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

newspaper—once again he was trying to read while she read to him. “Why, lonely people, Edward, that’s who,” Bee said, in tones of gentle reproach, as if he’d been the one making fun of them.
    Now his blood seemed to thicken and slow with dread. The “girls,” Amanda and Julie, had joined that furtive cabal of matchmakers: Sybil and her oddball cousin, Joy Feldman with her recent hints about online dating, all those phone calls from strangers streaming out of the woodwork. “What does it say?” he asked Nick.
    “I’ve got the paper right here. Should I read it to you?”
    “Do you mean it’s published already?”
    “Well, yeah,” Nick said.
Duh
,
Professor
. “Manda showed it to me this morning. Believe me, I wish they’d listen to reason.”
    Edward glanced at the mail he’d tossed onto the kitchen counter when he’d answered the phone, and there among the envelopes was that familiar thick, folded wedge. He and Bee had had an on-again, off-again subscription for years.
    Off, when they both complained about having much too much to read and admitted that they were merely skimming most of the essays. On, when they became hungry for literate writing, for opinions that sustained or argued with their own, or when they simply feared the threatened loss of the printed word. Bee used to inhale the inky fragrance of the
Times
in the morning before she started reading it, with an expression that was already nostalgic.
    In the months that he’d been alone, Edward read while he ate his supper—sometimes with the television set mumbling in the background, for noise, for company—and at bedtime, and in the middle of the night when he came abruptly awake as if his name had been called. He went through everything in the
Times
and
The New Yorker
and the
NYR
, except for the personal ads in the latter, which didn’t interest him in the first place, and reminded him of Bee’s wicked delight in them.
    “No,” he told Nick, as offhandedly as he could. “I have my copy here. I’ll take a look at it later.”
    But he didn’t even remove his jacket before he reached for his glasses, grabbed the paper, and dropped into a chair at the table. His eye was caught by some of the headlined names on the cover—Tony Judt, Freeman Dyson, Elizabeth Drew, former seductions—but he quickly turned to the back pages, where phone sex was advertised in discreet code, alongside rentals in Tuscany and the Loire Valley, and offers for the editing of manuscripts by acclaimed authors.
    Jesus, there it was, crammed between ads for two divorcées of competing charms.
    Science Guy . Erudite and kind, balding but handsome. Our widowed dad is the real thing for the right woman. Jersey/Metropolitan New York
    Balding! He ran one hand over his slightly thinning hair and squinted at his reflection in the toaster. He wasn’t about to resort to a comb-over yet. And
handsome
was another overstatement, of course. But would people still recognize him somehow, anyway?
Science Guy
could refer to anyone from Bill Nye to a Big Pharm researcher to some loner in a remote weather station. The term sounded suspiciously like one Nick had come up with, despite his self-proclaimed innocence and indignation.
Erudite
must have come from Amanda—it was a word she used—and
kind
from Julie. A collaboration, then. He’d kill them all.
    He read the ad again, with slightly less agitation this time, parsing it for meaning with what he imagined would have been Bee’s point of view, thinking, with a jolt, that she could have contributed
the real thing
herself. She had told him, more than once, that his best quality was his authenticity. “You are what you are,” she’d said in a kind of cockeyed parody of Popeye.
    No phone number or email address was given, thank God,just the number of a post office box. They’d probably had to pay extra for that; good money after bad, as Gladys would say. And they hadn’t mentioned how old he was. People’s ages were usually