An Available Man: A Novel

by Hilma Wolitzer Narrated by Fred Sullivan

Overview

When Edward Schuyler, a modest and bookish sixty-two-year-old science teacher, is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. There are plenty of unattached women around, but a healthy, handsome, available man is a rare and desirable creature. Edward receives phone calls from widows seeking love, or at least lunch, while well-meaning friends try to set him up at dinner parties. Even an attractive married neighbor offers herself to him. The problem is that Edward doesn't feel available. He's still mourning his beloved wife, Bee, and prefers solitude and the familiar routine of work, gardening, and bird-watching. But then his stepchildren surprise him by placing a personal ad in the New York Review of Books on his behalf. Soon the letters flood in, and Edward is torn between his loyalty to Bee's memory and his growing longing for connection. Gradually, reluctantly, he begins dating (“dating after death,” as one correspondent puts it), and his encounters are variously startling, comical, and sad. Just when Edward thinks he has the game figured out, a chance meeting proves that love always arrives when it's least expected.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Wonderful new novel . . . often hilarious and always compassionate.”—The New York Times Book Review
"Charming . . . affecting . . . emotionally layered."—NPR's Fresh Air
“Tender, witty . . . smart and poignant, An Available Man explores some universal truths—that the past is never past, life is for the living, and dating is really, really hard.”—O, the Oprah Magazine
“An Available Man is not just a cautionary tale of geriatric loneliness and sex. It’s a meditation—and then, a breathtaking roller-coaster ride, and then, a meditation again—on what we lose when we allow loss and longing to make us unavailable to ourselves.”—The Boston Globe
“[F]unny, wise and touching.”—The Washington Post

“[Hilma Wolitzer] succeeds, precisely because the writer understands that it's not a childish insistence on finding everything delightful but the full complexity of experience that gives a romance, late-life or otherwise, its real beauty.”—Philadelphia Enquirer
“Wolitzer is, by turns, funny, shocking, poignant and wise.”—The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Heartbreaking, maddening, comical, and poignant . . . This sweet story of a man’s diving back into the dating pool at an older age will especially appeal to readers in that demographic.”—Library Journal
“I absolutely loved An Available Man . . . This is a book to savor page by page, filled with astute detail, both comic and mournful, about what it’s like to be middle-aged and lonely yet not give up on the search for love.”—Julia Glass, author of The Widower’s Tale and the National Book Award-winning Three Junes

“A warm, keenly incisive view of life’s vicissitudes by a writer too seldom heard from.”—Booklist
“Comic, tender, and delicious.”—Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of Big Stone Gap and Very Valentine

“With its cast of exuberantly alive characters and a wise and witty plot, this book is love at first sight.”—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You

“Hilma Wolitzer is a master of the domestic world, and her writing is graceful, stylish, intelligent and so, so funny! This is a lovely novel, an elegant bouquet of family life, made up of tenderness and confusion, grief and solace, uncertainty and commitment, and the unexpectedness of love.”—Roxana Robinson, author of Cost
“Families are Wolitzer’s turf, and she’s an observant and often humorous chronicler of domesticity and the stuff that comes with it: illness, loss, boredom, crankiness, and, on good days, love.”—Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

Beatrice Schuyler is dead of cancer. Her widower Edward lingers on Larkspur Lane, ironing her clothes to hold onto a grief-filled connection. Wolitzer's (Summer Reading, 2007, etc.) insightful novel follows Edward, past 60 but still vigorous, as he fights through despair, frustration and numbness. Bee was only 57, and their 20-year marriage was thoroughly companionable and vibrantly sensual. With Edward trapped in mourning, his friends in the close-knit suburban New Jersey community urge him to re-enter the social whirl, ready to position an extra woman, compatible or not, next to him at dinner parties. Even his stepchildren, Julie, with whom Edward is quite close, and Nick and wife Amanda, are worried. To end Edward's self-imposed isolation, those three place a personal advertisement in the New York Review of Books. Wolitzer's Edward lives as an empathetic character, one to be respected and understood in both motivation and action. Edward is also revealed as fragile in a way only Bee comprehended, psychologically withdrawn for reasons that may relate to a love affair in his 20s that ended with Edward being abandoned at the altar. That first love was Laurel, a flighty and emotional fellow teacher with whom he had a passionate, powerfully physical relationship. That romance, as well as Edward's meeting and marrying Bee a decade or more later, and the comfort he found in his ready-made family, are presented in flashbacks that give the narrative color and depth. Sometimes ironic, sometimes melancholy, Edward's reluctant "dating after death" begins with toned and hungry Karen hot to finish dinner and head home for a romp in the hay. Roberta would rather talk about her late husband. Sylvia, 70 and shaped to appear 50 by plastic surgery, resigns herself to Edward's ambivalence. Lizzie, close friend of Edward and Bee, is eager for an affair. Only after Laurel reenters the story does Edward begin to comprehend the man that survived Bee's death. Literary fiction drawn out of the everyday world.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169602357
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	02/14/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

Out of the Woodwork

Edward Schuyler was ironing his oldest blue oxford shirtin the living room on a Saturday afternoon when the first telephone call came.He'd taken up ironing a few months before, not long after his wife, Bee, haddied. That happened in early summer, when school was out, and he couldn'tconcentrate on anything besides his grief and longing. At first, he onlypressed things of hers that he'd found in a basket of tangled clean clothing inthe laundry room. He had thought of it then as a way of reconnecting with herwhen she was so irrevocably gone, when he couldn't even will her into hisdreams.

And she did come back in a rush of disordered memories ashe stood at the ironing board. But he had no control over what he remembered,sometimes seeing her when they first met, or years later in her flowered chintzchair across the room, talking on the telephone and kneading the dog's bellywith her bare feet-Bee called it multitasking-or in the last days of her life,pausing so long between breaths that he found himself holding his own breathuntil she began again.

Still, this random collage of their days together wasbetter than nothing, and it was oddly comforting to smooth the wrinkles out ofher blouses, to restore their collapsed bosoms and sleeves and hang them in hercloset, where they looked orderly, expectant. And he liked the hiss of steam inthe quiet house and the yeasty smell of the scorched cloth.

Now he lay the iron down on the trivet and, with Bingo,the elderly dog, padding right behind him, went into the kitchen to answer thephone. Without his reading glasses, which didn't appear to be anywhere, Edward couldn'tmake out the caller I.D. But when he said hello there was no reply, and heassumed he'd hear one of those recorded messages from someone running forsomething. It was late October, after all. Half his mail these days wascomposed of political flyers, the other half divided between bills and belatednotes of sympathy. He was about to hang up when a woman's voice said, "Ed? Is that you?"

No one he knew called him Ed, or Eddie. Sometimes atelemarketer made a stab at sudden intimacy that way, but he was not a man whoinvited the casual use of nicknames. Even Bee, who knew him as well as anyone,and loved him, had always called him Edward. Her two grown children still kepttheir childhood names for him-Nick addressing him as "Schuyler" or"Professor," and Julie as "Poppy." Nick's bride, Amanda,said "Dad," a little self-consciously, while reserving the title"Daddy," as Julie did, for her own father.

"This is Edward, yes," he said into the phone."Who is this?" and the woman said, "You don't know me, Ed, butwe have a good friend in common."

He didn't say anything and she continued. "My nameis Dorothy Clark, Dodie to you. Joy Feldman and I went to schooltogether."

Edward tried to imagine sweet, matronly Joy as aschoolgirl, but all he could think of was the Tuna Surprise casserole she'dslid into his freezer right after the funeral, and that days later he'd found asingle hair at its defrosted center. Bee might have said, Ah, the surprise! Hehad a chilly premonition that this woman was going to try to sell him somethingdeath-related, like perpetual grave care, or hit him up for a contribution tosome obscure charity in Bee's memory.

But her voice seemed to deepen a little with emotion asshe said, in response to his silence, "You and I are in the same boat, Ed.I mean I'm recently widowed, too, and Joy thought . . . well,that we should probably get to know each other."

He wondered why Joy would have ever thought that, andthen he understood, with a little shock of revulsion and amusement, not unlikethe way he'd felt when he discovered the hair in the casserole. "Isee," Edward said. "That was kind of her, but I'm afraid she wasmistaken. I'm not really looking for . . . for any new friends at themoment." At the bird feeder tray right outside the window, a fewchickadees settled and pecked.

"Oh, of course," Dorothy Clark said in abrighter tone. "Everyone has their own timetable for grieving. But whenyou're ready, why don't you give me a ring. I live in Tenafly, we'repractically neighbors. I'll give you my number." There was a flurry at thebird feeder as a jay arrived, scattering seed and the chickadees.

"All right," Edward said resignedly, politely.He was polite to telemarketers, too, even those who took liberties with hisname.

She was suspicious, though. "Do you have apencil?" she asked. If he had a pencil, he might have noted the chickadeesand the jay in his neglected birding journal, or tapped on the window with itto interrupt the bullying. But he said, "Sure, go ahead," and sherecited the number slowly, twice. At least she didn't ask him to read it backto her.

He returned to the living room, but the glide of the ironover the worn blue field of his shirt was no longer soothing. His lonelinesshad been disturbed, and he wanted it back.

One evening near the end, he was reading at Bee'sbedside, his free hand resting lightly on her arm; she seemed to be asleep.Then she opened her glazed eyes and said, "Look at you. They'll becrawling out of the woodwork."

"What will, sweetheart?" he'd asked, but sheshut her eyes and didn't answer.

She had said many strange things during those last nightsand days. "Oh, what will I do without you?" she'd cried out once, asif he were the one dying and leaving her behind. And there were drug-inducedhallucinations, of small children standing at the foot of her bed, and micescrambling in the bathtub. Maybe there were more vermin waiting in the woodworkof her fevered dream.

It wasn't until the second phone call, a few days afterthe one from Dorothy Clark, that he finally got Bee's meaning. This time thecaller introduced herself as Madge Miller, a vaguely familiar name. She and Beehad been in the same book club a while back and she'd heard the sad newsthrough a grapevine of mutual friends. She was just calling to commiserate, shesaid-what a terrible shame, what a beautiful, bright woman in the prime of herlife. And maybe he'd like some company soon, for lunch or a drink.

Later that afternoon, Edward went into the kitchen andrummaged in what one of the children, in childhood, had aptly dubbed "thecrazy drawer." Among the loose batteries and spare shoelaces, the expiredsupermarket coupons and the keys that didn't open any known doors, he found thechain that had briefly kept Bee's reading glasses conveniently dangling fromher neck, until she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and declared thatshe'd rather go blind.

Now Edward untangled the chain and attached it to hisglasses, carefully avoiding his reflection, which he imagined bore anunfortunate resemblance to his third-grade teacher, Miss

Du Pont. His own students would have a field day. Buthe'd only use the chain at home, where he often mislaid his glasses, and atleast he'd be prepared to screen any future phone calls from strangers.


2

Bachelor Days

For a very long time, following a disastrous affair,Edward believed he would never marry. He had gone out with many women, but likehis father he'd fallen in love-in what promised to be a fatal and final way-withonly one of them. Her name was Laurel Ann Arquette, and she'd taught Frenchjust down the hall from his lab at Fenton Day, a private school on the UpperWest Side of Manhattan. Another teacher had introduced them at lunch onLaurel's first day.

He stood and said, "Hello, and welcome to perdition."The spoon he'd been stirring his coffee with clanged to the floor, making herlaugh, a bell that chimed from the top of his head to the pit of his belly. Herabundant hair was prematurely white, silver really, and her face was actually heart-shaped.She was as slender as a schoolgirl, for whom she might be mistaken, if not forthat hair and her knowing presence. "Edward," she said in return, asif she were naming or anointing him, and she let her hand be swallowed by his.

It was 1974. They were both in their mid-twenties thenand each school day became an agony of hours until they could meet at hisapartment in Hell's Kitchen and make raw and exhausting love. They were veryprudent at Fenton, though, sitting discreetly apart in the faculty room, nevereven accidentally touching in the corridors, and resisting the temptation toexchange loaded glances.

But everyone, from the overstimulated students to theamused lunch ladies, knew anyway, somehow. One morning, he confiscated a notebetween two seventh-graders in his homeroom: "Does Dr. S. couche avec Mademoiselle A.?" Oui! Yes, he did, every chance he could, and he might aswell have worn a sandwich board advertising his ardor. Even ripping up thatsilly note and frowning severely at the giggling transgressors didn't quelltheir excitement.

But once Edward and Laurel announced their engagement,right after their second spring break together, they became as boring to thestudents as their own parents, and somewhat less interesting to everyone else.Still, the engaged couple were consumed by their new status, and began to makewedding plans. He'd hoped for something simple, but Laurel wanted the wholeshow, in an almost unconscious act of defiance against her divorced parents,who had eloped to Maryland with Laurel already on board.

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