Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“Of course he does,” said Abigail, holding more food to Ethan’s mouth. He ate it immediately. “He’s hungry today,” she added. “Physical therapy always works up his appetite.”

“So what does he make of all this?” Samantha asked. “My being here.”

“I have no idea,” said Abigail, giving Ethan another bite. “I don’t know what he makes of anything.”

“Is it lonely, living here with him?”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘lonely,’” said Abigail.

“Was he always like this?”

“He seemed normal for the first couple of years. Then suddenly we noticed that he didn’t seem as responsive and emotional as other kids. He was diagnosed when he was Peter’s age. Buster.”

Samantha tightened her arm around her sleeping little boy and looked down at him. “Dad said Ethan didn’t talk but that he had a strong presence. I knew it annoyed him, how loud Ruby and I were, so I thought that meant he loved Ethan more.”

“He wasn’t much of a father to any of you,” said Abigail. “Around here, he ignored Ethan. I think he was a little afraid of him.”

“I always thought Dad was a selfish brat,” said Samantha. “The way he had to have my mother’s undivided attention. And I guess I also judged him for having two families. That seemed selfish, too.”

“He was the most selfish man who ever lived,” said Abigail.

“Did you love him?”

“Is your husband selfish?”

Samantha looked startled. Then she said slowly, “Well, yes. He is extremely possessive of me and demanding of my time and attention.” She hesitated, still thinking, then said, “But it feels different, being the one whose attention he wants, rather than the one whose attention he can’t deal with. Being the center of his attention rather than being pushed away by him.”

“Now you see,” said Abigail.

“Well, the difference is that my kids won’t have to grow up hating their father for never being around and for monopolizing me whenever he is.”

“They can hate him for other reasons,” said Abigail with a little laugh.

Samantha shook her head, surprised.

Lewis disembarked from the far side of his car like an astronaut on the moon emerging from his spaceship, leery of the inhospitable atmosphere, uncertain of the effects on his movements of a radically different gravitational field. Teddy watched through her front window as he came around the car and moved gingerly toward her house. He carried a briefcase. He was wearing brown trousers and a blue button-down shirt. His bald head gleamed in the bright sun. He looked trim and handsome. She could hardly breathe. It was so odd; she had known him so well for so long, but he seemed to her now, on her homey Brooklyn street, full of mystery and potential, as new as Adam freshly made.

She had invited him over for some sort of meal, but she hadn’t cooked anything, and she couldn’t even remember whether there was anything much to eat in the kitchen. She hadn’t been hungry in several days. She felt a nauseated elation that prevented her from eating. She had lain awake the past several nights, too excited to sleep. When she looked in the mirror, she was amazed by how young and flushed she looked, how alive. Talking to Lila on the phone earlier, they had laughed together about how they were both in the same state. It reminded them of Vassar, freshman year, when they’d both fallen in love over the same weekend with a pair of Brooklyn boys they’d met on the Staten Island ferry during a daring overnight jaunt — Teddy’s idea — to New York City.

Teddy had insisted that they buy a bag of pears and apples and ride the Staten Island ferry all night in honor of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Recuerdo,” which went, “We were very tired, we were very merry—/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.” But the notion of buying Millay’s apples and pears had fallen by the wayside and turned into a bottle of scotch instead. Teddy and Lila had sipped it from the bottle in a brown paper bag, feeling very daring, wrapped in their merino wool coats, sitting on a bench looking out at Manhattan.

Tom and Albert were inside the ferry, where the rows of benches were, playing jazz with an upturned hat at their feet. Tom played trumpet, Albert trombone. Teddy and Lila had wandered tipsily in to watch them play and had, of course, caught their eyes. During a break, the boys approached the girls and began chatting them up. They were not much older than Teddy and Lila, but they seemed decades older in terms of worldliness and experience. They were from Bay Ridge, but they shared an apartment now in Greenwich Village and played in a jazz combo. Teddy had staked a claim right away on Tom, the rougher, older, more profane and aggressive of the two, so Lila had gotten Albert, his younger and milder brother. The foursome had sat outside on the deck all night long, drinking, talking, and, finally, necking in their Teddy-ordained pairs, till the sun came up “dripping, a bucketful of gold.” Then the boys escorted the girls by subway up to Grand Central Station, treated them to breakfast at an Automat, and then Teddy and Lila had caught an early train back to Poughkeepsie and sat cuddled together, staring dreamily out the window at the gentle pink-and-blue morning river, the trees flashing by.

For a week or two afterward, Teddy and Lila had been in this same state of jittery, euphoric exhaustion, waiting for the dormitory telephone to ring. It never did, but by the time they realized it wouldn’t, they’d moved on to other youthful obsessions.

Teddy opened the door before Lewis could ring the doorbell. “Welcome to Oz,” she said, laughing at him. She pulled him into her house. In the living room, he set his briefcase on the coffee table and took a deep breath.

“Want a tour?” she asked.

“All I can see right now is you,” he said. “Sorry.” They exchanged dazed, elated looks; then she melted against him.

“I am so excited,” she said into his mouth, her voice rippling with laughter.

“I have been on fire since you left my house,” he said.

“So have I.”

“Can this happen to people as old as we are?”

“I had no idea.”

“I had a slight idea.”

She pulled back to look him right in the eye. “What’s in the briefcase, Lewis? Surely you’re not planning to work while you’re here.”

He released her reluctantly and opened the briefcase. “Do you have a record player?”

He handed her a few albums in their original battered cardboard covers. “I brought music.”

She took them, chuckling, and looked through them. “The Lovin’ Spoonful!” she said. “Oh! The Stones. That skinny little English boy sounds just like an old black man in the Delta.”

She took Beggars’ Banquet out of its sleeve and set it on the turntable. This she did with some difficulty; she hadn’t operated a record player for years, since Oscar was alive, but more importantly, she was dying to touch Lewis again. The music started: “Please allow me to introduce myself…” Teddy was swamped by a memory of how hot and raw and alive everything had seemed back then.

“I must have been in my mid-thirties when this came out,” she said.

“Remember when I took you to that Stones show at the Academy of Music? I got those tickets from a musician client who thought I would pass them along to someone younger…” Lewis laughed. “We were the oldest people there.”

“By far,” said Teddy. “Back then, being in your thirties was middle-aged, remember?”

Lewis moved toward her as if through heavy warm water, slid one arm around her waist, and took her hand in his.

“Why don’t we just go to bed,” she said. “And fuck.”