The Great Man (19 page)

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.”

“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.”

“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.