Free An Available Man by Hilma Wolitzer

changing his T-shirt and taming his unruly blond hair with water, his mother and father were at home but keeping their distance. Back then, he was going to take a girl named Rachel Granby to a school play, a kind of evening version of their daytime lives.
    Tonight, he was meeting someone called Karen Leslie at the Paper Moon in Short Hills. She was one of the five correspondents whose replies to the ad he’d held on to. She’d declined his offer to pick her up—either a sign of her independence, or a defense against some potential serial killer knowing where she lived.
    After her letter, their communication had been through email. She was fifty-four, she’d informed him, a Jerseyite, too, who worked in finance and had been divorced for a long time. He liked the specificity of her age, her laid-back tone, even the odd fact that she had two first names.
Relax
, she seemed to be saying,
this isn’t going to be a big deal
.
    He realized that he wanted the company of a woman—a shared meal and conversation—but beyond that, he told himself, he had no plans, no intentions. The near future was a peaceful blank. He tried not to think about Bee, about the past, about anything at all. But his mind kept returning to the video he’d shown at Fenton that afternoon with its underlying message that sex was for procreation, not recreation.
    All those years ago, when he’d sat next to Rachel in their junior high school auditorium as the houselights dimmed, he was excruciatingly aware of their elbows almost touching on the armrests. Did the hair on his arm actually stand up to graze the amber down on hers? She had breasts as tiny as teacups he could sip from. He’d felt swamped by a surfeit of that normal, healthy desire. What a dirty biological trick it was to inflame barely socialized kids with such burning lust.
    Karen Leslie was sitting at the bar in the Paper Moon, drinking a martini, when he got there. He knew who she was by the way she turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow in appraisal. Her crossed legs were long and muscular. He went over and shook her hand, like a business acquaintance, like Tommy in the sex ed film of his youth.
    She was good looking in a hard-edged, female-action-figure sort of way. Walking behind her and the hostess to the table, Edward realized that the two women were almost interchangeable, with their artful makeup and twitching short black skirts. They had the same self-possessed carriage, too, but only one of them was carrying menus.
    They sat down and Karen said, “So, who are you?” The question caught him by surprise. He’d already told her about himself in their email exchange: his marriage and widowhood, his job, the stepchildren—but maybe all that was only the dating equivalent of giving his name, rank, and serial number.
    He’d grown to be, post-Laurel, fairly confident with women, whether or not there was sexual tension between them. There was tension at this table, but he wasn’t sure of its nature. Suddenly he wasn’t sure of anything, least of all what he was doing there.
I’m heartbroken
, he might have said,
and I’m horny
. There was an icebreaker for you.
    Instead, he caught the eye of the waiter and ordered two martinis. In his head, Bee whispered:
You are what you are
,
Edward
, as if she were giving him dating pointers from beyond. “I guess I’m just a guy trying to make a good impression,” he told Karen Leslie. “What about you?”
    “Let me see,” she began. “I’m a fiscal conservative; I’ve been divorced twice. My older son doesn’t talk to me. Should we look at the menus? I’m starving.”
    “Sure,” he said, but she had already raised and opened hers,so that her face was hidden. He could still see the pale shadow of her cleavage, that sweet place. Her fingernails were long and crimson. This was a mistake; he didn’t like her—she was cold and tough—and yet he wanted her. Or the hostess. Or another woman, blond and chubby, sitting at the bar