How to Talk to a Widower

by Jonathan Tropper

  “Get the fuck out of here, Stephen. I mean it!” Claire shouts.

  “I just want to talk to you!” he shouts.

  “Then you should have called me!”

  “You won’t take my calls!”

  “Then you wait until I’m ready to take them. I don’t work for you, Stephen. You can’t schedule me like a meeting.”

  “Just get down here and open this fucking door!”

  He hits the door again and this time I can hear the wood groan, the faintest sound of preliminary splintering, but then his legs crumple under him and he drops to his knees, letting out an agonized sob as he clutches his shoulder. “Is he okay?” Claire calls down to me.

  “He’s looked better,” I say. “Why don’t you come down and talk to him?”

  “Butt out, Doug.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  Stephen struggles to his feet, still clutching his battered shoulder, and staggers out from under the porch roof and down the steps, lurching past me to look up at Claire from the lawn, his eyeballs throbbing with desperation. “Please, Claire,” he says, his voice ragged and hoarse. “Don’t do this.”

  “I have to,” she says softly.

  “I love you.”

  “No. You love having me. I could be anyone, really. Now go home!”

  “Is there someone else? Is that what this is about?”

  “Okay. I’m going to start throwing things now,” Claire says, tossing up her hands exasperatedly before disappearing from the window.

  Stephen looks at me. “That’s it, isn’t it? She’s having an affair.”

  “That’s not it,” I say, shaking my head.

  I register a dark blur in the upper corner of my eye and then we both jump as a pair of Rollerblades lands with a hard thud on the grass between us. “Jesus Christ, Claire!”

  “No, Stephen,” she shouts down at him. “There’s no one else. There has to be someone to begin with for there to then be someone else. And for me, there is no one at all, and that’s why I’m leaving you.”

  “You’re not making any sense!” he cries, approaching the window. Claire drives him back by throwing down the Louisville Slugger baseball bat that Russ has dutifully handed to her. The bat lands on its handle, carving out a fist-sized divot in the lawn.

  “Fuck!” Stephen shouts, throwing himself against the wall of the house. “Will you just calm down for a minute!”

  “Go home, Stephen. I swear to God I’ll call the cops.”

  By now I suspect that at least one of the many neighbors standing on their porches watching the spectacle with growing consternation has beaten her to it. Things like this don’t generally happen on our block.

  Meanwhile, Stephen mutters something unintelligible, pushes himself off the wall, and steps under the window again. “I love you, Claire,” he calls up to her. “I may not be the most exciting guy in the world, but I’ve always been good to you, and I’ve always tried to make you happy. I can’t make you stay if you’re going to leave me, but I think, after six years, that I deserve the courtesy of an explanation. You can throw anything down on me that you want.” He drops to his knees like a dazed fighter in the later rounds, and looks up at her, panting as the tears run unchecked down his dirty, sweat-soaked face. “I’m not going to move from this spot until you come down to talk to me, face-to-face. I’m through ducking.”

  There’s a moment of dead silence as Claire looks down at him, and then she hurls the desk chair out the window. Luckily for Stephen, it turns out he has one more duck left in him after all. I dive left and he lets out a yelp and rolls to his right as the chair lands with a heavy metallic crunch exactly where he’d been, the wheels and casters flying off in all directions like shrapnel. Rabbits run for their lives, and I wonder why I never thought of an aerial assault before. Stephen lands on his back and lets out an anguished scream that seems to go on until next week, while upstairs, Claire bursts into tears and disappears into the house.

  I pull myself to my feet and walk over to Stephen, who is still lying on his back and staring up at the sky in a catatonic haze, the way you do when you’re stoned and the clouds start looking like cartoon characters and old girlfriends. I bend down to pick up a chair wheel assembly and then sit down on the grass next to him, idly spinning it in my hands.

  “I’m sorry about your door,” he says after a while.

  “Don’t worry about it, man. You had your reasons. I’m sorry about my sister. That was uncalled-for. Really.”

  “She’s really leaving me, isn’t she?”

  “It seems that way, yeah.”

  He turns his head and looks at me, his lips quivering with emotion. “Why?”

  I rub the cool metal of the chair wheel against my palm and let out a deep sigh. “Because she’s Claire,” I say. “And that’s what Claire does.”

  He considers that for a minute, and then looks back up at the sky, nodding to himself. “I really do love her, you know?”

  “I know.”

  He gets up slowly, groaning with the effort. His right arm hangs limp, like something vital has been disconnected inside, and he starts limping toward his black Porsche, parked at the curb.

  “You sure you’re okay to drive a manual?” I say.

  He stops and turns around. “No.”

  “You want me to take you home?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  I don’t know how to drive a stick, so I take him in my Saab. He’ll send someone for the Porsche. When you’re as rich as Stephen, there’s always someone to send in these types of situations. He sits with his eyes closed in the passenger seat, his head pressed against the window, a low, steady hum coming from inside his closed mouth, like he’s singing a duet with the engine. The streets give way to boulevards and then to the highway, and soon we’re wordlessly speeding north toward the gilded forests of Greenwich in the loneliest part of the afternoon, just before the light starts to fade. Stephen doesn’t wear a seat belt, and I don’t remind him to. He looks like he’d prefer to fly through the windshield if we crash, and I know that feeling, I’m one of the founding fathers of that particular feeling. And seeing him like this, so limp and beaten, I feel an unexpected stab of empathy for him. He married the woman he loved, was as good to her as he knew how to be, and still he lost her. It’s incomprehensibly unfair, and I know that feeling too. Stephen’s only mistake was in thinking that Claire would keep on loving him. It was an understandable mistake, since she’d made it too.

  “I feel like I’m dying,” he says hoarsely as I pull through the gates and into the driveway of his Mediterranean-style mansion. Stephen is rich, handsome, and athletic, and it occurs to me that this may very well be the first time he’s ever lost the girl. There are tears in his eyes, and as much as I feel for him, I’m the last person he should be talking to about this. Later, he’ll regret having let me see him in this vulnerable state, and because he can’t take it back, he’ll just hate me more for it.

  “Look,” I say, throwing the car into park. “I know right now it seems overwhelmingly bad, but you’re in shock. I mean, between Claire leaving you and then the baby, it’s just a lot to absorb. You need to take your time with this.”

  He turns slowly in his seat until he’s facing me, and fixes me with a hard stare. “What baby?”

  I nod slowly, lowering my head until it’s resting on the steering wheel, and all I can think, over and over again, is Oh fuck.

  24

  LATER, AS THE DAY DIES, RUSS AND I STAND OUT IN the front yard, tossing a baseball back and forth in the lingering daylight while Claire screams into the phone at Stephen, who’s been calling pretty much every hour on the hour to demand an audience. The block is filled with the muted sounds of suburban evening: crickets chirping, the musical jangle of dog leashes, the muted thrum of central air compressors, and the resounding slap of leather on leather as the baseball hits the woven pockets of our worn mitts. This is usually my witching hour, the time of day when the utter futility of it all
threatens to overwhelm me, and by now I’m usually sitting on the porch, three or four swallows into the Jack Daniel’s.

  I just need a little time to figure this all out! Claire’s disembodied voice, half crying, half shouting, comes floating through the windows and across the yard to us.

  “Sounds pretty bad,” Russ says, throwing me the ball. It lands in my glove with a resounding smack.

  “It is,” I say, winding up and throwing it back. I overthrow a little, but Russ extends and easily makes the catch.

  “Does anyone actually stay married anymore?”

  Throw … smack.

  “I don’t know.” Throw … smack. “It does seem like an epidemic.”

  Stop trying to make deals with me, Stephen. This isn’t the Middle Ages. You can’t negotiate a marriage!

  “Do you think you and my mom would have made it?”

  Throw … smack.

  “I’d like to think so. We had a pretty good thing going.”

  “That’s true. But then again, you were still in the honeymoon phase.”

  Throw … smack.

  I stop to think about it for a moment. “It wasn’t perfect. I mean, we fought sometimes. Your mom liked to have everything organized, and I was a total slob. And sometimes she got self-conscious about being so much older than me, and I wasn’t always as reassuring as I should have been. Sometimes I even teased her about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m an asshole.” I shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I liked the idea that someone like her would worry about losing me.”

  Throw … smack.

  “That must have pissed her off.”

  “I think it just made her sad.”

  Throw … smack.

  “So who knows what would have happened down the road?” Russ says.

  You think I like doing this? You think I woke up one morning and said to myself, Today would be a great day to fuck up Stephen’s life?

  “I think we had a shot,” I say, throwing him the ball. “Your mom had been through a bad marriage already, and it was like she knew where the trapdoors were. There was only one way it would have ended, and that’s if I screwed it up.”

  Throw … smack.

  “And what were the odds of that, right?” Russ says with a light smirk.

  “Exactly,” I say, feeling suddenly deflated. I don’t tell Russ that I can sometimes recall looking at Hailey and shamefully wondering how I’d feel when she was fifty and I was thirty-nine, wondering if I’d have it in me to stay with an older woman once she was actually old. I don’t tell him that there are times, even now, that I experience a dark sense of relief that I will never get the opportunity to fuck things up, that Hailey died before the inevitability of my ruining us, because sometimes it seems inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t have. Fucking things up, after all, was what I did. I don’t tell him that I am still trying like hell to forget the way she sometimes looked at me, like she was seeing me for the first time and wondering how she’d so grossly overestimated my character. How in those moments I didn’t think—I knew—that at some point she was going to get rid of me. There are some things you can never say out loud, even to yourself, sins of the mind that you can only file away in the hopes of absolution at some later date.

  For now, all I can do is shake off the desolation that threatens to descend like a sudden downpour, and punch the pocket of my baseball mitt invitingly. Russ grins and throws me a pop fly, and for the next little while the only sounds are the emerging crickets, the ball hitting our gloves, and Claire’s intermittent screams. There’s something nice about throwing the ball with Russ, and now I understand the cliché about fathers and sons playing catch. We’re together and engaged, but far enough away to say personal things without feeling exposed, and for the things we can’t bring ourselves to say out loud, we have this ball to throw, and we can hear the neat smack of hard leather on soft and know the message has been delivered.

  I’m hanging up now, Stephen! No! I’m hanging up!

  “Thanks for talking to Jim,” Russ says. “It’s much better now, knowing that I’ll be moving back here soon.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve felt remotely okay since … you know.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “So I guess you’re my stepfather again.”

  “I guess so.”

  “How does it feel?”

  I think about it for a moment. “It feels okay,” I say.

  “Good.”

  Throw … smack.

  25

  LANEY POTTER WANTS ME TO TALK ABOUT HER vagina. Tell me how much you love my wet pussy. She really says this, depositing her tongue in my ear as we roll around naked on the guest room bed. When it comes to sex talk, I always run into a problem with the vagina. You’re not going to actually call it a vagina, but every other name sounds crude or just plain juvenile and makes me feel like I’m doing cheesy porn. As a result, I never refer to it directly, but kind of talk my way around it, the way I used to talk my way around my mother-in-law. “Mom” was out of the question, but “Charlotte” sounded so ridiculously formal, so I just nodded and said “Hey,” as in “Hey, can I get you another glass of tea?” And now I’m thinking about my former mother-in-law while I’m having sex, and there exists no more effective softener of erections, so I just banish the thought from my mind and try to focus on the task at hand, which has become slightly more complicated now that Laney has gotten comfortable enough with me to talk dirty during sex, which is just this side of too comfortable, if you ask me.

  And Laney likes to talk. Yes! she says. I missed you so much! she says. Oh my God, you’re so hard! she says. I want you in me right now! she says. And then, as she starts circling the runway of her orgasm, she breaks into a detailed play-by-play, complete with color commentary. Oh my God, I’m going to come! Not yet, not yet. Oooooooh! You feel so good in me, oh my God, oh my God, my pussy is so wet, I’m dripping. Yes, yes, don’t stop, never stop! Keep your fingers right there, oh my God, yes! I’m coming! I’m coming! I’m coming!

  Having sex narrated by your partner is not something I’m used to, and I find the effect somewhat distancing, making me wonder if it’s actually me that’s lying between her legs, because if it is, why does she find it necessary to report everything to me? Why can’t she just grunt, moan, and shriek like a mature adult?

  When we’re done, she wraps her legs around me, kneading my ass with her fingers, and takes the flesh of my neck between her teeth. “Ummmm,” she purrs, licking my chin like an ice cream cone. “I missed you so much.”

  “I missed you too,” I say.

  She smiles and looks up at me. “That’s a lie,” she says, “but it comes from a sweet place.” She kisses my nose and rolls me over, so we’re facing each other sideways. “I know this is strange for you, Doug. Whatever this is we’re doing, we’re each getting something different out of it. But you’re a beautiful man, and a stellar lover, and I just don’t want you to ever think you have to lie to me. I’m a big girl, and I’m going to try really hard not to fall in love with you, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, kissing her eyelid.

  “But in the meantime,” she says, “I just can’t stop wanting you. It’s all I think about.”

  “I want you too,” I say.

  She leans forward to kiss my mouth. “That one I believe.”

  We lie in silence for a little while and then I surprise us both by saying, “I was thinking about starting to date again.”

  “Oh!” she says, unable to hide the look of consternation that spreads across her face. “Do you think you’re ready for that?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “I don’t know what I’m ready for.”

  She licks her fingers and then moves them to my crotch, grabbing me in her wet fist. “Well, I know one thing you seem to be ready for,” she says, propping herself up and kissing her way down my belly. “And you know what they say?”

  “No,�
� I say, rolling onto my back. “What do they say?”

  Her voice is muffled from under the comforter, and I can feel her breasts on my thighs, her lips vibrating against my spanking-new erection. “Why pay for the cow, when you can get milked for free?” And then she’s on me in earnest, and I close my eyes, surrendering to the hot wetness of her mouth as Laney does her best to swallow me whole.

  Later, we come upstairs and find Claire and Russ in the kitchen, quietly eating Laney’s meatloaf right out of the tin. “Hey,” I say awkwardly. “I didn’t know you guys were home.”

  “We were being quiet,” Russ says. “Unlike some people I could name.”

  “I’m Claire,” Claire says, waving from her seat. “The screwed-up twin sister. I’m sure he’s told you all about me.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Laney says, blushing intensely the way redheads do, looking like she might spontaneously combust. “Hello, Russ.”