An Available Man Read online

  An Available Man is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Hilma Wolitzer

  Reading Group Guide copyright © 2012 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to peermusic for permission to reprint excerpts from “Bésame Mucho” (Kiss Me Much). Original Spanish words and music by Consuelo Velázquez, English lyrics by Sunny Skylar, copyright © 1941, 1943 by Promotora Hispano Americana de Musica S.A. Administered by Peer International Corporation. Reprinted by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wolitzer, Hilma.

  An available man : a novel / Hilma Wolitzer.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52756-1

  1. Widowers—Fiction. 2. Older people—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.O563A95 2012

  813′.54—dc23 2011037248

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Jacket design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Jacket image: DeA Picture Library/Getty Images

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1. Out of the Woodwork

  2. Bachelor Days

  3. The Beginning

  4. The Messenger

  5. Lessons in Death

  6. An Extra Man

  7. The Misery of Company

  8. The Monster in the Basement

  9. Science Guy

  10. Dating After Death

  11. Love Letters

  12. First Date

  13. What I Did on My Summer Vacation

  14. Smoke and Mirrors

  15. Patterns of Evolution

  16. Second Date

  17. What Women Want

  18. Two Telephone Calls

  19. Third Date, Postponed

  20. Third Date, Achieved

  21. A Noble Experiment

  22. Fourth Date: Another Chance

  23. Payback

  24. DSM

  25. Unknown Caller

  26. Reincarnation

  27. Silver and Gold

  28. An Unavailable Man

  29. Therapy

  30. The Dream

  31. The Next Day

  32. Real Life

  33. Separate Lives

  34. Late

  35. Home Cooking

  36. The Unicorn in Captivity

  37. Sleeping Arrangements

  38. Lost and Found

  39. The Way We Live Now

  40. The Missing Piece

  41. Glory

  42. Lying in Bed

  43. Urgent Personal Business

  44. My Old Flame

  45. Eden

  46. Aftermath

  47. Fifth Date

  48. The Seal of Approval

  49. The Future

  50. Coda

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  A Reader’s Guide

  Out of the Woodwork

  Edward Schuyler was ironing his oldest blue oxford shirt in the living room on a Saturday afternoon when the first telephone call came. He’d taken up ironing a few months before, not long after his wife, Bee, had died. That happened in early summer, when school was out, and he couldn’t concentrate on anything besides his grief and longing. At first, he only pressed things of hers that he’d found in a basket of tangled clean clothing in the laundry room. He had thought of it then as a way of reconnecting with her when she was so irrevocably gone, when he couldn’t even will her into his dreams.

  And she did come back in a rush of disordered memories as he stood at the ironing board. But he had no control over what he remembered, sometimes seeing her when they first met, or years later in her flowered chintz chair across the room, talking on the telephone and kneading the dog’s belly with her bare feet—Bee called it multitasking—or in the last days of her life, pausing so long between breaths that he found himself holding his own breath until she began again.

  Still, this random collage of their days together was better than nothing, and it was oddly comforting to smooth the wrinkles out of her blouses, to restore their collapsed bosoms and sleeves and hang them in her closet, where they looked orderly, expectant. And he liked the hiss of steam in the quiet house and the yeasty smell of the scorched cloth.

  Now he lay the iron down on the trivet and, with Bingo, the elderly dog, padding right behind him, went into the kitchen to answer the phone. Without his reading glasses, which didn’t appear to be anywhere, Edward couldn’t make out the caller I.D. But when he said hello there was no reply, and he assumed he’d hear one of those recorded messages from someone running for something. It was late October, after all. Half his mail these days was composed of political flyers, the other half divided between bills and belated notes of sympathy. He was about to hang up when a woman’s voice said, “Ed? Is that you?”

  No one he knew called him Ed, or Eddie. Sometimes a telemarketer made a stab at sudden intimacy that way, but he was not a man who invited the casual use of nicknames. Even Bee, who knew him as well as anyone, and loved him, had always called him Edward. Her two grown children still kept their childhood names for him—Nick addressing him as “Schuyler” or “Professor,” and Julie as “Poppy.” Nick’s bride, Amanda, said “Dad,” a little self-consciously, while reserving the title “Daddy,” as Julie did, for her own father.

  “This is Edward, yes,” he said into the phone. “Who is this?” and the woman said, “You don’t know me, Ed, but we have a good friend in common.”

  He didn’t say anything and she continued. “My name is Dorothy Clark, Dodie to you. Joy Feldman and I went to school together.”

  Edward tried to imagine sweet, matronly Joy as a schoolgirl, but all he could think of was the Tuna Surprise casserole she’d slid into his freezer right after the funeral, and that days later he’d found a single hair at its defrosted center. Bee might have said, Ah, the surprise! He had a chilly premonition that this woman was going to try to sell him something death-related, like perpetual grave care, or hit him up for a contribution to some obscure charity in Bee’s memory.

  But her voice seemed to deepen a little with emotion as she said, in response to his silence, “You and I are in the same boat, Ed. I mean I’m recently widowed, too, and Joy thought … well, that we should probably get to know each other.”

  He wondered why Joy would have ever thought that, and then he understood, with a little shock of revulsion and amusement, not unlike the way he’d felt when he discovered the hair in the casserole. “I see,” Edward said. “That was kind of her, but I’m afraid she was mistaken. I’m not really looking for … for any new friends at the moment.” At the bird feeder tray right outside the window, a few chickadees settled and pecked.

  “Oh, of course,” Dorothy Clark said in a brighter tone. “Everyone has their own timetable for grieving. But when you’re ready, why don’t you give me a ring. I live in Tenafly, we’re practically neighbors. I’ll give you my number.” There was a flurry at the bird feeder as a jay arrived, scattering seed and the chickadees.

  “All right,” Edward said resignedly, politely. He was polite to telemarketers, too, even those who took liberties with his name.
/>   She was suspicious, though. “Do you have a pencil?” she asked. If he had a pencil, he might have noted the chickadees and the jay in his neglected birding journal, or tapped on the window with it to interrupt the bullying. But he said, “Sure, go ahead,” and she recited the number slowly, twice. At least she didn’t ask him to read it back to her.

  He returned to the living room, but the glide of the iron over the worn blue field of his shirt was no longer soothing. His loneliness had been disturbed, and he wanted it back.

  One evening near the end, he was reading at Bee’s bedside, his free hand resting lightly on her arm; she seemed to be asleep. Then she opened her glazed eyes and said, “Look at you. They’ll be crawling out of the woodwork.”

  “What will, sweetheart?” he’d asked, but she shut her eyes and didn’t answer.

  She had said many strange things during those last nights and days. “Oh, what will I do without you?” she’d cried out once, as if he were the one dying and leaving her behind. And there were drug-induced hallucinations, of small children standing at the foot of her bed, and mice scrambling in the bathtub. Maybe there were more vermin waiting in the woodwork of her fevered dream.

  It wasn’t until the second phone call, a few days after the one from Dorothy Clark, that he finally got Bee’s meaning. This time the caller introduced herself as Madge Miller, a vaguely familiar name. She and Bee had been in the same book club a while back and she’d heard the sad news through a grapevine of mutual friends. She was just calling to commiserate, she said—what a terrible shame, what a beautiful, bright woman in the prime of her life. And maybe he’d like some company soon, for lunch or a drink.

  Later that afternoon, Edward went into the kitchen and rummaged in what one of the children, in childhood, had aptly dubbed “the crazy drawer.” Among the loose batteries and spare shoelaces, the expired supermarket coupons and the keys that didn’t open any known doors, he found the chain that had briefly kept Bee’s reading glasses conveniently dangling from her neck, until she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and declared that she’d rather go blind.

  Now Edward untangled the chain and attached it to his glasses, carefully avoiding his reflection, which he imagined bore an unfortunate resemblance to his third-grade teacher, Miss Du Pont. His own students would have a field day. But he’d only use the chain at home, where he often mislaid his glasses, and at least he’d be prepared to screen any future phone calls from strangers.

  Bachelor Days

  For a very long time, following a disastrous affair, Edward believed he would never marry. He had gone out with many women, but like his father he’d fallen in love—in what promised to be a fatal and final way—with only one of them. Her name was Laurel Ann Arquette, and she’d taught French just down the hall from his lab at Fenton Day, a private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Another teacher had introduced them at lunch on Laurel’s first day.

  He stood and said, “Hello, and welcome to perdition.” The spoon he’d been stirring his coffee with clanged to the floor, making her laugh, a bell that chimed from the top of his head to the pit of his belly. Her abundant hair was prematurely white, silver really, and her face was actually heart-shaped. She was as slender as a schoolgirl, for whom she might be mistaken, if not for that hair and her knowing presence. “Edward,” she said in return, as if she were naming or anointing him, and she let her hand be swallowed by his.

  It was 1974. They were both in their mid-twenties then and each school day became an agony of hours until they could meet at his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and make raw and exhausting love. They were very prudent at Fenton, though, sitting discreetly apart in the faculty room, never even accidentally touching in the corridors, and resisting the temptation to exchange loaded glances.

  But everyone, from the overstimulated students to the amused lunch ladies, knew anyway, somehow. One morning, he confiscated a note between two seventh-graders in his homeroom: “Does Dr. S. couche avec Mademoiselle A.?” Oui! Yes, he did, every chance he could, and he might as well have worn a sandwich board advertising his ardor. Even ripping up that silly note and frowning severely at the giggling transgressors didn’t quell their excitement.

  But once Edward and Laurel announced their engagement, right after their second spring break together, they became as boring to the students as their own parents, and somewhat less interesting to everyone else. Still, the engaged couple were consumed by their new status, and began to make wedding plans. He’d hoped for something simple, but Laurel wanted the whole show, in an almost unconscious act of defiance against her divorced parents, who had eloped to Maryland with Laurel already on board.

  Edward thought she was conflating the lavishness of a reception with the success of a marriage, but he went along with her. She’d been such a miserable child, passed back and forth between her depressed mother and angry father like a hand grenade that might suddenly go off. Once, she told Edward, her parents had an argument that threatened to become physical, and Laurel, stepping between them, was accidentally knocked to the ground. She claimed her hair had turned white as a result of all that early tension. “You can’t imagine,” she said, and he couldn’t.

  His own parents had stuck it out, their early passion having metamorphosed into something lower-key but lasting, a soufflé collapsed into a comforting soup of days. They were as dazzled as Edward was by Laurel, and would have remortgaged their house in Elmont to buy her happiness, and thereby their son’s. As it turned out, they only had to dig into their retirement fund to come up with the lion’s share of the wedding expenses.

  Edward swore that he would pay them back someday. There was nothing offered from the bride’s side; money, squandered and lost, was one of the many contentions between the still-contentious elder Arquettes. Laurel had been estranged from both of them, and only after Edward urged her did she send them invitations.

  Edward didn’t want a church service—he wavered between atheism and agnosticism, between science and the unknown. But Laurel, a nonbeliever herself, insisted that they had to hedge their bets. When the arrangements began to get out of hand, they quarreled. “You don’t care what I want,” she accused him, unfairly, in the sweetly suffocating, refrigerated breath of the florist’s shop.

  She wanted a couturier gown and fountains of Cristal. She wanted to have tiny, speckled yellow orchids that might have been plucked from some mossy jungle placed at every table in the Rainbow Room, and there were too many tables. How could she complain about feelings of isolation and still list more than 150 friends who had to be invited? He’d only met a few of them.

  He came back at her with, “You don’t even know what you really want.” But he gave in, finally, to everything, perversely pleased that she seemed more outraged than hurt by his resistance. She’d been hurt enough in her life. He wanted to protect and defend her, even before their official vows, to make up for her stolen happiness. And although he knew better—biology was his subject, after all—the heat between them seemed as if it might never die.

  A week before the wedding, they lay in their usual post-sexual stupor. Edward was still marveling at her body, the bold and innovative ways she used it, the way she looked—those small breasts, as tender as if they’d only recently budded; the springy, surprisingly dark hair of her bush. Words from Human Anatomy 101 struck him with new poignancy. Scapular. Clavicle. She extricated herself, turning away from him, and, instead of her usual, throatily whispered “Je t’aime,” or “Again, please,” she said, “I almost got married once before, you know.”

  He hadn’t known; she’d never mentioned it. His heart was just slowing, and he hoped she couldn’t feel the way it began to leap against the curve of her spine. “To David?” he asked, as casually as he could. David had been her previous boyfriend. She and Edward, after they’d declared their love for each other, had exchanged romantic histories—it was a ritual of intimacy that was painful but necessary; Laurel said so. And everyone in her past, as in his, seemed
ephemeral, anyway, like people encountered in a dream.

  “No,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by her pillow. “It was Joe.”

  “Joe? Who’s Joe?” Edward said.

  “This guy, Joe Ettlinger. Before I was with David.”

  “Are you making this up?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told you.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “You should have.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, less distinctly.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “We fell out.”

  “Over what?” Edward said, imagining rare orchids and sparkling Cristal at the heart of the story.

  “This and that, I don’t really remember. We just fell out of love.”

  He couldn’t picture that kind of falling, a plunge out of love, like a film about diving played in reverse. “For good?” he said.

  “Yes, of course,” she answered, after a lengthy pause. “I’m almost asleep,” she said then. “Let’s stop talking now, okay?”

  Despite that cautionary conversation, he was still taken by surprise when she didn’t show up at the church the following Saturday. He waited for her in the vestry for what seemed like years, but was actually less than two hours. Mysteriously, she had decided to spend the previous night in her mother’s apartment, which Edward had taken as a good omen. Peace on earth, goodwill toward everyone!

  And there were her mother and his sitting in front rows on opposite sides of the satin-swathed aisle, the two of them looking sisterly in their elaborate hats, their long gloves and trembling corsages. But Mrs. Arquette said, when asked about it later, that she hadn’t seen or spoken to Laurel in weeks.

  Edward went into a kind of emotional hibernation after Laurel’s defection, staving off sympathy because it embarrassed and pained him—as if someone were touching his fevered skin—and he managed to numb his own sense of anguished disgrace. At least Laurel had left Fenton as well as Edward. He kept telling himself he’d get over it; it wasn’t a death, even if it felt like one.

  That turned out to be true. Slowly, he began to recover, to see the world without her as an interesting place again, to even date a little. There seemed to be available, attractive women everywhere. And so he became a bachelor, that title nothing like the euphemism people once used for gay men such as Edward’s uncle Lewis. Everyone had referred to Lewis, his mother’s brother, as a “confirmed” bachelor, a man who adored women, really, but just couldn’t be tied down. Lewis was called into service to escort homely cousins to their high school proms, and later as a “walker” for widowed and spinster aunts, but he’d never introduced the love of his life to anyone in the family.