Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“I am getting younger, actually,” said Abigail. “This whiskey is making me feel about fifteen years old; it’s going right to my head. Whoo!” She giggled.

“All right, no more for you. I need you to be compos mentis when the crones get here.” Maxine took her glass away. “Which they will in about five minutes. That Claire strikes me as someone who shows up five minutes early to catch her opponent off guard.”

“I had an affair, too,” Abigail blurted out. “Not just Oscar.”

Maxine set her whiskey glass down with a snap.

“In the mid-seventies. With Ethan’s doctor. It lasted three years.”

Maxine’s eyes bulged behind her thick glasses. “How exactly did this come about?”

“He stayed the night once when there was a blizzard. We were snowed in and he couldn’t get back to Larchmont because none of the trains were running. Maribelle was in Queens at her boyfriend’s and Oscar was with Teddy, I imagine. We stayed up talking. I don’t know, the snow, the cognac. He was so gentle and literary. He loved poetry. We read Yeats out loud to each other and somehow we ended up in my bed. I was forty-eight; he wasn’t even thirty. I was a middle-aged wife and he was so beautiful. His name was Edward.”

“Edward,” repeated Maxine tonelessly.

“That’s right,” said Abigail, feeling oddly defensive, as if Maxine had mocked the name. “Dr. Edward Young. Everyone else called him Eddie, but I called him Edward. He treated me like gold, brought me flowers. Oscar never brought me a flower in his life. Oscar brought me his laundry.”

“You must have been a mother figure for him,” Maxine said with ruminative obliviousness. “He must have been that son that Ethan wasn’t.”

“No,” said Abigail. “We were really in love, man and woman.”

“Well,” said Maxine.

“Quite passionately, too.”

Maxine blinked. She drank some whiskey.

“Hard to imagine, isn’t it?” Abigail laughed. There was an edge of anger in her laughter.

The buzzer rang. Katerina appeared from the office area and went to the wall and said into the box, “Yes?”

A squawk came from the intercom, and Katerina pressed the button to let Teddy and Lila in.

Abigail suddenly felt sweat well under her arms and her jaw muscles tense and her heart thud. She cast a wild eye toward the door.

“Steady,” said Maxine. “You’re here for backup.”

“I’m here because you asked me to come,” said Abigail. “But just so you know, this is not the easiest thing for me.”

“It’ll do you good,” said Maxine. “Face down the enemy.”

“Maxine,” said Abigail through a thickness in her throat, “I’m doing this as a favor to you. In no way for myself. On the contrary.”

Maxine flapped an impatient hand at her. They waited in silence until they heard Teddy’s knock on the door.

Katerina opened the door with a motion of her arm like a knife through water. “Hello,” she said. “Come in.” She stepped back and let Teddy and Lila enter. Teddy came in first, of course, striding past Katerina with her head held high like a ballerina’s, her spine, Abigail thought, almost unnaturally straight. Then came Lila, a plump, pretty woman with curly white hair, smiling furtively, timidly at the back of Teddy’s head.

“Have a seat,” said Maxine by way of greeting, not bothering to stand.

Teddy and Abigail looked at each other for an instant of shocked silence. Then Abigail said, “Hello, Claire.”

“Call me Teddy, please,” said Teddy. She took the chair across from Maxine; Lila sat facing Abigail.

Abigail could not stop staring at Teddy. She forced herself to look away, make a joke. “The seconds,” she said, “are in place.”

“Quiet,” said Maxine.

“Seconds,” said Teddy. “Ah! You mean for the duel. This is my friend Lila Scofield. The original owner of Helena. ”

Teddy seemed collected, unfazed, even though she couldn’t have known Abigail was going to be here. Shouldn’t she, and not Abigail, have been the one who felt uncomfortable here? Abigail felt foolish for allowing herself to be the one who felt at a disadvantage.

“Hello, Lila,” said Abigail, trying to sound as poised as Teddy seemed. “I am pleased to meet you.”

“Hello, Abigail,” said Lila. She looked as if she might faint. So she, anyway, was appropriately nervous about seeing the mistress meet the wife. Abigail felt somehow reassured by this.

“This must be Ethan,” said Teddy, examining him with curiosity.

“We were just having some whiskey,” Abigail told her. Maxine made a noise in the back of her throat, which Abigail interpreted as an injunction to shut the hell up. “Maybe you’d like some,” Abigail went on. “We were drinking it neat, but you’d probably prefer it over ice.”

“Oh,” said Lila, startled and excited. “That would be delicious.”

Abigail got up and set about making a drink for Lila. “Teddy,” she said, finally turning to look directly at her again, “do you want one, too?”

“Well, yes,” said Teddy. “Thank you.”

Abigail and Teddy looked at each other for an instant. There was nothing in Teddy’s expression but uncomplicated amicability. Abigail felt herself relax. What was there to be upset about now? Oscar was dead. It was all over.

“Goddamn it,” said Maxine, “give me another one, then.”

When everyone had her glass of whiskey in front of her, there was a general sense of this meeting’s being called to order, along with an implicit acknowledgment that Maxine, on her home turf, was the chairman of this meeting, and Teddy was a visiting enemy, equal in stature to Maxine. Ethan sat quietly, as expressionless as a judge.

Maxine cleared her throat. “Well, so this is why we’re all here,” she said. “We need to discuss these biographers, what we’re going to tell them. We need a united front. And this united front must be that we won’t tell the truth about the painting Helena. ”

“I don’t care about Helena, ” said Teddy. She shifted in her chair, curled one long elegant leg around the other like a cat around a pole. “I have no need to tell anyone anything. Doing so would be to your benefit and no one else’s. I can’t for the life of me imagine why you’ve refrained from trumpeting it to the world.”

“She made a deathbed promise to Oscar,” said Abigail.

“Abigail!” said Maxine sharply.

“Ah,” said Teddy.

“Sorry,” said Abigail, surprised at herself.

“Oscar asked me to keep his secret before he died,” said Maxine. “That’s why I want it kept. If it were up to me, of course I would let the truth be known. I’m not an idiot.”

There was a brief silence and then Lila, her eyes slightly averted from Maxine’s, said, “I have been wanting to say this for many years, Maxine. When I learned that you had painted Helena, I was angry. We didn’t speak after that, so I had no chance to tell you that I’d changed my mind. I think the truth ought to come out. I think everyone should know. If it were me, I would really just burn to have it known.” She flushed.

“Lila,” said Teddy, “you need to write your novel.”

“Are you a novelist?” Abigail asked.

“No,” said Lila, “but I always meant to be one.”

“She is one,” said Teddy. “She just hasn’t written anything yet.”

“Gosh, that’s great,” said Abigail. She looked down at her hands on the table. They looked garish and gauche to her, covered in diamonds and veins. “I’m a big reader. I’d be first in line to buy it.”

Maxine looked around at all three of their faces, as if, Abigail thought, she were wondering how Abigail had become allied so easily with the enemy. Where was her allegiance to her sister-in-law? Abigail realized, to her own astonishment, that now their rivalry was out of the way, she was developing something of a little crush on Teddy. Teddy and Lila reminded Abigail of the pretty, fun shiksas she had always yearned to befriend in college. Next to them, Maxine looked like an old warthog.