Kate Christensen - The Great Man

Another silence.

“Well, you can bring him over if you want to,” said Teddy. “I’d like to meet him, and there’s plenty of food. I was thinking of making a kielbasa omelette; men love sausage, don’t they? Oscar always did.”

“Thanks,” said Lila, purring in spite of herself, Teddy could tell. “I think we’re all right where we are. Next Saturday, though, I promise, rain or shine.”

“All right,” said Teddy, “I’ll eat all the food myself. Say hello to him, assuming he knows who I am.” She hung up and stalked back to the kitchen, not hungry anymore. It was a hot, overcast morning, and the air felt like a wet towel. The back door was open; the smell of exhausted foliage blew in on a limp-wristed breeze. Teddy half-consciously hefted an uncut plum in one hand, squeezing it gently, the way physical therapists teach stroke victims to squeeze rubber balls to rehabilitate their hand strength. She took a small bite of it, then another bite. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty damn close. Juice ran down her chin, and she didn’t bother to wipe it off. So Lila and Rex were having a full-blown affair, and from the sound of Lila’s voice, it had been going on longer than just one night. When had she planned to tell Teddy about this? Maybe it was unfair of Teddy to mind having their breakfast canceled at the last minute because of a man, but she did mind. She didn’t begrudge Lila her sexual happiness, of course…or did she? No matter what, it just seemed impolite to call half an hour before Lila was supposed to arrive, after Teddy had shopped for their meal and was already preparing it.

Teddy threw the plum pit out into the yard, where it disappeared into the greenery. Now what? It was 7:30 on a Saturday morning, and the whole day lay yawning in front of her. Maybe because she had expected to have company, her loneliness, which she normally kept at bay, felt intolerable. Normally, she had a number of activities in reserve as bulwarks against this common sort of loneliness, among them reading The New Yorker carefully, from “The Talk of the Town” to the movie reviews, playing solitaire at the kitchen table while she listened to NPR, weeding the garden, or, in moments of real desperation, creating a time-consuming, nitpicky task like sorting through her thousands of recipe cards or piles of catalogs or boxes of papers….

She marched back to the telephone, picked up the receiver, and dialed Lewis’s number. He answered on the eighth ring, just when she had been about to give up.

“Hello?” He sounded out of breath.

“Were you running?”

“Teddy!”

The frank gladness in his voice cheered her up immediately. “Hello, Lewis. Lila just stood me up for my usual Saturday-morning date, and I just made fruit salad and walnut coffee cake and I’ve got a kielbasa and half a dozen eggs and some fresh chives and red peppers. Want to come over for breakfast?”

“Red peppers give me dyspepsia,” said Lewis.

“Lewis!” She laughed. “No one gets dyspepsia anymore.”

“Bring it all over here,” he said. “I’ll send Benny for you in the car. I have to stay home today because I’m supervising the decorator, who will be here in about an hour and who has to be watched every minute. She wants me to spend more on this living room than the queen of Persia.”

“How much did the queen of Persia spend on her living room?”

“Will you come?” Lewis asked.

“Why don’t I just call a car service?”

“Darling, you’re just over the Queensboro Bridge. He’ll be there before you know it.”

“The Midtown Tunnel is faster.”

“But the toll!” said Lewis.

She laughed again; Lewis was as rich as the queen of Persia, whoever she was. “I’ll be waiting with my little basket of delicacies all packed up.”

“Put on your bonnet,” said Lewis. “It looks like rain.”

Forty minutes later, a black Town Car pulled up in front of Teddy’s house. She got into it with a plastic shopping bag filled with food. Inside the car, it was air-conditioned and quiet and smelled of leather.

“Hello, Benny,” she said to Lewis’s driver. Benny, as always, looked very dapper. Today, he wore a plaid driving cap and an orchid yellow sweater vest over a flesh pink Oxford shirt; his smooth pink face was so well shaved, he gave the impression of being either prepubescent or unable to grow whiskers. His full head of short black hair gleamed with some sort of unguent.

“Someone’s over the moon that you’re coming,” he said in the Dickensian-orphan Cockney accent he never tried to modulate into anything more upper-crust.

“Is he,” said Teddy, settling back against the leather seat and watching scruffy, sweaty Greenpoint slide by, the store awnings — UNISEX SALON, FLORIST, BUTCHER — aluminum siding, spindly little trees growing out of the sidewalk. “As it happened, I was free today.”

She and Benny had for years shared the tacit knowledge that visiting Lewis was a bit of a chore for her. Lewis never came to Teddy’s house, not, she suspected, out of any snobbism about her neighborhood or the circumstances in which she lived, because Lewis was not a snob in any way. She suspected the reason was that he didn’t want to be reminded of Oscar, even though Oscar had never set foot in the India Street house. Greenpoint had been Oscar’s turf, and Lewis’s feelings for Oscar when he was alive had been complicated and mixed at best. Lewis had been Oscar’s lawyer, and, as such, had had to tolerate being taken for granted and treated by the great artist as a sort of repository for his furies and resentments toward the art world. Oscar was given the brush-off by one of his best collectors; when Emile Grosvenor died, his son Laurent had taken over the gallery and started giving Oscar fewer shows; the modern art museum in Amsterdam hung one of his subway nudes in an alcove, which he had considered insulting; always, Lewis had been there to take the brunt of Oscar’s outrage, although there was very little he could do about any of it. And meanwhile, Lewis had been not so secretly in love with Oscar’s mistress, who also happened to be his own secretary. Now that Oscar was dead, he had become something of an out-and-out bugbear for Lewis, his bête noire.

Benny made a left onto McGuinness Boulevard and the car went straight onto the Pulaski Bridge, crossing the Newtown Creek to Queens over a low-lying landscape with church spires and old houses that hearkened back to a nineteenth-century village just across the river from Manhattan. Teddy, who had never had a driver’s license, had always loved being driven through the city, looking through car windows as it all went by. Her daughter Samantha often said she turned into a cat when she rode in a car, staring unblinkingly and indiscriminately and fixedly out the window, sitting very still and tense, as if she were about to pounce on prey.

As she rode along, she pictured Lila lolling amorously in her big bed next to a good-looking, slightly younger man, both of them naked. In her mind, Lila was an odalisque, glossy, voluptuous, and aglow.

“The view of Manhattan from this bridge is one of the wonders of this city,” she said out of nowhere to Benny as they climbed high into the sky, heading east above Queens on a sinuously curving ramp, past billboards that seemed to float in thin air, and then curved around 180 degrees onto the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.

“I never tire of it,” said Benny.

Benny had lived in the States for more than thirty years, but his accent was as strong as if he were still in London. Teddy’s father had been the same way; he’d lived in New York for almost twenty years, but he’d spoken like a British nobleman till the day he died, but he wasn’t moneyed from birth; although his family had lived on an estate in Gloucestershire, the old family money was fairly well depleted by the time he came along. He had been educated, but just barely. As a young émigré to New York, in the 1920s, out of some maverick financial genius native only to him and evident nowhere else in his lineage, he’d made millions on Wall Street out of thin air, and that was where it had all gone back to when Teddy was nineteen. Still, riding in a chauffered car all these decades later was still as ingrained in Teddy as Benny’s accent was in him. No matter where you ended up, you never lost where you came from, never shook that particular dirt from your feet.