by Becky Aikman
“I see you’re having the Viagra.” Toby, a forty-nine-year-old lawyer with salt-and-pepper hair, leaned toward Denise conspiratorially. “Is that because of the name or …?”
“It’s because I like seafood.”
It seemed like a good time to address the stereotypes.
“After you were widowed,” I interjected, “how long was it before you started seeing other women?” Might as well get right to the juicy stuff.
Toby, our most ingratiating guest, was quick to answer. “My wife died of cancer just a year and two months ago,” he said with visible sorrow. He balanced a cocktail plate on his lap and dipped an empanada into a puddle of tomatillo sauce. The first time someone suggested fixing him up, he continued, was on the porch of his house after the funeral, but he declined. “I’d say I’ve dated six to ten women since then.”
I was afraid to give away my thoughts by glancing at my crew. Six to ten women in a little over a year—none of us approached that level of industriousness. Chalk one up for the conventional wisdom.
“Has it been weird for you to see other people?” Lesley asked.
“I wasn’t nervous about it,” Toby said. A father of three, he’d been married twenty-five years, longer than some of us, and yet he admitted to kissing every one of those women on the first date. When he moved his first relationship into the bedroom, he claimed he did so without reserve. “She was actually thrilled at how easily I doffed my clothes. Her reaction that first time helped me with the other times.”
Other times? Toby, the cheerful doffer, made us look like pikers. “You didn’t find it awkward at all?” I asked.
“No.”
Another guy weighed in. “For me, it wasn’t any more awkward than the first time with anybody,” said Mitchell, a fifty-seven-year-old journalist with a full face, wire-rimmed glasses, and a complexion that betrayed a lifetime of desk work. Mitchell hadn’t remarried, even though he’d been a widower for fifteen years. “I had my first encounter six months after my wife died, with somebody I’d known for a long time,” he said. “My wife was dying of cancer for six or eight months, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t used to the idea.”
I had been expecting cocktail party repartee in this cosmopolitan setting, but the men were getting right down to it, seizing a rare opportunity to discuss their private lives. For once, our group didn’t say much, content to fire the questions and hear what ricocheted back. Toby refilled Denise’s wine with a headwaiter’s finesse and offered more to Dawn. She placed a hand over her glass to decline.
“What about you, Bryan?” I asked our youngest guest.
Bryan, not yet forty, was a former lawyer turned sommelier with a lean physique and intense expression. More fashion-forward than the others, in pegged jeans and an open-collar black shirt, he had first found himself in bed with a woman four months after the sudden death of his wife, he said. “The woman and I had already had a relationship before my marriage. She was also a good friend, so there was a high level of comfort. It was no weirder than when I was just dating people.”
“I think women feel more pressure than we do to have their bodies look a certain way,” Mitchell said matter-of-factly, straightening his glasses.
Bryan set down his plate, his intense appearance growing more earnest. “There is something I’ve been reflecting on. It’s been two years since my wife died. The relationships I’ve been having have been less emotional, more physical. The bar is set really high after you’ve had the kind of relationship I had with my wife. It makes it hard to put my heart in it now.”
This was the first reference to emotion, and Lesley, touched by his vulnerability, made a comforting sound. The other men stopped eating and nodded in agreement. It clarified my thinking about what they were saying. I had to admit I’d been listening with a judgmental bent, surmising that these guys might be cold customers, that they might not have loved their wives much if they could hop back into the sack with such dispatch. But Bryan’s comment reminded me of something Professor Bonanno had told me, how studies had shown that widows and widowers who jumped into new affairs loved their spouses no less than those who didn’t.
“You’re so young,” Lesley said to Bryan with solicitude. “What happened to your wife?”
She had died suddenly, as Denise’s husband did, of an undiscovered heart condition, collapsing in a restaurant as the couple paid for lunch. They had married only three months earlier, and she was seven months pregnant. By the time an ambulance arrived, Bryan said, it was too late to save her or the baby. Marriage, pregnancy, the loss of a wife and child—the sequence of events was almost unimaginable. Bryan had been so grief-stricken that he stayed at his mother’s for six weeks before he could bear to go home, and when he did, for months he couldn’t bring himself to put away one of his wife’s bras that was dangling on a bathroom doorknob. Yet he was also capable of initiating new romances in the face of grief, and he saw no contradiction. This evening was going to be more revealing than I thought.
The other men observed Bryan with a been-there commiseration. I could tell that all of them missed their wives desperately, still mourned them with heartfelt surrender, as we missed our husbands. Nevertheless, they seemed capable of holding opposing emotions in heedful balance, both grieving and plainly enjoying the perks of being the new bachelor on the block.
“I often have one foot in the past and one foot forward,” Toby was saying when I turned back to the conversation. The others seemed to have mastered that same duality, something we women had struggled to achieve.
By now the sun had dipped lower in the hazy sky, and bright shards of the Hudson River winked and dodged between skyscrapers. I was curious about the one guest who had been silent so far. Glenn was a youthful-looking fifty-two, with a smooth face and balding head. He was a friend of Dawn’s whose wife had died in the north tower of the World Trade Center almost ten years earlier. He’d been following the conversation at a polite remove.
“Have you been dating, Glenn?” I asked.
“I’m not ready to consider the idea,” he said, looking toward the other men with some chagrin. “People have offered to fix me up. I pretty much tell them I don’t do that.”
So not all widowers strive to replace. Behind Glenn’s obliging expression, I observed a skittish sorrow. Whatever we all had suffered, he seemed to be in deeper. I flashed again on the Twin Towers, resisting the memory, aware that Glenn had to visit it every day. The conversation stalled, so I posed another question. How did they think the experience differed for widows and widowers? Did they hate their label as much as we hated ours?
“Widower—it’s a strange word, but I don’t mind being identified with it,” said Toby, who had test-driven it on so many dates. “It’s generally a positive when I meet women. It means I’m not a divorced guy.”
The others signaled their agreement. “For us it’s a plus.” Mitchell, the journalist, warmed to the sociological nuances of the issue. “I think for a woman, being called a widow is kind of a negative. It’s a stereotype that makes you sound a little older, sort of used, to be crude.”
Used. Say what? I recoiled, and I couldn’t help taking in the other women’s expressions. Where was a coyote when you needed one? My first impulse was to challenge him to a duel, but somehow all of us managed to hold our tongues. As Marcia once observed, this was an accepting and open group. It was old news to us that widow suffered from dreadful PR.
“Your perception is … interesting,” Marcia said with uncharacteristic diplomacy.
“If a man is divorced, women think, oh God, all the baggage,” Mitchell elaborated. “And if he’s never been married, they think he’s gay, or just weird. But if you’re a widower, it signals that you are marriage material, and you get sympathy, which I don’t think is true for a woman.”
It had never occurred to me that this man would be considered a hot commodity while I was perceived as damaged goods, yet none of our guests stepped forward to disagree. The word used—it called to
mind primitive notions that an available woman with sexual experience was somehow tarnished, whereas a man was not. I took in the dark circles under Toby’s eyes and Mitchell’s khaki pants, which looked as if they’d been left too long in the dryer. I couldn’t help thinking that these guys were simply beneficiaries of a favorable ratio, their value enhanced and their egos massaged by their relative scarcity in comparison to us. Supply and demand.
Then I thought about all the negative variations on the word widow—black widow, widow’s weeds, the widow-maker. Even at my newspaper, widow was a copyediting term for an extraneous word at the end of a paragraph, marked to be deleted to save space for more valuable material.
“I just hate the word widow,” Marcia said to Mitchell. “I’ve never analyzed it the way you did. To me it means that I lost my husband.”
“But with us,” Mitchell said, “there’s no stigma.”
“Then why do you say there is with us?” I pressed.
“Maybe because there are more older widows, the word just reads as old.”
A big coyote, I thought, one that hasn’t eaten in weeks.
“Yes, with us it’s a positive,” Toby weighed in. “We are way up on the hierarchy of singles.” He gestured, one hand several inches above the other.
From my slot at the bottom of the hierarchy, I felt my hopes of any love matches arising from the evening deflate. You had to respect the men for their … um, candor, but it wasn’t weaving any magic on our women. Their expressions ranged from bemusement to distaste.
“So many of the women I meet cry when I tell them,” Toby continued, with a touch of sheepish gratification. “Years ago, when I was single, they didn’t cry.”
“When I tell my story to women I’ve dated, they become very emotional,” said Bryan. “I always feel a little guilty. I had a woman straight out ask me once, ‘How much sympathy sex have you had?’ ”
Mitchell and Toby laughed, and Mitchell said, “Never enough.”
“Sympathy sex—I’m not familiar with the term,” I said. “Women offer you sympathy sex?”
“Yeah, okay, there were a couple.” Bryan had the grace to appear embarrassed, and Toby shrugged his assent.
This was a new one on us. We’d fielded many reactions from men to the news that we were widows, from “I’m sorry” to “Creepy” to “You don’t look that sad,” but none of us had received an offer of a charitable dip in the sack.
Then Lesley posed a question that had haunted many of us. “With all this pressing the flesh, do you ever feel guilty?”
“No,” the men answered, like a Greek chorus, all of them except Glenn.
The women eyed each other, a fleeting pantomime that expressed equal parts “It figures” and “Why couldn’t we pull that off?”
Toby hedged a bit. “I don’t feel guilty,” he said, “but there are echoes that make me think: how would my wife feel about this?”
Just then—you couldn’t make this up—a flash of lightning streaked across the sky, accompanied by a sonic boom. Gathering clouds, unnoticed, had blocked the sunset, and now we realized they’d converged into towering thunderheads. The air crackled. We scrambled to gather up the remaining food and dash for the elevator.
Back in her apartment, Marcia assembled chairs around the couch and we claimed new places. Toby slid in next to Denise, launching a private conversation. The skies let loose, and rain mixed with hailstones battered the windows.
“Wow, my first storm here,” Marcia said as torrents obliterated the view. “Cool.”
We turned away from the deluge, and Mitchell reflexively hiked his glasses higher on his nose. “I want to say more about guilt,” he addressed the group. “It has to do with a fundamental question, which is whether you believe that you can only love one person. And of course there are myriad people out in the world who you could fall in love with. If you believe that, which to me is a given, then one love is not any better than another love.”
Marcia stood to stack plates on the kitchen counter while we pondered what I had to admit was a wise philosophy. Toby passed around the chocolates he’d brought. The theatrical storm outside threw us into a cocoon of greater intimacy, and Mitchell spoke again in a wistful tone.
After fifteen years, he said, he still hoarded an odd assortment of keepsakes, like dozens of tiny perfume samples that his wife collected at department stores. He wished he still had his wife’s wedding ring, now in the possession of her sister. “I just feel that it’s a talisman,” he said, straining for words. “My wife is fading into the past. And things get fuzzy. The date she died, our anniversary … I used to know them. Now I have to look them up That’s why I wish I had the ring back. To remind me that I was married, to this woman, and that it was real.”
We all looked at each other, unspeaking, surprised at the power of that thought.
“Would you like to marry again?” Lesley asked him gently.
“No,” Mitchell said with stoicism. “What I long for, which is something I can’t have, is a relationship with someone I’ve already known for twelve years. That’s gone. That’s the sad thing.”
The rest of us listened in perfect sympathy as thunder swallowed his words. At first, with all their talk about easy fix-ups and seemingly zipless fucks, some of these guys had sounded more resistant to grief than we had, but now my heart went out to Mitchell, to all of them. For all their romantic conquests, they were suffering, uncertain how to proceed, reluctant to sever ties. For all the sympathy sex that they received and we did not, for all their reveling in the sudden availability of fresh conquests, they were missing the same intimacy that we missed.
Toby must have been thinking along the same lines. “It strikes me that you women are lucky to have each other,” he said.
“Yes,” said Mitchell, regarding everyone in the room. “I can’t in a million years imagine men getting together once a month to talk about this stuff. I think women are more serious about their emotional lives.”
“Women overanalyze,” said Bryan, striving to provoke, and we repaid him with hisses.
“We treasure the fact that we can talk about intimate things,” I said.
“Honestly, I have no one for that,” Mitchell admitted.
The other men nodded and agreed, more or less.
“I have friends,” said Bryan, “but I lost the one person I unconditionally could say anything to.” At parties, he often found himself nursing a glass of wine while others talked about having children and passed around sonogram pictures, avoiding his gaze. “I am their worst fear realized.”
Lesley was moved to comfort him again. “You have to come back here once a month to talk to us,” she said.
I felt the men were looking at me, as if for permission. “What about Morocco?” Toby asked, kidding, I assumed. “I’ve always wanted to be the guy who sweeps in out of the desert, unshaven and armed with a sense of humor, to rescue damsels in minor distress.”
“You’ve been watching too many movies,” I said, laughing him off. “Sorry guys, women only.”
The party began to fracture into individual conversations. Toby worked the room and managed to cadge phone numbers and e-mail addresses from Dawn and Denise. He told Lesley he liked her accent and gave me a frankly appraising up-and-down look before saying, “If you were available, I would definitely date you.”
“Toby’s a mover,” Dawn said to me with a shake of her head. “The guy’s enjoying himself, and I suppose you can’t fault him for that.”
After the men left, we women clustered in the kitchen, loading glasses into the dishwasher. The men, we agreed, were not so different from us, aside from some gentlemen’s-club attitudes about sex, and, if some of them were to be believed, the abundant availability of partners for it. The guys had their sympathy sex, but we had friends, we had each other. And soon enough, we’d be far from home, testing the strength of that bond.
chapter
TWENTY-FIVE
it was Dawn who pointed out that people wou
ld tell us ad nauseam that time would make all the difference, and that hearing this would make us want to smack them. But people, I learned, are right. Time might not make all the difference, but it was definitely on our side.
I had wanted to retreat in the aftermath of Bernie’s death. I had wanted to take care of myself, by myself. I didn’t want commitment. I didn’t want responsibility. I didn’t want a husband, a one-eyed dog, a stepdaughter who didn’t want me around. I didn’t want a hot mess of a life split between New York and Connecticut. I didn’t have the desire; I didn’t have the strength.
Six months after our trip to Paris, Bob and I took another trip, a long weekend in a shack on a beach in Tulum. We ate tacos filled with habañeros and snapper delivered off a wooden boat, vegetated on a hammock, reevaluated from afar. Not much had changed since our trip to Paris, when we considered and abandoned thoughts of marriage.
Lily still wasn’t wild about sharing her dad with me, but time was working its healing powers between us. One weekend my newspaper, pleading budget cuts, declined to send a photographer for a story I was reporting on teenage parties. Lily, it occurred to me, was a crack shot at functions with her friends, so I enlisted her. She kept a level head and snapped a vivid series of pictures of kids dancing around a pool. The photo editor published them with pleasure. I didn’t mention that Lily was fourteen. A few weeks later, a photographer was canceled again, and Lily volunteered this time, coolly capturing close-ups and scenic views aboard a boat for an article on cultivating oysters. Lily became intrigued by my job and asked me countless questions. She started to find other aspects of my presence acceptable as well. Without thinking, she might sit next to me instead of Bob, sculpt demented creations with my hair, or ask my advice on social dilemmas with her friends. Bob teased me, as we burrowed our feet in the warm Mexican sand, that the day might dawn when Lily would call me by my name.