Hailey is dead, and I’m having sex. And maybe it’s the strangeness of the situation—I’m screwing the neighbor’s wife in my basement—or maybe it’s Hailey, whose naked body suddenly fills my eyes like tears, but it’s Nora Barton all over again, and I could swear that I don’t feel a thing, like my groin was injected with Novocain, even as I hear my own moans growing louder and more frequent.
Afterwards, we lie side by side and she runs two fingers up and down my slick back, kissing my face softly as I taste the light sweat on her neck. “Doug,” she whispers tentatively, after a long, long while.
“Laney,” I say, and the air around us grows heavy.
“Nothing,” she says after a pause, which is perfect because, really, that’s all there is to say. And because she said that, and only that, I feel a surge of warmth and gratitude toward her, so I kiss her. And because I kissed her, she kisses me back, those impossibly full lips absorbing my thinner ones, her teeth gripping, her tongue probing. And because of that, I move my fingers between her damp thighs, and she rolls onto me to run her tongue over my nipples, and in no time we’re at it again. And because she’s more comfortable now, she guides my lips down to exactly where she wants them to be and her moans are louder, her hips bucking with reckless abandon. And because of that, I am able to lose myself in her, in her flesh and smells and taste. And because of that, this time I actually feel it when I come. Because, because, because. Because Hailey is dead, I am fucking a married woman in the basement. Because I don’t care anymore. Because I’m lonely and horny and drunk. Because, because, because.
Because I’m fucked anyway.
Laney leaves me with deep lingering kisses and meaningful glances that promise she will be back soon. “Today was magical,” she whispers into my ear. “I wish I could come back later, make love all night, and wake up in your arms in the morning.” But she can’t. Because I need some time to absorb this, to reflect on it and torture myself about it, and because I get the creeps whenever anyone says “make love” instead of “have sex,” or “fuck.” Hailey never said “make love.” It’s just goofy.
And now Laney has to go home and start getting dinner ready for her husband and children, and I have to crawl back into this rumpled bed and be alone as the first tears come, burying my head in this pillow that smells of sex and still bears a few stray auburn hairs. The sobs come, heavier now, racking my body, slicing through me like hot blades. I never cheated on Hailey, never even thought about it, so the fact that I just had sex with someone else must mean she’s really, truly gone. And I already knew she was gone, but now my body knows it too, and it’s like finding out all over again. I’m sorry about Laney, not because it was wrong, but because I already know we’ll do it again, and it’s just one more step into a life without Hailey, one step further away from her. And so is every day and every night, and even this empty, sexed-out sleep, falling on me now like a cartoon anvil, driving all coherent thought from my mind.
8
LISTEN. I NEVER ASKED FOR ANY OF THIS.
I’m only twenty-nine years old, for God’s sake. My story should be one of those urban romantic slacker-finds-true-love-and-grows-up comedies, not this random, senseless tragedy. Just over three years ago I was living in my little studio apartment in the West Village, going out to the bars with my friends, getting drunk and laid and fired from dead-end writing jobs with the same relative frequency. I never could have fathomed that I’d be widowed and living alone in New fucking Radford, in a house I didn’t buy, mourning the dead wife that never should have been mine to begin with.
You know guys like me, there’s one of me in every crowd, the laid-back wiseass who’s never going to amount to very much. I used to imagine that I was like Rob Lowe in Saint Elmo’s Fire, minus the saxophone, but as I got older I came to understand that Rob Lowe could pull it off only because he looked so much like Rob Lowe. I looked a little too much like Doug Parker, and last I heard, Demi Moore wasn’t losing any sleep trying to figure out how to share a bathtub with me.
I was the kid about whom teachers always said he’s a bright boy, if only he’d apply himself, the kid who could always be counted on to decimate classroom decorum with a well-timed one-liner, the one who always took the joke just a little too far. My parents heard this so consistently about me at parent-teacher conferences that they stopped going altogether after a while, choosing to accentuate the positive by focusing on the stellar achievements of my sisters. Claire was a notorious slut, but smart enough to get into Yale, where she slept around prodigiously, leaving her bed just long enough to earn an advanced degree in clinical psychology. Then she surprised us all by marrying the interminably boring Stephen Ives, heir to the Ives Lawn Manure fortune, and was now devoted to the business of being an obscenely wealthy housewife. You could almost hear the click of the switch when she powered down her brain and tossed her career, but as far as my folks were concerned, all was forgiven when she married the horseshit heir.
Debbie, three years younger than us, seemed to understand from an early age that all of my parents’ hopes and dreams were pinned on her, and she didn’t disappoint. She was a straight-A student, the kind who whiningly appealed every less-than-perfect test score to teachers who ultimately caved just to shut her up. She graduated Harvard Law School with honors and is already on the partnership track at a Manhattan firm whose name generates instant nods of approval among those in the know. She has a spacious office with a view of the Hudson River, her own secretary, and textured linen business cards with raised silver lettering. Somewhere along the way, though, she discarded her sense of humor, probably because there would never be a test on it, and now her laughs are rare and her smiles often rushed and vaguely pained, which is a shame because she was a beautiful girl and smiling had always suited her when she was younger. She’s still beautiful, but now it’s the kind of beauty that comes with a barbed wire fence around it.
Not cut out for the Ivies, I just barely scraped through the State University of New York with a bachelor’s in English, leaving me perfectly qualified to do absolutely nothing that would earn me a living. As far as I knew, there were no essay portions at job interviews, and, that being the case, there hardly seemed any point in trying. So while my friends all splurged on pin-striped Brioni suits and joined investment banks and hedge funds, I bounced around a few PR agencies, writing inconsequential press releases and getting fired for a wide range of corporate delinquency. At one agency, I decided that I was going to re-create my work cubicle, item for item, in my apartment. Every day I would steal office supplies, from Post-it pads and pens to staplers, secreting them out of the office like Tim Robbins and his tunnel dirt in The Shawshank Redemption. I brought a gym bag to handle the larger stuff, like the telephone and fax machine. It was the actual cubicle walls that would prove to be my undoing. There was no way to sneak them out, so I waited until after hours and then acted like I was authorized to be taking a cubicle wall down in the elevator. The security guard in the lobby was unimpressed, and the next day I had to sit in a conference room with the head of HR and my flabbergasted boss, Stephanie, watching my criminal enterprise on the building’s surveillance tapes.
“I can’t believe that’s you,” Stephanie said, looking away from the surveillance video.
“The camera adds ten pounds,” I pointed out.
“Doug,” she said miserably, and I could see she now regretted even more having slept with me after a late client dinner a few weeks earlier. She’d worn her heels to bed and commanded me to slap her ass while she rode me like a cowgirl. In the morning she went through all five stages of grief before breakfast and then made me swear I’d never tell a soul. Then, since we were already there, we had sex again, to seal our pact.
“You know I’m going to have to fire you,” she said.
I was actually kind of relieved, because my plan to steal the copy machine was proving to be a logistical nightmare.
I had to return everything, but not before I photographed the cu
bicle I had so painstakingly re-created in my living room. Then I wrote a funny little article about it, which I sold to M Magazine, and that’s when I discovered magazine writing. I got myself an agent, a high-powered little blowhard named Kyle Evans, who sold my stuff and ultimately landed me a gig at M, where I wrote a fairly popular column called “How to Talk to a Movie Star,” a loose, comic riff on anything remotely connected to the Hollywood zeitgeist. Plastic surgeries and eating disorders among young actresses, trends in the current crop of summer movies or the fall TV lineup, profiles on up-and-coming actors and directors, you get the picture. Occasionally, I was sent out to Los Angeles to profile somebody famous, and despite my high hopes, I never did manage to sleep with a movie star, although I think I came pretty close once or twice.
I was perfectly content with this easygoing life, making my own hours, hanging out with my buddies, falling in and out of love, and basically waiting for life to begin. Sure, I got lonely sometimes, sunny-Sunday-afternoon lonely, but until I met Hailey, I just never knew what I might be missing.
Fate. Destiny. God.
It’s all a crock.
People want their lives to make sense, want to sit back like cosmic detectives and examine what’s happened to them so far, identifying the key turning points that shaped them and retroactively imbuing these moments with a mystical aura, like the celestial forces of the universe are a team of writers on the serialized television show of your life, charged with concocting outrageously convoluted plotlines designed to achieve resolution by the end of the season. No one wants to believe that it’s all completely random, that the direction of our lives is nothing more than a complex series of accidents, little nuclear mushroom clouds, and we’re just living in the fallout.
As near as I can figure, these were the accidents that shaped my life. If Hailey had never married Jim, then he never would have cheated on her with his ex-girlfriend Angie. And if Jim hadn’t forgotten about the nanny cam in the basement playroom, he never would have gotten caught when he did. Since it was Jim who had installed the nanny cam, most shrinks would see this as unassailable evidence that he wanted to get caught, but they just say that because there’s no prevailing psychological term for a dumbass. And if Hailey had never divorced Jim, then years later she would not have ducked into what she thought was an unused office to have herself a quick, single-mother cry. It was actually only a mostly unused office. It was mine. And if I hadn’t picked that day, of all days, to actually show up for work, I never would have found her there. If I’d met her at any other time, under any other circumstances, she never would have gone for me. Women of her caliber never did. And, knowing my own limitations, I never would have had the nerve to ask her out. But by then, the accidents had built up a momentum all their own, like a tornado whipping through the heartland, and we were sucked up into the twister like a couple of grazing cows.
I stepped into my tiny office at M Magazine that morning and there was Hailey, crying at my desk. “Oh,” I said, which is what you say when you find a beautiful stranger crying at your desk.
She looked up at me through her tears, blew her nose into a twisted, crumbling tissue, and said, “Can you please come back in a few minutes?”
She was a VP in ad sales, and I was an articles editor and columnist, which meant our paths rarely crossed, but I knew who she was, had already nursed my little office crush on her and moved on. After all, she was beautiful, older, and an officer in the company. But now she was crying at my desk, and there’s nothing like a weeping woman to bring out your inner white knight. So I stepped out of my office and closed the door, not only to give her privacy, but also to keep any other white knights from joining the fray, because I was not up for a joust. I took a quick walk and picked up two coffees. I don’t drink coffee, but as an old girlfriend once said to me, sometimes you have to fake it for the greater good of mankind. When I returned, Hailey was reapplying her makeup. “Here,” I said, placing the cup in front of her and leaning against the wall.
She smiled at me through the last of her tears, and she was ragged and worried and ever so slightly damaged and that’s what you need with a beautiful woman, some chink in her armor that gives you the guts to approach. Otherwise, you just circle like a scavenger, watching the other predators move in. “Thanks,” she said, taking a long, grateful sip. “Who are you?”
“I’m Doug,” I said. “This is my office.”
“Hailey.” We shook hands across the desk. Hers were small and soft, her fingernails bitten and unpolished. “I’m sorry about this. I’m just having a bad morning.”
I waved my hand. “I just wish I’d known you were coming. I’d have brought donuts. And Kleenex.”
She grinned. “I’m usually not like this.”
“It’s not your fault. I always have this effect on women.”
The grin escalated into a full-on smile. It was a killer smile, a warm, piercing humdinger of a smile that I felt in my thighs. Women like this generally didn’t smile at me like that. Usually they flashed polite, blinking smiles like hazard lights that said Keep moving, nothing to see here. But Hailey said, “I don’t want to go to my office.”
“So stay here,” I said.
“I should let you get back to work.”
“If you knew me, you’d know how ridiculous you just sounded.”
She looked at me thoughtfully. She had long, honey-colored hair, skin like burnished ivory, and dark almond eyes that opened wide when she spoke and crinkled magnificently when she smiled. “Today is my birthday,” she said.
“Happy birthday.”
“Thanks.”
“Birthdays can be rough.”
“Tell me about it.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-six. And divorced. And mother of an angry twelve-year-old.”
“You’re only as old as you feel.”
“Well, then I’m fifty.”
“You look outstanding for fifty.”
She smiled. “It’s just not what I thought it would be, you know?”
“Thirty-six?”
“Life.”
“Ah, life,” I said, just like somebody wiser than me might say it. “Don’t get me started.”
She flashed me a wry grin. “How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-five. But I feel twelve.”
She snorted when she laughed, but I liked it anyway, and so I made her do it a few more times, and then she opened up and started to tell me about her divorce and her troubled son, and her bad luck with men. She was thirty-six, divorced, and a single mother. I was twenty-five and still waiting for something to happen to me. We were from two different universes, suddenly thrown together in the twilight zone of my office. It wasn’t just that she was too old for me; it was that she was too pretty, too sad, too wise, and altogether too worldly for someone like me. But something had happened, some hiccup in the cosmos, and we could see behind each other’s curtains, and we were talking and laughing, and she was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.
“Listen,” I said, after a little bit. “We can go on like this all day, but today is your birthday, and in my family, a birthday means one thing, and one thing only.”
“And what’s that?” she said.
“Great Adventure.”
“What, the theme park?”
“So you’re familiar with it.”
“We’re at work.”
“I don’t know about you, but I won’t be missed.”
“We can’t just leave work and go to an amusement park.”
“Normally I would agree. Or I’d pretend to agree so that I seemed responsible. But it’s your birthday today. My hands are tied.”
“I have a budget meeting at ten-thirty.”
“Blow it off. I’ve never seen someone who needs to ride Nitro as badly as you do right now.”
Hailey looked at me for almost a full minute, I mean, really looked at me, li
ke she was studying a map. “I’m eleven years older than you.”
“So if I were thirteen, then this would be weird.”
She shook off her smile. “Just tell me why?”
“Because the more you talk, the more I like you. And because you’re so beautiful that it actually hurts if I look at you for too long. And I’m sure you get asked out a lot, by older, smoother men than me, but they’re asking you out because you’re good-looking, and there’s nothing wrong with that, I mean, you have to start somewhere, but you see, normally that would be exactly why I didn’t ask you out, so the fact that I am now means that we’ve already passed all of that.” I took a deep breath. “And because I think you would really like me, if you gave me a chance.”
Her face turned red, and she didn’t smile like I’d hoped she would, but she didn’t look away. She did not look away. “Are you always this honest?”
I nodded. “Almost never.”
“But that’s honest too.”
“I know. It’s tricky.”
“It’s nothing personal, Doug. I’ve just had some bad luck with men.”
“That’s because you don’t know the secret.”
“What’s the secret?”
“You have to train us when we’re young.”
And this time her smile was like a ray of sunlight, the kind that pierces the clouds on an angle and makes you think about heaven. And so we drove her car out to Great Adventure, and we rode Nitro and The Great American Scream Machine and The Batman Coaster and Kingda Ka, and I bought her a funnel cake and a sparkler and sang “Happy Birthday” to her on the Ferris wheel and she kissed me at the top. And sometimes that’s all it takes, no epiphanies, no revelations, just funnel cake on a Ferris wheel and one crazy, miraculous day that should never have happened, but somehow did. It was fate, I thought. Destiny. But I only thought those things because I was in love and didn’t know any better.
How to Talk to a Widower Page 5
