An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  She laughed. “They’re pretty androgynous with their diapers on at that age, aren’t they?”

  “I thought I’d get a clue, but the kid’s name is Morgan, for God’s sake. And all Peggy said was, ‘What do you think of our Morgan?’ She could have been talking about a horse.”

  “They don’t have a horse,” Ellen said. “And the baby’s a girl.”

  “Well, then I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t ask if it’s harness-trained yet.”

  They’d come to Ellen’s rental, a medium-sized A-frame about a mile from Edward’s. As he lifted her bicycle from the car, he decided to rent a bike himself, as he and Bee used to do every summer. He’d cycle to the wildlife sanctuary at Felix Neck again. Maybe he would ask Ellen to go with him. At her door, she took a pen from her purse and scribbled her phone number on the palm of his hand. Then she turned her face up and he kissed her lightly on the lips.

  Back in the witch’s cottage, he lay awake for a while, despite his drowsiness. He went backward through the events of the long day, from the kiss at Ellen’s door to locking up the house in Englewood. Then his thoughts meandered, the way they do right before sleep. For some reason he remembered that Houdini had promised his wife to send her a sign from the hereafter, and that she’d never received one. “If I could come back,” Bee once said in the last weeks of her life, “I would want another shot at being myself. But only with you.”

  Silver and Gold

  Julie was among the first passengers off the ferry. When he saw her, Edward was reminded of picking her up at school once when Fenton was closed for one of its ersatz holidays: Founder’s Day or Reading Day or something. He’d been waiting outside Grove Elementary in Englewood, along with other parents and nannies and siblings, when the doors burst open to release a mob of children, all of them rushing forward noisily, like a gaggle of geese. You’d think the building was on fire.

  Julie was a second-grader and Edward fairly new to his step-fathering role. For a panicky moment, he wondered if they’d recognize each other. Then he spotted her—how small she looked, even among her peers—and he thought, with a startling rush: Mine! She’d seen him, too, and began waving and separating herself from the others to run toward him.

  Now he heard her call “Poppy!” and had the same pleasantly surprised, proprietary sensation. Bingo, who’d come along for the ride, barked at her until she threw her arms around him. In the car, she was as chatty as she’d been as a child. So much had happened in the short time Edward had been away. For one thing, Nick and Amanda were trying to become pregnant. Amanda had confided this to Julie under penalty of “death by torture” if she blabbed about it to anyone. “But I don’t think she meant you,” she told Edward.

  Edward was still trying to absorb that news and its ramifications. He might become the grandfather, the step-grandfather, anyway, of a child Bee would never know, and he began to think of the time he and Bee had tried to have a baby—their initial excitement and the ultimate letdown—when Julie continued. She’d visited Gladdy, who looked, to Julie’s distress, “about a hundred.”

  “She’s not that far from it,” he said.

  “But I want her to be at my wedding,” Julie said.

  “Oh, are you getting married?” he asked.

  “Well, not right away,” she admitted. “Anyway, I’ve broken up with Todd.”

  Since this was a bulletin she’d delivered a couple of times before and then rescinded, he didn’t become too hopeful. But then she said, “I’ve met someone new, though.”

  “Hmm,” he said, knowing that he wouldn’t have to probe to get a few salient details.

  “His name is Andrew Gold. Silver and Gold, can you believe it? We could name our first kid Sterling. Sterling Silver-Gold!”

  Their first kid. “How long have you known this metallurgic soul mate?” Edward said.

  “Not that long, a few weeks, but we’re really close. And you’ll never guess how I met him. Speed-dating!”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to proceed to speed-loving,” Edward said, pleased that she seemed so happy.

  “Oh, you!” she said.

  Julie liked the cottage. “It’s really quaint,” she said. “It suits you.” Was that how she saw him—an old eccentric who belonged in this gingerbread house? Maybe others did, too.

  At least Ellen had declared the rental a complete mismatch when she’d come for lunch a few days before. “I did ask for something very different from the yellow house,” he told her as they sat at the metal table out back eating soft-shell crabs and drinking iced tea. The dog, easy with his affection, lay on his side at her feet.

  “And you certainly got that,” she said.

  When he activated the fountain, they discovered that the water was illuminated by blinking red, white, and blue lights. The thing was musical, too, playing, of course, “Three Coins in the Fountain.” Edward had trouble turning it off and they couldn’t stop laughing.

  After Julie had dropped her things in the second bedroom, she turned to him and said, “I almost forgot—somebody called the other day looking for you.”

  “Who?”

  “Some woman. I think her name was Laura. Lauren? She said she was an old friend of yours.”

  Edward stood in the doorway, holding on to the frame. “What did she want?” he said, although he already knew the answer to that.

  “She’d been trying to reach you, she said. I told her you were up here. That was all right, wasn’t it? I mean, she sounded really nice.”

  “It’s fine,” he managed to say. How had Laurel located Julie? And just how much information had Julie given her? He couldn’t ask without sparking Julie’s curiosity.

  “Was she just a friend or an old girlfriend?” Julie asked, her curiosity already sparked without any prompting from him.

  “You’ve got romance on your mind, Mrs. Silver-Gold,” Edward said.

  “That’s because of this stupid TV show I’ve become addicted to. First Love, Second Chance? I’m sure you’ve never seen it. Do you still only watch those things where animals devour each other? Anyway, they reunite people who broke up when they were younger—”

  “You’re right on both counts, I’ve never seen it, and it does sound stupid.”

  “But that’s the latest thing,” she said. “And it’s kind of fascinating—long-lost lovers finding each other again.” Then, mercifully, her cell phone rang and he left the doorway to give her privacy. As he walked down the hall to his bedroom, he could hear her whispering and laughing.

  Edward took Julie out for dinner that night. He’d thought of asking Ellen to join them, but decided that Julie would probably need his focused attention; she was going to be with him for only three days. And it might seem presumptuous to introduce Ellen to a member of his family, even under these casual circumstances. But he did tell her that Julie was visiting and that he’d call her in a few days. “If you don’t, I’ll call you,” she said.

  Their lunch in his backyard had followed a morning bike ride to Felix Neck. At the edge of one of the ponds, they saw a pair of green herons and a family of mute swans that Edward noted in his journal. “Fine weather, fine company,” he added. And in the woods, Ellen pointed out an orchard oriole, a bird he had never seen there before.

  The night before the visit to Felix Neck, they’d been invited to the same July 4 beach party. When Edward took her home that second time, the kiss at the door lasted longer and was more charged. “Wow, are you seeing fireworks, too?” he said, as the last of the skyrockets boomed in the distance and lit up the night. They kissed again, but when he asked if he could come inside, she said she’d rather take things slowly, if he didn’t mind. Her separation was pretty recent and she was still adjusting to a whole new way of being.

  Of course he minded. He was aroused by the kissing, and his celibacy was beginning to seem like a grotesque private joke. He hadn’t been this sexually frustrated since adolescence. What if he forgot how? But maybe it was like riding a bicycle, someth
ing your body holds in memory for you. And he was a little wobbly at first on the rented bike the next day, after a two-year hiatus, but soon he was rolling along easily beside Ellen on the way to Felix Neck.

  “So tell me about this Andrew Gold,” he said to Julie at dinner.

  “Well, he’s an accountant—not the most glamorous job in the world.” That distinction belonged to Todd, of course—a bank clerk who’d started moonlighting as a deejay at a club in Noho, one of several venues where he came onto other women.

  “Steady, probably, though,” Edward said, “and lucrative. Baby Sterling’s gonna need new shoes.”

  “He’s very funny,” Julie said, “Not funny ha-ha, but in a wry way, like you.” She took a deep breath. “And he thinks I’m beautiful,” she added shyly.

  “Then he has good taste,” Edward said.

  “Or he needs glasses. Actually, he wears glasses.”

  “Jules, you’re an idiot,” he said. “But a beautiful idiot.”

  Much later that night, Edward passed her bedroom on his way to the bathroom. There was no light visible under her door, and he assumed she was asleep. But then he heard her talking softly, probably into her cell phone again. Her voice sounded querulous this time, and then beseeching, and he guessed that she wasn’t talking to the new guy, to the twenty-four-karat Andrew Gold.

  Back in bed, he tried to remember exactly what Julie had said about Laurel’s call. Julie was so trusting, she’d probably offered his phone number at the cottage, and with very little effort Laurel could find his cell phone number, too. But it had been days since her call to Julie, and he hadn’t heard from her yet. Maybe she was just playing out some fantasy about contacting him again. Or she might have changed her mind. God knew she was unpredictable. What if—he wondered, and couldn’t complete the thought. Maybe his brain had fried from all that conjecture. Oh, just go to sleep, he commanded himself, and before long he did.

  An Unavailable Man

  In the morning, Edward began thinking about asking Ellen to have dinner with them that evening. Julie had triggered the idea with her starry-eyed talk the day before about his having a “girlfriend.” He decided that she’d enjoy meeting someone friendly and pretty who just might fit that title, and that Ellen probably wouldn’t mind the invitation. He checked with Julie at breakfast, and she said, “That sounds great.”

  So he called Ellen’s number, long transcribed from his palm to his cell phone speed dial, but her message said that she’d be off-island for a couple of days, and would return calls as soon as she was back. Edward was disappointed, and curious about where she’d gone. “Sorry I missed you. I miss you,” he said. Did that sound weird? He was always unprepared for a taped message when he expected a live human voice.

  That afternoon, he and Julie visited Peggy and Ike. “Now I feel as if I’m really here,” Julie said after the hug fest was over, which gave Edward a jealous twinge. It was the place as well as the people, he reasoned. This was where Julie and Nick had often played with the Martins’ three children, and where they’d hung out as teenagers.

  But when they stepped out onto the veranda, and Julie looked across at the yellow house, she started to sob. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she wailed. At least nobody said that they knew how she felt. Edward put his arms around her, and Peggy went inside for some Kleenex. While Julie dried her eyes and blew her nose, Ike asked if she’d like to go out with him in his kayak.

  Edward, watching them glide by on the lake like figures on a picture postcard, was relieved now that Ellen wasn’t available for dinner. Despite Julie’s playful hints about his love life, memories of their summers on the Vineyard as an intact family would have pervaded the evening, making it gloomy and uncomfortable. This wasn’t the right time or place to introduce her to a new woman he was seeing. In some ways, he was still an unavailable man.

  And he was right about Julie—she wanted to talk about her mother during dinner. That view of their old rental house had unleashed whatever she’d been suppressing. “Two years!” she said, as if Edward wasn’t aware of the passage of time since Bee died, or that an eternity without her awaited them both. He didn’t shy away from the subject—how could he?—but he tried to emphasize the happiness they’d all once known, and the astonishing privilege of it. “Mom used to say how lucky we were.” He didn’t add what Bee usually had, about enjoying their luck while they could, that someday they’d be coming up here with their attendants and walkers.

  The thing was, they’d expected to grow old together, as if that was their due, especially after their late start as a couple. “Do you remember the Wexlers?” Edward asked Julie.

  Of course she did. Herb and Belle, the elderly pair down the street in Englewood, were the standard-bearers for the horrors of aging, with their diminished faculties and mobility, their loss of patience with each other. They fought over the wattage of lightbulbs and the expiration date on milk, about which one of them had left the water running or put the pot scrubber in the freezer. They always accused each other of deliberately mumbling. And all of their friends had predeceased them. The Wexlers split up and got back together again almost as often as Julie and Todd.

  Except that neither of them had anywhere else to go besides separate corners of their house, where they fell into twin soliloquies of silence. Until one day Belle would say, out of forgetfulness or forgiveness, “Do you want me to reheat the chicken for dinner?” or Herb would offer to set the table, and that particular battle was over.

  “We were terrified of becoming like them,” Edward told Julie. He meant old beyond the possibility of pleasure, and frightened and angry. Sometimes, when Edward misplaced his glasses or keys, Bee would say, “Uh-oh, Herb.” And if she yelled “What?” from another room, he’d yell back something about her needing Belle’s ear trumpet. Someday, Bee predicted, Edward would refuse to throw the neighbors’ kid’s ball back over the fence. And she would serve shrunken, stale “old lady” ice cubes to guests, who would surreptitiously spit them back into their flat seltzer. “We’ll be so decrepit by then,” she said, “our deaths won’t seem tragic to anyone but ourselves.”

  “You wouldn’t have been like the Wexlers—you loved each other,” Julie said.

  “We did, very much. But maybe Herb and Belle were in love once, too, and all of their losses ground them down.”

  “So, are you saying it’s better to die young?” Julie asked.

  “No, no, of course not.” Then what was he saying? “It’s just that you should choose someone to spend your life with who’s likely to wear well, someone kind and with a sense of humor.” The un-Todd, he thought, but didn’t say.

  As soon as Julie left on the ferry the next day, Edward felt available again. He wondered once more when Ellen was returning to the Vineyard, and he anticipated her call. He even checked his phone once or twice to make sure it was working. In the afternoon, he bought a couple of lobsters and a bottle of Sancerre, and when he got back to the cottage he lay down on the couch and began to read the second novel in the Stieg Larsson trilogy. He and Ellen had talked about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—how intelligent the characters were, how sex seemed more of a natural aspect of life in Sweden than it did in the United States. That was before their second kiss and her gentle rejection—a postponement, really. And this was now.

  He fell asleep wearing his glasses, and with the book open across his chest. When he woke, he was slightly surprised by his surroundings, and then by the way the light in the room had begun to fade. He looked at his watch and at the mute phone on the table next to him. Hours had gone by. The Sancerre was still cooling in the refrigerator next to the live, seaweed-wrapped lobsters. Like Herb and Belle, bound together until their demise. How long could you keep lobsters alive in there? If he’d brought his computer with him he could have Googled the answer or fired off some emails. Where the hell was Ellen?

  Edward wasn’t exactly hungry, but he stood in the light of the open fridge eating crackers and cheese, washing them down
with orange juice right from the carton. Then he showered and shaved for the second time that day, grabbed his book, and went out to the patio. His backyard neighbors, unseen behind the stockade fence, were having a party. Music, voices, and outbursts of laughter kept interfering with the words on the page. Sweden and New Jersey seemed equally distant and foreign. It was like being on the other side of life itself.

  He went back into the house. It was too late to make other plans for dinner and too early to go to bed. The nap had left him wide awake, yet unrefreshed. He opened the refrigerator again, browsing for food he didn’t really want. This was how so many lonely people must become obese. It occurred to him to cook the lobsters while he still could, and make a salad out of them the next day, when Ellen would have surely returned.

  He had set a big pot of water to boil when he heard a knock on the door. Can the heart actually lift? Of course not, but it can beat madly, like a bird’s wings before flight. Just in time, he was going to say. Welcome back, I hope you’re hungry! And—in a reprise of his clumsy phone message—I missed you. But when he threw off his apron and opened the door, Laurel was standing there.

  Therapy

  “What are you doing here?” Edward said. He was so stunned and let down at once that he might have added, And what have you done with Ellen?

  “I came to talk to you. You wouldn’t listen to me on the phone.”

  “God, Laurel, I told you there’s nothing to talk about.”

  Her shoulders, all of her, seemed to droop. If she melted into a little puddle right there on the step, he wouldn’t have been surprised. “Edward, I’m dying,” she said.

  “What!”

  “I mean inside, I mean emotionally.” He sighed in exasperation and she said, “Look, could I just come in?”