Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“More coffee?”

“Please.” Lewis cast around under a stack of bills and pulled out his fake ceramic cigarette and clamped it between his teeth.

“Your oral-fixation device,” Teddy remarked, pouring each of them a fresh cup.

“I wonder,” said Lewis, “whether I have now become irresistible to you due to the vicarious thrill of Lila’s new romance.”

“You wonder that, do you,” said Teddy.

“I can’t help but remark on your sudden appearance at my doorstep bearing seductive foodstuffs.”

“Kielbasa is seductive?”

“Very seductive,” said Lewis.

Teddy found to her surprise that she had no ready comeback to this.

“I will take that as a yes,” said Lewis, watching her closely.

Teddy looked steadily back at him. “I bought the kielbasa for Lila,” she said after a moment.

“Teddy,” said Lewis. “Do you honestly plan to go to your grave without replacing Oscar?”

“My grave,” said Teddy, laughing. She stood up and began to pace around the room. “Why are you bringing up my grave, of all subjects?” She picked up one of the carved masks. It bore a resemblance to a wizened monkey and reminded her of a death mask. She put it down again quickly, as if it were red-hot.

“Well,” said Lewis. “I’ve been thinking a lot about my own lately. How near I am to it.”

“Have you really been alone all these years since Deborah left you?”

“No,” said Lewis, looking her in the eye.

“You’ve had girlfriends?”

“I’ve had women.”

“All these years that you and I have known each other,” said Teddy, “I’ve never known you to have so much as a date.”

“You assume I tell you everything.”

“I do assume that,” she said, surprised.

“Well, don’t.”

Teddy lifted another mask. This one looked like a tragic owl. “Well, did you have dates with one woman or a series of them?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I’m just curious.”

“I’ve been involved, as they say, with several women over the years.”

“Ellen?” Teddy asked. Ellen was wildly unsuitable for Lewis, Teddy thought; she was so shrewd and brassy.

“Well, I could be, if I wanted.”

“But you’re not.”

“Not yet, anyway,” he said. His tone was light, teasing, and tender.

Teddy set the mask down and ran her finger slowly along the sideboard, then examined her fingertip for dust. There was none.

“You’re jealous!” said Lewis with delight.

“Of Ellen? Oh, come on. How could you possibly fall in love with Ellen?”

“Who said falling in love had anything to do with anything?”

She rolled her eyes. “Coffee cake?”

“Coffee cake,” Lewis repeated as Teddy went into the kitchen. She came back with two plates of cake and set one in front of Lewis.

“Fresh-baked this morning,” she said.

“How do you stay so slender when you eat so much, Teddy?” Lewis asked her. “Do you go into the bathroom after meals and stick your finger down your throat?”

“Of course I do,” she said, sitting down.

“Waste of good food.”

“Oh no, I regurgitate it whole, predigestion, then box it up and donate it to the poor.”

“Lucky poor.”

“They appreciate it.”

Lewis took a bite of cake. “Good cake.”

“Of course it is.”

“ Joy of Cooking ?”

“Is that the only cookbook you’ve ever heard of?”

“There are other cookbooks?”

They ate in easy silence for a moment.

“Teddy,” said Lewis, putting his fork down. “I think it’s really time we went to bed together.”

Teddy choked on a piece of brown-sugar topping. “You think it’s really what ?”

He was looking intently at her. “You heard me.”

Coughing, she waved him away. “And wreck our friendship?”

“I’d happily wreck our friendship if it meant going to bed together.”

She regained control of her windpipe. “Good Lord,” she said. She cleared her throat. “What’s gotten into you?”

“All this talk about the grave.” He laughed. “What have we got to lose?”

Teddy smiled inscrutably at him. The clock behind her ticked loudly in the silence— tick-tock, tick-tock —hollow, skeletal clicks, too apropos for comfort.

Lewis sighed and said, “Two biographies about Oscar. Who cares about art anymore anyway? Who really gives a fig?”

“About art,” said Teddy, “very few people give a fig. About Oscar, even fewer. But these two boys have wild hairs. Well, not really so wild. Tame hairs. One of them, the white one, Henry, seems to see Oscar as an emblem of lost manliness, a kind of visceral, unapologetic masculinity that’s gone out of fashion. The other, the black one, Ralph, sees him, I would say, as an aesthetic maverick, but slightly disapprovingly so, or so it seems to me; he seems to think Oscar hamstrung himself by eschewing the abstract. But he reveres him nonetheless; they both do. The white one, who’s rather cute actually and extremely sexually frustrated, keeps quoting some hackneyed female poet he wrote a biography about, which gives me some pause. This poet; Oscar. Clearly he has no standards. Oscar was no genius, let’s face it. Henry seems to think they’re both unjustly forgotten.”

“I love how brutal you are,” said Lewis.

“I know you do,” said Teddy. “It’s entirely for your entertainment.”

“I think you’re being a little coy. Of course you think he was a genius.”

“Not coy at all,” said Teddy. Throughout this conversation, she had been half-aware of the fact that she had been watching his mouth more closely than usual; now she was noticing that his upper lip had a cleft above it, as if pressed there by a small child’s finger in clay. “A genius is someone who changes the fabric of his own time and stands above everyone around him. Oscar Feldman kicked around with the best of them, but he didn’t transcend them or show them the way.”

“Hitler was a genius?”

“An evil genius.”

“I like this sophomoric little game.”

“Sophomoric in the extreme!”

Lewis and Teddy both laughed.

“I’m planning a trip to Tuscany,” said Lewis. “Want to come along? My treat.”

“When?” Teddy asked with longing.

“November, December, whenever you want.”

“Why are you planning to go?”

“To get you to come with me.”

“Oh, Lewis,” said Teddy. She sighed. “You know I love you. You know I think you’re the best man in the world.”

“Besides your grandson,” said Lewis, as if he were forcing himself not to take too much pleasure in the compliment because of the implicit rejection behind it.

“He’s three.”

“And now that Oscar’s dead.”

“You’re a far better man than Oscar ever was.”

“That is so true,” he said, his blue eyes flashing, “but what mystifies me…I don’t need to say it. My wife left me for a real turd. And you stuck with the likes of Oscar.”

Teddy looked piercingly at Lewis for a moment or two. “I wonder why,” she said finally.

“Women seem to find assholes irresistible,” said Lewis. “It’s Darwinian, I guess. You want to be put in your place, left slightly askew, because then you know you’re with an alpha male. I have no desire to put you in your place or knock you off-kilter, which apparently translates into erotic nullity. But I’m arguably an alpha-male type. I just don’t care to beat my hairy breast and bellow about it the way Oscar did.”

“You’re pretty smart for an old guy,” said Teddy, laughing.

“Maybe Ellen wants to go to Tuscany.”

“I mean it. Most men of our generation don’t have a clue about women.”