The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating

by Carole Radziwill

  She looked around her in the car to confirm, she felt the spot where he’d been sitting, it was warm. It turned midnight and Jack Huxley disappeared like Cinderella. Claire Byrne’s carriage made its slow way south through Broadway traffic, to her home.

  43

  Claire entered her apartment, tired. She went to her bedroom and began to undress. She held her breath and turned on the light. No one was there.

  She picked up the phone.

  “Sweetie, where are you? It’s after midnight,” Sasha said.

  “Crazy. I’m in crazy.”

  “And your movie star?”

  Claire let out a long sigh.

  “Gone. I saw him. It was nice. And then he left. We got in his car together and then he left—got out at his hotel and told the driver to take me home.”

  “Oh.”

  “He kissed me on the forehead and asked if I was in town for a spell—he said ‘spell,’ he’s cute that way—and I said, ‘Yes I am, I live here, remember?’ He’s doing a press thing or a promo thing or some sort of stupid thing and he said, ‘I’ll call you.’”

  Claire could hear the clinking of a glass on the other end, the shush as Sasha told Thom to go back to bed. It made Claire feel lonely. “What if he calls?” Sasha asked.

  “He’s not going to call. It would be insulting at this point to call.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we start at the same place every time. Except I’ve gone back a step and now we start there. Now he doesn’t even go home with me, he doesn’t even invite me in. But wait, the next part’s pathetic. He asked for my number. He’s so damn good at this, he can ask for the number of a woman who could have sworn they’d recently been intimately involved without even batting an eye.”

  “He asked for your number…”

  “Yes, and I gave it to him. And then he paused and said, ‘Hey, that’s a great number. Did you know the guy?’”

  “Know what guy?”

  “The phone guy, you know … did I know the phone guy to get such a good number.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Yes, well. There’s nothing to really get. The point is … the pathetic point is he already said that exact same line to me. The first time he ever asked for my number. The first time he asked, when it all seemed spontaneous, when I didn’t know I was watching the first act of a play that I was never going to see the end of.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Nothing to say. I’m merely illustrating a sad denouement. I have to go.”

  “When will I see you, sweetie?”

  “Soon.”

  Claire hung up and climbed into bed.

  * * *

  HER CELL PHONE rang a few minutes later. “You’re up late.” Ethan’s voice was reassuring.

  “Why couldn’t my husband just not be dead so I could be married and living happily ever after?”

  He would not indulge her.

  “I adored the man, honey, but stop romanticizing it. He wasn’t your fairy tale, and this one isn’t either.”

  Claire started to argue, then stopped.

  “The curtain closed on your first act. You were just finding your second and this guy comes along. Huxley is exactly like Charlie. Wake up, Cinderella. Get a new pair of shoes.”

  “How come I paid Lowenstein and Spence two hundred dollars an hour apiece and they never noticed this? I’m scared of second acts,” Claire said. The room felt hot. She punched her pillow. Turned onto her side.

  “Of course you are, second acts are messy. There are obstacles, twists and turns, in a second act. You have to fix things that came up in act one.” Ethan continued. “You’d rather avoid it. That’s what you did with Charlie and then he suddenly died so you never had to. Then you pick another first act guy.”

  “I like first acts,” Claire mumbled.

  “Everyone does. All action, no accountability.”

  “I need to look for a second act.”

  “Yes, Clarabelle, you do.”

  * * *

  AT THREE IN the morning, Claire committed a desperate third act. Three o’clock is the time when desperate acts occur. It took an hour to compose it. To write and then delete and then revise—is that too strong? Too flippant? Will he understand I’m being funny there?

  Four hours later, at seven that morning, she turned on her television in time to see his legs crossed casually in front of Matt Lauer and his smile at full morning wattage. He was wearing the black Armani suit, a stark white shirt. Tan and fit, his jawbone lean, he looked like a well-behaved rogue. He looked like what heroin must have looked to Billie Holiday, like vodka to Liz Taylor. His gestures were fluid; his head bobbed playfully from side to side. At this exact same time, her e-mail to him was arriving on a gadget in his dressing room, in the room where he’d likely taken fifteen minutes to prepare and in that fifteen minutes had claimed the world as his again. The camera had almost certainly been invented with Jack Huxley in mind.

  Claire had sent the e-mail; it was sent.

  I wanted to call your room, but forgot your fake name.

  I stayed at that party, suffering over all those sycophants so I could spend time with you afterward. I’m clumsy, though, and for a writer, still incapable of expressing myself next to you in a Suburban with Sal.

  I thought we could be more, Jack. I was wrong … fairy tales are best left for the books.

  My late husband was much better suited for writing your story than I am. Take care, Jack.

  Claire

  It was the end, for Claire, of actors.

  44

  RULE #18: “Never discourage anyone who continues to make progress, no matter how slow” (Plato).

  * * *

  “THAT’S INTERESTING.” EVAN Spence was wearing a scarf around his neck and it was distracting to Claire. She had impulsively decided to see him again. She was impulsively deciding everything.

  “What’s interesting?”

  “What you were saying.”

  Claire for an instant, and then two, stretching into three, was unable to reattach to a single thread of what she was saying. She was going on four and decided to move. “Can I sit over there?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “It’s just, I’m distracted over here.”

  “Whatever you like.”

  “Okay. Now I remember.” She was facing the window now, and couldn’t see Evan Spence.

  “Claire, excuse me.”

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind, go on.”

  “Ummm. I was talking about people as punctuation, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there are periods and commas and ellipses … and colons and semicolons, of course, all that. But I’m a parenthesis.”

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “I was Charlie’s plus one, I was his parenthesis. My botanomanist, Eve, is a semicolon. Ethan’s thoughtful, like a comma. Sasha’s definitely an exclamation point. I go to events, I go to places, and no one quite remembers my name but they remember my face. I’m a parenthesis. Charlie was a period. And where does a parenthesis go after a period?”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “I’m just saying. I haven’t enjoyed, really, being a widow.”

  “No one particularly enjoys it.”

  “No, I know, right. Not enjoy, but everyone knows there are perks. That’s what I mean. You’re a star, center stage for—well, you can stretch it out for a long damn time. I realize now why I don’t enjoy it and why I liked Huxley.”

  “Because you’re a parenthesis?”

  “No, because I’m a period now.”

  Claire smiled at her reflection in the window.

  45

  Trollope wrote three thousand words a day, but Claire was not Trollope.

  What He Wants: Jack Huxley and the Art of the Narcissist. The book. The ghost of Charlie, she hoped, might revisit her for his book. On the occasions when he haunted her, however, neither of th
em brought it up.

  “It’s about tragedy,” she said. She was in Richard’s office. Her eyes were fixed on his bookshelf. “It’s a crisis of meaning.”

  Richard’s eyes were closed, presumably to more deeply absorb the essence of the subject at hand, Claire’s work. That’s right: her work. The book she wanted to write. He was obligated, for a number of reasons, to humor her. They were both aware of this.

  “A crisis of meaning?” he said.

  Claire walked to the side of Richard’s desk, though she couldn’t get behind it. Outside, it was an ordinary day.

  “Describe what you mean,” he said.

  “Crisis of meaning. Well, a person or a whole country can experience it. It could be happening right now.”

  Richard put his hands together beneath his chin; his eyes remained closed.

  “It’s like Bob Dylan before his motorcycle accident that may or may not have actually happened, and then Bob Dylan shortly after. He was an entirely different person. Before the accident, he was reckless and drifting. Then he crashed and disappeared and came back married and serious. He had a crisis of meaning. One day you know who you are and then you don’t. Charlie was alive one morning, coming to see you, and then he was dead. I was married when I flew to Texas and then a widow before I got back home. I’m not the same person anymore, and it was sudden. A physical change—look at me, I don’t even look the same—and then spiritual. It started on the plane, after you called me and I flew back from Austin—I ordered gin. I would never order gin. I let a man wear Charlie’s robe, I opened up the expensive wine, I got a second-opinion shrink, I lost my virginity again. That’s what the book should be about.”

  Richard nodded and cleared his throat.

  Claire scowled at the bookshelf. “Richard, open your eyes please.”

  Richard opened them.

  Claire put one hand on her hip and with the other one gestured behind Richard’s head. “What is that?”

  It was Tête sur tige (Head of a Man on a Rod), 1947. They both knew this very well. “It was a good investment, Claire. These things go in cycles.”

  “Is it real?” she asked. She knew very well that it was.

  Richard, with his hands still folded beneath his chin, nodded.

  “A fake Giacometti kills Charlie, and there’s a rush on the real ones? How long have you had it? I don’t want to know. How do you know it’s not fake? It’s ugly.” Claire was furious; this didn’t seem right. “If Charlie had been murdered with a gun, would you have rushed out to buy one? In homage?”

  “Charlie wasn’t murdered. It’s comforting having it here.”

  “Charlie wouldn’t agree with that. It’s morbid, Richard.”

  “How many pages do you have?” he asked.

  “A Giacometti was my crisis of meaning. Thirty-eight.”

  Richard’s eyes popped open wide.

  “I think we need a new play, Richard,” Claire said. “I have an idea.”

  PART IV

  The Widow Finds Meaning

  46

  A different year, another Monday in New York, and on this one a woman found meaning. It was sunny. There was a breeze. Birds chirped in the suburbs, trains ran on time, the postmen made their rounds. It was the kind of day when art might fall from the sky, the kind of day a leading man might walk into an ordinary bookstore, the kind of day when the improbable makes sense. No one expects anything to happen, so it does. Blue skies can be misleading.

  Nearly one year after Charlie’s death, Claire began her stroll through lower Manhattan, along Prince Street toward Crosby, at approximately ten after nine in the morning. She wove her way through sun-dappled shade and baby oaks sprouting up from the sidewalk, traversing the concrete and crosswalks, dodging harried commuters beelining toward the subways. Jack Huxley was back in town.

  He was filming Moving Violations. Although Claire had forgotten, by now, his secret phone number, although she’d stopped noticing his pictures on magazines at every newsstand, and his face on the billboards, she still kept track.

  The day before, she’d gone to his hotel, the Mercer. Somehow, she’d known he’d have checked in under the name Larry Darrell—it was his favorite. She shivered a little with old feelings—maybe he’d been thinking of her, here in New York. She’d left a note for him, at the front desk, on pale blue stationery.

  Meet me at McNally Jackson Books on Sunday at 11. If you’re not there I’ll know you would have wanted to be. Claire

  Along her walk, she stopped for coffee, perused the paper. At 10:59 she crossed under the pale awning of the little bookstore and walked inside. The smell of paper and poetry and the comfort of words wedged into shelves and stacked up against walls gave her confidence. She was surrounded by everything that was ever worth saying.

  And there he was. A man of average height, and from the back almost unnoticeable. Then he turned and there was the smile, and it wasn’t just poetry but a reminder of where the line is drawn between those who are mortal—and those who are not.

  He saw her and moved her way. “Hubbell Gardiner,” he said, introducing himself. “Of course,” she said in reply, sticking a hand out, “Katie Morosky.” This was easy; he knew how to make it be. He had The Great Gatsby in his hand. “At the risk of you writing me off as some shallow Hollywood hack, I confess I’ve never read it start to end.”

  “Well, you know the highlights—love, sex, and death, not necessarily in that order. Somewhere between pages seventy and one hundred and forty, a crisis of confidence, a crippling one. Then a coupling, an entanglement—”

  “—and it all comes undone, yes. There are broken dreams and a futile pursuit. Maybe I have read it.” He looks at the ground. Kicks at it with the bottom of his shoe. “How are you, Claire?”

  “I’m really good.”

  “You know—”

  “Shh…” Claire put her finger to his lips. They felt lovely. She was writing the ending. She was bringing the characters back home. There was no more longing, just an overall sense of serenity.

  “I didn’t write the book,” she said.

  “I heard. Subject matter’s dull. I’m not surprised.”

  So much had happened. “I couldn’t write Charlie’s book, it was crazy. I don’t think even Charlie could. The world isn’t ready to find out that Jack Huxley knows every word to ‘MacArthur Park.’”

  “Right,” he said, and laughed.

  She explained to him that Knopf had canceled the book but that Richard had worked his magic. He got them to agree to substitute an essay collection as well as an original project of hers, so that she could keep the advance.

  She got a little shy, then, as writers often do with a work in progress, with a work that feels so delicate that to describe it out loud seems like it might change it, might send crystalline insights and subtle grace notes fleeing from the mind, never to be recaptured in magical combination again. Where to begin, she tells him, was the problem. It’s all for naught without a knockout first line, she knows this from Charlie. Every story lives or dies on where you start.

  Once upon a time and a very good time it was …

  All this happened, more or less.

  It was love at first sight.

  It is a truth universally acknowledged …

  It was a dark and stormy night.

  Once upon a time there was a girl named Claire. She had a manageable sort of life and then her husband died and her life became unmanageable for a moment. She became smaller and quieter until it seemed there was nothing. But then …

  “How about your film? How’s it going?”

  He was directing this time, from a script he’d adapted from a book. He gave her his aw-shucks grin, said behind the camera is harder than he remembered. A different sort of creativity. He hoped to do more of it. The film, he said, despite its action-packed plot—an accident, lovers, war zones, a hero in a wheelchair in the desert—is something of a fairy tale. He looked right into her eyes. “That’s what drew me to the project
,” he said. “They’re the only stories worth telling.”

  She congratulated him, and as they talked they wandered among the stacks of books, the shelves of biographies and memoirs, all those stories of heartbreak and futility. In the large section labeled FICTION, she allowed herself to imagine a slender novel by Claire Byrne on the shelf next to Thinker’s Hope—her novel a perfect .7 ratio next to Charlie’s tome—and the oddity of that pairing seemed no less momentous than the moon and the earth switching orbits, or love and sex sharing a home.

  Jack referenced a girl, but then waved off her queries: no one special. He said he’d heard Claire was with someone, and she was surprised. She was pleased to think that he’d tried to keep track of her. She wasn’t going to marry again. No. But she thought he should try it. They laughed at that, and the conversation flowed through other topics.

  This is why she loved him, she thought. Publicly he’s imperfect, but privately he tries. There are moments of sincerity. Those moments float away like bubbles but he takes the trouble to dip the wand in the soap and blow them through. Charlie, publicly, was a husband, an intellectual, a serious writer, but privately he screwed publicists and the wives of his friends and he couldn’t address the incongruity of this with his own wife. Instead, he couched it in theory. There was the unhappy Sasha with her philandering husband; she’d rather get jewelry than face the truth about her life. Richard, and Bridget, who somehow knew intimately the particulars of Jake the hockey player’s, um, dick. Ethan and Kevin might come closest of all of them to, well, something—maybe Ethan still had a chance.

  “The Way We Were” came over the speaker in the store. Or was it just in Claire’s head? Maybe she was just playing it back.

  “I should be going,” she said. Jack nodded. He seemed nervous. She tried to imagine all the reasons for this: that he didn’t want her to go, that he realized they could have been so much more, that he knows they still can be but he’s trapped—by a name, a face, a persona too big to escape.