NINETEEN

You’re a single man again. Some men think this is a dream come true, like to joke with other men about how they can’t stand their wives, who are nagging and old and boring, and they dream of being back on the prowl, making up for lost time with nubile and enthusiastic young women, but you haven’t been single in almost a decade, and being single when you’re thirty is so vastly different from being single when you’re twenty that they barely qualify as related experiences.

Some days, you cannot stop thinking about having to live another fifty years like this.

Now and then, you thought about the girls from your past. Fantasized about running into them on the street, striking up a conversation and going out to grab coffee. Finding out they’re single and they’ve been missing you all this time. Showing them how much funnier and more mature you are than you used to be. Feeling what it’s like to be flirted with again, because you couldn’t remember the last time anyone, anywhere, had flirted with you. Kait didn’t know how to flirt, felt uncomfortable trying to act sexy, and even though you knew she loved you and you thought she achieved sexiness without any effort, it wasn’t quite the same as sitting down to lunch with a woman who wanted to seduce you. It would be gratifying to know that you still represented a viable option for at least some women somewhere. And, okay, the fantasizing wasn’t always so innocent. You thought that if you were ever single again, you would enjoy it in a way you didn’t in college, because you were awkward then and didn’t go to parties, and so you missed out on a crucial element of the university experience. In the aftermath of Kait’s death, Uncle Bobby tried to cheer you up, said something about how you’re free to go out on the town again, and you played along, laughing, but then here’s what you thought: actually, maybe he’s right.

EVERY MAY, SHE HAD to use up her accumulated vacation days, burning them all off before they expired, and for two weeks you found yourself spending every free moment with her. She crammed the days full of outings and expectations—movie dates, day trips to Amish country, nights out at swanky restaurants, repainting various rooms in your house, an interminable series of chores so that sometimes it felt like your life was devoted to running errands. Your life became regimented and overwhelmingly active, and she kept saying, “This is so much fun,” and you nodded, because it was fun at first and because you knew this time was important to her, knew she sometimes felt disconnected from the real world when she was working every day. But you found yourself sometimes wishing for extra space, thinking it would be nice to just have a couple hours alone to watch TV uninterrupted or to play around on the computer, both of which suddenly felt pressing when you couldn’t do them at your whim. You suggested she go out with her friends, catch up with them while you stayed home, you didn’t want to monopolize her. And you were relieved on the days when she finally went back to work, but in hindsight you can’t identify exactly the source of the relief, besides that you were able to return to your hollow and perfunctory daily routine while blithely assuming she would always be there for you.

WHEN YOU SEE BEAUTIFUL women out in the world—and they’re everywhere you look—you can’t help comparing them to Kait. You search them for the curve of her hips, the jetstream curl in her hair, the constellations of freckles on her right forearm. Think of how much work is involved in getting to know these new women. Your life had been completely built around the idea of being a married man until the day you died, but now that plan is ruined and it’s difficult to know how to begin again. You’re not even sure exactly who you are anymore; your personality and hers molded themselves to each other over time, subtle alterations, gradual erosion of certain habits, accretion of new beliefs and mannerisms, the accumulation of inside jokes and a shared history. The expertise you both developed in reading the other’s nonverbal cues, so that you could process an entire conversation with no words, and barely even any motion. You could look at her and know what she was thinking, and she could do the same with you, but what if that language isn’t adaptable? What if you evolved into a person who is capable of only being loved by exactly one other person?

YOU HAVE NO CONCEPT of what adult dating entails. You were still living with your parents when you started dating your wife. How does one even begin to retrain oneself? It all seems so harrowing: the careful crafting of an Internet dating profile, checking e-mail every day until you find someone who wants to meet for coffee, the meeting and worrying about ordering the right kind of coffee and the small talking, the stressing every night about whether they like you and whether you really like them. The near inevitability of rejection. The cumulative agony of being dumped by your rebound relationship after your wife’s death. The baggage you carry with you forever, the way your wife’s death will infect all future relationships, and the lingering concern in the back of women’s minds that you’re a hex, that marrying you might doom them too. The fact that they might be right. The fact that right now you’re not old, but soon you will be. Old. And undateable. And this persistent thought that if you’re undateable, then what that means is you’re unlovable.

EVERYONE YOU USED TO know is married and has kids now, and is too busy panicking about amortization schedules and changing diapers and watching cartoon shows about talking alligators to worry about your depression. They’re at least ten years removed from regaining some measure of independence, and if you’re still single by then, you will have become a weird guy to hang around with, because people do not trust single men at that age.

AFTER YOUR WEDDING, YOU stood in a receiving line so everyone could shake your hand and tell Kait she looked beautiful and tell you you clean up nice! as if they were surprised that you could look presentable in public. Family and friends insisted on saying things to her like I don’t know what you see in him or good luck with him, you’ll need it, and the path of least resistance was to chuckle along with their insulting jokes, but she defended you every time, saying things like he treats me good, I’m the lucky one or I think I’ll hold on to him a while. You shook hands with limping uncles and hugged teary-eyed aunts. Every time a married man patted you on the back and said welcome to the club, you pretended they were the first to have come up with that one. They barraged you with advice about compromise and never going to bed angry. And they all kept saying things like marriage is tough and you have to really work at it. But that never seemed particularly true, not even on days when you lost patience with her or when she complained about your lack of ambition. Marriage was easy, the easiest, most uncomplicated thing you’ve ever done, the most unambiguously pleasant and satisfying and right thing you’ve ever engaged in. Maybe, you thought but didn’t say, if your marriage is so hard, then you married the wrong person. Maybe, you thought but didn’t say, if you can’t handle it, then you shouldn’t be the one giving out advice. But you were arrogant then, younger and sheltered and drunk on love. You both thought you were the only ones who had ever loved the way you did, and thought nobody could ever match or understand the depths of it.