An Available Man (6 page)

The ninety minutes passed more quickly than Edward had expected. The bereavement group had formed a kind of cautious community, the way his students usually did at the beginning of a new term. And he mostly liked the people in the room. He envied their openness and admired the respect they showed one another. But he still felt pretty much the way he had coming in: reluctant and skeptical and, most of all, alone. He didn’t really see any point in coming back.

The Monster in the Basement

W
hile Bee was still able to make sense, she’d told Edward many things: that she was afraid; that she wasn’t afraid; that she was too old to die young, it wasn’t even romantic; that she loved him; that she feared the darkness; that she feared the silence—but she wouldn’t be able to sense them, right? She didn’t know which was scarier: the absence of consciousness forever, or the haunting possibility of eternal consciousness. Sometimes she came awake and spoke without opening her eyes, as if to try out the darkness. Once she said, “Am I dead yet?”

He readied himself for an outburst of anger that never happened. So he became angry for her and tried not to show it in her presence. It was a hazardous balancing act;
they ought to give lessons in this
, he thought. Whenever he could, he went down to the basement to vent, or just to tremble with fury and terror.

This was where Bee’s ex, Bruce, once had a woodworking shop, and Edward now had his home laboratory. There was a toilet and a slop sink down there, a metal cabinet for supplies, a small refrigerator for snacks and some of his specimens—“Now, don’t become absentminded, dear,” Bee used to say—and an old studio bed for naps or daydreaming.

Bruce’s weekend hobby had produced various small household items, like fish- and frog-shaped trivets and a box for the television remote controls. He had taken all of his tools with him when he left, but not the long table that Bee had found on one of her flea market jaunts, and bought for him from a vendor who was moving to Florida.

Edward had appropriated it for his lab equipment. Once in a while, when Julie and Nick were still in school, he’d invited them downstairs to do simple experiments, for homework or just for fun. They sprouted lima beans in damp cotton, and grew bread mold that they examined under the microscope, along with hairs plucked from their own heads. It was during these sessions that Nick first let down his guard and began to communicate with Edward. Julie, he remembered, had freaked out at the magnification of her split ends.

After the kids grew up and moved out, Bee offered Edward the use of one of their bedrooms as his lab, but he preferred the quiet and seclusion of the basement. “It’s more peaceful down there,” he’d told her. “It’s spookier, too,” she said. “I just hope some guy with a bolt through his neck doesn’t come thumping up the stairs one day.” But it was always only Edward, rubbing his eyes, looking for her company, for a drink or a cup of coffee.

One Sunday night a few weeks after the bereavement group meeting, he went down to the basement after supper, hoping he could lose himself in work for a little while. The dog whimpered at the top of the stairs, which he couldn’t manage anymore. Edward
contemplated carrying him down, and then decided he’d think better on his own. He’d started an experiment just before Bee became ill, involving the growth of bacteria on a kitchen sponge. Although he’d lost track of the whole project, he saw that his samples had been preserved, and that his notes were still on the table.

But he couldn’t concentrate. Bingo had stopped whimpering, but his toenails clicked as he paced the kitchen, waiting for Edward’s return. And the house creaked and settled, like light, hesitant human footsteps above him, making him look upward for a moment. If only he believed in ghosts, or an afterlife, or anything besides the scientific evidence of decomposition. Despite the fears she’d expressed, Bee had chosen burial over cremation. “I don’t want you to be stuck with my ashes,” she’d told him, as if she were referring to a perpetual bad blind date. “And I don’t want to be scattered all over the place, either. It sounds so … restless.”

Now Edward lay down on the studio bed and closed his eyes. Why had he always associated silence with this part,
his
part, of the house? He’d turned on the dishwasher earlier, and water still gurgled through the pipes. The furnace kicked in and roared. And that subtle creaking continued from time to time. It was enough to wake the dead, he thought, and sat up in shock.

He took a package of cotton batting from the cabinet and tore off a couple of pieces. He rolled them into pellets and put them into his ears, pressing until he couldn’t hear anything, not even the tapping of his own fingers on the cabinet door. It was as if he’d gone totally deaf.

Then he turned off the light switch on the wall near the steps. It was a cloudy, moonless night—the high, shallow windows appeared black—and the room was pitched into utter darkness. He had to grope his way back to the bed, and although
he’d thought he knew the place by heart, he stumbled against a corner of the long table. He could feel it tremble, and the petri dishes and flasks must have rattled. But he didn’t hear them any more than he heard the usual groan of the bedsprings as he lay down again.

For decades, in a unit on the senses, he’d shown classrooms of kids how their pupils contracted in brightness, and enlarged in the absence of light. They learned the role of vitamin A in night vision, the way the molecules in the rods inside their eyes split and then recombined. And how, after several minutes, they could begin to make out shapes and even details of their environment in the dark.

Now it was happening to him. There was the outline of the table, with its miniature skyline of test tubes and beakers. There were the skulking silhouettes of the furnace and the water heater, the dehumidifier in the shadowy distance. Edward pulled the folded blanket from the foot of the bed all the way up past his head, shutting his eyes once more, tighter this time.

Darkness and silence. But also
consciousness
, glorious consciousness, of darkness and silence, and of his own metabolism: the heat of his body beneath the blanket, his urgent pulse and anxious breathing. His eyelids fluttered behind their blindfold, and all of his muscles seemed to flex involuntarily; he was a veritable machine of motion. And his brain teemed with stored sounds and images. Bee!

Edward threw off the blanket and opened his eyes. While they readjusted, he pulled the cotton wads out of his ears and got up and stretched, easing a slight cramp in his left leg. His real bed was a lot more comfortable. The book he’d been reading earlier, on Darwin and Lincoln, was waiting on his night table. He looked at the luminous dial on his watch; the dishwasher would be ready to be emptied by now.

Then there were three sets of exams to go through and grade, the lesson plans to prepare for the following week. He was thirsty, as if he’d been running for miles. And he remembered that Sybil had left a message earlier: “Edward,” she’d said, “why in the world do you still have Bee’s voice on this thing?” He hadn’t called her back, but he knew that he had to change the outgoing message on his voice mail. He tidied up the remains of the abandoned experiment, and soon he was lumbering up the stairs, half monster, half human, returning to the noise and light of the living world.

Science Guy

“P
rofessor, hey, I’m glad you’re home. I wanted to give you a heads-up about something.” It was Nick, on the telephone, as soon as Edward walked into the house after work.

“What’s going on?” Edward asked. His manner was carefully casual, but he felt a pang of foreboding. He’d suddenly remembered other phone calls from Nick, or about him—from school and once from the police—when he was a teenager and Bee and Edward were newly married. It was hard to believe how sullen and unapproachable the boy was back then, the way he’d always said “
What
” if you so much as glanced in his direction, a flat, belligerent statement rather than a question. Edward, having won Bee, but still courting the children, had come to his defense. “It’s only adolescence,” he assured Bee. “It’s boys. I was like that, too,” he said, although he hadn’t been. “He’ll outgrow it,” he ventured, without real certainty.

But Nick
had
outgrown it, whatever it was. He was a man now, married, and a highly paid software designer, tamed at last by maturity and the quicksilver magic of love, for Amanda, for his mother and sister and grandmother—even for Edward.

On the phone, Nick said, “It’s the girls. Man, I’m sorry, but they’ve taken this ad out about you.” Before Edward could respond, he went on. “I tried to stop them. I told them it was a stupid idea and they had no right …” Now he sounded like the younger Nick who was never at fault for anything, from skipped classes and failing grades to vandalized mailboxes and the stash of weed in his own smelly sneaker. But this wasn’t about Nick; apparently it was about Edward. Something to do with an ad.

“What ad?” Edward asked. “What are you talking about?”

“That literary paper you subscribe to,
The New York Review
?”

“
Of Book
s,” Edward finished lamely. “What about it?” But he already knew. Those personals that Bee had gleefully insisted on reading aloud to him, along with a running commentary. “Listen to this one. ‘Sensual, smart, stunning, sensitive.’ Oh, why do they always resort to alliteration? ‘Julia Roberts look-alike.’ In her dreams, maybe. And this one’s a music lover! Well, who doesn’t love music, besides the Taliban? ‘Searching for that special someone to share Bach, Brecht, and breakfast.’ When they’ll probably eat bagels, bacon, and brussels sprouts.”

Pretty, petite, passionate. Witty, wise, wonderful. Wasn’t anyone ordinary, a little flawed? Bee wanted to know. Homely and shy, with a stammer, perhaps, or a glass eye? “Well, who places those ads? And who answers them?” Edward once said, irritably, rattling his newspaper—once again he was trying to read while she read to him. “Why, lonely people, Edward, that’s who,” Bee said, in tones of gentle reproach, as if he’d been the one making fun of them.

Now his blood seemed to thicken and slow with dread. The “girls,” Amanda and Julie, had joined that furtive cabal of matchmakers: Sybil and her oddball cousin, Joy Feldman with her recent hints about online dating, all those phone calls from strangers streaming out of the woodwork. “What does it say?” he asked Nick.

“I’ve got the paper right here. Should I read it to you?”

“Do you mean it’s published already?”

“Well, yeah,” Nick said.
Duh
,
Professor
. “Manda showed it to me this morning. Believe me, I wish they’d listen to reason.”

Edward glanced at the mail he’d tossed onto the kitchen counter when he’d answered the phone, and there among the envelopes was that familiar thick, folded wedge. He and Bee had had an on-again, off-again subscription for years.

Off, when they both complained about having much too much to read and admitted that they were merely skimming most of the essays. On, when they became hungry for literate writing, for opinions that sustained or argued with their own, or when they simply feared the threatened loss of the printed word. Bee used to inhale the inky fragrance of the
Times
in the morning before she started reading it, with an expression that was already nostalgic.

In the months that he’d been alone, Edward read while he ate his supper—sometimes with the television set mumbling in the background, for noise, for company—and at bedtime, and in the middle of the night when he came abruptly awake as if his name had been called. He went through everything in the
Times
and
The New Yorker
and the
NYR
, except for the personal ads in the latter, which didn’t interest him in the first place, and reminded him of Bee’s wicked delight in them.

“No,” he told Nick, as offhandedly as he could. “I have my copy here. I’ll take a look at it later.”

But he didn’t even remove his jacket before he reached for his glasses, grabbed the paper, and dropped into a chair at the table. His eye was caught by some of the headlined names on the cover—Tony Judt, Freeman Dyson, Elizabeth Drew, former seductions—but he quickly turned to the back pages, where phone sex was advertised in discreet code, alongside rentals in Tuscany and the Loire Valley, and offers for the editing of manuscripts by acclaimed authors.