An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “So, do you see her often?” Julie said.

  Why was she being so dense, and why had she turned so ashen? “As often as I can. Jules, I’m very much in love with her.”

  The fork clanked to her plate. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I’ve fallen in love with a woman named Olga Nemerov—Ollie—and, well, she seems to love me back.”

  “I see,” Julie said. “So, are you getting married?”

  “We haven’t talked about that. We haven’t even moved in together yet.” That was only a half-truth, because, except for work, they were hardly ever apart or out of each other’s thoughts. “Right now, we’re just enjoying being together.”

  “How long have you known her?” Julie said.

  “Not very long. A few months. It was sort of like a lightning strike.”

  “That seems pretty fast, the sort of thing you always advised me against.”

  She was referring to the way Edward and Bee tried to protect her from sudden crushes in high school on boys who were unlikely to even notice her. “I’m older than you, I’m an old guy,” he said. “At my age, you can’t afford to waste time.” He sounded like George Burns in his nineties, explaining why he didn’t buy green bananas anymore. “And this is the real thing,” he added. “I know you’re going to like her.”

  Tears welled in Julie’s eyes, just as they had in Nick’s. But these weren’t tears of joy. “What about Mom?” she cried. “I thought she was the love of your life.”

  “She was, you know that. But I’ve been on my own for a long while now. My happiness with your mother is what made me want to be with someone again.”

  “Don’t blame her!” Julie said. She was trembling with rage and sorrow.

  Edward looked at her in dismay. His poor girl; she had genuinely wanted him to be happy, but not completely happy, because that might erase Bee forever. He longed to comfort her, to touch her arm or her head, but he didn’t dare. “I’m not,” he said. “I’m grateful to her, for so many reasons, including you.” He touched his chest. “She’s still in here, Jules. I’ll never, ever forget her.”

  Julie appeared unconvinced. “Do you intend to tell Gladdy about this, about … Olga?”

  “I’m not looking forward to it, but I think she’d want me to be honest with her. In fact, I was hoping you would—”

  “You’ll kill her,” Julie said.

  The Future

  Gladys went to bed early—“Like a little child again,” she’d told Edward—so he arrived at her place just after six o’clock, his stomach growling with hunger and nerves. Mildred let him in, wearing an apron, and then went back to the kitchen, where she’d been doing the dishes from the supper she’d cooked and the two women had shared. Gladys was in the living room, moving her magnifying glass over a newly started jigsaw puzzle.

  “Long time no see,” she said, like a B-movie femme fatale, when Edward came into the room, and he felt himself flush. With his ardent concentration on Ollie, he had neglected almost everyone else in his life. But he had deliberately avoided visiting Gladys, putting off the delivery of what he considered a terrible, yet inevitable, blow. She looked even more fragile than he remembered, but maybe his own guilty fear affected his view of her.

  “Come sit next to me, honey,” she said after he’d kissed her shirred cheek. “I need help.”

  So do I, Edward thought, but he sat down beside her and picked up a straight-edged puzzle piece from a pile of similar pieces she had set aside.

  “Here’s the picture,” she said, holding up the cover of the puzzle box. “Julie bought it for me.” Edward had a further failure of heart at the mention of Julie’s name; the last thing she’d said to him and her look of betrayal were still in his head. At least he was certain she hadn’t mentioned anything to her grandmother about Ollie. He was the designated hit man.

  The puzzle was a pastoral scene, black-and-white cows grazing in a vast meadow. The green parts would be the trickiest. “Why are there always meadows or jungles or snow in these things?” he said. He sounded like a whiny kid, like Julie when she couldn’t force a puzzle piece into the wrong space.

  “To keep us on our toes, honey. Here,” Gladys said, taking the straight-edged piece from his hand and fitting it into its proper place on the frame. She seemed to be the calm center of the room, the only person Edward could turn to for advice on what he was about to say to her. Maybe he should have enlisted Mildred’s help. He probably still could, under the pretext of going into the kitchen for a glass of water. He could hear her puttering around in there, the clink and clank of dishes and pots such stabilizing domestic sounds. And didn’t they always send two cops, at least on TV, to break bad news to someone, usually a woman? One to tell her and one to catch her. He remembered Gladys collapsing against him when he’d told her about Bee.

  But it would be cowardly to involve Mildred in what he’d now begun to think of as his crime. Could love be a crime? Well, maybe Julie and Laurel and Mia Farrow would think so, but he’d never intended to hurt anyone. What all criminals probably said.

  Gladys turned to him, holding the magnifying glass to her eye, which in its enlargement seemed inescapable and all-seeing. “You look pale,” she declared. “Are you hungry? There’s plenty of chicken left.”

  The hunger he had felt when he’d gotten there was gone, although his stomach still bubbled and murmured. He hoped Gladys couldn’t hear it, or read his mind. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m just a little tired.”

  “You work too hard. Maybe it’s time to think about retiring.”

  He and Ollie had talked about that very thing the night before, making plans for the future the way he’d done with Bee. Man plans, God laughs.

  “I am,” he said. “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Well, good,” she said. She put the magnifying glass down but didn’t take her gaze from his face. “What’s the matter?” she said, and he was startled by her insight—or did he just look as miserable as he felt?

  “The thing of it is,” he began—a phrase his father had used when he’d been stalled, trying to explain something difficult or complicated to his children. “Gladys,” he said, “I’ve met a woman.”

  There. The gun had gone off in his hand, but she didn’t fall over. She just sat upright in her chair, breathing, looking at him, waiting. The dishes were still clattering in the background. Were they left over from a banquet? Was Mildred throwing them at the walls?

  “You’re only human,” Gladys said, at last.

  “But it isn’t just a fling, it’s serious.” When she didn’t say anything, he said, “I didn’t expect this to happen.”

  “Whyever not?” she asked.

  “Because … because I loved Bee so much.”

  “I know you did.”

  “But I became very lonely,” Edward said, his chest filling alarmingly with the very sensation he was describing. He was terrified that he was going to cry. He didn’t, though, and neither did Gladys.

  “So, this woman,” she said. “Does she have a name?”

  Edward thought about the way Julie had said “Olga!” as if she were spitting out something that tasted terrible, a foreign, alien food.

  “Olga Nemerov,” he said. “Ollie.”

  “Ollie,” Gladys repeated, closing her eyes. She might have been trying to remember if she knew this person. Or maybe she simply couldn’t bear looking at him.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For loving someone else. For hurting you like this.”

  “Oh, my honey boy,” she said. “Dear Edward.” Her eyes were shimmering now. “My hurt has nothing to do with you. And you made Beattie so happy; you deserve to be happy again yourself.”

  He wanted to lay his head in her lap in gratitude and exhaustion. Instead he took both of her hands in his, surprised by how much warmer hers were. “You loved Jake, too,” he said, “but you didn’t have anyone after he died, did you?”

  She
shrugged. “I was an old lady already. Past eighty. You’re still a young man.”

  “That’s relative, I suppose. Though sometimes I think of myself that way.”

  “Since Ollie,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Well, she’s Jewish. My weakness, it seems.” She smiled at him. “She works at the Metropolitan Museum, restoring old tapestries. And she’s Sybil Morganstern’s cousin.”

  “My,” Gladys said.

  “Listen,” Edward said, “I’ve told the children about all this. Nick and Amanda were fine with it, wonderful, really. But Julie is very unhappy, very angry with me.”

  “Oh, Julie,” Gladys said dismissively. “It’s her father she’s really angry with. Don’t worry, I’ll talk to her. She’ll come around.”

  Edward stared at her, this amazing, enduring woman. He had planned on enlisting Julie’s aid in soothing her, and now she was the one who would soothe Julie, and him, as well. He knew that she was keeping much of what she was feeling to herself, for his sake, what mothers did.

  The noises from the kitchen had stopped, and Mildred appeared in the doorway. “I’m finished now, Glad,” she said, “so if you’re ready, I’ll help you to bed and then I’ll get going.”

  “Wait, Mildred,” Gladys said. “Edward needs to have his fortune told.”

  “Oh, you know he’s not into that,” Mildred said, and the two women exchanged a conspiratorial glance.

  The connection between them had seemed so unlikely until that moment, when Edward understood that they were simply friends, with, at least, widowhood and an impulse for caretaking in common. “Well, maybe this once,” he said. He would have done anything for either of them right then.

  “Really?” Mildred gave him a skeptical glance. “What’ll it be, then? Tarot? Numerology? Psychometry? Name your poison.”

  She might have been reciting the specials at an exotic ethnic restaurant. “You choose,” he said.

  She moved closer to where he and Gladys were sitting. “Let me feel the energy around your hands,” she said. “Put them on the table, palms up.”

  He did as he was told, suddenly submissive and vulnerable, as if he were begging for alms, or for his future.

  Mildred pulled up another chair so that she was facing him, only a foot or so away.

  “Shall I close my eyes?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I want you here, fully present.” Then she raised her own hands, palms down, a few inches above his, moving them around a little before letting them just hover. Gladys leaned forward, watching, listening, while Mildred stared off into the distance above Edward’s head, as if at someone else across the room.

  Edward felt amused, a little giddy, and strangely hopeful and moved.

  Hours seemed to pass, but surely it was only a matter of minutes before Mildred looked directly at him and said, “The universe is offering you a gift. Claim it.”

  Coda

  Was there a happy ending? Edward wouldn’t call it that, because it wasn’t over yet. Not just his own story, but the story of the evolving, persistent world. And that was a continuum, with or without him. Richard Dawkins said that nature isn’t cruel, only indifferent, and Edward agreed. He believed that people invented and then acted out their extravagant emotional dramas to give their lives shape and meaning. But he had experienced episodes of such uncommon bliss, they seemed ordained rather than random, and periods of darkness and sorrow that held their own mysteries. Bee was truly gone, having moved farther and farther from the center, and then the periphery, of Edward’s life into pure memory, just as Amy Weitz had predicted she would.

  Ollie was the one he would spend the rest of his days and nights with. They continued to desire and cherish each other, which didn’t cease to astound them. “Let’s never tell Sybil,” she said one day. “I can’t stand to give her the satisfaction.” But love wants a witness, and their own satisfaction was even greater than Sybil’s.

  Soon they began spending the working week in the city and weekends in Englewood. Josie the pug preferred suburban New Jersey, with all that delightful greenery to kill. But Edward and Ollie were pleased to be anywhere together. He found himself wishing, with a lover’s generosity, that Sylvia Smith and Ellen, and even Laurel—if that were possible—would know similar contentment and joy.

  The first time he brought Ollie to his house, she paused in the doorway for several moments. She seemed to be waiting for permission to enter. Finally, he grabbed her hand and pulled her inside. “So this is where you’ve been all this time,” she said, as if he’d been hiding out there, which in a sense he had been.

  He showed her the kitchen, where they would have breakfast the next morning, and the bedroom, where they would lie down together, and even his makeshift basement lab—feeling a little like a real estate agent, pushing to make a sale. But she was already sold on the entire package.

  They made defiant short- and long-term plans. They would build a gazebo in the garden, they would travel. Olga was eager to show him the tapestries in museums in Belgium and northern France. Edward wanted to visit a bird sanctuary in Cesena and Monet’s garden in Giverny. They’d both put in for retirement at the end of the school year, and the Met had offered to retain Ollie’s services as a consultant. Edward would miss teaching, but he was suddenly greedy for leisure, for the luxury of all those additional domestic hours. He wouldn’t ever take them for granted again.

  Although he kept expecting a phone call or a letter from Laurel, Edward didn’t hear from her, not even indirectly. Bernie asked about her a couple of times, and then she seemed to have slipped his mind as easily as she’d eluded Edward’s grasp. Once in a while, in the beginning, he would see a slender woman with dark or silvery hair walk by him in the city, and feel a glancing rush of apprehension, but it was never Laurel, in any of her incarnations.

  As Gladys had promised, she’d spoken to Julie, and Julie had come around, grudgingly at first, and out of her own need as much as his, but that didn’t matter; Edward could still look after her, the only thing left that he could do for Bee. His influence was limited, though, as Mildred could have told him. She was one of those psychics, like the omnipotent, omniscient biblical God, who still allowed for free will. The universe had been holding out a gift to Edward, but he was required to accept it. Happiness was in store for Julie, but it was also up to her.

  And she broke things off with Mr. Right, as Edward and Ollie and the rest of the family considered Andrew; there would be no Silver and Gold wedding, no baby Sterling. Instead she chose Todd, the archetypical Mr. Wrong, who dumped her the following week. Amanda was considering posting a personal ad for Julie on some new dating website called doyoucomehereoften.com.

  Two days before she was officially due to be born, Annabelle Beatrice Silver repositioned herself, feetfirst—as if she were late for an appointment, as if she intended to hit the world running—and had to be delivered by Caesarian section. She was bald and mottled and appeared to need ironing. Nick reported her Apgar score with the kind of pride usually reserved for college boards. Everyone insisted that she looked like Edward.

  About a year later, Gladys died shortly after Mildred had settled her into bed for the night. Her final words were, “What a long day this was.” The jigsaw puzzle on the bridge table in her living room, a reproduction of the tapestry The Unicorn Leaps Out of the Stream—a gift from Ollie—was still a work in progress.

  For Henry Dunow,

  a most available agent and friend

  Acknowledgments

  Several people shared their expert knowledge of various matters touched on in this novel. Any errors are my own.

  I’m very grateful for the generous assistance of Steve Allen, Marilyn Beaven, Suzan Bellincampi, Sandra Bonardi, George Cooper, Dr. Eugene Decker, Luke Dempsey, Keith Glutting, Marge Goldwater, David Jácome, Françoise Joyes, Lorrie Kazan, Deirdre Larkin, Nuala Oates, Elizabeth Pastan, Nancy Slowik, Dr. Julia Smith, and Dr. Richard
Soffer.

  Many thanks to my good friends at Ballantine Books, especially Jen Smith, my wonderfully astute and patient editor.

  Also by Hilma Wolitzer

  NOVELS

  Summer Reading

  The Doctor’s Daughter

  Tunnel of Love

  Silver

  In the Palomar Arms

  Hearts

  In the Flesh

  Ending

  NONFICTION

  The Company of Writers

  NOVELS FOR YOUNG READERS

  Wish You Were Here

  Toby Lived Here

  Out of Love

  Introducing Shirley Braverman

  About the Author

  HILMA WOLITZER is the author of several novels, including Summer Reading, The Doctor’s Daughter, Hearts, Ending, and Tunnel of Love, as well as a nonfiction book, The Company of Writers. She is a recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa, New York University, and Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  1. There are so many themes in this novel (romantic love, family relationships, loneliness vs. togetherness, bereavement, and forgiveness). Which one resonated with you the most?

  2. Why do you think there’s such a dearth of “available men” above a certain age? Are society’s expectations of aging women different from those of aging men?

  3. What do you think contributed to the success of Edward and Bee’s marriage? What did you make of Edward’s difficulty coping after Bee’s death?

  4. Edward’s family and friends conspire to help him find a new love. But Olga has chosen loneliness over being with the wrong person. Is being part of a couple best for everyone?