The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

My sons had remained with their mother. At all moments, I seemed to feel them behind me, like passengers left on some pier. They were both in high school, a sophomore and a senior. I felt awful for them. But I felt worse for myself.

I moved into an apartment building in Center City, not far from work. The building’s population was mostly young, late-twenties just-getting-starteds. I was weirdly aware of the number who moved out each week. Common sense suggested that they had fallen in love and were relocating to begin a life with someone else. The sight of furniture on dollies, of bags and boxes piled in the service elevator, seemed to seize all of my attention, like somebody calling my name.

I turned into one of those people who arrive home for a night alone, carrying as much as possible — the cleaning, something I’d had repaired, and a few groceries for dinner. Twice a week I saw my sons. The other nights I tried not to drink too much, certain that this cataclysm would finally make me the gentle alcoholic my father was in his later years, always waiting for sunset and the first Manhattan. I had been told that women would find a successful single man in his late forties magnetic, but I felt too sad even to start in that direction. Eventually, I began attending the kind of tony intellectual events around the city at which I’d envisioned myself when I first came here for law school and which Clarissa for years had derided as a complete bore — art openings, symphonies, lectures. There were few singles at these events, and I often felt out of place, but I was desperate to make some effort at self-improvement.

One of these evenings, involving a fundraising dinner and a reading by a poet celebrated in circles too narrow to mean much to me, was held in the West Bank condo of old acquaintances, Leo Levitz, a shrink, and his wife, Ruth, whose industrial-design firm has been an off-and-on client of mine for years. In their late sixties, the Levitzes had achieved an enviable settled grace. Vivid paintings and objects of primitive art they’d gathered from around the world crowded the track-lit corridors of their apartment. Alone, I studied each piece, deeply struck that a congenial married life could be reflected by such tangible beauty.

By ten, the gathering had thinned and I prepared to shirk the pretense I had made of being cheerful, humorous, of feeling I was of interest to other people. Shortly, I would again be on my own. I bade the Levitzes goodbye. Waiting in the small corridor outside their door for the elevator, I heard a vague thudding. I swore out loud when I realized it was the skylight overhead.

“I’m sorry?” A tall woman with straight black hair was working the key into the lock of her apartment across the hall. I’d noticed her once or twice during the evening, especially as she’d departed immediately before me. She smiled sociably, revealing a front tooth lapped over its neighbor. She had a long face and dark eyes, a woman close to my age who knew she still retained much of the appeal of youth.

“Is it raining out there?” I asked. It was fall, late November, and the prediction had been snow rather than rain. Without an umbrella, my topcoat would become sodden and emit a repellent scent that would taint the close air of my apartment.

“Take a look.” Across the threshold, she gestured to her living room window. Staring down, I could make out both rain and snow, leaving a lethal glister on the streets. The smarter taxi drivers, who valued their lives and property, would already have called it a night.

She introduced herself as Karen Kolmar. Her apartment had soft yellow walls and deep Chinese rugs. A book about Coco Chanel was open on a cocktail table. We talked about the poet who’d read.

“His work seemed cold to me,” she said. “But I suppose a lot of it was just over my head.” She shrugged, not much concerned.

I would have said the same thing, I told her, but lacked the strength of character to admit it.

“I’m at peace as a middlebrow,” she answered. I liked her. Self-awareness seemed a particularly appealing trait at the moment.

She asked whether it was the Levitzes or poetry that had brought me around, and in no time I had explained my situation in life, saying far too much about Clarissa. Karen Kolmar smiled philosophically. She was not wearing a wedding ring and no doubt had encountered her share of guys like me.

In fact, I soon picked out a photo of a fellow I figured for her beau, given the prominence with which the picture was displayed on the closed ebony lid of a baby grand in the corner. A healthy-looking older guy, he seemed mildly familiar, if only for his buoyant smile that appeared all too obviously manufactured for the sake of the camera. Looking at the photograph, I sized up my hostess’s situation. A divorce. Some money. This guy who was at least ten years too old for her but who probably paid a lot of attention. That, I was slowly coming to realize, was one more sadness in divorce, not merely getting to the middle of your life and confessing that the most basic things had not worked out but finding that you’re one of life’s bench players waiting to get on the court again with the rest of the second string.