An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Before they hung up, Julie asked Edward if he had any social plans for the rest of the weekend, an only slightly veiled allusion to the personal ad, and Edward admitted that he hadn’t made any. “I have some papers to grade,” he told her, as if that were a project requiring days to complete. The truth was, he didn’t want to be with anybody, least of all any of the prospective dates waiting for him in the crazy drawer. Yet he hadn’t gotten rid of the letters.

  There were no organized nature walks nearby in the sanctuary, and no other birders in sight. It was a dank, cold November morning, as Edward noted in his journal, with the promise of winter in the air, and in the thinned-out foliage of the oak forest. It had rained the night before, so the ground cover of leaves hardly crunched beneath his boots. Through his binoculars, he spotted a pair of yellow-rumped warblers on a high, bare branch. No melodic warbling this time of year, though; only their soft, mechanical chipping. You could count the bars.

  Bee once read aloud something Emily Dickinson had said to a friend: “I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.” Maybe he should have urged Bee to come here with him, just once. It was beautiful, with the Hudson rushing past hundreds of feet below. But he’d always prized his solitude in the forest, as opposed to the loneliness he felt now at home.

  There was only a little visible activity in the trees: some winter wrens and white-throated sparrows. A single dark-eyed junco. The improbability of animals, as someone once observed. Edward recorded those sightings in his journal, along with the variety of spongy mushrooms pushing up among the fallen leaves. He’d dressed warmly, but there was some wind now, and the damp chill permeated the layers he wore. Getting older, he thought, and in a rare instance of registering personal data, he wrote that down, too. He’d leave soon, and maybe he would call Julie back after he’d graded his papers, and take her someplace festive for dinner.

  As he looked down once more at the river, he sensed a dark cloud descending—a storm? And suddenly there was an enormous flock of European starlings—hundreds and hundreds of them flying in formation, putting on a private air show as they circled above him. It was thrilling; he’d forgotten about the rapturous quality of nature in his pursuit of quietude. Edward watched until the starlings changed direction and flew off into the distance. Then he walked back through the woods toward the parking lot.

  When he got home, Bingo was still out with Mildred on their afternoon walk. Edward picked up the telephone in the kitchen, but instead of calling Julie, he called Bruce Silver, whose number he’d found in Bee’s Rolodex, the unfinished business of their children still between them when she died. Bruce answered the phone himself. Edward could hear a television playing in the background—cartoon squeals—and the voices of young children. “This is Edward Schuyler,” he said. “Bee’s husband.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Bruce said, and then he shouted, away from the mouthpiece, “Turn that down, will you? I’m on the phone! What can I do for you, Ed?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Edward said. “But you can do something for your daughter, for Julie.”

  “What? Is she okay?”

  “Yes,” Edward said. “She’s fine. She misses her mother.”

  “I know,” Bruce said. “Tough break.”

  There it was, like the sparest of elegies, after fifteen years of marriage and two kids: tough break.

  “Why didn’t you come to Bee’s funeral?” Edward asked. “The children expected you.”

  There was a pause in which he could hear Bruce breathing, maybe even thinking. “I wanted to,” he finally said. “I intended to. But it was … awkward, you know. All her friends, her mother. They blamed me for what happened between Bee and I.”

  Between Bee and me, Edward immediately, pedantically thought, but stopped himself from saying. “Well, whose fault was it?” he said.

  “I don’t like to assign blame,” Bruce said. “It’s complicated. Things happen in a marriage.”

  Yes, Edward said to himself, one person dies.

  “So what about Julie?” Bruce asked.

  Edward was going to say that Julie was fragile, that she needed Bruce, had always needed him, and especially now, in her mother’s absence. That all of her relationships were tainted by his failure as a parent. But if the man had to ask, he wouldn’t really understand. That boob. That clueless prick. “Call her once in a while, she misses you, too,” Edward said.

  “Sure thing,” Bruce said, sounding relieved. “Will do.” At least Edward had not asked him to behave like a father.

  Mildred and the dog came back to the house soon after the phone call. It was drizzling by then, and Bingo’s coat and Mildred’s rain bonnet were both wet. While she was rubbing the dog dry with an old towel, Edward invited her in for a cup of tea. “Do you want me to read the leaves for you?” she asked, with a flicker of hope on her face. “On the house?”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m not into the occult.” His polite word for hokum. “And besides, I only have tea bags.”

  The essays Edward graded later were about the patterns of evolution. His brightest student, an eighth-grader named Shelby Marks, had written, in conclusion, “We humans always think in terms of our own survival. We truly can’t imagine that, like most species that have ever lived on earth, we, too, might become extinct someday. The others died out because they couldn’t adapt to the changing environment. Poor us!”

  “Indeed!” Edward wrote under that last line, before scrawling a big, red A at the top of the first page. Then he thought, in a flash of spiteful satisfaction, of Bruce Silver, still selling paper in a digital age.

  Second Date

  Edward was looking in the crazy drawer for a rubber band when he came across the letters in response to the personal ad. Not that he had forgotten about them. He’d only kept them tucked away, out of sight, while he tried to keep his increasing loneliness out of mind. Now he laid the letters out on the kitchen counter and contemplated them, while he flexed the rubber band over and over again until it shot from his fingers across the room.

  Roberta Costello was an amiable woman, practically the antithesis of Karen Leslie. Edward had chosen her letter because it exuded warmth and an appealing modesty. “Hello!” she’d written. “Am I the zillionth woman to write to you? I hope not.” She described herself as a widow, “average” in most respects, including her height and weight and even her looks.

  She was actually quite pretty, with graying black hair and dark eyes. And she gave him a big smile and a little hug when he picked her up at her town house in Teaneck, not far from the restaurant she had suggested for Sunday brunch. “The best omelets in the world,” she’d promised. “We always went there.”

  Although Edward had made a reservation, it wasn’t honored. The place was mobbed when they arrived, and they found themselves in the midst of a noisy, impatient crowd of couples and families waiting for tables. Bee, Edward remembered, had resisted the popular restaurant brunch, which she claimed was “just breakfast, only later, and in public.” She’d preferred eating eggs in their bathrobes, exchanging sections of the Sunday paper across the kitchen table. This was just the sort of scene she had probably wanted to avoid.

  “Shall we try going somewhere else?” Edward asked Roberta. A baby was crying nearby, and he had to shout a little to be heard.

  “Well, if you want to,” she said, but he detected a note of disappointment in her voice. So he didn’t offer the next suggestion that came to mind—that they stop at a deli and buy all the ingredients for a meal and bring them back to her place. She might have taken it as an inappropriate move on his part, when what he really wanted was a quiet meal in a domestic setting. He would have even done the cooking, as he’d often done on Sundays at home.

  When they were finally seated and handed menus, the waitress greeted Roberta as if they were old friends, and she gave Edward the once-over, which felt like a severe assessment. “Did I pass muster, do you think?” he asked after the wait
ress left, and Roberta smiled and said, “Oh, Wynona’s just being a little protective. Vince was a big favorite around here.”

  Roberta had been widowed about the same time as Edward, but her husband had lingered for two years, breathless from emphysema, she said, and mad as hops. Edward imagined that he might have taken his anger out on Roberta—there was a resigned weariness about her, in the corners of her eyes and mouth, whenever she forgot to smile. But she said that he’d only railed against his bad luck, his lifetime smoking habit, the crappy, poisonous air in industrial New Jersey.

  He had worked, she told Edward, as an account executive at an oil refinery in Linden, having risen up through the ranks from the pipelines on merit and perseverance. Roberta had been an adjuster for a large insurance company, work she’d once enjoyed. But she had retired soon after Vince died. He’d left her well provided for—his main concern—and she had lost interest in her job, anyway.

  Edward was grateful that he had stayed on at Fenton. At first the mere routine of going to work had helped to sustain him, but now his old excitement about teaching had revived. Even the mild spark he’d struck in Nathaniel Worth during their tutoring sessions had provided some gratification. He told Roberta that each new crop of students was a challenge and a joy. Tabula rasa. She said that she had grandchildren about to start school; she hoped they’d find dedicated teachers like Edward.

  After their omelets were served, she said, “Vince always had the western with a side of sausage,” and her eyes filled with tears. Edward put his fork down and touched her hand. “It’s hard, I know,” he said. And he did know. The stages of grief weren’t so neatly arranged or easily disposed of. And as that pharmacist’s widow had said in her letter, dating after death wasn’t easy. But why had Roberta responded to the ad if she didn’t feel ready? Or even read the personals in the first place.

  Yet who was he to talk about readiness? On New Year’s Eve, he’d finally agreed, under pressure from Sybil and Henry, to drop in on their supper party, arriving alone on the late side and fleeing before midnight, like Cinderella, without leaving behind what he’d thought of as his glass heart. At least Lizzie hadn’t come on to him again.

  “Very hard,” Roberta agreed. “We were married for thirty-four years, six weeks shy of thirty-five.” She fumbled in her purse, for a Kleenex, Edward assumed, but she pulled out a cell phone instead. Was she going to leave, call for a cab?

  She fiddled with the phone for a moment and then passed it to Edward. “Our wedding,” she said. He stared at a photo of a younger Roberta, swathed in white, gazing up at a tall guy in a tux.

  “You were a handsome couple,” he said, passing the phone back to her. She fingered some buttons and handed it back to him. “Our kids,” she said. Edward saw three children sitting under a beach umbrella, everyone and everything in faded colors. “They’re much older than that now, of course,” Roberta said. “But they all live in different states, so I like to remember when they were little and everybody was together.” She asked how many children Edward had.

  “Two, plus a daughter-in-law,” he said. “They were Bee’s, my wife’s, kids, but I inherited them.”

  “Tell me about your wife,” Roberta said huskily, leaning toward him, and he was struck dumb, sideswiped by emotion. “Do you have any pictures?” she asked.

  Edward had never kept photos of anyone on his cell phone or in his wallet. “No,” he said. He looked down at his plate, where the folded eggs were congealing next to an orange slice. “Not on me.” And then, suddenly, there was a whole slideshow of pictures going through his head. Help me, he thought, and Bee said, Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

  “What can I say?” he told Roberta. That she was my one true love? That she hated brunch? “We had a very good life together,” he said.

  “Oh, we did, too!” Roberta said. “We met in high school, we were high school sweethearts.” And she went into a précis of the years since then. Edward only took in the highlights of what she was saying—college, the army, first apartment, first baby—before he stopped listening. He pushed his food around on the plate, the way Nick used to do, hoping it would somehow disappear. Roberta seemed to come out of her reverie. “Don’t you like what you ordered?” she asked.

  “It’s fine,” he said, taking a bite of toast and washing it down with a swig of coffee. “I’m just not as hungry as I’d thought.”

  She sighed. “I guess I’m used to a man with a big appetite,” she said. “Vince always cleaned his plate.”

  Edward was reminded of the bereavement group, where the dead were praised for everything from good penmanship to good teeth before the survivors’ defenses gave way, and they admitted to their loved ones’ human flaws. He waited for something similar to happen to Roberta, but it never did. It was like attending a memorial brunch for someone he’d never met, alongside the not-so-merry widow.

  He tried to change the subject without making too great a leap, and he mentioned a book he’d read about disturbances in the food chain as species were facing extinction. It seemed to work. They talked about books for a while—she belonged to a reading club—and then Edward brought up his birding. “Birds!” she exclaimed. “I love them, too!” She pulled out the phone again and showed him a close-up of two budgies in a gilded cage. “That’s Alice and Petey,” she said. “I’ve taught them to hop right onto my finger.”

  She held her left hand up, perch-style, and Edward noticed that she was wearing a wedding ring. He tried to remember when he’d stopped wearing his. Not long after he had given Bee’s clothes away. And right after Sybil had chided him about it, he’d erased Bee’s message from their voice mail by taping a new one over hers. “This is Edward Schuyler,” he said into the mike. “Please leave a message.”

  When he played it back, he sounded affectless, almost robotic. On the second try, he coughed and had to do it all over again. The whole process seemed haunted by the past, but at last he got it right. Two days later, Julie called him. “What happened to Mom’s message?” she asked before breaking into tears. It seemed that she’d been calling the number, the way he had, just to hear her mother’s voice. “Dear, we have to let go,” he said, as much to himself as to her, and then listened in silence while she wept.

  “And I’ve taught them to talk, too,” Roberta was saying proudly, startling him back into the moment. “Petey is up to six words now.” No bird imitations, please, he silently begged. And no more pictures.

  As he drove Roberta home, he remembered Karen Leslie’s unexpected, almost violent kiss in the parking lot of the Paper Moon. He was pretty sure nothing like that would happen this time, nor did he want it to, but what if she asked him to come inside, out of simple courtesy? Edward was courteous, as well, and he wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings. But he didn’t think he could chance it. She might have a shrine to her dead husband in there, replete with flickering votives and a whole gallery of photos. And he didn’t want to see or hear her caged birds, positive now that Vince was one of the six words in Petey’s vocabulary.

  He needn’t have worried. When he escorted Roberta up the steps to her town house, she said she’d had a wonderful time, flashed a brave smile, and gave him another little hug. Then she went inside, shutting the door firmly behind her.

  What Women Want

  “Never again,” Edward said. He was in another busy restaurant, this one a long, dim room on Columbus Avenue, filled with the vibrant conversation of adults recently released from the company of children. Bruno’s was more of a bar, really, but they served halfway decent food from a limited menu, and this was where several members of Fenton’s faculty, and the faculties of a couple of nearby public schools, often hung out on Friday afternoons and evenings.

  When Bee was still alive, Edward had only occasionally joined them; he’d preferred to start the weekend back in Englewood with her. And for several months, those dark, antisocial months after her death, he still hardly ever showed up at Bruno’s. But gradually he was lured into that after
-school ritual, and the company of other people who weren’t in a hurry to get home, either.

  He was sitting in a booth, sharing a pitcher of beer and a bowl of popcorn shrimp with Frances Hartman and Bernie Roth, in whom he’d begun to confide a little about his adventures in the dating world. They were both unattached. Frances, in her early or mid-fifties now, had been married and divorced years before and seemed to have sworn off men recently. At just past sixty, slight, dapper Bernie had managed to remain single, and had a reputation for superficial, short-lived affairs—something like Edward’s love life between Laurel and Bee. Bernie’s crack about mindless sex probably had an element of personal truth in it.

  Edward didn’t offer any information to his stepchildren about the dates that had evolved from the ad they’d placed, even when they hinted or asked outright, except to say that there was nothing to report. And he chose not to talk to the friends he’d shared with Bee about any of it, either. His reticence also extended to Gladys, who, he was sure, would be terribly hurt by his attempts with women, even though they had failed.

  “Never say never,” Frances told Edward.

  “Your problem, my friend,” Bernie said, “is the whole meal deal—the commitment to spending hours with someone you’ve never met. What’s wrong with just a drink or a cup of coffee?”

  “You’re a cheapskate, Bern, and a drive-by lover,” Frances said. “Edward is a gentleman, maybe the last of his kind. Inviting a woman to dinner is a sign of good faith.”

  “Is that what women want?” Bernie asked. “Signs? Gentlemen? A free dinner?”

  “Don’t start,” Frances warned.

  Bernie was of the opinion, often and freely given, that what women really wanted was the same thing he and most other men wanted—a little companionship and sexual pleasure. On the European plan, which might include breakfast.