An Available Man (16 page)

Of course she had the advantage of having known who he was from the time he’d phoned and introduced himself. How many Edward Schuylers could there have been in her life? She hadn’t given anything away then, though, except for saying, with such certainty, “Don’t worry, I’ll find you.” And then there was the penetrating way she’d gazed at him in the museum’s lobby.
But that was all hindsight. At the time, he didn’t have a clue as to who she was—not with a new name, her once breathy voice coarsened by years of use out of his earshot, the whole physical transformation.

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“Why?”
he said, hating the plaintive sound of his own voice, and the way he was reduced to monosyllables, as if he couldn’t force more than one sound at a time up through the clogged pipes of his throat. What was he really asking her?
Why did you go through with this
,
once you heard my name? Why did you pursue me after I destroyed your first letter?
Or,
Why did you leave me stranded like that more than thirty-five years ago?

He wasn’t sure what he meant and Laurel—Ann was her middle name, he suddenly remembered—wasn’t going to help him figure that out. She said, “We have to talk, Edward.” And whatever she saw in his face made her add, “Please.”

“No,” he said. “I think the statute of limitations has run out on that little talk.” Well, at least his voice and vocabulary were restored. He sounded like a lawyer now, like the stuffed shirt she used to tease and seduce into abandonment.

“You have to give me a chance to explain,” she said.

“I do? Really?”
Well
,
fuck you
, he thought, something he had never said aloud to anyone, but had to stop himself from saying now. As he turned to go, he saw a naked woman climbing a ladder against the far wall. Art or madness, Edward didn’t know which and didn’t care. He followed the exit signs, weaving between clusters of people until he came to the broad stairway that would take him down to the lobby. Without looking back, he ran down the center of the steps, almost tripping a couple of times.

She must have been close behind him. He heard his name called above the conversational din as he made his way across
the lobby, cutting between people again. “Hey!” a man said as Edward brushed against him in passing, but he kept on going, through the revolving doors that spun him out onto the street. “Edward!” he heard. “Wait!” Bee’s last words. He wanted to laugh, or cry.

He headed toward Fifth Avenue, out of breath and a little light-headed. His legs were much longer than hers and he’d hardly slackened his pace, but she caught up to him, anyway. “Come on,” she said, “this is crazy.”

“No,
you’re
crazy, if you think I want to talk to you.” He continued to walk, despite the feeling that he might pitch over onto the sidewalk any minute.

“I am crazy,” she said. “Or I was crazy. Edward, I was
sick
.”

He stopped, with his fists on his hips, his heart struggling like a flooded engine. Sick! She looked extraordinarily healthy to him. Why wasn’t she panting, too? He was reminded of the lame or exaggerated excuses students often gave when they’d been absent or hadn’t turned in an assignment. “Do you have a note from your mother?” he said, his tone as coldly contemptuous as Maureen Wheeler’s.
Are you sitting on your brain?

But Laurel seemed to take the question seriously. “My mother is dead,” she told him.

Mrs. Arquette in her lilac-colored dress, her drooping corsage. “Everyone’s mother is dead,” he said. Except for Bee’s, except for poor Gladys.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and for one incredulous moment he thought she was offering condolences about his mother. Then he realized that she was trying to apologize with those two easy words for the devastation she had once wreaked.

“Are you?”

“Yes.
Oui. Je suis très désolée
,” she said. It had always sounded so much more sincere in French—like utter desolation instead
of mere regret. “Can we go somewhere?” she asked. “For that cup of coffee you offered before?”

“I offered that to Ann Parrish,” he said. “This isn’t a date anymore, in case you haven’t noticed.” His breath had returned and he started walking again, turning onto the avenue and heading north. He had no particular destination; he just had to keep going.

She walked alongside him. He tried to stay a few steps ahead of her, but she kept catching up. When they reached Central Park South, with the park on the other side, he headed toward it, stepping off the curb just as the lights changed. He had to hurry across the wide street as the traffic began moving, and he heard horns honking behind him, but he didn’t turn around to see if she’d made it safely across, too. What a gentleman he used to be, what a sap.

When he entered the park, it was if he’d gone from the gritty black-and-white world of the city into the Technicolor palette of nature—Dorothy gone from Kansas to Oz. Everything that had happened seemed just as unreal. Yet all around him, Edward saw evidence of ordinary life: babies, dogs, bicyclists, trees. He made his way down a path to a lawn and sat under a red maple, leaning back against its trunk. There was no sign of Laurel. He might have invented or dreamed the entire episode, or simply willed her away. He closed his eyes, feeling the dappled sunlight strike his lids between the new leaves of the maple, like a blessing.

But he didn’t feel relaxed. He was still simmering with anger and beset by an inexplicable melancholy. His own reaction surprised him; he’d put her out of his heart and head ages ago. And even when she’d still been on his mind, and he’d imagined running into her somewhere, he always saw himself as being civil, if not exactly cordial. Yet today’s encounter had wrenched him backward to that church where he’d stood and waited, as if no
time had passed at all. And walking out on her at the museum hardly seemed like adequate payback.

Payback! What was he thinking? Edward had never considered himself a vengeful person, someone who had to get even for being wronged. His parents’ style had been conciliatory, and he’d been raised to turn the other cheek, or to at least be tolerant of other people’s foibles and transgressions. “Forgive and forget” was his mother’s motto, “Live and let live,” his father’s. “Kiss and make up,” they’d chorused when he and Catherine had quarreled as children. Clichés by which they’d lived such honorable, orderly lives.

Maybe that’s why he’d let Laurel get away with so much when they were together. That entrenched passivity, and his being so helplessly in love with her. Had they married, his patience would have worn away in time; he knew that now. They’d have made each other miserable and probably wouldn’t have lasted. But the chronology of his life would have been altered, and maybe he’d never have met Bee and known genuine happiness.

The wonder of that, of such random, lucky cause and effect—like the high number he’d drawn in the draft lottery during the Vietnam War—gave him a feeling of peace that seemed to radiate from his chest to all of his limbs. The anger seeped away. He thought that he might even fall asleep in the shifting, glittering shadows of the tree. It wasn’t as if he’d forgiven or forgotten Laurel, and they certainly would never kiss and make up. But when it came down to it, she had really done him a great favor.

DSM

F
or the first time, Nathaniel Worth went past Edward’s lab in the company of someone who appeared to be—from the way they were shoving each other and laughing—his friend. Or maybe his clone, with that skinny frame and those standout ears. It was the final Friday of the school year, and for once Nathaniel wasn’t going to need tutoring during the summer vacation. Not that he was excelling in any of his classes, but at least he had passing grades in all of them, including Bio/Life Science, which he had ended up having to repeat.

Edward had gotten him out of Maureen Wheeler’s clutches, though, by asking the headmaster to transfer the kid to the class of another, more humane and laid-back colleague. Parents had no say in these matters at Fenton, but there was no rule against faculty interference. It was like a reprieve from the governor. Since then, Edward had heard, Nathaniel became more focused
and had even lost the nickname “Worthless.” Now he was known as “Worms,” which, in the brutal and mysterious kingdom of childhood, was somehow considered cooler.

Bernie and Frances were sitting at their usual table at Bruno’s when Edward walked in. “Hey,” Bernie said, “if it isn’t Casanova.”

“I thought you were going straight home after you cleaned out your desk,” Frances said.

“I decided to celebrate with you.” Edward sat down as Bernie signaled their waiter for another glass.

How strange it was to feel celebratory, to actually welcome this time of year again. Edward felt as if he’d shed heavy armor or lost a few pounds. What he’d actually lost was the anchor of mourning that had weighed his heart down for the last two years. Amy Weitz had promised the bereavement group that this would happen in time, and she was right, at least about him. But it made him sad to think about it. And afraid it might return, like a post-traumatic stress flashback.

Frances clinked her glass against his and then against Bernie’s. “No more lessons, no more books, no more students’ dirty looks.”

“Amen,” Bernie said.
“L’chaim.”
To life. And he didn’t feel the need to throw Edward an apologetic glance.

“When are you leaving?” Frances asked.

“The first of July,” Edward said. “How about you?”

“Monday. I’m too old to delay gratification.”

Frances was flying to the south of France with two women friends, and Edward was going back to the Vineyard for a month, although not to the rented house he’d shared with Bee. Bernie was staying in town. He was one of those people who
claimed to love New York City in the summer, when everyone else deserted it.

But Edward hadn’t come to Bruno’s to discuss their vacation plans; he wanted to talk to Frances and Bernie about his encounter with Laurel. He needed to tell someone. Neither his family nor his Englewood friends knew anything about her, and he had no intention of enlightening them.

Bernie had been at Fenton when Edward was supposed to marry her. He’d been in attendance at the church that fateful day, too. And even if he hadn’t been, it was the sort of scandalous event that stayed in the collective memory of an institution. Back then, students still passed scribbled notes and nobody had cell phones yet, but the news spread quickly, anyway. These days it would have been even worse, the story proliferating wildly via texting and Facebook, probably embellished, and maybe even illustrated with Photoshopped nude pictures.

The only other mercy was that Laurel had wanted a late-June wedding, so that Edward was able to escape from the physical place for the summer. By September, when school resumed, he’d already begun to restore his ego and his social life. Laurel was gone and there was new gossip to keep everyone occupied. Not that anyone really forgot about the jilting—it just wasn’t current enough to be that interesting. Bernie’s advice hadn’t changed over the years. What Edward needed then, too, was to get laid, which he did, in the freewheeling 1970s, as often as he could.

Now he took a sip of beer and said, “You won’t believe who I ran into last week. A ghost from my past: Laurel Arquette.”

His audience was rapt. Frances, who knew all about Laurel’s betrayal, even though she’d been hired at Fenton years later, hadn’t ever brought her up with Edward. That was a kindness, he knew, a measure of their friendship. But he could see by her
face that the story was alive in her mind. Bernie whistled softly. “You didn’t recognize her? I thought she’d be tattooed on your brain.”

“She’s changed,” Edward said, suddenly wondering why he hadn’t known Laurel’s eyes. People’s eyes, those famous “windows to the soul,” didn’t change, did they? And hers had been large and an unusual light grayish green.

“Well, of course she’s changed,” Frances said. “How many years has it been?”

“No, it’s not just that she’s older, or even that she has a new name. She might as well have been wearing a disguise. Her hair is dark, her skin, too. Remember her hair, Bern?”

“Who could forget it? She was the White Goddess, the Snow Queen.” He collected himself. “And a first-class bitch,” he added.

“Seeing her again like that must have been awful,” Frances said to Edward. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, sure. I don’t know. It was a shock. And I acted like an asshole.”

“Why, did you kill her?” Bernie said. “Trust me, no jury would convict you.”

“No, but I felt murderous. She ran after me for blocks.”

Bernie laughed. “That’s poetic justice, my friend. Revenge, in your case, is really ‘a dish best served cold.’ ”

“Come on,” Edward said. “Revenge? What am I, a Blood or a Crip?”

“What did she say?” Frances asked.

“She said that she used to be crazy, that she was sick when she walked out on me.”

“Sounds about right to me,” Bernie said.

Bee had come to the same conclusion years before. When she and Edward were falling in love, they began to talk intensely
about their previous lives, but not just about former lovers as Laurel had insisted they do, swearing it would be cathartic rather than cruel.