How to Talk to a Widower (5 page)

What needed to be done? I had no fucking idea, but I was highly aware of Russ, in his room down the hall. He was sleeping now, but he would wake up to a nightmare and never sleep the same again. He would never breathe, smile, eat, cry, think, cough, walk, blink, piss, or laugh the same way again, and he didn't even know it, and that seemed particularly cruel and unfair. I already suspected that I would have a harder time facing his grief than my own. I wanted to leave before he stirred, run away and never have to see his eyes fill with the horrible knowledge of his changed life.

What needed to be done?

Keep moving. Call someone. Someone would know what to do.

I picked up the phone again.

“Hello,” grunted Stephen, Claire's husband.

“Can I talk to Claire?”

“Doug?” he said drowsily. “Christ! Do you know what time it is?”

“It's one forty-three. I need to talk to Claire.”

“She's sleeping,” he said firmly. Stephen had never liked me all that much. I'd made an impassioned plea to Claire not to marry him, spontaneously articulating a long, detailed list of all the reasons why he was wrong for her, and he'd taken offense, particularly because I had the admittedly bad sense to incorporate this diatribe into my toast at their wedding reception. In my defense, I was young and there was an open bar.

“It can't wait.”

“Is everything okay?”

Hailey is dead
. “I just need Claire.”

There was a brief, muffled rustling and then Claire came on the phone, sounding all hoarse and confused. “Doug, what the fuck?” Claire's potty mouth was always legendary, and even now, married to one of the wealthiest scions in Connecticut, she clung to it like a precious keepsake from her childhood.

“Hailey's plane went down. She's dead.” Finally, I'd said it, and something cold and hard clicked into place.

“What?”

“Hailey's dead. Her plane crashed.”

“Oh, Jesus. Are you sure?”

“Yeah. The airline called.”

“They know for a fact she was on the plane?”

“She was on it.”

“Oh, shit,” she said, starting to cry, and I wanted to tell her not to, but I still hadn't cried and I figured somebody should, so Claire cried for me and I listened to her do it.

“I'm coming over,” she said.

“It's okay. You don't have to.”

“Shut the fuck up. I'll be there in an hour.”

“Okay.”

“Should I call Mom and Dad?”

“No.”

“Stupid-assed question. Sorry.” Her breathing grew more labored over the phone as she moved around her room throwing on clothes, telling Stephen to just shut the fuck up. “Where's Russ?”

“Sleeping,” I said. “Claire.”

“Yeah.”

“I don't know what to do.”

“Just breathe. In and out. In and out.”

“I'm thinking some pretty sick shit.”

“You're in shock. Okay, I'm in my car.”

Moments later, there was a loud, protracted crashing sound.

“Motherfucker!”

“What was that?”

“I just backed through the garage door.”

“Jesus. You okay?”

“I'm fine,” she said. “The whole damn door came down. I'll just drive over it.”

“Drive carefully.”

“Whatever. Listen—” But she forgot that she was on her cordless and not her cell phone, and as soon as she turned out of her driveway she was out of range and the line went dead.

7

THURSDAY AFTERNOON. LANEY'S ENDLESS HUG. SHE
generally comes only on Tuesdays, but she tells me she was in the neighborhood.

“You live in the neighborhood,” I point out stupidly.

“Exactly,” she says, blushing, and it's two p.m. and I've already put away a few preliminary shots of Jack Daniel's, and she's wearing this tight sleeveless blouse and her cleavage is like a warm, inviting smile so I'm not going to quibble. Her breath is hot on my ear, her fingers spread out like a web across the back of my neck, burrowing into my hair, and my face is pressed against the lightly freckled skin of her shoulder. Something's happened with our legs, some trick of positioning, and they've become intertwined even as we stand there, so that I can feel the heat from her crotch through my jeans, and I'm sure she can feel the incipient commotion in my pants as well.

This is wrong,
I think.

There is no God,
I think.

Hailey,
I think.

And then,
There is no Hailey
.

And that's when I pull back and kiss Laney smack-dab on those plump, berry-colored lips, grabbing fistfuls of her red hair just behind her neck, and her mouth has anticipated me, is already open, her tongue snaking easily over mine and through my teeth. The kiss goes on forever. It's many kisses, actually, packaged together like cereal at the price club, a continuous stream of clashing tongues and crushing lips, because if we stop there will be time to think, and no good will come from thinking. No good will come from screwing Laney, either, I know, but when did that ever stop anyone? After Tuesday's close call, Laney came dressed for the kill today, skin tight and low cut in a short skirt, her long Coppertone legs waxed and buffed to a low sheen, and she had me at “Hello.”

Hands start flying furiously, like Hong Kong choreography, pressing, cupping, stroking, and squeezing at targets under our clothing. Her fingertips run swiftly up and down my back, sliding under my T-shirt to tear at my skin, and mine slide up under her skirt to clutch at the curve of her naked ass. Doesn't anyone wear underwear anymore? Because I do and, frankly, it's about to become a problem. But she unfastens my belt buckle one-handed, her fingers encircling me tightly as my pants and boxers fall around my knees. She tries to mount me right there, backing me up against the fridge, fruit-shaped magnets and outdated calendars falling at our feet. But when has that ever really worked? Laney is my height in her heels, and we just can't find the right angle. I see her eyes dart over to the kitchen table, but I have to eat off that table. The truth is that while I like sex as much as the next guy who hasn't gotten laid in a year, I've learned that, contrary to what you see in the movies, floors bruise and rugs burn, and there's just no substitute for a good bed. Going up to my and Hailey's bedroom is out of the question, so I take Laney down to the guest room off the basement, where she shimmies out of her clothing and spreads her long, toned body invitingly across the comforter, gazing doe-eyed at me, her mouth open like a nested chick waiting for its mother's beak. “Hurry,” she says, her voice thick with sex as I get momentarily stuck in my T-shirt. It's the only word either of us will say for the duration.

And it's beyond strange, to be kissing these lips that aren't Hailey's, to be tracing the alien landscape of these unfamiliar breasts, first with my fingers and then my tongue, to be hearing someone else's most private sounds, to be adjusting to the innate rhythm of someone else's rocking hips. I don't know what she likes, and I have no reason to look into her eyes, which must be why I'm avoiding them. Laney is voluptuous, and I mean that in a good way, not the way people will sometimes use it as a euphemism. But still, she's bigger than Hailey in every way, and at first there's something intimidating about her melon-sized breasts, her broad, powerful shoulders, her wider hips. When, after a while, she rolls over to straddle me, I actually experience a passing instant of claustrophobic panic as she lowers her body onto mine. But regardless of the peripherals, the hardware remains the same, and as soon as I slide into her, everything clicks into place. She keeps her open mouth locked on mine the whole time, her tongue darting in and out continuously as she moans to the beat of our rocking bodies, biting down on my lower lip so hard that I can briefly taste my own blood before she licks it away.

And I try not to think of Hailey, I really do, I try to lose myself in the unmitigated exuberance of Laney's undulations, in how alive and uncomplicated she is in her lust, but even as she cries out loudly, I find myself floating above us, dispassionately observing it all, and trust me, the last thing you want to do is watch yourself having sex. I don't care how attractive you are, you'll still feel like an idiot when you see that stupid expression on your face, eyelids at half-mast, jaw set determinedly, urgently humping away like the fate of the civilized world hangs in the balance. Women close their eyes during sex, not to picture Brad Pitt, but just because they don't want to see your stupid-looking mug. The Brad Pitt thing is just a bonus.

When I was sixteen, Claire decided that my virginity was holding me back, so she convinced her friend Nora Barton to sleep with me. Nora was skinny and flat-chested, but willing to do me for “shits and giggles,” which made her a perfect ten in my book. We did it in my bedroom, while she was supposedly sleeping over to study with Claire, and for the entire time, all six or seven minutes of it, I remember thinking,
So this is sex, I'm having sex,
over and over again, and wishing that I could stop thinking for just one minute and lose myself in the sensation of it all. And then it was over, and Nora tiptoed back to Claire's room so they could laugh themselves to sleep talking about me, and a half hour later I was sitting in bed mournfully handling my resurgent erection, wondering why I hadn't felt anything.

Hailey is dead, and I'm having sex.
And maybe it's the strangeness of the situation—I'm screwing the neighbor's wife in my basement—or maybe it's Hailey, whose naked body suddenly fills my eyes like tears, but it's Nora Barton all over again, and I could swear that I don't feel a thing, like my groin was injected with Novocain, even as I hear my own moans growing louder and more frequent.

Afterwards, we lie side by side and she runs two fingers up and down my slick back, kissing my face softly as I taste the light sweat on her neck. “Doug,” she whispers tentatively, after a long, long while.

“Laney,” I say, and the air around us grows heavy.

“Nothing,” she says after a pause, which is perfect because, really, that's all there is to say. And because she said that, and only that, I feel a surge of warmth and gratitude toward her, so I kiss her. And because I kissed her, she kisses me back, those impossibly full lips absorbing my thinner ones, her teeth gripping, her tongue probing. And because of that, I move my fingers between her damp thighs, and she rolls onto me to run her tongue over my nipples, and in no time we're at it again. And because she's more comfortable now, she guides my lips down to exactly where she wants them to be and her moans are louder, her hips bucking with reckless abandon. And because of that, I am able to lose myself in her, in her flesh and smells and taste. And because of that, this time I actually feel it when I come. Because, because, because. Because Hailey is dead, I am fucking a married woman in the basement. Because I don't care anymore. Because I'm lonely and horny and drunk. Because, because, because.

Because I'm fucked anyway.

         

Laney leaves me with deep lingering kisses and meaningful glances that promise she will be back soon. “Today was magical,” she whispers into my ear. “I wish I could come back later, make love all night, and wake up in your arms in the morning.” But she can't. Because I need some time to absorb this, to reflect on it and torture myself about it, and because I get the creeps whenever anyone says “make love” instead of “have sex,” or “fuck.” Hailey never said “make love.” It's just goofy.

And now Laney has to go home and start getting dinner ready for her husband and children, and I have to crawl back into this rumpled bed and be alone as the first tears come, burying my head in this pillow that smells of sex and still bears a few stray auburn hairs. The sobs come, heavier now, racking my body, slicing through me like hot blades. I never cheated on Hailey, never even thought about it, so the fact that I just had sex with someone else must mean she's really, truly gone. And I already knew she was gone, but now my body knows it too, and it's like finding out all over again. I'm sorry about Laney, not because it was wrong, but because I already know we'll do it again, and it's just one more step into a life without Hailey, one step further away from her. And so is every day and every night, and even this empty, sexed-out sleep, falling on me now like a cartoon anvil, driving all coherent thought from my mind.

8

LISTEN. I NEVER ASKED FOR ANY OF THIS.

I'm only twenty-nine years old, for God's sake. My story should be one of those urban romantic slacker-finds-true-love-and-grows-up comedies, not this random, senseless tragedy. Just over three years ago I was living in my little studio apartment in the West Village, going out to the bars with my friends, getting drunk and laid and fired from dead-end writing jobs with the same relative frequency. I never could have fathomed that I'd be widowed and living alone in New fucking Radford, in a house I didn't buy, mourning the dead wife that never should have been mine to begin with.

You know guys like me, there's one of me in every crowd, the laid-back wiseass who's never going to amount to very much. I used to imagine that I was like Rob Lowe in
Saint Elmo's Fire,
minus the saxophone, but as I got older I came to understand that Rob Lowe could pull it off only because he looked so much like Rob Lowe. I looked a little too much like Doug Parker, and last I heard, Demi Moore wasn't losing any sleep trying to figure out how to share a bathtub with me.

I was the kid about whom teachers always said he's a bright boy, if only he'd apply himself, the kid who could always be counted on to decimate classroom decorum with a well-timed one-liner, the one who always took the joke just a little too far. My parents heard this so consistently about me at parent-teacher conferences that they stopped going altogether after a while, choosing to accentuate the positive by focusing on the stellar achievements of my sisters. Claire was a notorious slut, but smart enough to get into Yale, where she slept around prodigiously, leaving her bed just long enough to earn an advanced degree in clinical psychology. Then she surprised us all by marrying the interminably boring Stephen Ives, heir to the Ives Lawn Manure fortune, and was now devoted to the business of being an obscenely wealthy housewife. You could almost hear the click of the switch when she powered down her brain and tossed her career, but as far as my folks were concerned, all was forgiven when she married the horseshit heir.

Debbie, three years younger than us, seemed to understand from an early age that all of my parents' hopes and dreams were pinned on her, and she didn't disappoint. She was a straight-A student, the kind who whiningly appealed every less-than-perfect test score to teachers who ultimately caved just to shut her up. She graduated Harvard Law School with honors and is already on the partnership track at a Manhattan firm whose name generates instant nods of approval among those in the know. She has a spacious office with a view of the Hudson River, her own secretary, and textured linen business cards with raised silver lettering. Somewhere along the way, though, she discarded her sense of humor, probably because there would never be a test on it, and now her laughs are rare and her smiles often rushed and vaguely pained, which is a shame because she was a beautiful girl and smiling had always suited her when she was younger. She's still beautiful, but now it's the kind of beauty that comes with a barbed wire fence around it.

Not cut out for the Ivies, I just barely scraped through the State University of New York with a bachelor's in English, leaving me perfectly qualified to do absolutely nothing that would earn me a living. As far as I knew, there were no essay portions at job interviews, and, that being the case, there hardly seemed any point in trying. So while my friends all splurged on pin-striped Brioni suits and joined investment banks and hedge funds, I bounced around a few PR agencies, writing inconsequential press releases and getting fired for a wide range of corporate delinquency. At one agency, I decided that I was going to re-create my work cubicle, item for item, in my apartment. Every day I would steal office supplies, from Post-it pads and pens to staplers, secreting them out of the office like Tim Robbins and his tunnel dirt in
The Shawshank Redemption
. I brought a gym bag to handle the larger stuff, like the telephone and fax machine. It was the actual cubicle walls that would prove to be my undoing. There was no way to sneak them out, so I waited until after hours and then acted like I was authorized to be taking a cubicle wall down in the elevator. The security guard in the lobby was unimpressed, and the next day I had to sit in a conference room with the head of HR and my flabbergasted boss, Stephanie, watching my criminal enterprise on the building's surveillance tapes.

“I can't believe that's you,” Stephanie said, looking away from the surveillance video.

“The camera adds ten pounds,” I pointed out.

“Doug,” she said miserably, and I could see she now regretted even more having slept with me after a late client dinner a few weeks earlier. She'd worn her heels to bed and commanded me to slap her ass while she rode me like a cowgirl. In the morning she went through all five stages of grief before breakfast and then made me swear I'd never tell a soul. Then, since we were already there, we had sex again, to seal our pact.

“You know I'm going to have to fire you,” she said.

I was actually kind of relieved, because my plan to steal the copy machine was proving to be a logistical nightmare.

I had to return everything, but not before I photographed the cubicle I had so painstakingly re-created in my living room. Then I wrote a funny little article about it, which I sold to
M Magazine,
and that's when I discovered magazine writing. I got myself an agent, a high-powered little blowhard named Kyle Evans, who sold my stuff and ultimately landed me a gig at
M,
where I wrote a fairly popular column called “How to Talk to a Movie Star,” a loose, comic riff on anything remotely connected to the Hollywood zeitgeist. Plastic surgeries and eating disorders among young actresses, trends in the current crop of summer movies or the fall TV lineup, profiles on up-and-coming actors and directors, you get the picture. Occasionally, I was sent out to Los Angeles to profile somebody famous, and despite my high hopes, I never did manage to sleep with a movie star, although I think I came pretty close once or twice.

I was perfectly content with this easygoing life, making my own hours, hanging out with my buddies, falling in and out of love, and basically waiting for life to begin. Sure, I got lonely sometimes, sunny-Sunday-afternoon lonely, but until I met Hailey, I just never knew what I might be missing.

Fate. Destiny. God.

It's all a crock.

People want their lives to make sense, want to sit back like cosmic detectives and examine what's happened to them so far, identifying the key turning points that shaped them and retroactively imbuing these moments with a mystical aura, like the celestial forces of the universe are a team of writers on the serialized television show of your life, charged with concocting outrageously convoluted plotlines designed to achieve resolution by the end of the season. No one wants to believe that it's all completely random, that the direction of our lives is nothing more than a complex series of accidents, little nuclear mushroom clouds, and we're just living in the fallout.

As near as I can figure, these were the accidents that shaped my life. If Hailey had never married Jim, then he never would have cheated on her with his ex-girlfriend Angie. And if Jim hadn't forgotten about the nanny cam in the basement playroom, he never would have gotten caught when he did. Since it was Jim who had installed the nanny cam, most shrinks would see this as unassailable evidence that he wanted to get caught, but they just say that because there's no prevailing psychological term for a dumbass. And if Hailey had never divorced Jim, then years later she would not have ducked into what she thought was an unused office to have herself a quick, single-mother cry. It was actually only a mostly unused office. It was mine. And if I hadn't picked that day, of all days, to actually show up for work, I never would have found her there. If I'd met her at any other time, under any other circumstances, she never would have gone for me. Women of her caliber never did. And, knowing my own limitations, I never would have had the nerve to ask her out. But by then, the accidents had built up a momentum all their own, like a tornado whipping through the heartland, and we were sucked up into the twister like a couple of grazing cows.

         

I stepped into my tiny office at
M Magazine
that morning and there was Hailey, crying at my desk. “Oh,” I said, which is what you say when you find a beautiful stranger crying at your desk.

She looked up at me through her tears, blew her nose into a twisted, crumbling tissue, and said, “Can you please come back in a few minutes?”

She was a VP in ad sales, and I was an articles editor and columnist, which meant our paths rarely crossed, but I knew who she was, had already nursed my little office crush on her and moved on. After all, she was beautiful, older, and an officer in the company. But now she was crying at my desk, and there's nothing like a weeping woman to bring out your inner white knight. So I stepped out of my office and closed the door, not only to give her privacy, but also to keep any other white knights from joining the fray, because I was not up for a joust. I took a quick walk and picked up two coffees. I don't drink coffee, but as an old girlfriend once said to me, sometimes you have to fake it for the greater good of mankind. When I returned, Hailey was reapplying her makeup. “Here,” I said, placing the cup in front of her and leaning against the wall.

She smiled at me through the last of her tears, and she was ragged and worried and ever so slightly damaged and that's what you need with a beautiful woman, some chink in her armor that gives you the guts to approach. Otherwise, you just circle like a scavenger, watching the other predators move in. “Thanks,” she said, taking a long, grateful sip. “Who are you?”

“I'm Doug,” I said. “This is my office.”

“Hailey.” We shook hands across the desk. Hers were small and soft, her fingernails bitten and unpolished. “I'm sorry about this. I'm just having a bad morning.”

I waved my hand. “I just wish I'd known you were coming. I'd have brought donuts. And Kleenex.”

She grinned. “I'm usually not like this.”

“It's not your fault. I always have this effect on women.”

The grin escalated into a full-on smile. It was a killer smile, a warm, piercing humdinger of a smile that I felt in my thighs. Women like this generally didn't smile at me like that. Usually they flashed polite, blinking smiles like hazard lights that said
Keep moving, nothing to see here.
But Hailey said, “I don't want to go to my office.”

“So stay here,” I said.

“I should let you get back to work.”

“If you knew me, you'd know how ridiculous you just sounded.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. She had long, honey-colored hair, skin like burnished ivory, and dark almond eyes that opened wide when she spoke and crinkled magnificently when she smiled. “Today is my birthday,” she said.

“Happy birthday.”

“Thanks.”

“Birthdays can be rough.”

“Tell me about it.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-six. And divorced. And mother of an angry twelve-year-old.”

“You're only as old as you feel.”

“Well, then I'm fifty.”

“You look outstanding for fifty.”

She smiled. “It's just not what I thought it would be, you know?”

“Thirty-six?”

“Life.”

“Ah, life,” I said, just like somebody wiser than me might say it. “Don't get me started.”

She flashed me a wry grin. “How old are you?”

“I'm twenty-five. But I feel twelve.”

She snorted when she laughed, but I liked it anyway, and so I made her do it a few more times, and then she opened up and started to tell me about her divorce and her troubled son, and her bad luck with men. She was thirty-six, divorced, and a single mother. I was twenty-five and still waiting for something to happen to me. We were from two different universes, suddenly thrown together in the twilight zone of my office. It wasn't just that she was too old for me; it was that she was too pretty, too sad, too wise, and altogether too worldly for someone like me. But something had happened, some hiccup in the cosmos, and we could see behind each other's curtains, and we were talking and laughing, and she was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.