The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating

by Carole Radziwill

  Let’s start with scene and setting. The story opens in a brothel-cum-massage parlor, circa 1999. The Madam proprietor is Fortuna, a Roman Goddess. She’s ancient, but we know the time is contemporary because she’s wearing Guess jeans and the artist who was then known as Prince is playing from a boom box. The Goddess turned Madame wanders languidly about the grounds in jeans and black bustier and at this point in the narrative we should be bowled over by the literary brilliance of Mr. Byrne. The Goddess of Fate, in designer jeans, prancing around in 1999 as Prince sings that year’s titled track. Great stuff!

  The patrons of our modern medieval whorehouse are mostly artists and philosophers, few of whom were alive at the same time—Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel each make an appearance, as do Matisse, Damien Hirst, and Matthew Barney, which gives Byrne the opportunity to drop the term “Cremaster” repeatedly. It is a reference that is neither original nor fun nor anything that most readers—assuming there are some—are likely to get. It is one of many such references designed to stroke Mr. Byrne’s cerebral ego but add nothing to his text. Aside from Fortuna, there are no women in the whorehouse, only caricatured glory holes (among them, Margaret Thatcher and Elizabeth Taylor) and an assembly of clean-scrubbed farm animals.

  There. I’ve just alluded to the only interesting thing in the 723 pages—that Schopenhauer’s love is a goat. There is nothing else, really, to say. This is Harold Robbins on a long-winded creative writing assignment—it’s staggering, self-abusive, unrestrained. It’s Byrnes’s Story of O, written not to a lover, but to himself. Reading it feels like getting left alone with the bar drunk at 2 a.m., so your friend can get the phone number of the only girl.

  This should be the end of my review; anything more than this and you’ll be terrifically bored. It would insult you to go on, in the same way that Charles Byrne goes on, and on, oblivious to the value of his reader’s time. He might have, more considerately, ended his tale at the bottom of page 232 (a suggestion perhaps too generous to his prose). But there was space to fill up, empty pages. To fill them is the order of the day, and so in that vein I’ve got (here, right now) 297 more words of this review to go. Soon 289. And my apologies if you’re still reading.

  There’d been a night at the Quill Awards shortly after the Atlantic’s review (Charlie was presenting) when Claire had inadvertently struck up a conversation with Mr. Hawthorne, who was wearing the sort of end-of-summer tan and beach-tossed hair that inspired Slim Aarons books. “You know, I read ‘Hustling Woody,’” he said, and she forgot to remember he was an enemy. “I loved it. It was very good.” They’d shared a polite but friendly laugh. “Are you working on a book?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, not really.” She’d looked down as she said this, moved her foot in short arcs on the floor, and then she’d looked up, her mouth beginning to form words she instantly forgot when her eyes met Charlie’s across the room.

  They went home and he didn’t speak to her for three days. It was understood, in the Byrne house, that there was their version of a fatwa on the critic’s head. Claire had egregiously crossed the line.

  Claire had put down Thinker’s Hope at the exact same page cited by Hawthorne, the middle of 232, interrupting a painfully long dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Albert Schweitzer on the sensual possibilities of Brie. She’d made heroic attempts to finish, skipped ahead, started fresh on the introduction of Kant walking into a pub and promptly banging the busty Irish lass on a bar stool, from the front and then the back as two farmers discussed their potato crop undeterred. Charlie’s erotica, Claire had to admit, packed a punch. But there was something blowsy about the rest.

  A week after the funeral, she’d taken a worn copy from Charlie’s nightstand drawer. She thought rereading it would be a nice gesture. She turned to where she’d left off before they’d married. Chapter 13: “Sartre and the Horny Mikmaid.”

  “To exist is to scatter one’s seed across field and ocean; across continents and brambles, over the knotted topcoat of the Redwoods, or onto the crinkled fabric of yellowed bed sheets.”

  By the bottom of the page, she fell asleep.

  With Charlie spying on her from God-knows-where, with his posthumous endorsement (he certainly never imagined he’d die! Had he written that in his will as a prank?) She was charged with his book, his last one. Claire felt a responsibility.

  “Jack Huxley and the Art of the Narcissist” was, so far, a loose group of pages marked up with notes. There were countless references to mythology, of course. Charlie never met a god—including himself—he didn’t like. Narcissus was here, and Tiresias, the incurable voyeur who was changed into a woman. The pages were part biography, part fiction, part psychosexual pseudofantasy.

  That it was a biography, of sorts, from one of the world’s most egotistical men about one of the world’s others, was the jig; Charlie’s little wink. Claire was beginning to feel the whole damn thing a setup.

  She clicked on an image of Huxley to make it bigger. His head was cocked, angled down. He was looking at nothing particular but seemed amused, like someone in on a clever inside joke.

  Charlie’s infamous book had sold over five million copies worldwide in its first edition, and over twenty million copies to date. He considered it a serious work, but it was titillating enough to find its way into every cocktail conversation from Beverly Hills to East Hampton for a better part of the ’90s. Had Jack Huxley skimmed it? Claire suspected he had.

  RULE #6: Sometimes a dream is just a dream.

  Claire woke the next morning with an epiphany. She rushed breathlessly to Lowenstein. She arrived early and twitched impatiently in the waiting room for her appointment. She’d had a vivid dream and she’d written it down. More important, it wasn’t the first time that she’d had it.

  “Go ahead, then,” the doctor said.

  “Okay, this is a recurring one.” Claire knew that Lowenstein liked those. “I’ve never mentioned it, but I used to dream it when Charlie was alive.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  Claire took a breath and closed her eyes. “I’m a bug and Charlie sits on me at dinner.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At someone’s house.”

  “Whose house?”

  “The Spencers’. Wilt and Sherry. They have bad art and an orange Eames chair that no one ever sits in. Charlie hated their apartment. Anyway, that’s not important.”

  “I don’t agree, but go on.”

  “He sits on me and I’m helpless. Trapped. Under this unending swath of corduroy.”

  “Did Charlie wear corduroy?”

  “Never. But in the dream it’s clearly corduroy; there are wales.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m pinned to the chair. No air, no light, though I can hear them all talking. I’m praying he’ll need to relieve himself and get up. But time goes on and on and I can’t move and I’m forced to listen to all of it for hours. There’s no chance to excuse myself, or breathe, or rub an elbow distractedly or even scratch an itch.”

  “You said this is a recurring dream. How long have you been having it?”

  “Well, I used to have it when he was alive, like I said. And I’m not just any bug, I’m a green leaf beetle. Have you seen one?”

  “No. But I assume they’re green?”

  “Yes, they are. They blend. I always blend too perfectly with the upholstery, so I’m never noticed, and he sits on me every time. I’m always perched delicately on the chair as though I’ve just got there, just landed and am taking the room in, when the solid square mass of Charlie descends. This is awful, it makes it sound like I hate him.”

  “You felt trapped by him.”

  Claire picked at a nail.

  “Charlie is always the guest of honor in this dream, and his is the only voice I can make out, that’s the other thing. I can’t hear any other voices clearly, only his, in loud barreling echoes.”

  “You felt suppressed by him, overshadowed.”

  “I don’t know. I guess maybe
I did,” Claire said.

  “It’s not unusual, you married very young.”

  She watched the second hand on Lowenstein’s wall clock tick by.

  “Dr. Jung says dreams are an expression of your current condition, not a preexisting one. So you still feel suppressed by Charlie. Even in death, you can’t escape him. You’re still overpowered by him to an extreme—you’ve painted a harrowing account of claustrophobia—one that leaves me, just listening to you, struggling a bit for air.”

  “You know what I hated sometimes, about most of the social things we went to?” Claire pushed loose hair back from her face.

  “Tell me,” Lowenstein said.

  “No one laughed.”

  Lowenstein scribbled something down.

  “They were stern, or cold?”

  “I mean, they just didn’t sincerely laugh. There were ironies or intellectual inside cracks that required a familiarity with Nietzsche or somebody’s blue phase or Kierkegaard’s concept of despair. These were not met with laughter, but instead more of a bark.”

  “You thought them insincere perhaps.”

  “I miss real laughter. No one laughs anymore. You know, where it’s uncontrollable and sometimes brings tears. Richard’s girlfriend, Bridget, laughs sometimes, but I think it’s a nervous tic. Sasha’s had too many injections to laugh, and Ethan thinks it’s a weakness of character. Real laughter explodes without warning, like a sneeze.”

  Claire produced a magazine from her handbag, a copy of OK! with Jack Huxley on the cover. He was wearing a blue sweater and jeans, walking on a sidewalk in New York. His head was down and under a baseball cap, but not so far that you missed the trademark smirk. A four-page spread in the middle addressed the simultaneous claims on his sperm by three different women—a young actress, a dancer, and a makeup artist, in no special order.

  “This is who Charlie was writing about,” Claire said. “This was the work in progress when he died.”

  The doctor studied the pictures for an unusually long time. Claire thought she saw her smile. But she handed it back straight-faced.

  “You know who Jack Huxley is, right?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of him,” Lowenstein replied. “Why are you showing me this?”

  Claire regarded her curiously. Lowenstein looked away; she wiggled her pencil, she pressed a finger to her lip.

  “Because Richard just gave me the manuscript, the one Charlie was working on. He wants me to … well, finish it. Charlie stipulated in his will that if anything should happen to him I would be responsible for any unfinished work.”

  After an unnaturally long pause, Lowenstein spoke.

  “Let’s not be trivial about this,” she said. “That is a huge commitment.”

  She cleared her throat, then continued. Her voice had raised in pitch. “You didn’t know what he was working on, then?”

  “I wasn’t interested. And Charlie never brought his work home. So, no.”

  Lowenstein set her pen and notebook on her desk and assessed the pictures in Claire’s lap. “That is a profoundly attractive man,” Lowenstein said. Then she took up her pen again and wrote something down.

  13

  “See, this is what I mean!” Claire waved Sunday’s New York Times Style section at Ethan.

  They were eating brunch and sharing the paper at Pastis. October had dawned cool and rainy, as if to emphasize that time kept moving, even when people were stuck. “Did you read Modern Love?” Claire asked.

  “No, honey. It’s hard for me to read it when you have it,” Ethan said.

  “It’s from a widower. Five hundred sappy words on why he’s already sleeping with someone four months after his wife died. I needed the distraction. She would’ve wanted it that way. Are we supposed to believe his wife wanted him screwing around four months later, and that she’d be happy for him? I’ll tell you something, it’s not like that on my side.”

  Ethan took a slow drink of his coffee.

  “Did I tell you Melanie Stark fixed me up?”

  “No, you didn’t. I hope he was rich.” He was reading the Sunday Magazine. A quick glance at the article revealed none other than Charlie’s muse: “Huxleys in Hollywood: Then and Now.”

  “There must be a movie coming out.”

  Ethan whistled low and shook his head. “That is one pretty man.”

  “Anyway, yes, he was rich, Melanie’s setup. He was also seventy and widowed.”

  Ethan was scanning the Huxley article.

  “May I remind you that I am thirty-two? That’s too young for seventy,” Claire said, loud enough to make the man two tables over glance their way. “What? You’ve never heard a woman raise her voice?” Claire snapped at him.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, honey,” Ethan said. He put the paper down.

  “My point is that this guy was old and widowed less than two months and he’s getting fixed up with me. A husband dies and the world gets just another widow. A wife dies, and a star is born.”

  “That’s catchy.”

  “Seriously, Ethan.” Claire crossed, then uncrossed her legs.

  “Okay. Does it bother you?” Ethan asked.

  “Yes, it does. There’s no protocol for men. It’s like breaking up: they’re just single again, suddenly, and they run back out and fool around. I mean, what about Scout’s dad in To Kill a Mockingbird—what was his name?”

  “Atticus.”

  “Right, Atticus. He didn’t start hitting on Scout’s teacher right after his wife died. He stayed sober and serious. He made his children his focus, not getting laid. This Modern Love guy has a seven-year-old daughter. Can’t he just watch porn like everyone else? It’s pathetic.”

  “What’s pathetic? That he’s in a relationship, and you’re not?”

  “No. That’s not … no. It’s this ruse of doing it for his wife. He says she told him, ‘If I die, I don’t want you to be unhappy the rest of your life,’ then says she added jokingly, ‘just for a couple years.’ Well, maybe she wasn’t joking, maybe she did want him to be unhappy for a couple of years. These widowers have no respect and it’s demeaning to all of us.”

  “No one’s saying you can’t have a life, Clarabelle.”

  “Nancy Drew, there’s another one. Her dad poured himself into his work. He didn’t start screwing secretaries or, if he did, at least he was discreet.”

  A pitcher of Bloody Marys appeared on their table. Ethan smiled.

  “Smooth,” Claire said.

  “To the bloody widow.” He raised his glass and ate his celery. “Relax, honey. Time figures things out.”

  * * *

  WHEN CLAIRE GOT home, there was an envelope outside her door, from Richard. It contained a small white card and a note: “What you need, Claire, is a journey, however brief—R.”

  Everyone and their journeys, she thought.

  The white card said this:

  * * *

  Griot: New York City

  I will take you on a tour.

  You will end up in a different place.

  212.555.1284

  * * *

  Claire read the card twice, turned it over, ate a scoop of peanut butter from a jar.

  She looked up griot in Charlie’s battered Oxford dictionary.

  Noun: A member of a class of traveling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa. Origin: French, earlier guiriot, perhaps from Portuguese criado.

  She called Ethan.

  “What’s a griot?”

  “A griot? Hmm. Well, he’s an historian of sorts. It’s a West African tradition that goes back centuries, although they are enjoying a renaissance in Europe. Why?”

  Claire studied the card. “Well, Richard sent me the number of a griot. Can they be in New York?”

  “East Village or West?”

  “You know griots?”

  “If it’s Derek, in the West Village, you should go. He’s got a certain flair. You should follow him. Actually, I think he’s a clie
nt of Richard’s.”

  “Follow him? What do I do?”

  “Just show up where he tells you to go and listen. He’ll tell you a story. Remember when your mother took you to story time when you were a kid?”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Well, pretend she did. This is story time for grown-ups. He’ll know every sad song that’s ever played out in this town, big or small. Every drunk, every lecher, every swindle, scandal, and sordid act. If he doesn’t, he’ll make it up. Derek’s a bartender by trade; he’s out of work. People drink at home when the economy’s bad.”

  It couldn’t hurt, Claire thought. And Ethan said, “If Beatrice wasn’t the olive for your martini, so to speak, you should try him.”

  * * *

  HIS NAME WAS Derek, it turned out. He was abrupt on the phone but not in an unfriendly way—it was a manner Claire recognized. She had a similar anxiety about words spilled through phones, so unstructured and loose and never a natural end. He told Claire to be at Houston and Sullivan Street at nine o’clock Thursday, and when she arrived he handed her and four other people a white card that he produced crisp and neat from his fingers, like magic. It was blank but for his name and phone number in small Helvetica font.

  Derek Fountain, Griot 212.555.1284

  And then one word in Garamond: LONGING.

  Besides Claire, there was a businessman from Kansas, a woman from Great Neck and her teenage son, and a pale man in leather pants and black hair with bright tattoos that snaked from his wrists up into his sleeves on both arms, and which Claire could not quite make sense of.

  They walked two blocks in silence, then Derek stopped and read from Le Père Goriot by Balzac. After he closed the book and replaced it in his backpack, he produced a tarnished flute and began a Chopin étude, then he walked again. The group followed. They walked for thirty-three minutes until they reached a corner at West Twenty-Fourth Street, where the griot broke down the flute, returned it to his pack, and began to speak.