An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  When she was dying, the dog stayed close by her. Edward disapproved of anthropomorphizing animals. Some of them learned to live with us, but they still retained innate aspects of their own species. Stray dogs tended to find one another and move in wolf-like packs, and even well-fed house cats let out into the garden preyed on birds. He’d discouraged Julie from tying ribbons in her new puppy’s fur, or polishing his toenails. When she lifted a silky ear and whispered “Who does Bingo love?” it was for her own assurance and consolation. Her familiar voice was what he responded to. He would have writhed in ecstasy if she’d recited the Declaration of Independence.

  And reports of dogs howling at the moment of their owner’s death seemed anecdotal at best. But there was something to the idea that they could sense and react to the moods of human beings. The household was tense with apprehension and sadness that centered on the sickroom—Bee and Edward’s bedroom—where a hospital bed had been set up next to the regular bed, and where Bingo chose to hang out. The hospice nurses didn’t object, even when he was underfoot; they seemed to find his presence there entirely natural. They often petted him as they went by, even if it meant washing their hands over and over again.

  Nick rubbed Bingo, too, absentmindedly or as if for luck, and Julie still buried her face in his coat, as she had when he was a pup and served as her own personal comfort and confidant. And Edward could cry in privacy while the dog sniffed at every bush and scrap of grass in search of the perfect place to squat during their nightly walks. For a time, someone was always around to walk Bingo, which wouldn’t be true, at least during the day, once Edward went back to school in the fall, and the rest of the family resumed their regular lives. He suggested that one of the kids might take him on.

  But Julie couldn’t keep him in the city because dogs were excluded from the lease for her apartment, and the woman she shared it with was allergic to fur and dander. Why didn’t Nicky take him?—Bingo was his dog, too. Although Nick, as Bee had, worked close to home, and had a house with a fenced-in yard, he and Amanda didn’t really want the responsibility of a pet. Their new marriage and their respective jobs used up all of their energy and time, and besides, Bingo had always been Julie’s dog. What was that stupid joke? That life doesn’t begin at conception or at birth, but after the children leave home and the dog dies.

  Bingo was grizzled and arthritic and slightly deaf. Cataracts clouded his vision, and sometimes he lost his balance when he lifted his leg. He was very old, especially for a dog of his size, but he was far from moribund, from becoming anyone’s lesson in death. In June, the month before Bee died, Edward found an ad in the local Pennysaver placed by someone offering to do odd jobs that included weeding, babysitting, and dog walking, all for a reasonable fee. He clipped the ad and threw it into the crazy drawer.

  In the middle of August, he took the ad out and called the number listed. A woman answered the phone and said she’d come by that afternoon for an interview. Her name was Mildred Sykes and she was short and square, like a crude wood carving, and somewhere in late middle age. Bingo fell for her immediately. Not that he was a hard sell, but he took to Mildred as if she had sausages hidden on her person.

  Her fee was as reasonable as advertised; she lived nearby, in one of those new, low-cost-housing units; and she was available every afternoon at the hour Bee used to leave the clinic and come home to walk the dog. An old boy like that, Mildred said, could probably use a midmorning walk, too. So Edward hired her immediately, without even checking the references she’d offered. He would make up a couple of extra keys—she could start after Labor Day. In the past, under other circumstances, he might have been more prudent, but right then it seemed as if he had nothing left to lose.

  She asked if Edward needed her for anything else. She could do some light housekeeping or cooking if he’d like, or help in the garden. But they’d had the same reliable cleaning service for years, food had become just a source of sustenance, and he depended on weeding and pruning to keep him occupied, something to do on those endless summer days besides his new hobby of ironing or just moping around. And outdoor work would help to sustain him during weekends once the school semester began.

  “If you want me to, I could read your cards,” she said. “Or do your numbers.”

  “Pardon?” he said.

  “I’m mainly a psychic,” she said. “You know, Tarot, numerology, auras. I do all this other stuff to fill in the hours.”

  “I see,” Edward said, with a pang of regret. “Well, thank you, but right now I only need some dog care.” Why had he said right now? He’d always believed that so-called psychics were deluded, demented, or simply con artists. And who in his right mind would ever want to know the future?

  “That’s fine,” Mildred said, taking the leash from the broom closet doorknob. “Now, why doesn’t Bingo show me some of his favorite trees?”

  An Extra Man

  After all his reluctance about going to the Morgansterns’ dinner party, or anywhere else besides school since Bee’s death, Edward was the first to arrive. The occasion, or non-occasion, as Sybil assured him—“The usual, just a few of us getting together”—had been called for seven o’clock and it was almost a quarter past, but there were no cars parked in the driveway or on the street right near the house, where the drapes were pulled open and the front windows blazed with light.

  The porch lights were on, too, and the little hooded electric lanterns that lit the way up the leaf-littered path. Wood smoke was in the air and Edward, his Honda idling at the curb, saw Sybil and Henry move about their living and dining rooms, passing each other like the wooden figures in the Swiss clock on their mantel.

  Henry’s shingle swung and creaked in the wind. His medical offices, with their own entrance, and with cutouts of menorahs and Christmas trees taped to the windows, were on the side of the house. That was where Bee had taken Julie and Nick for checkups and childhood illnesses until they’d graduated from middle school and Henry’s pediatric practice. Sybil, so efficiently in charge, was Henry’s office manager.

  Edward drove around the corner and parked midway between two streetlamps. In the relatively dark safety of the car, he contemplated continuing on back home, fixing himself a sandwich, and taking the dog out for a bonus walk. He was like a savage summoned into civilization, or someone suffering from a kind of behavioral amnesia. Maybe he’d forgotten how to be in company or eat with implements. Maybe he’d beat his chest and howl instead of shaking hands with the men and accepting the kisses of the women.

  His hands, still holding the steering wheel, were trembling, and he was aware of his own heartbeat, the cooling tick of the car’s engine. He could call them on his cell phone and claim a sudden illness, a stomach thing. There really was a vague cramping somewhere in his abdomen or chest. It was a sensation he remembered from his first days at a new school or a new job. He took the phone from his pocket.

  But instead he called his own number and heard Bee say, “Edward and Bee aren’t home right now. Please leave your name and number after the beep and one of us will call you back.” Before long, one of their friends—probably bossy, outspoken Sybil—would challenge him about not having changed the message, and he’d have to claim that he’d simply forgotten and promise to take care of it.

  In the meantime, though, he could still listen to Bee’s voice in his ear and their names said together like that. Not that he did it often, just once in a while—from a private corner on school grounds or sitting in his parked car somewhere, like this. And he wasn’t so far gone that he felt compelled to actually leave a message for Bee, although there were so many things he wished he could tell her: that the first African American president had been elected, that several of her clinic clients had sent Edward notes expressing their own sense of loss, that he would always feel grateful for the family she had given him.

  “Edward and Bee aren’t home right now …” Recording those outgoing messages had always been such a hilarious hassle. Bee had to revise hers
a few times over the years: first to exclude Bruce, then to include Edward, and finally to leave off the children’s names, one after the other, as they left home. Each time, something had gone wrong. Once, the doorbell had rung repeatedly in the middle of a taping. And the kids had started a screaming battle as soon as she’d started another. During the final recording, when she was joining Edward’s name solely to hers, she’d said, “Bedward and Bee” at first and began to laugh until she got the hiccups. He ran off, laughing, too, to get her a glass of water, and then she made him leave the room so she could resume recording without cracking up again.

  That’s what he listened for mostly, and this time, too, a remnant of that laughter in her voice, a brief reprisal of their silly happiness that day. It didn’t hurt anyone, he reasoned, and the message might even be putting off future phone calls from unknown, unattached women. He put the phone back in his pocket and considered what to do.

  Edward had attended dozens of the Morgansterns’ dinner parties, but he’d never gone there before without Bee and they had never been the first ones to arrive. Long ago, when the children were still at home, there were all the delays of saying good night—Julie was especially clingy—and the futile warnings about bedtime and homework and television repeated like protective mantras.

  And once the kids were grown and gone, Bee had invented other delays: a misplaced earring or shoe, or the need to pee one more time, as if they were going into some third-world area without indoor plumbing instead of to an upscale suburban Jersey street so similar to their own. She’d insisted they were only “fashionably late” when they showed up last, after the other guests had made sloppy dents in the hummus, and the conversation was already heightened by alcohol. Bee loved plunging into the middle of a party, and Edward always followed in her wake, feeling his own natural reticence melt in the warm and lively room.

  Now, hiding out in his car, he looked at his watch every few minutes until the half hour was reached, and then he drove back to the Morgansterns’ street, where other cars were already parked near their house. He recognized Ned and Lizzie Gilbert’s SUV, the environment-friendly Prius that belonged to the Jordans. Just a few old friends, as Sybil had promised in that cajoling telephone call. She had been Bee’s oldest and closest friend, and she and Henry were like sturdy bookends of support throughout her illness and ever since.

  “Edward, we miss you,” she’d practically wailed on the phone, and he realized that he had been missing them, too, all these months, or at least the ordinary business of a communal life, of breaking bread with friends, and talking about politics and movies and neighborhood gossip.

  So he grabbed the bottle of Chardonnay that had rolled around the floor of the passenger side while he drove, and went inside and accepted the minor clamor at his arrival, the velvet skim of the women’s cheeks, the hearty grasps and back-patting of the men. But if they spoke of Bee, he believed he would not be able to bear it, and if they didn’t, it might be equally terrible.

  The recently dead were such a social menace. Their absence was as aggressive as the loudest voice in a room. You could not speak of them without sorrow, or ignore them without shame and even trepidation. They ruined the natural flow of conversation and the pleasurable balance of coupledom. It had been tolerable somehow during that unreal but official period of mourning, when they’d all come to him with their casseroles and consolation. But tonight was a kind of debut, or at least a reentry into the real world. Edward was on his own now; he would be the extra man in the room, the odd number at the table.

  But when he glanced into the dining room, he saw that the gleaming Parsons table had been set for ten; its symmetry was shocking. And then the doorbell rang and Henry was greeting a woman Edward had never seen before. She’d come alone—the door was shut firmly behind her—and she carried a large ferny, foil-wrapped plant, which Henry took from her, along with her coat and trailing scarf, and he staggered a little under the awkward burden. Edward didn’t offer to help, his automatic inclination, because he didn’t want to be introduced to this stranger in the entry. It was only a fix-up, after all, and he felt the awful thrill of Sybil’s betrayal.

  Then Sybil herself was coming toward him, pulling the plant woman along by the hand. “Oh, Edward,” she said, as if they’d just run into each other in the street. “I want you to meet my most favorite cousin, Olga Nemerov. Ollie, this is our old, dear friend, Edward Schuyler.” The woman scowled at Sybil and then at Edward, who contained his impulse to scowl back as Sybil skittered away from them like a sand crab toward other guests.

  Instead, he managed a stilted smile that this Olga Nemerov didn’t bother to return. Was she really Sybil’s cousin or merely some minor, sour character plucked from Chekhov? “Do you live in New Jersey?” he asked idiotically.

  “God, no,” she said, with what he perceived as a tiny shudder. She was a slight, bespectacled person in a prickly-looking tweed suit. Among the other colorful and scented women at the party, she was like a cactus in a rose garden. Bee would have intuitively shown up by now and rescued him.

  “Well, it’s not that bad,” Edward said, thinking that it actually was that bad, that everywhere was. He wanted to ask her why she was so angry, before he realized that she, too, had understood why they’d both been invited and thrust together. “This wasn’t my idea, you know,” he said.

  “My cousin is incurably romantic,” she answered. “She’s been doing this to me since we were teenagers.”

  And it never took, did it, Edward thought. “Sybil means well,” he said, insincerely—another brilliant remark—and Olga actually snorted.

  When Henry boomed that dinner was served and that everyone could sit anywhere, Edward and Olga quickly separated, as if they’d been demagnetized, and headed for opposite ends of the table.

  During the rest of the evening, Edward felt as if he were under a light anesthesia, from which he was roused from time to time to exchange a few words with his neighbors, to eat a little of the food. He couldn’t even bestir himself to become irate with Sybil for being so insensitive to him and disloyal to Bee’s memory. It would have been useless, anyway. She would either baldly deny having tried to set him up, or scold him for yielding his zest for life, Bee’s best and most contagious quality.

  Finally, the ordeal was over. There were more handshakes and kisses, and farewells: “Good night, drive carefully, call me, good night!” Even Sybil’s unsmiling cousin offered her hand at the door and Edward took it, surprised that it was soft rather than bristling with thorns. And then, mercifully, he was released back into his own care.

  The Misery of Company

  There was only one other man in the grief counselor’s living room, and he looked up with something like relief in his eyes when Edward came in. A woman with a notebook on her lap smiled and said, “You must be Edward Schuyler. I’m Amy Weitz. Welcome, and take a seat.” Five other women sitting there glanced at Edward with varying degrees of attention. The only remaining seat was between two of them on a deep sofa, where he slowly sank, as if into a downy trap.

  As he’d told Bee, he wasn’t partial toward groups of strangers. He wasn’t a member of Kiwanis, the Rotarians, or even the National Education Association. And unlike Bee, he’d never joined a bridge or book club. They’d played bridge with their friends, and reading seemed to him like the last stronghold of privacy in a group-crazed society. Why had she ever thought he could abandon his natural reserve in a situation like this?

  But Edward felt intolerably bad, and his friends kept clucking over him. At least there was school on weekdays, somewhere to go that was more or less programmed and predictable, something he had to get out of bed to do. When he’d first returned to Fenton in September, many of his students had looked at him shyly, almost fearfully. They knew about Bee; that kind of news spread easily in a school community, even during vacation months. Should they say something to him? What should they say?

  He felt sorry for them in their awkwardness—everything was so
much harder in one’s early teens—so he spared them the remarks they dreaded as much as he did by jumping right into the work at hand. As they entered the classroom, he was writing on the blackboard in great, scrawling letters: “Welcome back! Start thinking again! Why is science important? What are the principles of good science?”

  His encounters with colleagues were brief and manageable. Those he was closest to, Frances Hartman in math and Bernie Roth in English, had come to the funeral and to the house afterward, and had expressed their regrets about Bee and their affectionate concern for him. Now they took their cues from Edward, and although he caught some worried glances between them, they kept their conversations with him bearably neutral.

  But weekends and evenings had become increasingly difficult. He didn’t want company, and solitary pursuits like birding in the Palisades or performing lab experiments in the basement required energy he couldn’t seem to muster. He’d declined all invitations since the Morgansterns’ dinner—there were several during the holidays—and Henry told him that his withdrawal was unhealthy; perhaps he needed some outside help. And then his internist seconded the motion when Edward came to him for a prescription or two: something to help him sleep at night, something to keep him functioning better during the day. In addition to a mild sedative, Dr. Fiedler scribbled a couple of names on his prescription pad.

  Amy Weitz, MSW, CSW, whose iron-gray hair and excellent posture reminded Edward of the teachers of his childhood, asked each of them to say who they were and why they were there. It wasn’t like those 12-step programs where only first names and addictions are given, followed by a chorus of greetings. The prevailing mood in the room was like Edward’s own—tentative and sad.