The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating (26 page)

“She’s not in the picture now.”

“In the picture? One girl?” Claire wanted to start laughing. It was so absurd. And Ann Holloway was right—it’s not about the sex. Charlie was right. Love and sex can’t coexist. Jack Huxley was never going to get that, any of it.

There was one more day before she was to leave. Jack had left early in the morning, with some vague detail to take care of. Claire’s small body coiled up beneath his goose feather comforter, eight-hundred-thread-count sheets. Still she shivered.

There was a book face down on the pillow next to her. Claire turned it over.
The Razor’s Edge
, first edition. Signed by Somerset Maugham. She couldn’t imagine where Jack had found it. Was this his own personal copy? Now given to her? Inside was a note:

C—

Our book. Now yours.

    —Jack

He gives a little piece of himself away to each of you, every time.
Ann Holloway’s words rang in her ears.

RULE #16
: Relationships are like writing; the hardest part is knowing when to stop.

40

After Claire got back to New York, she got her period. So much for that. She relaxed, then obsessed, then met Sasha and Ethan at Bar Pitti for post-Jack analysis.

Claire handed Ethan her coat. She told them about the visit to Ann Holloway and their awkward last day. She didn’t tell them about the book. They wouldn’t understand.

“I don’t have an exit strategy,” she said.

“Oh my God, it’s not love, honey,” Ethan said.

“How do you know?” Claire asked.

“At best, it’s oxytocin,” Sasha said. “It’s the bonding hormone. Women release it during sex and childbirth. Dr. Riva says it can take up to two years to detox from high levels of it.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“I might be, but I’m not the one claiming to love a hologram.”

“A hologram?”

“Yes, you see him in front of you but when you reach out to touch him he’s not really there. I hadn’t wanted to tell you, but this whole thing you’re doing is not you and it’s not good for you either.”

“Don’t preach, Sash. Last week you said you wished Thom was dead.”

“What?” Ethan said. “Did I miss something?”

Sasha glared at Claire.

“Never mind,” Claire said.

Panderer and seducer, flatterer and alchemist—the embodiment of everyone Dante bumped into on his zippy little foray into hell. That was Jack Huxley.

“You should sue him for breach of affection. He’s squandering affections you should be investing somewhere else. He’s sabotaging your future potential. He should pay you restitution.”

“That’s not very helpful, Sasha,” Claire said. “I’ll just forget any of it ever happened. Who cares? My husband died. I’m thirty-two and I don’t have a clue about life or love or men.”

“Clarabelle, sweetie. Take advantage of your freedom. Go out with me tonight. Maybe you’ll meet someone normal—a ballet dancer.”

Claire pouted. “‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’”

“That’s a song lyric.” Ethan said.

“Song lyrics are true. Joan Baez was a poet.” Claire took a sip of her wine and distracted herself with her menu.

“You didn’t just say that.” Ethan pulled Claire’s menu down from in front of her.

“Janis Joplin!” Claire said and laughed. “Just testing you.”

41

It was the middle of Claire’s discontent. She woke up at three minutes past nine in the morning. There was a phone call from Richard.

“Claire. Sorry to wake you. Did I wake you?”

“No. Yes.”

“Knopf is asking for the first one hundred pages of Charlie’s book. If you stall, they’ll lose interest and then we’re back at square one. Do you have something?”

“Hmm. I guess.”

“Something I can give them?”

“No.”

“Okay, first fifty.”

“By when?”

“As soon as you can. If you give me something reasonable, I’ll tell them and they’ll be okay if they have a date. The catch is, you can’t miss it.”

“Tell them a year. Maxwell Perkins used to—”

“I know about Maxwell Perkins,” Richard said. “But you haven’t written
For Whom the Bell Tolls
yet. So until then, they want to know how much of the book is going to be Charlie and how much you. They want to know they’re going to be able to sell the booksellers on it.”

“I need more time, Richard.”

“I’ll tell them first few chapters and a synopsis by June. They’ll take that. Stick to a schedule. Get up and eat some fruit and get to work. I want to see some finished pages next month.”

Claire was tired of Charlie’s book. She had been taking up space at the National Arts Club, going every day, staring at walls, watching Don DeLillo come and go, counting down the remaining days of Charlie’s membership, and e-mailing people she hadn’t talked to in five years. She had not, technically, done much work on Charlie’s book at all.

*   *   *

T
HE CITY, AS
if to shame her, felt unnaturally upbeat. Unapologetically happy. It rolled right over her. Ethan invited her to a cocktail party on Thursday, and Jonathan Rochet was there. Claire made it a point to overdrink. She choked down the house bar’s signature margaritas in big gulps. She made a terrible insult to Ethan’s friend, then excused herself to wobble back home.

Another week down. Three million to go.

The first day of spring, Claire took a taxi to the Empire State Building and bought an all-day pass to Big Apple Tours—a double-decker bus that drove up and down the city, over and over, like a giant narrative taxi, infusing its passengers with useless bits of island legend and gossip and lore.

She took the first bus in the line and handed her ticket to Derek. Yes, Derek. Claire’s griot. Islands are small.

He began in a quiet, conspiratorial murmur. “Right now you are six blocks from where Thomas Paine died. Paine, the infidel, the author of
Common Sense
and
The Crisis
, two of the most political pamphlets of American history. Both written during the American Revolutionary War. Thomas Paine returned to fifty-nine Grove Street to die somewhat disgraced soon after being imprisoned by Robespierre in Paris during the French Revolution.”

He made no suggestion of knowing Claire, and she was glad. There was no awkwardness. She sank back in a seat and watched. The griot was animated. His arms gesticulated in one direction, then—
swoop, whoosh
—in the other.

She sat and listened, and at the first stop she stayed on. She stayed on through the Village, through Chinatown and Soho, up to Times Square and Museum Mile.

By late afternoon Claire was hungry and considering getting off when the tour bus slowed at Sixty-Fourth Street as it made its way up Madison Avenue.

“Here,” the griot began. He was solemn. Claire sat up straight.

“Here is where just last year one of the city’s finest minds was felled by one of its most expensive works of art.”

He didn’t say Charlie’s name. He didn’t mention the fake. No one asked any questions. But he did catch Claire’s eye.

She stood up as the bus approached the stop at Grant’s Tomb, 122nd Street and Riverside Drive. He was in the middle of a story about the number of times Grant proposed to his wife before she finally agreed to marry him. Claire left with her heart warm and walked the long, long, long way back downtown.

At the corner of Broadway and Fifty-Ninth, at Columbus Circle, she stopped to catch her breath. There was a newsstand on the corner. In the same way that Michael Corleone didn’t look but still sensed the headline that said his father had been shot, Claire sensed it.

She did not want to turn her head, but she did.

Jack Huxley was on the cover of
People
,
OK!
,
Us
, the
National Enquirer
, and, of course, the
New York Post
.

“Preggers!”

Claire walked up to the newsstand under the pretense of buying gum. She pretended to dig through her wallet. She tried inconspicuously to read the magazine.

“Right,” she said softly.

“You want the paper?” the brown-haired man asked impatiently.

“Just gum. Doublemint.”

She looked up and down Eighth Avenue. She looked across at the park where couples where swinging small children between them, lifting them up off the ground and letting them back down.

No one in the city could possibly register the Richter measurement that had just rocked Claire Byrne.

Preggers!

RULE #17
: Once you have non-monogamously dated a man, step aside for other women to non-monogamously date him.

She left a dollar bill on the counter, snatched up the
Post
, and walked fast and angry the rest of the way home. Then she called Sasha.

“Someone’s pregnant.”

“What? Who is? Wait, hold on a second.”

Claire took the phone into her bathroom and examined herself in the small mirror. Charlie’s bathrobe was still hanging on the door. Her hair looked too long, too brown, too old. Her face looked too plain. She had very small breasts. Charlie had liked her. Hadn’t he?
No one is ever going to like me again
, she thought.

“Honey, I have a situation going on,” Sasha said. “I’ll call you right back.”

Instead of calling, though, Sasha came through the door thirty minutes later. She walked in with wine bottles.

“‘Remember when I was young and so were you-ouuu. And time stood still, and love was all we knew-ewww.’” Claire was singing loud and off-key and didn’t realize either of these things until she looked up to see Sasha staring. Claire took an earplug out. “What?” she said.

“Lock your front door, Claire, and what are you listening to?”

“Alan Jackson.”

“What is wrong with you? Are you crying?”

“No.”

“You are. Oh my God. Honey, what the hell is going on? Alan Jackson?”

“I’m not crying. And why do you have wine? I hate wine,” Claire said.

“It’s good for you. Antioxidants. Where’d you see it?”

Claire had already processed the information; she didn’t want to go over it. At this point, it didn’t really matter how or who or what was pregnant.

“It doesn’t matter. He’s like a rat who won’t move for cheese. Ann Holloway explained it very clearly to me. I just didn’t know someone would get pregnant, but of course someone eventually would. You have sex, the sperm and the egg, sometimes they meet up. Who cares? Why aren’t you saying anything?”

“Because I doubt anyone’s pregnant. I’m sure the girl is a nut, she’s trying to set him up, manipulate him into thinking he should care about her and his fake unborn baby.”

“And what if she is?”

“Since when do you believe tabloids?”

“Since I started reading them.”

Sasha sat down next to Claire and slipped out a gold cigarette case from her purse. “Listen,” she said and lit up a pink menthol, “I saw the pictures. She’s not going to risk losing that body.”

“That’s, for some reason, little comfort.”

“It’s the oldest trick in the book, that’s all I’m saying. You get pregnant or, more likely, say you are, you land the guy or at least get his attention.” Sasha handed the cigarette to Claire. “It’s a desperate move but girls do it because, guess what, it works.”

“Like negative campaigning?” Claire took a drag of the cigarette and handed it back.

“Exactly. The energy shifts back in her direction and then, suddenly, a fake miscarriage.” Sasha stood and walked into the kitchen. She got halfway there, then turned back and grabbed the wine bottles. “Men will never get it. Listen,” she added. “You need to really find some better medication. I didn’t want to say anything…”

“I’m fine, with medication. What do you mean you didn’t want to say anything?”

“What are you taking?” Sasha called. Claire could hear her opening a cabinet and pulling out glasses.

“Nothing. An Ambien sometimes if I can’t sleep.”

“Klonopin for anxiety then, maybe.” Sasha popped her head out of the kitchen and gestured with a corkscrew. “In my purse. There’s a prescription. Take two.”

“What do
you
know?” Claire said, as Sasha’s head disappeared. She set the cigarette on an ashtray, then dug around in Sasha’s giant leather purse and surfaced with a small, unmarked white pill bottle.

“Movie stars fall in love with regular girls in the movies—it’s so sweet—but you’re not in a movie.”

“Okay, Sasha, I get it.”

“In real life, you’re lucky you even had one. It’s like a shooting star, or finding a new leopard species in Borneo or a four-leaf clover, or maybe winning a fucking Pulitzer, I don’t know. But there’s a half-life, honey.” Sasha could be brutal.

“A half-life?”

“Yes, the pleasure of the experience is cut in half in direct proportion to the likelihood of it happening. In other words, let’s find a nice investment banker next time.”

Claire popped open the bottle. Sasha continued.

“He’s not real. He doesn’t even know who you are when you’re not in front of him. You probably have to keep telling your fucking story over and over to him every time you get together. Right? And then he picks up a detail and plunges into it, because that’s what he does. It’s a role, and he nails it because that’s his job and why he gets the big parts, and then you misinterpret that for some greater quality of humanity that you have never quite found in someone else and the reason you have never quite found it in someone else is because it doesn’t exist. Real people don’t have those qualities. Screenwriters make them up and people in Kansas pay ten dollars to fantasize for a few hours.”

Claire glanced down at an old
Daily News
she’d saved. It was sitting on her coffee table next to Charlie’s urn. It was the photo of a movie star buying lemonade from a little kid. Jack was reaching down, handing him a bill. “Jack Huxley’s $20 Lemonade.”

Claire had just dropped three pills into her palm when Sasha came into the living room, wineglasses in hand, took one look at Claire, and shrieked. Both glasses dropped from her hand and shattered. Claire watched as red wine cascaded like blood across her hardwood floor. She stood up. “Jesus, Sasha. What is wrong with you?”