Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“I know,” said Abigail. “He told me you two fell out, but he wouldn’t say what it was about. He also always sort of thought…you know, you’d patch it up.”

“Well, we never did. Maxie I see from time to time. You know I live near her now. I see her out walking her dog, late at night. Both of us are night owls. I call her ‘Crankypants’ she calls me ‘the old nutjob.’ ‘Well, if it isn’t Crankypants!’ ‘Oh no, not the old nutjob.’ She sure has a stick up her ass. She sure can pass judgment. We start arguing drop of a hat. I say, ‘Maxie, calm down. It’s all one big pot of gold we’re dipping our brushes in, whatever we do with the paint.’ I was spray-painting awhile back, heavily influenced by my very good friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. I told Maxie all about it and she said, ‘Oh, that’s just a bunch of bull.’ On the whole, she doesn’t care for anything too street, you know, too unconventional, too black. Personally, I think black art and culture is all this country has going for it. It’s the only original shit we’ve got.” Morris clapped his hands together once and shook his head. “That’s the shit, man. That’s where it’s at. Black kids.”

“I’m sure Maxie would have a lot to say about that,” said Abigail. “I myself have no opinion.”

“Ockie was just as nuts as his sister,” Morris said. He looked over at Ethan with a paranoid grin, as if he might be a gossip columnist in disguise. “Ockie was a bad boy, worse than anyone but me you ever saw. We were the red devils on each other’s shoulders, me and him, till we weren’t anymore. There’s a lot of stuff you would wet yourself if you knew, and most of that goes to the grave with me, or the stoppered jar, wherever I end up. I’ll tell you one thing, though. He and I came up together, sort of like brothers. Brothers who fell out with each other, who ended up in hatred, but for a while there we were very close.”

Abigail watched him with an expression of careful, mild interest on her face, afraid if she revealed how rabidly she wanted to hear this, he would clam up and scuttle away.

“Listen to me,” Morris went on, leaning in. “No one knows this. I forgave Ockie a long time ago, or maybe I never will, but this is my hour of sweet revenge.”

“No one,” repeated Abigail with frank disbelief.

“That’s right,” said Morris. “And I know he never told anyone. It’s not the kind of thing he would brag about, as you’ll see.”

“Not even Maxine?”

“Naw,” said Morris. “Well, all right, Maxie probably knows most of this story. So, my best friend.” Morris’s thin shoulders hunched in a shrug. “As you well know, Ockie didn’t get along with a lot of guys. He was competitive, liked women better, whatever. I put up with a lot of bullshit from him. One thing with Ockie, he had to be the alpha male. He had to be top guy, big man on campus. Otherwise, he was out of his depth. He had to leave if another guy topped him. He didn’t fight; he scrammed. With me, I let him be the famous guy who married a rich girl and lived in a nice house and had a tamale of a girlfriend on the side and all that.”

Abgiail flinched.

“Sorry, sorry,” said Morris, leaning in closer, as if he were sucking in her pain, altruistically siphoning it off like snake venom, but drinking it vampirelike at the same time. “Anyway. Meanwhile, I was the crazy poor one in the weird situations, doing drugs and living in cockroach shit. On top, that was him; on the edge, that was me. I never fought Ockie on this. I let it ride. I wasn’t competitive like that; I’m a live-and-let-win kind of guy. Whatever, if that was his thing, let him have it — that’s how I saw it. And that kept the friendship together through a lot of shit. A lot of shit. So then I got married.”

“Oh,” said Abigail.

“You ever meet Carole?”

“I never met her,” said Abigail. “I don’t think Oscar ever even mentioned her.”

“No surprise,” said Moe. “This girl wasn’t like the other girls I always had. This one was my own true love. Carole, her name was, and she was so good to me. I would always go for these smarty-pants Ivy League girls, younger classy babes slumming it with an old schmo like me from the Lower East Side who didn’t know his ass from Thoreau. Then I meet Carole. She was younger, too, but from the same neighborhood, not Jewish, but might as well’ve been. She spoke the same language as me; she knew who I was. And what was new for me was, I was a step up for her; I looked pretty good after a bunch of low-life scumbags. I looked like a prince compared to those jerks, a real knight in white armor. But the thing is, she was beautiful, Carole. I mean really a knockout. Long black hair, good-tempered, easy to be around. I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I couldn’t believe she loved me, too. Both of us had suffered from past heartbreaks; we’d been treated pretty rough, so we knew each other’s weak spots, and we always took care to avoid causing more pain. We just plain loved each other, no drama, no bullshit.”

“That sounds wonderful,” said Abigail.

“It was, but Ockie had a problem with her, he said. He was concerned when I told him we were tying the knot. He thought she was a bad influence on me. He thought she and I did too many drugs together. Drugs, schmugs, what did Ockie know about that? What’s wrong with it? What’s wrong is, you cease to be a good taxpaying member of society, but other than that, if you do it right, there’s nothing bad about it; it doesn’t hurt you or anyone else. There is no better feeling than that high. So me and Carole had a nice little using-now-and-then, shacked-up lifestyle going, and Ockie didn’t like it one bit. I had already been through rehab, and Ockie had seen me through the whole fuckin’ thing, and paid for it, too, as you know, so to be fair, I can see why it might’ve bugged him. But this time around, I was smart about it. I didn’t let it get out of control because I loved this girl too much, and I was looking out for her, as well.”

Abigail made a skeptical noise that had been intended to sound noncommittally encouraging.

“So we get married, get on with it. She’s a writer; I’m a painter and musician. We do our things — she does poetry readings; I play the odd gig. We sell stuff on First Avenue and St. Marks to make ends meet. Stuff we find rooting through other people’s garbage, but perfectly good shit, you know? On a good night, we could clear plenty to score and get a little taco and go out the next day, do it again. There I was, living the sub-American dream, perfect wife, little tenement flat with the bathtub in the kitchen, the free and easy life. So, back to Ockie. The wrench in the works.”

“Oh dear,” said Abigail.

“I don’t know if it was seeing me happy finally, or if it was because Carole didn’t give Ockie the time of day. In her eyes, I was the great artist. She always told me, ‘You have more originality in your little finger,’ yadda yadda, built me up like that. She’d go, ‘Don’t let him act like that, treat you that way. His stuff is cornball; it’s over.’ She thought he was a big phony. He thought she was bad news. So there was no love lost.”

“Yes,” said Abigail, “I’m gathering that.”

“Well, it’s important that you do, because what happens next is so shocking. Afterwards, Carole and I went our separate ways. At first, though, I knew, I just knew, I felt it in my bone marrow, that we’d be together till the end. And then it all exploded in my face.”

Abigail looked right at Morris. “Well, I can see it coming like a regular commuter train,” she said.

He looked at her and shook his head without surprise. “I bet you can,” he said. “But I didn’t. And I never got over it. To this day, I am still not over it.” He paused dramatically.