The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating: A Novel by Radziwill Carole

Author:Radziwill, Carole [Radziwill, Carole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2014-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

20

“I brought a man home, to spend the night. To have sex with.”

“And how did that go?”

“He put on Charlie’s robe and I freaked out.”

Spence had an emery board and was very methodically filing his nails. Claire couldn’t take her eyes away.

“Why is that? Why did you freak out?”

“I don’t know. It felt like Charlie was in the room watching us. I felt like I’d been caught.”

“What do you feel today?”

“Um. Annoyed, I guess, a little. Anxious. If I don’t find someone suitable in the next couple of months, my married friends will move on. Sasha wants to have kids now. Mothers don’t have time for single friends.”

“Claire, did it occur to you that each person bears his or her own set of problems? That if you read Socrates, or Hegel, they tell you that the struggle of the ordinary is one of the universal pitfalls of mankind?”

“No.”

“It’s the every day, the getting from breakfast to jobs to appointments to dinner to bed, all the seemingly minor incidents lodged between big moments, that topple us.”

Claire looked at Spence, then looked out the window. He probably got all this crap from Charlie, she thought.

“I just need to get through the first year,” Claire said.

“What makes you so certain some sea change occurs after a year?”

Spence had an eyebrow raised, her cue, she knew, to behave. Be fucked up, but do it right.

“A year is as long as you can stretch it. You know, the Jewish year of mourning … it’s a year. You get a year.”

“I wasn’t aware you were Jewish,” said Dr. Spence.

“It’s carefully unwritten into every conversation about death. It’s the three-six-three paradigm.”

“I’m unfamiliar with it,” Spence said.

“For the first three months, everyone’s around and attentive, there’s great concern, or show of concern, and they conspire to keep you distracted and busy. The next six months are busy, too, though the attention trails off. Widowhood is like any other commodity. It’s not enough to just have it. You have to understand its value.”

Spence managed to glance at his watch without disturbing the eyebrow, which Claire found fascinating, but she was determined to finish her thought.

“And then the last three months it dies. Tumbleweeds blow by. The old couples’ friends stop calling; some new friends trickle in. You start to segue out of one skin and into another. Then you start running into people. ‘Oh yeah you, I remember. You’re still a widow? How’s that working out?’”

She looked at Spence’s shoes; they were a horrible shade of red-brown. He should be starting his wrap-up.

“Claire.”

“Yes?”

“Did you hear me? I need to reschedule next week. Can we move to Thursday?”

The perfect man will walk through my door one night when the lights are out, Claire thought. And then she heard her mother’s voice: Honey, lock your door. It’s New York. People get killed.

The journalist, Alex, hadn’t liked Claire’s seduction scene, but what did he know? Stephen had had the seductive power of a rat. Some girls want candles and wine, and that’s okay.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.