The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating (11 page)

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, honey,” Ethan said. He put the paper down.

“My point is that this guy was
old
and widowed less than
two
months and he’s getting fixed up with
me.
A husband dies and the world gets just another widow. A wife dies, and a star is born.”

“That’s catchy.”

“Seriously, Ethan.” Claire crossed, then uncrossed her legs.

“Okay. Does it bother you?” Ethan asked.

“Yes, it does. There’s no protocol for men. It’s like breaking up: they’re just single again, suddenly, and they run back out and fool around. I mean, what about Scout’s dad in
To Kill a Mockingbird—
what was his name?”

“Atticus.”

“Right, Atticus. He didn’t start hitting on Scout’s teacher right after his wife died. He stayed sober and serious. He made his children his focus, not getting laid. This Modern Love guy has a seven-year-old daughter. Can’t he just watch porn like everyone else? It’s pathetic.”

“What’s pathetic? That he’s in a relationship, and you’re not?”

“No. That’s not … no. It’s this ruse of doing it for his wife. He says she told him, ‘If I die, I don’t want you to be unhappy the rest of your life,’ then says she added jokingly, ‘just for a couple years.’ Well, maybe she wasn’t joking, maybe she did want him to be unhappy for a couple of years. These widowers have no respect and it’s demeaning to all of us.”

“No one’s saying you can’t have a life, Clarabelle.”

“Nancy Drew, there’s another one. Her dad poured himself into his work. He didn’t start screwing secretaries or, if he did, at least he was discreet.”

A pitcher of Bloody Marys appeared on their table. Ethan smiled.

“Smooth,” Claire said.

“To the bloody widow.” He raised his glass and ate his celery. “Relax, honey. Time figures things out.”

*   *   *

W
HEN
C
LAIRE GOT
home, there was an envelope outside her door, from Richard. It contained a small white card and a note: “What you need, Claire, is a journey, however brief—R.”

Everyone and their journeys
, she thought.

The white card said this:

Griot: New York City

I will take you on a tour.
You will end up in a different place.

212.555.1284

Claire read the card twice, turned it over, ate a scoop of peanut butter from a jar.

She looked up
griot
in Charlie’s battered Oxford dictionary.

Noun: A member of a class of traveling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa. Origin: French, earlier
guiriot
, perhaps from Portuguese
criado
.

She called Ethan.

“What’s a griot?”

“A griot? Hmm. Well, he’s an historian of sorts. It’s a West African tradition that goes back centuries, although they are enjoying a renaissance in Europe. Why?”

Claire studied the card. “Well, Richard sent me the number of a griot. Can they be in New York?”

“East Village or West?”

“You know griots?”

“If it’s Derek, in the West Village, you should go. He’s got a certain flair. You should follow him. Actually, I think he’s a client of Richard’s.”

“Follow him? What do I do?”

“Just show up where he tells you to go and listen. He’ll tell you a story. Remember when your mother took you to story time when you were a kid?”

“She didn’t.”

“Well, pretend she did. This is story time for grown-ups. He’ll know every sad song that’s ever played out in this town, big or small. Every drunk, every lecher, every swindle, scandal, and sordid act. If he doesn’t, he’ll make it up. Derek’s a bartender by trade; he’s out of work. People drink at home when the economy’s bad.”

It couldn’t hurt, Claire thought. And Ethan said, “If Beatrice wasn’t the olive for your martini, so to speak, you should try him.”

*   *   *

H
IS NAME
WAS
Derek, it turned out. He was abrupt on the phone but not in an unfriendly way—it was a manner Claire recognized. She had a similar anxiety about words spilled through phones, so unstructured and loose and never a natural end. He told Claire to be at Houston and Sullivan Street at nine o’clock Thursday, and when she arrived he handed her and four other people a white card that he produced crisp and neat from his fingers, like magic. It was blank but for his name and phone number in small Helvetica font.

Derek Fountain, Griot        212.555.1284

And then one word in Garamond:
LONGING
.

Besides Claire, there was a businessman from Kansas, a woman from Great Neck and her teenage son, and a pale man in leather pants and black hair with bright tattoos that snaked from his wrists up into his sleeves on both arms, and which Claire could not quite make sense of.

They walked two blocks in silence, then Derek stopped and read from
Le Père Goriot
by Balzac. After he closed the book and replaced it in his backpack, he produced a tarnished flute and began a Chopin étude, then he walked again. The group followed. They walked for thirty-three minutes until they reached a corner at West Twenty-Fourth Street, where the griot broke down the flute, returned it to his pack, and began to speak.

“That, my friends, is the site of the town house where Evelyn Nesbit first maneuvered her rosy adolescent body onto Stanford White’s red velvet swing. White was a wealthy architect. His firm was responsible for the second Madison Square Garden and the Washington Square Arch, among other prominent city fixtures. Nesbit was an artist’s muse and an actress. She was the Norma Jean of her time, circa 1903.”

The griot faced the rubble that had once been a stately four-floor mansion. He took a deep breath and continued.

“This was not Stanford’s family home, of course, but a private lair where he turned vulnerable young women into his conquests. Evelyn Nesbit was the most vulnerable of them all and, subsequently, the most infamous.”

He cleared his throat.

“She was sixteen when she disrobed and climbed onto his notorious red swing for the first time. Stanford White, married with children, was forty-seven.”

The woman from Great Neck gasped.

“She had the narrow waist and full hips that Marilyn Monroe would later trademark, the famous ‘hourglass shape.’ She had soft lips and delicate skin that, it is said, rendered Stanford White helpless. Of course, some might think it a stretch to imagine a wealthy and powerful forty-seven-year-old man helpless against a sixteen-year-old girl, but this is how the story’s told and what I do here is tell stories.”

The griot’s small gathering was rapt.

“While White pursued her fervently at first,” the griot continued, “he later abandoned her for fresher conquests and she returned—both literally and figuratively—to the chorus line where he’d found her, one of countless young women hoping for a shot at security that the families they came from never had. The working women of Broadway at this time had a short window in which to engage a proper husband—one who could provide them with an allowance and a future shielded from poverty, after their youth had faded.”

Suddenly, Claire caught the griot’s eye. She’d been watching him, they all had been, but then he looked at her directly. His eyes were clear and blue.

“Some time later, long after the end of her affair with Stanford, Evelyn married the millionaire Harry Thaw. She wore black to their modest nuptials. Shortly after they married, Harry shot Stanford White in the face.”

The griot gazed at his little group and then at the site of the mansion. He wiped a hand across his brow—it was unseasonably warm for late October.

“Unfortunately for Evelyn, Harry’s family was crazy, too. After her husband was jailed for murder, she was cast onto the street, penniless. She lived a long hard life, finally succumbing at the age of eighty-two, in California—after decades of false hopes and setbacks, addictions, and lousy men.”

The griot paused to check his watch. Without a note or a word, he squared his shoulders and walked away. The street corner resumed as if he had never been there.

He had a certain
je ne sais quoi
, a flair. Ethan was right. She found herself thinking about him. A few days later, she called again.

“I’d like to buy a subscription,” she said.

“I don’t do that. But you can come again on Thursday at nine a.m.”

Claire hung up. She wished she hadn’t. She wished she’d kept him on the phone. She tried to picture the griot on a red velvet swing.

In the days and weeks after Charlie died, Claire had had occasional thoughts of intimacy with other men. Now, a few months later, she thought of it all the time. She imagined having sex with the brusque man behind the counter at her corner deli, she imagined it with the grocery delivery boy from Fresh Direct. She imagined sex with Jack Huxley, and even, oh my God, Ethan. Now she imagined it repeatedly, and in great detail, and in various locales with the griot.

She grew increasingly concerned with her virginity as a widow. She wanted to be done with it. She harbored the irrational fear that she might die like this—a widow virgin. And her death thoughts weren’t the general existential ones, a woman struggling with mundane thoughts of mortality. Hers were neurotic and imminent. Claire began to believe she was going to die any minute. When she crossed streets, she braced for the wayward bus to mow her down. Out to dinner she imagined a deadly virus in her food. She naturally entertained thoughts of objects falling from the sky, and if she woke in the mornings with a foggy head or if there was a twitch in her arm, she couldn’t quite put a name to the thing but was sure it was fatal.

Beatrice, who’d been thorough on other topics, did not seem concerned about Claire’s death. But it wasn’t uncommon, according to Judith Lowenstein, to feel vulnerable after the experience Claire had had. Survivor’s guilt, death by proximity, crazy paranoia—call it what you will. If healthy, robust Charlie who had looked just fine that June morning could expire before noon, then it was likely, in Claire’s mind, that something would befall her, too. She noticed symptoms, beginning with her faint onto Carter Hinckley’s office floor at Wanamaker and Sons. This, she was certain, heralded Parkinson’s disease. At the Waverly Street Starbucks, unable to summon the presence of mind to order a drink, she thought she had lupus. When her stomach fizzled and rumbled after a late Sunday breakfast at Sasha’s—her cook was sick and Sasha had bravely whipped up eggs—she’d thought it was Asian flu.

Ethan believed these subconscious fears were planted by Beatrice and Eve, by their gloomy outlooks on romance. It was true, the oracles had unnerved her.

The following Thursday Claire showed up where Derek had told her to show, at St. Anthony’s Convent on Prince Street. There were three followers this time, including Claire. They exchanged twenty-dollar bills again for Derek’s card, which had his name and number and a different larger word, again in Garamond:
ABSURDITY
.

Derek started by reading the work of poets who’d suffered tragic deaths—Delmore Schwartz (alcoholism and madness), Keats (tuberculosis and a broken heart), and Derek’s own second cousin Frank (laxatives).

Then he walked north toward Washington Square Park. He was tall and didn’t slouch. He wore his jeans loose but not baggy. He was thin but defined. She dressed and undressed him in different outfits as he spoke—hovering over her in a white T-shirt and denim, then shirtless, then in a tailored black suit. She imagined his hair gelled back, then loose, then cropped short, then wavy and long. She imagined his hands on her waist. She imagined him in front of her and behind. She failed to hear most of what he said.

The griot stopped abruptly on West Third Street and spoke in a low murmur, as if he were being careful to not let someone overhear. “We are standing six blocks from the Provincetown Playhouse where Eugene O’Neill began his career with the short work
Bound East for Cardiff
.” He shifted slightly to the right. “At the height of his career, O’Neill was most noted for the very public affair he conducted with Jack Reed’s wife, Louise. Reed was O’Neill’s close friend, and also fellow communist and radical, who was made a household name by Warren Beatty in the movie
Reds
. Louise was played by Diane Keaton who, by the way, is a regular when she’s in town at that restaurant right there, across the street.”

The griot took two small steps to the right. “We are five blocks from where Henry Miller lived before he fled New York for Paris with his second wife, June. Henry and June carried on a bisexual ménage à trois for several months here with the artist Jean Kronski, which Henry wrote about in his autobiographical work
Crazy Cock
.”

The griot spoke as if no one else was there.

“In Paris, Jean was replaced by Anaïs Nin in the Millers’ love triangle, which launched Anaïs Nin’s longtime patronage of Henry. June Miller eventually left to marry a businessman, who then left her for an actress. June deteriorated. She was in and out of the city’s psychiatric system for years and finally died in obscurity.”

The griot shifted once more. “We are just over three blocks from where e. e. cummings gave up on capitalization.” At this the griot smiled and in reply the three others in the group chuckled. Claire stared at the back of Derek’s head, willing him to look at her again.

He gesticulated in one direction and then, without warning, another. Then he spit out an array of trivia like fireworks. “You are three and a half blocks away from where Mark Twain moved after his wife passed away, five blocks from where Henry James was born, and a short distance from where William James—an anonymous man, with no relationship to Henry or to Henry’s brother William—fed his obese and bed-ridden wife Oressa a steady diet of arsenic eggnogs in order to off her and marry her young daughter. Oressa James took a heroically long time to die, but when she did it was gruesome. She expired in a pool of her own vomit and filth and William jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge as police bore down on him, in a terrible cliché of an end.” Derek pointed southeast in the direction of the bridge; then he gathered his pack and left. His followers disbanded. Claire was the last to walk away. She was more than slightly undone by the morning’s narrative. She was breathless.