The Great Man (18 page)

Ralph looked at her expressionlessly for a moment. Abigail thought she must have sounded like an ass.

“Something similar is happening for me with Oscar, but in the opposite direction,” he said with measured precision, as if he were resisting the temptation to match her vehemence but privately shared it. “Maybe I should have written a purely intellectual book about him and never tried to find out about his life. But they convinced me that a biography was the way to go.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“My agent,” he said. “And the editor who acquired the project. They both said it would be a better book if I wrote it from a biographical standpoint, and so I started to feel like that might be interesting and worthwhile, to do the research and tell Oscar’s life story.” He pushed his gold glasses up the bridge of his nose.

His soup and her salad appeared. The cockles were golden puffballs. They weren’t at all what she’d expected from the waiter’s description. She stole an envious look at Ralph’s soup. It looked cool, green, and light.

Ralph picked up his spoon and took a small, appreciative taste of his soup while Abigail speared a cockle with her fork. Finding it sizzling hot against her tongue, she set it back down and nibbled an asparagus spear.

“How is everything?” the waiter asked Ralph.

“Wonderful,” said Ralph.

The waiter sighed and glided off. Ralph watched him go.

“Can I ask you something?” Abigail said.

“Well of course,” he replied warily.

“This is very forward of me. I don’t want to offend you. But this might be the only chance in my life to ask this question.”

“Go ahead,” he said even more warily.

“Oh, I’ve overstepped already,” she said, horrified at herself. “Never mind.”

“Please feel free. I can always choose not to answer it.”

“Oh, well,” she said. She took another sip of the fizzy fishy-tasting wine to steady herself. “I was just wondering what it’s been like for you,” she said in a tentative voice. “To be who you are.”

“A black man?” he said. “You’re wondering what it’s like to be black?”

“Yes,” she said. “Black, and…and, well, and homosexual. I wonder how that is, because I imagine it must be very hard. I’m asking out of great sympathy, believe me, thinking that you’ve had a hard time. I admire those who struggle with their identities and…” She stopped and looked down at her plate. Ralph was silent, staring at her, his expression unreadable. “I have terribly overstepped. I apologize.”

Ralph still didn’t say anything.

“Well,” said Abigail, laughing, trying to hide the fact that she was close to tears of mortification. “I certainly have ruined a nice lunch!”

“No,” he said. “Not ruined. But I never said anything about myself. I just wonder how you got that idea. About me.”

“Oh, I always know,” said Abigail, unbearably contrite. “I don’t know how, but I do.” She shrugged.

“You just
know
?” he said. There was an unmistakable note of teasing in his voice, almost relief that she had guessed his secret. “No one ever guessed before. My brother has no idea. My best friend from childhood keeps introducing me to girls. I mean women. I have a very straight personality.”

“Well, maybe you could let all that go,” she said.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because it’s…” She ate a cockle. The crust was crisp and savory; the little animal inside was meaty and sweet. “Oh my! This is very good,” she said.

“I’m not one of those people who needs to tell the whole world every detail of his life.”

“And you don’t mind, you don’t feel lonely, that your brother and your best friend have no idea…”

“I prefer it that way.”

“But what if you fall in love and want to be with someone…settle down with him?” She put down her fork and held up both hands. “I’m overstepping again. I know, I know, but I’m very interested.”

“If and when I fall in love, I will make a decision based on that particular relationship and that particular individual. I’m in no rush.”

“Well, I think that’s fascinating,” she said doubtfully.

“But truthfully, I imagine I will remain alone. That suits me. I enjoy having the possibility of defining who I am without labels or promises to anyone else. I have worked very hard to free myself from entanglements and obligations. It would have to be someone very unusual to make me want to give that up.”

“Someone like Oscar,” said Abigail before she could stop herself. She changed the subject. “Do you earn a living from your writing?”

“No,” he said. “I work at the moment as an office temp. A temporary secretary. I have a long-term position at Citibank. I have a decent salary and good hours, and I can take days off when I need them. It’s not ideal, but it’s good for now. When I go back to school, I hope to have a teaching fellowship. If this book is at all successful, it should make it much easier for me to get into a superior program like Columbia’s.”

“Your future is all laid out for you,” she said admiringly. “How old are you? You look about twenty-three.”

“I’m thirty,” he said.

Abigail couldn’t tell whether he was miffed or flattered, but she suspected that although a straight man his age would be slightly insulted, Ralph, being a homosexual, would be glad to look younger. One had to appeal to women, the other to men. “When Ethan was a little boy,” she said, “before he was diagnosed, when I thought he was normal, I used to think about his future. It was the best part of having a very small child. Because a small child is all potential. Nothing much else to rejoice about when they’re two and three. It’s a lot of mess and work and panic. But the reward is thinking about later, when all that work pays off.”

“But it didn’t pay off,” Ralph said, perturbed.

“No, it didn’t,” she replied.

They ate in silence for a moment.

“No, it continued,” she said.

Ralph looked up from his soup bowl.

“I work as hard for Ethan now as I did when he was a small boy,” she went on. “When I die, I don’t know what will happen to him; I’ve provided for his care at a small private place upstate. But will he like it there? Will he be all right?”

“Will he even know?” Ralph asked. He scraped his bowl, ate the final bite of soup. “Not to be unfeeling, but how aware is he of his surroundings? He is unusually deeply autistic, am I correct?”

“Oh! He’s keenly aware, almost painfully so at times. I try to keep things regular, simple, calm, and quiet for him because he gets so overwhelmed by change, or noise, or upheavals. My death and his move will be a shock to him. I hope he can survive it.”

“How do you know he knows if he can’t tell you?”

“Because other autistics who aren’t as locked in have explained what it’s like, and they’ve described a whole world of sensation different from our own, but related. It’s not verbal. It’s not interpersonal. But it’s no less real for that.”

Ralph drank some wine, thinking about this.

“And,” Abigail continued, “I think it’s even more intense because there’s no shield of words in your head, no comfort of knowing everyone else feels what you feel. Language and society keep a lot at bay for us. Talking to ourselves and to one another. Autistic people have no such armor.”

The waiter returned, took away their empty first-course dishes, poured more wine into both their glasses, and then was gone.

“Why didn’t you have more children?” Ralph asked Abigail.

“Neither Oscar nor I wanted more children,” she said. “That is the short answer. I couldn’t take care of anyone else but Oscar and Ethan. They both needed me so completely and in such different ways, there was never any room for anyone else. And Oscar…well, he had more children, just not with me.”

“Right,” said Ralph, as if he weren’t sure how much he was supposed to ask or know about Oscar’s relationship with Teddy where Abigail was concerned. “And the long answer?”

“The long answer is a little more complicated,” she said. “No more children came along, although every now and then we would open ourselves to the possibility. With ambivalence on both sides, I have to add. So I think we were both relieved when it didn’t happen. Our parents thought we should try for more, though, so we did. Ethan wasn’t enough for them. They wanted a ‘normal’ grandchild. Especially Oscar’s parents, since Ethan was all they got. I have two sisters, and they had three children each, so my parents had plenty of normal grandchildren to look for the afikomen at the family seders.”

Ralph caught the eye of the waiter as he glided forth from the kitchen laden with plates. Abigail had a sudden image of Ralph and this beautiful young man entangling their limbs, white and black, in some imaginary realm of classical marble statues on a dappled Impressionist riverbank with the Italian Renaissance artists’ idea of Jerusalem in the background, those sheer, high, topographically unlikely mountains with their dizzying gorges and plunging waterfalls, strange black carrion birds wheeling high overhead.

“Everything all right?” asked the waiter.

“I haven’t had trout meunière in so long,” said Abigail. “This is terrific!”

The waiter fluttered doelike lashes and was gone.

“Oh!” Abigail exclaimed in a burst of wine-warmed chumminess. “Do you know what Teddy’s friend Lila said to me yesterday?”

“No,” said Ralph.

“She’s in love, but she can’t bring herself to tell Teddy—you know, Claire. Amazing that she told me, when she had only just met me. But I suppose that was safer. She said she’s afraid Teddy will resent her happiness or feel left out. And she’s seventy-four….”

“That’s something,” said Ralph with blank wonderment.

Abigail could tell that he couldn’t imagine being that old and feeling much of anything at all. Back when she was his age, old age had seemed as distant as a faraway time zone or planet. She had imagined the state of agedness as being like a Rembrandt self-portrait: the subject lit from within by a golden, ancient light, inscrutably wrinkled, at one with his achievements and beliefs, about to slide through the terrible black tunnel between this world and the next. The very idea of two people falling in sexual love at that fragile, faraway stage of life used to make her mind quail and shut down. The thought of old bodies conjoined, old faces mashed together, quavery voices making guttural sounds had seemed so undignified to her, it was obscene.

“This is a terrible time to be young,” she burst out.

“What do you mean?” Ralph asked.

“I love the computer; I spend as much time using it as anyone else. Maybe that’s why I’m saying this. I can see how much my life has changed. The feeling I get about what’s going on, which, I admit, is only from what I read, is that the young are highly sophisticated now, bright and educated and articulate, but no one is questioning the way things are in a massive, organized way. Kids’ lives are abstract, cerebral. There’s no cultural or political revolution, no upswell of anger. But there’s never been more to protest! Gosh, do I sound like an old crackpot.” She quoted in a high, self-righteous bleat, “‘When I was your age, I walked ten miles to school barefoot through the snow.’”

Ralph laughed. He held his wineglass up and looked off into the distance behind her left shoulder. “Things feel pretty hopeful to me,” he said. “Don’t worry about us.”

“I do worry about you,” she said, “and all of us.”

Ralph smiled at her. “Older people always worry about younger people.”

“And younger people always think they know what older people don’t know,” said Abigail, smiling also. “I have a business proposition for you.”

He looked startled. “You do?”

“Hypothetically,” said Abigail, “say I offered to stake you to graduate school. You could quit your job, study whatever you wanted. I have plenty of money, and nothing really to do with it all.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because,” she said, “in return, you’re going to write a book praising Oscar without reservation. That other guy, Henry Burke, is probably going to try to stir up controversy and trouble. I want one biography of Oscar at least to be flattering.”

“I can’t!” he said, surprised.

“I knew you’d say that,” she said, “but just think about it. Oscar gave you so much, he inspired your career, and it’s the least you can do to repay him.”

“That may be,” he said. “But I don’t like feeling as if I’m being bought.”

“You’re not being
bought
; you’re being paid extra to write the book you want to write. Just think about it; that’s all I ask.”

Ralph stared at Abigail for a while. The whites of his eyes were aggressively white and showed top and bottom between his eyelids and corneas, which made him look intense and intimidating. Abigail stared right back at him, silently urging him to acquiesce to her will.

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

The feeling of triumph this gave her—premature though it may have been—was like a snort of cocaine, not that she had ever actually tried cocaine, but she had read enough about it to know its biochemical simulacrum when she felt it.

Ten

“I can’t have breakfast this morning,” Lila was saying to Teddy in a tone of bashful apology.

It was Saturday morning, just half an hour before their standing breakfast date. It was Lila’s turn to come to Teddy’s; Teddy had just been slicing fruit. The hand that held the receiver was slightly sticky with plum juice even though she’d rinsed her hands quickly when the phone had rung.

“Are you feeling all right?” Teddy asked.

There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone. “Oh, yes.”

“Then why can’t you come?”

Another silence.

“Stop being coy! It’s that man, isn’t it?”

“His name is Rex,” said Lila, laughing a little. “Yes, he’s here right now.”

Teddy blinked in surprise. She hadn’t actually thought Rex was at Lila’s; she had only been teasing. For some reason, she had assumed that Lila’s not coming over today had had something to do with her grandchildren.

“At your house?”

“Right here,” said Lila. “Next to me.”

“You’re still in bed?” Teddy asked, choking slightly on some foreign emotion.

Another silence.

“Well, you can bring him over if you want to,” said Teddy. “I’d like to meet him, and there’s plenty of food. I was thinking of making a kielbasa omelette; men love sausage, don’t they? Oscar always did.”

“Thanks,” said Lila, purring in spite of herself, Teddy could tell. “I think we’re all right where we are. Next Saturday, though, I promise, rain or shine.”

“All right,” said Teddy, “I’ll eat all the food myself. Say hello to him, assuming he knows who I am.” She hung up and stalked back to the kitchen, not hungry anymore. It was a hot, overcast morning, and the air felt like a wet towel. The back door was open; the smell of exhausted foliage blew in on a limp-wristed breeze. Teddy half-consciously hefted an uncut plum in one hand, squeezing it gently, the way physical therapists teach stroke victims to squeeze rubber balls to rehabilitate their hand strength. She took a small bite of it, then another bite. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty damn close. Juice ran down her chin, and she didn’t bother to wipe it off. So Lila and Rex were having a full-blown affair, and from the sound of Lila’s voice, it had been going on longer than just one night. When had she planned to tell Teddy about this? Maybe it was unfair of Teddy to mind having their breakfast canceled at the last minute because of a man, but she did mind. She didn’t begrudge Lila her sexual happiness, of course…or did she? No matter what, it just seemed impolite to call half an hour before Lila was supposed to arrive, after Teddy had shopped for their meal and was already preparing it.

Teddy threw the plum pit out into the yard, where it disappeared into the greenery. Now what? It was 7:30 on a Saturday morning, and the whole day lay yawning in front of her. Maybe because she had expected to have company, her loneliness, which she normally kept at bay, felt intolerable. Normally, she had a number of activities in reserve as bulwarks against this common sort of loneliness, among them reading
The New Yorker
carefully, from “The Talk of the Town” to the movie reviews, playing solitaire at the kitchen table while she listened to NPR, weeding the garden, or, in moments of real desperation, creating a time-consuming, nitpicky task like sorting through her thousands of recipe cards or piles of catalogs or boxes of papers….

She marched back to the telephone, picked up the receiver, and dialed Lewis’s number. He answered on the eighth ring, just when she had been about to give up.

“Hello?” He sounded out of breath.

“Were you running?”

“Teddy!”

The frank gladness in his voice cheered her up immediately. “Hello, Lewis. Lila just stood me up for my usual Saturday-morning date, and I just made fruit salad and walnut coffee cake and I’ve got a kielbasa and half a dozen eggs and some fresh chives and red peppers. Want to come over for breakfast?”

“Red peppers give me dyspepsia,” said Lewis.

“Lewis!” She laughed. “No one gets dyspepsia anymore.”

“Bring it all over here,” he said. “I’ll send Benny for you in the car. I have to stay home today because I’m supervising the decorator, who will be here in about an hour and who has to be watched every minute. She wants me to spend more on this living room than the queen of Persia.”

“How much did the queen of Persia spend on her living room?”

“Will you come?” Lewis asked.

“Why don’t I just call a car service?”

“Darling, you’re just over the Queensboro Bridge. He’ll be there before you know it.”

“The Midtown Tunnel is faster.”

“But the toll!” said Lewis.

She laughed again; Lewis was as rich as the queen of Persia, whoever she was. “I’ll be waiting with my little basket of delicacies all packed up.”

“Put on your bonnet,” said Lewis. “It looks like rain.”

Forty minutes later, a black Town Car pulled up in front of Teddy’s house. She got into it with a plastic shopping bag filled with food. Inside the car, it was air-conditioned and quiet and smelled of leather.

“Hello, Benny,” she said to Lewis’s driver. Benny, as always, looked very dapper. Today, he wore a plaid driving cap and an orchid yellow sweater vest over a flesh pink Oxford shirt; his smooth pink face was so well shaved, he gave the impression of being either prepubescent or unable to grow whiskers. His full head of short black hair gleamed with some sort of unguent.

“Someone’s over the moon that you’re coming,” he said in the Dickensian-orphan Cockney accent he never tried to modulate into anything more upper-crust.

“Is he,” said Teddy, settling back against the leather seat and watching scruffy, sweaty Greenpoint slide by, the store awnings—
UNISEX SALON
,
FLORIST
,
BUTCHER
—aluminum siding, spindly little trees growing out of the sidewalk. “As it happened, I was free today.”

She and Benny had for years shared the tacit knowledge that visiting Lewis was a bit of a chore for her. Lewis never came to Teddy’s house, not, she suspected, out of any snobbism about her neighborhood or the circumstances in which she lived, because Lewis was not a snob in any way. She suspected the reason was that he didn’t want to be reminded of Oscar, even though Oscar had never set foot in the India Street house. Greenpoint had been Oscar’s turf, and Lewis’s feelings for Oscar when he was alive had been complicated and mixed at best. Lewis had been Oscar’s lawyer, and, as such, had had to tolerate being taken for granted and treated by the great artist as a sort of repository for his furies and resentments toward the art world. Oscar was given the brush-off by one of his best collectors; when Emile Grosvenor died, his son Laurent had taken over the gallery and started giving Oscar fewer shows; the modern art museum in Amsterdam hung one of his subway nudes in an alcove, which he had considered insulting; always, Lewis had been there to take the brunt of Oscar’s outrage, although there was very little he could do about any of it. And meanwhile, Lewis had been not so secretly in love with Oscar’s mistress, who also happened to be his own secretary. Now that Oscar was dead, he had become something of an out-and-out bugbear for Lewis, his bête noire.

Benny made a left onto McGuinness Boulevard and the car went straight onto the Pulaski Bridge, crossing the Newtown Creek to Queens over a low-lying landscape with church spires and old houses that hearkened back to a nineteenth-century village just across the river from Manhattan. Teddy, who had never had a driver’s license, had always loved being driven through the city, looking through car windows as it all went by. Her daughter Samantha often said she turned into a cat when she rode in a car, staring unblinkingly and indiscriminately and fixedly out the window, sitting very still and tense, as if she were about to pounce on prey.

As she rode along, she pictured Lila lolling amorously in her big bed next to a good-looking, slightly younger man, both of them naked. In her mind, Lila was an odalisque, glossy, voluptuous, and aglow.

“The view of Manhattan from this bridge is one of the wonders of this city,” she said out of nowhere to Benny as they climbed high into the sky, heading east above Queens on a sinuously curving ramp, past billboards that seemed to float in thin air, and then curved around 180 degrees onto the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.

“I never tire of it,” said Benny.

Benny had lived in the States for more than thirty years, but his accent was as strong as if he were still in London. Teddy’s father had been the same way; he’d lived in New York for almost twenty years, but he’d spoken like a British nobleman till the day he died, but he wasn’t moneyed from birth; although his family had lived on an estate in Gloucestershire, the old family money was fairly well depleted by the time he came along. He had been educated, but just barely. As a young émigré to New York, in the 1920s, out of some maverick financial genius native only to him and evident nowhere else in his lineage, he’d made millions on Wall Street out of thin air, and that was where it had all gone back to when Teddy was nineteen. Still, riding in a chauffered car all these decades later was still as ingrained in Teddy as Benny’s accent was in him. No matter where you ended up, you never lost where you came from, never shook that particular dirt from your feet.

As Benny pulled up under the awning of Lewis’s building, on East Seventy-seventh between Park and Lexington, the doorman was immediately on hand to open Teddy’s door for her and help her out of the car. “Miss St. Cloud,” he said with slightly bowed head. “Mr. Strathairn is expecting you.” He took her bag of food from her and ushered her through the lobby, with its bronze-framed mirrors, hand-painted wallpaper, and brocade upholstery, and then into the elevator, finally relinquishing the bag of food just before the doors closed.

Lewis was standing at his open door when she stepped out of the elevator. He immediately took her bag from her while kissing her fervently on both cheeks. They were about the same height. Lewis, like Teddy, was thin, and he was almost completely bald. His face was lean, angular; he had piercing blue eyes that were now examining her with frank rapaciousness.

“You’re really here,” he said. “Come in, come in.”

“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, walking past him, bracing herself for the inevitable attack of claustrophobia. Lewis was constantly redecorating the place in hopes, perhaps, of creating spaciousness, letting in a little air, but he and his longtime decorator, Ellen, had been locked for years in battle over his accumulation of things—bric-a-brac and mementos from his travels, old
Playbills
, dog-eared paperback books, enamel dishes filled with paper clips, foreign coins, defunct subway tokens, fortune-cookie slips, cuff links, heaps of “claptrap,” as Ellen called it. He even stockpiled the flyers that were handed out to passersby in the street, those glorified coupons for a free eye exam or trial gym membership or cell phone with purchase of a package plan; there were always twelve or fifteen of these on his coffee table alone.

“I’m very hungry,” he said, laughing. “But don’t worry, if I weren’t, I would pretend to be.”

Teddy headed straight into his kitchen, the one room in the apartment that had a little space to move around in, if only because Lewis wasn’t a cook and had little in the way of equipment. Still, the countertop was covered with stacks of old
Sports Illustrated
s. “Move your porn, please,” she commanded, handing him an armload.

Teddy unpacked the bag, found a skillet in a cupboard and some butter in the refrigerator, and got to work chopping the red pepper and chives and sausage, beating the eggs. When the omelette was done, she cut it in half, spread it thickly with sour cream, and put the pieces on two plates with a mound of fruit salad on each. She carried the plates into the dining room and used one of them to shove aside a stack of mail on Lewis’s place mat. She set the other plate on the place mat across from his chair and sat down. He had set the table with cutlery, glasses of orange juice, and cups of hot coffee, finding room to put it all amid stacks of mail, half-read books and magazines, an inexplicable bag from the hardware store, and eight or ten equally inexplicable carved masks. Teddy busied herself with cream and sugar while Lewis leaned his face over his plate and happily inhaled sausage-scented steam.

“You’ve outdone yourself,” he said. Lewis loved to eat well, but he had never bothered to learn to cook. Teddy knew, because he had told her, that he ate his dinners at a little candlelit bistro on Lexington or stayed in and heated up ready-cooked gourmet meals from a private catering company. But nothing, he’d added pointedly, tasted as good as a meal made by someone he loved. Teddy had chosen through the years to ignore this appeal; she made a deliberate point of not cooking in his kitchen more than twice a year. She was not and had never been particularly wifely, and she’d never wanted to give Lewis any romantic encouragement of any kind, because that would lead immediately to a profound and intense entanglement she had always been a little afraid of, although she had never been exactly sure why. Anyway, it galled her that he wouldn’t simply take it upon himself to learn to grill a simple filet or steak, steam some broccoli, for God’s sake. Cooking was far too easy, and Lewis far too intelligent, for him to have to resort to eating either restaurant or premade meals. Also, he could easily have hired a cook.

“Where did the masks come from?” Teddy asked. “And more important, why are they on the table?”

“Bali,” said Lewis. “Ellen thinks they’ll go up on that wall above the sideboard.”

“What’s in the hardware-store bag?”

“Hardware,” said Lewis with a grin.

“To hang the masks?”

“I guess so. Teddy, this omelette is superb.”

“It would have been better with chorizo or Italian sausage, something spicy and piquant instead of smoky. Lila loves kielbasa; that’s why I got it.”

“Why did she stand you up this morning?”

“A man,” said Teddy. “She met him in the street and now he’s staying over, apparently.”

“Lucky him,” said Lewis with one of his sidelong looks at Teddy. “Lucky both of them.”