An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Of course I’m not,” he said. “You’re wonderful.” And she was, in her own innovative way.

  “I’ve never been to your house,” she said. “That rental in the Vineyard doesn’t count, and I had to practically force my way in there. Even my married lover took me home once, when his wife and kids were out of town.”

  While Edward was trying to envision that scene, it was supplanted by an image of Laurel entering the house in Englewood, of her shadow crossing the threshold of his marriage. Now he really wanted to change the subject. “Listen,” he said, “do you remember Bernie Roth?”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “Short guy? In the English Department at Fenton.”

  “Oh, yeah, the little bantam rooster,” she said.

  Accurate, he supposed. Bernie did strut and crow a lot back then. He still did, at times. “Well, there’s a place on Columbus Avenue, Bruno’s, that we go to sometimes after school, Bernie and Frances Hartman and me. She’s in math, hired way after your time.”

  “Are they together?” she asked.

  “No. They may have been once, but not now.”

  “How old is she?”

  “I’m not sure—you know how bad I am about people’s ages. Fifties?”

  “I see,” Laurel said. What did she see? “Do they know about me?” she asked.

  “Yes. Bernie was there when we were together, remember?” He was at the church. His wedding gift was one of a trio of chafing dishes I had to return. “He still talks about your amazing hair. And I’ve told them both about running into you again.”

  She didn’t question him about the content of that conversation. Instead she said, “How long have you been at Fenton, Edward? It must be a million years by now. Haven’t you ever thought about retiring?”

  Yes, he had thought about it, and so had Bee. They were going to retire together when she turned sixty, and he sixty-five. What did Gladys say? Man plans, God laughs. It sounded better, or worse—more dire, somehow—in Yiddish. Yet he and Bee had made elaborate plans to travel, especially to the Far East, where neither of them had ever been. For his sixtieth birthday, she had bought him a field guide to the birds of East Asia. Do some of them sing in Mandarin? she wondered. For her part, she’d already started to research the open markets and bazaars in New Delhi and Katmandu. They were not going to turn into the Wexlers, who’d stayed in New Jersey, squabbling, and squandering their remaining days.

  “Sure, I’ve considered it,” he said, “and the school board has offered incentives to get us old-timers out. But I guess I’m just not ready yet.” He didn’t say that work had been his salvation after Bee died, or that he still got a kick out of teaching. Laurel had taken her pension in Phoenix several years before, bored to death by generations of children and their lousy accents. She’d worked at a few odd jobs for a while afterward—mostly to help pay for refresher visits to her therapist—as a freelance translator, selling art objects in a gallery, and as a receptionist in a doctor’s office. Was that her married lover? Edward didn’t ask, just as she’d never mentioned Ellen again. Quid pro quo.

  “I’ll be going back to the salt mines soon,” he said. “Bernie and Frances and I will probably all meet up at Bruno’s to commiserate beforehand and review the summer. Why don’t you come, too?”

  “Maybe,” she said. But she let him take her hand.

  Late

  When Laurel was twenty minutes late, Edward tried not to look at his watch again too soon. Instead, he glanced across the table at Bernie’s oversized Fossil chronograph, which seemed to be running about ten minutes fast. He wished he knew which one was accurate; half an hour seemed significantly later than twenty minutes. Frances’s watch was one of those tiny things with little jeweled dots instead of numbers and such delicate hands they were hard to discern from even a foot or so away. And she kept moving her own hands around, fiddling with her purse and realigning the salt and pepper shakers. When had she become an obsessive-compulsive? Edward wanted to clamp his hands over hers to make her stop and then, when she was still, take a quick, close look at the face of her minuscule watch.

  They’d ordered a pitcher about fifteen minutes into their wait and, despite a dry mouth and throat, Edward was nursing his beer. Bernie seemed to be guzzling his, and he’d already reduced the bowl of pretzels to a pile of salt and dust. “Traffic,” Edward said, as if it were merely an idle observation, and although Columbus Avenue appeared almost deserted on this Friday before Labor Day. Even Bruno’s was pretty empty. He didn’t check his watch again for what felt like ages, but only ten more minutes had gone by. Laurel was officially half an hour, or perhaps forty minutes, late by then.

  Edward hadn’t been this fixated on the passage of time since what he now thought of with irony as his first wedding. The church had been filled, yet he hardly knew anyone there, including the minister, who’d met with the bridal couple only once a couple of weeks earlier, to discuss the ceremony and give them some perfunctory marital counseling. His language was archaic, Edward remembered. He said things like “Cleave unto each other,” and went on about the “sacrament of commitment.” Edward and Laurel had trouble containing themselves. And what a sad joke that proved to be.

  Standing in the vestry with Laurel’s father, Edward heard the wheezing, meandering notes of the organ, like a medley of numbers played on a cocktail lounge piano. All the splendid music they’d chosen awaited a signal to the organist that everyone germane to the occasion had arrived. His parents sat expectantly in the first row of pews on the groom’s side of the aisle, which also held the overflow from the bride’s side.

  On Laurel’s instructions, the two mothers had worn lilac-colored dresses. Evelyn Schuyler’s was made of lace, and had what she’d kept referring to, with obvious pleasure, as a “sweetheart neck.” Why were details like that still fresh in his memory? When they’d all first assembled on the steps to the church, Bud Schuyler, in a morning coat and striped trousers, patted his pockets repeatedly, probably for the notes he’d prepared for his toast to the newlyweds.

  At Edward’s wedding to Bee, Bud had raised his champagne flute and spoken extemporaneously. “What a beautiful day this is,” he said, although dark clouds hovered, menacing the garden reception. “It is!” he insisted, when there was laughter and some wag opened an umbrella. “And what a joy to welcome our new daughter, Beatrice, and her wonderful children into our family.” Edward had repaid his parents for the aborted wedding by then, although they’d wanted to forgive the debt.

  He had weddings on the brain, and a feeling of dread growing in his gut. What had Laurel’s father said to him in the vestry? “She was often tardy to school, too. Her mother always had to write these notes for her. ‘Indisposed,’ she used to say. It covered everything.” Edward had received similar missives from students’ parents over the years, and a few forged by the latecomers and absentees themselves—every teacher did. He stared at the man, who smelled of mothballs and breath mints, and he knew that Laurel wasn’t coming at all. In an unhinged moment, he imagined a note from her mother. Please excuse Laurel’s absence from her wedding to you. She was indisposed.

  At Bruno’s, he remembered asking her sarcastically if she had such a note when she’d tried to explain that she’d been sick, and how bewildered she had been by his meanness. He wondered if she’d considered this date a kind of thrown bone, an easy way of appeasing her appetite for the parts of his life he didn’t share with her. And maybe she’d be right about that.

  He got up from the table and went to the men’s room, where he called her cell phone. It must have been turned off because he was connected directly to her voice mail, with its generic message to leave a call-back number at the sound of the tone. “We’re waiting for you, Laurel Leaf,” he said. “Hope everything is okay. Well, see you soon!” A toilet flushed in one of the stalls before he hung up, a perfect finale to his forced cheeriness. Without planning to, he’d used a term of endearment—Lorelei and Lulu were others—from their ea
rly courting days. Was it out of nostalgia or renewed affection? Or just some magical thinking, an abracadabra to draw her there?

  If so, it didn’t work, and now there was no way to avoid addressing her absence. It was more than an hour past the appointed time, by anyone’s watch. “I just left her a message,” he said, plunking his phone down on the table and taking a long swill of his beer. “She should be getting back to me.” Frances murmured something agreeable, but Bernie said, “If she’s standing you up again, man, I don’t want to be a witness.”

  “Bernie!” Frances said, but Edward was glad that the elephant in the room, or not in the room, was finally being acknowledged. “At least I won’t have to return a gang of gifts this time,” he said.

  “How did you ever manage to do that?” Frances asked.

  Edward pretended she was only referring to the physical challenge. “We had an invitation list, with addresses, and Laurel had made a notation next to everyone’s name—you know, Joe Blow: ugly chafing dish.”

  “That’s what I gave you, wasn’t it?” Bernie said.

  “Well, yours wasn’t ugly, but yes, you and a couple of other Joe Blows. I just had to rewrap each gift and return it to the sender. It was their job to get a refund.”

  “I think I still have mine somewhere,” Bernie said, almost to himself.

  “You might have to take a store credit,” Edward said.

  “That must have taken you ages, Edward,” Frances said.

  “My sister helped,” Edward told her. He didn’t mention his own catatonic state or Catherine’s critical commentary about people’s taste and generosity, especially among Laurel’s guests. “Gee, do you think the five-and-dime would take this back?” she’d wondered aloud as she held up some object between two fingers before smothering it with tissue paper. “You would have had to bury this in the backyard,” she said about an openmouthed, fish-shaped cigarette dispenser, “and it would probably have worked its way out again.” Some of it actually seemed funny today, but everything anyone said to him back then felt like a physical assault. And reliving it all in Bruno’s more than a quarter of a century later still generated a surprising sting. Where the hell was she?

  Those were the true magical words, as it turned out, even if he hadn’t said them aloud. The door opened and Laurel walked in and scanned the room. Edward would not have been completely shocked to see a willowy, haloed bride waving her bouquet of exotic flowers at him, instead of a shapely older woman in red, with one hand poised above her eyes, as she tried to adjust to the relative darkness indoors. He had a chance to really look at her before she found him. Did she seem flustered and out of breath, like someone who’d kept people—one of them a complete stranger—waiting more than a comfortable length of time? Was she contrite?

  He couldn’t tell, and as she approached he didn’t truly care, his sense of relief was so great. He stood with his right hand to his hectic heart, like a patriot in the presence of the flag. “This is Laurel,” he said, but who else could it be? Bernie stood, too, slowly, obviously marveling at how she had changed and who she’d become.

  “Mon chou,” she said to Edward, offering her pursed lips for a kiss. “You wouldn’t believe the traffic,” she continued, taking the empty chair. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Do you have a note from your mother?” Bernie asked.

  Home Cooking

  Mildred Sykes, Edward discovered, was a very good cook. He’d come home one day after school to find half of a small roasted and stuffed chicken in the refrigerator, with a note propped against it. “Left over from a lady I clean and cook for. Hope you enjoy it.”

  The reheated chicken was excellent, moist and crisp at once, with a fragrant, crumbly herb filling. Edward had still not gotten into the habit of making anything resembling a regular meal when he ate at home by himself. Sometimes he scrambled some eggs with grated cheese, opened a can or two, or brought in a pizza that served as supper for a couple of nights. He’d been living like a kid, or a young bachelor. But the ceremony of food preparation was still joyless without a partner. And Laurel and he usually ate out; her kitchen was so tiny and ill equipped.

  He had asked Gladys and the children to come for supper the following Sunday and intended to offer them the usual ethnic takeout—Thai or Vietnamese, dished out directly from the cartons—before he’d encountered Mildred’s surprise in his refrigerator. The next time he saw her, he asked if she would come in to cook something for his family and help to serve it and clean up afterward. They decided on a menu of lasagna and a spinach salad, with Moroccan spiced almonds and mushroom bruschetta as appetizers. She advised him to leave the choice of a dessert up to her.

  For the first time in more than two years, the house was aromatic with home cooking, and Mildred had washed and laid out Bee’s neglected best china and glassware, which Edward had been planning to hand over to Nick and Amanda one of these days. The dining room table was both formal and festive, with candles and blue linen napkins that Mildred had rolled into scrolls and tied with yellow satin ribbons.

  Julie called about an hour before everyone was expected and asked if she could bring a friend, and Edward, distracted by all the activity in the kitchen, said yes without asking who the friend was. Not that he would have rejected anyone, but after he hung up he hoped it wouldn’t be her allergic roommate, requiring Bingo’s banishment, or Todd, whom she was still seeing when she wasn’t seeing Andrew Gold. Like Edward, Julie was living a divided life, and so far they were both getting away with it.

  Nick and Amanda picked Gladys up and arrived first. “Is this a special occasion?” Gladys asked when she saw the table. Edward could tell she was worried that she might have forgotten someone’s birthday. But as a foil against memory loss, she kept a log of that sort of data, including lists of the gifts she’d given everyone for previous birthdays to avoid repetition.

  The dog was stalking Mildred in the kitchen, as much out of a desire for scraps—she dropped bits of food with the sang-froid of Julia Child—as out of devotion to her. Even Julie couldn’t get his full attention, but at least she had Andrew Gold’s. The two of them had turned up soon after the others. He was tall and lanky, with dark curly hair and scholarly-looking rimless eyeglasses. His eyes sought Julie out in what Edward recognized as a lovesick gaze, but he noticed that she didn’t cling to Andrew the way she did to Todd, which he took as a promising sign. She didn’t seem to be afraid that this one might get away.

  Edward ushered everyone, except for Bingo, out of Mildred’s way and into the living room, where she’d laid out the appetizers. There was an unfamiliar reserve to the family gathering, marked by courteous outbursts, like “Have some nuts! They’re delicious!” and protracted silences, broken only by the noisy crunching of the nuts. Was it the stranger in the kitchen or the one in the living room who made them all so self-conscious?

  When Mildred appeared in the doorway to announce that dinner was ready, Edward looked at her as if she were the comic relief in a ponderous play. “Good!” he said too loudly, bounding up from his chair. “Let’s eat!”

  At the table, he scanned the faces of his children and Julie’s date, trying to discern if any announcements were forthcoming—about a pregnancy, perhaps, or an engagement—that would turn this stiff little affair into a celebration. But no one seemed about to make any. And Gladys, on whom Edward could usually count for some lively comments, quietly attended to her food, which she then pronounced superb. That gave Edward his cue to summon Mildred from the kitchen. She’d declined to join them for dinner, but when he called, “Mildred, come out and take a bow,” she came to the doorway and actually bowed deeply from the waist, while everyone clapped and Bingo barked.

  As soon as she’d returned to the kitchen, the spell of constraint was broken and the conversation picked up. There were no earthshaking bulletins, but Andrew told Gladys that he loved her hat, a metallic turban that resembled a coiled cobra, and was impressed to learn that it was older than he was. Amanda said that
she’d kill for the lasagna recipe. By the time Mildred came back with a trembling mound of zabaglione, they were all chattering away comfortably. Edward insisted that she sit down with them for dessert, and, still wearing her apron, she allowed him to pull up another chair for her between Amanda and Julie.

  “Are you a Gemini?” Mildred asked Julie.

  Julie put one hand to her throat. “How did you know?” she said.

  “I sense a duality in you,” Mildred said.

  “You mean she’s schizoid, right?” Nick said.

  “Shut up, Nickhead,” Julie told him, before turning back to Mildred. “Do you do horoscopes?”

  “ ‘It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves,’ ” Andrew quoted, and Edward looked at him with new interest, but Julie ignored him.

  “Horoscopes, Tarot, palms, numerology,” Mildred said.

  “And a divine zabaglione,” Edward added, in a pathetic attempt to redirect the conversation.

  “This is just a sideline,” Mildred said, with a dismissive gesture at the debris of dinner.

  “I’d love a reading,” Julie said. “I mean, for your usual fee, of course.”

  “My treat!” Gladys cried. Since when was she an advocate of the mystical?

  “Do you happen to have your Tarot cards with you?” Julie asked Mildred.

  Of course she did—she probably had a crystal ball in her oversized tote, too—and after Mildred had cleared the dessert dishes, with Julie’s help, she went off to get the cards. “Wouldn’t you rather play charades?” Edward said, an unlikely suggestion from him. He usually had to be dragged into party games.

  “No!” Julie and Amanda cried in unison. Maybe Amanda was another two-faced Gemini.

  As Mildred began to lay the cards out on the table, Edward went into the kitchen and began to rinse the plates and stack them in the dishwasher. After a couple of minutes, Nick and Andrew followed him. “What!” Edward said, in mock disbelief. “You guys aren’t into that stuff?”