An Available Man

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “But how did she sound?” Edward said.

  “I don’t know. Fine, I guess. Flirty, a little funny. Like herself.”

  “And after you turned her down?”

  “She didn’t stay on too long after that. But she seemed cool with it. Like, whatever, as our most eloquent students would say.” Edward was silent. “You still there?” Bernie asked. “Maybe I shouldn’t have even told you about this.”

  “No, it’s okay, really, I’m glad you did.” And he was.

  This was the word he’d been waiting for all day, that Laurel had calmed down, that she wasn’t suicidal, after all, that she was following her old pattern of looking for a new man to replace the one she’d lost, or felt in danger of losing. She was still attractive, and beguiling, in her way. Bernie wasn’t going to take her on, but sooner or later someone else probably would. Edward was free.

  Fifth Date

  He felt the same unsettling mix of anticipation and dread he’d had before those blind dates resulting from the ad in The New York Review. But so much more was at stake here, and of course he already knew Olga—by heart, he thought, although they had met only a few times. The anticipation came from his desire to see her again and to declare himself, the dread from his fear of being rejected.

  The phone call had been awkward enough. Whatever he had intended to say flew out of his head at the sound of her voice. “Ollie, I want to see you,” he’d blurted, and then filled the ticking silence that followed by saying, “I need your advice about something.” Where had that brainstorm come from? But she agreed to have dinner with him that evening, at an Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue.

  They came from opposite directions in the midst of a cloudburst, and almost collided in a sudden gust of wind at the restaurant’s entrance. Her umbrella blew inside out, and Edward fumbled to right it. He wanted to embrace, to enfold, her then, but settled for a wet handclasp—with the umbrella between them, dripping on their shoes—before they went inside. The room was brightly lit and noisy—not the most romantic of settings. But she had chosen it after he’d said, “Pick someplace you like in your neighborhood,” and this was clearly a neighborhood favorite.

  After they’d been seated and ordered wine and listened to the specials, she said, “I suppose you’re not in the market for a medieval tapestry, and I don’t know much about investments or used cars. So, are you after some advice to the lovelorn?”

  Exactly, he thought, but only said, “In a way.” She waited and he continued. “Laurel and I have broken things off.”

  “Ah,” she said. A noncommittal response in which he heard nothing he could interpret as surprise or pleasure or regret or sympathy.

  “And I find I have feelings for you,” he said. The racket in the background seemed to soften and recede as she looked back at him from behind her glasses with all of her attention. “I’m as surprised as you must be,” he said. Why didn’t she say something—anything? No, not anything; just the words he wanted to hear. But she didn’t speak and he was forced to go on. “I think of you all the time.” This was a truth he hadn’t quite known until he said it.

  “I think of you, too,” she said. He waited for her to add but just as a friend, or only not in that way. She didn’t, though, and the table between them became a snowy expanse he could have sprung across. Instead, he reached for her hand and looked at it as carefully as a fortune-teller, or a doctor about to remove a splinter. Her nails were short and unpolished. There were little nicks in her fingers that he imagined came from the needle he’d watched her ply at the museum. He gazed down at her palm with its crisscrossed lines of life and fate and pressed his lips against it.

  “Oh,” she said, that single word floating from her mouth like a perfect smoke ring.

  The waiter brought the wine, and a busboy came with a basket of bread and a dish of olives. Edward and Olga glanced at each other through the blur of activity between them. No one who happened to observe them at that moment would have thought they were new lovers, or about to be. They would more easily be taken for an older married couple, out celebrating an anniversary or a birthday, or even some good news about a biopsy. But Edward felt new—younger, and flooded with expectation.

  Over dinner, he told her something about his history with Laurel, calling it a folie à deux, revisited, with a slight pang about the use of that French expression. Then he spoke about Bee: the way they’d met, their marriage, her mother and the children, her illness and death. It sounded to his own ears like a crude abridgement of a long, complex novel. But Olga seemed to intuit whatever he’d omitted. “Bee sounds wonderful,” she said. And, “You’ve been in deep mourning, and everyone expected you to just snap out of it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I hoped, I really tried, to snap out of it, myself, but it doesn’t work that way.”

  “And you still love her.”

  “I do, in remembrance. But this—you—it’s like the beginning of a new lifetime. Mildred, the woman who used to walk my dog, doubles as a psychic—a sort of suburban mystic. She believes in literal past lives. Who knows, maybe I’ve loved many women over the centuries.”

  Olga smiled. “Now you’re making me jealous,” she said.

  She told him that she’d never come close to what he’d had with Bee, although there’d been affairs that had seemed loaded with promise before they fizzled. “I don’t know why, exactly. Bad choices, bad timing, bad vibes—or maybe it was bad karma, as your friend Mildred might say. Sometimes, I think that I’ve missed out on everything. Other times, I just think of it as my life.”

  “Your past life,” he amended.

  “Yes.”

  They kissed as soon as they were back out on the street, briefly, as if they were sealing a contract. A moment with more tenderness than heat. Then they walked the few blocks in the rain to the brownstone where she lived on the second floor. He’d forgotten that she had a dog, but recognized the scratching and whimpering, that renewable excitement, behind the door to her apartment when she put her key into the lock.

  “Don’t worry, she’s friendly,” Olga said as the door opened and the pug leapt from one of them to the other, snorting and wheezing and bestowing affection, her curled tail quivering with happiness.

  “There’s an understatement,” Edward said. He missed Bingo right then, but what a sweet dog Josie was, so instantly trusting. Maybe he’d been Napoleon in one of his former lives.

  Olga set out the dog’s dinner, and then she led Edward into her bedroom. She removed her eyeglasses and placed them on one of the nightstands before she turned to him. How undefended her naked face seemed. This time their kiss sent a shock directly to his groin.

  He’d had some quick impressions of the room when they first came in, that it was smallish and uncluttered, with a faint scent of cedar in the air. Later, he would remember the glow of the bedside lamps, like moonlight; the thick, silky quilt; and the welcoming give of her bed when they lay down together. Edward had thought, had fantasized, about making love to her. Somehow he’d expected it to be good, but not sizzling—more like the modest charge of a small domestic appliance. She wasn’t his type, because he no longer had a type. But her body was marvelous in its urgency against his, and his own surge of passion took him by surprise.

  Afterward, still entwined, they shared a few moments of stunned, happy silence. Then he said, “You don’t really hog the bed, you know.” He marveled at how little space she seemed to take up.

  “Just you wait,” she said, but it was more of a promise than a threat.

  “So, here we are,” he said. “How did this happen?”

  “I’m not sure. Do you think we’ve been possessed?”

  “I have, anyway,” he said. “When I remember you at Sybil and Henry’s that first time—”

  “Don’t.” She held one finger to his mouth. “I was such a bitch.”

  “Yes, you were. And I was an insufferable prick.”

  “That’s true. But now we’ve both been transformed.�
�

  “Restored to our better selves,” Edward said, and he realized that this was what he had missed more than anything, this easy, intimate talk before sleep that seemed to send you gently drifting off, away from the shore of the day.

  When he was almost there, Olga stirred in his arms. She reached from under the quilt and groped for her glasses. Then she put them on and turned to him again, propping herself up on one elbow

  “What are you doing?” he asked drowsily.

  “I’m looking at you,” she said.

  “Not too closely, I hope.”

  “Why not?” she said. “You have a very good face.”

  “And you … you are entirely beautiful.”

  “Oh, Edward, that’s just post-coital dementia.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s love.”

  The Seal of Approval

  Chanel appeared as delighted to see Edward as Olga’s pug had been a few weeks before. But in the puppy’s wild excitement, she tugged his shoelaces open, nipped at the hems of his trousers, and peed a little on his shoes. “You bad girl,” Amanda said, making it sound as warmly indulgent as praise. She even slipped Chanel a treat, while handing Edward a Kleenex for his shoes and inviting him to feel her belly, which had grown astoundingly since he’d last seen her. It felt like a basketball, freshly pumped with air and bounce.

  Then she and Nick gave Edward a tour of the nursery, which he dutifully admired, although he was taken aback by the black-and-white color scheme. Amanda, who’d been researching prenatal development, explained that stark contrasts would help the baby’s eyes to focus. She was already enhancing the fetus’s brain by reading children’s books aloud, listening to classical music, and eating foods high in choline and omega-3. They’d decided not to learn the baby’s sex in advance, so they could greet it without what Amanda called “gender-ghettoizing preconceptions.”

  “Very nice,” Edward said about everything, although the mobile suspended over the crib had the dizzying effect of an Escher maze.

  When they were sitting in the living room, drinking coffee, Nick said, “So, what are you up to, Professor? You haven’t been around for a while.”

  Edward couldn’t have asked for a better opening, and he grabbed it. “I’ve been seeing someone,” he said. What people usually said about casual dating, he realized, or about consulting a psychotherapist.

  They both stared at him for a moment before Amanda punched Nick’s arm and said, “I told you that ad would work!”

  “Ow,” Nick said. “You mean seeing, like in going out with?” he asked Edward.

  “Well, more than that,” Edward said, embarrassed by his own sudden shyness.

  “You’re in love!” Amanda shrieked. Even the baby must have taken that in.

  “Yes,” he admitted gladly, “I’m in love.”

  “Is she the one who sent her picture?” He looked at her blankly and she said, “You know. That pharmacist’s widow in Hoboken, the perfumed letter?”

  Dating after death. “Oh, no,” he said. “No. She’s not one of the women I met through the ad.”

  Amanda sank back a little against the sofa cushions.

  “But the ad got me out there again, back into the social whirl,” Edward told her, remembering how it had almost turned him into a hermit, but she seemed appeased.

  “Well, this is thrilling,” she said. “Tell us all about her. How did you meet? What does she look like? What does she do? What’s her name?”

  “Manda, you sound like the police,” Nick said. “Give him a chance to answer.”

  “Her name is Ollie, Olga, actually. Olga Nemerov. I met her …”

  Here Edward faltered. Did their first meeting at the Morgansterns’ count? It was so long ago, preceding the ad by months, and such a disaster. “We met at the Cloisters,” he said, picturing The Unicorn in Captivity, prancing and so lightly tethered. And he remembered Ollie feeding crumbs from her sandwich to the birds, taking off her glasses to look at the garden. It sounded like the absolute truth.

  “God, that’s such a romantic place. We should go there,” Amanda said to Nick, who put one arm around her, his other hand splayed across her belly, as if he were about to dribble it across the court and shoot for a basket.

  Edward described Ollie to them—her reddish spiked hair, her small frame and articulate, unadorned hands—what he’d come to think of as her accidental beauty. He talked about her ironic charm, and tried to explain her work and how honored she felt to have those precious relics in her care. Edward thought of all that he’d left out. Laurel, especially. But he hadn’t intended to tell them the whole complicated story, just to announce his new status as part of a couple. He’d come alone to do it, just as he’d come alone to tell them about Bee’s illness, the beginning of his uncoupling.

  Back then, he’d given them the bad news and tried to deflect and absorb some of their grief. This time he sought their approval, their acceptance of his newfound happiness. And how easily that was obtained. Maybe it was because their own happiness was so fulfilling and preoccupying: their love for each other and for their baby, with its developing brain and limbs and personality; the house they were avidly decorating; their life together stretched out before them like a gloriously lush field.

  If Nick had any sense of disloyalty to his mother, he kept it to himself. But Edward felt bound to bring Bee up. How could he not? He had been her husband and these were her children. “This doesn’t undo my love for Mom,” he said. “I’m not replacing her. She’s irreplaceable. I’m just starting out again.” And he thought of that novel, Starting Out in the Evening, that Bee had kept reading to him.

  “We know that,” Nick said. Tears stood in his eyes. He jumped up from his seat beside Amanda and threw his arms around Edward. “This is such great news, man,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “We wish you the best.”

  “The best,” Amanda echoed. “And I’ll hug you, too, Dad, as soon as somebody gives me a hand up.”

  Julie would be even easier. Edward had already told her something about Laurel, after being forced into it by her phone call to Julie, which Julie had blown up into some grand, reality-show-based fairy tale. Later, when he said that he’d been seeing Laurel more frequently, she’d seemed pleased, and eager to meet her. She had even suggested they double-date! Maybe she’d be disappointed to discover his new love was someone else entirely, but it was the matter of his loneliness that had mostly concerned her. What had she said, so dolefully, after Bingo died? Poppy, now you’re all alone.

  And he believed that she would like Ollie, that she would find her as witty and smart as he did. And, in due course, as dear, too. It was Gladys he didn’t want to think about. He shrank from sharing his news with her almost as much as he’d resisted telling her about her only child’s fatal illness. Maybe Julie, who was so close to her grandmother, would advise him on how to approach her.

  But he was going to take it one step at a time. After he left Nick and Amanda’s, he drove into the city to meet Julie for supper. This was the first Saturday in more than a month that he hadn’t spent with Olga, but he would see her later, stay over at her apartment that night. He had told her that he was informing his stepchildren that he’d fallen in love. “That sounds a little tricky,” she said.

  “Not really,” he’d assured her. “They tried to fix me up way before I was ready. They’re really great kids.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but they still might think of me as an interloper. You’ve been a family for such a long time.”

  “You’ll fit right in, trust me,” he said, thinking: You are my family now, too.

  “Maybe they’ll worry about their inheritance. Can you assure them that I’m not a gold digger?”

  Edward laughed. “There’s not a hell of a lot of gold to dig,” he said.

  “That’s not the point. Just let them know I’m not after you for your money.”

  “What other reason could you possibly have?”

  “Stop fishing,” she sai
d. “And tell them they never have to meet me if they don’t want to.”

  “They’ll have to and they’ll want to,” he said. “I’ll make you sound irresistible, which won’t be very hard.”

  “Poor Edward. You are so easy.”

  Julie was a little late. Edward had finished a glass of water and one of the rolls in the basket before she came in. He kept clearing his throat, as if he were about to go onstage with none of his lines memorized. Then she was there, making her way between the tables, mouthing, “Sorry, sorry,” to him. She held one hand near her ear to indicate she’d been stuck on the phone.

  He kissed her and pulled out her chair. “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “The important thing is that you’re here. Are you hungry? I am.”

  They ordered and he waited until their food came before he said, “Jules, dear, I have an announcement to make.” That was more formal than he’d meant to be. She had just speared some lettuce leaves with her fork, which she lowered to her plate.

  “What?” she said. She looked primed for bad news, and he wished for her sake that her feelings weren’t so close to the surface, that her face didn’t always give her away. Punks like Todd probably used her transparency to their own advantage.

  He smiled at her. “It’s something good.” He had an uneasy sense of déjà vu. This was similar to the conversation he’d had with Julie about Laurel. Would she think he’d become an over-the-hill playboy?

  “Did you win the lottery?” she asked. She picked up her fork again.

  “No, but this is even better. I’ve met someone special.”

  “Oh? You mean what’s-her-face, that person you used to date a long time ago?”

  “No, that didn’t pan out,” he said.

  “Bummer,” she said, munching her salad.

  “Yes, in some ways. But then I met Olga.”

  “Olga! Is she foreign?”

  “No. But her parents were into Russian literature.” He’d just made that up. She’d been named for a beloved aunt.