The Great Man (3 page)

“Of course,” he said. “After Oscar died, you sold the Calyer Street house to a young couple with three children. I went there. They let me go in and look around, but of course they’ve completely renovated it.”

“Don’t tell me,” she said, closing her eyes. “I don’t even walk on that street anymore if I can help it.”

“He could have left you a painting or two,” Henry prompted.

“Oscar owed her,” said Teddy. “It was as simple as that.”

“I wonder,” said Henry. “I wonder if it’s really that simple in your heart of hearts. But I can’t really ask you that….”

“Listen, Henry,” she said. “Oscar was my beloved mate. I never had any other or wanted one. But after forty-odd years, the word
beloved
takes on some fairly perverse complexities. You’re probably too young still to know. To be truly loved is to be…known, of course, which also implies despised and even hated. I’m trusting you to see the love in everything I’m saying, including the deli-man comparison. I let you into my house, fed you, gave you a nap, and told you the truth. I have no idea whether or not this was a colossal mistake. But I can’t do otherwise. You have a lot of power.”

“It isn’t a mistake to tell me these things,” Henry assured her. He took some salad and forked a slippery dressing-coated burgundy lettuce leaf into his mouth. Fresh lemon juice, coarse black pepper, and olive oil mingled on his tongue. He stared at the salad on his plate.

“I grow it myself,” said Teddy, who had been watching him closely. “Not directly in Greenpoint soil, don’t worry; that’s so contaminated, it would make you grow another head. Look, over there in tubs by that corner near the fence, an unusual and rare lettuce most people haven’t heard of: Les Oreilles du Diable, ears of the devil. It’s excellent, isn’t it? Nutty and robust. I bought the seeds for the name. I always splurge on interesting-sounding seeds. Thank God I’m healthy…. Most people my age spend everything on medications; I buy good wine and rare seeds. Something symbolic there…maybe out of Greek mythology, seeds and wine…” She took a dreamy sip of wine, a bite of lettuce. Alcohol softened her. It blurred her edges, smoothed her face.

Henry watched her without self-consciousness, half-drunk himself.

They finished their salads, drank more wine. With warm peach crumble and vanilla ice cream, Teddy served espresso and little thimbles of
poire
liqueur. The sky darkened; the sounds of children in the streets tapered off as they were all called inside. Henry leaned back a little tipsily in his chair. They had talked about a lot of things, but he’d written very little in his notebook.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“What I’m doing wrong. With my wife. Tell me how to get her to…”

She didn’t laugh; she understood immediately what he was getting at. “Have an affair,” she replied gently. “A passionate affair. It doesn’t even have to be literally sexual. An affair of the heart, it could be. Daydream about someone else obsessively.”

He didn’t laugh. “That’s how to make my wife want me again? Sleep with someone else?”

“Or just think about sleeping with her. But really think about it.”

“I should get going,” he said.

“You really should,” she told him. “It’s getting late; your wife will be annoyed. Even if she takes care of the baby, she still wants you home.”

“I help,” he said.

“Where did you park?”

“Right out front.”

“Well, you’re not driving home to—where do you live, Westchester or Connecticut?”

“Astoria,” he said. “In a tacky little frame house with aluminum siding.”

“Sounds just like mine,” she said. “Well, you’re not driving home tonight. I’ll call you a cab.”

“I can drive after a few glasses of wine.”

At the door, she handed him a container. “The leftovers,” she said. “For your wife. So she won’t be upset that you’re so late. Or less upset, anyway.”

He took the package from her and went into the night. Teddy stepped out onto her front stoop and watched him get into his car, which was indeed a Volvo, but an old one. She waved as he drove off, watched his taillights disappear.

Two

Teddy and her friend Lila had a standing breakfast date: every Saturday morning at eight. Today they were at Lila’s. On the way over, Teddy had stopped at the little Mexican market that lay between their houses and bought four of the fresh buns they always had on the counter in a plastic box, not too sweet, not too soft, four for a dollar. Lila had heated them up and served them with blackberry jam, butter, Jarlsberg, fruit salad, and coffee. They were sitting on Lila’s shaded back deck, looking at her yard. A large-leafed vine sprawled on a trellis, heavy with the kind of perfectly shaped, cascading bunches of purple grapes Teddy had always associated with the Calvinist Dutch masters: symbols of bacchanalian wantonness and drunkenness. Lilac bushes, tea roses, rhododendrons, and hydrangeas, in splotches of purples, reds, pinks, and oranges, grew against the back brick wall. On the cartoonishly green lawn, under a little pergola, were a white wrought-iron table and matching chairs. Two docile little pear trees rose near the house, thoughtfully blossoming in the spring and bearing fruit in the fall. An equally thoughtful pine tree provided shade in one corner of the yard, under which Lila had had built a playhouse for visiting grandchildren.

Teddy had not been born to end up in a neighborhood like Greenpoint: She had chosen to live here. In 1952, during her sophomore year at Vassar, her English expatriate financier father, Herbert Groverton St. Cloud, the untitled younger son of a nobleman, had lost everything all at once on a bad investment, a South African diamond mine swindle he should have been too shrewd to fall for. He’d sold his Fifth Avenue town house and all his various possessions to pay his debts, and his only child had had to leave college abruptly. Almost penniless, Teddy had camped out with her father at an old family friend’s house and enrolled in a secretarial course, then found work as a secretary for an entertainment law firm and got herself an apartment. Her father, her only family, had died shortly afterward of a heart attack, leaving her almost nothing. She’d zealously reinvented herself as a working girl, settling in Greenpoint in the late 1950s. Originally a nineteenth-century rough-and-tumble riverfront shipbuilding town at the northernmost tip of Brooklyn, just across the river from midtown Manhattan, it had been populated largely by immigrants, Italians and Irish first, then Poles.

Lila also lived here by choice. In 1985, shortly after Sam Scofield, her first husband, had died of colon cancer, she had sold the apartment in Gramercy Park they’d owned since 1968 and bought an old Queen Anne brownstone on stately, tree-lined Noble Street, just a five-minute walk from Teddy’s smallish old brick house with its tiny back garden on the more heavily trafficked, down-at-the-heels Calyer Street. Back then, this neighborhood had been seedy, run-down, so the house was a bargain, and after Lila had had it refurbished and reappointed, it was as elegant as any house, anywhere.

Teddy had always liked coming to Lila’s house, which was the sort of place she’d been born to inhabit, the life she’d lost. Coming here always reminded her how much happier she was as a “single working mother,” lackadaisical housekeeper, and server-forth of imaginative cookery on mismatched chipped dishes than she would have been as the inhabitant of such a house, with its daily maid, grand piano, heirloom dishes, groomed back garden, and state-of-the-art appliances. She loved Lila’s house both because it was comfortable and luxurious and because it reassured her that she didn’t regret her fate.

Teddy had put the Calyer Street house on the market immediately after Oscar’s death; she’d found the house on India Street that same afternoon at the Realtor’s office. The unmarried old owner, Homer Meehan, the last surviving descendant of the family who’d bought it when it was built in the 1870s, had become too crippled to live alone and so was headed for an old-age home and was selling his family house. He left behind odd touches, like the Chinese-cardboard cartoon faces in the lav, ballpoint pen–scrawled maunderings upstairs on the wall of the smaller of the two bedrooms (her favorite: “It’s useless to give up and useless to persevere, so take the path of least resistance with your eyes and mouth shut”), and photos of wild animals mating or about to mate, cut from
National Geographic
s and pasted in a free-form collage on the wall of the tiny boot room leading out to the backyard. Teddy had left all this handiwork untouched, partly out of her heartbroken reluctance to start over in a new place, partly out of an appreciation for weirdo eccentrics.

“He seemed too earnest at first,” Teddy said to Lila, slathering her second bun with jam.

“Earnest isn’t bad,” said Lila. She rightly suspected that Teddy sometimes secretly chafed at her own earnestness.

“Not bad,” Teddy said. “Just a little boring.”

There was a brief, pointed silence. Lila nibbled her roll, then set it carefully back down on the plate. She was a large woman, but she still felt and behaved like the sylph she had once been. Her gestures were miniature, girlish; she wore a gauzy dress that reminded Teddy a little of the “frocks” they had affected when they were freshmen and sophomores at Vassar and had worshiped the campus phantom of the young Edna St. Vincent Millay. Now (more than half a century later) she wore a blue shawl and house slippers with her gauzy dress, but she still looked girlish. Tendrils of her curly pure white neck-length hair stuck to her cheeks and neck in the humidity. Her dress had long, filmy sleeves; Teddy knew she was embarrassed by her arms, which were more sagging and wrinkled than the rest of her skin, which had aged very little. She also knew that Lila took special pains to appear young whenever one of her sons was coming over with the grandchildren; Joe was coming today, her baby, her favorite. Teddy also did the same with her daughters, tried to seem young and alive when she saw them, tried to hide the signs of age as best she could; as mothers, they didn’t want their children to think of them as decrepit, needy, without the ability to help them. But Lila didn’t have to worry. At the moment, she looked like a fat, hot, beautiful baby.

Lila Emerson had been a scholarship girl from a rural Maine family, the youngest daughter of a Presbyterian minister, thirsting to soak up every drop of academic bohemia she could absorb. She’d been instantly intrigued by her roommate, Claire St. Cloud, whose father was rich and English and whose mother had died when Claire was a small child, like the parents of certain heroines of James, Austen, and Brontë, not to mention Frances Hodgson Burnett, Lila’s favorite writer as a girl. Claire was outspoken, extremely smart without being an egghead, confident, unapologetically sexual. Lila was shy, bookish, reserved, and alight with the desire to flee her cage, itching for mischief. She had seduced Claire into being her friend by letting her glimpse hints of the person Lila might become and tempting her with the power to coax that person into being. It was Lila who had given Teddy her nickname; Teddy was half girl, half boy, Lila liked to say, so the androgynous toy-bear name suited her. In homage to Millay, Lila had sewn them both dresses in shades of fawn, ecru, pastel yellow—sleeveless for spring and long-sleeved for winter—which they’d worn with ballet slippers or Greek goddess sandals, bead necklaces or arm bracelets, depending on the season. They had danced on the lawn in them, burbled off to classes, run up the stairs of their dormitory to their room, and, a few times, stripped them off each other.

Teddy had matter-of-factly, with frank lust, initiated these occasional trysts, and Lila was too hot with her own need for subversiveness to resist, or to pay full attention to what her body was doing. Although it wasn’t really so subversive when you thought about it; women’s schools had always been full of affairs between girls who went on to have husbands and children. But at the time, it had seemed to Lila’s puritanical New England soul like the wickedest of transgressions. And their schoolgirl sex, innocent and laughing as it was, had cemented her undying passion for Teddy. When Teddy had to leave Vassar in the winter of their sophomore year, Lila had suffered a mild nervous breakdown and almost had to take a semester off.

“More coffee?” asked Lila.

“But then in the end,” said Teddy, “I found him…sympathetic. I don’t know why. Maybe because he lives in Queens….”

Lila refilled Teddy’s coffee cup. Teddy was such a reverse snob; she wasn’t going to touch that comment about Queens.

“The funniest thing, though—I had a call two days ago from another would-be Oscar biographer. Henry has a rival, unbeknownst to him, I’m sure.”

“
Another
biographer called you?” Lila asked, instantly jealous in spite of herself. She reached into her fruit-salad bowl and pulverized half a cherry with her molars.

“He’s coming over for lunch today. Why would two people want to write a biography of Oscar?”

“I can imagine that a lot of people might!” said Lila.

Lila had been flabbergasted and hurt that Teddy hadn’t seemed even remotely put out when she’d had to drop out of college. Instead, she’d seemed galvanized, even excited, by her sudden reversal of fortune. Lila had had to admit to herself that being a secretary had agreed with Teddy in a way student life hadn’t; she had drifted through her three semesters at Vassar without much ambition, but over the years, then the decades, she’d stayed at the same law firm, working for a succession of lawyers she bossed around and whose schedules, kids’ birthdays, file contents, and correspondence intricacies she knew better than they did. They trusted her completely to run their lives. When one retired, the lawyer who got her next felt honored with a great treasure. She had retired at sixty-five, to much fanfare; she’d become a legend at the firm, a force to reckon with. “You’ll have to get past Mrs. St. Cloud,” people said when they wanted a favor from her boss (that Mrs. was nothing but camouflage, an honorarium of sorts, of course). Or, if they were in with Teddy, they showed off their right to call her by her nickname. After work, she went home on the subway to her Calyer Street house, where she was likewise ruler of the roost. She cooked excellent meals and was generous and loving in her way, but she raised her girls firmly and without sentiment, and whenever Oscar came around, she sent them off to bed so she could take care of the insatiable, all-consuming needs of the great artist with undivided, clear-eyed attention. She argued with him, laughed at him. She lit fires and made midnight suppers and entertained him with stories about the lawyers she worked for, one of whom represented him, and their clients, some of whom were his fellow artists, many of whom were famous. He ate and laughed and drank and smoked and opined and argued and listened; then he took Teddy off to bed and left before the girls awoke.

Whenever, during the sixties and seventies, Lila had managed to sneak away from husband and children and have an evening or afternoon to herself, it was Teddy’s house she went to, Teddy’s life they talked about—Oscar, his tantrums, his other women, the hilarious poetic notes he left on his pillow for Teddy in the mornings. Lila always felt both revitalized and soothed after a visit to the Calyer Street house, with its crazy old icebox and funky furniture, Oscar’s sketches pinned up haphazardly over the fireplace, filled year-round with the ashes left over from their firelit dinners. She breathed easier there, spoke more loudly, smoked cigarettes and took a snort or two of whiskey, listened to whatever records Oscar had brought over—Miles, Mingus, Monk, Sun Ra, Coltrane, Louis Prima, Harry Partch—as she ate the food Teddy cooked and put in her two cents if Oscar was around and there was an argument afoot. At the parties they gave, Teddy competed with Oscar for the limelight, teased him in front of people, disagreed openly with his pronouncements about his rival painters. Oscar seemed to get a huge kick out of Teddy’s jabs and jousts and never seemed to notice that Lila drank in everything he said and yearned to lick him all over like a big lollipop. If he ever looked Lila’s way at all, he treated her like a lesser adjunct of Teddy, like Teddy’s dimmer domesticated sister.

While Teddy, without having graduated from college, lived out Lila’s youthful dream of hobnobbing with artists and living an unconventional life, Lila had capitulated to her own tame destiny, which even her Vassar degree hadn’t altered. She had planned to be a novelist, and had moved to Manhattan to pursue this plan, but then she promptly acquiesced to her parents’ unspoken but ironclad expectations and married Sam Scofield, a young English professor at NYU, at twenty-two. By thirty, she’d found herself the mother of three small boys. Until recently, she had been “nothing but” a wife and mother, and now she was “nothing but” a twice-widowed grandmother. She had always, through all those years, tried very hard not to compare exciting, sexy Oscar to faithful, gentle Sam, who stayed up late grading papers, who had tenure and was good at what he did but was never ambitious enough to publish, network, push himself out of his comfortable groove. She sustained and tortured herself with her own suppressed ambition, the idea that someday she would write the novels she’d been born to write.

But shortly after Sam’s funeral, she’d been introduced by mutual friends to a wealthy retired engineer whose wife had also died recently, the kindly but not-quite-there Peter Williams, and a little later on Lila had married him, almost out of the habit of having a man around. He had lasted ten years with her before he, too, gave out, and during their marriage she had found that he, like Sam and the kids before him, took up all her time. Now that everyone was gone, she kept trying to start a novel, but no matter how many times she tried to get a narrative going, she discovered that the fire of inspiration she’d tried to keep burning in the pit of her stomach through decades of ministering to others seemed to have gone completely out.

“Well, if either of these biographers wants to talk to you, are you available?” Teddy said, throwing Lila a bone; of course she knew Lila had always secretly lusted after Oscar and also secretly judged Teddy for being what Lila perceived as rough on him. But neither of them wanted the slightest crack of a schism between them or could afford one; even though they both had children and grandchildren and other friends, in a nearby daily sense, as someone to count on, Lila was Teddy’s mainstay, and vice versa.