Kate Christensen - The Great Man

Henry took a daub of whitefish salad, a piece of cheese, a few lumps of potato salad, a piece of rye bread. “This looks great,” he said.

“He hated lox and cream cheese. And bagels. He said it was all too slippery. The texture of the bagels, slippery. Lox, slippery. Cream cheese, ditto. He called them ‘the Jewish Unholy Trinity.’”

Henry laughed. Abigail sat down, afraid she was babbling. She spooned whitefish salad onto some bread and took a big bite to shut herself up, then did the same with another piece of bread and put it onto Ethan’s plate. Ethan, without looking at it, immediately lifted it to his mouth, touched it to his lips, then set it down again.

Henry took another swig of beer. “I wonder,” he said through a gentle burp, “whether you remember those photo portraits of schoolgirls Oscar took in high school. I went out to Brooklyn College yesterday and found them, and at least half of them were of you, or someone who looked a lot like you.”

“That was me,” she said, startled. “That’s right, I’d forgotten about those things.”

“I didn’t realize you were high school sweethearts. I thought you met in college.”

“We weren’t,” said Abigail. “I barely knew him in high school. Frankly, I hardly remember him shooting me, but now that you mention it, he did come around me a lot with a camera. I thought he was very funny; I knew he was out of my league romantically, so I didn’t even bother playing coy with him. When he asked me on our first real date in college, when I was a freshman and he was a senior, I was very surprised, but of course I went, but even then I felt there weren’t many sparks between us, so I didn’t bother getting too worked up about it.”

“But he really liked you,” said Henry.

“He kissed me good night, sure, but to me it felt friendly and polite. We didn’t become, as they say, romantically involved until I was a junior and he was living in the Village…. In my mind, it happened by default, since we were hanging out together so much, so I tried not to expect anything from it. The girls were all crazy about him, and none of them took his thing with me seriously. They kept buzzing around even when I was there.”

“What did you and Oscar do on your dates?”

“We went and heard a lot of jazz, which I hated, and he thought it was the funniest thing, to hate jazz. One day, he asked if I would marry him. We were out at Coney Island, on the roller coaster, of all places. What a way to propose! I said I’d think about it, I was so surprised. Inside, I was just singing. I always thought we were mostly pals, and sleeping together was just something our crowd did back then — to be different from our parents, I guess. Well, we really were just pals, but we were great pals, and it turned out that’s the kind of wife he wanted.”

“I had the strong impression,” Henry said, “seeing those photographs, that he was in love with you even in high school. I could see it in how he kept the camera on you. And you were so—”

“If you say pretty, I’ll laugh,” she said.

“I was going to say ‘comfortable with yourself.’”

She shot him a shrewd look. “Oscar liked to say he married me because he knew he would always feel he could be fully himself with me. Not the most romantic reason, is it?”

“How long did it take?” Henry asked, writing doggedly in his notebook. “Before you accepted?”

“My sister Rachel said to me when I told her about it, ‘He’s a good man.’ Rachel is one year older than I am, a psychiatrist in Great Neck, or was — she’s retired now. Even back then she knew I didn’t have it in me to be a professor, which was what I always said I wanted to be. I always loved to read, but I didn’t do so great in college. I didn’t like to think that way about books; I just liked reading them. All that analysis gave me a headache. So Rachel told me to marry Oscar because she said I’d be much happier that way. I knew she was right; plus, I loved him like crazy. The next day, I told him the answer was yes. He seemed relieved, which shocked me…. He acted like he’d been really worried I’d say no. Ethan,” she said suddenly to her son, “let me do it for you.” She picked up his piece of bread and held it to his mouth. Ethan took a snapping bite and began to chew savagely, staring sideways at the ceiling.

“I imagine he broke a lot of hearts when he married you,” said Henry. He checked his watch by tilting his wrist slightly and stealing a quick glance.

“Of course not,” said Abigail quietly. His glance at the time, along with the question, had hurt her feelings. She tamped down her disappointment. It wasn’t Henry’s fault, it was her own. In the old days, she wouldn’t have minded. Maybe she had spent too much time alone with Ethan. She never should have gone to so much trouble to get her hair done and all that; now she felt foolish.

“Actually,” she said, her voice steady, “it broke some sort of tension, a question hanging in the air between Oscar and all the girls he flirted with. He was off the market, but that just made him somehow more interesting to them, so they wanted him even more. And they got him, or part of him anyway. I’m just conjecturing. I don’t know this for a fact.”

He stopped writing, looked up. “Why didn’t Oscar paint portraits of you? He obviously loved having you as a subject in those photographs.”

“I wouldn’t let him,” she said, wiping Ethan’s mouth with a napkin.

“Why not?”

“I didn’t like how it made me feel. I had to be quiet and try not to move while he looked at me. Some painters talk while they paint, and maybe he talked to his other models, but I could feel myself disappearing. I told him to stop and walked away, and that was the end of it. Later he asked why, and I tried to explain, but it was the one thing I think he never could understand. The real reason was, when he painted me, it was one of the rare times with Oscar when I felt—” She stopped talking abruptly. How could she be revealing these things? She was a private and dignified person, or at least she always had been, until now. She had been about to say that it was the only time Oscar made her feel like a purely sexual object, and she hadn’t liked that feeling at all.

The telephone rang then, and with relief Abigail got up and went out to the hall and picked up the cordless phone from its bay. “Hello?”

“Abigail,” came Maxine’s harsh voice. “Can you come down here this afternoon? That horrible Claire is coming to talk about something, and I think you should be here.”

“Claire!” said Abigail.

“Yes, I know,” said Maxine. “I need you to be whatever it’s called in duels, the person who hands the pistol over, then carts off the body or escorts the victor from the scene, whichever.”

“A second?” said Abigail. The last person she wanted to see was Claire, but she was not in the habit of standing up to Maxine. “What is this all about, Maxie?”

“Eccch, it’s these biographers,” said Maxine.

“One of them is here right now,” said Abigail.

“The black one or the white one?”

“The white one,” said Abigail. “Why is Claire coming?”

“Because I sent a note to her best friend. They’re both coming at three. Can you get here at a quarter of?”

“Why did you send a note to her best friend?”

“I want to explain all this in person. I don’t know whether Oscar ever told you about this, but if he didn’t, I can imagine that you’re going to need a little time to adjust to the news before she arrives.”

Abigail pinched the bridge of her nose between forefinger and thumb. She wanted to say, So there’s some big secret that I don’t know about but that you, my dead husband’s former mistress, and her best friend are all in on that you’re going to drop on me fifteen minutes before I have to protect you from her? Hell no!