The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating (29 page)

“How about your film? How’s it going?”

He was directing this time, from a script he’d adapted from a book. He gave her his aw-shucks grin, said behind the camera is harder than he remembered. A different sort of creativity. He hoped to do more of it. The film, he said, despite its action-packed plot—an accident, lovers, war zones, a hero in a wheelchair in the desert—is something of a fairy tale. He looked right into her eyes. “That’s what drew me to the project,” he said. “They’re the only stories worth telling.”

She congratulated him, and as they talked they wandered among the stacks of books, the shelves of biographies and memoirs, all those stories of heartbreak and futility. In the large section labeled
FICTION
, she allowed herself to imagine a slender novel by Claire Byrne on the shelf next to
Thinker’s Hope
—her novel a perfect .7 ratio next to Charlie’s tome—and the oddity of that pairing seemed no less momentous than the moon and the earth switching orbits, or love and sex sharing a home.

Jack referenced a girl, but then waved off her queries: no one special. He said he’d heard Claire was with someone, and she was surprised. She was pleased to think that he’d tried to keep track of her. She wasn’t going to marry again. No. But she thought
he
should try it. They laughed at that, and the conversation flowed through other topics.

This is why she loved him, she thought. Publicly he’s imperfect, but privately he tries. There are moments of sincerity. Those moments float away like bubbles but he takes the trouble to dip the wand in the soap and blow them through. Charlie, publicly, was a husband, an intellectual, a serious writer, but privately he screwed publicists and the wives of his friends and he couldn’t address the incongruity of this with his own wife. Instead, he couched it in theory. There was the unhappy Sasha with her philandering husband; she’d rather get jewelry than face the truth about her life. Richard, and Bridget, who somehow knew intimately the particulars of Jake the hockey player’s, um, dick. Ethan and Kevin might come closest of all of them to, well, something—maybe Ethan still had a chance.

“The Way We Were” came over the speaker in the store. Or was it just in Claire’s head? Maybe she was just playing it back.

“I should be going,” she said. Jack nodded. He seemed nervous. She tried to imagine all the reasons for this: that he didn’t want her to go, that he realized they could have been so much more, that he knows they still can be but he’s trapped—by a name, a face, a persona too big to escape.

Right. And then she laughed. He was nervous because he wanted to leave. The scene had run long and he was too polite to yell cut. Fairy tales, that’s what sells. She reached up slowly and pushed a lock of hair off of his face, the way Barbra Streisand did to Robert Redford. It was one of the silliest things Claire had done in her thirty-three years. Ethan was going to love that little touch. Huxley, though, looked confused. Then he asked, “Would you mind if I kissed you?” Claire leaned toward him. He kissed her, right on the lips, and Claire realized the reason the store felt so quiet. All the players were off the set—the sales team, four of them, three women and a man—had been watching, mouths agape, thinking through how they’d play this back at dinner to their friends, and tomorrow for customers in the store. Jack Huxley in McNally Jackson, with a girl, oh my God, and just kissed her. Who was the girl? We don’t know!

Claire turned away, alone and happy and content. And Jack Huxley watched her disappear into the crowded street.

47

Claire picked up the two hundred pages of her double-spaced manuscript—the first half of her book—from the printer down the block from her apartment and took a cab to Richard’s office. She handed the stack to his assistant and walked out. She took another cab to Kennedy Airport and an airplane to San Francisco, where she rented a midsize passenger car and drove to a small town a short distance away. She parked in a driveway and entered a pretty white cottage, then waited.

She sent a text.

The sheets still smell like you.

He replied immediately.

I’m hurrying home.

*   *   *

T
HERE WAS A
night before this, before this escape to a small town on the coast. There was more than one night, actually. I just didn’t want to interrupt the story to tell you.

Claire had not only finished the first half of her book, she had also helped Ethan put the essays together. The book of essays was titled
Sex Matters
.

Charlie had left thousands of pages of unpublished work, and they had picked out the best of it. Claire went back and forth with Ethan—they were very careful. It was not her desire to see her late husband buffooned. She took very seriously this responsibility of letting Charlie have an eloquent postscript.

The essay collection turned out nicely; Richard had gotten a respectable sum for it, and every critic worth his salt gave the book a twirl.

The reviews were mixed, of course.

Which was fine. Claire knew in her heart it was good.

And then,
he
reviewed it and, surprisingly, he liked it.

This, unlike the dry tenor of much of the late Byrne’s other work, has some stardust sprinkled in,
is what he said.
An elegant flourish graces these essays. As if the author found divine inspiration from the grave. There’s a playful element, even, that I found startlingly refreshing. It was a bittersweet pleasure to read them.

She’d sent him a note.

He’d sent her one back.

He felt like an old friend. He felt comfortable. He felt warm and nice and funny.

Time had passed. (It does that.) Things had changed. (They often do.)

Then one dull night out with Sasha—one of those nights where one doesn’t want to go out but, to satisfy someone else, does—one late, awful night as her head reeled from the noise and the same disjointed chatter about this or that or nothing, Claire, with no relief from any drink, found herself feeling a little bit low and dispirited. And then she spotted him. He was in profile to her, and she was rolling off her tongue the things she might say—
What are you doing? Hey, how’ve you been? Oh, how funny to see you here.
She saw him and a series of impulses set her in motion, propelled her to walk to him, to say hello. She’d gotten a sudden warm feeling, the kind of pleasant surprise you sometimes get on a terrible late night, in a place you don’t want to be, with the music booming and an end nowhere in sight. Claire was becoming infused with that good feeling, leaning over to Sasha to say, “Wait here, I’ll be right back.” She was just looking forward to Hello, when another girl walked up, not her, and kissed his cheek and held his arm.

Figures
, Claire thought. She changed direction and walked out of the club, but not before he had seen her. And he, a little drunk, and not knowing why but just reacting, unwound his arm from the girl’s and followed Claire out.

“Hey!” he shouted to Claire. “Wait.”

Claire turned around. “Hey,” she said back. She waited for him and he caught up to her, and neither of them knew what to do so they giggled, then they laughed.

It felt good to laugh with him. Really good.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Hi. I want to say something, I’m a little drunk now, though. Share a cab with me, okay?”

“But the girl.”

He smiled.

“The girl, yeah. She came with friends. I promise I’m not a jerk, Claire Byrne. She’ll be fine.”

“Okay, then let’s walk,” she said. “How far are you?”

He was on Seventy-Fourth Street, it was a mile or a little more, but it was a nice summer night in New York, one of the nicest nights. They started talking. Right in the middle of things. No past, no future. They just started right there on Fiftieth Street. Talking. About the loud club, about New York at night, about Claire’s favorite view from the twilight tourist cruise that left every evening from Pier 39. About a play he was trying to write, about his dwindling savings, the various enemies he’d made through the years, including—and they shared a fond laugh over this—Charlie.

“It wasn’t that bad a book,
Thinker’s Hope
,” he said. “I am guilty. I have vanity and ego, too. He was an easy target. I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy the notoriety of taking on a giant.”

When they got to his apartment, it started to rain. “Thank you. This was really nice.” She kissed him quickly. She said good-bye and walked away and caught a cab on the next block.

He watched her and then the spot where she had been. Long after her cab had turned the corner, long after her cab was out of sight.

*   *   *

O
NE WEEK LATER
, Claire woke early and showered and put on her flowered sundress. The one Beatrice had divined. It was time, she had decided, for Charlie to go.

Grace was not yet ready to part with her share of her son, so Claire alone took half of Charlie to what she supposed was the most fitting place. She held him, in her bag, close to her side, as an elevator whisked her to the 80th floor, where she caught another elevator to the 102nd, to the upper observation deck of the Empire State Building.

It seemed right for Charlie to reign in perpetuity over the city he loved.

The wind was low, the temperature mild, the sun lounged behind the clouds as Claire made her way to one end of the deck. Below her were Central Park, the Chrysler Building, and down on the Hudson the Circle Line boat was moving its way around the island.

A group of schoolchildren filed past her and started jockeying for the viewfinders. At the other end of the deck a Cirque du Soleil acrobat balanced herself on one leg atop a man’s head. Security men in burgundy vests and matching police hats kept the tourists moving along. A pigeon sat precariously on a bit of ledge beyond the safety fence. The deck was a cacophony of dissidents. Claire and Charlie went unnoticed.

Claire walked close to the fence and took out the urn.

There was, when it came down to it, very little of him in it. The body is made mostly of water.

Claire unscrewed the top of the urn and tipped it so that the ashes were at the lip of the opening. Then she upended him. Out, over the barrier that separated them from the sidewalk 102 floors down.

A gust of wind, ill-timed, blew some of him back. Claire blinked the dust from her eyes. What was left swelled for a moment, directly in front of her, then the wind surged again and he was gone.

Claire remembered the priest from the morgue, the one who looked like Jimmy Cagney, and wondered if she should say a prayer.

“To hell with that,” she said out loud. “You had a nice go of it while you were here. That’s all you would have asked.”

Then she put the top back on the urn and took her place in the growing line to catch the elevator back down.

*   *   *

C
LAIRE FLEW TO
San Francisco, in July then drove to the small town of Petaluma and to the cottage at the end of a long driveway, a small inheritance from his grandmother, which he playfully called the “Estate.” He is the only one in the family who makes use of it. He has come out here to work on his play. And he’s rented an office in the small town to keep up with ongoing assignments.

Claire was not doing anything, except finishing her book. This time her own book. She’s promised to have the second half, a full final draft of it, in Richard’s hands at the end of the month.

Ben is the one who gets up early. He makes the coffee, he kisses her forehead, and leaves at eight for his office in town. Claire gets up at nine, drinks the coffee, pads lightly through the wide doorways of the house, from room to room, then after a time pulls on clothes, a backpack, and walks the mile into town. There’s a small coffee shop there, where they know her by name. She settles in, and works on chapter eight, which is faltering just now—her protagonist is in limbo.

Ben. This might surprise you, but it shouldn’t. It is standard romantic comedy. The fix was in from the start: guy pans girl’s husband’s book; husband dies; there’s a misunderstanding. Guy bumps into girl around town. There is a kiss in the rain. Love ensues.

It could only have been Ben Hawthorne. That’s why he popped up along the way. Book critic of the
Atlantic.
Charlie-bashing, funeral-crashing, sweet guy Ben.

In the evenings, they have clever conversation and repartee. When they go out they get approving glances from strangers. Sometimes they take a ride along the river or go for a long walk. They’re in act one but not the Charlie/Jack version of act one. Ben is eager for what’s ahead. And, this time, so is Claire. Ben forgets to entertain nonstop, and Claire likes that. They talk about what’s to come.

Over drinks one night in an old inn that has been converted to a pub, Ben says, “I think we might be onto something.”

“You do?” Claire asked.

“Yes. I think we might warrant more than a seven-hundred-and-twenty-three-word review.”

She smiles and falls against his arm, and then his arm pulls her close. They’d skipped stages. They’d skipped posturing and awkwardness and worrying who might call or when or what. They’d skipped false devotions and puffery. They hadn’t skipped sex, but they’d also not rushed it. They had conversations that carried over, that picked up where they left off. They spoke every night if they were apart, they had passionate kisses, they touched each other as they slept.

He was charmed by her. He couldn’t get enough of her smell, her hair, the softness of her cheek. “We have dinner tomorrow night with my parents, don’t forget. With Mummy.”

“Mummy?” Claire laughed.

“She likes ‘Mummy,’” he said.

“Who else?”

“Oh, stuffy friends of the family. Old stuffy friends.”

“I like stuffy.”

“I have to warn you. Henry—Hank—is a scoundrel. He’ll tell you dirty limericks when he thinks no one’s listening.”

“I love dirty limericks.”

“You won’t always. Four years from now, you’ll dread dinner with Mummy. Hank will bore you rotten. You’ll have heard all my jokes.”