The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating (3 page)

She wondered if in New York they were running Charlie’s story on the news (they were), and if they’d put a picture on the screen of a different man to represent him (they hadn’t). She’d understood from the vague details she’d gathered on the phone that Charlie was in no shape for viewing either.

He would have been horrified to find her riveted like this. Charlie considered the news a pedestrian form of entertainment. He wasn’t one to sit quietly in the open seating of an airport, in any case. He would have been in full swing at the bar. Charlie’s airport routine was simple. He wore a uniform of jeans, blazer, and button-down shirt. He gathered his reading materials at Hudson’s News—gossip magazines like
People
and
Star
that didn’t come to the house. And then he prowled. In the beginning, Claire had often traveled with him to his conferences and lectures. He always seemed bigger to her in airports, where everything else looked so small. And he was always recognized. It was here where he collected people, here where he found his “vox populi.” Airports are the great leveler, he said. He coaxed out the secrets and stories of people from Kentucky to Juneau. Charlie got them to talk.

On the airport television screens, Margaret was animated. Her eyes darted left to right as she spoke; her face was flushed. Her hand gestures were sudden and jerky. She bore a strong resemblance—in her movements, the roundness of her eyes, the angular limbs—to Charlie’s mother. Oh God, Charlie’s mother. Who had called?

*   *   *

S
HE
’
D BEEN
“
STARTLED
,” Margaret said, her right hand flying to her breast. She’d heard a “god-awful sound”—she waved her arm toward a location off camera. She’d rushed in when she’d heard the crash—a finger on her right hand jabbed toward a room down the hall—then she’d screamed loudly enough that Abby had heard from next door. Abby Price ran from her yard, clutching a fistful of forget-me-nots, right into Margaret’s house. She hadn’t bothered even to knock first. It was that kind of scream. Both women were breathless—clearly shocked, still—in the recounting.

Claire couldn’t help noticing, though, the measured excitement in Margaret’s voice as she pointed to where the bird had landed, as she re-created the crash, as she detailed the gruesome scene. There was a marked sexual repression in her diction. Charlie had taught Claire what to look for: breathlessness, excitable language, dramatic dips and changes of tenor in the voice. There was a lingering close-up to show glass shards, feathers, and a tiny red streak on the floor. (Claire might have imagined it. The bird was dead from a broken neck; there would have been little, if any, blood.)

After her third time watching the story, it was fixed in Claire’s head—the characters, the plot, the metaphor. After years of living behind him, she’d come to imagine scenes through Charlie’s eyes. There were many different ways, many different words to describe this one: Margaret’s red-checkered shirtdress, her cloth-flecked sewing room, the last attempts by the bird to right himself, the pitcher of iced tea on the counter that Claire hadn’t seen, but imagined, next to a ceramic bowl of wooden fruit. It all played through her head like a slide show on an endless loop; a virtual tour of Margaret’s shattered home.

Claire began to cry. She looked around to see who might have spotted it—Charlie despised public displays of emotion. But this was too much. She grieved for the falcon and she grieved for the man from Fish and Wildlife who’d had to drive out and retrieve it. She grieved for Margaret, who looked too ripe for the moment, like she’d been waiting in her sewing room thirty years to hear glass shatter, to cover her mouth, to have Abby burst through her front door. Thirty years was a long time to wait to have KVUE 2 News standing in her house, for all of Austin to see. Thirty years to tell a ninety-second story on television.

*   *   *

N
OW WHAT
? C
LAIRE
looked at the phone in her lap. She had nine messages and thirty-three texts. She turned off the phone. She couldn’t quite grasp the situation regarding her husband. She hadn’t seen a body or feathers, or anyone visibly shaken by whatever it was that had occurred. It seemed improbable that Charlie was dead, yet the callers and texters were adamant. Richard—usually cool as steel—had faltered when she’d called back, his voice had cracked.

After his initial shock, Dr. Singh had offered water and apologies. He’d patted her awkwardly on the head while standing above her. He’d thought it disrespectful to sit down in his comfortable chair. He would suffer, too. Claire sipped the water, and they stayed that way for a time in silence. She was sure he had appointments or faculty meetings, yet there she was in his office, her husband dead.

“Things happen,” Dr. Singh said finally, looking for closure, “for a reason.”

He sent her off with the measuring tape and, for some reason, a packet of cheese. He insisted she keep the transparency of Marilyn Monroe. This was Claire Byrne’s inauspicious induction to widowhood: an hourglass waist, a bronze statue, a dead bird. Her life, the one she’d grown used to, had come abruptly to an end. In the morning, she’d been a wife, the sun had been out, it had been ordinary. In the afternoon, alone in the airport, watching footage of swooping birds, with Marilyn Monroe on her lap, Claire wished that breasts mattered. She wished Charlie had known she had an almost perfect waist-to-hip ratio. She wished she’d bought the no-pulp orange juice that week, the kind he preferred. She wished that she smoked.

*   *   *

I
T
’
S HARD TO
get from Austin to New York, even on a good day. So when Claire finally got onto an overnight Delta flight with two connections, she splurged on an upgrade to first class. She ordered a red wine, then regretted it. She’d never cared much for wine. It was a source of friction with Charlie (
had been
a source of friction with Charlie), an accomplished gourmand—fricasseeing and braising and sautéing seasonal grass-fed this and that, all of which called for big bold reds, the kind you swirled around in large glassware and sniffed at like a hound.

“It’s Gallo,” said the man across the aisle, crisp suit, smooth jaw. Charlie had always worn stubble.

The man nodded at her drink. “First class, but they serve shitty wine.” He chuckled. “British Air has good wines, anywhere else I stick to gin.” On his tray was a plastic tumbler with a lime wedge and ice cubes, and a clear bubbly drink. He held it up to her, as if to toast.

“Gin,” Claire said when the flight attendant came back around. She’d never been the sort to order gin, but she choked the first one down, then ordered another. The man, still watching her, smiled. “My husband is dead,” Claire said to him, and opened her packet of peanuts.

3

In Charlie’s first hours postmortem, Claire flew from Texas to North Carolina, to Washington, D.C., and then to New York while Ethan worried over what to wear to pick her up, and Richard just paced. Dead. Dead.
Dead
. Claire chanted it to herself as her plane touched down at Kennedy; that Charlie was, in fact, dead was not getting through.

Ethan greeted her in thin cashmere, but he was uncharacteristically unkempt. She spotted concealer hiding the redness around his eyes.

“Clarabelle,” he said somberly, opening his arms. As she stepped into them, he put his hand up. “Wait.” He produced a small white pill, broke it in two, and fished a bottle of Evian from his bag. He held a half pill in front of her. “Open, sweetie. Good. Now swallow.”

In baggage claim, she leaned on his shoulder while they waited for her suitcase to come around. Her dreams on the plane had been frenzied; she felt like she’d been gone for weeks.

“Ethan? Why was he uptown? Where was he going so early?” she asked.

Ethan put an arm around her and squeezed. “He was meeting Richard. He never made it.”

Ethan knew as well as Claire did that Charlie was a slave to routine. He woke at seven every morning, made coffee, read the papers, and checked his e-mail. If he went uptown to see Richard he took the subway to Forty-Second Street, walked a block north to Forty-Third, then west to Fifth Avenue. There was no reason to be
above
Forty-Third Street at that time of the morning.

“Okay, but why would he be walking
down
Madison?” She knew why, of course, she just didn’t know who.
Dead
, she silently repeated to herself.
Dead, dead, dead
.

Ethan dodged the question. Her suitcase appeared. He set it beside her. It seemed a ridiculous thing to care about—a few books, an outfit change and pajamas. She looked at it and sighed. “What do I do now?” she asked.

“Well, first, the hospital. Richard’s waiting there for us.”

“No, not
now
, I mean
next
. What do I do with my life?”

Ethan straightened the suitcase handle and took her hand. “Remember
Night on Earth
?” Yes, she did. They’d all watched it together, the previous summer at Bryant Park. The director and Charlie had met at a party when Charlie was at Princeton. She nodded yes and Ethan smiled. “Exactly. We’ll figure everything out in the cab.”

The ride to Lenox Hill Hospital was slow, through traffic on the Grand Central Parkway and across the Triborough Bridge. Claire stared out the window, not sure if she felt blurry from the Xanax or from watching the raindrops smear the glass. Ethan stabbed at his phone distractedly, checking e-mail, Twitter, the news.

They were going to see Charlie for the last time, a few short blocks from where he died. When they pulled up, there was Richard on his phone, pacing back and forth between ambulances. He snapped it shut when he saw them and gave Claire a long hug.

“They’re waiting on you honey, so they can take him to the funeral home.”

“Okay.”

She put her hand out toward Ethan, and he deposited the other half of her pill. Then the three of them walked through the automatic doors like odd links in a chain: the motley shades of Charlie. The new widow, rumpled from flight, flanked by his agent and his assistant. She looked tiny alongside Ethan, clutching his hand. The two of them moored by Richard’s calm authority and cool gait.
Daddy’s got this
.

“How was the flight?” Richard asked. “You can’t get a good connection out of Austin.”

“I drank gin,” Claire said. “Not too much, though.” An ill-timed hiccup escaped her but it went unremarked. Reaching Charlie meant a long, windy walk through a trauma unit, past the blood donor center to the elevator, then two floors down to the morgue. The hospital chaplain met them at the door. He looked familiar.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs.—” He coughed suddenly, hard. “I’m—excuse me.” He coughed again. He put his hand out, then withdrew it. It was going to be a long day.

It was his nose, Claire decided, and thick brow—he bore an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Cagney. She imagined herself with guns, in a doorway, calling someone a dirty rat. She imagined souped-up cars and getaways.

“Would you like to say a prayer?” he asked. Dead or alive, there were rules.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

The chaplain led them to a gurney, where a body—Charlie’s, they had to assume—was covered with a sheet. The chaplain cleared his throat. Ethan fidgeted. Richard’s eyebrow shot up. Claire reached for the sheet, but Richard gently grabbed her hand. There was a tag hanging out from the end, where Charlie’s feet were. His name and statistics, just like in the movies. Charlie had perfectly manicured toes. Claire had an odd urge to see them.

The chaplain read a psalm, paused at the end, then patted Claire’s shoulder and left the room.

Richard ran a hand across his forehead. “Okay. Let’s get you home, honey. Listen, I don’t want you to worry about anything.” The certainty of his tone almost made her cry. “Wanamaker and Sons is going to handle the service. You’re going to go home, take a nap, and then, when you’re ready, you’ll go meet them. You’ll sign some paperwork, choose a casket, that’s it.”

Choose a casket. That’s it. Sure.
No big deal.

There was another long taxi ride downtown. Sasha called and offered to come over, but Claire wanted to be alone. She dug her keys from her purse, unlocked the building door, and took the elevator up like it was any other day. She set her suitcase in the entryway and walked through the apartment. Hanging on the bedroom door was the brown cashmere robe she’d given Charlie for Christmas the previous year.

On the small table where they took breakfast was the faded Sunday
Times
, folded over to Charlie’s unfinished crossword, and a brown bag with several prescription bottles inside from Zitomer’s—Charlie’s mother. There was a note attached:
YOU
MIGHT NEED THIS
,
DEAR. GRACE
.
Amen to that
, Claire thought.

She changed out of her clothes and climbed into bed. The sheets still conformed to Charlie’s weight; they fell into wrinkles on his side. Her body, small and alone, stirred up nothing. It was as if Charlie were out and might walk through the door any minute. Nothing had changed.

*   *   *

P
ER
R
ICHARD’S INSTRUCTIONS
, Claire dressed in black and headed back uptown to pick a casket. She dipped into Grace’s gift basket before she left. By the time she arrived at the mortuary, a tickly little cloud had scooped her up. She felt light—too light—like an actress auditioning for a role in an ironic comic film. The funeral home was a nondescript brownstone on Lexington. Claire had passed by here many times without knowing it. Inside, the showroom’s floor-to-ceiling drapes and brass chandelier were intended, she assumed, to create a sense of sophistication for the bereaved. Instead, she found the decor theatrical and macabre, as if a ghoulish performance of
The Phantom of the Opera
were about to break out. Charlie, Carter the funeral director informed her, was in the basement.

Carter Hinckley of Wanamaker and Sons wore a lightweight gray suit and carried a black leather binder. He had a strong nose and confident stance; he was conventionally handsome. “My condolences, Mrs. Byrne,” he said, and held out his hand. His hair was slicked back; he sounded older than he looked.