Serial (The Quickies), Part 8

8. The very week Tilda Wriston met Howard Zinc was the week she had decided to finally try Match.com. Because her own efforts in that department were hopeless (I am a horny middle-aged widow ready to love again. Candlelight hides a multitude of wrinkles. As for my stellar personality: think Lily Tomlin meets Susan Sontag. Except I’m not dead.) Tilda’s best friend Pauline wrote her profile. Pauline also took about fifty digital pictures before they could agree on one to put on the website. Then Tilda met Howard at a fiftieth birthday party for her college roommate, whose husband played golf with Howard. He told her that since his wife’s death and since reentering the dating scene, friends had matched him up with many divorcées. But he had finally come to the conclusion that he would never be happy with a divorcée, and that he could only connect with a widow, as only a widow would understand not only the sense of loss, but also the creepy sense of relief when the year of suffering was over. Tilda agreed heartily. They both drank champagne, but neither drank too much. Tilda did not mention her early, brief marriage - the one she herself often forgot about - and her Mexican divorce from Larry Quinby. She did not mention that just the other week – she had come late to the pleasures of nosiness-indulging through Google – she had Googled her long-ago ex-husband and learned that he had published six well–received books of poetry and was a tenured professor at a Midwestern college. She was unable to learn from Google whether he was married or not, whether or not there were children.