The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating

by Carole Radziwill

  Dr. Singh was tall, like Charlie, and lean. He dressed simply—dark slacks, V-neck sweater—but his clothing flattered him. He became animated when he spoke about his work, punctuating his sentences with wide sweeps of his arms, and short bursts of laughter that were intended, Claire thought, to disarm her. She wondered if he slept with his students.

  Singh’s book had debuted at #2 on the New York Times Best Sellers List. The book was why Claire was sitting here, why Misconstrued deemed his measurements worthy of print. Charlie, for his part, had snorted when she’d told him about the assignment—as if only a hack would write a bestseller about breasts instead of balls. That Claire was writing pop stories for glossy female magazines at all had everything to do with Charlie. He had discouraged her own literary ambition. For a few years after they married she had been content looking after Charlie’s needs and writing an occasional piece freelance. Then the temporary adjustment in her focus became what she did permanently. Charlie worked, and Claire found things to do.

  They were just starting, Claire and Singh; they’d finished shifting in chairs and clearing their throats and were on Claire’s second question.

  “Is there any evidence, then, that the size of the penis matters, reproductively speaking?” Just as a hint of a smile crossed her face, Claire’s cell phone began to buzz. She had set it to “vibrate.” It lurched noisily across the desk.

  “I’m sorry, please ignore it,” she said, and made a gesture with her hand to mean “go on.”

  “Before we get too far,” said Singh, “let’s do this.” He was holding a measuring tape. He jumped up, then motioned for Claire to stand so he might measure and calculate her own ratio, her own potential for reproduction.

  “I’ve studied every Playboy centerfold since 1954,” he said, with his arms around Claire’s waist. While Claire held her arms up and out of the way, Singh dipped his head down, beneath her breasts, to read the thin tape he’d pressed against her. His hands felt warm through her blouse. He had a tantalizing mess of dark, thick hair; a heady shot of cologne hit her nose. Claire couldn’t remember the last time a man’s hands had circled her waist. Somewhere along her nine years with Charlie, certain interest had, well … waned. Singh mumbled a number and jotted it on his notepad. “And though the bunnies have gotten thinner”—he paused as if about to reveal a great secret—“their hip-to-waist ratios have remained the same!”

  A stack of transparencies lay on his desk—anatomically correct line drawings of well-ratioed women: Eva Mendes, Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch. He showed Claire, laying the drawings one over the other, how the shapes were different but the ratios stayed in line.

  “Watch this,” he said, putting a transparency of Kate Moss over Scarlett Johansson. “Hmm? Surprised?”

  “Well, Kate’s skinnier, and her breasts…”

  “But that’s it!” Singh shrieked, delighted. “It’s not the breasts!” He lowered his voice and leaned toward her. “It is strictly the proportion of the hip to the waist. It signals health and fertility. This is the true essence of desire.”

  Claire looked down at her own small breasts. She wanted to believe him. She wondered if there was a Mrs. Singh and, if so, what size her breasts were. He jotted her measurements on a notepad and did the math. “Ha! Point seven five,” he said, appraising Claire’s reproductive area and nodding in approval. “Almost perfect!”

  The buzzing persisted. Claire’s phone lurched forward, then stopped, then lurched again. Dr. Singh took in the spectacle.

  “We should take a short break,” he said.

  Claire agreed, and while Singh ruffled papers she punched in the number for voice mail and pressed “1” to play her messages. There were four: The first was a policeman in a somber tone: “Mrs. Byrne, this is Officer Callan from the Nineteenth Precinct. I need you to contact me immediately, your husband … there’s been an accident.” The second was Richard, who also asked her to call back and spoke in a suspiciously measured tone. The third was Ethan, Claire’s close friend and Charlie’s longtime assistant, who just said, “Honey. I’m sorry. Oh fuck.”

  Sasha was fourth. She was sobbing and Claire could hear ice hitting glass. “Jesus, Claire, why aren’t you answering your phone? They dropped a Giacometti on Charlie. Turn the TV on! I can’t believe he’s dead. God … Richard said he didn’t suffer.”

  Claire set her phone on the desk and looked at Singh shuffling paper stacks. She ran a couple of versions through her head, then settled on this: “My husband, I think, is dead.” She looked toward the window and her gaze fell on an oak tree. Dr. Singh took a step toward her then stopped. He lifted his arms up and dropped them. There were an awkward few moments of silence. “My God,” he finally said.

  * * *

  CLAIRE WAS MARRIED—seconds, minutes, hours ago?—and now she was not. A recent image of Charlie flashed before her. Last week, high off a tennis win and flush from gossip and scotch, he’d come home and whisked Claire off to the Circle Line tourist boat. For three hours he charmed and regaled her beneath the stars. It had been years since he’d been flirtatiously impulsive this way, with her. Had it been a sign?

  Saturday, five days from now, they were expected at Charlie’s mother’s. He’d promised to make his veal fettuccine, Claire’s favorite dish. Only last week they’d been planning their summer rental with Sasha and Thom on the Vineyard. Charlie was here, moments ago, just yesterday in all of his celebrated charm, and now he was gone. Claire was looking at breasts, less than a minute ago, and now she was not. The rate of change in her life, the death-to-change ratio, if you will, had peaked.

  The sky in Austin, too, was blue.

  2

  There are many things that fall from the sky, it turns out. There are statistics about this; it’s not like Charlie’s thin man was the first.

  On the day the Giacometti fell on Charlie, a peregrine falcon crashed through the plate glass window in Margaret Grabel’s Austin kitchen. Right there on Round Rock Circle, smash onto her floor. The falcon fall happened in the morning, and by the time Claire got to the airport for her flight back to New York, it was the hottest story in town. She watched it three times on the local news, three different channels on the television bank, while she waited to be called for standby. Peregrine falcons, like Giacomettis, are rare, especially in Texas. Claire learned this from the story. She learned, too, that they can dive very fast, up to two hundred miles per hour. There were three distinct visuals that each of the local news teams focused on: the falcon, the flustered Margaret, and the mottled-green geometric design of her linoleum floor.

  The story was gripping, and Claire let herself get caught up in it. A dead bird somehow made sense to her right now. The idea that her husband was in the same condition did not.

  * * *

  IT CERTAINLY WASN’T Margaret Grabel’s intent to kill the bird, yet Claire couldn’t help but feel scorn. If Margaret had had a normal-size kitchen window, maybe a small one over the sink, it wouldn’t have caused such confusion. But she had an unreasonably large window, plate glass. She probably cleaned it twice a day with Windex; she probably kept it unnaturally streak-free.

  Tragedy never comes in the form we anticipate, Claire thought, watching the screen.

  A man wearing bright plaid golf pants crossed in front of Claire. He looked young, in his thirties, but had a gray beard that reached his chest. The first year they were married, Claire had flown to Chicago without Charlie—a wedding, distant cousin; he’d begged off. In the airport, she’d spotted a middle-aged woman in pink leather leggings and jacquard top who somehow pulled it off. Claire had snapped a photo of the woman with her phone and sent it to her new husband and this launched a little tradition of theirs—to collect characters when they traveled, whether together or apart. There was Neon Tube Dress, Atlanta. Feather Hat, Portland. Then, like most things with Charlie, it became serious. Last year, MoMA had run a showing of the Byrnes’ collection—Character Sketches—alongside Bob Dylan’s abstract silk screens. There
was no use, of course, in taking this man’s photo now.

  * * *

  CLAIRE TURNED HER attention back to the televisions. Because the dead bird was in no shape for viewing, the television producers showed, instead, a colorful picture of a healthy one with small black eyes. Claire couldn’t help wondering why they were showing another bird, not the bird who had died, but a completely different one, a bird who had nothing at all to do with the dead one, nothing.

  She wondered if in New York they were running Charlie’s story on the news (they were), and if they’d put a picture on the screen of a different man to represent him (they hadn’t). She’d understood from the vague details she’d gathered on the phone that Charlie was in no shape for viewing either.

  He would have been horrified to find her riveted like this. Charlie considered the news a pedestrian form of entertainment. He wasn’t one to sit quietly in the open seating of an airport, in any case. He would have been in full swing at the bar. Charlie’s airport routine was simple. He wore a uniform of jeans, blazer, and button-down shirt. He gathered his reading materials at Hudson’s News—gossip magazines like People and Star that didn’t come to the house. And then he prowled. In the beginning, Claire had often traveled with him to his conferences and lectures. He always seemed bigger to her in airports, where everything else looked so small. And he was always recognized. It was here where he collected people, here where he found his “vox populi.” Airports are the great leveler, he said. He coaxed out the secrets and stories of people from Kentucky to Juneau. Charlie got them to talk.

  On the airport television screens, Margaret was animated. Her eyes darted left to right as she spoke; her face was flushed. Her hand gestures were sudden and jerky. She bore a strong resemblance—in her movements, the roundness of her eyes, the angular limbs—to Charlie’s mother. Oh God, Charlie’s mother. Who had called?

  * * *

  SHE’D BEEN “STARTLED,” Margaret said, her right hand flying to her breast. She’d heard a “god-awful sound”—she waved her arm toward a location off camera. She’d rushed in when she’d heard the crash—a finger on her right hand jabbed toward a room down the hall—then she’d screamed loudly enough that Abby had heard from next door. Abby Price ran from her yard, clutching a fistful of forget-me-nots, right into Margaret’s house. She hadn’t bothered even to knock first. It was that kind of scream. Both women were breathless—clearly shocked, still—in the recounting.

  Claire couldn’t help noticing, though, the measured excitement in Margaret’s voice as she pointed to where the bird had landed, as she re-created the crash, as she detailed the gruesome scene. There was a marked sexual repression in her diction. Charlie had taught Claire what to look for: breathlessness, excitable language, dramatic dips and changes of tenor in the voice. There was a lingering close-up to show glass shards, feathers, and a tiny red streak on the floor. (Claire might have imagined it. The bird was dead from a broken neck; there would have been little, if any, blood.)

  After her third time watching the story, it was fixed in Claire’s head—the characters, the plot, the metaphor. After years of living behind him, she’d come to imagine scenes through Charlie’s eyes. There were many different ways, many different words to describe this one: Margaret’s red-checkered shirtdress, her cloth-flecked sewing room, the last attempts by the bird to right himself, the pitcher of iced tea on the counter that Claire hadn’t seen, but imagined, next to a ceramic bowl of wooden fruit. It all played through her head like a slide show on an endless loop; a virtual tour of Margaret’s shattered home.

  Claire began to cry. She looked around to see who might have spotted it—Charlie despised public displays of emotion. But this was too much. She grieved for the falcon and she grieved for the man from Fish and Wildlife who’d had to drive out and retrieve it. She grieved for Margaret, who looked too ripe for the moment, like she’d been waiting in her sewing room thirty years to hear glass shatter, to cover her mouth, to have Abby burst through her front door. Thirty years was a long time to wait to have KVUE 2 News standing in her house, for all of Austin to see. Thirty years to tell a ninety-second story on television.

  * * *

  NOW WHAT? CLAIRE looked at the phone in her lap. She had nine messages and thirty-three texts. She turned off the phone. She couldn’t quite grasp the situation regarding her husband. She hadn’t seen a body or feathers, or anyone visibly shaken by whatever it was that had occurred. It seemed improbable that Charlie was dead, yet the callers and texters were adamant. Richard—usually cool as steel—had faltered when she’d called back, his voice had cracked.

  After his initial shock, Dr. Singh had offered water and apologies. He’d patted her awkwardly on the head while standing above her. He’d thought it disrespectful to sit down in his comfortable chair. He would suffer, too. Claire sipped the water, and they stayed that way for a time in silence. She was sure he had appointments or faculty meetings, yet there she was in his office, her husband dead.

  “Things happen,” Dr. Singh said finally, looking for closure, “for a reason.”

  He sent her off with the measuring tape and, for some reason, a packet of cheese. He insisted she keep the transparency of Marilyn Monroe. This was Claire Byrne’s inauspicious induction to widowhood: an hourglass waist, a bronze statue, a dead bird. Her life, the one she’d grown used to, had come abruptly to an end. In the morning, she’d been a wife, the sun had been out, it had been ordinary. In the afternoon, alone in the airport, watching footage of swooping birds, with Marilyn Monroe on her lap, Claire wished that breasts mattered. She wished Charlie had known she had an almost perfect waist-to-hip ratio. She wished she’d bought the no-pulp orange juice that week, the kind he preferred. She wished that she smoked.

  * * *

  IT’S HARD TO get from Austin to New York, even on a good day. So when Claire finally got onto an overnight Delta flight with two connections, she splurged on an upgrade to first class. She ordered a red wine, then regretted it. She’d never cared much for wine. It was a source of friction with Charlie (had been a source of friction with Charlie), an accomplished gourmand—fricasseeing and braising and sautéing seasonal grass-fed this and that, all of which called for big bold reds, the kind you swirled around in large glassware and sniffed at like a hound.

  “It’s Gallo,” said the man across the aisle, crisp suit, smooth jaw. Charlie had always worn stubble.

  The man nodded at her drink. “First class, but they serve shitty wine.” He chuckled. “British Air has good wines, anywhere else I stick to gin.” On his tray was a plastic tumbler with a lime wedge and ice cubes, and a clear bubbly drink. He held it up to her, as if to toast.

  “Gin,” Claire said when the flight attendant came back around. She’d never been the sort to order gin, but she choked the first one down, then ordered another. The man, still watching her, smiled. “My husband is dead,” Claire said to him, and opened her packet of peanuts.

  3

  In Charlie’s first hours postmortem, Claire flew from Texas to North Carolina, to Washington, D.C., and then to New York while Ethan worried over what to wear to pick her up, and Richard just paced. Dead. Dead. Dead. Claire chanted it to herself as her plane touched down at Kennedy; that Charlie was, in fact, dead was not getting through.

  Ethan greeted her in thin cashmere, but he was uncharacteristically unkempt. She spotted concealer hiding the redness around his eyes.

  “Clarabelle,” he said somberly, opening his arms. As she stepped into them, he put his hand up. “Wait.” He produced a small white pill, broke it in two, and fished a bottle of Evian from his bag. He held a half pill in front of her. “Open, sweetie. Good. Now swallow.”

  In baggage claim, she leaned on his shoulder while they waited for her suitcase to come around. Her dreams on the plane had been frenzied; she felt like she’d been gone for weeks.

  “Ethan? Why was he uptown? Where was he going so early?” she asked.

  Ethan put an arm around her and squeezed. “He
was meeting Richard. He never made it.”

  Ethan knew as well as Claire did that Charlie was a slave to routine. He woke at seven every morning, made coffee, read the papers, and checked his e-mail. If he went uptown to see Richard he took the subway to Forty-Second Street, walked a block north to Forty-Third, then west to Fifth Avenue. There was no reason to be above Forty-Third Street at that time of the morning.

  “Okay, but why would he be walking down Madison?” She knew why, of course, she just didn’t know who. Dead, she silently repeated to herself. Dead, dead, dead.

  Ethan dodged the question. Her suitcase appeared. He set it beside her. It seemed a ridiculous thing to care about—a few books, an outfit change and pajamas. She looked at it and sighed. “What do I do now?” she asked.

  “Well, first, the hospital. Richard’s waiting there for us.”

  “No, not now, I mean next. What do I do with my life?”

  Ethan straightened the suitcase handle and took her hand. “Remember Night on Earth?” Yes, she did. They’d all watched it together, the previous summer at Bryant Park. The director and Charlie had met at a party when Charlie was at Princeton. She nodded yes and Ethan smiled. “Exactly. We’ll figure everything out in the cab.”

  The ride to Lenox Hill Hospital was slow, through traffic on the Grand Central Parkway and across the Triborough Bridge. Claire stared out the window, not sure if she felt blurry from the Xanax or from watching the raindrops smear the glass. Ethan stabbed at his phone distractedly, checking e-mail, Twitter, the news.