Saturday Night Widows (34 page)

Lesley and I commiserated for the rest of the ride about the difficulty of forming new households out of the shards of splintered ones. Lesley and Craig had chosen each other, and Bob and I had, too, but the children hadn’t asked for new adults to butt into their lives, and vice versa. We all had to make room for each other, and none of us quite knew how.

There were plenty of complications to go around. All of us—Denise, Dawn, Marcia, Lesley, Tara, me—had set out on a path to reinvent our lives with no idea of the scope and variety of the complications that awaited us. Aside from maybe the blessedly remote and empty dunes of Morocco, it was anybody’s guess where each of us was headed next.

chapter
TWENTY-FOUR

i
didn’t know which was more distracting, the view or the guests. It was the last gathering before we took off for Morocco, and the vista from the roof of Marcia’s new apartment building was a knockout. Someone swam lazy laps in the atrium pool as the Manhattan skyline shimmered in the final rays of the October sun. In the distance, the Empire State Building rose like a silver spear.

Marcia made our visitors feel instantly at home with chitchat about cars and football. “I’m glad you guys are here,” she said to them. “I’m usually the odd one out with this gang.”

The rest of us didn’t take offense. We were proud of Marcia for her successful real estate coup, pleased with ourselves for whatever role we’d played in her decision to pull it off. By now it was clear that we all gained from our connection to one another, providing companionship, listening, trading points of view. But one point of view had been consistently absent so far, and it came from a source of particular fascination: men.

And here men were, four of ’em, a lot like us, widowers around our ages, a couple of them graying around the temples, but mostly not much worse for the wear. They had already made themselves useful by carrying platters of food to the roof and hefting patio chairs around a big picnic table as we shrugged off the first nip of fall. One had brought chocolates, another wine, yet another a box of bakery butter cookies tied with a ribbon. Glasses clinked, and hands reached politely for empanadas and crudités. We outnumbered the men by one. Tara had begged off that night for a birthday celebration for Will, but the rest of us saw this as a rare opportunity for insight into the masculine mind-set.

My attempts at research on the subject had gotten me nowhere so far. There are a lot of clichés about how widows and widowers differ, perhaps the most common being “women mourn, men replace.” Men are less burdened by guilt, so the conventional wisdom goes. They jump onto the Internet a few weeks after their wives die to hook up with fondly remembered high school sweethearts. While we make do with Lean Cuisine at home, widowers supposedly live the high life, beneficiaries of limitless fix-ups, recipients of unsolicited covered dishes, winners of sought-after roles as extra men at dinner parties. If the stereotypes are to be believed, then perhaps men are better equipped than we are to overcome grief and achieve happiness
à la minute
. Perhaps, we thought, they possessed coping mechanisms we could co-opt for ourselves. With a little luck, we could ply these specimens with enough wine and finger foods to extract their secrets.

I had already determined that there’d been little actual study on gender and grieving, with the few citations I uncovered finding little difference between the sexes. It was up to us to reach some
highly invalid and unscientific conclusions based on four random guys we corralled by asking around.

Was I hoping for more? I’m only human. These were men, eligible men, and I just happened to know some eligible women. Dawn was free again, and Denise and Marcia hadn’t become involved with anyone yet. I noticed Denise decked out in a smart dress and Lesley a showy blouse. Marcia dressed for comfort in pants and a polo shirt, and most of the guys wore pressed cotton shirts and khakis. A take-out place provided the empanadas, their fillings identified with offbeat labels.

“I see you’re having the Viagra.” Toby, a forty-nine-year-old lawyer with salt-and-pepper hair, leaned toward Denise conspiratorially. “Is that because of the name or …?”

“It’s because I like seafood.”

It seemed like a good time to address the stereotypes.

“After you were widowed,” I interjected, “how long was it before you started seeing other women?” Might as well get right to the juicy stuff.

Toby, our most ingratiating guest, was quick to answer. “My wife died of cancer just a year and two months ago,” he said with visible sorrow. He balanced a cocktail plate on his lap and dipped an empanada into a puddle of tomatillo sauce. The first time someone suggested fixing him up, he continued, was on the porch of his house after the funeral, but he declined. “I’d say I’ve dated six to ten women since then.”

I was afraid to give away my thoughts by glancing at my crew. Six to ten women in a little over a year—none of us approached that level of industriousness. Chalk one up for the conventional wisdom.

“Has it been weird for you to see other people?” Lesley asked.

“I wasn’t nervous about it,” Toby said. A father of three, he’d been married twenty-five years, longer than some of us, and yet he admitted to kissing every one of those women on the first date. When he moved his first relationship into the bedroom, he claimed he did so without reserve. “She was actually thrilled at how easily I doffed my clothes. Her reaction that first time helped me with the other times.”

Other times? Toby, the cheerful doffer, made us look like pikers. “You didn’t find it awkward at all?” I asked.

“No.”

Another guy weighed in. “For me, it wasn’t any more awkward than the first time with anybody,” said Mitchell, a fifty-seven-year-old journalist with a full face, wire-rimmed glasses, and a complexion that betrayed a lifetime of desk work. Mitchell hadn’t remarried, even though he’d been a widower for fifteen years. “I had my first encounter six months after my wife died, with somebody I’d known for a long time,” he said. “My wife was dying of cancer for six or eight months, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t used to the idea.”

I had been expecting cocktail party repartee in this cosmopolitan setting, but the men were getting right down to it, seizing a rare opportunity to discuss their private lives. For once, our group didn’t say much, content to fire the questions and hear what ricocheted back. Toby refilled Denise’s wine with a headwaiter’s finesse and offered more to Dawn. She placed a hand over her glass to decline.

“What about you, Bryan?” I asked our youngest guest.

Bryan, not yet forty, was a former lawyer turned sommelier with a lean physique and intense expression. More fashion-forward than the others, in pegged jeans and an open-collar black shirt, he had
first found himself in bed with a woman four months after the sudden death of his wife, he said. “The woman and I had already had a relationship before my marriage. She was also a good friend, so there was a high level of comfort. It was no weirder than when I was just dating people.”

“I think women feel more pressure than we do to have their bodies look a certain way,” Mitchell said matter-of-factly, straightening his glasses.

Bryan set down his plate, his intense appearance growing more earnest. “There
is
something I’ve been reflecting on. It’s been two years since my wife died. The relationships I’ve been having have been less emotional, more physical. The bar is set really high after you’ve had the kind of relationship I had with my wife. It makes it hard to put my heart in it now.”

This was the first reference to emotion, and Lesley, touched by his vulnerability, made a comforting sound. The other men stopped eating and nodded in agreement. It clarified my thinking about what they were saying. I had to admit I’d been listening with a judgmental bent, surmising that these guys might be cold customers, that they might not have loved their wives much if they could hop back into the sack with such dispatch. But Bryan’s comment reminded me of something Professor Bonanno had told me, how studies had shown that widows and widowers who jumped into new affairs loved their spouses no less than those who didn’t.

“You’re so young,” Lesley said to Bryan with solicitude. “What happened to your wife?”

She had died suddenly, as Denise’s husband did, of an undiscovered heart condition, collapsing in a restaurant as the couple paid for lunch. They had married only three months earlier, and she was
seven months pregnant. By the time an ambulance arrived, Bryan said, it was too late to save her or the baby. Marriage, pregnancy, the loss of a wife and child—the sequence of events was almost unimaginable. Bryan had been so grief-stricken that he stayed at his mother’s for six weeks before he could bear to go home, and when he did, for months he couldn’t bring himself to put away one of his wife’s bras that was dangling on a bathroom doorknob. Yet he was also capable of initiating new romances in the face of grief, and he saw no contradiction. This evening was going to be more revealing than I thought.

The other men observed Bryan with a been-there commiseration. I could tell that all of them missed their wives desperately, still mourned them with heartfelt surrender, as we missed our husbands. Nevertheless, they seemed capable of holding opposing emotions in heedful balance, both grieving and plainly enjoying the perks of being the new bachelor on the block.

“I often have one foot in the past and one foot forward,” Toby was saying when I turned back to the conversation. The others seemed to have mastered that same duality, something we women had struggled to achieve.

By now the sun had dipped lower in the hazy sky, and bright shards of the Hudson River winked and dodged between skyscrapers. I was curious about the one guest who had been silent so far. Glenn was a youthful-looking fifty-two, with a smooth face and balding head. He was a friend of Dawn’s whose wife had died in the north tower of the World Trade Center almost ten years earlier. He’d been following the conversation at a polite remove.

“Have you been dating, Glenn?” I asked.

“I’m not ready to consider the idea,” he said, looking toward the
other men with some chagrin. “People have offered to fix me up. I pretty much tell them I don’t do that.”

So not all widowers strive to replace. Behind Glenn’s obliging expression, I observed a skittish sorrow. Whatever we all had suffered, he seemed to be in deeper. I flashed again on the Twin Towers, resisting the memory, aware that Glenn had to visit it every day. The conversation stalled, so I posed another question. How did they think the experience differed for widows and widowers? Did they hate their label as much as we hated ours?

“
Widower
—it’s a strange word, but I don’t mind being identified with it,” said Toby, who had test-driven it on so many dates. “It’s generally a positive when I meet women. It means I’m not a divorced guy.”

The others signaled their agreement. “For us it’s a plus.” Mitchell, the journalist, warmed to the sociological nuances of the issue. “I think for a woman, being called a widow is kind of a negative. It’s a stereotype that makes you sound a little older, sort of
used
, to be crude.”

Used
. Say what? I recoiled, and I couldn’t help taking in the other women’s expressions. Where was a coyote when you needed one? My first impulse was to challenge him to a duel, but somehow all of us managed to hold our tongues. As Marcia once observed, this was an accepting and open group. It was old news to us that
widow
suffered from dreadful PR.

“Your perception is … interesting,” Marcia said with uncharacteristic diplomacy.

“If a man is divorced, women think,
oh God, all the baggage
,” Mitchell elaborated. “And if he’s never been married, they think he’s gay, or just weird. But if you’re a widower, it signals that you
are marriage material, and you get sympathy, which I don’t think is true for a woman.”

It had never occurred to me that this man would be considered a hot commodity while I was perceived as damaged goods, yet none of our guests stepped forward to disagree. The word
used
—it called to mind primitive notions that an available woman with sexual experience was somehow tarnished, whereas a man was not. I took in the dark circles under Toby’s eyes and Mitchell’s khaki pants, which looked as if they’d been left too long in the dryer. I couldn’t help thinking that these guys were simply beneficiaries of a favorable ratio, their value enhanced and their egos massaged by their relative scarcity in comparison to us. Supply and demand.

Then I thought about all the negative variations on the word
widow
—black widow, widow’s weeds, the widow-maker. Even at my newspaper,
widow
was a copyediting term for an extraneous word at the end of a paragraph, marked to be deleted to save space for more valuable material.

“I just hate the word
widow
,” Marcia said to Mitchell. “I’ve never analyzed it the way you did. To me it means that I lost my husband.”

“But with us,” Mitchell said, “there’s no stigma.”