Saturday Night Widows (18 page)

She tried to spin a Dawnism even out of this. “I always think that when bad things happen, it’s because something better is coming.” But, for once, her perpetual sunshine failed her. “I can’t imagine it being any better than what we had. I’m not being negative. But anybody who knew Andries would agree. Where do you go from here?” Her voice jumped an octave.
“Where do you go from here?”

Throughout lunch, Dawn played her voice like a musical instrument, finding the right tone for the emotion, ranging from
husky low notes when she began describing how she first met Andries to the full-throttle high of that impossible-to-answer question. Scientists had told me that the bereaved can benefit from the ability to express genuine emotions so long as they don’t dwell excessively on the negative, and if so, Dawn was right on track. She let her feelings rip, looking for the bright side, the humor, ever ready for a laugh. And when things turned dark, she instinctively looked away.

For the first months after Andries’s death, she considered selling her stake in the business. Seeing his closed office door, hearing others cry at their desks, made her sick to her stomach. But she had a family to feed. The children kept her spirits up. It was important that she keep their father alive for them, telling them he would be proud of them, keeping out pictures and photo albums. “They would be the first to say that Daddy is watching over us. I believe he is, too. No one will tell me different.”

On holidays, she and the children hosted his family, surrounding themselves with people who looked and sounded like him. And she maintained Andries’s active philosophy, keeping busy, surrounding herself with happier friends. On a weekend trip to a spa in the Poconos six months after he died, she met a guy who was going through a divorce. He asked her out, but she said it was too soon.

A few days later, she was on the phone with her mother-in-law, a widow who warned Dawn, “The holidays are coming up, and it’s going to be awful, and I just have to prepare you.” She paused for dramatic effect. “It. Doesn’t. Get. Any. Better. Ever.”

Dawn got off the phone as fast as she could, and the next day, she called the guy from the spa. “I told myself I was getting right back on that horse.” Her gestures as she told me this were so big, so
over the top, that she nearly knocked over a water glass. She asked him, “What do you want to do?” He said, “Anything you want.” Dawn fired back, “Okay. Let’s go.”

She smacked down her palm. A deep flush suffused her face. “There’s that saying—there’s good, and there’s good for now. And the good-for-nows can actually be better.” Dawn’s irrepressible laugh cut through the noise in the restaurant.

I relished her defiance of convention. “Do you ever worry about social pressure?” I asked for myself as much as her. “That if you date someone else, that if you don’t seem miserable all the time, people will think that you didn’t love your husband?”

“Life is so short,” Dawn said. “I say, when you’ve walked a mile in my shoes, come talk to me.”

Her fling with the spa guy had been a lark, but that didn’t satisfy her larger mission. Those kids felt the absence of a father acutely, and her goal was to fill that absence. Good-for-now wouldn’t cut it for long.

Days before our lunch, Dawn’s daughter had drawn up a wish list for Christmas. “Mommy, all I want is another Daddy,” she said, with pleading eyes. “It’s at the top of my list.” She handed it to Dawn and pointed. “Look, I have an arrow here, next to the word.”
Daddy
.

“Honey, Mommy can’t just go on the Internet and find one,” Dawn explained. Actually, Mommy can, she acknowledged to me with a laugh, but she couldn’t be assured of the quality. “Mommy is very open to this, but we have to make sure it’s the right person. It has to just happen. It has to come from God.”

chapter
TWELVE

w
hether through God, the Internet, or some other higher power, most of the women when we first met seemed bolder than I had been about finding love again, or at least an occasional good-for-now. But the question was how. Attractive, available, age-appropriate men seemed as rare as plutonium and possibly just as dangerous. After we said good-bye to Katie and convened for dinner at a museum café, Tara told us that in the last month she had survived the mortification of one of the great trials of the midlife single person—the public fix-up.

We found a table near big windows looking out over Central Park. The sun had yet to set, and outside we saw little buds beginning to bloom in the dogwood trees. Appetizers arrived—small plates of roasted eggplant, shrimp arancini, cocktail meatballs, red beet ravioli, and red pepper hummus—while Tara slowly recounted the excruciating details.

Two longtime couples had invited her to join them for dinner at the home of a single man, a keen woodworker who had recently
built a new recycling bin. Ordinarily, Tara might have declined, but Lesley and Dawn had convinced her there was no harm in accepting the attentions of a gentleman more than a year after her husband died. Nevertheless, this being a public fix-up, we groaned at the possibilities for embarrassment—the intimate setting, the implication that Tara and the recycling-bin guy constituted a third couple, the witnesses standing by like laboratory scientists eagerly awaiting evidence of romantic combustion.

Tara did her best. She brought a bottle of wine—recyclable! She praised the museum-quality bin to the skies. But over dinner, Recycling-Bin Man asked her, “How old are your children?” His were six and eight.

Tara told him that both her girls were out of college. Silence descended over the table like the dirigible in
Black Sunday
.

“How young is he?” Marcia said.

“Forty-seven.” Tara was fifty-four. A meaningless difference if the man had been the older one, but even in this enlightened era, dating a younger man was still, apparently, a stretch.

“That’s what I want,” said Marcia, who had just turned fifty-eight. “A younger man.”

“Well, this guy … freaked out.” Tara dragged out the suspense with her protracted way of speaking.

Dawn tried to salvage the story. “He was probably thinking, ‘I can’t believe she looks that great and she has kids that age.’ You are feeding into your fears.”

Tara’s expression shut her down. “It got worse. Afterward, my friends critiqued me. They said I didn’t show enough … interest. I didn’t … flirt enough.” Her alto voice had dropped a full register. “I was … 
dying
.”

I told her about my failed public fix-up with the mulch man, and Lesley weighed in with one she’d endured. Through the alchemy of retelling, these episodes seemed funnier than they had at the time.

Nevertheless, Tara had decided that the best approach to this strange new phase in her life was not to think about romance, but to concentrate on upgrading everything else about herself. Perhaps, as a side benefit, she might draw a man to her from some uncharted, outlying sphere on the sheer force of her newfound magnetism. If not, so be it. She was making undeniable progress. Since leaving her job at an educational foundation, she had been casting about for something new, and that dusky voice of hers had opened an unexpected opportunity. A friend who performed voice-over work, reading scripts for commercials and industrial films, recognized her potential and invited Tara along on an audition. Competing against trained actors, she gave it a shot, more for laughs than anything else, and she was thrilled when she began to field some offers—a callback for a drug commercial, a script for a business conference.

“I’ve had so much fun,” she said. “Not … a whole new career, but it’s a nice little bit of … icing on the cake.”

Lesley asked Denise how she was faring since the gathering at the cooking class. To help with the mortgage, she told us, she’d been considering a couple of candidates to rent the second bedroom in her apartment. A midlife roommate, unappealing as that sounded, was probably necessary. But the helpful widower was still buying her groceries. “He’s getting me laundry detergent right now,” she said, discreetly pleased. “It’s not romantic, though.”

“Has he done anything more, like touch you or kiss you?” Lesley asked, watching with sharp eyes.

“No, he hasn’t. I don’t want more right now.”

“Let me say this as gently as possible,” I said. “When I was first widowed, I needed all kinds of help—you know, reaching a high shelf, painting the bathroom ceiling. In my experience, the guy who wants to help you is the guy who wants to get into bed with you.”

“I can’t say I disagree,” Lesley said.

She filled us in on how everything was humming along in her live-in relationship with Craig. It wasn’t as simple as her marriage had been, when she and Kevin, young and unencumbered, made their home and started a family. Craig was divorced and had custody of a thirteen-year-old son, so the boy was now living with Lesley, too. They were cautiously negotiating protocols on vegetable consumption at dinner and the proper volume of an electric guitar. It sounded as if Lesley was winning over Craig’s son, cautiously extending affection, stepping into her homemaker role, with or without green beans. In her rush to share her home with Craig, she admitted, she hadn’t thought through all the implications of caring for his boy, too, but she was reveling in having company in the house again.

The sky grew dark outside the windows, and a waiter lit candles on our table. It was easy to talk over the soft undertone of other diners scattered nearby. While we waited for the main course, I passed around my frayed clipping of the Ed Ruscha painting
I Was Gasping for Contact
.

“Contact,” Lesley said, nodding. “That was the thing I missed the most from being married to Kevin. I missed touching somebody. Think about babies, how they thrive on touch. You stroke your baby, you touch her head. This is what we need to thrive.”

“It’s tough,” I said. “In our culture, touching is considered sexual,
so if you’re not in a sexual relationship, nobody ever touches you. All you get is a quick social hug, or a peck on the cheek.”

“All day I’m around tons of people,” Marcia said. “They work and go home. It’s not the same. It’s not intimate.” Listening to Marcia, I began to realize that she wasn’t so much inscrutable as brief. She cut right to the point—blink and you missed it. As this one sank in, I understood that Marcia, with her all-consuming career, might have fewer opportunities for meeting love interests than the rest of the gang.

“Marcia, we need to get you on Match.com,” Lesley said.

“No,” Marcia scowled. Point made.

Lesley rattled on, undeterred. “Craig touches a lot,” she said with a grin. “If I’m in a room full of people, he’ll walk past me and touch me, just to let me know he’s there. I go
woooo-hoooo
, like I’m having an orgasm. Those are things you forget.”

“Also, it’s different now,” said Dawn. “You know what you’ve lost.”

Something in her expression caught my attention, something fragile. She, too, was wrestling with the matter of needing or wanting touch, but this new relationship with the widower was stirring up more, reviving a longing for the union of love and soul that we’d witnessed in
Cupid and Psyche
. Dawn told us that she and Adam had carried on a three-hour discussion that day, starting at breakfast and stretching through the morning, trying to sort out what limits to place on their relationship, what to combine and what to keep separate. Dawn was drawn to Adam and his children, but he was resisting.

“I don’t think he wants to feel
anything
,” she said. “He said he thought the reason it worked between his wife and him was that
they didn’t need each other. They were independent.” But Dawn told him, “It’s not the
need
. It’s the
want
.” She turned her eyes on all of us, trying to explain. “It’s the
wanting
.”

Her voice built to a whine. “Everything feels so freaking
calculated
. Is it ever going to be like it was
before
? Is it ever going to happen where you just meet someone, you love each other, and then you sort everything out
later
?” She looked at each of us imploringly. Her next words sounded discouraged. “With him it’s all about what works and what doesn’t.”

“Because you know things now that you didn’t know when you got married,” Marcia said.

“Just this morning, I said to him, ‘It’s just freakin’ easier to be by yourself.’ ” Dawn banged her hand against the table and made the silverware bounce.

“I took a different approach with Craig,” Lesley said. “I jumped into this living together without thinking too much. But here’s what I did think: things with Craig are good
right now
. They might not be good next week, but what the hell, I’m having fun. I’m willing to take that risk. If it doesn’t work next week, my heart will be broken, but you know what? I’ve overcome much.”

“But it’s different for Dawn,” Marcia said, bringing her analytical mind to bear. “She has to worry about young children, hers and his.”

Marcia, as usual, had hit on something. None of us thought there was anything wrong with casual affairs, but easygoing romance was harder to pull off when children were involved, especially children who had recently lost a parent and longed for stability.