Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“Well, the nice ones do, because we have plenty of time to study you without the mind-sapping distraction of actual entanglement.”

“I thought you said you’d had women.”

“I have,” he replied vehemently. “I’m no monk.”

“Why haven’t you fallen in love again?”

“I’ve been pining for you. It’s the truth.”

“No one pines this long. You must have wanted to pine.”

He said, “I haven’t entirely enjoyed it.”

They looked at each other.

“Lewis,” said Teddy.

“Teddy.”

She tried to say something, failed, then shook her head decisively. “I’m a bit flummoxed all of a sudden.”

“That’s a new one.”

Teddy stood and made her way over to where Lewis sat. “Stand up,” she said. “I want to try something.”

He stood, nudged his chair aside with his leg, and faced her. She looked right into his eyes and put her hands on his shoulders. “Dance with me a little,” she said.

“What are we, geriatrics?” he asked, laughing. Still, he put one hand on her waist and with the other lifted and took her hand from his right shoulder. He began to lead her in a medium-tempo foxtrot. They hadn’t broken their mutual gaze. Their eyes were almost on the same level. “We’re too young for this,” said Lewis. “Let’s get drunk instead.”

“Dance with me, I want my arm about you,” Teddy sang in an unpracticed voice that cracked a little with laughter. “The charm about you will carry me through to…”

Lewis laid his cheek against Teddy’s and danced her purposefully into the living room. “There’s liquor in here,” he said.

“Indulge me,” she said. “We’re characters in an old movie.”

“They drank whiskey in old movies,” said Lewis.

“Heaven, I’m in Heaven,” Teddy sang on, smiling but no longer laughing, leaning her head against his, feeling the satisfying intimate hardness of another human skull against her own, “and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak…”

“At least you can carry a tune,” he said. “It could be worse.” He turned his head and kissed her without breaking the dance.

“And I seem to find the happiness I seek,” she sang against his mouth as if she didn’t know it was there, “when we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.” Then she stopped singing; they stopped dancing. It should have felt far more odd than it did, kissing Lewis, but instead it felt like something long overdue and inevitable. He knows what he’s doing, Teddy thought, surprised. His mouth was firm and sensitive. She had not imagined it would be so; she had imagined he would be either overly enthusiastic with his tongue or that his lips would feel dry and uncommitted. Instead, his lips felt like something live and exciting against hers, dancing with her mouth; his tongue was barely there, tantalizingly. Their bodies pressed together warmly, with equal pressure, equal need. Suddenly she was so aroused, she could hardly stand up. She started to laugh again, out of giddiness and surprise rather than amusement. “Lewis!”

“I tried to tell you,” he said. “Now come to bed.”

In his bedroom, she clawed at his clothes. He stood, chuckling, helping her, while she undressed him. Then she stripped off her own clothes and they fell together onto his bed, naked and necking. The light coming in his bedroom window was bright and clear; she could see every gray hair on his chest, every small sag and wrinkle on his body, and she knew he could see hers, but they were both still slim and well shaped. Their bodies looked good together, like a matched set. They both looked so much better than she had expected. His thighs were well muscled, his flanks were lean, and his stomach was flat but endearingly slightly rounded, like a small boy’s. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and rocked him a little, looked into his blue, ardent, eternally humorous eyes, and was struck both by how well she knew him and how exciting this was. His skin against the length of her body felt warm and velvety; the hairs on his chest and legs rasped against her smooth skin, so she felt small, intensely pleasurable electrical shocks everywhere.

“Hello, sailor,” she said.

“Hello, beautiful,” he whispered back. “You should have done this about twenty years ago. I had a real erection to offer back then.”

She took his penis in her hand and looked down at it; it was just about firm enough for her purposes, and perfectly shaped. “Your cock is beautiful,” she said with joy. “You should have warned me!”

He was silent for a moment, his head pressed between her breasts, shaking with laughter. Then he looked up at her and said with a roguish smile she had never seen on him before, “I really should have warned you about my cock.”

She laughed, too, and then they had nothing more to say to each other for a long time.

“Yeah?” said Maxine into her cell phone, cigarette still in her mouth.

“Maxine Feldman?” said a youngish man’s voice she didn’t recognize.

“That’s me.”

“This is Dexter Harris from the New York Times. How are you today?”

“Ducky, thanks,” said Maxine.

“I wonder if you have time to answer a couple of questions?”

“Of what nature?”

“Concerning,” said the young man, “your brother’s famous diptych, Helena and Mercy. ”

Maxine clapped the phone shut and pitched it across the room. It clattered onto her worktable and lay still among the brushes like a dead beetle. She stumped into her bedroom and got dressed. It was eight o’clock on a Saturday morning, for God’s sake. She wanted to throttle that Claire St. Cloud with her bare hands. But of course it wasn’t Claire who had told; Claire, naturally, wanted to protect Oscar, too. They all did, or so it had seemed. The only people who knew about the painting’s real author besides the mousy little man who had hidden Maxine’s signature all those years ago were the four of them around that table the other day. And Ethan, of course, assuming he was capable of knowing anything.

And Katerina. Maxine’s hands paused on the buttons of her shirt. Well, if Katerina had told, there wasn’t much Maxine could say. She couldn’t deny that she’d painted Helena . Her signature would be easy enough to uncover. She had signed the damn thing because, of course, subconsciously she must have hoped that someday this would happen.

This was just the sort of nice little story that people loved to read about over their breakfasts. “Look here, John, some painter named Maxine Feldman passed off one of her paintings as her brother’s and it’s in the Met and no one ever knew! It says here it was because of a bet, and she promised him at the end of his life that she would never tell, but someone else told….”

Her cell phone tinkled its lilting little melody again. There was nothing she could say to these people; either she had to lie or break her promise to Oscar. She poured coffee, wandered into her studio, walked over to the window. The phone stopped ringing, but a few minutes later, as she was just finishing her first cup of coffee, it rang again. She ignored it again and rubbed Frago’s head; Frago always followed her everywhere in the mornings until he’d been given his walk, which also involved feeding him his breakfast, and then, sated and exercised for the day, he would subside into a comatose sleep under the table or on the couch. He looked up at her, his eyes liquid with yearning.

“I know,” she told him in the exaggeratedly gruff voice she always used when she spoke to him. “I know what you want. I read you loud and clear; you are not a mystery to me in any way.”

She got out his leash, clipped it to his collar, put her keys and wallet in her pants pocket, and left her cell phone behind.