How to Talk to a Widower

says.
    I look down at my drink, wondering why I brought her up at all. “I don’t know,” I say. “That wasn’t the point, really.”
    “No,” Mike says, steering me away from the bar. “The point is, you’re my buddy and you’ve been through a lot and the guys and I want to buy you some lap dances.”
    “That’s okay, really,” I say.
    “Just sit down and enjoy yourself,” Mike says, shoving me onto the couch, and the other guys call out their own intoxicated bellows of encouragement. Max leans forward and gravely whispers to me, like he’s sharing state secrets, that for an extra hundred some of the girls will blow you in the Champagne Room, and before I know it, there’s a naked girl on my lap with bleached blond hair and a metal stud in her tongue. She smells of gin, lavender body lotion, and baby powder, and her high gum line makes me wonder briefly about strip clubs and dental plans. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Vanessa.”
    “Jack,” I say, avoiding eye contact. She can’t be older than twenty, and her body lotion makes her taut belly sparkle like a sidewalk, which makes me think for a sad instant of Brooke’s eye shadow. And then the song starts, and it’s an old Van Halen song that reminds me of Julie Baskin, my first high school girlfriend. Vanessa starts to sway and grind on my thighs, and I close my eyes and remember a party in someone’s house, and how Julie and I stood outside in the shadow of the house, pressed up against each other kissing and petting, while inside this same song was playing on the stereo. She smelled clean, like scented soap, and tasted like Juicy Fruit gum, and I can still feel how in love I was, how pure and exciting and perfect it was to stand outside on a cool spring night kissing a pretty girl, and how whole we still were, as yet untouched in any way by life, and how easy everything was, because it was never meant to last. We never even broke up, just kind of dissolved peacefully, and a few weeks later we were each making out with someone else at another party, in love all over again.
    “Hey,” Vanessa says softly, still moving her hips unconsciously against me.
    “Yeah,” I say, opening my eyes.
    “You’re crying.”
    “Allergies,” I say, wiping my face with the back of my hand.
    Vanessa moves her face to within an inch of mine, and I can see a thin, raised scar that follows the line of her eyebrow. It’s faded enough to have come from her childhood, and I wonder how she cut herself. I imagine a young, sweet-faced mother who pressed a wet cloth to her head and rushed her to the doctor and held her hand while they stitched up the wound and felt the pain like it was her own. And then I wonder what made that pretty little girl with the loving mother turn down the road that brought her to this dark club, and my sad, unresponsive lap.
    “I’m sorry,” I say, for more than she knows.
    “You’re not into it,” she says. “What’s wrong?”
    And before I even know that I’m doing it, I tell her. “I miss my wife,” I blurt out, so violently that our heads knock. “I miss her so much that it’s like this cinder block in my chest, crushing my lungs so that I can’t breathe.” I point to Dave, still lost in the Asian girl’s mountainous cleavage. “And you see that guy over there? I’m fucking his wife, and I never thought I’d be the kind of guy who fucks someone else’s wife. And paying a pretty girl to grind on me would be sad under the best of circumstances, but now it’s sad because, compared to everything else in my life, a pair of tits in my face is not terribly sad, which of course just makes it that much sadder, and I just want it to stop hurting already, you know? I just want to be able to breathe again. I’m tired of going to sleep every night terrified of waking up, but I’m scared for it to stop hurting, because that will mean I’ve moved on, and then she’ll be gone forever.”
    And throughout this entire rant, she never ceases the slow, gentle rocking of her hips, and when I’m done, she runs her hand softly down the side of my face, the flesh of her fingers soft against my angry stubble, and pulls my forehead gently against hers. We sit like that for a moment, as the last bars of the song fade. “Jack,” she says softly.
    “Yeah,” I say, looking into her wide green eyes. And in the instant before she speaks, I realize that I already know what she’s going to say.
    “You want to come with me to the Champagne