How to Talk to a Widower (4 page)

6

LANEY POTTER SHOWS UP AROUND NOON TO DROP
off a meatloaf for my dinner. Hailey's friends set up a rotation in the weeks after the crash, and while I've long since convinced most of them that it's no longer necessary, Laney, who had Tuesdays, has yet to relinquish them. As soon as she arrives, she puts her meatloaf in the fridge and hugs me, kissing my cheek on her way in. She holds me tightly against the full length of her body, not at all the way a married woman should hug a single man, and she touches me a lot when she talks, asks me if I'm doing okay, and she would love it if I would just fall apart in front of her, so that she could hold me and comfort me. Laney is a rowdy redhead, big boned and curvy, with the bee-stung lips of a porn star, and a husband named Dave, a lawyer about fifteen years older than me. At thirty-four, she was the only other spouse in our circle from my generation, and she'd always been somewhat flirty with me, in a harmless, joking way, like we were in this together, but lately she's turned things up a few notches. Nothing that couldn't be explained away if it backfired, but there's a pointed invitation in these comprehensive hugs of hers.

“You don't look too good,” she says, pulling back from her embrace, but not yet releasing me, her lower body still incidentally pressed up against mine.

“I've been looking at pictures and crying.” It's not what I mean to say, but it's what comes out anyway. It's such a strange condition I have; I can't look anyone in the eye for more than a second or two, but ask me a simple question and I'll pour my heart out uncensored. When Laney rang the doorbell, I'd been lying on the living room floor going through a shoebox of pictures of Hailey and me—we hadn't gotten around to albums yet—waiting for the last bits of afternoon sunlight to stop pouring through the windows to illuminate the galaxy of floating spores, so that I could legally break out the Jack Daniel's.

“Poor Doug,” Laney says, pulling me back into her embrace, and I can feel her hardened nipples, like two sand-smoothed pebbles against my chest, can smell her skin in the hollow of her neck, that earthy scent unique to redheads, and I actually find myself thinking about opening my mouth against her neck, running my tongue against her skin, and seeing what will happen. It's been a shitty, shitty day, and the idea of undressing the voluptuous and seemingly game Laney Potter, of losing myself in the folds of her soft dimpled flesh, is suddenly very appealing. I can tell that she'll be an energetic lover, that she'll be loud and wild and without boundaries of any kind, and when was the last time I had that kind of sex? I haven't gotten laid in a year, and maybe a little slap and tickle with Laney Potter would be just the thing to cheer me up.

But even as I feel myself growing hard against her, even as I feel her heartbeat accelerating in her chest and her breath against my ear becoming more pronounced, I know it would be a mistake. She'll start coming over every week, maybe even more than once a week, and before I know it we'll be in some twisted relationship, and then she'll start complaining to me about Dave and how she's thinking of leaving him, and so I'll have to start avoiding her, which won't be easy since I never leave the house, and all of this because in a moment of weakness I mistook my own immense loneliness for garden-variety horniness.

“I'm sorry,” I say, stepping out of her embrace. “I'm a little out of it today.”

“Can I do anything?” she says, her face ever so slightly flushed, her eyes flitting anxiously around the kitchen.

“I think I'll just have some dinner and go to bed.”

“I hate to think of you all alone here when you're not feeling well. You want me to stay for a while?”

She's talking and I'm talking, but there are other conversations going on, between our carefully averted eyes, our nervously animated hands, and our throbbing groins, and that's just too many conversations for me to follow. It's like blasting the radio while you're watching television, vacuuming, and talking on the phone.

“No, I'm fine,” I say, walking ahead of her toward the door. “Really. I just need to get some sleep.”

“I can tuck you in,” she says, and I can feel her eyes on my back.

“It's okay. Thanks.”

At the door, she hugs me again, and this time I kiss her cheek, ridiculously proud of myself for having resisted the temptation. I've never slept with a married woman, less out of principle than because it simply never came up, but something tells me that now would be a bad time to try it. Dave Potter, Laney's husband, is a lawyer in private practice and partners with Mike Sandleman, the man who will be marrying my sister Debbie in a few weeks. Did you follow that? The interconnectedness of everything? Your wife dies dramatically and your life becomes a goddamn soap opera.

Still, Laney has those ridiculously sexy lips, like two tapered pillows glossed to a slick sheen, and since I'm not going to sleep with her, I don't see the harm in letting the corner of my mouth accidentally graze them as I kiss her cheek. “Thanks for everything, Laney.”

“I'm always here, Doug, for anything you need,” she says meaningfully, looking into my eyes before she goes. “You know that, right?”

“I do.”

Her smile is a naked confirmation that something is happening between us, that it's there for the taking. And I feel the smallest pang of regret as I watch her get into her car, can still feel the soft fullness of those lips on mine. I don't know why she's offering herself up to this possibility, could be that her marriage is lousy, could be that she's lonely, or bored, or that Dave is as dull in bed as he is out of it, but whatever the reason, I think the wisest course is to maintain the status quo. Because, ultimately, I would just have to break it off and she'd feel used and I'd feel bad, and while I don't know exactly how it would all play out, I'm pretty sure it would mean the end of Tuesday nights with Laney Potter. And in the final analysis, I think I would miss her meatloaf more than anything else.

         

Still, I'm bummed when she's gone. I want to touch someone, to kiss and lick and suck on them and hear them writhe and surge beneath me. I want to taste the tart sweetness of a woman's mouth, want to be naked and sweating and tangled up in the hot wetness of Laney Potter's heaving thighs.

“I'm horny,” I complain to Claire over the phone. We talk every day.

“And you feel guilty about it.”

“I guess.”

“Don't.”

“Okay. I'm glad we had this talk.”

“I'm serious, Doug. It's perfectly natural. Everybody fucks.”

“It seems kind of soon.”

“To get married, maybe. To date, possibly. But to get laid? That's purely physiological. It's no different than taking a dump.”

“Somehow, I've never connected the two.”

“It's exactly the same thing. Something building up inside of you that needs release.”

“It just doesn't seem right.”

“Get over yourself, little brother. If some horny hausfrau is willing to make booty calls, then pick up the damn phone and get busy. You spent the better part of your life wishing you had a number to call for something like that. Well, now you do.”

“It can't end well.”

“It hasn't even started and you're already worried about the ending,” Claire says exasperatedly. “Look at it this way. The first few times you have sex, it's going to suck. You're like a born-again virgin, carrying all this emotional baggage. You'll have trouble keeping it up, or you'll come too soon, or not at all, and you'll get all depressed afterwards. So you might as well get all that shit over with now, so that it's out of your system by the time you meet someone real.”

“Thanks for the confidence booster.”

Claire laughs. “It's what I do.”

I sigh. “She's a married woman.”

Claire sighs right back at me, mimicking my resigned tone. “You live in New Radford, little brother. That's pretty much the only kind you'll find there.”

         

Claire is my twin sister and the voice inside my head, whether I like it or not. She was the first person I called when Hailey died. Well, that's not exactly true. I called my mother first, sort of. It was the middle of the night and the airline had just called to tell me about the crash, and I didn't even remember dialing the phone.

“Hello?” my mother said, her voice still thick and syrupy with slumber. “Hello?” I could hear the darkness in her bedroom, the heavy silence I had just shattered. “Who is this?”

I couldn't speak. To speak would be to grant entry to the angry mob of my reality now protesting at my embassy gates. “Hello?” she said one more time, and then she said, “Creep,” and hung up on me.

Hailey was dead and my mother thought I was a creep. It's the little things you know you'll always remember.

Somewhere, in a field or a forest, the wreckage was still smoking, with luggage and body parts and charred, twisted sections of fuselage scattered all around. And somewhere, in the midst of that carnage, lay my Hailey, the same woman I had kissed good-bye only a few hours ago, the same cascading mane of blond hair, the same long legs she used to wrap around me, the same wide, knowing eyes, button nose, and thin sensuous lips I could never get enough of, they were all there, in some random place, as inanimate as the crushed and burned debris all around her. It just didn't seem possible. I understood it to be true, but I wasn't getting it.

The guy in the mirror looked like he might be getting it; his face was pale and drawn, and there was something pulsating behind his eyes, some glimmer of horror that had not yet radiated out to twist his expression. But I felt nothing. I ran a quick test on the guy in the mirror. I smiled at him. He flashed back the lopsided smile of the mentally deranged. Then I made us look horrified, and then sad, like I was practicing for some Method acting class, where a bunch of skinny dweebs sit around applauding each other's exaggerated expressions while some never-been Gloria Swanson type offers meaningless critiques between puffs on her cigarillo. Hailey was dead, and I was fucking around in the mirror. I'd always felt unworthy of her love, and if I ever needed validation of my unworthiness there it was, staring me right in the face.

“Hailey is dead,” I said aloud, my voice filling the room like an audible fart at a dinner party. Normal people reacted violently to calls like this, didn't they? They screamed anguished denials and fell to the floor sobbing, or pounded the wall in a blood-red haze until they could no longer tell if the cracking sounds were coming from the dented wall or their broken fists. But all I could do was stand beside the bed, rubbing my neck and wondering what the hell to do. I supposed I was in shock, and that was, at least, a little bit comforting, because Hailey didn't deserve this pathetic excuse for a reaction.

My first instinct was to call someone. My first instinct was to call Hailey. I dialed her cell phone, not sure what I was hoping for. Her voice mail picked up instantly.
Hi, this is Hailey. Please leave me a message and I'll call you back as soon as I can. Thanks, bye.
She'd recorded the outgoing message in the kitchen one night, and in the background, faintly, I could hear Russ and me laughing at the television. I heard the message so many times over the last few years that I had long ago stopped actually hearing it. But now I heard her calm, confident voice, her distracted tone as she hurriedly recorded the message, the faded background noise of her family laughing. She couldn't be gone. She was right there on the phone, sounding every bit like herself. The dead didn't have voice mail. The phone beeped and I realized that it was now recording me. “Hey, babe,” I said stupidly, but I couldn't get any more words out, so I hung up.

A terrible, selfish thought entered my mind unbidden, and then another and soon they were coming in droves, one after another, like when you hold the door for one old lady, and fifteen more people decide to walk through and you get stuck there on door duty when all you meant to do was accommodate one old lady.

How I will handle this?

Where will I live?

Will anyone ever love me again?

I pictured Hailey naked, coming through the bathroom doorway, smiling lustily at me as she walked over to the bed. Would there ever be another naked woman smiling at me like that? And even right then, at that terrible moment, I knew there would be other naked women, and I felt ashamed for knowing it. But still, would any of them look at me like she used to?

Also—and this was the worst one, not for the weak stomachs—I felt an undeniable twinge of relief at the knowledge that she would never have the chance to fall out of love with me, that she would love me forever. I felt like a bigger asshole than I'd ever been, and that was saying something.

Hailey is dead
. I tried to comprehend it.
She's not coming back. I will never see her again
. None of it meant anything to me. They were just words, nothing more than unproven hypotheses. What was I supposed to do now?
Hailey is dead. Hailey is dead. Hailey is dead
. It seemed important that I grasp this concept in its entirety, so that I could function, do whatever needed to be done.