Kate Christensen - The Great Man

As Benny pulled up under the awning of Lewis’s building, on East Seventy-seventh between Park and Lexington, the doorman was immediately on hand to open Teddy’s door for her and help her out of the car. “Miss St. Cloud,” he said with slightly bowed head. “Mr. Strathairn is expecting you.” He took her bag of food from her and ushered her through the lobby, with its bronze-framed mirrors, hand-painted wallpaper, and brocade upholstery, and then into the elevator, finally relinquishing the bag of food just before the doors closed.

Lewis was standing at his open door when she stepped out of the elevator. He immediately took her bag from her while kissing her fervently on both cheeks. They were about the same height. Lewis, like Teddy, was thin, and he was almost completely bald. His face was lean, angular; he had piercing blue eyes that were now examining her with frank rapaciousness.

“You’re really here,” he said. “Come in, come in.”

“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, walking past him, bracing herself for the inevitable attack of claustrophobia. Lewis was constantly redecorating the place in hopes, perhaps, of creating spaciousness, letting in a little air, but he and his longtime decorator, Ellen, had been locked for years in battle over his accumulation of things — bric-a-brac and mementos from his travels, old Playbills , dog-eared paperback books, enamel dishes filled with paper clips, foreign coins, defunct subway tokens, fortune-cookie slips, cuff links, heaps of “claptrap,” as Ellen called it. He even stockpiled the flyers that were handed out to passersby in the street, those glorified coupons for a free eye exam or trial gym membership or cell phone with purchase of a package plan; there were always twelve or fifteen of these on his coffee table alone.

“I’m very hungry,” he said, laughing. “But don’t worry, if I weren’t, I would pretend to be.”

Teddy headed straight into his kitchen, the one room in the apartment that had a little space to move around in, if only because Lewis wasn’t a cook and had little in the way of equipment. Still, the countertop was covered with stacks of old Sports Illustrated s. “Move your porn, please,” she commanded, handing him an armload.

Teddy unpacked the bag, found a skillet in a cupboard and some butter in the refrigerator, and got to work chopping the red pepper and chives and sausage, beating the eggs. When the omelette was done, she cut it in half, spread it thickly with sour cream, and put the pieces on two plates with a mound of fruit salad on each. She carried the plates into the dining room and used one of them to shove aside a stack of mail on Lewis’s place mat. She set the other plate on the place mat across from his chair and sat down. He had set the table with cutlery, glasses of orange juice, and cups of hot coffee, finding room to put it all amid stacks of mail, half-read books and magazines, an inexplicable bag from the hardware store, and eight or ten equally inexplicable carved masks. Teddy busied herself with cream and sugar while Lewis leaned his face over his plate and happily inhaled sausage-scented steam.

“You’ve outdone yourself,” he said. Lewis loved to eat well, but he had never bothered to learn to cook. Teddy knew, because he had told her, that he ate his dinners at a little candlelit bistro on Lexington or stayed in and heated up ready-cooked gourmet meals from a private catering company. But nothing, he’d added pointedly, tasted as good as a meal made by someone he loved. Teddy had chosen through the years to ignore this appeal; she made a deliberate point of not cooking in his kitchen more than twice a year. She was not and had never been particularly wifely, and she’d never wanted to give Lewis any romantic encouragement of any kind, because that would lead immediately to a profound and intense entanglement she had always been a little afraid of, although she had never been exactly sure why. Anyway, it galled her that he wouldn’t simply take it upon himself to learn to grill a simple filet or steak, steam some broccoli, for God’s sake. Cooking was far too easy, and Lewis far too intelligent, for him to have to resort to eating either restaurant or premade meals. Also, he could easily have hired a cook.

“Where did the masks come from?” Teddy asked. “And more important, why are they on the table?”

“Bali,” said Lewis. “Ellen thinks they’ll go up on that wall above the sideboard.”

“What’s in the hardware-store bag?”

“Hardware,” said Lewis with a grin.

“To hang the masks?”

“I guess so. Teddy, this omelette is superb.”

“It would have been better with chorizo or Italian sausage, something spicy and piquant instead of smoky. Lila loves kielbasa; that’s why I got it.”

“Why did she stand you up this morning?”

“A man,” said Teddy. “She met him in the street and now he’s staying over, apparently.”

“Lucky him,” said Lewis with one of his sidelong looks at Teddy. “Lucky both of them.”

She brushed him off, as she had done for decades. “Indeed,” she said. “When is Ellen arriving?”

Lewis had the grace to look sheepish.

“I knew it,” she said. “Why would she come on a Saturday? Someday you’ll have the good manners to come and visit me in Greenpoint.”

“You know why I don’t want to,” said Lewis. “And I always send Benny for you.”

“You don’t want to because you’re afraid Oscar’s ghost will come out and say boo.”

“I would prefer not to encounter Oscar in any form.”

Teddy examined Lewis’s face. As usual, his expression was benign, seemingly blank, with the barest hint of a self-mocking lift at one corner of his mouth, even while he chewed. She wasn’t taken in by his apparent mildness, which was merely the lawyerly habit of many years, even in retirement, of presenting an impassive facade; behind it, his thoughts were always simmering, his feelings always churning. As a boss, he had been quietly exacting and not so quietly appreciative, at first merely of Teddy’s efficiency, tact, and integrity, but then after his movie-star wife had run off with one of her directors, his admiration frankly and immediately expanded to include her beauty, wit, charm, and physical being. One night, she’d stayed at the office late, asked to have a word with him, went into his office and shut the door, and told him, frankly and without fuss, that this turn in his feelings had made it difficult for her to continue as his secretary. Lewis had asked her whether she and Oscar were having an affair, she’d replied that they were, had been for many years, and he’d immediately agreed to transfer her to one of his colleagues and hire a new secretary, since it was now impossible for them to work together under such circumstances. Their friendship had continued through the years unimpeded by romantic complications, if only because Lewis, passionate as he felt about Teddy, had proved pragmatically capable of transcending his desires. “I’ll take as much of you as I can get,” he had told her more than once. This must have fulfilled certain needs for both of them. The fact that a man as intelligent and successful as Lewis would have chosen to languish for decades with unrequited love for Teddy, his former secretary, made no sense unless she took into consideration the real possibility that after his wife had left him, he had preferred simple unfulfilled yearning to messy conjugal complexity.

“He died owing you a lot of money,” she said with teasing sympathy, “and you chose not to dun his widow for it.”

“His widow had other things to worry about, and it was money I could easily spare,” Lewis said, taking the bait.

“He could have paid you,” Teddy said.

“Oscar chose not to pay me because he didn’t like the fact that I failed to urge him to sign the exclusive contract with Barbara Solomon. Of course, that was my fault. Never mind that I told him, ‘My job is not to advise you about career moves; it’s to advise you about a contract’s soundness.’ He took a pass and regretted it and then blamed me for every bad thing that happened to him thereafter.”