An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  He’d remember how Bee used to seize his hand during a moving passage of music or a suspenseful moment in a movie’s plot. And he would miss her simply sitting beside him in the darkened auditorium. So he hadn’t seen the “Abramović; thing,” although he’d read opposing reviews of it, and listened to Sybil and Henry argue at dinner one evening about the artistic value of performance art.

  Henry was of the old school; he believed that classical materials like canvas and paint and marble couldn’t be replaced by what he called the “whimsy” of using anything at hand, including urine or feces or blood and, now, naked bodies. He said this was madness, not art—just another case of the emperor’s new clothes.

  “Or lack of clothes,” Sybil said. She agreed with Henry that exhibitionism and a touch of sadomasochism—those ladders of knives!—were at the heart of what Marina Abramović: did, but she believed that artists had to find new ways of expressing themselves, even when that disturbed or perplexed their audience. “Think of Stravinsky,” she told Henry.

  “You always bring up Stravinsky,” he said. “But at least his performers were dressed.”

  Edward called Ann Parrish and made plans to meet her in MoMA’s lobby the following Saturday at noon. “I’ll be nearer to the Fifty-third Street entrance, at the membership desk,” he told her. “But it gets pretty crowded on the weekend. How will we know each other?”

  “Well, I’m on the slim side, medium height, and I have darkish hair and a medically frowned-upon tan.”

  “And I’m tall,” Edward said. “What’s left of my hair is blond, or gray, according to the light. Shall I wear a carnation?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll find you,” she said.

  The museum lobby was especially crowded, even for a weekend day in the spring. There had been all that buzz about the Abramović exhibit, and a simultaneous show celebrating Tim Burton’s career. So many of the women milling around and seated at the large circular ottoman across the room were dark-haired and slender. A surprising number of them appeared to be suntanned, too.

  And how many tall, balding men were standing in Edward’s general vicinity? Easily enough for a Rogaine commercial. It was folly to think they’d recognize each other with such minimal description, and he couldn’t go around asking various women if they were named Ann, like some desperate old lecher. Probably several of them actually were.

  They hadn’t exchanged cell phone numbers, another mistake. You would think he’d have gotten the hang of this kind of meeting by now. It was twenty past twelve when someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” she said.

  “Ann?” he said. A woman near his own age, an animated bronze statue. Brunette, as she’d described herself, and slightly weathered, but lovely—in a strange way—as if she’d willed herself to be.

  She gazed back at him. “Well, if I’m not, I’m going to pretend I am.”

  “Shall we sit down somewhere, have coffee?” he asked.

  “Later, maybe,” she said. “Let’s go look at the art first.”

  Edward had bought two tickets of admission as soon as he’d come in, and they went straight to the Marina Abramović exhibit, The Artist Is Present. As indeed she was, seated at a table, clothed, slightly hunched and staring ahead, but not directly at the woman sitting opposite her, a museum visitor who’d helped herself to the facing chair.

  Edward could never have thrust himself into the spotlight that way. He would feel too shy, and he was already weary of the culture of instant fame. “Could you do that?” he asked Ann. “Just plunk yourself down opposite her?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “But I don’t particularly want to.”

  In another room they were assaulted by the images and noise from several screens hanging from the ceiling and set into the walls. It was bedlam, like the dayroom in an asylum, like an orchestra tuning up, readying to play Stravinsky. “Enough,” Ann said—his thought exactly—taking his hand and leading him into the next gallery.

  That’s where the nude couple, made famous by art critics and news writers, was standing in a narrow passageway, facing each other, less than a couple of feet apart. They were anatomically correct, but were somehow as neutered as store mannequins, as Barbie and Ken. It seemed that you were expected to sidle between them to continue on in the exhibition. Edward had read somewhere that there was another, conventional way into the adjacent room, and that the artist had objected in vain to this more conservative option.

  According to an item in the Times, a man, a patron, had made his way between the naked pair, allegedly patting the male actor on the butt in the process, and had been summarily ejected by one or more of the guards. The accused had also been deprived of his long-standing membership in the museum. Henry said it was entrapment; Sybil called it rough justice.

  Edward was looking around for the other way in when Ann dropped his hand and darted as quickly as a hummingbird between the nude sentries. She stood on the other side and said, “Come on, what are you waiting for?”

  In a fairy tale, this would be the ultimate test, that defining moment when one could turn out to be the hero of the story or merely an ogreish chump. Wasn’t he too old for this sort of challenge? Didn’t those two nudists ever take a break for a smoke or the restrooms?

  Out of nowhere, he thought of the whirling hora dancers the night he first met Bee, and how he’d stood on the sidelines, struck by longing, until he was pulled into the swiftly moving circle that became his life. He smiled at Ann, still hesitating, and she called, “Let’s go, Edward. Lighten up!”

  It was like a blow to the head of an amnesiac, similar to the one that took his memory, except that this one served to restore it. She was older by thirty-some-odd years and like a sepia negative of her former ethereal, silver-haired self. She bore a different name, for some reason, and the burnishing of age and sunlight, but, God, it was Laurel, it was her! He threw off his inhibitions, like cumbersome garments, and passed through the guarded doorway to the other side.

  Payback

  For the rest of his life, Edward would wonder why he hadn’t just turned away from Laurel and left the museum. He would play that moment over and over in his head without ever coming to a definitive conclusion. When it happened, when she called to him and he followed her into the other gallery, he felt propelled by shock and rage, as well as by something else he couldn’t name. “You!” he cried, when he reached her, that single word ablaze with recrimination. She didn’t cower or even step back, but at least she’d stopped smiling.

  Of course she had the advantage of having known who he was from the time he’d phoned and introduced himself. How many Edward Schuylers could there have been in her life? She hadn’t given anything away then, though, except for saying, with such certainty, “Don’t worry, I’ll find you.” And then there was the penetrating way she’d gazed at him in the museum’s lobby. But that was all hindsight. At the time, he didn’t have a clue as to who she was—not with a new name, her once breathy voice coarsened by years of use out of his earshot, the whole physical transformation.

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  “Why?” he said, hating the plaintive sound of his own voice, and the way he was reduced to monosyllables, as if he couldn’t force more than one sound at a time up through the clogged pipes of his throat. What was he really asking her? Why did you go through with this, once you heard my name? Why did you pursue me after I destroyed your first letter? Or, Why did you leave me stranded like that more than thirty-five years ago?

  He wasn’t sure what he meant and Laurel—Ann was her middle name, he suddenly remembered—wasn’t going to help him figure that out. She said, “We have to talk, Edward.” And whatever she saw in his face made her add, “Please.”

  “No,” he said. “I think the statute of limitations has run out on that little talk.” Well, at least his voice and vocabulary were restored. He sounded like a lawyer now, like the stuffed shirt she used to tease and seduce into abandonment.

 
“You have to give me a chance to explain,” she said.

  “I do? Really?” Well, fuck you, he thought, something he had never said aloud to anyone, but had to stop himself from saying now. As he turned to go, he saw a naked woman climbing a ladder against the far wall. Art or madness, Edward didn’t know which and didn’t care. He followed the exit signs, weaving between clusters of people until he came to the broad stairway that would take him down to the lobby. Without looking back, he ran down the center of the steps, almost tripping a couple of times.

  She must have been close behind him. He heard his name called above the conversational din as he made his way across the lobby, cutting between people again. “Hey!” a man said as Edward brushed against him in passing, but he kept on going, through the revolving doors that spun him out onto the street. “Edward!” he heard. “Wait!” Bee’s last words. He wanted to laugh, or cry.

  He headed toward Fifth Avenue, out of breath and a little light-headed. His legs were much longer than hers and he’d hardly slackened his pace, but she caught up to him, anyway. “Come on,” she said, “this is crazy.”

  “No, you’re crazy, if you think I want to talk to you.” He continued to walk, despite the feeling that he might pitch over onto the sidewalk any minute.

  “I am crazy,” she said. “Or I was crazy. Edward, I was sick.”

  He stopped, with his fists on his hips, his heart struggling like a flooded engine. Sick! She looked extraordinarily healthy to him. Why wasn’t she panting, too? He was reminded of the lame or exaggerated excuses students often gave when they’d been absent or hadn’t turned in an assignment. “Do you have a note from your mother?” he said, his tone as coldly contemptuous as Maureen Wheeler’s. Are you sitting on your brain?

  But Laurel seemed to take the question seriously. “My mother is dead,” she told him.

  Mrs. Arquette in her lilac-colored dress, her drooping corsage. “Everyone’s mother is dead,” he said. Except for Bee’s, except for poor Gladys.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and for one incredulous moment he thought she was offering condolences about his mother. Then he realized that she was trying to apologize with those two easy words for the devastation she had once wreaked.

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. Oui. Je suis très désolée,” she said. It had always sounded so much more sincere in French—like utter desolation instead of mere regret. “Can we go somewhere?” she asked. “For that cup of coffee you offered before?”

  “I offered that to Ann Parrish,” he said. “This isn’t a date anymore, in case you haven’t noticed.” His breath had returned and he started walking again, turning onto the avenue and heading north. He had no particular destination; he just had to keep going.

  She walked alongside him. He tried to stay a few steps ahead of her, but she kept catching up. When they reached Central Park South, with the park on the other side, he headed toward it, stepping off the curb just as the lights changed. He had to hurry across the wide street as the traffic began moving, and he heard horns honking behind him, but he didn’t turn around to see if she’d made it safely across, too. What a gentleman he used to be, what a sap.

  When he entered the park, it was if he’d gone from the gritty black-and-white world of the city into the Technicolor palette of nature—Dorothy gone from Kansas to Oz. Everything that had happened seemed just as unreal. Yet all around him, Edward saw evidence of ordinary life: babies, dogs, bicyclists, trees. He made his way down a path to a lawn and sat under a red maple, leaning back against its trunk. There was no sign of Laurel. He might have invented or dreamed the entire episode, or simply willed her away. He closed his eyes, feeling the dappled sunlight strike his lids between the new leaves of the maple, like a blessing.

  But he didn’t feel relaxed. He was still simmering with anger and beset by an inexplicable melancholy. His own reaction surprised him; he’d put her out of his heart and head ages ago. And even when she’d still been on his mind, and he’d imagined running into her somewhere, he always saw himself as being civil, if not exactly cordial. Yet today’s encounter had wrenched him backward to that church where he’d stood and waited, as if no time had passed at all. And walking out on her at the museum hardly seemed like adequate payback.

  Payback! What was he thinking? Edward had never considered himself a vengeful person, someone who had to get even for being wronged. His parents’ style had been conciliatory, and he’d been raised to turn the other cheek, or to at least be tolerant of other people’s foibles and transgressions. “Forgive and forget” was his mother’s motto, “Live and let live,” his father’s. “Kiss and make up,” they’d chorused when he and Catherine had quarreled as children. Clichés by which they’d lived such honorable, orderly lives.

  Maybe that’s why he’d let Laurel get away with so much when they were together. That entrenched passivity, and his being so helplessly in love with her. Had they married, his patience would have worn away in time; he knew that now. They’d have made each other miserable and probably wouldn’t have lasted. But the chronology of his life would have been altered, and maybe he’d never have met Bee and known genuine happiness.

  The wonder of that, of such random, lucky cause and effect—like the high number he’d drawn in the draft lottery during the Vietnam War—gave him a feeling of peace that seemed to radiate from his chest to all of his limbs. The anger seeped away. He thought that he might even fall asleep in the shifting, glittering shadows of the tree. It wasn’t as if he’d forgiven or forgotten Laurel, and they certainly would never kiss and make up. But when it came down to it, she had really done him a great favor.

  DSM

  For the first time, Nathaniel Worth went past Edward’s lab in the company of someone who appeared to be—from the way they were shoving each other and laughing—his friend. Or maybe his clone, with that skinny frame and those standout ears. It was the final Friday of the school year, and for once Nathaniel wasn’t going to need tutoring during the summer vacation. Not that he was excelling in any of his classes, but at least he had passing grades in all of them, including Bio/Life Science, which he had ended up having to repeat.

  Edward had gotten him out of Maureen Wheeler’s clutches, though, by asking the headmaster to transfer the kid to the class of another, more humane and laid-back colleague. Parents had no say in these matters at Fenton, but there was no rule against faculty interference. It was like a reprieve from the governor. Since then, Edward had heard, Nathaniel became more focused and had even lost the nickname “Worthless.” Now he was known as “Worms,” which, in the brutal and mysterious kingdom of childhood, was somehow considered cooler.

  Bernie and Frances were sitting at their usual table at Bruno’s when Edward walked in. “Hey,” Bernie said, “if it isn’t Casanova.”

  “I thought you were going straight home after you cleaned out your desk,” Frances said.

  “I decided to celebrate with you.” Edward sat down as Bernie signaled their waiter for another glass.

  How strange it was to feel celebratory, to actually welcome this time of year again. Edward felt as if he’d shed heavy armor or lost a few pounds. What he’d actually lost was the anchor of mourning that had weighed his heart down for the last two years. Amy Weitz had promised the bereavement group that this would happen in time, and she was right, at least about him. But it made him sad to think about it. And afraid it might return, like a post-traumatic stress flashback.

  Frances clinked her glass against his and then against Bernie’s. “No more lessons, no more books, no more students’ dirty looks.”

  “Amen,” Bernie said. “L’chaim.” To life. And he didn’t feel the need to throw Edward an apologetic glance.

  “When are you leaving?” Frances asked.

  “The first of July,” Edward said. “How about you?”

  “Monday. I’m too old to delay gratification.”

  Frances was flying to the south of France with two women friends, and Edward was going back to
the Vineyard for a month, although not to the rented house he’d shared with Bee. Bernie was staying in town. He was one of those people who claimed to love New York City in the summer, when everyone else deserted it.

  But Edward hadn’t come to Bruno’s to discuss their vacation plans; he wanted to talk to Frances and Bernie about his encounter with Laurel. He needed to tell someone. Neither his family nor his Englewood friends knew anything about her, and he had no intention of enlightening them.

  Bernie had been at Fenton when Edward was supposed to marry her. He’d been in attendance at the church that fateful day, too. And even if he hadn’t been, it was the sort of scandalous event that stayed in the collective memory of an institution. Back then, students still passed scribbled notes and nobody had cell phones yet, but the news spread quickly, anyway. These days it would have been even worse, the story proliferating wildly via texting and Facebook, probably embellished, and maybe even illustrated with Photoshopped nude pictures.

  The only other mercy was that Laurel had wanted a late-June wedding, so that Edward was able to escape from the physical place for the summer. By September, when school resumed, he’d already begun to restore his ego and his social life. Laurel was gone and there was new gossip to keep everyone occupied. Not that anyone really forgot about the jilting—it just wasn’t current enough to be that interesting. Bernie’s advice hadn’t changed over the years. What Edward needed then, too, was to get laid, which he did, in the freewheeling 1970s, as often as he could.

  Now he took a sip of beer and said, “You won’t believe who I ran into last week. A ghost from my past: Laurel Arquette.”

  His audience was rapt. Frances, who knew all about Laurel’s betrayal, even though she’d been hired at Fenton years later, hadn’t ever brought her up with Edward. That was a kindness, he knew, a measure of their friendship. But he could see by her face that the story was alive in her mind. Bernie whistled softly. “You didn’t recognize her? I thought she’d be tattooed on your brain.”