The Great Man (2 page)

She sat opposite him with her own glass of wine. “Finally you’re writing something. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”

He covered his writing with his hand as if it were his naked crotch. “I’m not a failed anything, by the way,” he said in a clipped voice. “I have a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley. I got my M.F.A. from UC Irvine. To make a living, if you can call it that, I teach creative writing at Columbia. A few years ago, I published my first novel with Random House. It sank to the bottom of the pond without a trace, but I’ll write more of them, and at least it saw the light of print. I’ve also published another biography, of Greta Church, an obscure but very brilliant poet no one’s ever heard of but who should be in every canonical anthology. She died a penniless morphine addict in Chicago in 1932 at the age of sixty, living in a rented room with a hot plate.”

“She died like a male artist, then,” said Teddy. “How’s her work?”

Henry quoted raptly, looking down at the table, “‘The light of winter stands/ On the silent road, waiting to kill me/ With a cold shot to the heart,/ Tapping its booted foot/ Its gray gun aimed and cocked,/ And I am pierced to the utter root.’”

“Good Lord,” said Teddy, laughing. “‘The utter root.’ Almost as bad as
delicious
.”

“You were a secretary for how many years?” Henry asked tightly.

“Oh, you think I make fun of these so-called great artists because I’m a never-was? Maybe I could never take myself seriously enough to muster the kind of ego and sense of self-mystique you need to write ‘the utter root’ with a straight face. Come to think of it, that didn’t help her either at the end, did it? At least I have a house and I’m not a junkie.”

“She uses the word
utter
complexly,” Henry said. “She’s talking about her own writing. Her ‘utter root’ is her tongue. The winter light is the clarity of self-knowledge that comes with age. She could hardly write at the end; she was too beaten down by poverty and addiction and the inescapable knowledge that it was all her own fault. Read my book; you’ll see what she meant. I defy you to read my biography of her and then laugh at that line.”

“You’re a romantic,” she said. “Aren’t you? You love artists; you think they’re better than the rest of humanity. Like modern-day saints. So my reference to Saint Oscar wasn’t far from the mark. They suffer for humanity. They absorb our failings and weaknesses, transmogrify them, reflect them back to us in the light of truth and beauty.”

“Why are you psychoanalyzing me? I’m here to interview you about Oscar.”

“You can’t ‘interview’ me ‘about Oscar,’” she said. “I can tell the truth about Oscar and tell you my incidental observations about you. Take it or leave it. And my guess—not that you asked, but you deserve it after that crack about my being nothing but a secretary and therefore unqualified to criticize Great Art—is that your wife is very distant now that she’s in thrall to new motherhood. I’m guessing that her interest in sex is next to nothing, and who can blame her? And I can tell you what you’re doing wrong and how to get her to want you again, but you have to listen to what I say and not interrupt, and, most of all, not come back at me with your starry-eyed wishful thinking about what was going on. Oscar was the furthest thing from a genius I ever knew. He was a very good painter with a shtick and a way with women. He knew how to stir up a scene, how to create a buzz before anyone ever heard of buzz. But you should go back to his paintings and really look at them. Really look. What you see through all those moths’ wings is a slapdash crudeness in his brush strokes, a boyish swagger in his adulterous success. If you look at him clearly without needing to see him a certain way, you’ll see that he was like a grocery man with three barrels of pickles, an apron, a roll of waxed paper, and a nose for excellent meat. He painted like a grocer; fucked like a grocer; lived and died like a grocer. No more and no less. The art of the delicatessen.”

There was a brief silence, during which Teddy ran a hand through her hair and Henry somewhat peevishly turned the stem of his wineglass between forefinger and thumb slowly against the tabletop.

“Which is a worthy art,” Teddy said, “do not misunderstand me, but it doesn’t qualify one for sainthood. Women were his real obsession, more than painting. Painting was just an outlet for him, like the store is for the deli man. He saw women, he
knew
women, the way a deli man knows smoked meats: He knew how to pick them, weigh and touch and price and display them. His brush strokes were crude and he painted too many paintings and he cheated on his wife for more than forty years with me but couldn’t leave her and couldn’t give me up, not that I ever wanted him to do either. He waffled between two women and two families, the good Jewish wife with the damaged son and the bad shiksa mistress with the perfect daughters. He was a deli man at his utter root.”

“I can’t believe you’re debunking him,” said Henry.

“I knew you’d be a calf-eyed hero worshiper,” she said. “When oh when is Oscar going to get a real biographer?”

“You are not always right, Teddy. In fact, at the moment you’re wrong on all counts. Not only am I not sexually frustrated at all, but my wife will not stop hounding me for sex. She complains that now that I’m past forty, I can’t keep getting it up all night long anymore. We’ve been married eight years and she’s just getting hungrier.” His nostrils flared defiantly with the force of this wishful fantasy. “Twice in one night should satisfy any human. She’s a she-wolf.” He took a deep breath. “She’s a witch,” he added.

“She’s human all right,” said Teddy. “She’s forty?”

“Forty-two.”

“She’s how you were at eighteen.”

“That’s what she tries to tell me. But when I was eighteen, I didn’t have a girlfriend. I had no outlet for my horniness, and even if I’d had, I would have had no perspective on it. Women are lucky: They get it when they can use it. Men get it when they’re dumb as sheep. And then it ebbs away.”

“Nature is very cruel,” said Teddy. “Women get it when they’re on the edge of irrelevancy, sociobiologically speaking. One last great burst of white light and you’re a dwarf star, humpbacked and withered. Although women don’t wither anymore like they used to. But I bet Greta Church was withered. Morphine addicts always are.”

“She was a skeleton, actually.”

“And pierced to the utter root. I know what the utter root is, and it’s not the tongue, Henry. And incidentally, I think it’s all hogwash, every word you just said about your marriage. Maybe before the kid was born she wanted sex all the time, but I will bet you anything that she doesn’t anymore; she’s got a new newborn helpless love, and you’re feeling very left out.”

His eyes shifted briefly to the floor. “Spoken like someone who knows from experience,” he said.

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Meaning that maybe Maxine’s theory about you and Oscar is true.”

She cast him a sharp look from the corners of her eyes. “In time, if you pay attention, you will learn that it’s not.”

“Do you live here alone?”

“Alone as a stone. My daughters call and visit, of course, but it’s complicated. Ruby loved her father. She looks like him. She reminds me of him. I think there’s a part of her that can’t forgive me for not making him marry me and be a real father to the girls and live with us instead of coming and going at odd hours, so that she hardly ever got to see him, and when she did, it was never on holidays, rarely on her birthdays. Of course she blames me for this, not him. Samantha was always my baby; she’s loyal to me. She looks like me. It’s funny how Oscar and I had twins, one in each of our images. It’s so fitting, somehow, and that they’re both girls, given his passion for women. Interesting, too, that his only male offspring is emotionally unknowable, a cipher, when all of Oscar’s women are outspoken as hell. Anyway, Samantha adores me, but she needs to keep some distance from me, too…. I imagine she’s unconsciously resentful at some perceived neglect on my part; she has accused me, on several occasions, of loving Oscar more than I loved her and Ruby. That isn’t true at all, although I certainly liked him more.”

“Liked Oscar more than your children,” Henry repeated.

“He was a man,” Teddy said, “and they were little girls. I always knew the difference. I never let my children dominate my life the way you parents do now with your children; they take over your lives!”

“My kid has not taken over my life,” said Henry.

“It’s all wrong,” she said. “I set limits; I had my own life. I wanted them to learn that even if you have children, you can have a life that doesn’t include them. I think therapists now are encouraging adult children to view this sort of old-fashioned parenting as neglectful, which makes them into victims of their parents and martyrs to their children. Kids need to know their place in the scheme of things, like dogs. And children, of course, leave you in the end…. It’s your contemporaries who stay, spouses and old friends. That’s who you have in your later years. Oscar’s death was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. My friend Lila of the delicious grandchildren is my most loyal and stalwart companion here at the withered root. She lives nearby. We know each other better than anyone else alive. Of course I can hardly bear her.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You are half right.”

“I’m always half right,” he said, and caught her glance. They smiled at each other, suddenly battle-weary. A silence fell between them. They felt they’d earned it, and settled simultaneously into their chairs. Teddy drank some wine; Henry ate another chunk of sweet melon wrapped in salty prosciutto. The sounds of the backyards and streets mingled peacefully, the late summer afternoon, the humid air.

Henry swallowed his mouthful and yawned, rubbed his eyes. He’d drunk two large glasses of wine without knowing it. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in two months.

“You can nap on the couch,” said Teddy. “I’ll wake you when the meal is ready and you can ask me your questions over supper. I know you have a whole numbered and annotated list of them. Questions, subquestions, a, b, c, asterisks and arrows. You strike me as that sort of person.”

“Actually, I am that sort of person, but I wouldn’t mind a nap,” he said.

“There’s a very comfortable old couch in the living room,” she said, gesturing toward the front of the house. “Supper should take about half an hour.”

Henry lay fully stretched out, shoes off, on Teddy’s long green velvet couch, which smelled of dust and years-old incense. When he awoke half an hour later, the hot early-evening sunlight slanted along the hallway from the kitchen. He heard a pot lid clanking and water running in the kitchen and smelled something cooking.

He found Teddy in the kitchen, stirring a pot on the stove. “It’s almost ready,” she said without turning around. “You can wash up in the lav; the door’s just to my left.”

The “lav,” like the rest of the house, was in a comfortable state of semicleanliness, with deft cartoon faces drawn on cardboard glued to the wall in haphazard rows.

“I set a table in back, on the patio,” said Teddy when he emerged. She was dishing something onto plates: stewed chicken over couscous. On the counter was a salad made of only some sort of strange purple lettuce, nothing else.

“Did Oscar draw those faces in the bathroom?” Henry asked.

“No,” said Teddy. “I’m sorry, it was the former owner of this house. Good, aren’t they?”

He helped her carry things out to the patio, the two plates laden with steaming food, the salad bowl, another bottle of cold Sancerre. The evening sunlight in the yard was so intense, it was almost surreal. It was an odd little garden, a jumble of flowering bushes and wild grasses crowded together in a lush tangle that seemed to grow as it liked, without human interference, yet there seemed to be an original organizing principle behind the riot, God’s or Teddy’s or someone else’s.

Henry sat at the old enameled metal table on Teddy’s tiny bluestone terrace and picked up his fork. “This looks”—he cleared his throat—“delicious, but now I can’t say it.”

Their eyes met.

“A pernicious word,” she said with smug satisfaction.

“Only because you made it into one. It was a fine word before I got here.”

“I only pointed out what ought to be clear to everyone.”

“A habit of yours.”

“Henry,” she said, pouring the wine, “eat your supper.”

He augmented his plate with things from the bowls Teddy had already set out: toasted sliced almonds, homemade apricot chutney, fried banana-pepper rings, minced raw red onion, matchstick-size pieces of fresh jicama, wedges of lime.

The food, which looked bland and unprepossessing, was subtle and amazing. The couscous tasted nutty and buttery. The rich chicken stew was laced with hints of saffron, cinnamon, cayenne, lemon zest, and something else, unfamiliar and exotic, but these things announced themselves very faintly, so he had to concentrate to taste them through the perfectly cooked meat and grain.

“Teddy, this food is brilliant.”

“Why, thank you,” said Teddy. She let the nickname pass this time. Her mood had changed entirely; now she felt mellow, almost flirtatious. This was due in part to the wine; Sancerre was in a class by itself; it could hardly be called by the same name as Chardonnay or Chablis. It had some other dimension other whites lacked.

“You accept the word
brilliant
but not the word
delicious
?”

“You parse it out, Henry. You’re a bright specimen. But while you do, I must be permitted to boast about the provenance of my chicken. It’s the very best chicken money can buy, the sort of bird who ran free and ate food of a higher quality than that of most of the people in the world. But I didn’t have to pay for it…. I bartered for it with flowers from this very garden. I’m single-handedly bringing the art of village subsistence living into an urban setting.”

Henry nodded, swallowing, clearly not fully listening. “How do you feel about the fact that Oscar left everything to Abigail? You don’t even own a single one of his paintings.”

“He never promised me a thing. He loved me for my self-sufficiency, and as you see, it was no act on my part. I am quite poor, monetarily, but I get by very well on my wits and charm.” She laughed. “You can write that down; it’s a tailor-made quote for your book, but you won’t be able to convey the irony with which I said it, will you? I know people in this neighborhood; I have lived around here for decades. Not in this house, of course.”