The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating

by Carole Radziwill

  “And why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know. Either because I’m destined to write a mildly interesting screenplay one day, or I’m just re-scripting my averagely interesting life.”

  “Are you playing with memory, to make your life more interesting to you?”

  “Everything was thick. Wrists, carpet, walls, high-backed booths. The room was dark and table lights drilled down from the ceiling in the shape of cones, like an interrogation room. The carpet was the color of dried blood. Norma Desmond would have fit in perfectly sprawled out on a velvet settee in the corner with a cigarette holder the length of her arm.”

  Lowenstein cleared her throat.

  “Claire, the scene has changed three times while you’ve been sitting here,” she said. “Whether you consciously realize that or not, memories are affected by the information you’ve received subsequently. When you’re having conflicted feelings after your husband’s sudden death, don’t you think it’s interesting that the room decor has gone seedy? This dream-memory stands in for Charlie and for men; you’re at a point now where you’re seeking out intimacy, however tentative.”

  Claire looked out the window. While Lowenstein was looking down, she exhaled on the glass and traced her name.

  “I don’t know if it’s intimacy, exactly. Part of me just wants to sleep with someone and get it over with.”

  “You want a lover. Someone you can place in a different scenario than you see Charlie in.”

  “I don’t know. Eve, my botanomanist, said to do it out of town and don’t even ask his name. She screwed a car salesman and then got married eight months later.”

  “To the car salesman?”

  “No, to a tax attorney.”

  “I see.”

  “We’re out of time, aren’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  19

  Claire’s third date played hockey for the New York Islanders, and she arranged to double with Richard and Bridget to take the pressure off. They met, in various stages, at Bemelmans at the Carlyle Hotel. Bridget was there when Claire arrived, draped loosely around the bar, eating olives.

  “Oh my God, Claire. Hi!” Bridget said. A great part of her appeal was her unparalleled fervor for almost everything.

  Bridget double-kissed and Claire did not, but they got past it almost flawlessly and Claire assumed a tall chair at the bar.

  Bridget was a dog stylist. She outfitted very wealthy dogs. Charlie had casually observed of her once that she was a G-string away from pole dancing, which wasn’t saying anything at all except that he wouldn’t mind sleeping with her, given the chance. Claire noticed a wobble in Bridget’s movement off of, then back onto, her own tall chair. She was drunk.

  “So, are you okay?” Bridget whispered it passionately, with her head down, speaking and looking not at Claire but instead straight ahead, like a spy from central casting.

  “Yes, I am. Thanks,” Claire replied, also straight ahead. Bridget was having martinis; Claire followed suit.

  “No, I mean it. God, it’s so fucked up. I mean, how did you deal?”

  Claire hadn’t seen Bridget since the funeral and she wasn’t completely sure they were talking about Charlie, but it hardly mattered.

  Bridget was eating the olives from her drink, pulling them one at a time from a swizzle stick with her teeth. When she finished, she loaded her glass up again from a bowl the bartender had set in front of her. It was fascinating to watch. She chewed each briny fruit purposefully and with her whole mouth, like caramel-covered candies.

  “And now, oh my God. You have to start dating. Doesn’t that suck?”

  Claire bypassed Bridget’s questions and countered with her own, a trick she’d learned from Lowenstein. “How is work going?” If she started on this, Claire knew she wouldn’t have to talk for a while. Bridget’s eyes popped wide and she sucked in her breath.

  “Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s going so great. I’m in Bark next month!”

  Claire had to ask. “Bark?”

  “You know, the magazine? They did a huge cover story called ‘Doggie-Style.’ Isn’t that smart? We did the shoot in Bayville Beach. It was really amazing. Susan Sarandon’s dog was in it. And you know that woman who played Anna Wintour in the movie? Her dog was there, too.”

  Claire took an olive and contemplated the thought that Bridget did not even know who Meryl Streep was. Bridget went on.

  “I’m starting my own line now, too. Entire ensembles focused around verbs. Richard says it’s very highbrow.”

  Claire took another olive, leaving them just two—one apiece—with the bartender nowhere in sight.

  “They’re not a statement or, you know, a lifestyle or anything like that. They don’t say anything about you. They’re a verb. So I’ve sketched out a Sit line and a Come line, and, of course, a Shake. I’m planning to launch six verbs to start and add twelve more next year. I have to finalize my collection by November to get into spring shows.”

  Bridget picked up the last olive with her thumb and third finger and placed it on her tongue like communion. A ticker tape of new verbs, no doubt, raced through her seamless head. Still looking straight ahead, and not at Claire, Bridget let escape a prolonged laugh. It was a good laugh and it brought the bartender back with more olives.

  They chewed and Bridget laughed and they ordered more drinks.

  Richard’s arrival just then might have been anticlimactic had he not walked in the door with Jake Murphy on his heels.

  Claire was gripped suddenly by pet verbs. They had hold of her like an old song on the radio. Stop. Stay. Heel. Richard kissed first Bridget, then Claire, and ordered drinks for the four of them. Jake stuck out his hand and Bridget laughed.

  “You girls know this guy, of course,” Richard said. Claire didn’t watch hockey, but she understood the expectation that one was to recognize sports stars. She suspected Richard hadn’t known who Jake Murphy was, either, until that morning when he googled him. “Honey, this is Jake Murphy, best center in the league,” he said to Bridget. “We just met in the lobby. And, Jake, this is Claire.” Claire smiled. Bark. Fetch.

  Jake was cute and smartly dressed. He looked like a well-appointed boxer—the dog and athlete both. He was sleek and muscular, his clothes were snug. He looked obedient.

  Sasha just then began a steady stream of texts.

  4got 2 tell u, J’s writing a book! Claire took Sasha’s cue.

  “I heard you’re a writer off the ice. I didn’t know hockey players could write. I thought their hands were always all broken up.”

  Jake held out his smooth, unbandaged hands.

  “Memoir?” Richard said.

  “Something like that.” Jake was looking at Claire intently. “It’s about hockey, pretty much. So yeah.” Claire flashed a lopsided smile back. Between the chewy olives and Bridget’s verbs, she had managed to finish off three martinis. A square-jawed hockey player in business-casual Prada seemed like the next obvious thing.

  “This is brilliant,” she slurred to Richard. “Sasha’s out of her mind.” She felt the buzz of her phone: He has profile in Vogue, 2! Nxt month.

  Jake was not what she expected. He was soft-skinned and had all of his teeth. He didn’t look like a hockey player; he looked like a Chippendales dancer who juggled acting gigs by day. He looked like the Golf Pro on Days of Our Lives.

  “How’d your Vogue piece go?”

  “It was cool. Yeah.”

  “Who was the writer?”

  “Can’t hear you, honey.”

  “WHO WAS THE WRITER?”

  Jake grabbed Claire’s hand. They moved their foursome to a table and Claire followed Bridget’s tipsy weave.

  “You write or something, too, right?” Jake said. Sasha had prepped him.

  Claire, heady from booze, formed a wry smile and geared up. “I write erotica,” she said. “BDSM, groups, shemales.” She laughed into her drink, looked up at Jake through wispy bangs, then sunk one pinky carelessly in the
vodka and twirled.

  Richard eyed Claire suspiciously. Bridget took Richard’s hand and started laughing again. “It’s okay, baby,” she said.

  “My husband was a sexologist,” Claire said.

  Jake smiled big, first at Claire, and then at Bridget, and Richard intercepted Claire’s next drink.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Bridget said again.

  By midnight, Bridget’s head wobbled, Richard yawned, Claire was enjoying Jake’s hand, but talk, for the most part, had died; they’d grown restless. Richard leaned in close. “Listen, you okay?”

  Claire gave him a thumbs-up and felt her phone buzz again.

  R U still there?

  Bridget was nudging Richard to leave. Claire texted Sasha, squinting at the screen on her phone, which appeared to have gotten smaller.

  Yes … little drink-richard I think worried.

  After some gratuitous wrangling, Jake paid the check and Bridget and Richard got in the first cab while Claire and Jake waited for the next. “Where are we going?” she asked, her hands clutching onto his muscular arm.

  “Fuck,” Jake said. “I don’t have my keys.”

  “What? Okay,” Claire said.

  “My keys. Shit, I don’t have my keys. I left them at the gym.”

  A call to the gym confirmed it was closed.

  “Shit. Oh well.”

  Claire was too hazy to think through whether this was something he’d planned—the old key ruse. So she took keyless Jake home. She tossed the clutter of take-out containers under the sink and threw open her drapes to let in the city lights.

  “Whoa, babe. Nice place.”

  She opened a bottle of wine and started giggling.

  “Beaujolais!” she announced. “Big fruit and leafy smells.” She took an exaggerated sniff of the bottle. “I think it’s out of season. There’s a season for Beaujolais, you know.” She could hear herself slurring. She found everything terribly funny. She stumbled and Jake caught her arm. She let her hair fall out of its clip and kicked her shoes across the room. She poured a glass of wine for Jake and kept the bottle. Clutching it, she put it up to her mouth for a long drink and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. This was New Claire now. Claire of the Jungle. Single, young, hot, wild, crazy Claire.

  Jake grabbed the bottle and drank from it, too. “You’re a naughty girl, I bet.” Naughty Claire? She considered it. Should she spank him? Spank herself? What would Charlie have said were Claire to ever have inquired about the terms of being naughty?

  “You know,” Jake said, rubbing the wine bottle against her throat. Oh God, Claire thought. Am I supposed to do it with the bottle? “I might be stuck here for the night.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  Jake asked to take a shower, which seemed perfectly natural. Claire pointed down the hall. It was one o’clock, and they could sleep in or maybe not. They could go for coffee in the morning, or he could leave while it was dark. Who cared? There was a man in her room for the first time in six months, not counting Ethan. She was too drunk to panic. This was easy. This was nice.

  At that moment, losing her widow virginity to a hockey player made perfect sense.

  But fifteen minutes later Jake reappeared in Charlie’s robe. The camel-colored cashmere robe she’d bought him for Christmas just last year, before anyone knew about dying. Their last Christmas, before she knew it was the last.

  Claire gasped loudly, then covered her mouth. “Oh my God. Shit.” The night was blown. All of it. The flirts, the man, the crazy, naughty Claire.

  RULE #7: Do not keep your dead husband’s robe in the bathroom.

  “What, babe? What’s wrong?”

  Was this why Evan Spence had made a note about the robe? Why had Claire left it hanging on the back of the door, her dead husband’s robe? Why the fuck had she left Charlie’s toiletries neat and in place, instead of moving them to the second bathroom down the hall—the shaving supplies, the cologne? One bathroom for Claire, one for dead Charlie. She’d never thought this was anything that would intersect with Jake, with any Jake, with any hockey player, with anyone. How had Jake seen dead Charlie’s robe? Didn’t he think it was strange to put it on, another man’s robe? Shouldn’t he have avoided it? Did he think she ran a fucking hotel outfitted with men’s cashmere robes?

  No, it was Claire who was wrong. Claire had a problem, not Jake.

  “Listen, you know what. I’m sorry. I can’t…”

  “Can’t what?”

  “I need to take you home. Somewhere.”

  “I don’t have my keys to go home. Hey, what happened?”

  “Then you need to call someone, a friend. Nothing happened. I just … you need to go. I’ll walk you somewhere or go with you. I need you to put your clothes on.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Claire’s voice was rising like floodwater in a hurricane and she thought she might scream the way a three-year-old screamed—eyes closed, hands on ears, full-throated emotional scream. Claire had that urgent need and hoped she could hold it in until Jake went away.

  “I’m fine. I think the alcohol wore off, and I get these headaches and I just want to go to bed.”

  She was fighting the urge to tear the robe off of him, to snatch it off and kick him and run. She needed to get him out the door and he was moving too slowly.

  “Okay, baby. That’s cool,” Jake said. “I’ll call someone, then.”

  “Can you call them outside, please?”

  “It’s loud on the street.”

  “Then in the hall? Please.”

  Jake was putting on pants, buttoning buttons, slipping on shoes. He looked dazed and confused, and a little sad. He very gallantly kissed Claire’s cheek before he left, though. It made a tear of hers run down. “Good night, pretty girl.”

  It was the end, for Claire, of hockey.

  20

  “I brought a man home, to spend the night. To have sex with.”

  “And how did that go?”

  “He put on Charlie’s robe and I freaked out.”

  Spence had an emery board and was very methodically filing his nails. Claire couldn’t take her eyes away.

  “Why is that? Why did you freak out?”

  “I don’t know. It felt like Charlie was in the room watching us. I felt like I’d been caught.”

  “What do you feel today?”

  “Um. Annoyed, I guess, a little. Anxious. If I don’t find someone suitable in the next couple of months, my married friends will move on. Sasha wants to have kids now. Mothers don’t have time for single friends.”

  “Claire, did it occur to you that each person bears his or her own set of problems? That if you read Socrates, or Hegel, they tell you that the struggle of the ordinary is one of the universal pitfalls of mankind?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the every day, the getting from breakfast to jobs to appointments to dinner to bed, all the seemingly minor incidents lodged between big moments, that topple us.”

  Claire looked at Spence, then looked out the window. He probably got all this crap from Charlie, she thought.

  “I just need to get through the first year,” Claire said.

  “What makes you so certain some sea change occurs after a year?”

  Spence had an eyebrow raised, her cue, she knew, to behave. Be fucked up, but do it right.

  “A year is as long as you can stretch it. You know, the Jewish year of mourning … it’s a year. You get a year.”

  “I wasn’t aware you were Jewish,” said Dr. Spence.

  “It’s carefully unwritten into every conversation about death. It’s the three-six-three paradigm.”

  “I’m unfamiliar with it,” Spence said.

  “For the first three months, everyone’s around and attentive, there’s great concern, or show of concern, and they conspire to keep you distracted and busy. The next six months are busy, too, though the attention trails off. Widowhood is like any other commodity. It’s not enough to just have
it. You have to understand its value.”

  Spence managed to glance at his watch without disturbing the eyebrow, which Claire found fascinating, but she was determined to finish her thought.

  “And then the last three months it dies. Tumbleweeds blow by. The old couples’ friends stop calling; some new friends trickle in. You start to segue out of one skin and into another. Then you start running into people. ‘Oh yeah you, I remember. You’re still a widow? How’s that working out?’”

  She looked at Spence’s shoes; they were a horrible shade of red-brown. He should be starting his wrap-up.

  “Claire.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you hear me? I need to reschedule next week. Can we move to Thursday?”

  The perfect man will walk through my door one night when the lights are out, Claire thought. And then she heard her mother’s voice: Honey, lock your door. It’s New York. People get killed.

  The journalist, Alex, hadn’t liked Claire’s seduction scene, but what did he know? Stephen had had the seductive power of a rat. Some girls want candles and wine, and that’s okay. Some like to be whisked out of town. Some are fine getting fucked in a nice room at The Standard. Charlie covered methods of seduction and sexual fantasies at length in Driving with Her Head in Your Lap. Generally speaking, in almost every species, from the bonobo to the fruit fly, there’s a template the male follows: show confidence, then empathy, self-deprecation, then go for the kill.

  Claire, personally, liked how Robert Redford seduced Katharine Ross. What was wrong with that? “Yes, sure. Thursday is fine,” Claire said. When she got home, Jack Huxley was in her mailbox, on the front page of Variety. She’d almost forgotten about him. He had just signed on to a new project, opposite Keira Knightley, who’d been offered the highest amount of money ever paid to a woman in a lead. An enormous picture of the two—she in red, a full-lipped bosomy piece of candy; and he in black with his lottery-winning grin—adorned the small article.