“That, my friends, is the site of the town house where Evelyn Nesbit first maneuvered her rosy adolescent body onto Stanford White’s red velvet swing. White was a wealthy architect. His firm was responsible for the second Madison Square Garden and the Washington Square Arch, among other prominent city fixtures. Nesbit was an artist’s muse and an actress. She was the Norma Jean of her time, circa 1903.”
The griot faced the rubble that had once been a stately four-floor mansion. He took a deep breath and continued.
“This was not Stanford’s family home, of course, but a private lair where he turned vulnerable young women into his conquests. Evelyn Nesbit was the most vulnerable of them all and, subsequently, the most infamous.”
He cleared his throat.
“She was sixteen when she disrobed and climbed onto his notorious red swing for the first time. Stanford White, married with children, was forty-seven.”
The woman from Great Neck gasped.
“She had the narrow waist and full hips that Marilyn Monroe would later trademark, the famous ‘hourglass shape.’ She had soft lips and delicate skin that, it is said, rendered Stanford White helpless. Of course, some might think it a stretch to imagine a wealthy and powerful forty-seven-year-old man helpless against a sixteen-year-old girl, but this is how the story’s told and what I do here is tell stories.”
The griot’s small gathering was rapt.
“While White pursued her fervently at first,” the griot continued, “he later abandoned her for fresher conquests and she returned—both literally and figuratively—to the chorus line where he’d found her, one of countless young women hoping for a shot at security that the families they came from never had. The working women of Broadway at this time had a short window in which to engage a proper husband—one who could provide them with an allowance and a future shielded from poverty, after their youth had faded.”
Suddenly, Claire caught the griot’s eye. She’d been watching him, they all had been, but then he looked at her directly. His eyes were clear and blue.
“Some time later, long after the end of her affair with Stanford, Evelyn married the millionaire Harry Thaw. She wore black to their modest nuptials. Shortly after they married, Harry shot Stanford White in the face.”
The griot gazed at his little group and then at the site of the mansion. He wiped a hand across his brow—it was unseasonably warm for late October.
“Unfortunately for Evelyn, Harry’s family was crazy, too. After her husband was jailed for murder, she was cast onto the street, penniless. She lived a long hard life, finally succumbing at the age of eighty-two, in California—after decades of false hopes and setbacks, addictions, and lousy men.”
The griot paused to check his watch. Without a note or a word, he squared his shoulders and walked away. The street corner resumed as if he had never been there.
He had a certain je ne sais quoi, a flair. Ethan was right. She found herself thinking about him. A few days later, she called again.
“I’d like to buy a subscription,” she said.
“I don’t do that. But you can come again on Thursday at nine a.m.”
Claire hung up. She wished she hadn’t. She wished she’d kept him on the phone. She tried to picture the griot on a red velvet swing.
In the days and weeks after Charlie died, Claire had had occasional thoughts of intimacy with other men. Now, a few months later, she thought of it all the time. She imagined having sex with the brusque man behind the counter at her corner deli, she imagined it with the grocery delivery boy from Fresh Direct. She imagined sex with Jack Huxley, and even, oh my God, Ethan. Now she imagined it repeatedly, and in great detail, and in various locales with the griot.
She grew increasingly concerned with her virginity as a widow. She wanted to be done with it. She harbored the irrational fear that she might die like this—a widow virgin. And her death thoughts weren’t the general existential ones, a woman struggling with mundane thoughts of mortality. Hers were neurotic and imminent. Claire began to believe she was going to die any minute. When she crossed streets, she braced for the wayward bus to mow her down. Out to dinner she imagined a deadly virus in her food. She naturally entertained thoughts of objects falling from the sky, and if she woke in the mornings with a foggy head or if there was a twitch in her arm, she couldn’t quite put a name to the thing but was sure it was fatal.
Beatrice, who’d been thorough on other topics, did not seem concerned about Claire’s death. But it wasn’t uncommon, according to Judith Lowenstein, to feel vulnerable after the experience Claire had had. Survivor’s guilt, death by proximity, crazy paranoia—call it what you will. If healthy, robust Charlie who had looked just fine that June morning could expire before noon, then it was likely, in Claire’s mind, that something would befall her, too. She noticed symptoms, beginning with her faint onto Carter Hinckley’s office floor at Wanamaker and Sons. This, she was certain, heralded Parkinson’s disease. At the Waverly Street Starbucks, unable to summon the presence of mind to order a drink, she thought she had lupus. When her stomach fizzled and rumbled after a late Sunday breakfast at Sasha’s—her cook was sick and Sasha had bravely whipped up eggs—she’d thought it was Asian flu.
Ethan believed these subconscious fears were planted by Beatrice and Eve, by their gloomy outlooks on romance. It was true, the oracles had unnerved her.
The following Thursday Claire showed up where Derek had told her to show, at St. Anthony’s Convent on Prince Street. There were three followers this time, including Claire. They exchanged twenty-dollar bills again for Derek’s card, which had his name and number and a different larger word, again in Garamond: ABSURDITY.
Derek started by reading the work of poets who’d suffered tragic deaths—Delmore Schwartz (alcoholism and madness), Keats (tuberculosis and a broken heart), and Derek’s own second cousin Frank (laxatives).
Then he walked north toward Washington Square Park. He was tall and didn’t slouch. He wore his jeans loose but not baggy. He was thin but defined. She dressed and undressed him in different outfits as he spoke—hovering over her in a white T-shirt and denim, then shirtless, then in a tailored black suit. She imagined his hair gelled back, then loose, then cropped short, then wavy and long. She imagined his hands on her waist. She imagined him in front of her and behind. She failed to hear most of what he said.
The griot stopped abruptly on West Third Street and spoke in a low murmur, as if he were being careful to not let someone overhear. “We are standing six blocks from the Provincetown Playhouse where Eugene O’Neill began his career with the short work Bound East for Cardiff.” He shifted slightly to the right. “At the height of his career, O’Neill was most noted for the very public affair he conducted with Jack Reed’s wife, Louise. Reed was O’Neill’s close friend, and also fellow communist and radical, who was made a household name by Warren Beatty in the movie Reds. Louise was played by Diane Keaton who, by the way, is a regular when she’s in town at that restaurant right there, across the street.”
The griot took two small steps to the right. “We are five blocks from where Henry Miller lived before he fled New York for Paris with his second wife, June. Henry and June carried on a bisexual ménage à trois for several months here with the artist Jean Kronski, which Henry wrote about in his autobiographical work Crazy Cock.”
The griot spoke as if no one else was there.
“In Paris, Jean was replaced by Anaïs Nin in the Millers’ love triangle, which launched Anaïs Nin’s longtime patronage of Henry. June Miller eventually left to marry a businessman, who then left her for an actress. June deteriorated. She was in and out of the city’s psychiatric system for years and finally died in obscurity.”
The griot shifted once more. “We are just over three blocks from where e. e. cummings gave up on capitalization.” At this the griot smiled and in reply the three others in the group chuckled. Claire stared at the back of Derek’s head, willing him to look at her again.
He gesticulat
ed in one direction and then, without warning, another. Then he spit out an array of trivia like fireworks. “You are three and a half blocks away from where Mark Twain moved after his wife passed away, five blocks from where Henry James was born, and a short distance from where William James—an anonymous man, with no relationship to Henry or to Henry’s brother William—fed his obese and bed-ridden wife Oressa a steady diet of arsenic eggnogs in order to off her and marry her young daughter. Oressa James took a heroically long time to die, but when she did it was gruesome. She expired in a pool of her own vomit and filth and William jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge as police bore down on him, in a terrible cliché of an end.” Derek pointed southeast in the direction of the bridge; then he gathered his pack and left. His followers disbanded. Claire was the last to walk away. She was more than slightly undone by the morning’s narrative. She was breathless.
PART II
The Widow Gets Laid
14
Let’s pause briefly, here, to recap. Charlie Byrne, husband to Claire, writer, sexologist, and notorious man about town has been dead for five months, and his widow’s unsure how to proceed. We do not know if Claire Byrne derived sexual pleasure from her husband, though there’s a strong indication she didn’t. There’s the impression that there was love. Still, there was something missing in her life and now she craves it. But what with paraphilia and philandering and pronouncements from psychics, who knows what anyone wants or even which way is up? Is it sex that she wants, or is it something more pure—the state of platonic amor, maybe, as Plato understood it?
Claire is a pretty girl with hips in nice proportion to her waist. She’s young, in good health, and has money. Her friends seem interesting; her dreams don’t seem dull. She is by some accounts, in spite of or maybe because of her husband having died, fortunate.
The griot had said a lot of things, most of which Claire hadn’t even heard—she’d been too busy imagining him in bed. She felt frustrated. She longed for an awakening. She wondered if Jack Huxley was susceptible to an almost-perfect ratio of hip to waist. She remembered that Eve said to do it out of town. Thanks to Beatrice, she was on the lookout for black suits. She was ready to be flattered and seduced.
But whether from the monotony of marriage, or by Charlie’s ceaseless analysis, or by the theories and the talk and the other women, sex for Claire was not a simple act. She couldn’t imagine calling her gynecologist, for instance, to get the name of a good stimulating lubricant, rushing off to buy it, and applying it liberally before mounting the sweaty tumescent man across the couch, as Dr. Ruth had just suggested that morning on Good Day New York.
Often, when Claire and Charlie had sex, she felt like a control subject in his research. If Charlie wanted her to stroke something, he would instruct her to do so in a clinical fashion, mentally record the conditions under which she’d done so, and observe the results. She was more lab assistant than intimate.
* * *
MOST ANYONE WHO gave it thought felt Claire should hole up the first year, cool her heels, wear conservative clothes. That was the rule, after all, implied by the general public and reinforced by a psychic—no love for one year. Richard, of course, wanted to finish and sell Charlie’s book.
“Work on it, you’ll thank me. The distraction is good.” To that end, tabloid magazines appeared in weekly bundles at her door, the subject of Charlie’s book affixed to every one. Always arranged at a dodgy angle from the camera, Jack Huxley refused to be shot straight on. It was like Claire’s captivating author’s photo that had first turned Charlie on.
Life in a three-quarter turn.
Ethan was anxious about change. He was plainly in the cool your heels camp. Sasha, though, thought it high time to move on. As she delicately put it, “If there was anyone who would have wanted to see you get laid, it would have been your dead husband, God rest his perverted soul.”
Charlie had always had a thing for widows, it’s true. He would have hated to see one go to waste. Claire, having been recently relieved of a husband, was at a virginal milestone. To anyone other than jealous wives, Claire, much like Iberian ham in Spain at the height of the season, was a rare delicacy. Charlie would have derived ecstatic pleasure from the catch; ah, the irony.
Claire picked up her phone, put it down, picked it up, put it down again. She left her apartment and took a cab to 969 Park. When the doorman called up to announce her, he paused. His eyes darted warily toward Claire. He replaced the telecom slowly and nodded Claire up.
Claire immediately identified the doorman’s concern. Sasha was fixed at one end of her custom D’Angelo sofa, with a cocktail shaker at her right elbow and a pitcher of vodka on the Adnet table in front of her. Her torso was perfectly straight; her legs were looped carelessly beneath her. The scene looked like a Cindy Sherman display.
“What are you doing?” Claire asked, alarmed. It wasn’t the presence of vodka in the afternoon so much as the shine of Sasha’s skin, the dark, blood-colored lips and vivid, skintight leather dress that slightly startled her. Claire remembered what Beatrice had said.
Someone in a fuchsia dress is taking risks.
“Talk. I can’t move, I’ll drip. Just talk.”
Botox is a relatively innocuous procedure, but Sasha had a deathly fear of needles. Pills before the appointment, drinks with pills after. The leather dress, Claire assumed, was for—
“Let me guess, Dr. Struck?”
Gerald Struck was new in town and taking the ladies’ skin scene by storm. He was a former quarterback; he’d played one season for the Jets. He was tall and defined beneath his thin cashmere crew necks and gabardine slacks in a way no dermatologist had ever quite been before him. He walked about in a teasing stage of semi-erection.
“Um-mm.” Sasha waved her hand for Claire to talk.
They were all acting like lunatics. It was the autumn of everyone’s discontent.
“Well, listen to this. I have a griot,” Claire said. “His name is Derek.”
“That’s nice, honey. What’s a griot?”
“It’s a storyteller. They tell stories. He recited the entire text of The Waste Land, with footnotes.”
Sasha’s housekeeper came in with a straw for her martini glass. She put the straw up to Sasha’s lips. When Sasha had finished sipping, she pronounced her words carefully. “Things must be slow downtown.”
“After The Waste Land he recited a parallel text he’d written from his own life. His own Waste Land. He called it The Gap. It’s tongue in cheek. He also plays the flute.”
Sasha breathed in and eyed Claire dubiously, “What’s so great about a griot?”
“Well, that’s why I’m here.”
Sasha made an attempt to open her eyes wide to show interest, but the Botox had already taken effect. “I’m listening.”
“I want to have sex. I want to get it over with, out of town or anywhere, I don’t care. I was at the movies with Ethan last week and started rubbing his leg. I didn’t even realize it.”
“And?”
“And I don’t know how to go about it. Charlie wrote an entire book on animal sex that he never published. Isn’t that crazy? Anacondas mate for three weeks.”
“That’s longer than most New Yorkers,” Sasha said.
“It’s three weeks for one single act. One single fuck. And it takes thirteen males to do it. Thirteen male anacondas wrap themselves around the female and then just hang on until they’re done.”
Sasha picked her legs up one at a time and laid them out on the couch. She let out a sound that might have been an exasperated laugh if she’d been able to move her lips. “Stick to human seduction. You know, most women would trade places with you in a heartbeat. Marriage is so—you know. And here you are with a freebie, a do-over.” She waved her arm in the air lazily, closed her eyes, groped for her drink. The Klonopin was kicking in. “Margorie Dermott’s already dating a surgeon.”
“Great. Good for Margorie. Who cares? I’m dating, too. That’s what I came to tel
l you. I’m not going to wander around in disrepair. I want to date and I need you to find me someone.”
“Thank God. Enough’s enough.”
“It’s been months, not years. I’d hardly call it procrastination.”
“Good. I’ll live vicariously through you. Marriage is so damn repetitive…” Sasha trailed off.
When she began to snore, Claire tucked a blanket around her and left.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY Sasha got serious. They sat in her study as she thumbed through Thom’s Rolodex, the old-fashioned kind with handwritten cards that spun around in a wheel. She was jotting down notes.
“Here’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to assemble a variety pack. You don’t know what your taste is because you’ve been out of the game. So I’m going to start you off with this fun little threesome right here.” Sasha was holding three white cards in her hand.
“Alex is a journalist, he’s very tall, very nice. Stephen’s a billionaire. Balding a bit, but he’s a billionaire. Jake plays hockey, great ass, but not too bright, and then I might throw in Sid. He’s an alcoholic.”
“Alcoholic?”
“Yes, a high-functioning one. He’s a venture capitalist, energy. He’s into those windmill farms in the Midwest. Apparently there’s a lot of wind in Kansas.”
Claire picked the journalist, to start.
“Great. You can just have a drink, no pressure,” Sasha said. “This is a warm-up to practice your small talk. It will be easy.”
Sasha called Claire the next morning.
“Okay, I gave him your number. He’s out of town but gets back tomorrow. He’ll probably call—”
“He did already. He called.”
Sasha squealed. “Ha! You see? He loves you. I knew it! And so?”
“We might have coffee. This week, maybe? I told him to call me back.”
“Call you back?”
“Yeah.”
The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating Page 9