The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating

by Carole Radziwill

  “Think of Charlie’s demise as your plot point. Where do you go from here?”

  “I can’t even manage the menu at Starbucks. Where am I supposed to go?”

  Ethan ran a hand through his perfectly styled hair, his legs stretched out on the ottoman. “You’re too young to be mired in denouement.”

  The intercom buzzed: chicken parmigiana and Gigi salad from The Palm. Where Claire grew up, people brought casseroles to the bereaved. In New York, well-mannered friends sent high-end takeout. Claire and Ethan ate from the containers with plastic forks. Ethan continued.

  “You need divination. You need soothsayers and seers.”

  “What do you mean, like a fortune-teller?”

  “Don’t mock, Clarabelle. I’m serious. Here.” He wrote down a number.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Beatrice.”

  Claire wrinkled her nose.

  “You know, there’s barely any difference between a good psychic and your uptight shrink. Before Freud, dreams were interpreted as messages from the gods. Anyway, call her tomorrow. I’ll warn her.”

  Claire knew of Beatrice; she was famous in Manhattan. She’d predicted the affairs and subsequent divorces of a number of prominent couples and was remarkably accurate about elections. She was also almost impossible to see, but Ethan had developed an odd friendship with her. He went to her apartment once a month for chicken Kiev.

  “You’ll love her. Take a picture with you, though. She won’t read you without one.”

  * * *

  BEATRICE WAS NOT what Claire expected. She imagined a turbaned woman with spotted hands. Instead, she faced a long, willowy thing with delicate bones; she might have been a runway model in her youth, thirty years ago. Her face was angular, imposing.

  Claire had ignored Ethan’s directive and, instead of a photograph, brought Charlie’s socks. Out of spite, maybe—at Charlie or at the psychic, she didn’t know. Either way, she regretted it immediately. As she handed them over, she could hear the clench of Beatrice’s jaw.

  “I don’t read socks,” she said.

  “I know,” Claire replied. “I suspected you didn’t, but they belong to someone close to me. They’re the last living sense of him. A picture … the pictures don’t seem real.”

  “I won’t read a sock. Next time, bring a photograph of your husband.”

  Claire hadn’t mentioned a husband. These were the first words they’d exchanged. Ethan might have told her, but she didn’t think so. Ethan believed in oracles, he believed in divination; he’d had the same Magic 8 Ball for twenty years and still consulted it. Ethan would not have interfered.

  “He’s not my husband. He’s dead.”

  This was true, wasn’t it? How could Charlie be her husband if he was dead?

  Beatrice had sharp, judging eyes, like an owl’s. She fixed them on Claire and made a rumbling, guttural sound.

  “I need to know my arc,” Claire said. “I’m on a journey without a plot. I need a story line.”

  “Give me your hand, then.”

  Claire clutched Charlie’s sock in her right hand while Beatrice read her left. In a charmless monotone, she made her announcements.

  “There is a very refined and intellectual air about you…”

  Claire, initially anxious, perked up.

  “You create harmony wherever you go; people are calmed.”

  Claire smiled.

  “You have a cluster of healing and learning planets in Aries. This is the sign of the explorer. It is the opposite of your rising moon. Libra is partnership; it is something you haven’t had. You yearn for it.”

  Claire nodded.

  “You have an inquisitive mind. Your journey will be exciting.”

  “Oh,” Claire said. With Ethan’s words in her head, she seized on “journey.”

  “Your health will be good.”

  Claire scratched her nose.

  “And this is a time for you to focus on work.”

  Claire paused to consider.

  “How old are you?” Beatrice asked. It made Claire slightly suspicious—shouldn’t Beatrice already know?

  “Thirty-two.”

  “What day were you born?”

  “Wednesday. May fourth.” Beatrice examined her for an unsettling amount of time before she went on.

  “This year you will focus on work. You won’t find love.”

  Beatrice looked up and Claire looked down, at her leathery palm. She arched a brow. “Are you sure? I might just need lotion.”

  “A parade of silver-tongued charlatans and seducers will flatter you; you’ll fall prey to one of them. Like the circles of Dante’s hell, there will be all types. There will be gluttonous men and violent men and angry and lustful men. What you will not have is love. Not for one year. You are vulnerable to vanity, so beware. Your husband was an egotistical man, and just as the fly returns again and again to the web in spite of certain doom, you sense safety and warmth where you shouldn’t.”

  Beatrice paused and cocked her head as if she heard an unfamiliar noise, then she went on.

  “Your work will flourish. You will emerge from a chrysalis and derive satisfaction as a result. You will write this book they are talking about, but you will not write it the way they think.”

  Claire gasped. Even if Beatrice had seen the gossip in the Post, that was still quite a leap.

  “Now,” Beatrice said, lowering her voice. “I see someone in fuchsia. A close friend. She is taking unnecessary risks.”

  Sasha, Claire thought. Only Sasha would wear fuchsia.

  “And a man in a black suit … I have not a good vibration, but not entirely bad. A man in a black suit will come into your life and impact it in some way.”

  Claire considered this. A lot of men wore black suits.

  “Still,” Beatrice said, as if it needed repeating, “no love for one year.”

  “Why not?” Claire asked.

  “I don’t make the rules.”

  RULE #4: When in doubt, make your own rule.

  Claire thought for a moment. “What happens in a year?”

  Beatrice’s lids lowered and grew hoods like a cobra. “One year.”

  8

  Claire’s meeting with Beatrice left her disturbed. The widow was restless.

  Ethan came to dinner on Sunday wearing fur and bearing gifts.

  “Pickled vegetables,” he said, waving his hand across the jars. “Cauliflower, cabbage, carrots.”

  “Why do they all start with C?” Claire asked.

  “They’re good for you. They’re fermented. It’s cleansing,” he said. “I drink a shot glass of brine every day.”

  He arranged an elaborate display on a platter and popped a dish in the oven.

  Claire turned the television on. Ethan went down to Charlie’s office.

  “How’s all that coming, by the way?” she asked.

  He poked his head out the door. “Well, it’s not boring. Listen to this: How do male porcupines hit on female porcupines?”

  Claire raised a brow. “I don’t know. How?”

  “They urinate,” he said. “The male urinates on the female, and if she likes him she lets him keep going, keep peeing on her, I mean. If she doesn’t like him, she fights back.”

  “That’s very sweet,” said Claire.

  “It is sweet; it’s utterly intimate. We get hung up on our own fears about sex for no good reason. One species’ urine is another one’s whipped cream.”

  Claire crunched a piece of pickled cauliflower. “What’s for dinner?” she asked.

  “Chicken marbella.”

  “What are you reading?”

  Ethan waved a sheaf of papers. “A file of notes on animals. Male garter snakes have two penises, by the way, one on each side of their body. I’m so jealous.”

  “That must be why cheating men are called snakes. You didn’t ask me about Beatrice.”

  “Shh!” Ethan said. “Rule number one: you never talk about Beatrice! Rule number two: don�
��t talk about Beatrice!”

  “Oh, come on. She said something about the book. Isn’t that weird? She said I’d write it. I can’t imagine.” Claire made a face.

  She thought about Charlie and his strange passions. He was passionate about many things, but it was comfort, not passion, he felt toward Claire. While Claire wanted to believe that combinations exist, of man and woman or man and man or woman and woman, that can satisfy both sexual desire and love, Charlie refused to entertain such a notion. To him, it was completely absurd.

  “Ethan, do you think love and sex are incompatible?”

  He walked down the hall and sat next to her on the couch. “I think they’re inconveniently tangled up.”

  “Is that the same thing?”

  He popped a pickled bean in his mouth.

  “Are you angry with him?” he asked.

  “Who, Charlie? About what?”

  He waved a hand around in the air. “The other women. All the…” He trailed off.

  She was silent for a few moments. “They’re ugly,” she said finally. “Have you ever seen one? I don’t get the fuss.”

  “Have I seen what?”

  “A Giacometti. They’re bony and protruding.”

  “I saw the photo in the paper.”

  “The surrealists were obsessed with sex. They thought monogamy was bourgeois.” Claire pronounced the French word slowly, dropping the last syllable—boor-zhwah. “They took the penis, in and of itself, much too seriously.”

  “Not possible!” Ethan said, feigning horror.

  Claire smiled. “Anyway, Charlie could screw circles around them—not with me, necessarily, but in general. He was adventurous, let’s say. He lived what he wrote. I knew that when I married him.” She thought about the end of affection—when does it stop and why? She thought about women who grow contempt for their husbands but love their children no matter what. Sisters who dote on brothers, in spite of the same troublesome tics they find insurmountable in lovers—clothes strewn about, carelessness with food, televised sports for hours on end. She thought about the mercurial nature of art, the wasted talent of forgery artists, how they never receive due acclaim. She thought of Sande, Walter White’s lover, who was perhaps living out the last days of her own dwindling fame. She wouldn’t think of Charlie’s pre-mortem screw. The intercom buzzed and startled her. Before Claire could speak, Ethan jumped up to let in the delivery man and paid him in cash—leafy greens, bright-colored fruits, fatty sardines, and, as a concession to Claire, Diet Coke.

  “Food is therapy,” he said. “You need supplies.”

  “I’ve never heard that.”

  “Well, maybe it’s not, but you’re turning into one of those skinny little sculptures yourself. Charlie always had food here. It’s comforting. And listen, no one can know what really goes on inside a marriage, but for what it’s worth, from what I could see, Charlie’s love for you was real. It was as true as he was capable of, and that’s no small thing.”

  “Beatrice said I’m going to have gluttonous men.” As she said this, Claire eyed Ethan suspiciously. All he talked about anymore was food. “Also a man in a black suit plays a role, and there might be someone violent.” She recalled how angry Richard had been on the phone.

  “Honey, that is between you and the divine.”

  “She made it sound like I’m going to sleep around. She mentioned a lot of men.”

  “I’m not listening.”

  “And Sasha in a fuchsia dress.”

  “Don’t say one more word, Clarabelle, I mean it.”

  “But no love.” Ethan covered his ears and started to hum.

  “Okay, I get it.”

  They watched the end of an old movie together, and when Claire fell asleep, Ethan let himself out. She woke up to a jar of pickle juice by her bed.

  9

  Sasha was appalled, naturally, when she found out Claire had gone to Beatrice. She hadn’t been consulted, no one had pleaded she come along, she hadn’t been asked for her post-reading dissection. In the classic chic of her uptown sitting room, she scoffed.

  “First, Claire, you never answer your phone, so people are worried about you. Second, everyone thinks you’re hiding because maybe you’ve run out of money. Third, no one goes to Beatrice anymore—she’s a carnival act. She hustles tourists, she hands her card out at the Empire State Building.”

  “I’m not hiding, I have money, and Beatrice said I would meet a lot of men … charlatans or something, but not have love. I think it was just because I brought socks instead of a picture.”

  “No one sees a psychic anymore, is all I’m saying.”

  “She seemed to know what she was doing.”

  “I just wish you’d talked to me, honey. Ethan doesn’t know everything; I have someone, too.”

  She handed Claire a black card with white print. It smelled of musk oil.

  “This is Eve, she’s my botanomanist. She saged Thom’s office and the apartment after that little thing with his personal assistant—the most ironic title ever—and our energy completely changed. But that’s not her forte, she’s the real thing. She’s not a kook.”

  “How did your energy change?”

  “The apartment is turmoil-free now,” she said, though her smile wobbled. “Go ahead, take a deep breath, you’ll smell it.”

  Claire took a breath and nodded, though she smelled neither turmoil nor calm.

  Sasha took a long, deep breath, too, and waved her arms through the air. “The lack of tension is palpable. Anyway, her first husband died, so she was a widow once. She’s perfect.”

  Ethan said divination. He said soothsayers and seers. How could one botanomanist hurt?

  * * *

  EVE LIVED AND herbed in a railroad-style apartment in Brooklyn. It had a markedly different feel than Beatrice’s stark uptown space. She was a small, thick woman. Squat was the word Charlie would have used. She answered the door in a black pantsuit with a bright Hermès scarf on her head and, after “Hello,” had little to say. She gestured for Claire to follow her and walked down a long hallway into a large, open room. There were comfortable chairs around a table and there was an orange bowl set out on top. A furry white cat curled up in the window like a pom-pom.

  She filled the bowl with rosemary stalks and a handful of sage leaves, then lit the strange little pile with a white lighter adorned with the face of Ringo Starr. “Do you like the Beatles?” Claire asked.

  “Not especially,” Eve replied. “It was a gift.”

  She added cannabis leaves to the fire, and the space took on a completely different feel. The smoke blurred the shapes in the room. Claire sat down across from a red Rothko that hung on the wall—unsigned, a knockoff—and wondered if all art is ultimately fake.

  Eve moved the rubble around with a cocktail stirrer.

  “A friend of mine,” Claire began.

  Eve put a hand up and shook her head. “Not yet. Don’t speak. What I see is that what was once a carefully structured life for you has come loose; it’s why you’re here. The thread has unraveled, the hem has come apart, and you’re not a seamstress.”

  Claire nodded her head in agreement. She was definitely not a seamstress.

  “You need help to smooth the ends. It’s definition you lack, and proper nutrition.”

  Eve unfavorably appraised the small body sitting across from her, and Claire was uncomfortably aware of the few pounds, yes, that she’d lost since returning from Texas to find Charlie dead.

  “Well, I eat, it’s just that … I’m a slight woman, I’m small-boned—”

  Eve’s hand, again, rose up and she went on. “The masses are shocked, you’ll learn, if you haven’t discovered it already,” she said, while still stirring, “to find that marriages interrupted by death were ordinary ones, the same as their own. Good, bad, boring—at best, manageable.”

  “Right,” Claire said. Eve added more cannabis. She looked Claire straight in her hazel-blue, sometimes hazel-brown eyes. “We mythologize. We hav
e odd ways of coping with death, such as it is—a mundane and natural piece of the life cycle. Think of the phrase ‘Don’t speak ill of the dead.’ We don’t subject the dead to any sort of postmortem analysis at all. They become common property. There is no longer a marriage that is yours and your husband’s to define and engage in and present versions of, there’s no private relationship or collaboration between the two of you anymore, because now it’s just you. There’s a narrative that everyone is free to contribute to. It’s supposed to be a pleasant one. It will drag you along.”

  “I don’t know … I haven’t thought about it so much.”

  “The stories people buy, Kate, are fairy tales. The man is handsome and empathetic, and the good-hearted hooker can have him; he’ll treat her well. True Love. Never-Ending Lasting Love. Lifetime Channel, Frank Sinatra, Michael Bublé, Jen-and-Brad heartthrob love. When death ends a marriage, it interrupts the same petty hatreds and grievances and withholdings of affection that plague every coupling. Death never comes in the respites where everything is, for the briefest bit, resolved. It doesn’t come in those rare moments when you have the sense that all is calm and understood.”

  Eve continued to stir ash.

  “Truth gives way to story and there’s little to be done about it. You’re not allowed, you know this, Kat—”

  “It’s Claire, actually…”

  “—to not be grievously wounded by the death of a man, a partner, whom you may or may not have loved. You’re not allowed to be ambivalent. You’re not allowed to move on. Now you’re burdened with a title—you’re a widow. You’re allowed to be undone by the loss. You can be sexual—the color black is seductive, no accident—but can’t have sex. It’s your virginity all over again, but worse. You’re best off losing it with a stranger and out of town.”

  Claire was stunned. “That’s what Charlie said! About the virginity. He had this theory that women experience multiple virginities in a lifetime, and for men, collecting them is some sort of glorious pursuit—like finding whole black truffles, or a case of 1963 Montrachet. He said that to get a woman at one of her virginal milestones was like getting high on the Empire State Building with Keith Richards—an intoxicating, unforgettable moment in time.”