The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating (30 page)

“I suppose so,” she said. “But I’m looking forward to being bored by your jokes.”

Ben looked at her eyes, first the left and then the right. He was looking for her, not for his next line. “You are almost exactly as I thought you’d be.” Ben kissed her on her cheek.

“You thought about me?” Claire whispered in his ear.

Ben smiled sweetly.

What she loved—maybe, no need yet to pin it down—what she might love is Ben Hawthorne. Book critic of the
Atlantic
, skewerer of
Thinker’s Hope
, nemesis of the late Charlie Byrne, current companion to Claire.

*   *   *

R
ICHARD HAS LEFT
Claire three messages in the past two hours; the editor at Knopf has been calling him. They want her book, they’re eager to see it. They’d like to see pages by the end of the month.

RULE
#19
: Deprivation breeds appreciation.

Claire shelved the messages. She didn’t have time to talk about the book; she was writing it. She looked up at the clock: it read 11:00 a.m. She had fifteen thousand more good words, but forty thousand or so average words that she needed to patch up.

In the past, when Claire lost faith in anything, she had picked up her notebook the way another person might rub a rabbit’s foot. But she has faith enough to fill buckets now. She has it spilling out over Ferragamo shopping bags and out of suitcases and Birkins and from gutters out into the street. Faith was pouring out of Ben Hawthorne’s whitewashed Estate, down the long driveway and out onto Elm and all the way down to the Qwikstop store on McDowell Boulevard, spilling off onto all the other tree-named streets crossing its path. Claire has found herself in the unusual position of having more faith than she can use, more faith than she might ever need, more faith than she has room to store.

She was writing a decent novel. Richard would take it and he’d be happy enough with it to pass it on to Knopf. Her
boyfriend
would bring home champagne when she sent off the book. Ben would twist the cork off in his hand and pour some into a glass and hand it to her. She wouldn’t screw up her face at it. She was the sort of girl who liked to drink champagne.

*   *   *

H
E CALLED
,
AS
he did most nights before coming home, to see what she’d like for dinner. There was a grocery store on his way. “How about red snapper and arugula?” he asked. “And the chewy bread you love.”

“Yes,” Claire said. “That’s perfect.”

“Are you reading to me tonight?”

Most nights after dinner, over wine (Claire found she enjoyed wine with Ben), Claire read her work from the day and sometimes Ben read something back.

“Yes.”

“How many words?”

“You’ll never guess.”

“A thousand?”

“No, come on. I’m on a tear. A tear’s not a thousand!”

“Three thousand.”

“More!”

“Wow! We’ll skip dessert. We’ll watch a long movie.”

“What movie?”

“
Casablanca
.”

Casablanca.
He was her imaginary future boyfriend. He was here.

“Oh darling, the Wilkinsons are having a dinner on Friday, but let’s not go,” she said. “Let’s tell them we’re away and just stay home.”

“What? Who are the Wilkinsons?”

“No one, never mind,” she told him. “It doesn’t matter. Hurry home.”

So here they were, dangerously close to undoing Charlie’s great theory. They were dangerously close to pulling off both sex and love. They were dangerously close to a fairy tale.

Claire Byrne, formerly Mrs. Charlie Byrne, formerly Claire Jenks, formerly date and/or lover to Jack, Jake, Alex, and Steve, formerly mired, formerly lost, formerly stuck at chapter eight, has found a second act.

It was the beginning, for Claire, of critics.

Also by Carole Radziwill

What Remains:

A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love

A
BOUT
THE
A
UTHOR

C
AROLE
R
ADZIWILL
earned a BA at Hunter College and a master’s degree at New York University. She spent more than a decade at ABC News, where she reported on stories around the world and earned three Emmys. Her first book,
What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love
, spent over twenty weeks on the
New York Times
Best Sellers List. She has written for numerous publications and is a frequent contributor to
Glamour
magazine.

THE WIDOW
’
S GUIDE TO SEX AND DATING.
Copyright © 2013 by Carole Radziwill. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.henryholt.com

Cover art credit © Ben Wiseman

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Radziwill, Carole.

The widow’s guide to sex and dating: a novel / Carole Radziwill.—First edition

pages cm.

ISBN 978-0-8050-9884-6 (hardback)

1.  Widows—Fiction.   2.  Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.   I.  Title.

PS3618.A3585W53 2013

813’.6—dc23             2013002412

e-ISBN 9780805098853

First Edition: September 2013

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.