An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “I asked her if the Mets still have a shot at the playoffs and she gave me a dirty look,” Nick said.

  “Then she must know her baseball,” Andrew said. Nick gave him a dirty look.

  “Hey, I’m a fan,” Andrew said. “But I’m also realistic.”

  Mildred had left the carafe of coffee on the warming cycle, and Edward poured some into three cups and put them on the counter. “We can wait this out,” he said. “Have a seat.”

  They sat on bar stools around the counter and the two younger men compared the former and the new Beltran, talked about whether Minaya or Manuel should be fired, and why the Mets hadn’t acquired any new power or relief pitching during the trades in August. Edward’s interest in baseball was peripheral, although he’d loved the Yankees when he was a boy and had followed the games with Nick when he still lived at home.

  And right then Edward’s mind was in the dining room with the women, hoping that Mildred was predicting positive things for susceptible Julie and, no matter what was being foretold, that she and Amanda wouldn’t take any of it too seriously. What would Bee have said to Julie—believe in yourself? No, that sounded both corny and meaningless. If only she’d left a manual of instructions.

  When the men went back inside, with Edward in the lead, bearing a tray of filled coffee cups, Mildred swept up her Tarot cards and put them into the pocket of her apron. She took the tray from Edward and returned seamlessly to the business of serving. “Sugar?” she asked. “Splenda? Cream?”

  Read our minds, Edward thought.

  Amanda said, “Did you enjoy your brandy and cigars, gentlemen?”

  “Where did you go, honey?” Gladys said to Edward. “You missed everything.”

  Edward looked at Julie, whose face was flushed but unreadable. He sat down next to her, with his arm across the back of her chair. “Well?” he said, as soon as Mildred had gone back to the kitchen, “what’s in the cards for you?”

  She looked at him with glittering eyes. “Happiness,” she said. “But it’s up to me.”

  The Unicorn in Captivity

  One Sunday afternoon, when they were young lovers, Edward and Laurel had visited the Cloisters up in Fort Tryon Park. Everywhere they went together back then seemed romantic, but that serene and beautiful site was especially so. He remembered embracing Laurel on a balcony overlooking the shimmering Hudson, feeling as if they were at the top of the entire world, not just Manhattan. A less inhibited man, or Fred Astaire, anyway, would have broken into song and dance.

  In Edward’s memory of that day, there were Gregorian chants being piped in behind them while, in the distance, traffic streamed steadily across the George Washington Bridge. They were not so much caught between centuries and civilizations as poised in some timeless place. Of course, youth alone can give one the illusion of trapped time. How slowly the days melted into one another, and how much the same he and Laurel remained and would remain.

  It was Edward’s suggestion that they go back to the Cloisters, and Laurel’s eyes shone with delight when he proposed it. “Yes, Edward, yes!” she said, as if he’d just proposed marriage again. And he was happy to have elicited her happiness that easily. Ever since that evening at Bruno’s, which had turned out astonishingly well, she’d become more endearing to him, and more agreeable about the time they still spent apart.

  Bernie and Frances had recovered quickly from their annoyance with Laurel for being late. She was charming and funny, recalling things about Bernie—his passion for Yeats and Larkin; the way the kids at Fenton had called him Poetry Man, after that Phoebe Snow song—and flatteringly curious about Frances. How had she overcome the usual female math panic? Where had she gotten that stunning brooch? Later, Bernie told Edward that Laurel, so physically transformed, was still a dish. And Frances admitted that she hadn’t expected someone quite so sympathetic and nice. “I guess people really can change,” she said.

  Once more, Laurel and Edward walked hand in hand through the cool, dimly lit rooms of the Cloisters, into history. Thirty-five years had wrought considerable alterations in both of them, but it was reassuring to see how well those medieval treasures—the tapestries and religious sculpture and the stained-glass windows—had endured. And in one of the sunny courtyard gardens, with its crab apple trees and fragrant herbs, nature, too, continued.

  When they went back inside for another look at the Unicorn Tapestries, a group of tourists were taking photographs on their cell phones, and Laurel and Edward waited until the room was empty, except for another couple, before they approached. Of the two most popular interpretations of the tapestries, they’d both opted long ago for the romantic over the religious. In mythology, the unicorn, which could only be captured by a virginal maiden, was more readily seen as a bridegroom succumbing willingly to love rather than Christ being hounded and killed, especially to a newly engaged, agnostic couple.

  Now, as Edward was wondering if the Crucifixion theory might not be more accurate, after all—why were there precisely twelve hunters, if not to represent the twelve Disciples? And they weren’t dressed for a hunt—Laurel said, “Look, all that blood without a single wound.” She had turned from the first tapestries to the most famous, and final, one: The Unicorn in Captivity. The woman of the other couple turned around, too. “It might not be blood at all,” she said, “but the juices of the pomegranates in that tree.”

  “Well, he doesn’t seem hurt, in any event,” Laurel said.

  “No, he doesn’t, does he?” the woman said. “And he seems to be enjoying his ‘captivity.’ That fence is so low, he could just bound right over it.”

  “But he’s shackled,” Edward pointed out.

  “Not tightly,” the woman’s companion said.

  “By a lover’s knot, maybe,” Laurel said, and Edward blushed, remembering silk ribbons, his hands loosely tied to bedposts.

  They were all gathered in front of the tapestry now.

  “This one might not be part of the series, you know,” the woman said. “The unicorn is killed in the sixth tapestry, but here he is again, alive and sprightly.”

  “Christ, risen,” her companion said in mock pious tones.

  “We always have this argument,” the woman said. “Love against death.”

  “Death and resurrection,” the man amended.

  The woman gestured. “See the orchids and thistles? They’re symbols of fertility. This tapestry may have been woven separately, to celebrate a wedding.”

  Edward looked from one of them to the other. Had he seen them somewhere before? The man was bearded and a little portly, a professorial type rather than someone he actually knew. But the woman looked familiar. Small and slender. Eyeglasses. The mother of a student, perhaps. So many parent conferences, so many faces over the years. Had he once told her that her daughter had an aptitude for science, or that her son was an inattentive doofus? He couldn’t place her, and she didn’t seem to know him.

  “No, truly,” she said. “Whether or not this one is part of the series remains a mystery.”

  Laurel glanced around the room. “They’re all gorgeous. Just look at those colors. How have they lasted this long?”

  “With great curatorial care,” the woman said. “The backs of the tapestries are covered with linen. They’re mirror images of these, but the colors are far more brilliant because they haven’t been exposed to the elements.”

  “You know a lot about them,” Laurel said.

  “It’s my—our—field. The conservation and restoration of medieval tapestry. Pretty insular and obsessive, I’m afraid.”

  “Chacun à son goût,” Laurel said. She held out her hand. “I’m Laurel Parrish. And this is my …” She considered Edward and their relationship. “This is my friend Edward Schuyler.” She’d given up on using “Ann” after Edward had refused to call her that.

  The woman squinted at him from behind her glasses. “Olga Nemerov,” she said. “Lovely accent,” she told Laurel. “Are you French, or is that de votre goût?”
>
  “À mon goût, c’est vrai. Mais, merci, madame. Je suis flattée.”

  The man extended his hand to Laurel and then to Edward. “Elliot Willets,” he said.

  Edward shook it absentmindedly as he stared at the woman, Sybil Morganstern’s cranky cousin, who seemed to have been humanized by art. Edward had recognized her the very moment before she’d given her name, which he’d lost, although he knew it was something Russian.

  “So, are you still living in the wilds of New Jersey?” Olga asked Edward.

  “You know each other?” Laurel said. It was her turn to squint at him.

  “Not really,” Olga said. “We met once.”

  “I have never been,” Laurel said pointedly.

  “To Jersey?” Olga gave a dismissive little wave. “I was born there. Believe me, you’re not missing anything.”

  “You can’t condemn an entire state for one misspent childhood,” Edward said.

  “I left before I was three,” Olga said, and Edward pictured a bespectacled toddler, with a knapsack on a stick, thumbing a ride on the Garden State Parkway.

  The church tower bell pealed out the hour: one o’clock.

  “I’m hungry,” Elliot Willets announced. “Would you care to join us at the café for some lunch?”

  “His stomach is programmed by a clock,” Olga said. It was the sort of thing one says with fond irritation about a spouse or, perhaps, a dear colleague.

  In the Trie café, which was really just a few tables and chairs overlooking another garden, they ate their sandwiches and sipped bottled iced tea. Nervy sparrows hopped from the garden to the stone floor beneath the tables, looking for handouts. Olga crumbled a piece of crust from her tuna sandwich and sprinkled it in their path. “Litterbug,” Elliot said. He, too, sounded affectionate in his disapproval.

  “How did you two meet?” Laurel asked.

  “In graduate school,” Elliot answered, although the question wasn’t addressed to him, or even about him. “I used to dip her pigtails in my inkwell.”

  Edward looked at Olga’s sunlit, spikily cropped auburn hair, like that of a nun who’d recently left a strict order and was letting it grow out.

  She took off her glasses and gazed out at the garden. “This is how Giverny must have looked to Monet near the end,” she said. She wasn’t instantly converted into a glamour girl, like those secretaries in the movies who remove their spectacles and free the undulant waves of their pinned-up hair. Her hazel eyes simply seemed dreamy and unfocused, as if she’d had too much to drink, or had just been roused from anesthesia. Where am I? she might have been thinking.

  Edward understood Laurel’s question. “Our, my friend Sybil—Olga’s cousin—tried to fix us up once,” he said.

  “Really!” Laurel exclaimed.

  “Really?” Elliot echoed.

  “She’s insane,” Olga said.

  While Edward was trying to decide if he was offended by that remark, Elliot said, “That’s where we’re going next Saturday, Ollie, right?”

  “To Sybil and Henry’s?” Edward said. Why did he sound so amazed? They were blood relatives. At least Sybil and Olga were.

  “I don’t know them, do I?” Laurel asked, clearly a rhetorical question that Edward didn’t feel obliged to answer.

  “Family dues,” Olga said.

  “They’re wonderful,” Edward surprised himself by saying, surprised, too, by the swell of emotion in his chest. His wedding, the one that had actually taken place, had taken place in the Morgansterns’ garden. The canopy of wisteria under that threatening sky. His father’s toast. Bee.

  “Are you invited, too?” Laurel asked him.

  “What?” he said. “Oh, to Sybil and Henry’s, you mean? No. No.”

  But the very next day he was invited. And so was Laurel.

  Sleeping Arrangements

  If he had been prepared for the purpose of Sybil’s phone call the following afternoon, or simply a better liar, Edward might have gotten out of it. Theater tickets, dinner plans in the city—sorry, thanks anyway, some other time. But he was like a murderer with a sketchy time line and a bad memory. And Sybil would have grilled him with a homicide cop’s tenacity. What play? But you hate musicals! Dinner with whom? Where?

  Olga had told her all about their chance meeting at the Cloisters, and Sybil didn’t let him sidetrack her with talk about the tapestries or the view of the Palisades. As usual, she went right to the crux of the matter. “Ollie said you were with a very attractive woman. Not someone we know, I imagine.”

  “Don’t we know any attractive women?” he said, in a feeble try at levity, a bid for time. And when Sybil didn’t deign to answer, he sighed and went on. “Laurel’s an old friend, from Fenton, another teacher. I ran into her at MoMA a while back.” Remembering how he’d run away from her that day, he had to suppress a laugh.

  “Well, bring her Saturday night. Ollie’s bringing Elliot, of course, and it will be just the six of us—casual and cozy. Is there anything I should know about her?”

  Plenty, he thought, before he said, warily, “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think I mean? Is she a vegan? Is she lactose-intolerant, or allergic to shellfish?”

  Two things came into Edward’s mind at once: Laurel sucking the meat out of a lobster claw in the Vineyard, and a stray line from Sylvia Plath: I eat men like air. “No, she’s easy to please.”

  “Ah,” Sybil said, whatever that meant. “Good. Seven o’clock, then.” And she hung up.

  Easy to please seemed like an understatement once he’d told Laurel about the invitation. She practically whooped with joy. “What should I wear?” she asked. “Should I bring them something?”

  “It’s just a dinner party in the stultifying suburbs,” he said. “Casual and cozy.” But he was only playing dumb. The thing that thrilled her was the incursion into his other life. They had a brief back-and-forth about travel, in which he finally prevailed. He would stay at her place after school on Friday and drive her out to Englewood in time for dinner. Then they’d drive back to the city, where he’d stay until school on Monday morning. If she asked to stop off to see his house, he would think of something to deter her. The place was being painted; it was a mess; it was late; he didn’t want to fall asleep at the wheel. Not tonight, dear, I have a heartache.

  • • •

  She got too dressed up; it made Edward sad and filled him with affection for her. He was carefully tactful. “Why don’t you wear that blue sweater,” he said. “I love it on you.” Maybe the word love, which he hadn’t uttered once since their reconciliation, not even in the final spasms of sex, moved her to change into a less formal outfit. Whenever she said, “Je t’aime,” which she’d started to do again occasionally, he told himself it didn’t count in French, as if it were merely one of those idiomatic expressions you can’t really translate and that don’t require a response. So far, she hadn’t called him on it.

  Olga and Elliot were already there when Edward and Laurel arrived. They were nibbling on olives and cheese and drinking a deeply hued red wine. Henry was something of an oenophile. “Just some tonic on the rocks for me,” Edward said after the greetings and introductions. “We’re going back to the city tonight.”

  “Too bad,” Elliot said. “This is an excellent burgundy. Ollie and I are staying over,” he added, and took a hearty swallow of his wine. For the first time, he seemed annoyingly smug.

  “We could, too, couldn’t we?” Laurel asked Edward. “At your house, I mean. It’s not far, is it?”

  There was an almost palpable charge in the room while everyone waited for his answer. It was like one of those long pauses in a drawing room comedy, with all its attendant sexual innuendo. Edward found himself speculating about Olga and Elliot’s sleeping arrangements. “I hate Sunday traffic,” he said finally, as if everyone else was fond of it. Who was writing his lines? “But you have some wine,” he told Laurel. “I’m the designated driver.”

  Sybil smirked into her glass w
hile Henry went to fetch the drinks, but Laurel didn’t appear disconcerted. “What a pretty room this is,” she said. She walked to the French doors and looked out at the backyard, where fairy lights were strung through the trees. “And no wonder they call this the Garden State.” Did Olga snicker then or just cough?

  The main course—a stew of beef and harvest vegetables, as if to herald the change of seasons—was delicious, and Edward relaxed into the conversation, which glided from Olga and Elliot’s work to the midterm elections to recent medical discoveries. Edward was curious about the restoration of those ancient tapestries. Where did they find wool to match the original fibers? Was the repair done on looms? Elliot explained some of the process, and Olga said that Edward and Laurel were welcome to visit the museum lab one day, and see it for themselves.

  Later, someone brought up a news item about tests to predict who might develop Alzheimer’s disease in the future. With all of their faculties intact, they began to discuss the hazards and benefits of knowing such a thing. Not surprisingly, Henry’s take was clinical: an early diagnosis made you an ideal candidate for any new therapy down the road.

  “You mean an ideal guinea pig,” Edward said. “First trials are just to find out how much it takes to poison, not cure you.”

  Henry grudgingly agreed. “So, I’d try to get into a later one,” he said.

  “How about trying to avoid the whole thing in the first place?” Laurel said. “You know, use it or lose it? Some people swear that if you do the crossword every day, if you keep engaging your brain …”

  Edward thought of Gladys and her jigsaw puzzles, and then of Iris Murdoch, philosopher and writer, who suddenly became lost in her native London. “It may be inevitable,” he said. “Written into your DNA.”

  “Then I wouldn’t want to know,” Laurel said. “I’d choose to be happy until the last possible moment.” His little hedonist.

  Elliot agreed, but Olga said, “You might want to make plans for the future that you’d be incapable of making later.”