The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating (2 page)

Among the others who saw the collision was a woman from Ohio visiting New York with her church group on a theater package—one of those six-shows-in-three-days kinds of things that never include first runs. She saw
Mamma Mia!
and
The Lion King
, and was viewing the Simon Doonan window displays at Barneys when she saw Charlie die. She offered herself to Channel 6. “It was horrible,” she said in a shaky voice as she wiped away tears. Then she lowered her voice an octave and addressed the camera directly. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Another witness, a man from Brooklyn, performed for reporters as if he had a scene-stealing bit in a mob film—“Dere was dis
huge
(he pronounced it “yooj”) fuckin’ thing. Comes outta nowheh—Bam! Poor fuckin’ guy.” The network channels didn’t air his remarks, but two days later
The Howard Stern Show
did; Stern’s producers had him reenact the scene between strippers in a tribute of sorts to Charlie. Howard had been a big fan.

But it was Paul Bowman, an ad exec, whose account got the most play. He seemed to capture the spirit of the incident. “It was, for lack of a more original word,” he said, “surreal.”

“What went through your mind?” asked the reporter from ABC News. “Well, I think the stillness,” Paul said. “It was abnormally quiet. I felt it, that stillness. That’s what made me look up. It was like an Ingrid Bergman, or Bergmar, film, you know, that French guy. It was like everything, just briefly, paused.”

Paul’s were the words that somehow hit the mark. They played on WFAN, they ran in the
New York Times
, and after the Associated Press picked up his version it spent two days on Yahoo! News—Most Viewed. His estranged wife, Amy Strauss-Bowman, a film studies professor at Rutgers and the reason Paul Bowman even knew the name Bergman/Bergmar, sneered when she read his account and its gratuitous but bungled display of cineaste. Amy knew that Paul’s greatest art form thus far was to belch out the fight song during televised football games. She also knew that, obviously, a rare Giacometti fluttering down the side of a forty-three-story building against a bright blue backdrop of sky was vintage Kenneth Anger, or maybe Fassbinder, but certainly not Bergman.

The sun, after Charlie’s death, remained out. The day ticked on unmoved, though a large bronze sculpture and a man both lay still on the sidewalk. Charlie was clearly dead, but there was concern about the bronze. Walter White had been called, and Walter White summoned lawyers. A lot of money lay on the ground tended by the unappreciative eye of the NYPD. Then, too, there was concern with liability.

Sidewalk traffic bunched. Taxi drivers honked at stopped police cars. Men in suits hurried past, unimpressed. A family from Denver stood, mouths agape; the mother put a chubby hand in front of first one child’s eyes, then the other’s. Fire trucks closed in, sirens wailed.

Charlie’s denim-clad legs, toned from years of tennis, were bent at unnatural angles; his arms were askew. He’d wound up ungainly. He would have been mortified.

Paramedics moved slowly about the body. The ambulance driver lit a cigarette and joined the firemen a few feet away. The men stood talking for a time; now and then, one would laugh. They argued over the Yankees and the Mets, and traded jokes about another stiff they’d picked up that week. Policemen continued to take statements from the witnesses, one at a time, writing in small notebooks with blue ballpoint pens. None of it came to much.

At some point midmorning the body was covered and Charlie’s limbs were secured to a metal bed. One arm slipped from beneath his sheet and dangled, the way arms sometimes do in suspense films to reveal something—a birthmark or tattoo, some important clue that has been overlooked. But this was Charlie’s right arm—no watch, no marks—and a paramedic replaced it beneath the sheet without incident.

Gawkers stayed stubbornly put. Finally, the medical examiner’s van arrived and Charlie was removed from the scene—one hour and thirteen minutes after leaving his four-dollar tip at the diner.

Another team arrived to load the Giacometti into an evidence truck. Walter White stood nervously in his doorway, inquiring.
We’re taking it to the Sixty-First Precinct, Mr. White. I can’t tell you yet how long we’ll need it. We have to file the usual reports.
At that moment, Walter was unaware of who the dead man was.

Cleanup, for the most part, was brisk.

Meanwhile, in Texas, Claire sat in an uncomfortable chair across from Veejay Singh and worked to establish rapport. Dr. Singh, like Charlie, moved easily between pop culture and more serious arenas. His subject specialty was the biology of attraction—the whys and hows of picking a mate. Men like long hair and big breasts, we assume. But is that really the case and, if so, why? Dr. Singh had a theory, and he’d spent five years measuring women to prove it. He circled their hips and their waists with tailor’s tape and divided the second number by the first. He compared these ratios with estrogen levels and fertility data, and through his findings he promoted his idea that men are hardwired to seek a certain shape. More specifically, his research showed that women with a .7 hip-to-waist ratio—wide hips and small waists—are good breeders. These women have the best odds of conceiving a baby, so men intuitively seek them out to reproduce. The famous hourglass figure, in other words, is not just a fashion trend but an important step in evolution.

Dr. Singh was tall, like Charlie, and lean. He dressed simply—dark slacks, V-neck sweater—but his clothing flattered him. He became animated when he spoke about his work, punctuating his sentences with wide sweeps of his arms, and short bursts of laughter that were intended, Claire thought, to disarm her. She wondered if he slept with his students.

Singh’s book had debuted at #2 on the
New York Times
Best Sellers List. The book was why Claire was sitting here, why
Misconstrued
deemed his measurements worthy of print. Charlie, for his part, had snorted when she’d told him about the assignment—as if only a hack would write a bestseller about breasts instead of balls. That Claire was writing pop stories for glossy female magazines at all had everything to do with Charlie. He had discouraged her own literary ambition. For a few years after they married she had been content looking after Charlie’s needs and writing an occasional piece freelance. Then the temporary adjustment in her focus became what she did permanently. Charlie worked, and Claire found things to do.

They were just starting, Claire and Singh; they’d finished shifting in chairs and clearing their throats and were on Claire’s second question.

“Is there any evidence, then, that the size of the
penis
matters, reproductively speaking?” Just as a hint of a smile crossed her face, Claire’s cell phone began to buzz. She had set it to “vibrate.” It lurched noisily across the desk.

“I’m sorry, please ignore it,” she said, and made a gesture with her hand to mean “go on.”

“Before we get too far,” said Singh, “let’s do this.” He was holding a measuring tape. He jumped up, then motioned for Claire to stand so he might measure and calculate her own ratio, her own potential for reproduction.

“I’ve studied every
Playboy
centerfold since 1954,” he said, with his arms around Claire’s waist. While Claire held her arms up and out of the way, Singh dipped his head down, beneath her breasts, to read the thin tape he’d pressed against her. His hands felt warm through her blouse. He had a tantalizing mess of dark, thick hair; a heady shot of cologne hit her nose. Claire couldn’t remember the last time a man’s hands had circled her waist. Somewhere along her nine years with Charlie, certain interest had, well … waned. Singh mumbled a number and jotted it on his notepad. “And though the bunnies have gotten thinner”—he paused as if about to reveal a great secret—“their hip-to-waist ratios have remained the same!”

A stack of transparencies lay on his desk—anatomically correct line drawings of well-ratioed women: Eva Mendes, Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch. He showed Claire, laying the drawings one over the other, how the shapes were different but the ratios stayed in line.

“Watch this,” he said, putting a transparency of Kate Moss over Scarlett Johansson. “Hmm? Surprised?”

“Well, Kate’s skinnier, and her breasts…”

“But that’s it!” Singh shrieked, delighted. “It’s not the breasts!” He lowered his voice and leaned toward her. “It is strictly the proportion of the hip to the waist. It signals health and fertility. This is the true essence of desire.”

Claire looked down at her own small breasts. She wanted to believe him. She wondered if there was a Mrs. Singh and, if so, what size her breasts were. He jotted her measurements on a notepad and did the math. “Ha! Point seven five,” he said, appraising Claire’s reproductive area and nodding in approval. “Almost perfect!”

The buzzing persisted. Claire’s phone lurched forward, then stopped, then lurched again. Dr. Singh took in the spectacle.

“We should take a short break,” he said.

Claire agreed, and while Singh ruffled papers she punched in the number for voice mail and pressed “1” to play her messages. There were four: The first was a policeman in a somber tone: “Mrs. Byrne, this is Officer Callan from the Nineteenth Precinct. I need you to contact me immediately, your husband … there’s been an accident.” The second was Richard, who also asked her to call back and spoke in a suspiciously measured tone. The third was Ethan, Claire’s close friend and Charlie’s longtime assistant, who just said, “Honey. I’m sorry. Oh fuck.”

Sasha was fourth. She was sobbing and Claire could hear ice hitting glass. “Jesus, Claire, why aren’t you answering your phone? They dropped a Giacometti on Charlie. Turn the TV on! I can’t believe he’s dead. God … Richard said he didn’t suffer.”

Claire set her phone on the desk and looked at Singh shuffling paper stacks. She ran a couple of versions through her head, then settled on this: “My husband, I think, is dead.” She looked toward the window and her gaze fell on an oak tree. Dr. Singh took a step toward her then stopped. He lifted his arms up and dropped them. There were an awkward few moments of silence. “My God,” he finally said.

*   *   *

C
LAIRE WAS MARRIED
—seconds, minutes, hours ago?—and now she was not. A recent image of Charlie flashed before her. Last week, high off a tennis win and flush from gossip and scotch, he’d come home and whisked Claire off to the Circle Line tourist boat. For three hours he charmed and regaled her beneath the stars. It had been years since he’d been flirtatiously impulsive this way, with her. Had it been a sign?

Saturday, five days from now, they were expected at Charlie’s mother’s. He’d promised to make his veal fettuccine, Claire’s favorite dish. Only last week they’d been planning their summer rental with Sasha and Thom on the Vineyard. Charlie was here, moments ago, just yesterday in all of his celebrated charm, and now he was gone. Claire was looking at breasts, less than a minute ago, and now she was not. The rate of change in her life, the death-to-change ratio, if you will, had peaked.

The sky in Austin, too, was blue.

2

There are many things that fall from the sky, it turns out. There are statistics about this; it’s not like Charlie’s thin man was the first.

On the day the Giacometti fell on Charlie, a peregrine falcon crashed through the plate glass window in Margaret Grabel’s Austin kitchen. Right there on Round Rock Circle,
smash
onto her floor. The falcon fall happened in the morning, and by the time Claire got to the airport for her flight back to New York, it was the hottest story in town. She watched it three times on the local news, three different channels on the television bank, while she waited to be called for standby. Peregrine falcons, like Giacomettis, are rare, especially in Texas. Claire learned this from the story. She learned, too, that they can dive very fast, up to two hundred miles per hour. There were three distinct visuals that each of the local news teams focused on: the falcon, the flustered Margaret, and the mottled-green geometric design of her linoleum floor.

The story was gripping, and Claire let herself get caught up in it. A dead bird somehow made sense to her right now. The idea that her husband was in the same condition did not.

*   *   *

I
T CERTAINLY WASN
’
T
Margaret Grabel’s intent to kill the bird, yet Claire couldn’t help but feel scorn. If Margaret had had a normal-size kitchen window, maybe a small one over the sink, it wouldn’t have caused such confusion. But she had an unreasonably large window, plate glass. She probably cleaned it twice a day with Windex; she probably kept it unnaturally streak-free.

Tragedy never comes in the form we anticipate, Claire thought, watching the screen.

A man wearing bright plaid golf pants crossed in front of Claire. He looked young, in his thirties, but had a gray beard that reached his chest. The first year they were married, Claire had flown to Chicago without Charlie—a wedding, distant cousin; he’d begged off. In the airport, she’d spotted a middle-aged woman in pink leather leggings and jacquard top who somehow pulled it off. Claire had snapped a photo of the woman with her phone and sent it to her new husband and this launched a little tradition of theirs—to collect characters when they traveled, whether together or apart. There was Neon Tube Dress, Atlanta. Feather Hat, Portland. Then, like most things with Charlie, it became serious. Last year, MoMA had run a showing of the Byrnes’ collection—
Character Sketches
—alongside Bob Dylan’s abstract silk screens. There was no use, of course, in taking this man’s photo now.

*   *   *

C
LAIRE TURNED HER
attention back to the televisions. Because the dead bird was in no shape for viewing, the television producers showed, instead, a colorful picture of a healthy one with small black eyes. Claire couldn’t help wondering why they were showing another bird, not the bird who had died, but a completely different one, a bird who had nothing at all to do with the dead one, nothing.