Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“I believe you…” said Ralph with gloomy resignation.

Abigail reassured him again that this would all be to the good, then got him off the phone.

She went to her computer, put on her glasses, and checked her E-mail. Abigail loved the computer; the chatty immediacy of E-mail, the instant gratification of Google, the Internet’s global intimacy. It made her feel less lonely to play on-line Scrabble with live people and chat with them late at night sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. She loved looking at gossip Web sites, on-line newspapers, young people’s startlingly intimate blogs. This plastic box contained the entire world, allowed access to the goings-on of so many people without having to expose herself. Often, when she was on-line, whole swaths of time went by. She found this both alarming and unavoidable.

She had three E-mails, two of which were spam, one of which was from Ralph.

“I Give Up,” the header said. The message read in its entirety: “Dear Abigail, we have a deal! Ralph.”

Well! That was fast; they had just hung up the phone a few moments before. Then she saw that it had been sent just before midnight the night before, when he hadn’t seen the article about Helena yet.

Abigail thought about this for a moment. Then she hit the reply icon and wrote back craftily, taking his E-mail at face value despite all the new information: “Dear Ralph, I am very glad to hear it. We will hammer out the details later. Abigail.”

Then she went to the Google page and typed in “Nicoise salad recipe,” found one that looked plausible, and printed it out. Then she typed in “Chilled cantaloupe soup recipe,” looked at several, chose one, and printed that out, too. She felt a surge of rare domestic inspiration, an unfamiliar excitement at being about to prepare from scratch a good meal for important strangers.

The moment Marcus arrived, Abigail put her shopping list into her purse and went out to the elevator. When she came out of her cool, dark building onto the street, the morning air was already staggeringly hot. She blinked a few times with the shock of it, then made her way over to Broadway, feeling like a slow, lumbering, half-blind rhinoceros. In the grocery store, nothing looked familiar to her. Had everything been replaced with new brands? She saw strange fruits and vegetables that seemed to have just been invented. She filled her cart and paid for everything, then started back to her apartment. The bags were almost too heavy to carry; she hadn’t thought about how much a cantaloupè weighed. She thought about getting a cab, but the whole thing seemed like so much trouble, it daunted her just to contemplate hailing one. The sunlight glinting off windshields and metal and broken glass hurt her eyes. On West End Avenue, she set the bags down on a stoop for a moment and sat; it was undignified and unlike her to do this, but she was sweating and her arms were tired. She should have thought ahead, should have ordered from FreshDirect. Oh well.

She wiped her forehead on the back of her hand, sat there until the hot pulse calmed in her wrists and temples. Then she pulled herself to her feet and managed to get herself and all her groceries home. The cool, dim air of her apartment felt welcoming and safe; she was so glad to be home, and she felt as if her jaunt to the store had been a metaphorical pilgrimage, a difficult journey with some high, imperative meaning. She hoisted the bags onto the kitchen counter, then went to see how things were going with Ethan and Marcus.

She found them in Ethan’s room. Ethan lay on a mat, and Marcus was helping him through his leg lifts. Abigail was always amazed at how rigorous these exercises were and how well Ethan was able to do them. Marcus was a big believer in the therapeutic benefits of exercise, and he had convinced Abigail several years ago in her initial interview with him that this would help Ethan more than anything else. And he had been right: Ethan’s mood swings had stabilized; his sleep was better.

“How is everything, boys?” she asked with a cheer she didn’t feel.

“He’s in a good mood today,” said Marcus, who always seemed to be able to divine things going on in Ethan that even his mother couldn’t. Marcus was a large, sweet black man who had told Abigail he had eight children at home. He seemed much too young to her to have any, but she knew that the older she got, the younger everyone else seemed. Marcus’s head was large and round, and his face gleamed with sweat and goodwill. He didn’t seem entirely human.

“Glad to hear it,” said Abigail. She backed out of Ethan’s room and went to her quiet, dark bedroom to lie down for a little while. Her bed was broad and comfortable; she lay on top of the bedspread with her shoes on. She intended to lie there for five minutes, then get up and make lunch, but when she awoke, her pillow was soaked with sweat, her hair was damp, and her mouth was dry. She sat up, befuddled. The clock said it was nearly noon. She had been asleep for two hours. She leapt up and, patting her head to smooth her hair, rushed to the kitchen. She stood there blinking for a moment, trying to orient herself, then sat down in the breakfast nook and pored over the recipes, trying to get her mind around how she would do all those things in time for Samantha’s arrival in half an hour. Picturing herself from an aerial perspective, she had an image of herself as a rumpled old woman in a dull apartment with a weird son, mussed hair, and nothing good to eat. Meanwhile, Samantha’s mother cooked exciting food, always looked glamorous, and lived in an interesting house; Abigail had always suspected this. She started to weep with self-pity. This was extremely unlike her. She shook herself, dried her eyes on a napkin. Of course this was just silly, irrational anxiety. She was nervous. That was all. There was nothing to be afraid of: This was Oscar’s daughter, after all, Oscar, whom Abigail had known as well as she knew herself.

When the doorman called to say that Samantha was on her way up, Abigail had managed to cut the cantaloupe in half and get the scrubbed potatoes in some simmering water. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand and went to the door.

“Hello,” she said, opening it, squinting at the figures in the brightly lit hallway. “I’m Abigail Feldman. Please come in!”

“Thank you,” came a woman’s voice. “Come on, Buster, let’s go.”

Abigail led them back to the kitchen and gestured to the breakfast nook. “Please sit down,” she said. “Oh, shoot! What do I have to offer your kids to drink?”

“Oh, I brought stuff for the kids, don’t worry,” said Samantha. She stood in the center of the room, a tall, rather ungainly young woman with flyaway dark hair and a baby riding on her hip, a little boy clinging possessively to her legs. She looked like a less remarkable, more pragmatic version of Teddy. She was painfully thin and seemed harried and tense.

“It’s really so nice to meet you finally,” said Abigail, oddly at ease now that she saw who Samantha was.

“Oh,” said Samantha, “thanks for inviting us. We can’t stay too long, don’t worry.”

“I was just in the middle of cooking lunch,” said Abigail. “Sit down. Would you like…” She regarded her, thought for an instant. “A beer? I think I have one or two bottles in the icebox.”

“Would I like a beer,” said Samantha with a longing little laugh. “God, would I. But I’m breast-feeding, so I better not.”

“I’ve read on-line that a little beer is good for breast milk,” Abigail said, feeling protective toward this gaunt, unhappy creature. “It’s got B vitamins or something.”

“My husband would kill me.” Samantha sat on the breakfast-nook bench, settled the little boy next to her, rummaged around in her enormous bag, and produced a small box of apple juice with a miniature straw protruding from it, which he began sucking on aggressively. “Can I help you cook?” she asked then, looking up at Abigail, suddenly bright-eyed.