An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  He went up to her and received his second surprise, a shock, really. She wasn’t young at all. The lights in the bistro were low—to create a romantic atmosphere, probably, or to keep the noise level down. The woman at the bar had appeared to be in her twenties or thirties from the entranceway, but up close Edward saw that it had only been an illusion. She was probably nearer to his own age, although that was still difficult to gauge.

  Sylvia had undergone what Bee and her friends used to call “serious work” on her face. There were no apparent lines or wrinkles, no emotional history written there, and there was an unfortunate mask-like tightness to her skin, and even to the plumped-up line of her lips. Once, a few years ago, Bee had yanked up both sides of her face and said, through her stretched mouth, “How do I look?” and Edward said, “Scary. Please don’t do that.”

  What he’d meant was that she didn’t look like herself or like anyone capable of the vast variety of human expressions. He supposed that Sylvia was kind of attractive, especially from a distance, and even ageless in a way. But he wondered what she’d looked like before and why she’d chosen to expunge what must have been her recognizable self. A line from Yeats came into his head: But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face. Probably it was Bee who’d read that to him in the first place, or maybe it only reminded him of her, of the changes he would miss seeing. In any event, she seemed to be his invisible chaperone again.

  When he and Sylvia were seated at a corner table, she said, “How is your mother-in-law?” Her interest seemed genuine, and Edward felt ashamed of his own concentration on her appearance; he might be the more superficial person on this date. “Better,” he said. “Remarkable, actually. She’s in rehab now, trying to get her strength and balance back.”

  “Good,” Sylvia said. “You must really love her.”

  “I do,” Edward said.

  “Your wife was very lucky, then. On all counts.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I mean, I think that was a compliment.”

  “It was. You’re a sweet fella.”

  Edward felt his face grow warm under her friendly, admiring gaze. And he noticed—how could he help it?—that the breasts rising from Sylvia’s low-cut blouse were like snowy globes. Too globe-like, really, too buoyant, for the rest of her. Had they been altered, as well?

  Bee used to say that plastic surgery was useless for older women unless they had their hands cut off. The hands were the giveaway, she’d claimed, and Sylvia’s were graceful and beautifully manicured, but thin-skinned and threaded with veins. Did she regret what she’d done to the rest of her?

  There was nothing artificial about her personality, though, and Edward was more comfortable in her company than he had been with anyone in a long time. The southern accent he’d detected in their phone calls—she’d grown up in Virginia—was melodic and seductive. They ordered two different dishes and shared them, as easily as they shared stories about their school lives. It was a little like being with Frances, toward whom he’d never felt more than brotherly, with the added frisson of sexual tension. There was no doubt about that, despite his critical appraisal of her physical self. Maybe the illusion of youth was a reasonable substitute for the real thing.

  Even while they’d stood together at the bar, he had become aware of the faint, woodsy scent she was wearing, and at the table she leaned toward him whenever he spoke as if he were the most interesting man in the world. She may have just been a little hard of hearing, but he didn’t really care by then. And soon after their dessert was served, when she said, “Will you walk me home? I’m practically around the corner,” he signaled for the check without hesitation.

  They held hands in the street and going past her inscrutable doorman and in the elevator of her high-rise building. She dropped his only long enough to unlock the door to her apartment. There was no conversational foreplay, no pretense about their intentions. They kissed inside the doorway and then she led him through the dimly lit foyer to her bedroom.

  When Edward reached for the light switch, she said, “Don’t,” and pulled him toward the bed, where they fell together onto silken sheets and undressed each other. Well, he probably wouldn’t benefit from illumination, either, with his thinning hair and the paunch he couldn’t really suck in anymore. Her skin was soft, and that scent was in her hair and on her neck and between her breasts. She touched him as eagerly as he touched her and he felt himself rise under her hand.

  He closed his eyes as he slipped into heedless pleasure, but an image of her pulled face rose immediately behind them. And the breasts he stroked and kissed so avidly were too firm, too resilient, even for someone young. He was slackening, deflating, and they both grew still, as if they were listening for the sounds of an intruder. The only intruder, though, was his own mind, with its relentless, imperishable thoughts and pictures. “Sylvia, I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am.”

  He was apologizing to her again and his apologies were sincere, but he knew that would be small comfort now. “It’s been a long time,” he said. “I seem to have lost my concentration.”

  Sylvia moved away from him and reached for the switch on her bedside lamp. The bed was pooled in light, like a stage set. She drew the top sheet up and covered them both. “That’s not what you’ve lost, darlin’,” she said, but her tone was only slightly sarcastic and not unkind. Before he could respond, she said, “It’s my age, isn’t it?”

  “No, no,” Edward said, a slick, easy answer to a complicated question.

  “How many responses did you get to your ad?” she asked in a seeming non sequitur.

  “A few,” he said.

  “More than a few, I’d wager,” she said. “Was anyone else as old as I am?”

  Another tricky question, but one that demanded honesty. “I don’t know how old you are.”

  “I’m seventy,” Sylvia said defiantly. “Seventy-one, to be precise.”

  “I’d never—” he began, but she held up her hand. “Please don’t,” she said. And then, “I noticed that you never mentioned your own age in the ad.”

  “My children wrote that. I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “That’s beside the point, isn’t it?” she said. “The thing is, it doesn’t matter how old you are. You’re a man, so your sex appeal, your attractiveness has a much later expiration date.” Pretty much what Frances had said at Bruno’s, only delivered with more bite. Maybe Frances hadn’t given up on men, after all. Maybe they’d given up on her.

  “I don’t feel too attractive right now,” Edward said, which was absolutely true. And this was the most awkward conversation he’d ever had with a woman he was lying next to.

  Sylvia must have had a similar thought, because she slipped out of bed and wrapped herself in a kimono that had been draped across a chaise on the other side of the room. “Shall we have some coffee?” she said, and went through the doorway without waiting for his answer, giving him a chance to get dressed.

  When they were sitting opposite each other in her dinette, she touched her face and said, “Maybe this turned you off.” Her hand went to her breasts next. “Or was it these?”

  “You’re a lovely woman,” he said, referring to her essence now, so that he could remain honest without being hurtful. “And I’m out of practice.”

  “But there’s no chemistry, right? You’re the science teacher, you should know.”

  “I teach biology, not chemistry,” he said, offering a weak smile.

  “Well, even better.”

  “Actually, it’s called Life Science now.” She was silent. “I thought there was chemistry between us,” Edward said. “And I like you.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “But like doesn’t lead easily to love with women my age. And you get desperate. I have a friend who reads the obituaries looking for fresh widowers before someone else gets to them. And all she requires is a penis and a pulse.” Edward remembered those unsolicited phone calls so soon after Bee’s death.r />
  “If I put an ad in the personals that said ‘Seventy-one-year-old woman longs for ardent lover,’ how many replies do you think I’d get? Trust me, not many, except from some scoundrels or nut cases.”

  “I heard from my share of loonies,” Edward said.

  “So we get coy,” Sylvia went on, “and we say ‘seventy-one years young,’ or lie about our ages. Or do this to ourselves.”

  “Men probably lie, too,” he said.

  “You bet they do. I’ve met a couple of eighty-somethings with contraptions like bicycle pumps to help them get it up. They’d advertised themselves as young studs. And a boy or two looking for financial support, like a sexual scholarship, or maybe just for their mothers. Who knows?”

  “I’m sorry,” Edward said again, feeling as if he were apologizing for all of crude, moronic mankind this time.

  “Oh, drink your coffee,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”

  When he was leaving a little later, he thought, only briefly, of asking if they could be friends, which he wished was possible. He also wished that she would ask him to just hold her, the way women in the movies always did after a failed encounter in bed. In fact, he needed to be held, himself. So he put his arms around her and she returned his embrace. They stood that way, rocking a little, for several moments before they let each other go.

  A Noble Experiment

  Edward took the last two letters from the kitchen drawer and fed them into the shredder. He didn’t even bother reading them again first, although he remembered that one had been a computer printout from a woman named Carole, and the other was written in a large, loopy scrawl and signed “Yours, Ann.” Well, not mine anymore, he thought as the machine screeched and pulped her words, although he found bits of shredded paper stuck to his shoe, like confetti, hours later at school.

  If any of his stepchildren brought up the ad—as they still occasionally did, fishing for news—he would say it had been a noble, if failed, experiment, and he’d try not to sound sardonic, or add Like Prohibition. And he’d put off Frances’s subtle concern for his social well-being and Bernie’s blatant questions about his sex life. He certainly wasn’t “getting any,” to use Bernie’s vernacular, unless you counted pleasuring oneself, which in Edward’s case seemed more of an appeasement than an actual pleasure. He would be sixty-four soon. In time, and without stimulation, even that need would go away.

  On a bright Saturday morning in April, he drove to the Greenbrook Sanctuary, where the usual spring crowd of swallows and crows chirped and cawed and rustled in the trees, which were just beginning to bud. There were other birders ahead of him on the path, so he lingered in a copse of paper birch and was rewarded by the sighting of an airborne purple martin, a species that usually nested closer to human habitation. Edward had never seen one before in all the years he’d visited the Palisades. An adult male, he guessed, from the full iridescent plumage. He watched it soar and bank and dive—a daring solo aerialist—and finally fly off before he noted it in his journal.

  That evening, he took his family out for dinner, to everyone’s favorite Chinese restaurant. Edward picked up Gladys, who used a walker now and required a daytime aide. But she had thrown off the mental fuzziness of the hospital, and was dressed up for this outing in stylish layers of wool and silk. To top it all off, she wore a rakish green felt hat from the 1940s that made her look like an aged Robin Hood in drag.

  On the phone, Amanda had said that she and Nick wanted to hold a sort of intervention at the restaurant for Julie, who was still seeing, and being emotionally mistreated by, her boyfriend, Todd. In fact, she was only available to join them on a Saturday night because Todd had bailed on her again, with some flimsy excuse this time about work he had to catch up on. Since he had an entry-level job at Chase, it was hard to think of anything besides a heist that would require him to put in overtime hours at the bank.

  “It’s just dinner,” Edward told Amanda. “I don’t think you want to corner Julie there.”

  “It will be informal and loving,” Amanda assured him. “Totally constructive.”

  “Yeah,” Nick agreed on the extension. “And that girl needs help.”

  Before they hung up, he told Edward that he had a little surprise for him, too.

  What now? Edward wondered. He hoped they hadn’t planted another personal ad on his behalf, or intended to place one for Julie in some younger, hipper version of the NYR. But he, too, wished she’d get out of that relationship, and maybe it would only happen if she met someone new.

  They had a round table at Tung’s, with a lazy Susan at its center, which they rotated slowly to pass the fragrant variety of dishes around. Julie had seemed in low spirits at the beginning of dinner, but she’d perked up by the time the fresh pineapple and fortune cookies were served. Maybe it was all that protein or just being with her family. She’d even tried on her grandmother’s hat, to general acclaim. Gladys said, “You could have modeled at Bamberger’s in my day!”

  That’s when Amanda cleared her throat in an attention-getting way. Next, she’d be tapping on her water glass with a knife. Edward tried to forestall her by opening his fortune cookie and reading it aloud, the sort of thing Amanda or Julie was far more likely to do. “Listen to this,” he said. “ ‘Strike iron while hot.’ ” It made him remember ironing Bee’s blouses, but all he said to the table at large was, “So what do you think this means?”

  The kids looked at one another, surprised by the question. Then Nick said, “English as a second language?”

  “It means you’re still hot, of course,” Julie said.

  Edward glanced nervously at Gladys, who was sipping her tea and appeared to be deeply within her own thoughts.

  “But maybe not forever,” Nick warned.

  Amanda cleared her throat again. “Speaking of hot,” she said. Edward could see the determination in her eyes and the set of her jaw. She would have used anything anyone said to her advantage.

  “He could still strike while warm,” Julie said to Nick.

  “Yeah, but not lukewarm,” Nick countered.

  “I believe I was speaking,” Amanda said. She hadn’t raised her voice, but everyone grew quiet and turned to her. “Jules,” she said, and Julie, who had just broken open another fortune cookie, let the pieces and her unread fortune drop to the table. “You know we all love you very, very much.”

  “Just like a sister,” Nick said, and Amanda put a restraining hand on his arm.

  “And we value you,” she continued, “more than we think you value yourself.”

  “You’re a doll,” Gladys said. “Just look at that hat face.” Obviously she hadn’t been let in on Amanda and Nick’s plan.

  “Listen,” Edward said, “there’s a time and a place—”

  “What is this?” Julie asked.

  “You’re much too good for that a-hole,” Nick said. “Sorry, Gladdy.”

  “We want to support you in giving Todd up,” Amanda said.

  “God, is there a camera hidden somewhere?” Julie looked over at the next table, where the people sitting there looked back at her, their chopsticks poised.

  Edward signaled the waiter for the check.

  Later, he called Julie at home and tried to put a good spin on Amanda and Nick’s attempt, without condoning it. “It was a little extreme,” he said. “But they really do love you and want you to be happy.” Another noble experiment.

  “They want me to try speed-dating,” she said.

  “Well, I certainly don’t think—” Edward began.

  “And maybe I just will,” Julie said.

  After they hung up, Edward took out his birding book and reread his notes for that day. He’d recorded the brilliant weather, the greening of the trees, and the avian commoners he’d spotted. About the purple martin, he’d written “Adult male, on his own.” Hah!

  As for Nick’s promised surprise, he’d tucked something into Edward’s breast pocket when they were all saying good-bye in the parking lot at Tung’s.
“You’ve got mail, bro,” was all Nick had said at the time.

  And Edward forgot about it until he was on his way to bed that night. He went to the closet then and retrieved an envelope from his jacket pocket. It was addressed to Science Guy at the same PO box number as the letters he’d shredded a few days before. The loopy handwriting looked eerily familiar. When he pulled out the note inside, he saw that it was signed, “Yours, Ann.”

  Fourth Date: Another Chance

  Of course it wasn’t one of the letters he’d shredded, magically made whole again, but it was from the same Ann who’d signed the previous one. There was no salutation this time; he seemed to recall a simple “Hello” at the beginning of the other letter. Now she’d written, “I was disappointed not to hear from you. I suppose you were besieged by mail—as that rare thing, a single, viable man—but that’s no excuse for overlooking a truly good prospect like me. Please tell me the dog ate my letter.” Well, this one had no shortage of self-confidence. Maybe it was catching; his own ego could certainly use a boost. And she seemed to have a sense of humor.

  She went on to say that if he decided to give her (and himself) another chance, they should forgo the usual drink/meal/coffee routine of blind dates and do something less predictable and more active. A walk in the park, perhaps, or a museum visit. Had he seen the Abramović thing at MoMA? She was a native New Yorker who’d strayed from home for a long while, but had returned recently and wanted to catch up on everything. “Why don’t you call me,” she’d written him, an invitation and a command.

  Edward had let his cultural life lapse since Bee’s death. They’d had dual memberships at MoMA and the Museum of Natural History, and a subscription to the New Jersey Philharmonic, none of which he’d renewed when the time came. Once in a while, he bought a single ticket to a concert, or went to a movie by himself or with friends, but his mind always tended to stray.