The Great Man (17 page)

“Yes,” said Abigail, “I can well imagine you must have been.”

“I have never trusted anyone since, although I’ve had my share of companionship. But trust and love like I had with those two, that is rare; that only comes around once or twice in a lifetime.” Morris looked at Abigail. “So now you know.”

“You can’t tell me anything new about him,” said Abigail, smiling as if her mouth hurt.

Morris stared at her. “This is
funny
to you?”

“You couldn’t get mad at him. You couldn’t hold him to anything.”

Morris examined Abigail’s face for any sign of disingenuousness or self-deception.

“Well, then what kind of love did he have to offer, Abigail?” he burst out.

“An honest kind of love. No illusions for either of us. How often can you say that?”

Before she was finished with her last sentence, he said, “I never understood why you put up with him.”

“Maybe Oscar really was trying to help you,” Abigail was saying, “however misguided he may have been. Did that never occur to you?”

“In recent years, it did,” Morris said. He rolled his eyes. “But come
on.
He fucked my wife.”

“To answer your question,” said Abigail, “I always gave Oscar the benefit of the doubt. That’s how I put up with him.”

“Carole died,” Morris said. He pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers and blinked a few times. “She OD’d.”

“I am so sorry,” said Abigail.

She was loath to say this aloud, but she found it extremely hard to believe that Oscar would have seduced his best friend’s wife solely to teach that friend a lesson, a woman he claimed he didn’t even like. Oscar wasn’t that altruistic; he was far too concerned with his own desires and needs to sacrifice himself sexually for another person, even a close old friend. Maybe Morris was delusional and heartbroken, but maybe he was telling some kind of truth, some version of what really happened. She wondered what Oscar’s side of the story would have been. She would have bet anything he’d had the hots for Carole, so he’d seduced her, being unable to resist anyone he was attracted to. Where the story about doing it for Morris’s sake had come from was anyone’s guess. What a schmuck Oscar had been; Maxine was right, but she was wrong in thinking Abigail didn’t know that.

Shortly after Morris had gone, Ethan’s male nurse arrived, and Abigail was free to go downtown to meet Ralph for lunch. She stood on West End Avenue with her arm up while the occasional cab went by with its lights off, people in the backseat. She was damp with sweat under the cream-colored linen suit; she’d worn it because it reminded her of what Teddy had been wearing the day before, but she knew she looked nothing whatsoever like Teddy in it. She felt rumpled and flustered.

Finally, a taxi stopped. She had a little trouble hoisting herself into it. She was old and creaky—that was the main problem—but the door was very heavy, and the handle stuck, and the man didn’t offer to help her open it. The instant she’d managed to get in and get the door closed, he sped away into the downtown traffic, lurching her against the back of the seat so suddenly, she lost her breath.

“I’m going to Chelsea,” she said, and gave the address. He said nothing, didn’t indicate in any way that he had heard or understood, but he did manage to get her there with alarming speed, so she wasn’t late. She paid him, tipped him, and got out as fast as she could; she sensed his impatience to be off in search of younger, nimbler fares, although all he did was sit staring straight ahead.

The place was tiny. She felt out of place and shy. It was dim inside. She caught a glimpse of two young men in waiter’s outfits laughing by the cash register. There was a lot of red cloth, an aquarium; she heard soft classical music playing and after a split second identified it as a late Beethoven quartet.

Seated at a table against the far wall was a young black man. After the brightness outside, she couldn’t make out his features, but he wore a short-sleeved white shirt and had some sort of complicated hairdo. He gave a quick wave to get her attention, as if he recognized her, although they had never met before. Of course, he must have recognized her from the photographs Oscar had taken of her when she was younger.

“You must be Ralph,” she said as she approached his table.

He stood and held her chair out for her and said, “Thank you so much for coming, Mrs. Feldman.”

They shook hands. His hand was dry and hot. She hoped hers wasn’t too sweaty.

“Oh!” she said. “Please call me Abigail. My gosh, no one calls me Mrs. Feldman.” She sat in the chair and was happy to find that the seat was cushioned. She took a sip of ice water and blinked as her eyes adjusted to the soft lighting. “What a lovely place,” she said. “It’s air-conditioned!”

“Well, it better be,” said Ralph. “It’s so hot today, you can hardly breathe out there. I came from Brooklyn on the subway.”

“Well, I came in a taxi, and the guy drove like a bat out of hell. I was lucky to get here alive.”

Ralph laughed. One of the willowy waiters stepped over and proffered one-page menus, elegant mottled cream-colored cardboard on which a very few dishes were listed in careful calligraphy and described in painstaking detail. The prices almost gave Abigail a coronary, although of course she could afford this; she could afford anything. Ralph ordered a bottle of sauvignon blanc. Abigail asked for sparkling water. The waiter wordlessly inclined his head, eyes lowered. He was a sloe-eyed, pale Pre-Raphaelite beauty with a mole by his lush lower lip and a lock of curly dark hair on his forehead. Abigail took him in, then looked back down at her menu; his beauty had been created to appeal to a sex different from hers.

“Will you have some of the wine?” Ralph asked her.

“Oh,” said Abigail, about to say no. “I’d love some.”

“Two glasses, please,” said Ralph.

The waiter went away; there were only a few other diners, and the room was so small, Abigail could have heard everyone’s conversation if she’d tried. The whole restaurant was about the size of her bedroom. A moment later, the waiter was back with a bottle of wine in a bucket of ice. He set about uncorking, pouring a smidge into one glass, waiting for Ralph to taste, then pouring for real; then he held up his pad and waited interrogatively; Ralph asked for the fresh pea soup and the cockle salad. Abigail deliberated aloud a moment. Trout meunière was such a classic, dependable dish, and you hardly ever saw it anymore, not that she went out to many restaurants anyway, but that cockle salad sounded so intriguing—it came with asparagus, her favorite, and a mango salsa, which she wasn’t familiar with, but she loved mango.

“Do the cockles come in their shells?” she asked the waiter. “Cockles are those little clamlike things, aren’t they?”

“They’re taken from their shells, rolled in buttermilk, dredged in cornmeal, then lightly fried,” said the waiter. “It’s one of our most popular dishes.”

“Oh,” said Abigail with lust; there was something about the word
dredged.

“Have both,” said Ralph.

“All right,” she said, surprised but not at all put off at his familiarity. Very rarely, this happened when she met people; she felt as if they somehow already knew each other, and finding out the details and filling in the blanks was just a formality.

“Excellent choice,” said the waiter, collecting the menus. Ralph smiled up at him and the two men exchanged a quick look.

“I have been thinking a lot as I research this book,” said Ralph to Abigail when the waiter was gone again, “about magnificence.” His tone was earnest and ruminating, as if she had asked him a question and he had been mulling over his answer. “Oscar’s work immediately appealed to me as an adolescent, when I first saw it, because, whatever flaws it may have, whatever limitations, his work has real magnificence—meaning grandeur, beauty, and passion all together.”

“Well,” said Abigail, “he would have liked to hear that.” She drank some wine. It was fizzy and metallic-tasting, with a strange, fishy aftertaste; she didn’t care for it at all. Disappointed, she took another sip to make sure.

“I watched him paint our housekeeper,” she said. “She stripped naked right there in our living room one day after lunch and he got out his paints.
Mercy,
he called it.”

“
Mercy
and
Helena
were the paintings I first saw of his,” said Ralph with hushed excitement. “What was the real-life Mercy like?”

“Her name was Maribelle. She was one of my best and dearest friends. She lived with us for many years and died shortly after Oscar. Well, I thought he didn’t do her justice at all in that painting! He missed the point of her, I thought. She was so much smarter than I ever was. We would talk about everything, she and I. He painted her as a singer. Is that not a cliché, a black woman singing?”

“What isn’t a cliché about black people when you get down to it?” Ralph said.

“She and I discussed religion, politics, art. We went through the radical age together, she and I, a housewife and a housekeeper. We sat in that apartment like two gerbils in a cage and we read the newspaper and listened to the radio and we discussed everything. We read
Ms.
magazine from the very first issue. We wanted to go to the big demonstrations, but we felt too self-conscious; we worried we’d get laughed at by the real protestors. But that didn’t mean we weren’t aware! We heard about other women having consciousness-raising groups. We weren’t that formal about it, but we had our own sort of ongoing discussion group, Maribelle and I. And Maxine would come over, of course. She really spiced up the conversation. Her life was so different from ours.”

“Oscar must have been there a lot of the time, too. What did he make of all this?”

“We waited on him and didn’t rock any boats. It never occurred to me to try to change anything in my
own
life. But oh, I admired those women who just
left
their husbands and went off on their own! A lot of them with children, to graduate school and into the work world! Maribelle was one of them, but she never saw herself that way.”

“Did she sing a lot?”

“Only around the house. Ethan liked her voice.”

“So it wasn’t out of the blue for him to paint her singing.”

“Oh no! She was singing while she was posing for him.”

“Then how did he miss the point of her?”

She picked up her wineglass and said abruptly, “Is this wine supposed to be so fizzy?”

Ralph swirled the wine around in his glass very fast, keeping the glass on the table, then lifted it to his mouth and inhaled before he tasted it. “It tastes excellent,” he said, puzzled. “Spot-on, in fact.”

“Oh,” she said. She took another sip, determined to choke it down and not look like a schnook. “He missed the point of her,” she said, “because he didn’t really know her. He didn’t take the trouble to know her. Not out of racism, but because to him, it must have been like when he painted me, and why I didn’t let him paint me after a couple of times. The way he looked at you while he was painting you…”

Ralph compressed his lips uncomfortably, glanced down at the napkin in his lap, then looked up at Abigail again. “How was that?” he asked patiently.

“As if he were using you for his own ends,” Abigail replied shortly, having strongly sensed Ralph’s distaste for this topic. She sighed and tried another sip of wine. It tasted exactly as horrible as it had on her first sip. Well, the food would arrive soon, and then she could busy herself with a good lunch.

“But he was famous for not doing that,” said Ralph.

“Well, of course,” said Abigail, immediately regretting having said anything negative about Oscar, the way they’d all agreed they wouldn’t. It was funny, the way she felt so loyal and loving toward him in her heart but came out with critical-sounding things when the biographers started asking about him. “That’s right. I don’t know why I felt that way. Maybe it was all in my head. And also, he was my husband. It was probably very different to model for him if you didn’t know him that well. Are you a painter?”

“No,” said Ralph, “not at all. Just a writer and an appreciator.”

“You have a degree in art history, I think you said?”

“A master’s,” he said modestly, “from Columbia, and I’m thinking of going back for my Ph.D. I’d like to be a college professor, ultimately.”

“So did I, once.”

“In what?”

“English literature. I’m a big reader. But I’m not an academic type; I don’t like thinking about books that way. You have to have a very analytical mind for that kind of thing.”

“That is true.”

“I would get into a classroom and just go mute. I would have thought so much about a book like
Jude the Obscure,
and then when my classmates started talking about all the themes and images and whatnot, my mind went completely blank. I only cared about Jude and Sue as people. How terribly, unbelievably sad the book was. And it spoiled it for me to have to think about how it was constructed; it felt like pulling apart your favorite toy as a kid to see what was inside.” The wine must have been going to her head; she felt quite worked up about this all of a sudden. “It just killed the magic for me,” she added before she could stop herself.