Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“So?” said Abigail, twitching a little with impatience to hear the worst.

“Maybe it was seeing me happy,” said Morris. “Maybe it was that he could tell she didn’t think much of him. I don’t know, but for whatever reason, Ockie had to break us up, and he knew the only way to do it. And I mean the only way. Carole could have killed my mother, fucked everyone in Rikers, eaten a pound of human feces every morning for breakfast. I would have kept her with me through nuclear fallout. But Ockie…I truly don’t know how he did it. I can’t imagine how he got around her.”

“I can,” said Abigail.

They exchanged a look.

“I bet you can,” said Morris with far more pity than anger.

“Oscar slept with your wife, ” Abigail said, as if this affirmatively answered a question she’d asked herself for many years.

“Not only that,” said Morris, “but he had the evil balls to pretend he did it for my own good, so I would see what a user she was, how she was bad news for me. He pretended he did it out of friendship!” He gave a hollow, sorrowful cackle. “He did it to save me from myself! He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Moe, now you see what she is.’ Is that pure evil?”

“No,” said Abigail. “I don’t think it’s evil.”

“Did you know about this?” Morris asked her.

“No. But it doesn’t surprise me. Oscar was competitive, just like you said. Like a two-year-old. You found something, and he couldn’t leave it alone.”

“I wanted to kill him. I would have bashed his head in with a baseball bat without a second’s thought if I had ever seen him again, but he had the sense to stay the fuck away from me. Wanting to kill her came later. Then she cried her guts out till she almost puked, swore she hated him, that he hypnotized her or something. Hypnotized, my ass. I physically threw her out of the house with all her crap. It was something like two o’clock in the morning, but I didn’t give a fuck, and I never spoke to her again. I would cross the street to avoid her for years. Leave parties where she was. Sent her the divorce papers in the mail. But at first, I blamed Ockie one hundred percent. It turned out that he was just as furious at me for being so stupid, as he called me. Well, maybe it was time for us to end that friendship and she was just the catalyst. I’ve never murdered anyone, but I came close then with Ockie in that last conversation between us. He said to me, ‘Of course I used a rubber with her.’ He told me some other shit I didn’t fucking want to know. Did you ever feel like the world made no sense whatsoever? It’s like the laws of gravity were canceled and I woke up to find everything floating off into space. For years after that, I was a walking shell.”

“Yes,” said Abigail, “I can well imagine you must have been.”

“I have never trusted anyone since, although I’ve had my share of companionship. But trust and love like I had with those two, that is rare; that only comes around once or twice in a lifetime.” Morris looked at Abigail. “So now you know.”

“You can’t tell me anything new about him,” said Abigail, smiling as if her mouth hurt.

Morris stared at her. “This is funny to you?”

“You couldn’t get mad at him. You couldn’t hold him to anything.”

Morris examined Abigail’s face for any sign of disingenuousness or self-deception.

“Well, then what kind of love did he have to offer, Abigail?” he burst out.

“An honest kind of love. No illusions for either of us. How often can you say that?”

Before she was finished with her last sentence, he said, “I never understood why you put up with him.”

“Maybe Oscar really was trying to help you,” Abigail was saying, “however misguided he may have been. Did that never occur to you?”

“In recent years, it did,” Morris said. He rolled his eyes. “But come on. He fucked my wife.”

“To answer your question,” said Abigail, “I always gave Oscar the benefit of the doubt. That’s how I put up with him.”

“Carole died,” Morris said. He pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers and blinked a few times. “She OD’d.”

“I am so sorry,” said Abigail.

She was loath to say this aloud, but she found it extremely hard to believe that Oscar would have seduced his best friend’s wife solely to teach that friend a lesson, a woman he claimed he didn’t even like. Oscar wasn’t that altruistic; he was far too concerned with his own desires and needs to sacrifice himself sexually for another person, even a close old friend. Maybe Morris was delusional and heartbroken, but maybe he was telling some kind of truth, some version of what really happened. She wondered what Oscar’s side of the story would have been. She would have bet anything he’d had the hots for Carole, so he’d seduced her, being unable to resist anyone he was attracted to. Where the story about doing it for Morris’s sake had come from was anyone’s guess. What a schmuck Oscar had been; Maxine was right, but she was wrong in thinking Abigail didn’t know that.

Shortly after Morris had gone, Ethan’s male nurse arrived, and Abigail was free to go downtown to meet Ralph for lunch. She stood on West End Avenue with her arm up while the occasional cab went by with its lights off, people in the backseat. She was damp with sweat under the cream-colored linen suit; she’d worn it because it reminded her of what Teddy had been wearing the day before, but she knew she looked nothing whatsoever like Teddy in it. She felt rumpled and flustered.

Finally, a taxi stopped. She had a little trouble hoisting herself into it. She was old and creaky — that was the main problem — but the door was very heavy, and the handle stuck, and the man didn’t offer to help her open it. The instant she’d managed to get in and get the door closed, he sped away into the downtown traffic, lurching her against the back of the seat so suddenly, she lost her breath.

“I’m going to Chelsea,” she said, and gave the address. He said nothing, didn’t indicate in any way that he had heard or understood, but he did manage to get her there with alarming speed, so she wasn’t late. She paid him, tipped him, and got out as fast as she could; she sensed his impatience to be off in search of younger, nimbler fares, although all he did was sit staring straight ahead.

The place was tiny. She felt out of place and shy. It was dim inside. She caught a glimpse of two young men in waiter’s outfits laughing by the cash register. There was a lot of red cloth, an aquarium; she heard soft classical music playing and after a split second identified it as a late Beethoven quartet.

Seated at a table against the far wall was a young black man. After the brightness outside, she couldn’t make out his features, but he wore a short-sleeved white shirt and had some sort of complicated hairdo. He gave a quick wave to get her attention, as if he recognized her, although they had never met before. Of course, he must have recognized her from the photographs Oscar had taken of her when she was younger.

“You must be Ralph,” she said as she approached his table.

He stood and held her chair out for her and said, “Thank you so much for coming, Mrs. Feldman.”

They shook hands. His hand was dry and hot. She hoped hers wasn’t too sweaty.

“Oh!” she said. “Please call me Abigail. My gosh, no one calls me Mrs. Feldman.” She sat in the chair and was happy to find that the seat was cushioned. She took a sip of ice water and blinked as her eyes adjusted to the soft lighting. “What a lovely place,” she said. “It’s air-conditioned!”