How to Talk to a Widower

thighs, and she rolls onto me to run her tongue over my nipples, and in no time we’re at it again. And because she’s more comfortable now, she guides my lips down to exactly where she wants them to be and her moans are louder, her hips bucking with reckless abandon. And because of that, I am able to lose myself in her, in her flesh and smells and taste. And because of that, this time I actually feel it when I come. Because, because, because. Because Hailey is dead, I am fucking a married woman in the basement. Because I don’t care anymore. Because I’m lonely and horny and drunk. Because, because, because.
    Because I’m fucked anyway.

    Laney leaves me with deep lingering kisses and meaningful glances that promise she will be back soon. “Today was magical,” she whispers into my ear. “I wish I could come back later, make love all night, and wake up in your arms in the morning.” But she can’t. Because I need some time to absorb this, to reflect on it and torture myself about it, and because I get the creeps whenever anyone says “make love” instead of “have sex,” or “fuck.” Hailey never said “make love.” It’s just goofy.
    And now Laney has to go home and start getting dinner ready for her husband and children, and I have to crawl back into this rumpled bed and be alone as the first tears come, burying my head in this pillow that smells of sex and still bears a few stray auburn hairs. The sobs come, heavier now, racking my body, slicing through me like hot blades. I never cheated on Hailey, never even thought about it, so the fact that I just had sex with someone else must mean she’s really, truly gone. And I already knew she was gone, but now my body knows it too, and it’s like finding out all over again. I’m sorry about Laney, not because it was wrong, but because I already know we’ll do it again, and it’s just one more step into a life without Hailey, one step further away from her. And so is every day and every night, and even this empty, sexed-out sleep, falling on me now like a cartoon anvil, driving all coherent thought from my mind.

8

    LISTEN. I NEVER ASKED FOR ANY OF THIS.
    I’m only twenty-nine years old, for God’s sake. My story should be one of those urban romantic slacker-finds-true-love-and-grows-up comedies, not this random, senseless tragedy. Just over three years ago I was living in my little studio apartment in the West Village, going out to the bars with my friends, getting drunk and laid and fired from dead-end writing jobs with the same relative frequency. I never could have fathomed that I’d be widowed and living alone in New fucking Radford, in a house I didn’t buy, mourning the dead wife that never should have been mine to begin with.
    You know guys like me, there’s one of me in every crowd, the laid-back wiseass who’s never going to amount to very much. I used to imagine that I was like Rob Lowe in
Saint Elmo’s Fire,
minus the saxophone, but as I got older I came to understand that Rob Lowe could pull it off only because he looked so much like Rob Lowe. I looked a little too much like Doug Parker, and last I heard, Demi Moore wasn’t losing any sleep trying to figure out how to share a bathtub with me.
    I was the kid about whom teachers always said he’s a bright boy, if only he’d apply himself, the kid who could always be counted on to decimate classroom decorum with a well-timed one-liner, the one who always took the joke just a little too far. My parents heard this so consistently about me at parent-teacher conferences that they stopped going altogether after a while, choosing to accentuate the positive by focusing on the stellar achievements of my sisters. Claire was a notorious slut, but smart enough to get into Yale, where she slept around prodigiously, leaving her bed just long enough to earn an advanced degree in clinical psychology. Then she surprised us all by marrying the interminably boring Stephen Ives, heir to the Ives Lawn Manure fortune, and was now devoted to the business of being an obscenely wealthy housewife. You could almost hear the click of the switch when she powered down her brain and tossed her career, but as far as my folks were concerned, all was forgiven when she married the horseshit heir.
    Debbie, three years younger than us, seemed to understand from an early age that all of my parents’ hopes and dreams were pinned on her, and she didn’t disappoint. She was a straight-A student, the kind who