The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating Page 3

  They were going to see Charlie for the last time, a few short blocks from where he died. When they pulled up, there was Richard on his phone, pacing back and forth between ambulances. He snapped it shut when he saw them and gave Claire a long hug.

  “They’re waiting on you honey, so they can take him to the funeral home.”

  “Okay.”

  She put her hand out toward Ethan, and he deposited the other half of her pill. Then the three of them walked through the automatic doors like odd links in a chain: the motley shades of Charlie. The new widow, rumpled from flight, flanked by his agent and his assistant. She looked tiny alongside Ethan, clutching his hand. The two of them moored by Richard’s calm authority and cool gait. Daddy’s got this.

  “How was the flight?” Richard asked. “You can’t get a good connection out of Austin.”

  “I drank gin,” Claire said. “Not too much, though.” An ill-timed hiccup escaped her but it went unremarked. Reaching Charlie meant a long, windy walk through a trauma unit, past the blood donor center to the elevator, then two floors down to the morgue. The hospital chaplain met them at the door. He looked familiar.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs.—” He coughed suddenly, hard. “I’m—excuse me.” He coughed again. He put his hand out, then withdrew it. It was going to be a long day.

  It was his nose, Claire decided, and thick brow—he bore an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Cagney. She imagined herself with guns, in a doorway, calling someone a dirty rat. She imagined souped-up cars and getaways.

  “Would you like to say a prayer?” he asked. Dead or alive, there were rules.

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  The chaplain led them to a gurney, where a body—Charlie’s, they had to assume—was covered with a sheet. The chaplain cleared his throat. Ethan fidgeted. Richard’s eyebrow shot up. Claire reached for the sheet, but Richard gently grabbed her hand. There was a tag hanging out from the end, where Charlie’s feet were. His name and statistics, just like in the movies. Charlie had perfectly manicured toes. Claire had an odd urge to see them.

  The chaplain read a psalm, paused at the end, then patted Claire’s shoulder and left the room.

  Richard ran a hand across his forehead. “Okay. Let’s get you home, honey. Listen, I don’t want you to worry about anything.” The certainty of his tone almost made her cry. “Wanamaker and Sons is going to handle the service. You’re going to go home, take a nap, and then, when you’re ready, you’ll go meet them. You’ll sign some paperwork, choose a casket, that’s it.”

  Choose a casket. That’s it. Sure. No big deal.

  There was another long taxi ride downtown. Sasha called and offered to come over, but Claire wanted to be alone. She dug her keys from her purse, unlocked the building door, and took the elevator up like it was any other day. She set her suitcase in the entryway and walked through the apartment. Hanging on the bedroom door was the brown cashmere robe she’d given Charlie for Christmas the previous year.

  On the small table where they took breakfast was the faded Sunday Times, folded over to Charlie’s unfinished crossword, and a brown bag with several prescription bottles inside from Zitomer’s—Charlie’s mother. There was a note attached: YOU MIGHT NEED THIS, DEAR. GRACE. Amen to that, Claire thought.

  She changed out of her clothes and climbed into bed. The sheets still conformed to Charlie’s weight; they fell into wrinkles on his side. Her body, small and alone, stirred up nothing. It was as if Charlie were out and might walk through the door any minute. Nothing had changed.

  * * *

  PER RICHARD’S INSTRUCTIONS, Claire dressed in black and headed back uptown to pick a casket. She dipped into Grace’s gift basket before she left. By the time she arrived at the mortuary, a tickly little cloud had scooped her up. She felt light—too light—like an actress auditioning for a role in an ironic comic film. The funeral home was a nondescript brownstone on Lexington. Claire had passed by here many times without knowing it. Inside, the showroom’s floor-to-ceiling drapes and brass chandelier were intended, she assumed, to create a sense of sophistication for the bereaved. Instead, she found the decor theatrical and macabre, as if a ghoulish performance of The Phantom of the Opera were about to break out. Charlie, Carter the funeral director informed her, was in the basement.

  Carter Hinckley of Wanamaker and Sons wore a lightweight gray suit and carried a black leather binder. He had a strong nose and confident stance; he was conventionally handsome. “My condolences, Mrs. Byrne,” he said, and held out his hand. His hair was slicked back; he sounded older than he looked.

  Claire wondered if Carter Hinckley knew her husband, if he’d read any of Charlie’s books. She knew that people thought of her husband’s work when they met her. Upon introduction, men and women alike reflexively visualized what they imagined must be a tunnel of gold beneath her skirt, to have snared such a discriminating connoisseur as Charles Byrne. The men were typically intrigued, the women bemused; it showed in their eyes.

  Claire watched Carter Hinckley’s dark eyes and found herself hostage to lewd thoughts. Here she was, barely into her second day widowed, wondering how a young funeral director was picturing her cunt.

  “I know this is hard,” Carter said. Hard. Charlie had instilled in Claire a sophomoric obsession with sex; she was drawn to Carter’s crotch as if he’d pointed.

  She’d never thought herself the sort of girl who’d seduce her husband’s mortician. I know this is hard, said the swarthy undertaker. It doesn’t have to be, Claire replied, unbuckling his belt.

  It’s the pills, Claire thought. Carter held the Wanamaker and Sons brochure between a thumb and two fingers. His wrist was bent back at an angle to keep it from flopping, to keep the brochure, as it were, erect. He pointed it straight out at Claire, and Claire relieved him of it. She was impressed by Carter’s comportment; she adjusted her posture.

  “I’m going to cremate him,” she said. “That is what he wished.” What he wished?

  She went on. “So I don’t need a coffin.”

  There was an awkward pause and then Carter cleared his throat.

  “You will still need a casket, actually.” Carter stressed the word casket. He couldn’t help himself. Coffins were for vampires, no one ever got it right. “Even in the case of … I’m sorry, excuse me.” He reached for a cloth in his pocket, and as he turned away from her, his eyes seized up tight, his mouth stretched open, and his features became abstract, like Munch’s The Scream. He paused, held the pose, then captured the explosion, quick and neat, in a light-colored cloth, which he wielded expertly with his right hand.

  When had she last seen a handkerchief? Claire couldn’t imagine Charlie with a handkerchief. She couldn’t picture Charlie in a sneeze.

  “Although you’ve chosen to cremate the remains of your husband—”

  “I’m sorry,” Claire interrupted. She wanted desperately to regain ground. “I know you told me it, your name.”

  “My name is Carter, Mrs. Byrne.” The “Mrs.” wedged twenty years between them. Was she even, technically, still a Mrs.? She could insist he call her Claire, but that might be awkward. Call me Claire. She didn’t know how to behave with the “Mrs.”; Carter wouldn’t know how to act without it.

  “As I said, although you’re cremating Mr. Byrne, we do still arrange the body. He will go through his stages in a casket.” He spoke the words with dramatic flair, as though he were reciting a poem.

  “Well, then, I suppose I should take the cheapest one.”

  She and Charlie had never worried for money; his royalties were steady and would, likely, see an uptick from his death. Still, that was no reason to be fleeced. He would have appreciated her pragmatism.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The cheapest coffin. Is there something on sale?”

  “It’s a casket, Mrs. Byrne. And we don’t typically run sales, no.” Carter was flustered.

  “Then I’d like the cheapest casket.” They were burning it, after all.
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br />   “We have this.” Carter took a single-sheet flyer out of his binder. The picture was of a light brown box. It looked like cardboard.

  “Well,” she reconsidered, “maybe the second cheapest.”

  As he replaced the flyer and opened the binder to another page, she followed his squared-off fingers to the girth of his wrist, the rakish charm of his platinum watch. Farther up, she could see a muscular definition in his chest and arms that was not well hidden beneath his suit. He had very defined elbows, too, like Charlie’s. Claire could see it in the way he carried them; they refused to be overlooked. The first sex she’d had with Charlie, his left elbow had lodged in her rib for the entire twenty minutes. So as not to dwell on it, Claire had made herself count. First in French to soixante-dix, and then in Italian, backward from ottanta, and in this way she’d gotten through. Now here were Charlie’s dead elbows, resurrected in Carter’s suit.

  “Mrs. Byrne? Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” Claire realized she’d been moving her lips, she’d been counting. She wondered how funeral directors were taught to handle an inappropriate advance. “Yes,” she said. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “This?” Carter asked.

  “This,” Claire said, gesturing across the room. “Arranging dead people.”

  He stood perfectly straight. No slouch, no swagger—grief was serious work.

  “I’ve been working in the end-of-life industry for six years.”

  “I never see women in a funeral home. Are there women?” she said.

  Carter stiffened, if that were possible.

  “The conferences must be dull,” Claire added.

  He took a somber look at her. Claire looked somberly back. He cleared his throat. “I know this is hard,” he said “Would you like to sit down?”

  There was a small, green-patterned sofa behind them, a pattern remarkably similar, Claire thought, to Margaret Grabel’s kitchen floor. It was positioned in front of a low table. A Bible—King James—rested on the tabletop. Carter motioned her toward the furniture with his whole arm, a gentle but solid suggestion: There. Or how about over there. No question marks. It reassured her. That was something she had liked about her marriage, the assurance. Everything was always taken care of.

  Charlie had screwed around from the beginning; he considered it research. Though he was discreet, for her benefit—he didn’t bring his work home, for instance—it was hardly a secret. And after a time, it hardly mattered. Claire felt loyalty and fondness for her husband, but she wouldn’t exactly call it love. Whatever she once might have felt for him had dulled. She had made a botched adulterous attempt of her own some time back, with one of the waiters from Zinc, their neighborhood restaurant. Armando. God, if Charlie had known. Armando was a kid, just twenty-four, and a painter—Italian, of course. Although sex hadn’t technically occurred, she counted it because she’d planned for it to. She’d had the intention of sex.

  She wanted Armando in her story. She wanted her lipstick smeared, her hair disarrayed, her countenance wanton in the middle of afternoons. She wanted to feel passion. So she’d gone to his apartment-slash-studio one day, because he’d asked. But when Armando set down his brush on the stained and spattered easel—the colors of women who’d posed here before, Claire thought—she saw him moving in. She stayed for one fumbled kiss, then apologized, politely, and left.

  Her husband, throughout both his career and their marriage, had insisted that there could be love or sex between people, but never both. Whether she agreed or not, it was apparent to Claire Byrne, wife of adulterous Charlie, that she was not the sort of married woman who screwed Italian painter-waiters in afternoons. However badly she might have wanted to be.

  Sitting with Carter, their knees almost touching, in the small space between couch and table, Claire’s thoughts continued to wander. She found it difficult to stay on task.

  “I think plain is best,” she said. “A plain—” Claire stopped and straightened her posture. “A plain casket.”

  Slowly, Carter opened his brochure.

  Everything in the hours since Charlie died had been maddeningly slow. The flight from Austin had been slow, Claire’s reactions were slow, this thirty minutes with Carter felt excruciatingly slow. “There are a number of dignified choices for your husband, Mrs. Byrne. This one, for example.”

  “Well,” she said, and wished she hadn’t. It gave the impression she had a plan. She felt the Xanax wearing off. Funeral. Husband. Dead. Fuck. The week was going to be long.

  “Mr. Byrne disliked adornment,” she heard herself saying. “Do you have something more … classic?” Charlie’s ghost was laughing at her from somewhere right now. Charles Byrne was the sort of man who hates embellishment. Charles Byrne was of simple taste. Charlie Byrne loved nothing more, in fact, than pomp and embellishment and being the center of attention.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Well, you know, straight lines. Plain, but not too plain. Nothing too showy, either.”

  Carter turned his brochure over to the back. “Maybe you’d like an Eco-casket.” He tapped his finger on a photo. It was a rectangle with rope handles. “They are relatively inexpensive and are sourced from sustainable forests.”

  “Oh God, no!”

  Claire looked up, and there, without warning, was Sasha, shattering their awkward stillness. She burst in huffily, trailing drama behind her like a wedding train. “Claire, sweetie, you’re not burying Charlie in a biodegradable box.” She kissed Claire on both cheeks. “I was worried when you weren’t at home. Then Ethan said you’d be here.” She squared herself up to Carter, who looked unprepared for the steep thrust of Sasha’s cleavage above the plunge of her patterned wrap dress. “Hello, I’m Sasha.” She put out her hand to Carter, palm down, and he took it, relieved to have somewhere else to look.

  All of the first act, the slow steam Claire and Carter had built up—the pauses and gazes and looks—Sasha had smashed in one motion, like a bird crashed through a window.

  “So listen, Carter, Mrs. Byrne should take the Marquis casket, don’t you think?” Claire stared at the brochure. The Marquis was solid bronze with a velvet interior. It had a twin-lid design with hermetic sealing, an amber and sable finish, swing handles, and, of course, an adjustable bed.

  “Do you like it, sweetie?”

  “It’s nice,” Claire said.

  “Margorie Dermott had it for her husband. Did you know he finally died? Jesus, ninety years old. Enough. He keeled over in his scotch after dinner. Margorie was so shocked, she threw the rest of the bottle out and it was twenty-five-year-old Chivas. Did you do that funeral, Carter?”

  “Well, I can’t—”

  “Never mind. We’ll take the Marquis, and the bronze Chalice urn with the etchings around the lid.”

  Claire suddenly started spinning, or the room did, she couldn’t tell. “I’m not feeling well,” she said. “I need to go.”

  Sasha put a hand to Claire’s forehead. “What’s wrong, honey? Do you need water?”

  “I don’t know,” Claire said. “I really need to go.” She stood up, wobbled theatrically, then fell. She fainted at Carter’s feet.

  Sasha pulled a flask from her purse and took a drink; Carter brought out smelling salts.

  4

  For all the decorum, disposal was swift.

  Richard took care of everything. Sasha drank, Ethan hid out, and Charlie’s mother, Grace, handled theatrics. The casket had been Claire’s only task. She wore a chic and mournful black dress to the funeral. She had her hair done. She tried to focus on other things beforehand, like the headlines in the morning Times. The Rangers had signed a goalie; the Dow was up; Evelyn White, of the dropped Giacometti, was on the Today show.

  The ceremony kicked off with a gospel choir—Grace Byrne had insisted. There were also a priest and a rabbi, at Grace’s request, like a bad joke. Charlie would have wanted neither. At least the glossy casket was closed.

  Richard gave the t
ribute, of course. He was impeccably calm. He stood at the front of the church and spoke as if it were a pitch meeting.

  “This is like a careless first draft,” he began, pausing to scan the three hundred–odd guests, stopping short, Claire saw, on the book critic Ben Hawthorne, who sat alone in the third row wearing a wrinkled jacket and rumpled hair. The rift between Charlie and Ben—from his unforgiveable panning in the Atlantic Monthly of Thinker’s Hope—was well-known in this room. Had there been more chance meetings between the two men, their discord might have rivaled Norman Mailer’s with Gore Vidal; someone might have thrown a punch. Ben Hawthorne should not have been here. Ben Hawthorne with a ticket to Charles Byrne’s funeral was an unfortunate oversight.

  Richard went on. “I imagine him bringing it to me in manuscript—the dynamic, vital protagonist killed off in the second chapter—and me handing it right back to him. ‘No, Charlie. I’ve never heard of such a thing. It won’t sell.’” There was quiet but genuine laughter at this. Richard was famous in the industry for his wide-eyed appeals of ignorance—I’ve never heard of such a thing. It just isn’t done. It was his parlor trick—the spider dressed up as the fly. He pulled off the shrewdest deals in town.

  Claire’s thoughts drifted, watching Richard. She saw Charlie’s death, sudden and absurd as it was, like a sac of helium floating up and away from her. She tried futilely to snatch it back. She felt like an uninvited guest here, a voyeur, a stranger. Her mother-in-law sat beside her almost unnaturally erect, draped in black silk. Grace’s hands were properly crossed, her lips were bright red—the widows Byrne.

  There were velvet bows on the pews, as if they were presents. There was a long runner on the floor of the aisle down to the front. There were thoughtful arrangements of flowers, and smartly dressed people in grim and proper poses. Sasha wore a cream-colored dress in the sea of black and twirled her fingers absentmindedly through her husband, Thom’s, hair. Thom West was an unassuming man who was ruthless in boardrooms and quietly amassing a fortune. Charlie never liked him, but Claire always had. Behind Sasha was Bridget, Richard’s girlfriend. She was grinning; she seldom didn’t. She was sitting next to Claire’s mother and father, Betty and Roger Jenks, who’d flown in from Illinois. Claire’s brother, Howard, had offered to come, too, but he was on the West Coast and had children. There’d been an expectation of arrangements and Claire didn’t see the point. She didn’t care to entertain anyone after this performance, or stay up late with open liquor bottles, conjuring memories.