An Available Man by Hilma Wolitzer Read Free Book Online Page A

the heat of his body beneath the blanket, his urgent pulse and anxious breathing. His eyelids fluttered behind their blindfold, and all of his muscles seemed to flex involuntarily; he was a veritable machine of motion. And his brain teemed with stored sounds and images. Bee!
    Edward threw off the blanket and opened his eyes. While they readjusted, he pulled the cotton wads out of his ears and got up and stretched, easing a slight cramp in his left leg. His real bed was a lot more comfortable. The book he’d been reading earlier, on Darwin and Lincoln, was waiting on his night table. He looked at the luminous dial on his watch; the dishwasher would be ready to be emptied by now.
    Then there were three sets of exams to go through and grade, the lesson plans to prepare for the following week. He was thirsty, as if he’d been running for miles. And he remembered that Sybil had left a message earlier: “Edward,” she’d said, “why in the world do you still have Bee’s voice on this thing?” He hadn’t called her back, but he knew that he had to change the outgoing message on his voice mail. He tidied up the remains of the abandoned experiment, and soon he was lumbering up the stairs, half monster, half human, returning to the noise and light of the living world.

Science Guy
    “P rofessor, hey, I’m glad you’re home. I wanted to give you a heads-up about something.” It was Nick, on the telephone, as soon as Edward walked into the house after work.
    “What’s going on?” Edward asked. His manner was carefully casual, but he felt a pang of foreboding. He’d suddenly remembered other phone calls from Nick, or about him—from school and once from the police—when he was a teenager and Bee and Edward were newly married. It was hard to believe how sullen and unapproachable the boy was back then, the way he’d always said “
What
” if you so much as glanced in his direction, a flat, belligerent statement rather than a question. Edward, having won Bee, but still courting the children, had come to his defense. “It’s only adolescence,” he assured Bee. “It’s boys. I was like that, too,” he said, although he hadn’t been. “He’ll outgrow it,” he ventured, without real certainty.
    But Nick
had
outgrown it, whatever it was. He was a man now, married, and a highly paid software designer, tamed at last by maturity and the quicksilver magic of love, for Amanda, for his mother and sister and grandmother—even for Edward.
    On the phone, Nick said, “It’s the girls. Man, I’m sorry, but they’ve taken this ad out about you.” Before Edward could respond, he went on. “I tried to stop them. I told them it was a stupid idea and they had no right …” Now he sounded like the younger Nick who was never at fault for anything, from skipped classes and failing grades to vandalized mailboxes and the stash of weed in his own smelly sneaker. But this wasn’t about Nick; apparently it was about Edward. Something to do with an ad.
    “What ad?” Edward asked. “What are you talking about?”
    “That literary paper you subscribe to,
The New York Review
?”
    “
Of Book
s,” Edward finished lamely. “What about it?” But he already knew. Those personals that Bee had gleefully insisted on reading aloud to him, along with a running commentary. “Listen to this one. ‘Sensual, smart, stunning, sensitive.’ Oh, why do they always resort to alliteration? ‘Julia Roberts look-alike.’ In her dreams, maybe. And this one’s a music lover! Well, who doesn’t love music, besides the Taliban? ‘Searching for that special someone to share Bach, Brecht, and breakfast.’ When they’ll probably eat bagels, bacon, and brussels sprouts.”
    Pretty, petite, passionate. Witty, wise, wonderful. Wasn’t anyone ordinary, a little flawed? Bee wanted to know. Homely and shy, with a stammer, perhaps, or a glass eye? “Well, who places those ads? And who answers them?” Edward once said, irritably, rattling his