Saturday Night Widows (28 page)

Lesley didn’t reveal how Kevin killed himself, and I didn’t ask. My research experts had told me it was best not to force painful disclosures. Why prod Lesley to summon the most horrific memory of her life? I found it interesting that later, when our group first convened, instinctively, no one else asked her, either. A sign—Do Not Go There—was plain for all to see. All Lesley told me the first time I met her was that he chose a method that wasn’t violent, knowing she would be the one to find him.

She tried mouth to mouth and called an ambulance, but he couldn’t be saved. In a three-page note, he said he loved Lesley unconditionally, and he said he would like her to marry again one day. That was a kindness.

Eventually, the note helped her to understand. For the longest
time, she wondered, “Was I not enough for him?” It wasn’t possible, at first, to grasp his emotional torment. “Mental illness can be as serious as cancer,” Lesley said. Over time, she and her daughters involved themselves in a suicide awareness organization, but that was a long way off. In the early days, they alternated between shock, numbness, and unimaginable despair.

“I felt a pain in my heart, like someone had stuck a knife in there and twisted it,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘I can’t get through another day.’ ”

Lesley had never thought of herself as smart or accomplished outside her realm at home. Now she would have to manage everything Kevin had overseen as a matter of course. She had to attend meetings at his firm to negotiate the sale of his shares in the company. “People offered to handle things for me, but I didn’t want to be a little old lady who doesn’t know what’s cooking. I went to every meeting and pretended I knew what they were talking about. I read Suze Orman books so I’d have buzzwords to throw around.”

But otherwise, she sank into an utter funk. “I felt that if a day went by without me crying, I was disappointing him.” She took pills to sleep. She was haunted by the vision of how she’d found him, afraid to close her eyes for fear of seeing it again. For months, she wore the same pair of brown Bermuda shorts with a brown-and-white top until her daughters threw them away. She heard them talking about her. “She didn’t comb her hair today.”

“It took me a long time to acknowledge and accept that, as much as I loved him, he really did abandon me in a way,” she said. One day, after about a year, the third finger on her left hand started to itch, and she took off the wedding ring. She and her girls began to make
jokes, like about how much money they’d save on Father’s Day. She thought about joining a support group but didn’t, not wanting to talk about the suicide and fearing that others would judge her about it. It was hard enough venturing out in her small town, wondering what everyone was thinking, fielding questions at the supermarket about whether she had seen it coming. She and her daughters took a trip to Arizona, where a Native American shaman told her that whenever images of the suicide flooded her thoughts, she should conjure a vision from a happier time to replace it. She made a conscious effort to do that, and it helped.

Taking over Kevin’s role as well as her own, Lesley began to realize that she was smarter than she’d given herself credit for. “I’d been given my pink slip; my job as a stay-at-home mother was done. But, like you, Becky, I’d been given a second chance at life. Now the challenge was doing it on my own.”

Kevin had been a champion rower, and for the first time, Lesley signed up for lessons. She begged her coach to let her take a scull out into the choppy waves of the open bay before she was ready. The coach agreed, and predictably, Lesley tipped over the boat. Another rower asked why the coach had allowed it. “Because Lesley wants it so badly,” the coach said. “Because she’s fearless to the point where she doesn’t care if she fails.”

Given all that had happened to Lesley, it must have taken all her fearlessness to venture her heart with another man. She knew she was making the right decision on one of her early dates with Craig, when they were sitting on a park bench, talking about their children and holding hands. She placed her head on his chest—he was tall, like Kevin—and she listened to him breathe. She thought,
This. This is what I’ve missed
.

A
T THIS STAGE
in life, people come complicated. Lesley and Craig woke up every morning laughing and went to sleep at night still laughing. But by the time our group made its lingerie outing, their living conditions were turbulent and getting more so. His youngest boy, living with Craig and Lesley in her new house, alternated between resisting and craving a mother’s touch. Then Craig’s eighteen-year-old, out of school and looking for work, moved in, too. Lesley hadn’t sold her old house yet, so her youngest daughter still bunked there when she was home from school, and the oldest was staying there until her wedding, only two weeks after our lingerie outing. Two homes, two families in flux, one young widow trying to steer them all to port. A perfect storm was gathering over both households, a collision of adolescent and postadolescent emotional fronts, with Lesley sailing right into the eye.

“The really hard thing is going to be the wedding,” Tara said at our post-shopping lunch. “You know … when the dad should give the bride away.”

“I’m going to do it, which is going to be tough.” Other traditions from the standard playbook would also be cast aside. No veil over the bride’s face, because the father usually lifts it; no first dance with Dad.

“It’s one of those things you don’t think about until it comes up,” said Tara, considering her own daughters. “Every little princess thinks about that dance.”

“I have to give the toast, too.” Lesley rolled her eyes. On top of everything else, public speaking! “I’m going to be a wreck.”

Marcia called for the check. I seized the lull to address another
touchy topic, the trip I envisioned for the fall. Our utter failure to reach a consensus at the last gathering made me pessimistic about wrangling anyone as far as the state line, so I had scrapped all the options I’d proposed to such a clamor of dissent and cast around in search of a compromise. There was another itinerary through Morocco, with hikes through cedar forests in the Atlas Mountains, strolls through ancient souks and casbahs, and only two days riding camels in the Sahara instead of four. Best of all, there would be only one night in the dreaded desert camp. I spoke to a guy in charge of the trip.

“I know this sounds finicky,” I said to him, “but just how rustic are the facilities at the camp? I’m traveling with women who seem rather … particular.”

“You sleep in tents made out of Berber carpets,” he said. “And believe it or not, there are two Kohler flush toilets, permanently installed.”

“Stop right there,” I said. “You’re hired.”

Pending approval from the group, of course. Cautiously, I presented my findings, and the atmosphere turned prickly but resigned. Marcia expressed more reluctance over tents and camels. Dawn looked dubious. Tara shrugged her assent. Denise was still and quiet. I shot a hopeful look at Lesley.

“This sounds like the perfect trip for all the princesses we are,” she said.

I can’t say anyone was thrilled, but they were willing to do this for me, for the group, and that was all I could ask. If the camels went on a rampage, if the toilets didn’t flush, if no one spoke by the time we dragged our dusty asses back to the permanent dissolution of our friendship, I knew who’d be to blame. But everyone agreed
to go, and I was determined to draw my courage from Lesley. I’d have to be fearless to the point where I didn’t care if we failed.

W
E
’
D BEEN TALKING
all day about taking risks, so I decided to end our gathering by telling the women about a dream I’d had shortly after I met Bob at the public fix-up with the Glamazons. In the dream, I was visiting a foreign city, a city of palazzos that spoke of a storied past. Instead of streets, all the passageways were canals filled with water as clear as Evian—tinted the color of hazel, actually—and incongruously enough, I was swimming in them. As in others of my dreams, I was alone, searching for Bernie and unable to find him, except that this time I wasn’t alarmed—no one was drowning. I was swimming the way I’d swum in the Galápagos, assured and fast.

Soon I hoisted myself from the water and walked in my skimpy bathing suit to the farthest edge of the city, at the top of a cliff, so high it made me dizzy. It opened onto a bright vista. I inched forward and craned over the edge. Below was more water, a whole vast sweep of ocean. It shifted with swells like sighs and stretched toward a limitless horizon. I had reached the demarcation between the known and the unknown, the jumping-off point for a fresh journey, if I chose. The sea was so clear that below the surface I could see enormous fish, the size of catamarans, in fantastic iridescent colors, like parrots. I wanted to dive into the water. I wanted to swim with those fantastic fish, but I was afraid—the cliff must have been a thousand feet high. I felt the way I had when I dove off the boat to chase the skipjacks, tantalized, exhilarated but scared to
my bones. Something in me wanted this adventure. Something in me wanted to back the hell away from the edge of the cliff.

I looked farther out to sea and saw a splendid whale, a captivating creature, also beautifully colored, the size of an ocean liner. It was spouting a long plume of water. The phallic symbolism was too preposterous, yet what can I say? I wanted to swim with that whale even more than I did with the fish, to abandon myself to a discovery beyond my imagination. I awoke still on the precipice, poised between fear and desire.

chapter
TWENTY

i
just want you to know,” he said in a reassuring tone, “nothing is going to happen here tonight.”

Of all the lines spoken at all the candlelight dinners in all the world, I had to walk into that one. I took a sip of champagne and tried to figure out where this evening was headed. I didn’t have much time, either, before a whole lot of something started to happen.

I was standing maybe a foot away from an attractive, available man, a man giving me the once-over with clear, empathetic hazel eyes, who at that very moment was stirring risotto—yes, risotto, with saffron and scallops, and oh-so-tenderly, as Dr. Spock might stir some baby formula—on the stovetop. A man who actually knew how to make risotto without having to look at a recipe. A man who was making it for me.

Bob and I had worked our way through a number of hands-off but increasingly steamy dinners at restaurants in the city, where I amused him with my ardent appetite. “I want to cook for you,” he invariably said, with appreciable relish, before we parted.

I couldn’t be sure whether he meant something more. It was a couple months since we’d met, and that evening I’d taken the train to his small town in Connecticut on the strength of a dinner invitation that promised to stretch late into the night. Afterward, he said, he could put me back on the train, or I could crash in his daughter’s room. I’d already seen it on a tour of the house, a confection of pink and lavender bedding heaped with stuffed animals. She was spending the night, perhaps too conveniently, at her mother’s in a nearby town.