air crackled. We scrambled to gather up the remaining food and dash for the elevator.

Back in her apartment, Marcia assembled chairs around the couch and we claimed new places. Toby slid in next to Denise, launching a private conversation. The skies let loose, and rain mixed with hailstones battered the windows.

“Wow, my first storm here,” Marcia said as torrents obliterated the view. “Cool.”

We turned away from the deluge, and Mitchell reflexively hiked his glasses higher on his nose. “I want to say more about guilt,” he addressed the group. “It has to do with a fundamental question, which is whether you believe that you can only love one person. And of course there are myriad people out in the world who you could fall in love with. If you believe that, which to me is a given, then one love is not any better than another love.”

Marcia stood to stack plates on the kitchen counter while we pondered what I had to admit was a wise philosophy. Toby passed around the chocolates he’d brought. The theatrical storm outside threw us into a cocoon of greater intimacy, and Mitchell spoke again in a wistful tone.

After fifteen years, he said, he still hoarded an odd assortment of keepsakes, like dozens of tiny perfume samples that his wife collected at department stores. He wished he still had his wife’s wedding ring, now in the possession of her sister. “I just feel that it’s a talisman,” he said, straining for words. “My wife is fading into the past. And things get fuzzy. The date she died, our anniversary … I used to know them. Now I have to look them up That’s why I wish I had the ring back. To remind me that I was married, to
this
woman, and that it was real.”

We all looked at each other, unspeaking, surprised at the power of that thought.

“Would you like to marry again?” Lesley asked him gently.

“No,” Mitchell said with stoicism. “What I long for, which is something I can’t have, is a relationship with someone I’ve already known for twelve years. That’s gone. That’s the sad thing.”

The rest of us listened in perfect sympathy as thunder swallowed his words. At first, with all their talk about easy fix-ups and seemingly zipless fucks, some of these guys had sounded more resistant to grief than we had, but now my heart went out to Mitchell, to all of them. For all their romantic conquests, they were suffering, uncertain how to proceed, reluctant to sever ties. For all the sympathy sex that they received and we did not, for all their reveling in the sudden availability of fresh conquests, they were missing the same intimacy that we missed.

Toby must have been thinking along the same lines. “It strikes me that you women are lucky to have each other,” he said.

“Yes,” said Mitchell, regarding everyone in the room. “I can’t in a million years imagine men getting together once a month to talk about this stuff. I think women are more serious about their emotional lives.”

“Women overanalyze,” said Bryan, striving to provoke, and we repaid him with hisses.

“We treasure the fact that we can talk about intimate things,” I said.

“Honestly, I have no one for that,” Mitchell admitted.

The other men nodded and agreed, more or less.

“I have friends,” said Bryan, “but I lost the one person I unconditionally could say anything to.” At parties, he often found himself
nursing a glass of wine while others talked about having children and passed around sonogram pictures, avoiding his gaze. “I am their worst fear realized.”

Lesley was moved to comfort him again. “You have to come back here once a month to talk to us,” she said.

I felt the men were looking at me, as if for permission. “What about Morocco?” Toby asked, kidding, I assumed. “I’ve always wanted to be the guy who sweeps in out of the desert, unshaven and armed with a sense of humor, to rescue damsels in minor distress.”

“You’ve been watching too many movies,” I said, laughing him off. “Sorry guys, women only.”

The party began to fracture into individual conversations. Toby worked the room and managed to cadge phone numbers and e-mail addresses from Dawn and Denise. He told Lesley he liked her accent and gave me a frankly appraising up-and-down look before saying, “If you were available, I would
definitely
date you.”

“Toby’s a mover,” Dawn said to me with a shake of her head. “The guy’s enjoying himself, and I suppose you can’t fault him for that.”

After the men left, we women clustered in the kitchen, loading glasses into the dishwasher. The men, we agreed, were not so different from us, aside from some gentlemen’s-club attitudes about sex, and, if some of them were to be believed, the abundant availability of partners for it. The guys had their sympathy sex, but we had friends, we had each other. And soon enough, we’d be far from home, testing the strength of that bond.

chapter
TWENTY-FIVE

i
t was Dawn who pointed out that people would tell us ad nauseam that time would make all the difference, and that hearing this would make us want to smack them. But people, I learned, are right. Time might not make
all
the difference, but it was definitely on our side.

I had wanted to retreat in the aftermath of Bernie’s death. I had wanted to take care of myself,
by myself
. I didn’t want commitment. I didn’t want responsibility. I didn’t want a husband, a one-eyed dog, a stepdaughter who didn’t want me around. I didn’t want a hot mess of a life split between New York and Connecticut. I didn’t have the desire; I didn’t have the strength.

Six months after our trip to Paris, Bob and I took another trip, a long weekend in a shack on a beach in Tulum. We ate tacos filled with habañeros and snapper delivered off a wooden boat, vegetated on a hammock, reevaluated from afar. Not much had changed since our trip to Paris, when we considered and abandoned thoughts of marriage.

Lily still wasn’t wild about sharing her dad with me, but time was working its healing powers between us. One weekend my newspaper, pleading budget cuts, declined to send a photographer for a story I was reporting on teenage parties. Lily, it occurred to me, was a crack shot at functions with her friends, so I enlisted her. She kept a level head and snapped a vivid series of pictures of kids dancing around a pool. The photo editor published them with pleasure. I didn’t mention that Lily was fourteen. A few weeks later, a photographer was canceled again, and Lily volunteered this time, coolly capturing close-ups and scenic views aboard a boat for an article on cultivating oysters. Lily became intrigued by my job and asked me countless questions. She started to find other aspects of my presence acceptable as well. Without thinking, she might sit next to me instead of Bob, sculpt demented creations with my hair, or ask my advice on social dilemmas with her friends. Bob teased me, as we burrowed our feet in the warm Mexican sand, that the day might dawn when Lily would call me by my name.

My job wasn’t progressing as well. The latest owner of
Newsday
wanted even shorter and less ambitious stories, and I was bored. More and more, as I immersed myself in research on widows, I wanted to write about that—write what you care about, write what you know—but I needed space and time to do the subject justice. I kicked around with Bob the possibility of leaving my job and pursuing the topic on my own. From a lazy beach in Mexico, the project seemed less daunting than I knew it would be.

And suddenly, so did marriage. We scribbled notes in the back pages of a paperback. Becky, Bob, Lily, Wink, New York, Connecticut—there had to be a way to make the pieces fit. Lily’s custody arrangement—every other week—must have been as
discombobulating for her as it was for us. We considered changing it so she would spend school nights at her mom’s, and weekends, holidays, and summers with us. Bob and I thought we could keep both our places, living and working in New York during the week and shifting the whole show to Connecticut on weekends. Maybe Lily would consent to summers in the city.

I’d already noticed that remaking a life at midstride was more complicated than brokering the subprime mortgage bailout. Make that the subprime bailout combined with a renegotiated divorce settlement. This treaty would demand compromises from all of us. Were they compromises I was willing to make?

From the perspective of a restful Mexican beach, the logistics didn’t seem as cockamamie as they no doubt would prove. And the expense of keeping both households afloat didn’t seem as formidable. From a clarifying distance, the dream of being together seemed more important than mere matters of where to live and when and how, not to mention what it would cost. Time had worked its magic. I felt solid enough to do this, solid enough to want this.

When we arrived back home, fate dealt us an opportunity.
Newsday
planned more cutbacks and offered the staff a voluntary buyout. If I took it, I would sever my ties to my once-beloved job and devote myself, as Bernie had, to writing about what mattered to me. A few weeks later, the landlord of Bob’s ramshackle house in Connecticut said he was putting it up for sale. If we took the buyout money to make a down payment, we could cut the costs of our convoluted two-home marriage plan. Everything was conspiring to force my hand.

Back in my apartment, alone, I deciphered all the hieroglyphics we’d made in the paperback on the beach. They took up the back
pages, the inside covers, and the margins of several chapters. For all of this to work, I had to quit the job I once loved, buy a house I didn’t love, and marry a man I did. I had to change everything, and I had to do it all at once. I felt the way I had on my voyage to the Galápagos, where unknown creatures and undiscovered sights beckoned from shore and sea. If I wanted an adventure, I had to abandon the safety of the boat.

O
UR FRIENDS WERE
expecting a simple, casual backyard cocktail party on a sultry June afternoon. And so it appeared, until Bob gathered them under a canopy of trees by the stream behind the house
—our
house, for all of four days. Then he cranked up a creaky recording of the Dixie Cups singing “Going to the chapel,” the only clue that we were launching this party with the ultimate happy ending—a wedding.