The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating (5 page)

Betty wore a tasteful gray suit—she’d splurged. She wasn’t about to come to New York and have someone peg her as Midwestern, credit card bills be damned. She snapped her handbag open and shut while Claire’s father studied the program. She could have worn Armani, Claire thought, it wouldn’t have mattered. Roger, in his serviceable slacks and ten-dollar barbershop cut, would always give her away. Ethan sat in the pew opposite Claire, with a houndstooth suit and a new boyfriend. He caught her eye and made a hand gesture she recognized.
Steady
.
It will all be okay.
Anna Bowers—the PR maven who ran New York’s social life and who was the one loud nod here to Charlie’s fame—sat fifth-row center in a wide-brimmed black organza hat. She was quietly taking phone calls. The rest of the room had filled with a mix of industry peers—writers and sycophants—and the odd city notable. The mayor, for instance, tastefully trim in Paul Stuart, was flanked by aides near the back. Tom Wolfe looked predictably dapper in his signature white suit.

Richard read from James Joyce—the quote Charlie had used to open
Thinker’s Hope
: “‘The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’”

Richard pulled his head up slowly, removed his glasses with his left hand, rubbed his eyes with the right. He was in full sales mode. Here was his chance to make Charlie epic and create a run on the books. Here was Richard making friends and influencing people and getting the good Glengarry leads all at once. He would call Sonny at Knopf tomorrow morning and talk about the electricity in the room; surely Sonny had felt it, too. He’d get them to go to press, to get
Thinker’s Hope
back on the bill at their Monday-morning sales meeting.

There were a number of particulars about Charlie that Richard dutifully ticked off—the countless awards, the honorary doctorates.

When the formal piece concluded, everyone lined up to pay respects to Claire. Richard took charge of Grace, and Grace was pleased with that. They both came from, as Grace liked to say, good stock.

The mourners, weeping and patting, offered soft hugs and double kisses. Claire was embraced by a small, bony woman. She recognized her immediately but had forgotten her name. She remembered only that Charlie had ended an affair with her years ago, abruptly, and it had gotten nasty for a bit. Like Ben Hawthorne, this woman was someone Richard surely had not put on the list. Or had he? Claire didn’t know what to think.

The whole thing felt off. Charlie would have laughed. Claire felt misled, she felt a fraud, she didn’t feel sufficiently sad at all.

Kathryn Muller came forward with her husband, Kick, one of the pallbearers. Kick was a television writer. He and Charlie had gone to school together, and their friendship had revolved around intellectual one-upmanship; they’d go on and on about Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault and quote different obscure passages, trying to top each other. Then one would jump suddenly to baseball.

“I keep expecting a fight to break out,” Kick said, after kissing her cheek. At her startled look, he added, “I mean, I could see Charlie coming in here and throwing a punch to shake things up. He would have wanted a little more action.”

“Kick,” his wife said, putting a hand on his arm.

Claire laughed and felt solid again for a moment. “No, you’re right. He wouldn’t have suffered this sort of thing.”

By 9:30 that night, Charlie was back to dust, Sasha was numb on brandy, Claire’s parents were on a plane, and Claire was in her apartment swallowing sleeping pills and Diet Coke. Ethan called on the landline; she let it go to Charlie’s voice on the machine. “Love you, darling,” he said after the beep. “Kisses and dreams.” She fell asleep to an old Dick Cavett show and slept for sixteen hours straight.

5

The Byrnes were an odd match, even beyond the age gap. You’re not the first to think so.

They’d been married for nine years. Charlie had been married briefly, once before; he didn’t put much stock in it. But Claire enjoyed being a wife, for the most part. Being married to Charlie Byrne was interesting. There were staggers and starts and extremes of all kinds. She’d watched most of their life curiously, from offstage. They went to films and the theater, and dinners—an endless stream of them—honoring Charlie or featuring Charlie or supporting something artistic of this or that. They spent late talk-filled nights with friends. He gave her entrée into the elite upper reaches of words and the people who traded in them; she gave him a wide berth.

Claire had once hoped to be a great writer, too, and to be vaunted like Charlie. She liked the rhythm of language—the cadences and the silent counts, the melody lines and the minor notes. She liked how a nondescript man in brown trousers could, with the fall of a shadow or twitch of a jaw, be turned into a lover, a dreamer, or a hard, cold psychopath. She liked how an omission or a reveal in a story could move the heart to great heights or drastic falls. She liked words at loose ends, and in books and songs and poems. She liked them in crossword puzzles, an obsession she and Charlie shared, and for which they’d found it necessary to maintain two separate subscriptions to the
Times
. Claire’s major at New York University had been literary studies, with a focus in Victorian realism; she had set herself up to fail at everything else. Her senior year she entered a short-story contest in a prestigious literary journal called
Zoetrope: All-Story
. She was shy with her work, but paid the ten-dollar reading fee, sent off three thousand double-spaced words, and then got a call. She was a finalist—
a finalist
! There had been more than eight thousand entries, and the judges were big guns. Ann Patchett and Peter Pringle were two of them. The third was Charles Byrne.

Later, there was a feature in
New York
magazine, spotlighting the winner, Anna Kuznetsov, and runners-up. “Young Pens,” it was called, a silly headline, Claire thought. Each of them had a pull quote next to their photo. Claire’s was this: “I believe in the redemptive power of a good blow job.” It was a cheeky nod to her story, “Hustling Woody.” In it, the protagonist—a hard-luck prostitute—lost her finger but found her soul by performing a sex act on Woody Allen. (Claire sent a copy of the magazine to her mother. Betty, who was uncomfortable with blow jobs—much less ones written by her daughter in a magazine for all the world to see—stashed it at the bottom of a tall stack of papers in the study.)

The Young Pens were promised agents; they had big hopes. For a brief amount of time, in certain circles, Claire was a star. At this point in the game, she had plans, too. Such as: Paris with Sasha, who was her roommate at the time. They’d planned it for months. They fought over Parisian identities—both wanted Kay Boyle, but Sasha agreed, in the end, to Mina Loy. They dreamed up French lovers and smoky Montparnasse cafés where Claire would write her novel while Sasha undressed for art students. They went so far as to secure a sublet in the Left Bank for the year.

But what happened instead of Paris was that after reading “Hustling Woody” and seeing Claire’s photo, with her symmetrical features and complicated lips, the great Charlie Byrne wrote her a letter. He’d gotten her address from an editor friend at
New York
, then stamped and posted his letter—the old-fashioned way. He’d flattered her tone and her style; his great triumph, she eventually understood, was his ability to effect a better version of himself in words, a man who was sincere, who had the capacity to love outside of the id.
Do you think I could buy you a drink
, he’d written,
in spite of my toxic eligibility?

He was funny, he was charming, and for his books about cocks he was an intellectual star. Crowded rooms fell to a hush as he stepped in (they didn’t actually, she realized later; it was an impression he’d successfully cultivated in her).

Claire was twenty-two; Charlie had just turned forty-five. In retrospect, she thought he must have seen a reflection of his own youthful success in her; men always seemed to want to recapture their early glories, even when they’d gone on to be far more successful since. She couldn’t imagine, at twenty-two, in a cab on her way to meet him, how she could possibly hold this man’s interest for any length of time, God forbid the hour it might take them to have a drink.

“You have sexy goddamn eyes,” he said to her in the first five minutes. “They’re like hot breath on the neck of my soul.” This from a frat boy and Claire would have spit out her drink. From Charles Byrne, it sounded poetic.

Claire Jenks, suburban girl from Illinois, handpicked by Charles Byrne. Charles Byrne! She was flattered. She was confused. His attentions had come out of nowhere. There was no appropriate way to decline. She moved into his apartment within the month, and in less than a year they were married. Claire Jenks—
snap, poof!
—Byrne. Sasha had gone to Paris anyway; a family friend there had later fixed her up with Thom, so in the end it had worked out for both of them.

Once, after they married, Claire had submitted a short story to the
New Yorker
. She’d been politely rejected, but it incensed Charlie when he found out—not only had she submitted without his input, but it became clear, early on, that in their two-bedroom Village town house, there was room for one man and one writer, and Charlie was both. So Claire put her creative writing on hold. Richard, Charlie, and everyone else seemed to assume she was satisfied, and Claire assumed that if there was a difference between happiness and contentment, then content was what she was.

Then, this strange twist of fate. What had seemed a plain kind of happiness, her life with Charlie, her marriage, had been crushed by a large chunk of bronze.

The art that killed Charlie had a name—
Man Walking
—and a story. I told you we’d come back to it. The piece was one of a series, and Walter White bought it at auction for an unconfirmed sum (the rumor was thirty million). He bought it to make up to his wife after what you might call a fight. He’d been screwing her yoga instructor, literally right beneath her nose. You see, Walter liked risk. In sexual terms, it was his paraphilia, an area that Charlie specialized in—atypical, often harmful ways of going about sex.

The riskier the act, the more Walter reveled in it. He liked to almost get caught, so he and the yogi had done it in the closet below Evelyn White’s reading room while she was at home and reading. They had done it on the dining-room table while she walked the pug, and knowing she was having a dinner that very night. They unsuccessfully attempted to do it in her bathroom when she was sprawled on her bed in what turned out to be a very light sleep. But it wasn’t getting caught
en flagrante
that undid them, it was the yogi’s big mouth. She’d whispered enough about their affair to enough of the right people that word of their unconventional ménage à trois got around.

White was the sort of carelessly rich, inelegant man that Charlie despised. The sort who bought sports teams, then hosted hot-dog-and-potato-chip receptions in his stadium suite to be ironic. The Giacometti had been procured because he’d been inexcusably sloppy. Once rumors of a “tummy bump” became a Blind Item on Page Six of the
Post
(
Which billionaire real estate tycoon planted his tenant in his wife’s yoga instructor’s womb?
), Evelyn came undone and White sought out the most pretentious piece of art available on short notice. It was cheaper than a divorce.

On the other side of town, a generous delivery from Cartier went to a certain fourth-floor walk-up. It couldn’t be said that Walter White was unfair.

The sculpture had been a nuisance long before it landed on Charlie. There was the auction at Christie’s where Courtney Love, of all people, scabbed but lucid, had scandalously bid up the piece, infuriating White. The attention the spiteful bidding war caused had dredged up the entire affair again in the tabloids, undermining the gesture and, furthermore, linking Evelyn—whose family had made their money at the turn of the century in proper, discriminate ways—with a former heroin addict from Washington State, a place Evelyn couldn’t, with any sort of imagination, picture as more than a muddy swamp with trees.

Then, there was the problem of how to get the statue into the Whites’ apartment. The bronze was an awkward, unreasonable shape; tall with dramatic angles. It wouldn’t fit in the building’s elevator, much less through the Whites’ narrow front door.

By the time
Man Walking
was on a crane headed up to the Whites’ penthouse balcony, it’s very possible Walter hoped it would fall and shatter to pieces, smash to ruin, and allay the bitterness he felt at the entire episode—the overall sense that he’d been had. The bronze was already psychically precarious when the cable snapped on the crane and sent it tumbling from the sky like a three-hundred-pound bird.

It was said—sotto voce, of course, not seeming a very proper thing to point out—that Charlie had saved the Giacometti from ruin, breaking its fall the way he had. Without Charlie as buffer, the unforgiving stone of the sidewalk might have left the great work misshaped.

The yogi heard the story on the news, alone, from her treadmill, and Evelyn White heard about it at her pinochle game. That damned Strickland Nash, newly rich from pedicure socks, never let her phone sit more than inches away. She got a news alert while Evelyn beat her two tricks.

“Evvy, do you know that writer, the sex guy Charlie Byrne?” she asked.

Evelyn paused, feigned an effort of concentration, and shook her head. “I don’t know. Yes. Vaguely.” She bit her lip. With Strickland, you never knew what was coming next.

“Weren’t you supposed to get your Giacometti today?”

Evelyn felt cornered; leading questions irritate everyone. “Yes?”

“Well, I think it killed someone. I think it fell on Charles Byrne.”

Evelyn White was a cool customer. She took her tricks without flinching and calmly drank her gimlet. Thank God, she thought, for booze. Then she made a neat exit and waited for her husband at home, where there was no new priceless art. He had some explaining to do.