An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Oh, God, no. It was back in graduate school, in Philadelphia, and he was a visiting professor, from the Midwest. He went home for holiday breaks and on occasional weekends, ostensibly to see his ailing mother. I was so dumb, I didn’t realize for almost a year that he was married.”

  “And then you broke it off?”

  “Yes.”

  Their food was served and Edward looked down at his plate, as if he’d forgotten what he’d ordered.

  “I thought you were hungry,” Olga said.

  “I was. I am.” He picked up his fork and poked at his pasta. “This looks delicious,” he said. But he was picturing Olga, lying in the middle of her bed in a tattered nightgown, singing at the top of her lungs.

  Lying in Bed

  Edward spent the weekend in Englewood, this time because Laurel had plans of her own in the city, with a friend visiting from Phoenix. He kept himself busy, puttering around the house and the garden, and even spent a couple of hours down in the basement, examining various fibers under the microscope. A bit of wool pulled from an old sweater appeared crimped and covered with overlapping scales, like a fish. The crimping, he knew, was what caused woolen fabrics to retain air and heat. Olga had said that those ancient tapestries were practical as well as decorative, that they’d also served as insulation against the cold. The sweater felt warm in Edward’s hands.

  Lying in bed alongside Laurel on Monday night, while she flipped through the channels on the muted TV, he told her about his visit to the museum, without mentioning his dinner afterward with Olga. It was beside the point, really, an omission rather than a lie. He expected her to be curious about what he’d seen and learned at the conservation lab, despite her reluctance to go there with him, but her interest lay elsewhere. “Were they both there?” she asked, without glancing away from the flickering screen.

  “Elliot and Olga?” he said. “Yes, of course. They gave me the grand tour. It’s pretty amazing, really painstaking work. Like adding another layer to history, one stitch at a time.”

  “They seem like a pretty tight couple, don’t they?” Laurel said.

  His own assumption about them, fostered by Sybil’s carefully fabricated hints. This time he did lie. “I don’t know,” he said. “We concentrated on the tapestries, not on their personal lives.”

  He asked about Laurel’s weekend with her friend. “We hit the usual hot spots,” she said. “The Empire State Building, Chinatown, Bloomingdale’s.”

  “Did you buy anything?” Sometimes she gave him a private, provocative little fashion show of new clothing that usually ended up with her purchases, tags still attached, in a pile on the floor, and Laurel naked beside him in bed.

  She sighed. “Everything was too expensive,” she said, “and designed for twelve-year-olds.”

  “Let me buy you something tomorrow,” he said, “as an advance on your birthday present. I’ll help you pick it out.”

  Laurel looked at him. Her birthday was months away, and he hated shopping almost as much as she enjoyed it.

  His offer surprised him, too, for the very same reasons, but suddenly he’d been infused with feeling for her. He wanted to please and protect her the way he had when they were young and she’d been unhappy about one thing or another. “You can try it on for me later, and then you can take it off for me,” he said. He took the remote from her hand and shut off the TV. Then he kissed her, and after a beat or two, she began to kiss him back.

  He was aroused, as he always was with her, but for the first time in their long history he was unable to do much about it. “I’m sorry, Lulu,” he said, and heard an echo in his head of his apology to Sylvia Smith on their one misbegotten date. He’d been metaphorical about it then, in his embarrassment, claiming to have lost his “concentration.” And in her disappointment she was both caustic and kind.

  Now he said, “Maybe I had too much wine with dinner,” although they’d each had only a single glassful at a local Chinese restaurant. And then, “Do they use MSG in that place?” When she didn’t respond, he added, “Or else old age is catching up with me.”

  “My old age, or yours?” she said.

  “You’re gorgeous, you know that. I love your body.” A passionate truth, and one she liked to hear. He knew that this was the moment to say something else, something larger and more encompassing, like I love you, but he held back. It was too easy and too difficult at once. Instead, he said, “May I have a rain check?” And he tried to kiss her again, but she reached across him to the night table on his side of the bed for the remote and turned the TV back on, without the mute this time.

  In the morning, he made up for his failure the night before. He was almost late for work because she held on to him for such a long time afterward. When he was getting dressed, she was still in bed, tangled in the sheets, observing him. “Were you thinking about her?” she asked.

  Edward stood still, his hand poised at a button on his shirt. His heart banged against it. “About who?” he said.

  “Your wife, of course. Who else?”

  “Do you mean when I was making love to you?”

  “Yes. And when you couldn’t.”

  He hadn’t brought Bee into Laurel’s bed, which would have dishonored both of them. He sat down next to her and took her hand. “No, never,” he said. “I’m with you now.”

  “When I was in your house,” Laurel said, “I could feel her presence.”

  “Well, that’s only natural. She lived there, it was her home. But there’s nobody here but us chickens.”

  She reached up and pulled him down to her. He pressed his mouth to her neck; her skin was warm, almost feverish, and she smelled of sleep and sex. “Play hooky today, mon cher,” she whispered. “Stay here with me.”

  “You know I can’t,” he said. “I have a roomful of kids dying to hear about the anatomy of the frog. But I’ll see you later, okay?”

  That afternoon, he met her at one of the designer shops in Saks, where a couple of other men of a certain age sat on strategically placed upholstered chairs, waiting for their female companions to emerge from the dressing rooms. One old guy, with several shopping bags at his feet, drooped in his seat, snoring softly. Bee had spared Edward this sort of expedition, knowing that it bored him and made him feel self-conscious. And aside from her flea market treasure hunts, she wasn’t that enamored of shopping, either.

  After Laurel disappeared with a salesclerk, he plunked himself down in an available chair with his briefcase and watched women rifling through the clothing racks as if they were searching for something they’d misplaced. The snoozing man across from him had slumped even lower, and Edward, who was growing drowsy, himself, in this carpeted, windowless environment, idly wondered if anybody ever died in one of these places, and if the body was carted discreetly away.

  Then his mind drifted to the classroom, to the charts he had pulled down that day of the frog’s highly developed nervous system, so similar to a human’s, and of its digestive and reproductive organs. He’d explained that the male frog has vocal cords enabling him to croak, a noise that attracts the female during the rainy breeding season. “Ribbit, ribbit,” one of the boys had intoned, while a couple of girls snickered and tossed their long hair. Edward’s rambling train of thought struck him as mildly funny in his sluggish state—old men croaking in department stores as they waited for their women to reappear, and frogs croaking in the rain for the attentions of the opposite sex. Boys and girls … Of course he was soon asleep, too.

  Laurel tapped him on the shoulder. “Chéri,” she said. “What do you think of this one?”

  Edward opened his eyes. She was wearing a simple shimmery black dress, and she walked slowly up and down before him, like a model on a runway. How pretty she was! “It’s perfect,” he said. “Let’s get it.”

  She stepped closer to him, while the saleswoman stood at a tactful distance, and wiggled the price tag near his face. “Soldes,” Laurel whispered, which meant that the thing was on sale, but still sounde
d like a foregone conclusion, an auctioneer’s final word. Edward patted his pockets for his reading glasses, but remembered they were in his crowded briefcase, and he didn’t want to fumble through it while Laurel and the saleswoman watched and waited. As he pulled out his credit card and hoped for the best, he noticed that the sleeping old man across from him was gone.

  Urgent Personal Business

  Bingo died in his sleep at home—what most people would consider a “good death,” if there actually was such a thing. But even modest canine pleasures, like meals and walks and rolling around in a pile of dry leaves, seemed significant to Edward in their termination. And he felt worse than he’d expected. That terrible sensation of loss after Bee’s death, from which he’d so slowly recovered, was revisited. Not in the same way, of course; the ache was more diffuse and not constant, but it also evoked a second round of grief for her. Without casseroles this time, or a bereavement group, and only a modicum of sympathy from friends. Bingo was just an animal, after all, and he was very old. Nature had taken its course.

  It happened on a Wednesday night, and Edward took the rest of the week off from school, citing urgent personal business. Then he canceled the plans for Thursday and Friday that he’d made with Laurel. “Poor Edward,” she said, when he called with the news.

  “Poor Bingo, actually,” he replied, remembering her uneasiness around the dog.

  “Why don’t I come out to see you?” she said.

  “I’m not great company right now,” he told her. “And there are things I have to take care of.”

  “But don’t you want someone to cheer you up?”

  “You’re sweet,” he said, “but, no, really, I’m fine.”

  He had the body cremated and let the vet dispose of the ashes. Nick and Amanda commiserated with Edward together on the phone, while their dog yipped frantically in the background. Only Mildred and Julie paid condolence calls that evening. Mildred pulled out the vacuum cleaner in the middle of her visit and cleared the rugs and furniture of dog hair. When she left, she took the few battered rubber toys and the food and water bowls with her.

  By the time Julie arrived, only the leash and collar were left, enough to set off an anguished moan from her. Edward supposed she was lamenting the puppy she’d once considered her own, or feeling guilty about so carelessly abandoning him later. Maybe Bingo’s death was a reminder of her own mortality. Margaret, are you grieving …, he thought. But her sorrow wasn’t just for herself. “Poppy, now you’re all alone!” she cried.

  He could have assured her that he wasn’t, really, but he didn’t think this was the right time to tell her about Laurel, although if she were there, as she’d wanted to be, no explanations would have been necessary. He maneuvered the conversation to Julie’s life—her job, her boyfriends. She was thinking of applying to law school, something Bee had encouraged her to do. And money her mother had left her would help make that possible. “That sounds good,” Edward said, with cautious optimism; Julie had considered law school in the past.

  She was still seeing both Andrew and Todd, and she’d gone on a blind date the week before. No one had asked her to be exclusive, she said, and she didn’t want to limit her options right now. Edward tried not to appear as impatient and judgmental as he felt. Anything he said might tip her in the wrong direction.

  After she was gone, he checked his email, and beneath the ads from Sears and Staples and Amazon, there was a letter from Olga. “Edward,” she’d written, “Sybil told me about your dog, and then cleverly offered your email address, but believe me I’m not doing her bidding. I intended to write, anyway, to say how sorry I am. It’s what you bargain for when you get a dog, I guess, but some of us never learn. Thanks again for that fine dinner last week. My best to you and Laurel. Olga”

  Before he went to bed that night, he wrote back to say that he’d enjoyed having dinner with her, too. He thanked her for allowing him that special visit to the conservation lab, and for her kind note about Bingo. Did she still have a dog?

  A question begs an answer, and early the following morning there was one. She had a seven-year-old pug, a heavy breather named Josie, for the Empress Josephine, whose own pug was said to have carried secret messages to Napoleon in prison. What breed had Bingo been?

  Just a mutt, he wrote back, or a composite, to quote Mark Twain. And that was that.

  Edward checked the computer for new messages a couple of times before he had coffee. He deleted a fresh round of ads and took a shower. He began to regret not having gone in to work now that his “urgent personal business” was finished. His students would be tormenting some pitiful substitute teacher by now.

  And it was another dazzling spring day, too good to waste moping around indoors. He put his birding journal and binoculars in his backpack and started to drive to Greenbrook. But as soon as he got onto the parkway, the traffic slowed, and then kept stopping and starting; there seemed to be an accident ahead. Edward remembered what Olga had said about Central Park, about getting her fill of greenness there. It was an excellent birding site, too. He got off at the next exit and headed south, toward the bridge.

  He found a garage on 84th Street between Park and Lexington and started walking in the direction of the park. As he was approaching Fifth Avenue, he thought of calling Laurel—how surprised and pleased she’d be—to ask her to meet him. That evening, he imagined, she would wear the terrific little black dress he’d bought for her at Saks, at what had turned out to be an astonishingly high reduced price. He’d even taken his phone from his pocket, but then he saw the museum, with its brilliant banners and populated steps, and he put the phone away and changed course.

  Edward chose a place for himself close to where he’d sat with Olga. The steps were sun-warmed as they’d been the previous Friday, and the only birds in sight were the freeloading pigeons, pecking and cooing around his feet. Again he closed his eyes and turned his face upward. He could hear people nearby speaking in German or Dutch, laughing, and he remembered lying in bed as a boy, listening to his parents talking in the next room, in what had seemed like a foreign language when he was on the verge of sleep. He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there when he felt himself cast in shadow. “Hey, what are you doing here?” someone said. When he opened his eyes, Elliot Willets was standing above him.

  This time Elliot asked Edward to join him for a meal, for lunch, right there on the steps. He said that Ollie would be down in a few minutes, too. By the time the two men had climbed back up the steps with hot dogs and soft drinks, Olga was sitting and waiting for them in what she’d described the week before as heaven. She didn’t seem as startled as Elliot had been to see Edward. “Hello,” she said. “Do you have a reservation?”

  My Old Flame

  After lunch, they strolled into the park, where pedestrians, bicyclists, and skateboarders went by in a constant stream, as if everyone in the world was a truant from obligation. “Green enough for you?” Olga asked Edward, her tone like a poke in his ribs. The lawns and the foliage were intensely green—the word verdant came to mind.

  “Milady considers this her own private garden,” Elliot said, “but she deigns to let the peasants in.”

  “Gee, thanks, Ollie,” Edward said. Her nickname had just slipped out. “Nice place you have here. Who’s your landscaper?”

  “Oh, Cézanne, most of the time. Sometimes Sisley.”

  Elliot and Olga couldn’t venture too far or stay very long; they had to return to work, and Edward was torn between walking back with them to the Met to look at some actual Cézannes and Sisleys, and going farther into the park. Finally, nature won out over renderings of nature, and he shook hands with the other two and followed the path he was on for a while, then veered off to the left and kept on going.

  He used to know Central Park pretty well when he lived in the city. He and Laurel had picnicked in the Sheep Meadow, and attended concerts and performances of Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park. Twelfth Night under the stars! And they’d ch
eered together for the Fenton soccer team on one of the playing fields.

  Now Edward wandered around and found Cleopatra’s Needle again, and gazed up at that imposing statue of the king of Poland on his horse. Then he went looking and listening for the birds. There were many to be found that afternoon: a magnolia warbler singing in couplets, a couple of rose-breasted grosbeaks, thrushes and wrens—and whole families of Canada geese and mallards floating on Turtle Pond, where dragonflies and damselflies darted and hung suspended in air. All of those creatures, even the common house sparrows and rock pigeons, gave Edward a sense of peace and pleasure. He sat under a tree on the low stone wall near the pond and entered them in his journal, adding a few notes about the park itself.

  Then he took out his cell phone. There were two missed calls, both of them from Laurel, but she hadn’t left any messages. The phone had vibrated in his pocket a couple of times while he was sitting on the museum steps having lunch, and he’d chosen to ignore it. Now he dialed Laurel’s number. “Edward,” she said, “I’ve been trying to reach you. Where have you been?”

  “You didn’t leave a message,” he said.

  “Of course I did, two of them, in fact.”

  “You mean at home?”

  “Well, that’s where I thought you were, where you said you’d be.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I changed my mind; I’m in the city, actually.”

  “Oh? Did you decide to go to work?”

  “No, I came in to do some birding, to take my mind off things.”

  “But when did you get in, and where are you?”

  “I’m in Central Park.” But as he said it, he didn’t picture any of the good times they’d had there when they were young. He just saw himself being chased by her that day at MoMA, and ending up under a similar tree in similar flickering sunlight. “I’m feeling better,” he said, although she hadn’t asked. He might have been referring to that other time, to his gradual recovery from overwhelming rage and misery. “And I want to see you,” he added.