An Available Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the street. “I want you to meet my most favorite cousin, Olga Nemerov. Ollie, this is our old, dear friend, Edward Schuyler.” The woman scowled at Sybiland then at Edward, who contained his impulse to scowl back as Sybil skittered away from them like a sand crab toward other guests.
    Instead, he managed a stilted smile that this Olga Nemerov didn’t bother to return. Was she really Sybil’s cousin or merely some minor, sour character plucked from Chekhov? “Do you live in New Jersey?” he asked idiotically.
    “God, no,” she said, with what he perceived as a tiny shudder. She was a slight, bespectacled person in a prickly-looking tweed suit. Among the other colorful and scented women at the party, she was like a cactus in a rose garden. Bee would have intuitively shown up by now and rescued him.
    “Well, it’s not
that
bad,” Edward said, thinking that it actually was that bad, that everywhere was. He wanted to ask her why she was so angry, before he realized that she, too, had understood why they’d both been invited and thrust together. “This wasn’t my idea, you know,” he said.
    “My cousin is incurably romantic,” she answered. “She’s been doing this to me since we were teenagers.”
    And it never took
,
did it
, Edward thought. “Sybil means well,” he said, insincerely—another brilliant remark—and Olga actually snorted.
    When Henry boomed that dinner was served and that everyone could sit anywhere, Edward and Olga quickly separated, as if they’d been demagnetized, and headed for opposite ends of the table.
    During the rest of the evening, Edward felt as if he were under a light anesthesia, from which he was roused from time to time to exchange a few words with his neighbors, to eat a little of the food. He couldn’t even bestir himself to become irate with Sybil for being so insensitive to him and disloyal to Bee’s memory. It would have been useless, anyway. She would either baldlydeny having tried to set him up, or scold him for yielding his zest for life, Bee’s best and most contagious quality.
    Finally, the ordeal was over. There were more handshakes and kisses, and farewells: “Good night, drive carefully, call me, good night!” Even Sybil’s unsmiling cousin offered her hand at the door and Edward took it, surprised that it was soft rather than bristling with thorns. And then, mercifully, he was released back into his own care.

The Misery of Company
    T here was only one other man in the grief counselor’s living room, and he looked up with something like relief in his eyes when Edward came in. A woman with a notebook on her lap smiled and said, “You must be Edward Schuyler. I’m Amy Weitz. Welcome, and take a seat.” Five other women sitting there glanced at Edward with varying degrees of attention. The only remaining seat was between two of them on a deep sofa, where he slowly sank, as if into a downy trap.
    As he’d told Bee, he wasn’t partial toward groups of strangers. He wasn’t a member of Kiwanis, the Rotarians, or even the National Education Association. And unlike Bee, he’d never joined a bridge or book club. They’d played bridge with their friends, and reading seemed to him like the last stronghold of privacy in a group-crazed society. Why had she ever thought he could abandon his natural reserve in a situation like this?
    But Edward felt intolerably bad, and his friends kept clucking over him. At least there was school on weekdays, somewhere to go that was more or less programmed and predictable, something he had to get out of bed to do. When he’d first returned to Fenton in September, many of his students had looked at him shyly, almost fearfully. They knew about Bee; that kind of news spread easily in a school community, even during vacation months. Should they say something to him? What should they say?
    He felt sorry for them in their awkwardness—everything was so much harder in one’s early teens—so he spared them the remarks they