The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating (20 page)

She turned back to look at him. He sat in a chair, one leg slung casually over the arm, like he’d been arranged that way by someone on set.
Okay, more slouch. Roll your drink around softly so the ice clinks. Tilt your head to the right. Perfect.
“Hey, don’t act impressed for my benefit. I’m the Hollywood hack nephew of a writer. You’re a
writer
, who shared a life with one of the world’s most interesting men.” He was flattering her, and she accepted. He was a stranger and out of town. He was exactly what Eve had suggested. He was perfect.

On the night before Claire was to leave, Jack broke down the details. “I have a car coming early in the morning, sweetheart. I have to be in San Francisco for a couple of days. But you don’t have to leave. You don’t even have to get up. I have another car coming to get you for your flight. Don’t lock up or clean or do anything. I want you to sleep until noon.”

“What time is your car?” she asked dreamily. They’d had the best chicken marsala she’d ever tasted and then a bubble bath. She felt like the stagehand in a dream.

“Five, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I know.”

Claire tried to smile. She turned the corners of her mouth up, she could do that, control her muscles, but—as he’d observed of her the first time they met—she was no actress.

Jack turned onto his side and held his head up with an L-shaped arm, resting all on his elbow.
Right out of
Pillow Talk, Claire thought. “Right out of
The Thin Man
,” Jack said.

Her eyes popped wide open and he kissed her.

RULE
#11
: Never kiss a man who will look better than you in the morning.

26

“What?!” Sasha screamed into the phone. NO hello, no lead-in. Claire had just barely hit
SEND
on the e-mail when her phone rang. How do e-mails get there so fast?

“What?” Claire replied, mock innocently.

“You know what. Honey, Thom’s sitting across the room with his thumb in his pants and you’re telling me you fucked—”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhh. Don’t say it. Laaaaaa, la, la.”

“Okay, you … whatever. Are you serious?”

“I didn’t say I did.”

“No, you said, ‘You’d be impressed.’ Here it is right here, I’m scrolling down. I say, ‘I’m not impressed until you sleep with him,’ and you reply, ‘Okay, then. You’d be impressed.’”

Claire had decided, for a number of reasons, to start her story with Jack—at least the one to tell Sasha—right here in Los Angeles. In Jack Huxley’s house, while she waited for her car to pick her up. There was the night, still, of the movie premiere, the accidental coupling with the wrong guy, but because that was not how Claire would typically start off any sort of thing—with a tequila blackout and mismatched shoes—she rewrote it slightly, for Sasha, on the fly.

“Okay, but it’s not like that. He’s very …
smart
. He’s
interesting
. And funny, he’s very funny.” She could hear Sasha rolling her eyes. “There’s not a single subject he can’t talk thoughtfully about and it’s because he knows. He’s curious about things, he’s not a braggart. We talked—I know this sounds ridiculous—but we stayed up and talked all night, every night.”

“And, just to be clear, you had sex with him?”

“Yes, but—”

“‘But’? Honey, why are you boring me with all this other stuff?”

Claire ignored her. “We downloaded music, we sang show tunes. He had a disco phase. Donna Summer, we sang the whole
Live and More
album. Oh … my God. What have I done?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I don’t want to think about him.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen. Everything will make you think about him.”

It was true. When she got home, everything Claire saw made her think about him. He was everywhere, and nowhere to be seen, like God. Magazines, billboards, grinning from the side of every single crosstown bus. She was flipping past
Access Hollywood
and there he was, right in her living room. And again, at eleven o’clock that night, there he was.

Perceptive selection
, she thought.
That’s all it is. He was everywhere before, and he’s everywhere now; it’s just that now, of course, I notice.

Meanwhile, the days ticked by loudly. They hadn’t made a plan. Claire was waiting in line at CVS one day, with her toilet paper and toothpaste, when she realized that it had been three weeks since she’d met Jack Huxley in L.A., and Jack Huxley—oh God, she thought, she cringed at herself … don’t think it, don’t think it … Jack Huxley hadn’t called. She was suddenly appalled at the things that spilled from her arms—deodorant, shampoo, paper towels, Goobers. Goobers! These were not the sort of things the girls Jack Huxley called would buy.

They wouldn’t buy Goobers.

With Charlie, Claire had never bought Goobers. What was wrong with her?

Maybe this whole thing with Jack was an aberration
,
Claire thought.
Jack Huxley doesn’t date small-breasted, old-fashioned
girls. He dates the girls who laugh, unprovoked, at all of his jokes whether they’ve heard them before or not. Girls who never roll their eyes, or eat. Not girls who shop at CVS.

Jack Huxley’s girls can while away hours—hours and hours—and not miss a single one of them when he’s tied up on set. They can try, then remove, then try again every single shade of mousse cheek glow at the cosmetics counter before stopping at Starbucks. They can wear a scarf through the loops of their jeans without feeling the least bit self-conscious. They can hold hands with their “girlfriends.” Jack Huxley’s girls don’t laugh at anything, ever: they giggle.

They wear push-up bras in junior high
, Claire thought. And when they moved on to sex, they knew right where to go. The jock first. Then the musician, a local politician, somebody’s mogul father, and then Hollywood. These girls are able, somehow, to walk straight up to the sorts of men who command industries and yachts, and who only live when the cameras roll, look those men in the eye, and somehow, without demeaning themselves, lead them away.

Claire couldn’t walk straight up to the news seller on Fourteenth Street. She was hardwired to wait for men to come. She was hardwired for courtship. It was the Midwestern in her. It was genetic. Her mother, Betty, had waited. She’d waited for men to call, to court, to send flowers, to ask. She had waited to have sex, and when she had it, she waited for it to end. Claire, like it or not, had inherited her mother’s wait. She’d married an older man, from a different generation, one who expected to lead, who pointed her everywhere, who had all the decisions made before she knew there were choices. She didn’t walk up to Charlie; he found her and she dutifully followed him home.

27

“You liked him, then?”

“Yes. I guess I did.”

Dr. Lowenstein discerned a noticeable shift in Claire since Jack Huxley had come on the scene. Where typically their sessions had been filled with a disingenuously wry back-and-forth, Claire now spoke randomly, speeding up and slowing down, letting no two thoughts connect.

One ten-minute story began in the middle and went nowhere, about Jack Huxley and a
Slate
article he’d read and how Claire Byrne, when he’d mentioned it, realized she’d read the exact same article, that exact same week. What were the odds? There was something about Jack Huxley’s eyes being in focus, and then not, and then in either case being very dramatic and darkly brown. “You look into them,” Claire said, “and it’s like you’ve found a wonderful secret place. You feel like Alice falling into Wonderland, only it’s warm and you’re not scared—they’re the safest eyes I’ve ever seen, they should head a cult. Then your stomach starts to tickle from the inside and you find yourself giggling for no reason at all; it’s like smoking pot.”

“Looking into Jack Huxley’s eyes evokes a feeling similar to that of smoking marijuana, then.”

“Yes. Or, like flying really high on a swing. Whatever it is, somehow gravity takes a pause.”

“A pause.”

“Yes, for a moment as you look in Huxley’s eyes, gravity steps aside. The peripheral sense, too. For a moment that feels like forever, there are only the eyes.”

Lowenstein nodded to indicate that yes, she understood. He had a great pair of eyes.

The second thing Jack Huxley had said to Claire after “Hello” was this: “Claire, forgive me, I know this, but it’s slipped. Tell me again what you do. Something with vibrators?” This is what he’d said. He was funny. He’d remembered from the first night. There had been no long-winded anecdotes, no performance or puffed-up stories, no pronouncements about the state of film, no scanning the room. There was no excessive facial movement or language, not one wink.

“He was different than I expected. That’s all.”

“Different from what? What did you expect?”

“He was like the lead in a Godard film—sweet and cool, vulnerable and rogue all at once, and backed by a brilliant sound track.”

“What did you expect, then?”

Claire hesitated. She picked nervously at a nail. “I don’t know. A flatterer and seducer. A charlatan, I guess.” That’s what Beatrice had said.

RULE #12
: Ignorance is bliss.

28

The holidays were a bust.

Claire capitulated to Grace and took the train to Connecticut for the Byrne Christmas Eve. Grace had been widowed for nineteen years. Franz, or The Judge, as his friends had called him, had died of a heart attack, a much more conventional sort of death than death by a Giacometti. It is helpful, Claire had discovered, if the things that happen to you in life are things that
people can understand
. People don’t understand someone getting killed by forged art.

Franz Byrne was no less present in the family home for being dead because after he died, Grace took up Catholicism, which to Claire seemed to mean that Franz was furtively lurking around.

“Don’t worry, dear. Charlie is watching you. He’s taking care of you. He’s up there with his father now. They’ll take care of everything.” Grace gestured aimlessly at a space above her head. She’d said a version of this on the four occasions Claire had seen her since the funeral. Claire’s eyes followed Grace’s hand nervously. Grace, along with The Judge’s sister, Agnes, seemed to know the exact location in the sky where everyone was seated. They appeared to have kept in close touch with Charlie since his death. Grace was a better widow than Claire. She had likely not touched a vibrator, much less a man, since The Judge clutched his heart and was transported by gurney to
his time
at St. Vincent’s hospital. She put a strong, skinny arm around Claire’s shoulder, “Follow me, dear.”

In a sitting room at the front of Grace’s house was an elaborate shrine. Charlie’s ashes—Grace’s share of them—were at rest in a huge embossed urn that sat on a tall marble table, flanked by bookcases full of his works: a small but impressive library of sex. Framed family photos and press photos of Charlie littered the walls. There were two armchairs and a chaise. A Chippendale table held the candles.

“Light one with me, dear.” Grace pulled an expensive-looking gold lighter from a bowl on the bookcase and lit a candle, then handed the lighter to Claire who lit another. “Join me.”

Grace clutched Claire’s hand and recited a Gloria and Hail Mary. When they were done Grace returned to her guests and to Claude, her handyman turned bartender. He shook up two Manhattans and topped them each with a bright red maraschino cherry.

“Don’t forget your cherry!” he said, looking at Claire.

She found the whole night unsettling. The
Times Magazine
had included Charlie in its annual obituary issue—“The Lives They Lived”—and Grace was reading passages of it aloud.

Claire couldn’t get the idea of Charlie staring down at them out of her head. She didn’t want Charlie watching her all the time. Good God, had he seen what had happened in their bedroom with Brad Hess? She certainly didn’t want Grace to know that Charlie was watching her if he was. What if he reported back?

Charlie’s family was notorious for being better than everyone at everything, and widowhood was no exception.

“So, Claire, are you seeing anyone?” Charlie’s cousin Dane innocently asked and Grace swatted his hand as if he’d just tried to grope her. “Good Lord, what a thing to ask!” She gestured, again, to the ceiling.

Grace gestured throughout the night. And around ten, after too many brandies, when Grace began to veer, Claire snuck out. She called a cab to the train station and, while she waited, cousin Dane escaped, too, and offered her a ride.

“So, I know we aren’t … I mean, we’ve never been very close,” he said in the car. It was true. They’d only ever met here, at Grace’s Christmas Eve. They’d never gotten beyond small talk. “… but how’s everything going for you, Claire? I mean, really. Has it been hard? Jesus, I’m sorry. Stupid question.”

Claire considered her answers. The stock one:
It’s been hard but I’m doing okay.
The drunk one:
No, but it could be, big guy, whyntcha come over?
And the truth: “It’s been … hard, yes. And also kind of … weird. But I just met someone. And I miss Charlie, don’t get me wrong—but there wasn’t a lot of … spark in our lives. He wouldn’t disagree if he were here. Still, I feel bad saying it. And now, maybe, well I think I might have met someone and it feels nice.”

She went with the truth. Dane, who’d had her back just minutes ago, pursed his lips and was silent. Not one word from him until the train. “Here you are,” he said curtly. No promises to stay in touch, no hug. “Be careful.”

Claire was home in bed by eleven p.m.

*   *   *

O
NE WEEK LATER
, on New Year’s Eve, Jack Huxley gave a ten-year-old boy twenty bucks for a cup of lemonade in Culver City and every paper in town ran it bold on the front page like they’d scooped world peace. The drink heard round the world.
Here, kid. Keep the change
. It had been five weeks since Claire was in Los Angeles. The holidays had steamrolled through New York with forced expectations and fake cheer. She stayed in alone New Year’s Eve. Sasha called to suggest they have an anti–New Year and order in Chinese.