Kate Christensen - The Great Man

She was bone-weary, she realized suddenly. She’d awakened at 7:30, which was very early for a night owl like her, and had walked Frago over a mile; then she’d cleaned steadily all day in a state of manic despair, without stopping to eat, and she’d smoked too much. She wanted nothing in the world so much as to crawl into bed and pass out. Her heart was fluttering arrhythmically, the way it did sometimes. She’d be damned if she’d go to a doctor, though. All they ever had was bad news and cures that just made things worse. She’d made it this far; she was as tough as a weed.

The buzzer rang. She got up and went to her front door and pushed the button to open the door downstairs without bothering to ask who it was over the intercom, then went back to the table and slumped in her chair and fell into a momentary waking nap. She heard the elevator doors clang open and shut, but she didn’t move until she heard Henry’s irritatingly soft knock on her door.

To her consternation, he was carrying a backpack that contained a baby. Even worse, it had a pinched-looking face, whose expression suggested that he either had a foul-smelling diaper or was about to launch into a two-hour squall. How rude, to bring a baby!

“Come in,” she said through clenched teeth.

“Sorry about the kid,” said Henry, who was red-faced and a little sweaty. “It couldn’t be helped; it was either this or wreck my marriage.”

“I’ve made hot tea,” said Maxine crabbily.

Henry took the backpack off and scooped the baby from it and cradled him in one arm. With his free hand, he extricated a notebook and pen from his shoulder bag. It was almost feminine, his way with the baby. And why did so many younger men wear shoulder bags now? Men were turning themselves into women now, the way women had turned themselves into men during the feminist heyday. Maxine, despite the fact that she was a rather mannish-looking lesbian who’d always lived her life on her own terms, nurtured a great fondness for the 1950s, the era of cartoonish sexual display, glossy painted lips and pointed breasts and full skirts on women, men in squared-off suits and hats shaped like circumcised penis heads…. “People knew who you were then; girls were girls and men were men….” She was with Archie Bunker all the way, in that at least.

“Have a seat,” said Maxine, setting out two cups and sugar. “I’m out of milk.”

“I don’t need it,” said Henry in a reassuring tone, which made Maxine suspect he did indeed take milk but was assuaging what he incorrectly took to be hostessy anxiety.

Henry unwrapped the baby from his gummy-looking swaddling blanket and spread it on the industrial-linoleum floor of Maxine’s kitchen, then set the baby down on his back. The baby, to his credit, appeared to take this indignity in stride. Frago, under the table, growled in the back of his throat but didn’t pounce.

“Chester likes to be on the floor, for some reason,” said Henry.

“Bodes well for his future,” said Maxine.

“Does your dog do all right with babies?” Henry asked.

“He doesn’t know any,” said Maxine. “But he’s harmless in general. All right, let’s cut to the chase. What did you come to ask me?”

Henry opened his notebook and consulted what Maxine took, upside down, to be a nearly illegible list of jotted questions. “I’ve been wondering about what you were saying about Abigail and Claire — or rather, Teddy, if you don’t mind my calling her that.”

“You can call her a two-headed hyena for all I care,” said Maxine, pouring tea.

“About Abigail, too, and the dynamics of their triangle,” he added, pressing on. “Do you think Oscar stayed with Abigail all those years out of guilt?”

“I see you’ve met Teddy and succumbed to her ‘charms,’” said Maxine, hoping the quotation marks were audible.

“What I’m trying to understand is why he kept two households going. I have one, and frankly, that’s more than enough. Why would a man want two? Why not divorce Abigail and move in with Teddy?”

Damn it, Maxine thought. She didn’t have it in her to be cooperative and cheerful and opaque today. She shouldn’t have let him come. “This biography mongering is just an excuse to stick your nose into Oscar’s private business, isn’t it?” she said. “A man you profess to admire and revere.”

“Why wouldn’t I be curious about his life?” he asked mildly.

In lieu of an answer, she took a loud slurp of tea. Then she lit a cigarette without asking whether it would bother the baby. Her own mother had smoked like a sailor through both her pregnancies and her children’s childhoods, and both she and Oscar had wound up chain-smokers themselves, but so what? Not the end of the world.

“Why don’t you like Teddy?” Henry asked.

“That’s what you’re really wondering, isn’t it,” Maxine said, “now that you’ve met her and been sucked in…. Isn’t there anyone you just don’t like?”

“Of course.”

“Call it biochemical, call it taste, call it bitchiness. I really don’t care what you call it. Unlike everyone else, apparently, I see right through Claire, and what I see I can’t stand.”

Henry leaned forward on his elbows, so the steam from his untouched teacup curled up to bathe his sweating face in yet more moisture. “What do you see?”

“Oh, think whatever you want,” Maxine said. “I have no interest in dredging up all that old shit with Oscar’s little mistress. That’s the last thing I feel like talking about. I’ve had a bad day.”

The baby opened his mouth and began to scream.

“So have I, actually,” said Henry. He picked up the baby and held him against his shoulder, gently patting his back. This looked to Maxine like a plausible solution, but it didn’t help. The baby wailed. Henry reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle. He stuck the nipple in the kid’s mouth. The kid fussed initially, then shut up and started to suck. “Breast milk,” Henry said. “Expressed from my wife’s breast, to be deployed in case of emergency.”

“I never had kids myself,” said Maxine. “And I don’t envy those who do.”

“I’m in no mood to argue,” said Henry. “Believe it or not, though,” he added, “it’s not all screaming and shitty diapers and sleep deprivation.”

“Really,” said Maxine.

“Every now and then…” Henry gave himself over to watching Chester’s mouth suck at the bottle. “It’s like they say. All the old clichés are true.”

“Probably why they’re old clichés,” said Maxine. “Listen, I’m sorry to cut this short, but I’ve got to take a nap before I go out tonight. Was there anything else—”

“Why don’t you like Teddy?”

She blinked at him. “You are persistent,” she said. “I suppose that’s an admirable quality.”

Henry waited; she didn’t say anything more. He switched to another tack. “Why did Oscar stay with Abigail?”

“I find it flattering that you credit me with the assumption that I would know the answer to that.”

Again, he waited; again, she clammed up.

“Why didn’t Oscar leave Teddy any of his paintings, or any money?” he asked.

Maxine finished her tea. “I guess because she had no claim to any of it.”

“I’m sorry to keep you,” said Henry. “I’m just trying to—”

“Was there anything else?”

“Why do you ignore Oscar’s daughters?”

“You mean Teddy’s daughters,” she said before she could stop herself.

“Why do I mean Teddy’s daughters?”

“You’ll have to ask them that.”

“But how do you know what they’d say if you never see them?”

“I pick things up through the air, like a radio.”

With a victorious expression Maxine didn’t care for at all, Henry said, “I will ask Ruby and Samantha. But I’m very interested to know why you chose not to recognize them as your nieces.”