Présentation de l'éditeur
In this tender and funny novel, award-winning author Hilma Wolitzer mines the unpredictable fallout of suddenly becoming single later in life, and the chaos and joys of falling in love the second time around. When Edward Schuyler, a modest and bookish sixty-two-year-old science teacher, is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. There are plenty of unattached women around, but a healthy, handsome, available man is a rare and desirable creature. Edward receives phone calls from widows seeking love, or at least lunch, while well-meaning friends try to set him up at dinner parties. Even an attractive married neighbor offers herself to him.
The problem is that Edward doesn’t
feel available. He’s still mourning his beloved wife, Bee, and prefers solitude and the familiar routine of work, gardening, and bird-watching. But then his stepchildren surprise him by placing a personal ad in
The New York Review of Books on his behalf. Soon the letters flood in, and Edward is torn between his loyalty to Bee’s memory and his growing longing for connection. Gradually, reluctantly, he begins dating (“dating after death,” as one correspondent puts it), and his encounters are variously startling, comical, and sad. Just when Edward thinks he has the game figured out, a chance meeting proves that love always arrives when it’s least expected.
With wit, warmth, and a keen understanding of the heart,
An Available Man explores aspects of loneliness and togetherness, and the difference in the options open to men and women of a certain age. Most of all, the novel celebrates the endurance of love, and its thrilling capacity to bloom anew.
Extrait
1
Out of the Woodwork
Edward Schuyler was ironing his oldest blue oxford shirtin the living room on a Saturday afternoon when the first telephone call came.He'd taken up ironing a few months before, not long after his wife, Bee, haddied. That happened in early summer, when school was out, and he couldn'tconcentrate on anything besides his grief and longing. At first, he onlypressed things of hers that he'd found in a basket of tangled clean clothing inthe laundry room. He had thought of it then as a way of reconnecting with herwhen she was so irrevocably gone, when he couldn't even will her into hisdreams.
And she did come back in a rush of disordered memories ashe stood at the ironing board. But he had no control over what he remembered,sometimes seeing her when they first met, or years later in her flowered chintzchair across the room, talking on the telephone and kneading the dog's bellywith her bare feet-Bee called it multitasking-or in the last days of her life,pausing so long between breaths that he found himself holding his own breathuntil she began again.
Still, this random collage of their days together wasbetter than nothing, and it was oddly comforting to smooth the wrinkles out ofher blouses, to restore their collapsed bosoms and sleeves and hang them in hercloset, where they looked orderly, expectant. And he liked the hiss of steam inthe quiet house and the yeasty smell of the scorched cloth.
Now he lay the iron down on the trivet and, with Bingo,the elderly dog, padding right behind him, went into the kitchen to answer thephone. Without his reading glasses, which didn't appear to be anywhere, Edward couldn'tmake out the caller I.D. But when he said hello there was no reply, and heassumed he'd hear one of those recorded messages from someone running forsomething. It was late October, after all. Half his mail these days wascomposed of political flyers, the other half divided between bills and belatednotes of sympathy. He was about to hang up when a woman's voice said, "Ed?Is that you?"
No one he knew called him Ed, or Eddie. Sometimes atelemarketer made a stab at sudden intimacy that way, but he was not a man whoinvited the casual use of nicknames. Even Bee, who knew him as well as anyone,and loved him, had always called him Edward. Her two
