The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating

by Carole Radziwill

  Meanwhile, the days ticked by loudly. They hadn’t made a plan. Claire was waiting in line at CVS one day, with her toilet paper and toothpaste, when she realized that it had been three weeks since she’d met Jack Huxley in L.A., and Jack Huxley—oh God, she thought, she cringed at herself … don’t think it, don’t think it … Jack Huxley hadn’t called. She was suddenly appalled at the things that spilled from her arms—deodorant, shampoo, paper towels, Goobers. Goobers! These were not the sort of things the girls Jack Huxley called would buy.

  They wouldn’t buy Goobers.

  With Charlie, Claire had never bought Goobers. What was wrong with her?

  Maybe this whole thing with Jack was an aberration, Claire thought. Jack Huxley doesn’t date small-breasted, old-fashioned girls. He dates the girls who laugh, unprovoked, at all of his jokes whether they’ve heard them before or not. Girls who never roll their eyes, or eat. Not girls who shop at CVS.

  Jack Huxley’s girls can while away hours—hours and hours—and not miss a single one of them when he’s tied up on set. They can try, then remove, then try again every single shade of mousse cheek glow at the cosmetics counter before stopping at Starbucks. They can wear a scarf through the loops of their jeans without feeling the least bit self-conscious. They can hold hands with their “girlfriends.” Jack Huxley’s girls don’t laugh at anything, ever: they giggle.

  They wear push-up bras in junior high, Claire thought. And when they moved on to sex, they knew right where to go. The jock first. Then the musician, a local politician, somebody’s mogul father, and then Hollywood. These girls are able, somehow, to walk straight up to the sorts of men who command industries and yachts, and who only live when the cameras roll, look those men in the eye, and somehow, without demeaning themselves, lead them away.

  Claire couldn’t walk straight up to the news seller on Fourteenth Street. She was hardwired to wait for men to come. She was hardwired for courtship. It was the Midwestern in her. It was genetic. Her mother, Betty, had waited. She’d waited for men to call, to court, to send flowers, to ask. She had waited to have sex, and when she had it, she waited for it to end. Claire, like it or not, had inherited her mother’s wait. She’d married an older man, from a different generation, one who expected to lead, who pointed her everywhere, who had all the decisions made before she knew there were choices. She didn’t walk up to Charlie; he found her and she dutifully followed him home.

  27

  “You liked him, then?”

  “Yes. I guess I did.”

  Dr. Lowenstein discerned a noticeable shift in Claire since Jack Huxley had come on the scene. Where typically their sessions had been filled with a disingenuously wry back-and-forth, Claire now spoke randomly, speeding up and slowing down, letting no two thoughts connect.

  One ten-minute story began in the middle and went nowhere, about Jack Huxley and a Slate article he’d read and how Claire Byrne, when he’d mentioned it, realized she’d read the exact same article, that exact same week. What were the odds? There was something about Jack Huxley’s eyes being in focus, and then not, and then in either case being very dramatic and darkly brown. “You look into them,” Claire said, “and it’s like you’ve found a wonderful secret place. You feel like Alice falling into Wonderland, only it’s warm and you’re not scared—they’re the safest eyes I’ve ever seen, they should head a cult. Then your stomach starts to tickle from the inside and you find yourself giggling for no reason at all; it’s like smoking pot.”

  “Looking into Jack Huxley’s eyes evokes a feeling similar to that of smoking marijuana, then.”

  “Yes. Or, like flying really high on a swing. Whatever it is, somehow gravity takes a pause.”

  “A pause.”

  “Yes, for a moment as you look in Huxley’s eyes, gravity steps aside. The peripheral sense, too. For a moment that feels like forever, there are only the eyes.”

  Lowenstein nodded to indicate that yes, she understood. He had a great pair of eyes.

  The second thing Jack Huxley had said to Claire after “Hello” was this: “Claire, forgive me, I know this, but it’s slipped. Tell me again what you do. Something with vibrators?” This is what he’d said. He was funny. He’d remembered from the first night. There had been no long-winded anecdotes, no performance or puffed-up stories, no pronouncements about the state of film, no scanning the room. There was no excessive facial movement or language, not one wink.

  “He was different than I expected. That’s all.”

  “Different from what? What did you expect?”

  “He was like the lead in a Godard film—sweet and cool, vulnerable and rogue all at once, and backed by a brilliant sound track.”

  “What did you expect, then?”

  Claire hesitated. She picked nervously at a nail. “I don’t know. A flatterer and seducer. A charlatan, I guess.” That’s what Beatrice had said.

  RULE #12: Ignorance is bliss.

  28

  The holidays were a bust.

  Claire capitulated to Grace and took the train to Connecticut for the Byrne Christmas Eve. Grace had been widowed for nineteen years. Franz, or The Judge, as his friends had called him, had died of a heart attack, a much more conventional sort of death than death by a Giacometti. It is helpful, Claire had discovered, if the things that happen to you in life are things that people can understand. People don’t understand someone getting killed by forged art.

  Franz Byrne was no less present in the family home for being dead because after he died, Grace took up Catholicism, which to Claire seemed to mean that Franz was furtively lurking around.

  “Don’t worry, dear. Charlie is watching you. He’s taking care of you. He’s up there with his father now. They’ll take care of everything.” Grace gestured aimlessly at a space above her head. She’d said a version of this on the four occasions Claire had seen her since the funeral. Claire’s eyes followed Grace’s hand nervously. Grace, along with The Judge’s sister, Agnes, seemed to know the exact location in the sky where everyone was seated. They appeared to have kept in close touch with Charlie since his death. Grace was a better widow than Claire. She had likely not touched a vibrator, much less a man, since The Judge clutched his heart and was transported by gurney to his time at St. Vincent’s hospital. She put a strong, skinny arm around Claire’s shoulder, “Follow me, dear.”

  In a sitting room at the front of Grace’s house was an elaborate shrine. Charlie’s ashes—Grace’s share of them—were at rest in a huge embossed urn that sat on a tall marble table, flanked by bookcases full of his works: a small but impressive library of sex. Framed family photos and press photos of Charlie littered the walls. There were two armchairs and a chaise. A Chippendale table held the candles.

  “Light one with me, dear.” Grace pulled an expensive-looking gold lighter from a bowl on the bookcase and lit a candle, then handed the lighter to Claire who lit another. “Join me.”

  Grace clutched Claire’s hand and recited a Gloria and Hail Mary. When they were done Grace returned to her guests and to Claude, her handyman turned bartender. He shook up two Manhattans and topped them each with a bright red maraschino cherry.

  “Don’t forget your cherry!” he said, looking at Claire.

  She found the whole night unsettling. The Times Magazine had included Charlie in its annual obituary issue—“The Lives They Lived”—and Grace was reading passages of it aloud.

  Claire couldn’t get the idea of Charlie staring down at them out of her head. She didn’t want Charlie watching her all the time. Good God, had he seen what had happened in their bedroom with Brad Hess? She certainly didn’t want Grace to know that Charlie was watching her if he was. What if he reported back?

  Charlie’s family was notorious for being better than everyone at everything, and widowhood was no exception.

  “So, Claire, are you seeing anyone?” Charlie’s cousin Dane innocently asked and Grace swatted his hand as if he’d just tried to grope her. “Good Lord, what a thing to ask!” She
gestured, again, to the ceiling.

  Grace gestured throughout the night. And around ten, after too many brandies, when Grace began to veer, Claire snuck out. She called a cab to the train station and, while she waited, cousin Dane escaped, too, and offered her a ride.

  “So, I know we aren’t … I mean, we’ve never been very close,” he said in the car. It was true. They’d only ever met here, at Grace’s Christmas Eve. They’d never gotten beyond small talk. “… but how’s everything going for you, Claire? I mean, really. Has it been hard? Jesus, I’m sorry. Stupid question.”

  Claire considered her answers. The stock one: It’s been hard but I’m doing okay. The drunk one: No, but it could be, big guy, whyntcha come over? And the truth: “It’s been … hard, yes. And also kind of … weird. But I just met someone. And I miss Charlie, don’t get me wrong—but there wasn’t a lot of … spark in our lives. He wouldn’t disagree if he were here. Still, I feel bad saying it. And now, maybe, well I think I might have met someone and it feels nice.”

  She went with the truth. Dane, who’d had her back just minutes ago, pursed his lips and was silent. Not one word from him until the train. “Here you are,” he said curtly. No promises to stay in touch, no hug. “Be careful.”

  Claire was home in bed by eleven p.m.

  * * *

  ONE WEEK LATER, on New Year’s Eve, Jack Huxley gave a ten-year-old boy twenty bucks for a cup of lemonade in Culver City and every paper in town ran it bold on the front page like they’d scooped world peace. The drink heard round the world. Here, kid. Keep the change. It had been five weeks since Claire was in Los Angeles. The holidays had steamrolled through New York with forced expectations and fake cheer. She stayed in alone New Year’s Eve. Sasha called to suggest they have an anti–New Year and order in Chinese.

  “You’re sweet,” Claire said, “but I’m fine.”

  She and Charlie never made a big deal of the holiday. Charlie called it amateur’s night and refused to leave the house. They had their own tradition, which hadn’t seemed like a tradition until now. In retrospect, it seemed so indulgent—and sweet. Charlie would cook an elaborate dinner for the two of them. Cooking relaxed him. He’d spend hours on the dish—a chicken galantine—deboning the bird, sewing the savory mixture of meats and herbs back into the skin, accompanied by Rachmaninoff, which set the tone for the evening. They feasted on his work over television trays in front of a string of old movies, then switched to ABC shortly before midnight, to count the night down.

  What was Jack Huxley doing? This year she fell asleep with the television on, shortly before Anderson Cooper dropped the ball.

  Claire woke uncharacteristically early the next day and used the extra hours to write. She was determined, or at least on the first day of the new year, to focus, as Beatrice divined, on her work. As she fidgeted in her chair a single image loomed large in her mind, quite possibly because Dr. Ahearn, her college literature professor described it frequently, and that was of the young Thomas Wolfe at work. Dr. Ahearn told this anecdote about Wolfe, which may or may not have been true: that he wrote standing up, in his kitchen. He was very tall and had difficulty finding a comfortable position in which to write, so he had his papers stacked on top of the icebox and stood in front of it writing. As he finished his pages, he slid them off onto the floor. Dozens of pages, she imagined, such was the prolificacy of Wolfe. Tens and dozens of pages fluttering to the floor like leaves shed from trees in October.

  Now Claire wanted to be epic and careless and in love with the world again. She sat slouched at her desk, filled pages up spuriously in longhand, and flung them wildly off to the floor.

  The problem was that once she’d flung four or five, she couldn’t stop herself from gathering them and neatly stacking them up in order. Inevitably, she returned to her computer and, thwarted by abandon, worked with the digital representations of Charlie’s curt words: stiff letters on a cold, flat screen.

  His smile: when he smiled he captured the room. Huxley had a sharp eye for the absurd; the paradox of the career he’d chosen didn’t escape him. He kept a signed copy of Brave New World on a shelf—signed not to him, but to Bruce Bozzi “with fondness.” He’d bought it on eBay, $37.99 his final bid. Like all practiced narcissists, he considered himself self-aware.

  29

  “What do you mean by that, ‘further along’?” Lowenstein wanted to know. “Where, exactly, is further?”

  It was sunny for January. There’d been snowfall; it was melting. Claire’s socks were damp through her boots. Sunlight streamed through Lowenstein’s hair; she looked ablaze.

  “We didn’t start with my dream.”

  “Yes, all right, your dream, then.”

  Claire was beginning to tire of this doctor, but she feared her enough to stay. Lowenstein had adopted condescension in her manner. She seemed impatient. It made Claire think she wasn’t worthy enough to leave.

  “It’s okay. I don’t have a dream. It’s just that’s usually where we start.”

  “What would you like to talk about, then?”

  “I’m irritable today, that’s all.” Claire crossed, then uncrossed her legs.

  “Yes.”

  “And I feel like a helium balloon that’s half-deflated. Or half-inflated. Which one is better?”

  “Why do you feel this way?”

  “I’m hovering. I’m lingering. I’m suspended in air. I don’t know that this is worthwhile.”

  “We’ve gotten nowhere with your dreams.” Lowenstein said this haughtily, almost hostilely. It stung.

  “Where were we supposed to get?”

  “Tell me this, Claire. What makes you think you’re so special? What progress, exactly, do you think you ought to have made?”

  “I don’t know, I just think … Well, Charlie’s cousin Sara, for instance. I saw her Christmas Eve, at Charlie’s mother’s. They were all there, Charlie’s mother, his cousin, his aunt Agnes—a room full of widows. The surviving men just looked shell-shocked. Anyway, Sara’s husband died only seven months before Charlie, he had a brain tumor, and she’s already engaged. She’s engaged! It’s been barely a year. She’s getting married, to a mechanical engineer. I mean, her first husband owned two Koo Koo Roos and now she’s marrying a mechanical engineer. No one even knows what that is.”

  “What is it about that scenario that disturbs you? Do you think you should be engaged?” Lowenstein’s face was alarmingly still.

  “No. I mean, it would make things easier, but I don’t think it’s the—”

  “Do you define yourself by whom you’re betrothed to, Claire?”

  “Well, a little, I guess. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “We define ourselves by many different things, some of which may or may not include a mate.”

  “It’s just, a consistent lover would be nice, or someone to get coffee with or read the paper with.”

  “And where are you, exactly, with Jack Huxley, then?”

  Last week Lowenstein had complimented Claire on her perfume. This time they began at the possibility that Claire’s unconventional new relationship was not a positive development in her treatment. Lowenstein had been erratic since Claire had returned from L.A. But Claire did not know how to go about breaking up with a shrink, so she didn’t.

  Instead, after her session, she called the griot.

  The sidewalks were slushy; it was uncharacteristically warm for a New York winter. There were a tourist, a young hippie, a man with a backpack, and a dwarf. The griot was late and the small group lingered uncomfortably, fiddling with phones through their gloves, feigning interest. After fifteen minutes, two men, one of whom she recognized, could be spotted on the sidewalk, two blocks down, on the opposite side of the street. They were talking animatedly, which means they were using their hands and arms. The man with the griot, Claire recognized him as they got close, was Ben Hawthorne—funeral-crashing, Charlie-bashing, scruffy-haired Ben Hawthorne. For a brief, unguarded second, she smiled. She was surprised, but happy, t
o see him.

  He smiled back—he had a nice smile. Ever since Huxley, Claire took greater notice in smiles. It was an awkward chance meeting but not entirely off-putting.

  The griot passed out his card. The word today on it was Unfulfilled. They stood on the northeast corner of Twenty-Third and Seventh.

  “What are you doing here?” she mouthed to Ben.

  “Shh,” he signaled, a finger to his lips.

  The griot was a stickler for quiet.

  The griot began. “We’re looking at the site where, among others, Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, and Simone de Beauvoir—when she was in town—stoked their creative and lascivious powers. We are near where Dorothy Parker wrestled with alcoholism and the defeats of a lifetime, and failed. Where Arthur Miller, the playwright, wrestled with his conscience and Dylan Thomas, the poet, died from whiskey. Sid Vicious famously bludgeoned his girlfriend in the bathtub here, after a drug-fueled night. Sid was twenty-one years old and his girlfriend, Nancy, was twenty. He overdosed on heroin four months later in a different lover’s bed.”

  Then the griot began a personal story. It was about his grandparents, Millie and Oren Crews. They were married for forty-three years, raised four sons, and were respected in their small town in Oklahoma. Millie was active in her church and Oren was on the city council. They’d managed a comfortable existence and after their children were raised they traveled some. But then Oren got an itch. He came into a small inheritance and began frequenting the saloons in town. There were rumors that he’d taken up with the town prostitute, Flore Collins.

  “When Grandma Millie got wind of this, she got an itch of her own. She took Oren’s shotgun to the hotel where Flore worked and used it to get the desk clerk to let her into Flore’s room, where she found an unlocked cashbox and several salacious notes in her husband’s familiar handwriting. She took the three hundred dollars and change from the cash box. Then she took the shotgun to the Buckaroo Room where Oren’s pickup was parked and she waited. He walked out at two in the morning and as he relieved himself by the side of the building, she shot him with his own shotgun in the scrotum.” The griot put his fingers into a gun shape and aimed them at his own crotch. “And then, after an excruciating wait, Millie shot him again in the head. When Flore heard the news, her heart stopped and she died on the spot. Grandma Millie lived out the next ten years, happily for the most part, in a county jail. She was teaching herself Portuguese when she died.”