The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating (12 page)

P
ART II

The Widow Gets Laid

14

Let’s pause briefly, here, to recap. Charlie Byrne, husband to Claire, writer, sexologist, and notorious man about town has been dead for five months, and his widow’s unsure how to proceed. We do not know if Claire Byrne derived sexual pleasure from her husband, though there’s a strong indication she didn’t. There’s the impression that there was love. Still, there was something missing in her life and now she craves it. But what with paraphilia and philandering and pronouncements from psychics, who knows what anyone wants or even which way is up? Is it sex that she wants, or is it something more pure—the state of
platonic amor
, maybe, as Plato understood it?

Claire is a pretty girl with hips in nice proportion to her waist. She’s young, in good health, and has money. Her friends seem interesting; her dreams don’t seem dull. She is by some accounts, in spite of or maybe because of her husband having died, fortunate.

The griot had said a lot of things, most of which Claire hadn’t even heard—she’d been too busy imagining him in bed. She felt frustrated. She longed for an awakening. She wondered if Jack Huxley was susceptible to an almost-perfect ratio of hip to waist. She remembered that Eve said to do it out of town. Thanks to Beatrice, she was on the lookout for black suits. She was ready to be flattered and seduced.

But whether from the monotony of marriage, or by Charlie’s ceaseless analysis, or by the theories and the talk and the other women, sex for Claire was not a simple act. She couldn’t imagine calling her gynecologist, for instance, to get the name of a good stimulating lubricant, rushing off to buy it, and applying it liberally before mounting the sweaty tumescent man across the couch, as Dr. Ruth had just suggested that morning on
Good Day New York
.

Often, when Claire and Charlie had sex, she felt like a control subject in his research. If Charlie wanted her to stroke something, he would instruct her to do so in a clinical fashion, mentally record the conditions under which she’d done so, and observe the results. She was more lab assistant than intimate.

*   *   *

M
OST ANYONE WHO
gave it thought felt Claire should hole up the first year, cool her heels, wear conservative clothes. That was the rule, after all, implied by the general public and reinforced by a psychic—no love for one year. Richard, of course, wanted to finish and sell Charlie’s book.

“Work on it, you’ll thank me. The distraction is good.” To that end, tabloid magazines appeared in weekly bundles at her door, the subject of Charlie’s book affixed to every one. Always arranged at a dodgy angle from the camera, Jack Huxley refused to be shot straight on. It was like Claire’s captivating author’s photo that had first turned Charlie on.

Life in a three-quarter turn.

Ethan was anxious about change. He was plainly in the cool your heels camp. Sasha, though, thought it high time to move on. As she delicately put it, “If there was anyone who would have wanted to see you get laid, it would have been your dead husband, God rest his perverted soul.”

Charlie had always had a thing for widows, it’s true. He would have hated to see one go to waste. Claire, having been recently relieved of a husband, was at a virginal milestone. To anyone other than jealous wives, Claire, much like Iberian ham in Spain at the height of the season, was a rare delicacy. Charlie would have derived ecstatic pleasure from the catch; ah, the irony.

Claire picked up her phone, put it down, picked it up, put it down again. She left her apartment and took a cab to 969 Park. When the doorman called up to announce her, he paused. His eyes darted warily toward Claire. He replaced the telecom slowly and nodded Claire up.

Claire immediately identified the doorman’s concern. Sasha was fixed at one end of her custom D’Angelo sofa, with a cocktail shaker at her right elbow and a pitcher of vodka on the Adnet table in front of her. Her torso was perfectly straight; her legs were looped carelessly beneath her. The scene looked like a Cindy Sherman display.

“What are you doing?” Claire asked, alarmed. It wasn’t the presence of vodka in the afternoon so much as the shine of Sasha’s skin, the dark, blood-colored lips and vivid, skintight leather dress that slightly startled her. Claire remembered what Beatrice had said.

Someone in a fuchsia dress is taking risks.

“Talk. I can’t move, I’ll drip. Just talk.”

Botox is a relatively innocuous procedure, but Sasha had a deathly fear of needles. Pills before the appointment, drinks with pills after. The leather dress, Claire assumed, was for—

“Let me guess, Dr. Struck?”

Gerald Struck was new in town and taking the ladies’ skin scene by storm. He was a former quarterback; he’d played one season for the Jets. He was tall and defined beneath his thin cashmere crew necks and gabardine slacks in a way no dermatologist had ever quite been before him. He walked about in a teasing stage of semi-erection.

“Um-mm.” Sasha waved her hand for Claire to talk.

They were all acting like lunatics. It was the autumn of everyone’s discontent.

“Well, listen to this. I have a griot,” Claire said. “His name is Derek.”

“That’s nice, honey. What’s a griot?”

“It’s a storyteller. They tell stories. He recited the entire text of
The Waste Land
, with footnotes.”

Sasha’s housekeeper came in with a straw for her martini glass. She put the straw up to Sasha’s lips. When Sasha had finished sipping, she pronounced her words carefully. “Things must be slow downtown.”

“After
The Waste Land
he recited a parallel text he’d written from his own life. His own
Waste Land
. He called it
The Gap
. It’s tongue in cheek. He also plays the flute.”

Sasha breathed in and eyed Claire dubiously, “What’s so great about a griot?”

“Well, that’s why I’m here.”

Sasha made an attempt to open her eyes wide to show interest, but the Botox had already taken effect. “I’m listening.”

“I want to have sex. I want to get it over with, out of town or anywhere, I don’t care. I was at the movies with Ethan last week and started rubbing his leg. I didn’t even realize it.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know how to go about it. Charlie wrote an entire book on animal sex that he never published. Isn’t that crazy? Anacondas mate for three weeks.”

“That’s longer than most New Yorkers,” Sasha said.

“It’s three weeks for one single act. One single fuck. And it takes thirteen males to do it. Thirteen male anacondas wrap themselves around the female and then just hang on until they’re done.”

Sasha picked her legs up one at a time and laid them out on the couch. She let out a sound that might have been an exasperated laugh if she’d been able to move her lips. “Stick to human seduction. You know, most women would trade places with you in a heartbeat. Marriage is so—you know. And here you are with a freebie, a do-over.” She waved her arm in the air lazily, closed her eyes, groped for her drink. The Klonopin was kicking in. “Margorie Dermott’s already dating a surgeon.”

“Great. Good for Margorie. Who cares? I’m dating, too. That’s what I came to tell you. I’m not going to wander around in disrepair. I want to date and I need you to find me someone.”

“Thank God. Enough’s enough.”

“It’s been months, not years. I’d hardly call it procrastination.”

“Good. I’ll live vicariously through you. Marriage is so damn repetitive…” Sasha trailed off.

When she began to snore, Claire tucked a blanket around her and left.

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT DAY
Sasha got serious. They sat in her study as she thumbed through Thom’s Rolodex, the old-fashioned kind with handwritten cards that spun around in a wheel. She was jotting down notes.

“Here’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to assemble a variety pack. You don’t know what your taste is because you’ve been out of the game. So I’m going to start you off with this fun little threesome right here.” Sasha was holding three white cards in her hand.

“Alex is a journalist, he’s very tall, very nice. Stephen’s a billionaire. Balding a bit, but he’s a billionaire. Jake plays hockey, great ass, but not too bright, and then I might throw in Sid. He’s an alcoholic.”

“Alcoholic?”

“Yes, a high-functioning one. He’s a venture capitalist, energy. He’s into those windmill farms in the Midwest. Apparently there’s a lot of wind in Kansas.”

Claire picked the journalist, to start.

“Great. You can just have a drink, no pressure,” Sasha said. “This is a warm-up to practice your small talk. It will be easy.”

Sasha called Claire the next morning.

“Okay, I gave him your number. He’s out of town but gets back tomorrow. He’ll probably call—”

“He did already. He called.”

Sasha squealed. “Ha! You see? He loves you. I knew it! And so?”

“We might have coffee. This week, maybe? I told him to call me back.”

“Call you
back
?”

“Yeah.”

“But he just called you.” Sasha sounded baffled, as if Claire had told her olives don’t pair well with gin. “Why does he have to call back?”

“Call me back later this
week
, I said.”

There was a pause, filled by the sound of a vacuum.

“Lydia. Can you
please
vacuum someplace else?” Sasha sounded exasperated.

“Okay. What happens later this week? I don’t understand.” Sasha was speaking to Claire in the same tone she used to speak to her Westie.

“I’ll know about coffee.” Claire was thumbing through an old
Paris Review
. Susan Sontag on “The Art of Fiction.” She wondered if she ought to have a bisexual phase.

“Sweetie, what is there to
know
about getting
coffee
?”

“Never mind. We talked for a few minutes and I told him to call me back, that’s all.”

“I hope you didn’t bring up anacondas.”

“I didn’t. And never mind.”

“Listen, honey. If you want to play you have to be in the game. I know what you’re up to. He’ll call, and you won’t answer, then you’ll call him from a cab or an elevator and get cut off and he’ll call again and you’ll wait a few days more to call him back; then two months will go by and he’ll be too tired to bother with coffee, he won’t even remember your name. And in two months he will have had two serious relationships come and go and be into his third and, by the way, she’s the one he’ll marry. Call him back
now
. And dinner—or at least a drink. Something grown-up.”

The truth was, Claire hadn’t liked the sound of Alex’s voice. It was faint and there were gaps in their talk that she’d felt obligated to fill in. She hated that.
He
had called
her
, after all. But Claire called him back, and they agreed to have dinner. Claire picked the restaurant; the journalist picked the time. The Waverly Inn on Bank Street was easy to get in and out of.

*   *   *

A
LEX THE JOURNALIST
was tall, Sasha was right about that. And he was slightly disheveled, though it looked contrived: he seemed to have purposely tousled hair. When Claire walked in, Alex was standing at the bar. He greeted her—and took charge right away. There was a table waiting and he ordered foie gras and salads before they sat down. He dashed quickly through three bourbons—was it four?—before they considered the entrées. Claire nursed the house Chardonnay.

“Foreign correspondent,” Alex said. Claire was tuning in and out. “Bureau chief, Beijing.
Washington Post
.” Alex was the sort of foreign correspondent who carried a picture of himself dressed in camouflage holding an M16 rifle. He was also the type of dinner date who liked to take it out and show it. Claire nodded at the picture in approval.

“Fallujah,” he said.

Alex was newly divorced. (“But,” Sasha had assured Claire, “I promise he’s not fucked up.”)

He’d been divorced for three months and said so more than once. Observations and exclamations popped out of him unexpectedly. He was halfway through a bottle of wine by the time their entrées came—quail for him and chicken potpie for Claire. When his fingers snapped—twice, and loudly—for their waiter, Claire jumped and the waiter appeared. “I can’t eat this,” Alex said. He was grimacing. His face was contorted into equal parts disgust and alarm. She glanced carefully toward his bird, afraid of spotting a leggy insect crawling out.

“It’s bloody,” he said through clenched teeth, “can’t you see that?” Here, with his fork, he held back a small wing to reveal to Claire and the waiter the unacceptable gore. Claire couldn’t see it.

“Take her plate back, too, please,” said Alex, through a brittle smile. “Keep it warm until you cook mine.” The waiter snatched up both plates. “You don’t mind, do you, Claire?”

“No,” she said, and took a deep breath. In Charlie, she might have found this scene charming. She was used to Charlie’s domineering. He had earned it. “No, I don’t mind. Of course not.” She smiled.

“More wine?” Alex asked.

It was red, and though Claire didn’t care for any, she nodded. The bottle made a gurgling sound as he tipped it into her glass.

Dinner—partly due to the quail, and partly due to long pauses Alex employed between pronouncements and digressions, and lavish stories about bombs—went on for hours; three and a half, it turned out, and during that time they covered the following: Alex’s book (
A Parrot in Berlin: The Colors of War
); Alex’s publisher (“No fucking clue how to sell a book. What. So. Ever”); Alex’s piece in
Harper’s
on Anwar Sadat (“At the risk of coming off as arrogant, Claire, it’s the goddamn closest anyone’s ever got to him”); Alex’s ex-wife (“I just fell out of love”); Alex’s rowing career at Yale (“We won the ’84 regatta against Harvard, the pussies”); Alex’s middle name (Letham, after his great-grandfather); Claire’s middle name (Marie, she wasn’t sure why); and Claire’s marital status.

“Do you get along with your ex?”