An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Edward, on the other hand, assiduously played the field. Whenever a relationship threatened to become serious, he was the one to break it off, to move on. And he’d finally thrown away the letter Laurel had sent from Tucson about running into Joe Ettlinger accidentally, about the doubts and fears she’d been suppressing, and the sixth sense she’d had about Edward’s own lack of commitment.

  Maybe she was right, maybe he’d only been kidding himself. He had caught her out in several little senseless lies during their courtship that he’d written off to her “high-strung” nature, and refused to see her neediness or mood swings as pathology. And he had known all along that prematurely white hair was usually just a genetic tendency or some hormonal imbalance that reduces melanin, but he’d indulged her fantasies, and even entered them, letting desire trump science and just plain common sense. He was never quite that trusting or romantic again, until he met Bee.

  The Beginning

  She wasn’t his type; he could see that right away. Even after all this time—almost fifteen years!—and how terribly Laurel had wounded and humiliated him, she had remained Edward’s physical ideal. He chalked this up to some sort of brain thing, a primordial imagery beyond his control. Beatrice Silver was full-breasted, with curly brown hair; her hips, like her smile, were a little too wide. Childbirth must have altered her figure, of course. She was dancing the cha-cha with her little daughter—that was his first sight of her—at the wedding reception of a mutual friend, Sue Cooper, a colleague of Edward’s and a former neighbor of Bee’s. It had never occurred to Sue, a notorious matchmaker, to introduce them to each other.

  One day, Bee would confide that she wasn’t instantly attracted to Edward, either. He’d looked too standoffish, she said, too patrician, hanging back on the sidelines of the dance floor like that, with his hands in his pockets. Good looking, she conceded, like one of those fair-haired Fitzgerald heroes. But not hot-blooded enough, like her gorgeous, swarthy, rotten ex-husband, from whom she’d only recently been divorced. No more men, she thought, cha-cha-cha!

  Edward still didn’t enjoy going to weddings. He no longer had any conscious feelings for Laurel, not even residual anger or yearning, but the whole setup, of solemn vows and extravagant toasts—the pomp and the circumstances—always made him want to be somewhere else. And this was a Jewish wedding, where the bride and groom were lifted on tilting, teetering chairs above the chanting crowd, with only a skimpy silk handkerchief joining them—their brand-new union, their very lives, already seemingly imperiled.

  Then there was all that communal dancing, wild and fast, to the piercing, joyful cries of the clarinets. Not Edward’s sort of thing, really, although for some reason he found his eyes brimming with tears as the dancers sped by, faster and faster to the escalating music, like horses on a carousel. And then his hand was grabbed and he was pulled into the maelstrom before he could protest. No, he did protest: he was just watching, he didn’t know the steps, but who could hear him in all that jubilant noise? And both of his hands were tightly clutched by then, on one side by the little girl who’d danced with her mother, and on the other by an older woman in a jaunty red hat, a kind of lopsided fez, who kicked up her heels like a chorus girl. They both held on as if he belonged to them, to Julie and her grandmother, Gladys, as he one day would.

  Edward liked children—their natural curiosity, how truly funny and intuitive they could be, the elastic possibilities of their minds. Teaching had never been boring, even though so much of the core curriculum hardly ever changed. He might have had kids of his own if he’d married when he was younger—although Laurel wasn’t keen about it—but he was in his forties now and didn’t long for them, not anymore. At least his sister, Catherine, and her husband, Jim, who lived in San Diego, had made grandparents out of their mother and father.

  And Bee’s children—there were two of them, he soon found out—didn’t immediately make him regret his own childless state. The boy, Nick, about twelve, Edward guessed, was seated at the almost abandoned children’s table in the reception hall. Julie, who hadn’t relinquished Edward’s hand after the frenetic hora finally ended, pulled him in that direction; it might have been just another phase of the dance. “This is my brother,” she announced, like a miniature docent showing off a prized painting.

  Nick, his shirttails half out of his pants, his teeth caged in metal, ignored her. He was busy bombarding another boy, sitting across from him, with pellets of the ceremonial challah, which were quickly sent flying back. The whole table looked like the aftermath of a minor war. One chair had been knocked over. And there were spilled Cokes, beheaded centerpiece flowers, and bits of food all over the stained pink tablecloth, although some of the plates seemed untouched.

  The band had now launched into something slow and romantic. “Bésame Mucho.” Each time I cling to your kiss I hear music divine. One of Laurel’s favorites, he remembered; did they still play that? He gently freed his hand from the girl’s grasp, and her mouth dropped open in disappointment. God, was he expected to slow-dance with her now? Adopt her?

  It was her mother who rescued him, coming up and telling Julie to bring her grandmother a plate of cookies from the dessert buffet. With a rueful backward glance at Edward, she ran off. In gratitude, and because she was already swaying to the music, he asked Bee if she’d like to dance.

  “Don’t worry about her,” she told Edward as she turned to him. “You’ve just caught her on the rebound.”

  He didn’t ask her then what she’d meant. It was only during their first date that he’d learn about Julie’s father’s desertion, Bee’s work as a therapist at a community mental health clinic, and the challenges of being a single parent. That was when he opened his life story to her, as well, with unusual candor and ease.

  But they didn’t say anything else at all while they danced and danced at the wedding, the band flowing without pause from one ballad to another. Bee was surprisingly light in Edward’s arms. Her face was glowing and her hair smelled damp and earthily sweet, like geraniums, he thought, or as if she’d just come in out of the rain. That was the beginning, with no apparent end in view: a needy young girl, a churlish boy, and a woman whose generous, swaying hips would soon cradle Edward in bed.

  Their own relatively small and quiet wedding, seven months after they met, took place in the garden of her closest friends, the Morgansterns, under a canopy of wisteria. Edward had already given up his bachelor quarters in Manhattan and moved into Bee’s Tudor-style house on Larkspur Lane in Englewood. Overnight, it seemed, he’d become a husband, a stepfather, a suburbanite, a mortgagor, a birder, and a commuter. He had never been so happy in his life.

  The Messenger

  Bee had brought up the subject of bereavement groups long before they’d even truly acknowledged their mortality, back when they still said things like “If anything ever happens to me,” rather than “If I die first.” In a joke that was popular then, a wife tells her husband, “If something happens to one of us, I’m going to Florida.”

  Then one night in bed, out of the blue, Bee told Edward that she didn’t think he would be capable of grieving properly for her. He pretended to be insulted. “Why, I’d cry rivers,” he said.

  “Well, maybe,” she conceded. “I’ve caught you tearing up during crappy movies. But you’re so private, you’d wait until you were all alone, and you wouldn’t let anyone really comfort you. It’s not just you, all men are like that. You wear your genitals on the outside and your feelings on the inside—the exact opposite of women.”

  “Vive la différence,” he said, putting his arms around her.

  But she pulled away. “You’d probably need to join one of those bereavement groups.”

  “I hate groups,” he said. “Except for The Beatles and the Supremes.”

  “Edward, be serious,” she said.

  What had brought this on? Maybe it was just her habit of helping, an overflow from her work with troubled families at the clinic. But they weren’t troubled. Only
moments before her warm legs had been tangled cozily with his while they read the books now lying on the floor beside the bed, their places saved for the following night. They’d had an especially good dinner earlier with a nice Cabernet, and, with both of the children at sleepovers, had even made love in the living room before clearing the dishes. He wasn’t going to let this unwelcome mood-shift take hold.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll go first—age before beauty, et cetera. And you can grieve to your heart’s content.” He had been on the verge of sleep when she’d started the whole stupid conversation, and he put an end to it by turning off his lamp and kissing her good night. But he lay awake in the dark for a long time.

  They were lucky, enchanted, even, and so were their friends. The years tripped by and several of their parents, including both of Edward’s and Bee’s father, succumbed to illness and old age, while they remained indestructible. Then a long-married couple in their crowd was killed instantly in a car crash. The first among them to go, as if they’d invented death the way they’d once invented love.

  The spell was broken. Less than a year later, two other friends died, one right after the other. Heart! Cancer! Driving home from the second of those funerals, Bee said, “Our circle is getting smaller and smaller. Soon we’ll only be a semicircle.”

  “And then a comma,” Edward added. They smiled at each other, in a guilty rush of gaiety.

  But those deaths seemed like tragic anomalies rather than the natural course of events. Bee and Edward were both still working; she was fifty-seven and he was sixty-two. Their sex life was more vibrant than anyone, including themselves, would have imagined. And her mother was alive and sentient, which preserved Bee’s status as someone’s child. This was only the late afternoon of their lives, and, despite the sorrow they felt, they could still make nervous comedy out of their friends’ misfortune.

  Soon after, when Bee’s diagnosis and prognosis were delivered in what sounded like one choppy paragraph of doom read aloud from the Merck Manual—“Pancreas. Metastases. Stage Four. Months.”—she and Edward simply throbbed with disbelief until they were given a second, identical opinion. Then they lay awake together in the menacing darkness. She murmured, “God,” then “Wow. It doesn’t seem real, does it?” And Edward held her and said, “No, no, of course it doesn’t.”

  But it seemed shockingly real to him. He could picture the wild division of her cells, as if he were seeing them through the lens of his microscope. She was here in his arms, in their bed, and he could already imagine her absence from every room in the house. He remembered with horror when Nick was reading Hamlet in high school and had recited at dinner: “To be Bee or not to be Bee,” and the way they’d all screamed with laughter. Julie, poor Julie, had snorted milk and had to leave the table. How would they tell her?

  Edward ended up doing it by himself, after Bee had begged off. “I can’t. Please. Not right now,” she’d said, as if she had all the time in the world. So he called Julie, who had a share in an apartment in his old neighborhood in the city, and asked her to meet him that evening at Nick and Amanda’s house, only a few miles from his and Bee’s own. He advised them all on the phone that he needed to tell them something in person. “What? What is it?” Nick demanded. “What is it?” Amanda echoed anxiously on another extension. They often spoke to Edward or Bee in stereo like that.

  “Let’s wait until I get there, okay?” Edward said, already trying to mitigate what he had to say. But he couldn’t help it—his tone was flat and somber.

  Julie cried out, “You’re not splitting up, are you?” She was five when her father had left, and she’d taken it harder than anyone, according to Bee. “No, never,” Edward said, and her heavy sigh of relief shattered his heart. At least, he consoled himself, the child that he and Bee had wanted but failed to make together wouldn’t have to be told.

  Everyone wept that evening, except for Edward. Like those soldiers who are sent to deliver terrible news to families, his mission was to inform and give solace without breaking down. Bee was wrong about his ever needing a bereavement group; if he could do this on his own, he could do anything. Soon, eventually, he would even be able to tell Gladys, although he secretly wished she would die in her sleep before then, or “lose her marbles,” as she was always threatening to do.

  The worst moment came when Julie bleated, “Mom, Mom,” sounding as plaintive as some lamb separated from the flock. Or maybe it was when Nick kept asking desperately hopeful questions about alternative treatments and experimental trials. Edward had searched medical websites in the middle of the night when Bee was finally asleep, seeking those same miracles despite everything he knew. He did his own weeping in private, too, just as she had once predicted, down in the sanctity of his basement lab, or in the shower where he used to belt out songs to the pulsing beat of the water.

  On the way home from speaking to the children, he pummeled the steering wheel and moaned and yelled with the car windows rolled up. But he was able to compose himself before he approached their house, where Bee, with Bingo like a sentinel beside her, was waiting for him in the doorway.

  Maybe, he thought later, Amanda’s swollen silence was the worst thing, and the way she’d gripped Nick’s hand, as if to keep him beside her, breathing, forever.

  Lessons in Death

  Bingo was almost fifteen years old when Bee became ill. He was the last in a long line of pets they’d acquired over the years, for the children’s sake. True to that ludicrous cliché, Nick and Julie had promised—no, sworn—to care for, in turn, goldfish, turtles, a hamster, a lizard, and a couple of kittens. Bee believed that giving in to their pleas and pledges would make Nick more responsible and help raise Julie’s self-esteem. Edward liked having animals around, but he thought of them more as first lessons in death. Most domesticated creatures had shorter life spans than humans, and then there were accidents.

  He’d had a dog when he was a boy, a German shepherd mix called Schultz, after the neighbor who’d given him the puppy from his dog’s litter. The canine Schultz had been hit by a car and killed after Edward’s father had whistled for him across the street, and the entire family had suffered the loss. Bud Schuyler, talented whistler, especially of birdcalls, never whistled again. And Edward, who should have been walking the dog that night instead of being off somewhere with his friends—he and Catherine had also promised faithful care and feeding—shared his father’s guilt. Sometimes he wondered if his interest in ornithology began back then, with the wonder of imitation birdsong and then its cessation.

  Nick and Julie’s pets had died, too, or mysteriously disappeared—the lizard and the hamster—one after the other. Edward remembered that Julie, a “minnow” in her swim class at day camp, came into the kitchen one morning in her Speedo and announced that Goldy was doing the sidestroke. She had poked at the floating fish gently with a pencil, trying to right it. “Do something!” she’d commanded Bee and Edward, as the truth began to seep in, and she wept enough tears that day to refill the emptied fishbowl. The first lesson.

  Bingo had been adopted when Julie was twelve and in the midst of a social crisis. Her best friend had become someone else’s best friend. She was positive nobody liked her; she needed a dog. Nick was a senior in high school by then, already moving away from home in his thoughts and plans, but in a rare gesture of solidarity he backed Julie up. Dogs were cool. They were funny and smart and they protected you. And sure, he’d help out whenever he could—he could teach their dog some neat tricks.

  The whole family went to the animal shelter together, but Julie got to choose among all the frantically yapping, leaping, and wagging caged beasts. It was going to be her dog and, only peripherally, Nick’s. Bee dropped hints about size and shedding and housebreaking. There was a two-year-old, purebred miniature poodle, a sedate and pretty little apricot-colored dog she’d tried to bring to Julie’s attention. “Look, sweetheart, I think she’s picked you!” Later, she would admit to having being shameless in her
attempts to influence Julie’s choice, but it didn’t matter. Julie was smitten by a large mixed-breed puppy that wet himself and her with joy as she lifted him into her arms. Part beagle, Edward guessed, from the eyeliner and floppy ears, and part collie from its luxuriant, molting coat. God knew where the short fluffy tail came from.

  Julie was allowed to name the dog, too, and Bingo was his name-o. What was wrong with Fido, Buster, or even Spot? If he ran away, as beagles were prone to do, Bee was afraid she’d seem like some crazy church lady with a winning card, scouring the neighborhood calling his name.

  B-i-n-g-o! B-i-n-g-o! The song went mercilessly through her head and Edward’s, as did the puppy’s yowls of loneliness during those first nights in his new home. They tried all the old tricks to fool him into thinking he was nuzzled against his mother in the blanket-lined carton: a loudly ticking clock to replicate the maternal heartbeat; a heated, towel-wrapped brick; and even a stuffed Lassie preserved from Nick’s babyhood that Bingo shredded in his despair.

  Eventually, he settled in. When the novelty of feeding and walking him quickly wore off—Julie found both canned dog food and poop-scooping unbearably gross, and Nick went off to RPI—Bee and Edward took over. Bee’s clinic was a five-minute drive from the house, so she came home for Bingo’s middle-of-the-day walks. Edward took him out at night. After Julie left for Fairleigh Dickinson, Bee said that at least Bingo wasn’t college material, that their nest wasn’t completely empty.