Saturday Night Widows

by Becky Aikman

  “Dawn, I didn’t know Andries was a god,” I said.

  “He sure looked like one,” she said, her face still on fire. “I was looking at pictures the other day. He was so freakin’ gorgeous. Where do you go from there? I can’t imagine a man coming along and filling even a quarter …”

  Her voice trailed off. Tara scootched in next to her, and Dawn dropped her head onto Tara’s shoulder with mock melodrama. When she picked it up again, her eyes had taken on the appraising hardness of Adélaïde’s.

  “I don’t know what to do about this guy I’m seeing now,” she said. He was Adam, the widower she had told us about the last time we gathered. They’d begun to date regularly, but just that morning, she had felt him backing off. He had even put forward the one strategy guaranteed to throw ice water on any budding relationship. “ ‘Friends with benefits,’ he said. Ugh. No. That is not my thing.”

  That was what she’d been confiding to Tara.

  “It is nice to know that you are desirable to other people,” Lesley offered.

  “To have a little physical contact, maybe until the next level comes along—maybe that’s not so bad,” Dawn said with a wistful look at Cupid. “But in the past I was always with people I really cared about and who cared about me. Even if it didn’t always work in the end, it didn’t feel empty.”

  “How long have you been seeing each other, six weeks?” Lesley said. “Maybe he’s just being cautious.”

  Dawn looked doubtful. “Nine years after his wife died, he still has all her stuff. It’s everywhere.” She glanced back at the idealized lovers in the sculpture. “I believe I had a great thing. I want a great thing again.”

  I followed her gaze. As Dawn might say, it seemed so freakin’ unfair that after basking in the warm assurance of her marriage, she had been tossed out into the chilly reality of guys who didn’t look at her the way Cupid looked at Psyche, the way the gorgeous Andries had looked at the gorgeous Dawn. The statue hadn’t quite been a zinger for Dawn. It didn’t bring her to tears or feel like a defeat, but it was making her think, casting her current choices into the context of her marriage.

  “Psyche, of course, means soul,” Katie informed us. “And Cupid is love. The reciprocity of their embrace is the recognition of love and soul coming together.”

  Harder than it looks, I thought. Not everyone comes equipped with wings. I could tell there was more that Dawn wanted to say, but we continued through the galleries, finding more parallels between art and our own circumstances, notably at a familiar water lily painting by Claude Monet. I had thought there would be little new to say about this much-reproduced work, but Katie found a way to rivet our group. Not only did the painting depict the lilies, close cousins to our friends the lotus blossoms, floating in some serious purplish depths, but Katie’s story of its creation lent itself to reflection, too.

  She explained that after Monet’s first wife died, he remarried and moved in 1883 to Giverny, where the new couple blended its two families and built a house and water gardens, the subjects of his most acclaimed work.

  “In this second part of his painterly career, he focused on what really moved him as a painter, which was on painting exactly what the eye sees,” Katie said. She pointed to the complexity of the images, how the viewer couldn’t be sure whether some green tendrils were willow tree branches reflected on the surface of the water or lily stems growing up from beneath.

  “How old was he when his first wife died?” Lesley asked.

  Everyone hung on the answer. “I think he would have been around forty.”

  “So he was a young widower.” We exchanged looks.

  “Yes. With a young son. His first wife had been the model for many of his paintings, so it was a devastating moment. He had to reevaluate what he wanted as an artist and as a parent, but it let him get to where he wanted to be.” I saw the others pondering this progression of events.

  “Beautiful,” said Marcia.

  Our next stop proved more polarizing. A small terra-cotta sculpture from Mali depicted a seated figure the color of clay, a man, I assumed at first, curled in on himself, his head resting on his knee. His eyes were downcast, his mouth slightly open, curving down. Katie didn’t need to tell us—he was in mourning. He looked as if he were rocking himself, comforting himself. I found him eloquent, dignified.

  “This sculpture is from the thirteenth century, but it looks very modern to me,” Katie said. “We’ve been looking at a lot of things about strength, but this one is resolutely about grief and nurturing one’s self. The shaving of the head is part of the mourning ritual in this part of Africa, so it’s not clear whether this is a man or a woman. The face and positioning of the body are so expressive that it doesn’t look like a particular individual so much as an evocation of sorrow.”

  Lesley and Dawn backed away from the glass case as if it held a live grenade, while Tara drew her face close and pulled on her reading glasses. “It’s extraordinary how well preserved it is.”

  “The protective posture really protected the sculpture, too, as an object,” said Katie.

  We went quiet as some of us circled the figure with respect and others pulled farther back.

  “I’m not comfortable looking at it for too long,” Lesley said, “because …”

  “Well, look at that face,” said Marcia.

  “I want to give him a hug,” I said.

  Dawn kept her distance, shaking her head. “How many times a day have you felt like that yourself? I mean, that is grief, right there in front of you.”

  “I feel voyeuristic,” said Tara, still peering through the glass.

  “There’s something about it that seems really private,” Katie agreed. She led the group deeper into the African galleries, while three of us fell behind.

  “That really traumatized me, that grief thing,” said Lesley.

  “What traumatized you, sweetie?” Tara asked.

  “Didn’t you two do that at some point? Get into the fetal position? When you were just too sad?”

  “Sure,” I said. “The fetal position is a very comforting little position.”

  “I rocked,” Lesley said. “Rocked and rocked. It was the rhythm for me.”

  So the sculpture had been a zinger for Lesley, but not for Tara, apparently. “It had a powerful effect on me, too,” she said in her sonorous voice. “It was a human being with elemental, fundamental, primal grief … but it was strong, too. Think about it … seven hundred years old, and it didn’t break. Dawn and I were talking about this.” She paused. “Sometimes, in order to get strong, it’s necessary to … face the pain.”

  Lesley wasn’t buying it. “It gave me a feeling I’d forgotten—that I didn’t want to remember.”

  “Then why go back there?” Tara said.

  I hadn’t been able to read Denise’s reaction to the work—her expression was as opaque as usual. But when we caught up, she was intent on an African mask, demonstrating more enthusiasm than I’d ever witnessed before. Worn by women in Sierra Leone when they initiated each other into a society of healers, the mask had idealized feminine features, wide-set eyes, and a small, composed mouth—very much like Denise’s face, I suddenly recognized.

  She declared it her favorite piece of the day, and I asked why. “See? This is how I feel,” she said, pointing to the enigmatic expression. “Pretending everything is normal for the benefit of others.”

  Our tour had achieved its goal. Each woman was finding insight through the idealization of art, sharing it with the others. Perhaps it was fitting that the final stop spoke most to me and my aspirations for the group itself.

  “I thought we would end with a celebration of beauty and the giving and receiving of gifts and favors, which is something that all of you do for each other,” Katie said as she steered us toward The Three Graces, a Roman marble sculpture from the second century. The piece depicted three women, handmaidens to the goddess of love, in a dancelike pose. “They are known as beauty, mirth, and abundance, and the
interlocking of their physical forms is also about the interlocking of these ideals.”

  The Graces were missing their heads and a few arms, too—they’d been through it—but their sisterly affection and camaraderie remained. Our group had yet to forge such a fond alliance. I wondered if we would.

  “You won’t believe this,” Dawn said, by now accustomed to coincidence. “I have a statue of this at home, too.”

  Figured.

  DAWN, YOU SEE, believed in fate rather than happenstance, that things were meant to be, that she was following a path, that the world, in short, made sense. This system of belief, rooted in her Roman Catholicism but fed by an embrace of all things spiritual, granted her such an outlook of optimism that her friends called her Sunshine.

  Whereas many of us tend to believe that we are, for the most part, at the mercy of the irrational forces of the universe, Dawn believed that Somebody Up There could have been paying close enough attention to draw up a plan that led me to hire a last-minute museum guide who picked out three works of art that Dawn happened to own in some form or other and that she looked at and drew strength from every day. She was capable of believing that they had been placed in her path now, because that Somebody meant to grant us wisdom and encouragement, not because random luck had brought us Katie, the best possible guide for a group of ladies in our searching state. Dawn believed she inhabited a world of meaning. The coincidence of the three works of art spooked me enough that it seemed worth considering Dawn’s point of view.

  But what about the death of Andries? Was that part of Someone’s master plan? I couldn’t accept it, and I wasn’t sure Dawn could, either.

  Otherwise, destiny had blessed her with beauty, grace, abundance, and so much more: her sunny nature, her knockout body, her business acumen, her ability to hit the sweet spot between work and family. Which is probably why, when I first met Dawn, I assumed that things would go easily for her, that she would know how to take the conundrum of young widowhood and hit that right down the line, too.

  “Wait a minute. This is not who I am.” The first time I heard her emphatic voice over the phone, I had just told Dawn that I was interested in talking about her experience as a widow. “Don’t use the W-word around me,” she commanded.

  That threw me for a momentary loss, until she rescued me with her full, free-floating, throaty laugh. “Unless you mean the W Hotel. They have the Bliss Spa there, and it is just the best.”

  A few days later, she met me at a screaming-loud Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. As she approached the table on high-altitude heels, I immediately realized that here was walking, talking proof that a widow doesn’t have to be the old Italian lady in black in the back of the church, which was how Dawn said she thought of her. A master of the feminine arts, Dawn looked the way all of us think we could look if we quit our jobs, relinquished our family responsibilities, and dedicated ourselves to hair, makeup, nails, the works. It wore me out to realize that she managed all this while running her company, mothering her children, and leading a spirited social life with a passel of girlfriends and, for all I knew, maybe a boyfriend or two, too.

  Confronted with this brute glamour, I took stock. Like Dawn, I had blond hair that fell below my shoulders, but hers was screen-siren platinum and perfectly in place. I’ve maintained myself well enough that I’m still game for bathing-suit season, but Dawn’s figure was the stuff of year-round male fantasies, with feminine curves cantilevered over a taut little torso. I believe in maintaining appearances in the limited time I’m willing to allot to the task, but her nails were impeccable crescents of white polish, her makeup airbrushed to a fine glow. I know my way around a sample sale, but Dawn’s creamy white cashmere sweater with a blousy top and trim little waist looked like a full-price find to me—and what mother of young children hazards white cashmere? Please!

  It wasn’t all surface sparkle, either. Like a movie star before a camera, she could blaze with an inner light, and she understood her effect.

  “I think I’ve challenged a lot of people to look at me and say, ‘Wow, did she really lose her husband?’ ” Dawn said. But she was determined not to let social expectations dictate her script. His death, she said, left her thinking, “If this can happen in my life, I’m going to live every single second. I can almost hear him saying, ‘Dawn, go out and do something fun. What are you sitting there for?’ ”

  Yes, I thought: Here she was in the flesh, the ultimate widow provocateur.

  Dawn had never concerned herself with culturally sanctioned behavior. She filled me in while we split some sautéed shrimp and a salad. “I was a bit of a rebel, right from the beginning,” she said. Her upbringing was Catholic, but she never believed in confession. “It was too dark and scary for me. And what can a seven-year-old child confess?” She told the nuns, “I can just talk to God myself.”

  Her self-reliance served her well growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in a mostly Italian American New Jersey town. After her dad left the family, Dawn pretty much ran the house and looked after her younger brother while her mother supported them. She got an associate’s degree in business management, burning to strike out on her own. She baked cheesecakes from her mom’s recipe and sold them to restaurants. Then she and a partner went into a venture together, providing two-way radios to police and fire departments, but with an eye on entertainment events. She became a fixture backstage at concerts, where top rock-’n’-roll acts hired her to manage communications. It was hard, exacting work, starstruck work for some, but the thrill for Dawn was in building her company.

  She paid a personal price with the constant travel. In 1996, though, amid the backstage hubbub at the MTV Europe Music Awards, a handsome blond South African who set up the generators struck up a conversation with her. It turned out they had been working the same tours in the same places for years but hadn’t met before. “As fate may have it,” Dawn said, “when you’re in alignment with the universe and doing what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s almost like the universe paves the way.” This remark, I gradually learned, was what Dawn’s friends call a Dawnism, a statement of such over-the-top positivity that it could only come from her.

  She and Andries married, and he left the road after his last tour with the Rolling Stones to run a division of Dawn’s company. They both scaled back their travel as the company grew, especially after they had kids. She savored the memory with a satisfied smile and then came up short. “Yeah … anyway.”

  Anyway. Andries and Dawn sometimes went separate ways on weekends. He was a robust outdoorsman, a risk taker, a guy’s guy, whereas Dawn was a girl’s girl, no apologies. “I am not sporty, not an ounce of me,” she said. Which is why she stayed home to host a family party one weekend while he went gunning through the forests of West Virginia on all-terrain vehicles with some friends. One of them called to break the news that Andries had careened over a cliff. He was forty years old. Dawn was forty-four.

  “I don’t even try to ask why Andries died, because it will make me crazy.” Dawn’s voice was uncharacteristically soft. “I don’t think I’ll ever have that answer.”

  She tried to spin a Dawnism even out of this. “I always think that when bad things happen, it’s because something better is coming.” But, for once, her perpetual sunshine failed her. “I can’t imagine it being any better than what we had. I’m not being negative. But anybody who knew Andries would agree. Where do you go from here?” Her voice jumped an octave. “Where do you go from here?”

  Throughout lunch, Dawn played her voice like a musical instrument, finding the right tone for the emotion, ranging from husky low notes when she began describing how she first met Andries to the full-throttle high of that impossible-to-answer question. Scientists had told me that the bereaved can benefit from the ability to express genuine emotions so long as they don’t dwell excessively on the negative, and if so, Dawn was right on track. She let her feelings rip, looking for the bright side, the humor, ever ready for a laugh. And when th
ings turned dark, she instinctively looked away.

  For the first months after Andries’s death, she considered selling her stake in the business. Seeing his closed office door, hearing others cry at their desks, made her sick to her stomach. But she had a family to feed. The children kept her spirits up. It was important that she keep their father alive for them, telling them he would be proud of them, keeping out pictures and photo albums. “They would be the first to say that Daddy is watching over us. I believe he is, too. No one will tell me different.”

  On holidays, she and the children hosted his family, surrounding themselves with people who looked and sounded like him. And she maintained Andries’s active philosophy, keeping busy, surrounding herself with happier friends. On a weekend trip to a spa in the Poconos six months after he died, she met a guy who was going through a divorce. He asked her out, but she said it was too soon.

  A few days later, she was on the phone with her mother-in-law, a widow who warned Dawn, “The holidays are coming up, and it’s going to be awful, and I just have to prepare you.” She paused for dramatic effect. “It. Doesn’t. Get. Any. Better. Ever.”

  Dawn got off the phone as fast as she could, and the next day, she called the guy from the spa. “I told myself I was getting right back on that horse.” Her gestures as she told me this were so big, so over the top, that she nearly knocked over a water glass. She asked him, “What do you want to do?” He said, “Anything you want.” Dawn fired back, “Okay. Let’s go.”

  She smacked down her palm. A deep flush suffused her face. “There’s that saying—there’s good, and there’s good for now. And the good-for-nows can actually be better.” Dawn’s irrepressible laugh cut through the noise in the restaurant.