by Becky Aikman
I told them that the sensation that a departed loved one is present, whether in dreams or even waking visions, is pretty common among people who aren’t necessarily crackpot paranormalists. A survey found that sixty-three percent of widows or widowers felt their spouses were with them at various times; forty-seven percent thought their spouses were looking out for them. Thirty-four percent said that they held regular conversations with their spouses. Once, any such ongoing connections might have been considered loony at worst, maladjusted at best. Theories of healthy grieving from Freud on down decreed that it was necessary to cut all emotional ties to the departed. Out of life, out of mind. But observations of bereaved people by a team of researchers in the nineties found that continuing bonds in healthy moderation provide support and sustenance. We didn’t see our husbands as scary ghosts—we were glad for their company.
I’ll admit I made occasional remarks to Bernie’s photo and sometimes greeted him aloud on the beach near where I scattered his ashes. But it was in the bee dream where I felt his presence so acutely that it seemed as if he were really there. Apparently, that’s fairly typical. Researchers even have a name for it—the visitation dream. It tends to be more vivid than normal dreams, and those who are reunited in them hold conversations and come to understandings.
The rationalist in me had to wonder. Did our husbands still reside in some parallel dimension from which they dropped in on us at will? Did they follow our progress, offer encouragement, maybe slip us an answer in the crossword puzzle on occasion? Or were we the living merely dreaming or hallucinating, summoning our own wishful visions from a recess of longing? Never much of a believer in stardust, I tended to view my ongoing connection with Bernie as arising purely from memory, and that had to be enough for me. My bee dream, and my one-way conversations, were all the comfort I had, lacking more concrete means of gratification.
I POPPED OUT of bed the morning after the bee dream, fully awake. My seven-grain toast tasted like eight; the water in the shower hit me like the surf on Maui. My body felt alive, my mind sharp. Seeing Bernie again with blessed clarity had cleared not only my vision, it cleared all my muzzy senses. It was the sensation that Tara described, how she had been living behind a curtain, and now it was opening onto something more. I’d been cowering back there for nearly two years, two years of looking inward. Seeing Bernie as I did in the dream swept the curtain away, granted me a view that was familiar yet hyper-real.
As I dressed for work, I could see again who Bernie had been when he was well—and who I had been, too. I remembered how much I had enjoyed my marriage, my job, the world in general. Whether I had the bee dream because I was beginning to remember this already or whether I could remember this because I had the dream—who could say? But it all started to come back to me—my bedrock of optimism, my dormant ambition, the incurable curiosity that drove me to seek out the news and succeed in New York, the open heart that delighted in my husband.
The day had come to become myself again. I threw the deadbolt on the front door of my building, scooped up my copy of the Times, and advanced down the street like the self-assured woman I once had been. Seeing Bernie had fired up my resolve. It was time to put my head down and go. It was time to get on with it, to Move Forward After Loss. It was time to stop thinking about what I’d lost and think about what I wanted.
It was only minutes later when my eyes shifted focus and blinked with dismay. I was settling into the saggy seat of a train for an hourlong grind to a suburban industrial park that I called the Gulag. I was heading to a job that was a shell of what it had been. Without taking much notice, I saw as plain as I had seen that bee that I had allowed my career to wither away.
While my mind was elsewhere, my beloved job in my beloved city had disappeared along with my beloved husband. New York Newsday had been a scrappy upstart in Manhattan when I started there two decades before. I was preoccupied with Bernie and cancer when the Internet began to spell doom for newspapers, at least the ones that weren’t nimble enough to compete.
Newsday changed owners not once, but twice, and later a third time. Austerity—and dejection—set in. New managers shut down the city edition, leaving only a suburban Long Island version behind. After Bernie died, they shut down the New York bureau, too, so I worked mostly from Bernie’s old desk at home, doubly lonely, missing the relentless banter of the old city room, trudging out to the main office in the Gulag as little as I could get away with. Scores of my colleagues hightailed it to other jobs, other careers, but I had clung to the health insurance while Bernie was sick and to the faded familiarity of a job I could do in my sleep after he was gone. The paper’s new mandate was quick takes on local stories, the sort of thing I wrote when I first got out of school.
The entire impetus of my adult life had been to escape my smalltown upbringing and make it in New York. I lived for the challenge. I lived for the flow. I gazed out the sooty train window at the bleak suburban sprawl. It was a winter morning, and the landscape, in between the strip malls and tract houses, was bereft of color. I was going through the motions, covering my ass to keep my paycheck now that I was squeaking by on my own. It was a pinched existence. I saw with dismay that I had become a drone.
I suddenly felt certain what Bernie would say if he could see the person I had become: “Who made off with my wife?” The one who thrived on meaningful work. The one who wouldn’t hesitate to rethink her career, rethink her life, if it no longer satisfied. My whole persona as a no-bullshit, independent woman had gotten lost during those months of mourning. I had thought that my goal as a widow was to get beyond grief and return to the status quo. But now the status quo was as gone as Bernie was. I would have to reinvent myself from scratch.
It would take some serious reassessment and nerve. But I saw it clearly now: the world was changing around me. If I didn’t change with it, I wouldn’t recognize myself anymore.
The bee dream jolted me to remember something else with electric clarity, something even more distracting. It was the pleasure I had taken in marriage. I squirmed in my seat and felt a long-suppressed grin play on my lips. The thrill I got when Bernie came through the door was a charge worth feeling again. I might not be ready for a new attachment, but a frisson of attraction wouldn’t be bad. It was time to start thinking about the benefits of attraction. Attraction to another man.
chapter
SEVENTEEN
it was a Sunday morning, one of the least threatening slots on the calendar, in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. Safe territory. Lay a hand on the art, lay a hand on me, either way, the alarms go off. Still, I masked my dread with a goggle-eyed stare. I had on the same green flared skirt and tank top I’d worn to the widows’ support group. If I got kicked out of the museum, the outfit was going in the Dumpster.
I scanned the top of the crowd, trying to spot him first. At five foot nine, I figured, he should be two inches taller than me. I watched for thick graying hair, dark eyebrows, a certain thoughtful expression.
“You must be Becky.”
The voice materialized from somewhere below my chin. I peered down onto a magnificent bald spot. Here in the glaring light, the thoughtful expression read more as defeated. I relaxed, buoyed by a surge of sympathy for this guy who had felt his only hope was to lie. I squinched down helpfully. Give the guy a break. This wasn’t easy for any of us. My romantic exploits, Act Two, curtain rising.
Finally. Months had passed since my resolve to seek companionship again, and more than two years since Bernie had died. My long-married friends were thrilled, frothing for details. I would be their entertainment, relief from marital monotony. Unfortunately, they were no help. I began my odyssey by quietly informing them that I was now Ready. If they knew any appropriate, available man, I would be open to an introduction. I’d have been better off asking for an unsecured loan. No one came through.
Plan B involved accepting any invitation to go anywhere, anytime, on the theory that George Clooney wasn’t loitering around my apar
tment. I attended the opera, where the average age of the audience was 103. Parties, where well-upholstered couples traded tips about mutual funds and restless leg syndrome. An architecture tour, rife with college students from Sweden. I became the most cultured, outgoing, and architecturally knowledgeable person in my circle, but still the only widow. Anyway, my flirting skills were dripping with cobwebs. I had interviewed dignitaries all over New York, but once, at a rare event when an attractive screenwriter asked me to join him for a drink, I tried to say, “I know a nice little wine bar around the corner,” but it came out as “b’dab b’dab b’dab b’dab.”
Thank goodness my longtime friend Fred kept me entertained. Fred was a writer specializing in opera and Italian food; his business card read “Pleasure Activist.” Sometimes I was lucky enough to join the cause, sharing his box at Carnegie Hall or sampling all the desserts at San Domenico. So long as I kept myself occupied with the opening night of L’Elisir d’Amore and other sensual pleasures, maybe I could tune out the rising crescendo from my libido.
One night over antipasti at a trattoria, Fred broached the subject. “I know someone I think you should meet,” he said with just enough mystery. “I don’t do this often, but when I do, it always works.”
He seemed to know everyone in New York, but—my luck—this man lived in deepest darkest Connecticut. Strike one. “You know I love New York,” I bleated. “And my job is in the Gulag now. I could never get there from Connecticut. Any chance he would move?”
“He has custody of his daughter. She’s thirteen. I doubt he would change her school.” Strike two. “He has a dog, too.” Strike six.
On to Plan C. Natural methods having failed completely, I dipped a toe into the Internet, where I demonstrated my ambivalence by signing up for a dinky dating website that limited itself to graduates of a few colleges. There were hundreds of women in my age category and only a few dozen men. One described his ideal Sunday thus: “Morning, sex with you. Afternoon, Bills game. Later, more sex with you.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t that into football. But the rest of them boasted a smorgasbord of sensitive-man interests—books, museums, travel, and, surprisingly, opera, lots of opera.
I told this to my sister when she called for an update. “The Bills fan sounds more realistic,” she said. “Most middle-aged men I know are only interested in a wide-screen TV and a bag of Doritos.”
Undaunted, I sent a note to my first choice. An academic, he professed avid enthusiasm for opera and adventure travel. His ideal woman, he said, was everyone’s favorite literary heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and he described his ideal relationship by quoting George Eliot: “the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.” No Connecticut, no daughter, no dog. Although I suspect it was the word safe that hooked me.
Like a genie popping out of a bottle, he answered my e-mail in minutes, inviting me to meet him at MoMA. This was almost too easy! I showed up ready to discuss Verdi versus Puccini, rock climbing versus deep-sea diving—I already owned the wetsuit. I soon learned that he had attended a few operas years ago with his wife but hadn’t returned since she crushed him in the divorce. The closest he had been to the sea was Chicken of the Sea. His hangdog expression showed he knew I was on to him. We put in some time at the museum, and then he invited me to lunch. Two steps up from coffee, only one step down from dinner. He even had a restaurant in mind. I slumped along to minimize the height differential as he led me into the morass of Times Square.
He’d chosen a Scottish pub with a tang of stale beer and a sticky floor from the night before. In the middle of Sunday afternoon, we were the only customers, perched on high stools in the gloom. He dug into a basket filled with chips, craning toward a television above the bar. The Jets were losing. I tried to perk him up by telling him that this was my first date in way too many years.
“I’ve been on the website for … a while,” he said glumly. “Most of the women don’t seem serious about a relationship.”
Ah, the wit of Austen, the wisdom of Eliot. We both knew where this was heading. The check arrived. I reached for my wallet, but he waved me off. “This is on me.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and smoothed it on the table as if it were an ancient scroll. A gift certificate he’d won in a raffle at work.
“Sorry, I can’t give you change on that,” the waitress said. He put up a fight, then conceded defeat with dejection so deep that I feared he might throw over dating altogether for life in a Benedictine brotherhood.
Bernie had treasured me, and now my company wasn’t worth the full value of a Groupon. I couldn’t let myself think that way. That way lay monsters.
All circuits lit up when I got home, everyone clamoring to hear about Becky’s First Date. Hedging, I told them it wasn’t that bad. I was scared, he was scared. Our complete lack of attraction guaranteed that we’d get nowhere near what really scared me—emotional engagement, sex, entanglement in someone else’s life, sex, responsibility for anther person, sex. Love, marriage, illness, death, sex. Oh, and did I mention sex? This business of mediocre, sexless dates could be a harmless time killer. I’d view it like my job: interviewing people, finding out what made them tick, walking away.
There were a few others. A perfectly presentable social studies teacher who made me feel the way I’d felt in social studies class. A doctor who told me he was seeing someone else but, in case that fell through, he would like to keep in touch. Sorry, no touching of any kind. Still too fragile. Some investment guy who said, “You don’t look too sad for a widow.” An ad executive who, upon learning that my husband had died, asked, “Don’t the guys you date find that creepy?” These guys may not have been right for me, but they weren’t all that different from me. They were befuddled and shell-shocked by whatever midlife disaster had sent them back out onto the playing field of embarrassing disclosures and good-night handshakes.
Back when I was twenty, I didn’t know how good I’d had it. Virtually everybody I met was available, but now, when prospects were few, I began to wonder whether I’d face a disagreeable choice—remain single forever, or settle for someone less than ideal.
The ad executive, I decided, had short-term possibilities. Tall, athletic, with a zany sense of humor, he peppered me with diverting e-mail messages. He kept asking me out, even though on our first date I packed in a stack of pancakes and half of his, too, while I chattered manically about Bernie’s illness and death and explained my theory that it had given me post-traumatic stress disorder.
“You’ll never settle down with another man,” he said, “because no one could compete with your husband.”
“Surely it’s not a competition,” I said, reaching for his home fries. “I don’t believe there’s only one person put on earth for each of us.”
For a second encounter, he invited me to a restaurant written up as “lovely for long gazes over superb cuisine.” “Casanovas,” the review continued, “call it the ultimate high-end date.” That gave me the willies, but it also got me thinking. I would never love this guy. I didn’t even like this guy. He was glued to his BlackBerry during meals, admitted that his chronic lateness made people nuts, made pompous pronouncements about how a widow was supposed to behave and feel. But if I wanted to “get back on that horse” as Dawn would later put it, what would be the harm?
My friend Jackie called as I was zipping up my little black dress. “Help! What am I getting myself into?” I asked.
“A good meal,” she said, “and some long-awaited dessert.”
Couples all over the restaurant were canoodling away when the waiter whisked away the remains of a chocolate tart. I felt a knee brush mine under the table. “You have a quality that is very important to me,” the ad guy said earnestly. “You have the loyalty of a lioness toward someone you care about, and the courage of a lioness, too.”
Taxi!
BACK TO PLAN B. I threw on the little black dress for a dinner invitation from Fred. He was hosting a couple doze
n food industry people at a restaurant uptown, where an Italian vineyard was introducing new wines. The menu promised nirvana, the crowd not so much: mostly couples, I saw, and a smattering of unattached women. The room was chilly during the pre-dinner mingle, so I shrugged on a bulky cardigan. Three twenty-something Italian women, identical triplets related in some way to the owners of the vineyard, greeted me so effusively that they knocked me back a pace. The sight of them alone would have done the trick. They towered above me in shiny stilettos, and they clearly hadn’t got the fashion memo that if you show some skin somewhere, you should cover up somewhere else. I didn’t know where to look first—long legs, big hair, gravity-defying breasts made from the same material as a Tempur-Pedic. I was already entertained.
They moved on and I found myself in conversation with Fred’s mother, a retired schoolteacher, about education policy. A final guest slipped in the door. He was a man roughly my age, wearing a sleek black suit, but he looked more like a jeans guy. His hair, prematurely silver, was bedroom tousled, and he carried himself with easy amusement, more so when the Italian Glamazons zeroed in, all six missiles pointed right at him like the entire Iranian weapons arsenal.
He modestly looked aside, a hint of panic in his eyes, and caught me watching. He mouthed a silent word in my direction: Help!
I laughed and turned away.
Fred gave a charming little talk about Pinot Grigio and Cabernet Franc, then gestured for me to sit to his right. His mother claimed a seat two more down. The chair next to me pulled back. It was the Help! guy.
“You must be Becky,” he said, offering a firm handshake.