Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“And you never resented it,” Lila prompted.

“I preferred it that way. I wasn’t pretending. I loved Oscar. I loved who he was. I wouldn’t have changed a thing about him, and I saw him so clearly…. That’s why he came back to me, even with all the girls and models and married women who chased him. He always came back to me, and he told me everything. I wasn’t being a martyr…. I was never jealous. I always felt a man was lucky to have me and if he was smart, he’d see that, and if he didn’t, he was an idiot. Arrogance, I guess it is. It served me well, though, because my lack of jealousy was another thing that kept him interested. And I knew him better than he knew himself. He was such a pathological narcissist. Telling him what he was thinking was the equivalent of a blow job for him. He made me feel brilliant for understanding him, made me feel as if I were a genius.”

She laughed and looked out at the yard. Lila kept quiet. Teddy had never talked like this before about Oscar.

“I can’t bear that he’s gone sometimes,” Teddy said. “I sometimes literally feel that I can’t bear that I’ll never see him again. Am I romanticizing Oscar?” Her voice was high.

“Not at all,” said Lila.

Teddy reached over and took Lila’s hand. Lila started a little; Teddy wasn’t the touchy type. She rarely hugged anyone, and although they always exchanged a mutual peck on the cheek to say hello or good-bye, it was generally more out of form than feeling. Their brief sexual past was there between them, of course, but it was light-years away from where they were now. Teddy’s hand tightened around Lila’s.

“Isn’t it strange,” she said, “to be at the end of your life, to feel you have so much more life in you…. But you won’t get it. The body gives out. I feel as if I were ready to start all over with someone, all of a sudden after missing Oscar for so long…. This feeling reminds me of youth. But youth is gone.”

“What about your old boss Lewis?” asked Lila.

“Lewis,” said Teddy. “What about him?”

“He’s been in love with you for decades. He’s rich and handsome and intelligent and so nice. And he’s not married to anyone else.”

Teddy waved the thought away, looking inscrutably amused. “I’m so happy you have a date with a nice suitable man.”

“What’s gotten into you?” Lila said warmly. “This isn’t like you at all. You’re usually so stoic…. It’s good to hear you talk like this.”

“It’s these biographers,” said Teddy. “Stirring the pot.”

“You know,” said Lila, “you never really grieved for Oscar; you just went on after he died. It’s good you’re saying all this now.”

“You mean I didn’t grieve publicly. How could I? I wasn’t his wife.”

“You were. You were his true wife.”

“Well, I was certainly faithful to him. One narcissistic baby-man was enough. And I could share Oscar, but he couldn’t share me. That was the deal.” Teddy and Lila both laughed.

As Teddy was leaving Lila’s house, she heard the phone ring, heard Lila answer it and cry, “Ben!” Her eldest son, who called her every day. Lila’s three sons all loved their mother uncomplicatedly. They had always felt sure of her devotion to them and returned it in kind. It served Teddy right: She had girls, twin girls, difficult, complicated, mercurial girls who felt for their mother a strong tumult of love and hate and many other things. Teddy had had Oscar, Lila Sam, but Lila had had sons, Teddy daughters; Teddy had had independence, Lila security. It was always a trade-off, no way around it. If you were a woman, you could never have everything.

When Teddy got home, she spent an hour or so in the backyard pruning her gnarled wayward rosebushes and rooting around in the tiny shed under the kitchen porch, sorting through packets of seeds and old plastic potting containers, trying to find the rosebush food she was sure she’d bought months ago but hadn’t used yet, and it was already mid-July; the summer was half over. She had forgotten how nice it could be back here, despite the limp rows of the neighbors’ laundry overhead and rank sewagey breezes that blew up from the Newtown Creek a few blocks away. The heat of the day hadn’t yet penetrated the deep shade of the giant old fir tree in the yard next door. The shadowy air had the feel of a grotto, somewhere underground and undisturbed. The back wall of the house undulated with a lapping underwater green, sunlight refracting off the spreading trees. She cut an armload of the salmon-colored roses planted long ago by some member of the Meehan clan, big loose blooms, and carried them into the kitchen. Her bare arms prickled with scratches.

She laid the roses on the counter and stood on the threshold between kitchen and dining room, listening with her whole body to the silence.

The telephone rang. She jumped at the sudden noise, then went into the kitchen and answered it. “Hello?”

“Teddy,” said Lewis Strathairn, her old boss, Oscar’s longtime lawyer. “It’s me.”

“Oh, hello, Lewis!” she said. “That’s funny, Lila and I were just talking about you. How are you today?”

“I’ve got a touch of a summer cold,” he said, “but other than that I’m all right.”

The subject of Lewis’s health was an old joke between them; Lewis was never sick, but he was constantly convinced that he was about to be.

“You don’t sound like you have a cold,” said Teddy.

“Just a tickle in the back of my throat. Teddy, I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” she said, realizing that it was true as she said it, although she hadn’t thought much about him since the last time she’d seen him, a couple of months before.

“Can you come into town today and have lunch with me? I can send Benny for you.”

Lewis lived on East Seventy-seventh Street in an apartment Teddy found cluttered and antiseptic. Benny was the driver of his Town Car.

“I can’t, Lewis,” she said. “I’m sorry, I have Oscar’s biographer, or one of them, coming for lunch.”

“So Oscar’s biography is finally getting written.”

“Actually,” she said, “there are two of them.” She stretched the phone cord and went to the sink and filled a blue crackle-glazed vase with water, then put the roses into it. They looked pleasingly blowsy and decadent.

“Two,” Lewis said.

Teddy had first gone to work for Lewis in 1957. Back then, he had been the balding, affably witty husband of a B-movie actress, who left him in 1979, predictably, for the director of a film she was starring in. Since then, he’d lived alone in his bachelor digs, his torch for Teddy burning bright. Teddy loved and respected Lewis and enjoyed his company tremendously, but his passionate adoration of her had always served, ironically, as a barrier to further intimacy; the strength of his desire created a hazy miragelike force field around him. She couldn’t see him clearly enough to desire him.

“That’s right,” said Teddy.

“I’ll call you again soon,” said Lewis. “I do miss you.”

“I’ll be here,” she said, and they rang off.

She set the vase of roses on the dining room table. Looking through the front window of the living room, she could see kids hanging out, half-grown pups of various shades of brown. Oscar had loved all the earlier incarnations of these kids. He’d been fascinated by their music, their clothes, their indeterminate ethnicities and aggressively fake Puerto Rican accents, fake because they’d all been born right here, which he knew because Oscar was what used to be called “a nosey parker.” He had prowled the blocks around the Calyer Street house, befriending the Polish store clerks up on Manhattan Avenue, stopping to talk to young mothers, snooping around, eavesdropping. Teddy remembered how he’d perched on her living room couch, staring out in the window like a big cat, gossiping with Ruby about the passersby with the nicknames he’d invented for them. “There goes Melanie,” he said about a young mother with melon-size breasts. “She’s talking to Smoking Man. Hey, it looks like Bambi’s pregnant. Did you know that? Wonder who the father is! Maybe it’s Dingbat. Think Dingbat knocked up Bambi? I saw him sweet-talking her a while ago.” Ruby had chimed in with whatever information she could muster up about the neighbors, beaming whenever he praised her for giving him something juicy.