Free The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating by Carole Radziwill Page B

stirring, “to find that marriages interrupted by death were ordinary ones, the same as their own. Good, bad, boring—at best, manageable.”
    “Right,” Claire said. Eve added more cannabis. She looked Claire straight in her hazel-blue, sometimes hazel-brown eyes. “We mythologize. We have odd ways of coping with death, such as it is—a mundane and natural piece of the life cycle. Think of the phrase ‘Don’t speak ill of the dead.’ We don’t subject the dead to any sort of postmortem analysis at all. They become common property. There is no longer a marriage that is yours and your husband’s to define and engage in and present versions of, there’s no private relationship or collaboration between the two of you anymore, because now it’s just you. There’s a narrative that everyone is free to contribute to. It’s supposed to be a pleasant one. It will drag you along.”
    “I don’t know … I haven’t thought about it so much.”
    “The stories people buy, Kate, are fairy tales. The man is handsome and empathetic, and the good-hearted hooker can have him; he’ll treat her well. True Love. Never-Ending Lasting Love. Lifetime Channel, Frank Sinatra, Michael Bublé, Jen-and-Brad heartthrob love. When death ends a marriage, it interrupts the same petty hatreds and grievances and withholdings of affection that plague every coupling. Death never comes in the respites where everything is, for the briefest bit, resolved. It doesn’t come in those rare moments when you have the sense that all is calm and understood.”
    Eve continued to stir ash.
    “Truth gives way to story and there’s little to be done about it. You’re not allowed, you know this, Kat—”
    “It’s Claire, actually…”
    “—to not be grievously wounded by the death of a man, a partner, whom you may or may not have loved. You’re not allowed to be ambivalent. You’re not allowed to move on. Now you’re burdened with a title—you’re a widow. You’re allowed to be undone by the loss. You can be sexual—the color black is seductive, no accident—but can’t have sex. It’s your virginity all over again, but worse. You’re best off losing it with a stranger and out of town.”
    Claire was stunned. “That’s what Charlie said! About the virginity. He had this theory that women experience multiple virginities in a lifetime, and for men, collecting them is some sort of glorious pursuit—like finding whole black truffles, or a case of 1963 Montrachet. He said that to get a woman at one of her virginal milestones was like getting high on the Empire State Building with Keith Richards—an intoxicating, unforgettable moment in time.”
    Eve’s eyebrow rose. “Did he get high with Keith Richards?”
    “I don’t know. He certainly got some virginal milestones, though.”
    Eve stopped stirring. The cat twitched its tail. A handful of thick raindrops rattled the window.
    “What is it? What?”
    “Your sage doesn’t look good,” Eve said.
    “No! What does that mean?”
    “Sage is the symbol of love and relationships. What I see here is a struggle.”
    “No, that’s wrong, that can’t be, there’s no struggle. Look at the rosemary. Add more pot.”
    Eve gently laid the small stick against the side of the bowl.
    Claire shifted in her chair. Eve’s scarf, what had first impressed her as a striking taste in accessories, had become unsettling. Its orbs and bulbs and embryo-shaped colors, spooning against each other, swimming the perimeter of Eve’s clavicle, disturbed her. It was entirely too quiet in the room. She cleared her throat.
    Eve smiled.
    “My advice, Katherine? Focus on work.”

 
    10
    The reading of Charlie’s will was anticlimactic, despite the delay. Besides Claire and Richard and Charlie’s lawyer, there was Ethan, and then Grace on the speaker. They gathered in Richard’s office the first week of September, just over two months since the day Charlie had died.
    Charlie wasn’t a particularly complicated