Saturday Night Widows (25 page)

Bernie had treasured me, and now my company wasn’t worth the full value of a Groupon. I couldn’t let myself think that way. That way lay monsters.

All circuits lit up when I got home, everyone clamoring to hear about Becky’s First Date. Hedging, I told them it wasn’t that bad. I was scared, he was scared. Our complete lack of attraction guaranteed that we’d get nowhere near what really scared me—emotional engagement, sex, entanglement in someone else’s life, sex, responsibility for anther person, sex. Love, marriage, illness, death, sex. Oh, and did I mention sex? This business of mediocre, sexless dates could be a harmless time killer. I’d view it like my job: interviewing people, finding out what made them tick, walking away.

There were a few others. A perfectly presentable social studies teacher who made me feel the way I’d felt in social studies class. A doctor who told me he was seeing someone else but, in case that fell through, he would like to keep in touch. Sorry, no touching of any kind. Still too fragile. Some investment guy who said, “You don’t look too sad for a widow.” An ad executive who, upon learning that my husband had died, asked, “Don’t the guys you date find that creepy?” These guys may not have been right for me, but they weren’t all that different from me. They were befuddled and shell-shocked by whatever midlife disaster had sent them back out onto the playing field of embarrassing disclosures and good-night handshakes.

Back when I was twenty, I didn’t know how good I’d had it. Virtually everybody I met was available, but now, when prospects were few, I began to wonder whether I’d face a disagreeable choice—remain single forever, or settle for someone less than ideal.

The ad executive, I decided, had short-term possibilities. Tall, athletic, with a zany sense of humor, he peppered me with diverting e-mail messages. He kept asking me out, even though on our first date I packed in a stack of pancakes and half of his, too, while I chattered manically about Bernie’s illness and death and explained my theory that it had given me post-traumatic stress disorder.

“You’ll never settle down with another man,” he said, “because no one could compete with your husband.”

“Surely it’s not a competition,” I said, reaching for his home fries. “I don’t believe there’s only one person put on earth for each of us.”

For a second encounter, he invited me to a restaurant written up as “lovely for long gazes over superb cuisine.” “Casanovas,” the review continued, “call it the ultimate high-end date.” That gave me the willies, but it also got me thinking. I would never love this guy. I didn’t even
like
this guy. He was glued to his BlackBerry during meals, admitted that his chronic lateness made people nuts, made pompous pronouncements about how a widow was supposed to behave and feel. But if I wanted to “get back on that horse” as Dawn would later put it, what would be the harm?

My friend Jackie called as I was zipping up my little black dress. “Help! What am I getting myself into?” I asked.

“A good meal,” she said, “and some long-awaited dessert.”

Couples all over the restaurant were canoodling away when the waiter whisked away the remains of a chocolate tart. I felt a knee brush mine under the table. “You have a quality that is very important to me,” the ad guy said earnestly. “You have the loyalty of a lioness toward someone you care about, and the courage of a lioness, too.”

Taxi!

B
ACK TO
P
LAN
B.
I threw on the little black dress for a dinner invitation from Fred. He was hosting a couple dozen food industry people at a restaurant uptown, where an Italian vineyard was introducing new wines. The menu promised nirvana, the crowd
not so much: mostly couples, I saw, and a smattering of unattached women. The room was chilly during the pre-dinner mingle, so I shrugged on a bulky cardigan. Three twenty-something Italian women, identical triplets related in some way to the owners of the vineyard, greeted me so effusively that they knocked me back a pace. The sight of them alone would have done the trick. They towered above me in shiny stilettos, and they clearly hadn’t got the fashion memo that if you show some skin somewhere, you should cover up somewhere else. I didn’t know where to look first—long legs, big hair, gravity-defying breasts made from the same material as a Tempur-Pedic. I was already entertained.

They moved on and I found myself in conversation with Fred’s mother, a retired schoolteacher, about education policy. A final guest slipped in the door. He was a man roughly my age, wearing a sleek black suit, but he looked more like a jeans guy. His hair, prematurely silver, was bedroom tousled, and he carried himself with easy amusement, more so when the Italian Glamazons zeroed in, all six missiles pointed right at him like the entire Iranian weapons arsenal.

He modestly looked aside, a hint of panic in his eyes, and caught me watching. He mouthed a silent word in my direction:
Help!

I laughed and turned away.

Fred gave a charming little talk about Pinot Grigio and Cabernet Franc, then gestured for me to sit to his right. His mother claimed a seat two more down. The chair next to me pulled back. It was the
Help!
guy.

“You must be Becky,” he said, offering a firm handshake.

“How do you know my name?” I demanded, my flirting no better for paltry practice.

“Fred told me,” he said. “I enjoyed the article you wrote last week. You really drew me in.”

“You’re interested in potato farming on Long Island?”

“No, actually. I was interested in you.”

It took a moment to sink in. This was Fred’s guy. I unconsciously leaned away. “Do you live in Connecticut by any chance?” I should have known: I was in the middle of a dreaded public fix-up. Ambushed. No escape.

Nice move wearing the dowdy sweater
, I thought. I considered shucking it, decided to let it be. A plate of risotto landed in front of me, and I dug in with antic zeal. “This stuff is total decadence,” I blubbed, mouth full.

The guy took a careful bite and lit up with pleasure. He and Fred swooned over the ingredients. Parmesan, they guessed, and pears and balsamic vinegar for sweetness. This was no Doritos guy.

“You know about food?” I switched into reporter mode: get the story, walk away. I took care not to make direct eye contact.

“I love to cook, sure. Fred and I met about a zillion years ago, traveling around Sicily with Julia Child for some articles I was writing. We had a blast, but I’m still trying to lose the weight.”

It didn’t seem like he needed to, not that I was noticing.

“You know Fred well?”

“I don’t get to see him much—I live too far away. But he’s taken me to the opera a few times.”

“You actually went?”

“Yes.” He looked confused. “But I’m a rock-’n’-roll guy at heart.”

This may have been an ambush, but it was shaping up as one I could survive. At least I’d have a diverting evening. I uncovered more details. For some lucky woman who lived in the right state,
this guy—let’s call him Bob—had definite cool boyfriend potential, if you could say that about someone who played with Bruce Springsteen when he was an opening act. Bob had left the music business to become a writer, publishing some highly regarded biographies, most recently of the Beatles.

He kept me laughing with self-deprecating stories about cooking disasters and single-dad mishaps, and he seemed to find my tales of the Gulag more amusing than the reality. We were rudely tuning out the rest of the table, where diners diplomatically assessed the wines and Fred and his mother discreetly watched over us like hens with their chicks. By the time some braised duck turned up, we had moved on to personal matters. Bob had decamped from the city to Connecticut nine years ago. A well-ordered life, everything in its rightful place—a wife, a daughter, a dog, a mortgage—five years later it all turned out a mess. His eyes grew wary and distant when I asked about the divorce. He seemed to take it as a personal defeat.

“I take it you’re single, too.”

So Fred hadn’t told all. “My husband died,” I said, bracing for the reaction.

“I’m sorry.” Bob considered this slowly, observed me with deeper curiosity. “That must have been an incredible blow. How do you go on after something like that?”

I found myself telling him all about it, the miserable support group, the strange dislocation from my peers, the gasping for contact, the few pathetic dates. I was halfway through an animated travelogue to the Galápagos when cackly laughter broke out across the room, where the Glamazons were holding court.

“Sorry to rattle on. That sounds like the fun table,” I said.

“Nah, I caught their act on World Wide Wrestling,” he said. “Seriously,
they’re basically kids. What would we talk to them about? I like a woman with something to say.”

His eyes trailed lightly over my face. Strange, I couldn’t tell whether they were brown or blue. They darted imperceptibly to the side just before mine did. Shit, shit, shit. This guy was doing something to my follicles.

By the time I turned back again, he was excusing himself to phone the babysitter. It would be well after midnight before he got home. Daughter, dog, home in a remote location. Here was a man with obligations. And I was a woman without, with visions of pain and loss that shadowed any impulse toward attachment. I should do him a favor and hit an afterparty with the Glamazons.

Bob returned, considering what to say. “You got me thinking, Becky. When my life got shot to hell, that’s when I found out what mattered to me. My daughter, my work—I try to stay true to that. I spent a lot of lonely nights talking to the dog, trying to figure it out. As David Bowie would say, ‘Turn and face the strange.’ But all those ch-ch-changes …”

He smiled and shrugged. He was injured, same as me. “I guess in the end they weren’t all bad.”

I regarded him directly. Hazel, that was it. His eyes were hazel.

chapter
EIGHTEEN

i
t’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.” I had just asked Professor Wortman, the grief expert from Stony Brook University, why she thought my group wanted to go lingerie shopping together. “I can’t imagine,” she sputtered. “It’s the
last
thing I would want to do.” We were about to go seriously off the grid.

I saw her point. In my first couple years of widowhood, even during my first wan stabs at meeting a man, I felt about as sexy as a grilled cheese sandwich. Put me in a push-up bra and a garter belt, and
voila!
—you’d have a grilled cheese sandwich in a push-up bra and garter belt.

Maybe what I needed was a dose of Lesley and Dawn in a lingerie shop. It might have spared me a couple years of celibacy. Maybe some of those Internet guys would have got lucky. Maybe when I met Bob at Fred’s dinner, I would have made a preemptive move.

The lingerie outing in June was Tara’s idea, not mine. I didn’t entirely understand the appeal of trying on underwear with a cheering section of friends, but the rest of them, except perhaps Marcia,
were dizzy with anticipation. I was glad for another opportunity to demonstrate my team spirit. If I agreed to squeeze myself into a negligee and matching thong for them, I hoped they might venture a night in a desert tent for me.

Tara breezed into the glossy white La Perla shop in SoHo on a steamy day, happy to explain her reasoning to the rest of us. She thought we should throw something into the mix that celebrated us as women, something that was also silly and fun. “And honestly … get ourselves out of the Mummy pants,” she said in her most sultry voice. She gave an approving once-over to the profusion of lace and satin on display. “Think of ourselves outside the dreadful box we’ve been in.”

We’d been dancing around the topic of sex ever since the first meeting. It was time to give some serious consideration to where we all stood on the matter. What role did we want it to play in our lives, and what roles were we willing to play to make it happen?

There was only one subject scarier, and that would be love. A subject for another day.

Today would be all about pleasure. First we cheered Marcia, who had returned from our spa weekend determined to overcome her qualms and buy that apartment she’d been mooning over. She met her real estate agent on the roof at sunset a few days later and made a deal. Maybe it wasn’t the best deal she’d ever negotiated, but it was the best deal for her, with the location, the view, and the pool fusing the pleasures of city and country that she’d relished with Martin. She’d be moving in the fall.