The Great Man (24 page)

“About Ruby,” Samantha said. “You know, I didn’t mean to imply that her poetry is bad or anything. It’s actually pretty good. She even publishes it in literary magazines….”

Clearly, Samantha was itching to say more about Ruby, but Abigail knew from having sisters herself that this itch could never be scratched. The love and rivalry were too intertwined to ever satisfactorily express either. She imagined that Samantha was feeling guilty for her earlier remarks and now wanted to acknowledge the positive side of the sisterly equation, and she smiled inwardly at how well she knew this dynamic, how it never went away no matter how old you got. She was still exactly the same way with both of her sisters, even though one of them was dead now.

Abigail set the salad on the table. Marcus brought Ethan in then, freshly bathed and dressed in clean clothing, his wet hair combed, his face clean-shaven. Samantha stared at the sight of her half brother, tall and beautiful and impassive and pale, being led into the kitchen by an enormous, gentle black man.

“Here he is,” said Marcus. “Ready for his lunch.” He sat Ethan down next to Samantha and said to Abigail, as if no one else were in the kitchen, “See you the day after tomorrow, Mrs. Feldman.” He vanished without another word.

“This is Ethan,” said Abigail to Samantha. She set a plate of sliced cantaloupe on the table.

“Hello, Ethan,” said Samantha.

Ethan didn’t look at her, but his expression looked quizzical to Abigail.

“Ethan,” she said, sitting across from them, “this is your half sister, Samantha, and these are her children, Peter and Josephine.”

Ethan twiddled his left ear with his right hand.

“I think he knows you’re here,” said Abigail, spooning Niçoise salad onto her plate. “Is Buster hungry?”

“He’ll wake up when he’s ready,” said Samantha, smiling down at her son. “He’s very self-directed. He has a genius IQ, like Ivan, by the way.”

“Ah,” said Abigail. “So we both have special sons.”

Samantha plucked one wizened black olive from the tray. She put it into her mouth and chewed it as if it were medicine, then said, as if Abigail hadn’t spoken, “We don’t know officially, of course, since it’s too early to test him, but it’s obvious.” She kissed the top of her placid daughter’s head. “Jo will probably take after me. Mediocre in all things.”

“You never know,” Abigail said, fighting an urge to slap her. “Josephine might turn out to be the smartest of you all.”

Samantha dropped her olive pit into her empty beer bottle and said, “Thank you for inviting us over. What a delicious lunch.”

“But,” said Abigail with a mock Jewish-mother inflection, “you’re not eating anything.”

“I’ll eat when Buster wakes up,” said Samantha. She looked over at Ethan. “Ethan,” she said. She spoke a little too loudly for him, Abigail thought. “I’m glad to meet you finally. I always knew I had a brother, all my life, and I was always so curious about you. You look a lot like our father and my twin sister, Ruby. She’s your half sister, too.”

Abigail reached across the table and held a forkful of fish and potato to Ethan’s mouth with a napkin underneath to catch any spillage. He took the food, chewed briefly, and swallowed, his right hand still touching his left ear.

“When I was a little girl,” said Samantha, “I used to dream about you. You were very strong. In one dream, you picked up a Volkswagen Beetle and carried it down the street. And in another dream, you moved all my mother’s furniture around her house. She came home and saw you and said, ‘Ethan! What are you doing?’ and you smiled at her and walked out of the house; then she looked at what you had done and said to Ruby and me, ‘It actually looks better this way.’”

Abigail looked in consternation at Samantha. It had never once occurred to her that Teddy’s daughters had, as children, known about their father’s other child, but of course Oscar would have told the girls about Ethan, and of course they must have been strongly curious about him; she herself would have been insatiably curious about an unknown brother. “What an amazing dream,” she said.

“Ethan was my secret hero when I was little,” said Samantha, more softly now, to Abigail. “I know it sounds ridiculous. I used to daydream about him coming to rescue me when I got teased by another kid or was worried about a test. I pretended Ethan would come and beat up the other kid or take my test for me.”

Abigail shook her head. “My gosh,” she said. “Do you hear that, Ethan? Your little sister thought you would protect her.”

Ethan made a low thrumming noise in the back of his throat.

“He understands,” Abigail said with certainty.

“Really?” said Samantha.

“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.

Thirteen

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.”

“I want to torture you first,” he said.

She burrowed her face into the crook of his neck and they moved around her living room, their thighs and groins pressed together, moving with raunchy intent, breathing in unison. They had both stopped laughing. Teddy was swooning against him, liquid. They were like two wax figures joining together in the heat.

She had felt so different with Oscar. His body had been bulkier and more solid. Sex with him had been like wrestling with a big, hungry bear; she had always felt very small and fragile with him. Oscar had been blunt and carnal and boyish in bed. Lewis was built exactly like Teddy, aerodynamically sinewy; being with him felt incestuously kinky. He was inventive, ardent, almost feminine in the dexterous subtlety of his hands on her flesh, but the way he moved inside her was not feminine at all.

Remembering that now, craving it again, she stumbled a little in their dance. “To bed,” she said, her words half plead, half command.

“What’s wrong with right here?” he asked her. He let her go and, bending down, took off his shoes and socks, stepped out of his trousers, unbuttoned his shirt and took that off, too. Then he stripped Teddy’s dress off. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. She was barefoot. They were just about the same height; he was possibly an inch taller than she was. His hard-on pressed against her pelvic bone. She reached down and felt it and her eyes closed; her hand tightened around it.

“Even better than last time,” she said, breathless, trying to joke, strangely embarrassed by her own lust. “Have you been taking those pills?”

“No,” he said, “just the result of years of anticipation.”

He put his hands on her hips and held them still while he entered her, bending his knees slightly until he was inside her, then straightening up to his full height. She felt herself expand to take him in, then enfold him tightly.

“We fit perfectly,” he said, his eyes blazing blue, inches from her own.

She was speechless. They swayed to the music, rocking, arms around each other.

“I have no food,” she said.

“But you invited me for lunch.” He lifted her with a small grunt, her thighs in his hands, her feet crossed behind his back, and carried her over to the green velvet couch. Still holding her, he slowly sat and lay back on the couch so she was straddling him. “I may never eat again,” he said with his mouth on hers.

She was suddenly nervous about this new position, the shift he’d made so impetuously in their connection, suddenly protective of him in case it didn’t work. “Let’s just stay like this till we starve and they find us skeletons overgrown with cobwebs,” she chattered. “Actually, Benny might knock on the door sometime tonight if you don’t go out and send him home.”

“I drove myself,” said Lewis. He didn’t seem nervous at all, which thrilled her. “Benny is far away.”

She stretched along the length of him and felt the rasp of his body hair on her skin. Their bellies were pressed together; they both breathed for a moment, getting used to this.

“Mmm,” he said. “Now this I like.”

“Remember when I worked for you?”

“You were a slave driver.”

“I still am,” she said, driving him deeper into herself and resting her open mouth on his shoulder. Many pulses went by as they fucked each other hard.

“Aggh,” she said. “If I had only known before what this would be
like
…”

His voice was as easy as ever, right in her ear. “Oh ye of little faith.”

“Will you spend the night?”

“Fuck it,” said Lewis, “I’ll stay here till I die of sexual exhaustion.”

“Don’t talk about death,” she said.

More pulses went by in silence. Then she felt him shaking with laughter underneath her.

“What?” she asked, pulling back to look down at him.

“Death,” said Lewis. “What a joke.”

Teddy convulsed with a completely unexpected orgasm, which left her gasping with a residue of tears against his chest. She watched his slack-jawed, helpless face as he came.

They looked at each other.

“Look how perfectly beautiful you are,” he said. “You look about twenty-five years old.”

“I’m so hungry,” she said.

“You’re hungry?”

“I’m starving.”

“What should we eat?”

“I know you came expecting a home-cooked meal,” she said. “But I can’t move. There’s a new Peruvian place that just opened nearby; they left a delivery menu on my stoop yesterday.”

“I have a bottle of champagne in that briefcase, too. I meant to put it on ice before we got carried away. Should we call now and order up a feast?”

“Use your cell phone,” said Teddy. “I can’t possibly lift that heavy receiver right now.”

“Helpless thing,” he said.

She looked at him suspiciously.

“Just the way I like you,” he added, and got up. While he ordered food and opened the champagne, Teddy lay on the ancient bottle green couch and inhaled its decades of smells. How extremely odd, to be madly in love with Lewis. How extremely odd, to be lying here naked, inhaling the smell of her old couch and luxuriating in the memory of babies’ diapers changed, Oscar’s sweat, Samantha’s childhood vomit, Ruby’s high-school incense and pot, fur and dander from a succession of cats. How odd, to be calling out for Peruvian food. What was Peruvian food, anyway? And Teddy didn’t normally drink champagne, but right now she craved it. She was zooming inside, her brain zipping and popping. Funny, she had fallen in love this way twice in her life, and both times the experience was intensified by the knowledge that this could never be a whole love. The barrier with Oscar had been circumstantial, but the one with Lewis was temporal, and that was much harder to bear. If she’d made a different decision, she and Lewis might have had a long life together of fellowship and adventure…. Well, at least it wasn’t over quite yet. At least they had this now. There was no point to regret.

Lewis sauntered in naked with two glasses of champagne. She gazed at him through the pearly summer light.

“Hello, old boy,” she said.

“Drink your champagne, old girl,” he replied. “I hope you like steak with eight different kinds of starch.”

“I’ve never heard of anything so perfect in my life,” she said. “I’ll answer the door when they come; I’ve got a bathrobe somewhere.”

“They’ll think you’re a senile old shut-in.”

“They’ll think I’m somebody’s abandoned great-grandmother.”

He landed next to her on the couch. They floated together in the sea of her living room, drinking and eating, talking and listening to music, until much later, when they resurfaced and found themselves cross-legged, naked, looking at each other in the dim yellow light from the streetlamp outside.

“Your house is crammed as full of stuff as mine is,” said Lewis, surprised, looking around him as if for the first time.

“I was hoping you’d never notice.”

“Do you ever find yourself perversely thrilled by accumulating so much junk?”

“No! It’s just been this way since Oscar died. I haven’t had the energy to keep on top of it all. Frankly, I’m horrified at myself for it.”

“It comforts me,” said Lewis. “As death approaches…”

“You’re obsessed with death!”

He smiled. “Not anymore. Suddenly not.”

“Well, you talk about it an awful lot.”

“Yes, but now I feel it there in the abstract. Until recently, it was ever present and painful as an open wound. Now it seems far off and unreal.”

“What’s made the difference?”

“You,” he said. “My fixation with death was caused by loneliness.”

“Even though you had Ellen,” said Teddy slyly.

“Teddy, you are evil. I have never felt less lonely in my life. Let’s go to Tuscany and rent a big house with no stuff in it and live there in sexual bliss for a while. Will you? Or anywhere else you want.”

“Oh, yes, why not, a villa in Tuscany will do,” said Teddy, feeling joy rising in her gorge like a bubble of helium gas. “Although Tuscany is such a cliché. Let’s leave all these piles of old magazines behind and just…run off together.”

“I can hardly believe it,” said Lewis. “I can hardly grasp my luck. I never thought this would happen.”

“Yes you did,” said Teddy. “You never gave up for a second, and that’s why we’re here. I owe you one.”

“You can never repay me,” he said, “but I look forward to seeing you try.”