The Great Man (16 page)

Lila fluttered around, gathering her pocketbook, hooking it through her arm. At the door, she turned and said, “Abigail, I would love to have lunch with you someday, but of course I understand if that’s impossible. Good-bye, Maxine.”

After the door had closed behind Lila, Maxine made a harrumphing noise that might have been just her clearing the phlegm from her throat.

“That was very tense,” said Abigail.

“You were on their side,” Maxine said.

“I said exactly what I thought,” said Abigail. “I was being honest.”

“I find it very interesting,” said Maxine, “that this seemed to involve agreeing with them most of the time.”

“What about the things you said to me? Calling me a yellowbelly in front of Teddy! What sort of loyalty is that, Maxine?”

Maxine bunched up her mouth, looking away from Abigail and at Ethan. “What do you make of all these crazy old bats, Ethan?” she said loudly.

Ethan clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Abigail said nothing.

“I bet you think we’re all out of our trees,” Maxine told Ethan.

“I’m not out of my tree,” said Abigail.

Maxine looked at her sister-in-law. “Well, sometimes I think I must be completely out of mine,” she said. It was as close to an apology as she had ever come.

“What did Moe Treitler say about Oscar that was so terrible?” Abigail asked, forgiving her grudgingly but completely, as always.

“Oh,” said Maxine. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t. I don’t know whether it’s true, for one thing. I only know what Moe told me.”

“Well, so tell me and I’ll take it with a grain of salt.”

Maxine called out, “Katerina!”

“Yes,” came a faint voice from the other end of the loft.

“Did you put those tefillin in the safe?”

“Yes,” came the stoic answer.

Maxine grimaced at Abigail. “I’m wrung out. That little meeting was goddamned debilitating.”

“Ethan,” said Abigail, wrung out herself, quailing at the thought of getting Ethan downstairs, hailing a taxi, getting him into it, then getting him out of it onto the sidewalk on Riverside Drive and into their building’s front door and elevator and finally their apartment, “it’s time to go home.”

Ethan said, “Unghhh.” His eyes were fixed on the ceiling now. His hands had come to rest on his thighs, still fluttering, like birds landing after a storm.

Nine

The next morning before breakfast, after a night of odd and upsetting dreams (one of which was about playing Scrabble with Ethan and having to pretend “eeokiys” was a word), Abigail got out the Manhattan White Pages, found a “Treitler, M” on Greene Street, and, without stopping to consider whether or not she might be opening a can of worms, dialed the number.

An hour later, her doorbell rang.

“Abigail Feldman,” said an ancient man in a slightly tattered black suit, a tattoo of a spider on his cheek. Shoulder-length greasy gray hair sprouted from his skull-like head. “You look just the same.”

She stared at him while he grinned at her. He was missing a front tooth.

“It’s Morris!” he said puckishly. “Moe Treitler.”

“Moe Treitler,” she said. Moe Treitler had always been on the stout side, stout and pink and somehow juicy.

“Esophageal cancer,” he said. “That’s why I look like this; I’m being eaten up from the inside. All those cigarettes finally bit me in the ass.”

“Moe!” Abigail said, recognizing him now by his breathy voice and hepcat manner, his glinting no-goodnik eyes. “Come in, come in.”

He followed her back to the kitchen, where Ethan sat at the breakfast nook. Morris chucked him under the chin and slid in next to him. “Ethan,” he said. “It’s been a fuckin’ lifetime, but you look just the same, too.”

Moe Treitler had been Oscar’s friend from childhood. They’d grown up together, had their bar mitzvahs the same year, chased girls together. Back before Oscar and Abigail were married, when they’d gone to jazz clubs in the Village, they had double-dated with Moe and a succession of his girls, most of whom Abigail had found intimidating, humorless, sophisticated, and slovenly. Then Oscar had married Abigail, and Moe had disappeared into Alphabet City to live in a tenement flat near Tompkins Square Park, where he’d cultivated through the years first a hipster heroin habit, then a full-blown addiction, and finally a rehabilitated, clean-living persona of righteous zeal. He painted street murals and enormous abstractions on stitched-together bedsheets and cheap fabric, played free jazz on his saxophone, mostly alone in the street for loose change but also gigs with other musicians when he could get them.

In the early years in the Riverside apartment, Moe had occasionally turned up for dinner with Oscar, both of them punchy and sweaty and hungry, often having walked the whole way uptown, shouting and arguing and gassing each other about what geniuses they both were. Moe always had some crazy outfit on, tie-dyed jeans and animal-fur vests in the sixties, top hats and glitzy ties and platform shoes in the seventies, velour jumpsuits and long silk scarves in the eighties, and then he’d disappeared from Oscar’s life after a blowup over something—Oscar wouldn’t say what.

Abigail hadn’t liked Moe Treitler much when he was sixteen and hadn’t cared much for him when he was twenty and thirty and forty, but she felt almost glad to see him now.

“You want a cup of coffee or something?”

“Coffee, great. Can I smoke in here?”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Abigail, pouring some coffee for him, “but all right.”

Moe settled in, stretched his legs out under the table, lit a cigarette, and fondled his coffee cup. He had always been excessively tactile, needing to claim whatever came into his orbit by touching it, whether it was a woman, an object, or food and drink. Abigail dredged up the ashtray Maxine always used when she visited, a souvenir from Maui that had come from she knew not where, and set it on the table in front of him.

“I can’t believe Ockie’s gone,” he said to Abigail, his eyes welling up. She remembered then his habit of tearing up easily, then pinching his nose as if staunching a potential cascade of tears. “Somehow sitting here makes it real in a way it wasn’t before. Makes me feel so fuckin’ old.”

“We are so fuckin’ old,” said Abigail. “I’m eighty; how old are you?”

“Yeah,” said Morris. “I’m the same as Ockie, so he would have been eighty-three now if he was still around. Time flies, life.”

“Time flies, life,” Abigail repeated. “It sure does.”

“Last time I saw Ockie, we almost killed each other. That was over twenty years ago, 1984. I remember that day like it was yesterday. Broke my heart, but I wanted to kill that guy. I wanted his neck between my two hands. We walked away like, pffft, it’s over, a lifelong friendship. And it really was. I kept thinking, you know, we’d…”

“I know,” said Abigail. “He told me you two fell out, but he wouldn’t say what it was about. He also always sort of thought…you know, you’d patch it up.”

“Well, we never did. Maxie I see from time to time. You know I live near her now. I see her out walking her dog, late at night. Both of us are night owls. I call her ‘Crankypants’ she calls me ‘the old nutjob.’ ‘Well, if it isn’t Crankypants!’ ‘Oh no, not the old nutjob.’ She sure has a stick up her ass. She sure can pass judgment. We start arguing drop of a hat. I say, ‘Maxie, calm down. It’s all one big pot of gold we’re dipping our brushes in, whatever we do with the paint.’ I was spray-painting awhile back, heavily influenced by my very good friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. I told Maxie all about it and she said, ‘Oh, that’s just a bunch of bull.’ On the whole, she doesn’t care for anything too street, you know, too unconventional, too black. Personally, I think black art and culture is all this country has going for it. It’s the only original shit we’ve got.” Morris clapped his hands together once and shook his head. “That’s the shit, man. That’s where it’s at. Black kids.”

“I’m sure Maxie would have a lot to say about that,” said Abigail. “I myself have no opinion.”

“Ockie was just as nuts as his sister,” Morris said. He looked over at Ethan with a paranoid grin, as if he might be a gossip columnist in disguise. “Ockie was a bad boy, worse than anyone but me you ever saw. We were the red devils on each other’s shoulders, me and him, till we weren’t anymore. There’s a lot of stuff you would wet yourself if you knew, and most of that goes to the grave with me, or the stoppered jar, wherever I end up. I’ll tell you one thing, though. He and I came up together, sort of like brothers. Brothers who fell out with each other, who ended up in hatred, but for a while there we were very close.”

Abigail watched him with an expression of careful, mild interest on her face, afraid if she revealed how rabidly she wanted to hear this, he would clam up and scuttle away.

“Listen to me,” Morris went on, leaning in. “No one knows this. I forgave Ockie a long time ago, or maybe I never will, but this is my hour of sweet revenge.”

“No one,” repeated Abigail with frank disbelief.

“That’s right,” said Morris. “And I know he never told anyone. It’s not the kind of thing he would brag about, as you’ll see.”

“Not even Maxine?”

“Naw,” said Morris. “Well, all right, Maxie probably knows most of this story. So, my best friend.” Morris’s thin shoulders hunched in a shrug. “As you well know, Ockie didn’t get along with a lot of guys. He was competitive, liked women better, whatever. I put up with a lot of bullshit from him. One thing with Ockie, he had to be the alpha male. He had to be top guy, big man on campus. Otherwise, he was out of his depth. He had to leave if another guy topped him. He didn’t fight; he scrammed. With me, I let him be the famous guy who married a rich girl and lived in a nice house and had a tamale of a girlfriend on the side and all that.”

Abgiail flinched.

“Sorry, sorry,” said Morris, leaning in closer, as if he were sucking in her pain, altruistically siphoning it off like snake venom, but drinking it vampirelike at the same time. “Anyway. Meanwhile, I was the crazy poor one in the weird situations, doing drugs and living in cockroach shit. On top, that was him; on the edge, that was me. I never fought Ockie on this. I let it ride. I wasn’t competitive like that; I’m a live-and-let-win kind of guy. Whatever, if that was his thing, let him have it—that’s how I saw it. And that kept the friendship together through a lot of shit. A
lot
of shit. So then I got married.”

“Oh,” said Abigail.

“You ever meet Carole?”

“I never met her,” said Abigail. “I don’t think Oscar ever even mentioned her.”

“No surprise,” said Moe. “This girl wasn’t like the other girls I always had. This one was my own true love. Carole, her name was, and she was so good to me. I would always go for these smarty-pants Ivy League girls, younger classy babes slumming it with an old schmo like me from the Lower East Side who didn’t know his ass from Thoreau. Then I meet Carole. She was younger, too, but from the same neighborhood, not Jewish, but might as well’ve been. She spoke the same language as me; she knew who I was. And what was new for me was, I was a step up for her; I looked pretty good after a bunch of low-life scumbags. I looked like a prince compared to those jerks, a real knight in white armor. But the thing is, she was beautiful, Carole. I mean really a knockout. Long black hair, good-tempered, easy to be around. I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I couldn’t believe she loved me, too. Both of us had suffered from past heartbreaks; we’d been treated pretty rough, so we knew each other’s weak spots, and we always took care to avoid causing more pain. We just plain loved each other, no drama, no bullshit.”

“That sounds wonderful,” said Abigail.

“It was, but Ockie had a problem with her, he said. He was concerned when I told him we were tying the knot. He thought she was a bad influence on me. He thought she and I did too many drugs together. Drugs, schmugs, what did Ockie know about that? What’s wrong with it? What’s wrong is, you cease to be a good taxpaying member of society, but other than that, if you do it right, there’s nothing bad about it; it doesn’t hurt you or anyone else. There is no better feeling than that high. So me and Carole had a nice little using-now-and-then, shacked-up lifestyle going, and Ockie didn’t like it one bit. I had already been through rehab, and Ockie had seen me through the whole fuckin’ thing, and paid for it, too, as you know, so to be fair, I can see why it might’ve bugged him. But this time around, I was smart about it. I didn’t let it get out of control because I loved this girl too much, and I was looking out for her, as well.”

Abigail made a skeptical noise that had been intended to sound noncommittally encouraging.

“So we get married, get on with it. She’s a writer; I’m a painter and musician. We do our things—she does poetry readings; I play the odd gig. We sell stuff on First Avenue and St. Marks to make ends meet. Stuff we find rooting through other people’s garbage, but perfectly good shit, you know? On a good night, we could clear plenty to score and get a little taco and go out the next day, do it again. There I was, living the sub-American dream, perfect wife, little tenement flat with the bathtub in the kitchen, the free and easy life. So, back to Ockie. The wrench in the works.”

“Oh dear,” said Abigail.

“I don’t know if it was seeing me happy finally, or if it was because Carole didn’t give Ockie the time of day. In her eyes,
I
was the great artist. She always told me, ‘You have more originality in your little finger,’ yadda yadda, built me up like that. She’d go, ‘Don’t let him act like that, treat you that way. His stuff is cornball; it’s over.’ She thought he was a big phony. He thought she was bad news. So there was no love lost.”

“Yes,” said Abigail, “I’m gathering that.”

“Well, it’s important that you do, because what happens next is so shocking. Afterwards, Carole and I went our separate ways. At first, though, I knew, I just knew, I felt it in my bone marrow, that we’d be together till the end. And then it all exploded in my face.”

Abigail looked right at Morris. “Well, I can see it coming like a regular commuter train,” she said.

He looked at her and shook his head without surprise. “I bet you can,” he said. “But I didn’t. And I never got over it. To this day, I am still not over it.” He paused dramatically.

“So?” said Abigail, twitching a little with impatience to hear the worst.

“Maybe it was seeing me happy,” said Morris. “Maybe it was that he could tell she didn’t think much of him. I don’t know, but for whatever reason, Ockie had to break us up, and he knew the only way to do it. And I mean the
only
way. Carole could have killed my mother, fucked everyone in Rikers, eaten a pound of human feces every morning for breakfast. I would have kept her with me through nuclear fallout. But Ockie…I truly don’t know how he did it. I can’t imagine how he got around her.”

“I can,” said Abigail.

They exchanged a look.

“I bet you can,” said Morris with far more pity than anger.

“Oscar slept with your
wife,
” Abigail said, as if this affirmatively answered a question she’d asked herself for many years.

“Not only that,” said Morris, “but he had the evil balls to pretend he did it for my own good, so I would see what a user she was, how she was bad news for me. He pretended he did it out of friendship!” He gave a hollow, sorrowful cackle. “He did it to save me from myself! He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Moe, now you see what she is.’ Is that pure evil?”

“No,” said Abigail. “I don’t think it’s evil.”

“Did you know about this?” Morris asked her.

“No. But it doesn’t surprise me. Oscar was competitive, just like you said. Like a two-year-old. You found something, and he couldn’t leave it alone.”

“I wanted to kill him. I would have bashed his head in with a baseball bat without a second’s thought if I had ever seen him again, but he had the sense to stay the fuck away from me. Wanting to kill her came later. Then she cried her guts out till she almost puked, swore she hated him, that he hypnotized her or something. Hypnotized, my ass. I physically threw her out of the house with all her crap. It was something like two o’clock in the morning, but I didn’t give a fuck, and I never spoke to her again. I would cross the street to avoid her for years. Leave parties where she was. Sent her the divorce papers in the mail. But at first, I blamed Ockie one hundred percent. It turned out that he was just as furious at me for being so stupid, as he called me. Well, maybe it was time for us to end that friendship and she was just the catalyst. I’ve never murdered anyone, but I came close then with Ockie in that last conversation between us. He said to me, ‘Of course I used a rubber with her.’ He told me some other shit I didn’t fucking want to know. Did you ever feel like the world made no sense whatsoever? It’s like the laws of gravity were canceled and I woke up to find everything floating off into space. For years after that, I was a walking shell.”