How to Talk to a Widower

throwing money at the girls and telling them to show me a good time, and then fending off the aggressive advances of the strippers themselves, who had sensed the dynamic and were ready to work the situation for all it was worth. And so I followed the dancer they’d selected for me down the dimly lit hall to the VIP room, but as soon as I was out of view, I ducked out of the club and used the batch of twenties my well-meaning friends had shoved into my hands for the dances to take a cab back to New Radford. And that was the last time anyone asked me to go to a strip club.
    “We’re going to a titty bar,” Max says. “As soon as we finish here.”
    Max is Mike’s younger brother, a good-looking guy in his mid-twenties, the kind of guy who still says things like “sweet” and “dude” and, of course, “titty bar,” and who earlier informed me, apropos of nothing and without the slightest trace of self-consciousness, that one of his fraternity brothers “has this banging house in the Hamptons, and on weekends it’s wall-to-wall models, man. You should totally come, dude. I’ll hook you up.” Whenever he speaks, I can picture him in his fraternity T-shirt, chugging beer through a hose, paddling the naked asses of freshman pledges, and date-raping semiconscious sorority girls.
    It’s Monday afternoon, and the members of Mike’s wedding party have all gathered in the dressing room of Gellers Tuxedo Studio in lower Manhattan, to be fitted for our gray waistcoats and tails. I had hoped that Mike would have better sense than to dress his groomsmen, but I forgot that Mike is not calling the shots, and Debbie wants all the ushers dressed up as Kennedys. In addition to Max and myself, Mike’s wedding party contains Paul, a hedge fund guy, and Rich, an investment banker, both from the neighborhood, who never stop taking cell phone calls and urgently checking their BlackBerries. And then, awkwardly enough, there’s Dave Potter, Laney’s husband, who is Mike’s partner and whom I should have anticipated but somehow didn’t, maybe because I’ve trained myself to forget he exists.
    Since Paul and Rich are too busy being important, jabbering into their cell phones and frantically shaking and pounding on their BlackBerries like they’re about to beat the high score, Dave gravitates over to me, talking while we get dressed. “I’ve been reading your column,” he says. “It’s amazing to me how you can write something so honest and raw, but still make it funny. You’ve really got a knack for it.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Sure. I hope Laney’s not driving you crazy, bringing over food all the time.”
    It’s strange, hearing her name spoken so casually by him. “No,” I say. “It’s really very nice of her.”
    “Sometimes she can go a little overboard.”
    I think of Laney straddling me, her auburn hair falling wildly around her face, eyes closed, mouth open, as she bucks and shrieks her way to orgasm. “It’s fine,” I say. “She’s a good friend.”
    He pulls off his try-on shirt, and there’s something about seeing the love handles and sagging pectorals of the man who doesn’t know I’m sleeping with his wife that makes me feel even worse than I already do. Dave’s not a bad-looking guy for forty-five, but he married a young sexpot and then let himself go, and I just want to grab him and haul him in front of the tailor’s mirror and say, “Look at yourself, you dumb fuck. What did you expect?!” And for one crazy instant, I find myself stepping forward and opening my mouth to tell him, because in the long term I think there would be an upside for both of us, but then Max makes his announcement about the titty bar and Dave nods his head and says, “Now you’re talking,” flashing me a conspiratorial, titty-bar grin, and in that instant I feel a little less bad for him, and the impulse to reveal myself is gone before I can get myself into more trouble than I’m already in.
    Max herds us to a high-end gentleman’s club a few blocks away, the kind with crimson velvet ropes and stanchions out front, and the Armani-clad heavies working the door greet him by name. I consider a variety of ways to make my apologies and leave, but Mike and I have only just buried the hatchet and I don’t want to do anything that might lead to a new misunderstanding. So pretty soon I’m sitting on a long, L-shaped couch in the dimly lit club with the other guys. Max heads over to the bar to put down a card,