The Great Man (5 page)

“‘Oscar’s mistress’?” Teddy repeated. “Good God.”

“What do you think she wants?”

“I think she just wants…power. What she always wanted. I’m sure it’s about that bet with Oscar. I’ll call her, don’t worry. I’d better go, Lila. I have so much to do in the backyard, and I have to get ready for this guy, what’s his name, Ralph Washington.”

“Don’t go yet,” said Lila. “Have some more coffee.”

“It’ll be fine, Lila,” said Teddy, following Lila into her kitchen and somewhat reluctantly accepting another cup of coffee. “Do you want to come and have lunch with us? The kids are supposed to come over, but I know Samantha will cancel at the last minute, and anyway, there’s plenty of food.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because she doesn’t want anything to do with Oscar or his biography. She’s mad at him; Ruby’s mad at me. So complicated with kids, even when they’re almost forty. Jesus, if I’d known, I might have opted out of the whole circus.”

“No, you wouldn’t have, Teddy.”

They went back out to the porch and sat down again and looked out over the garden. Teddy noticed that Lila’s hyacinths were flourishing; last summer they had moped and drooped.

“‘They call me the hyacinth girl…’” Teddy recited dreamily.

“I know, aren’t they thriving this year? So mysterious, plants…” Lila replied just as dreamily.

“You know what I miss the most?” said Teddy with a sudden jolt of erotic nostalgia. “Being in a man’s house, a man you’re about to fuck for the first time. Looking at the things he has, his masculine things…God, that was exciting. Having him make you a drink, put on music that he’s chosen, a man you really want with all of yourself. Oscar had a hot plate, a small refrigerator, a mattress on the floor. He had an old record player and a portable radio…. Everything was spattered with paint. Such a cliché of an artist’s studio. I remember teasing him about it, accusing him of spattering everything with paint so women would swoon over him. God, Oscar…I felt like I was going to throw up if he didn’t touch me. He played the radio, but I was sick to my stomach with sexual excitement—remember that feeling?—so I don’t recall a single song, but I remember the sound of Billie Holliday’s voice, which I’d never liked much, but it didn’t matter. It was early fall and the windows were open, and we sat facing each other on his mattress and ate the spaghetti with canned sardines he’d made and drank warm vodka, passing the bottle back and forth between us. That was the best meal I’ve ever had in my life…. We got drunk, but we weren’t drunk…. It was the way he smelled, the look in hiseye, the way he asked me questions and paid attention to my answers, really looking at me. We knew we were going to devour each other the minute we’d wiped the sardine juice from our chins, and it made the meal taste so good and last forever…. I seriously thought I was going to explode with hot juice and electricity.” She stopped. “But why me? Of all the women who wanted him. He was married, famous; I was his lawyer’s secretary…nobody.”

Lila considered this question. Her date with Rex seemed anemic in comparison. What did they have to offer each other that was in any way biography-worthy?

“Of course you,” she said.

“I never asked him for anything,” said Teddy. “Never asked him to leave Abigail, never asked him for a cent. When I was sick, I told him not to come around. When I gave birth, you brought flowers, not Oscar.”

“And you never resented it,” Lila prompted.

“I preferred it that way. I wasn’t pretending. I loved Oscar. I loved who he was. I wouldn’t have changed a thing about him, and I saw him so clearly…. That’s why he came back to me, even with all the girls and models and married women who chased him. He always came back to me, and he told me everything. I wasn’t being a martyr…. I was never jealous. I always felt a man was lucky to have me and if he was smart, he’d see that, and if he didn’t, he was an idiot. Arrogance, I guess it is. It served me well, though, because my lack of jealousy was another thing that kept him interested. And I knew him better than he knew himself. He was such a pathological narcissist. Telling him what he was thinking was the equivalent of a blow job for him. He made me feel brilliant for understanding him, made me feel as if I were a genius.”

She laughed and looked out at the yard. Lila kept quiet. Teddy had never talked like this before about Oscar.

“I can’t bear that he’s gone sometimes,” Teddy said. “I sometimes literally feel that I can’t bear that I’ll never see him again. Am I romanticizing Oscar?” Her voice was high.

“Not at all,” said Lila.

Teddy reached over and took Lila’s hand. Lila started a little; Teddy wasn’t the touchy type. She rarely hugged anyone, and although they always exchanged a mutual peck on the cheek to say hello or good-bye, it was generally more out of form than feeling. Their brief sexual past was there between them, of course, but it was light-years away from where they were now. Teddy’s hand tightened around Lila’s.

“Isn’t it strange,” she said, “to be at the end of your life, to feel you have so much more life in you…. But you won’t get it. The body gives out. I feel as if I were ready to start all over with someone, all of a sudden after missing Oscar for so long…. This feeling reminds me of youth. But youth is gone.”

“What about your old boss Lewis?” asked Lila.

“Lewis,” said Teddy. “What about him?”

“He’s been in love with you for decades. He’s rich and handsome and intelligent and so nice. And he’s not married to anyone else.”

Teddy waved the thought away, looking inscrutably amused. “I’m so happy you have a date with a nice suitable man.”

“What’s gotten into you?” Lila said warmly. “This isn’t like you at all. You’re usually so stoic…. It’s good to hear you talk like this.”

“It’s these biographers,” said Teddy. “Stirring the pot.”

“You know,” said Lila, “you never really grieved for Oscar; you just went on after he died. It’s good you’re saying all this now.”

“You mean I didn’t grieve publicly. How could I? I wasn’t his wife.”

“You were. You were his true wife.”

“Well, I was certainly faithful to him. One narcissistic baby-man was enough. And I could share Oscar, but he couldn’t share me. That was the deal.” Teddy and Lila both laughed.

As Teddy was leaving Lila’s house, she heard the phone ring, heard Lila answer it and cry, “Ben!” Her eldest son, who called her every day. Lila’s three sons all loved their mother uncomplicatedly. They had always felt sure of her devotion to them and returned it in kind. It served Teddy right: She had girls, twin girls, difficult, complicated, mercurial girls who felt for their mother a strong tumult of love and hate and many other things. Teddy had had Oscar, Lila Sam, but Lila had had sons, Teddy daughters; Teddy had had independence, Lila security. It was always a trade-off, no way around it. If you were a woman, you could never have everything.

Three

When Teddy got home, she spent an hour or so in the backyard pruning her gnarled wayward rosebushes and rooting around in the tiny shed under the kitchen porch, sorting through packets of seeds and old plastic potting containers, trying to find the rosebush food she was sure she’d bought months ago but hadn’t used yet, and it was already mid-July; the summer was half over. She had forgotten how nice it could be back here, despite the limp rows of the neighbors’ laundry overhead and rank sewagey breezes that blew up from the Newtown Creek a few blocks away. The heat of the day hadn’t yet penetrated the deep shade of the giant old fir tree in the yard next door. The shadowy air had the feel of a grotto, somewhere underground and undisturbed. The back wall of the house undulated with a lapping underwater green, sunlight refracting off the spreading trees. She cut an armload of the salmon-colored roses planted long ago by some member of the Meehan clan, big loose blooms, and carried them into the kitchen. Her bare arms prickled with scratches.

She laid the roses on the counter and stood on the threshold between kitchen and dining room, listening with her whole body to the silence.

The telephone rang. She jumped at the sudden noise, then went into the kitchen and answered it. “Hello?”

“Teddy,” said Lewis Strathairn, her old boss, Oscar’s longtime lawyer. “It’s me.”

“Oh, hello, Lewis!” she said. “That’s funny, Lila and I were just talking about you. How are you today?”

“I’ve got a touch of a summer cold,” he said, “but other than that I’m all right.”

The subject of Lewis’s health was an old joke between them; Lewis was never sick, but he was constantly convinced that he was about to be.

“You don’t sound like you have a cold,” said Teddy.

“Just a tickle in the back of my throat. Teddy, I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” she said, realizing that it was true as she said it, although she hadn’t thought much about him since the last time she’d seen him, a couple of months before.

“Can you come into town today and have lunch with me? I can send Benny for you.”

Lewis lived on East Seventy-seventh Street in an apartment Teddy found cluttered and antiseptic. Benny was the driver of his Town Car.

“I can’t, Lewis,” she said. “I’m sorry, I have Oscar’s biographer, or one of them, coming for lunch.”

“So Oscar’s biography is finally getting written.”

“Actually,” she said, “there are two of them.” She stretched the phone cord and went to the sink and filled a blue crackle-glazed vase with water, then put the roses into it. They looked pleasingly blowsy and decadent.

“Two,” Lewis said.

Teddy had first gone to work for Lewis in 1957. Back then, he had been the balding, affably witty husband of a B-movie actress, who left him in 1979, predictably, for the director of a film she was starring in. Since then, he’d lived alone in his bachelor digs, his torch for Teddy burning bright. Teddy loved and respected Lewis and enjoyed his company tremendously, but his passionate adoration of her had always served, ironically, as a barrier to further intimacy; the strength of his desire created a hazy miragelike force field around him. She couldn’t see him clearly enough to desire him.

“That’s right,” said Teddy.

“I’ll call you again soon,” said Lewis. “I do miss you.”

“I’ll be here,” she said, and they rang off.

She set the vase of roses on the dining room table. Looking through the front window of the living room, she could see kids hanging out, half-grown pups of various shades of brown. Oscar had loved all the earlier incarnations of these kids. He’d been fascinated by their music, their clothes, their indeterminate ethnicities and aggressively fake Puerto Rican accents, fake because they’d all been born right here, which he knew because Oscar was what used to be called “a nosey parker.” He had prowled the blocks around the Calyer Street house, befriending the Polish store clerks up on Manhattan Avenue, stopping to talk to young mothers, snooping around, eavesdropping. Teddy remembered how he’d perched on her living room couch, staring out in the window like a big cat, gossiping with Ruby about the passersby with the nicknames he’d invented for them. “There goes Melanie,” he said about a young mother with melon-size breasts. “She’s talking to Smoking Man. Hey, it looks like Bambi’s pregnant. Did you know that? Wonder who the father is! Maybe it’s Dingbat. Think Dingbat knocked up Bambi? I saw him sweet-talking her a while ago.” Ruby had chimed in with whatever information she could muster up about the neighbors, beaming whenever he praised her for giving him something juicy.

It was quarter after one, and Ralph Washington was coming at 1:30. Teddy went back to the kitchen and put the pot of lentil soup on a low flame to warm, then set the table for four. She threw the cheese biscuits together fast, because they tasted better if they were made quickly and lightly, without any fuss about measuring, and put them in the oven, then washed fresh-picked devil’s-ear lettuce. No point in trying to tidy up for Ralph if Henry had withstood this squalor; she wanted to be fair. And although her house was shabby and as neglected in its way as the potting shed, any attention she gave particular corners now would only make the general disheveledness that much more obvious. She lacked the energy to mop or dust or tie old magazines into recycling bundles on a regular basis anymore. Well, an artist’s biographer would presumably expect his subject’s mistress’s house to be unconventional.

When the doorbell made its
blat-blat
sound, she was just pulling the biscuits out of the oven. She went to open the front door. The black man who stood on her front stoop sported a straw boater hat like a baritone in a barbershop quartet in the Roaring Twenties. He had on gold-rimmed glasses, black jeans, and a short-sleeved white button-down shirt. He carried a canvas shoulder bag so full, it bulged. His skin shone with blackness and a fine sheen of sweat.

“May I help you?” she said, cursing herself for not looking through the peephole first before opening the door. These fanatics came around sometimes. Oscar used to encourage them, argue with them, lead them on, but those days were over.

“I’m Ralph Washington,” he said. His cheeks were high and apple like.

“Of course you are,” Teddy said, flustered. “Come in.”

“Thank you,” he said, and stepped over the threshold. “You must be the famous Claire St. Cloud.”

“Famous? I hardly think so.”

“That’s the province of the biographer,” he said. “History, in other words, makes people, not vice versa.”

“Quite a sense of purpose you’ve got,” she replied. So mistaking him for a Jehovah’s Witness hadn’t been entirely her own fault.

“You could call it that,” he said without smiling.

She gestured toward the sofa, for lack of anything better to do with him. He perched on the sofa and removed his hat, revealing a set of short, neat dreadlocks sprouting from his head like a multitude of little horns.

“May I?” he asked, placing his hat on the ottoman in front of him.

“By all means,” she said with a deep foreboding at his courtly manners and overarticulated speech. She felt a disinclination to sit across from him in the cramped little living room. It was much too hot to keep up with this politeness much longer.

“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for many years, Miss St. Cloud,” Ralph said.

“Oh, call me Claire, please,” she said. “The girls aren’t here yet, but we can go ahead without them; they both said they weren’t sure when they’d get here. Lunch is almost ready.”

“Of course,” he said, his face alight with an obvious desire to do and say the proper things.

“Why don’t you have a seat at the table,” she said. “Might as well get this show on the road. I have to do a few things, so please help yourself to wine and antipasti and make yourself at home in the meantime.”

She went back to the kitchen, stirred the soup again, arranged the biscuits on a board, dressed and tossed the salad, filled the water glasses.

“Now,” she said, going back into the dining room with a tray, “I imagine you’d like to get right down to business.”

Ralph looked startled. He held an olive in midair. He looked at it as if he were trying to decide whether to put it back or eat it. He kept it suspended there and said, “We don’t need to get to work right away, Miss—”

“Claire,” she repeated, sitting down across from him. “So where would you like to begin?”

Ralph hesitated a moment, then set the olive on his appetizer plate and reached over and switched on the small tape recorder he had set on the table in front of him. “Well, one thing I’d really be interested to hear you talk about,” Ralph said, “is where Oscar felt his work fit into the grand scheme. He wasn’t friends with de Kooning, Guston, Pollock; he wasn’t a joiner; he didn’t fraternize. Do you think his insistence on the figurative, his obsession with the human form, his refusal to capitulate to the prevailing passion for abstraction, allowed him an independence at the same time as it isolated him? Which is not to say he was entirely isolated; look at Lucien Freud, John Currin…. They’re his artistic offspring, wouldn’t you say? His figurative, if you’ll pardon the pun, children.”

“Are you taping this?”

“Do you mind?”

“Oscar always said,” she told him, dishing out some soup into a bowl, “that Lucien Freud was a pompous, overrated no-talent without a smidgen of technical skill, and that his people all looked like badly made meat dolls. John Currin, he found a sensationalistic fool, a cold void. He hated Currin’s women so much, he said he wanted to slash his canvases. This was, of course, when Oscar was an old man. But when he was younger, he was neither isolated nor independent; he always had plenty of people around him who believed in what he was doing. As for those ‘New York boys,’ as he called them, as if he didn’t live here himself, he felt he didn’t need them. Abstract Expressionism was a wet dream, embarrassing to look at, he always said: grown men spurting like virgin boys in their sleep. Guston, at least, had the sense to switch to those dreary little cartoons. Guston was the only one he had any respect for; we met him a few times, had dinner with him and his wife, Musa, once in the city, visited their place in Woodstock another time. I don’t think Guston liked Oscar’s work too terribly much, although they got on well enough, but Oscar respected Guston’s later work. He liked the smoking kidney-shaped heads very much.”

“Well, I know he hated Pollock,” said Ralph.

“Pollock,” said Teddy, smiling at Ralph’s obvious anticipation of Oscar’s reproduced diatribe. “Oscar almost had a stroke if anyone started praising Pollock. He thought Pollock was a retarded child who dribbled all over himself, who had no control of his bodily functions, all spray and spurt, like a bad dog.”

Ralph laughed almost ferally, showing a lot of white teeth. He wasn’t bad-looking really, although he wasn’t her type. There was something a little moist about him; her impression of him as wet-lipped on the phone hadn’t been too far off the mark. She wondered what steely depths of driven egomania undergirded his studious eagerness, the ghosts from the past he had to shove to the back of his mind as he got on with his mission.

She splayed one hand on the table and moved it up and down so it resembled a tarantula, the gesture Oscar had made when he was worked up. “The female figure was the only real subject as far as Oscar was concerned,” she told Ralph. “Cheese and oysters and bottles of beer were all very well if you were a medieval Dutchman and they were imbued with morality and social context. Landscapes had their power, their beauty, of course they did. But the female body was the most beautiful thing on earth, the most powerful and mysterious of all subjects and objects, animate or inanimate, the most familiar, the most earthly, and the most sacred. He used to chant it: “‘mother, queen, goddess, bitch, whore, saint, virgin, milkmaid.’”

Teddy drank some wine, tried a bite of a cheese biscuit. She had bought the cheap cheddar at the C-Town, where she bought all her cheese now. She missed the exciting, expensive cheeses she’d hand-selected every week from her favorite Manhattan shop before her commute home on the subway, with its big cut wheels, its tangy smells of milk fat and good mold. But these biscuits weren’t bad at all.

“And do you think,” Ralph asked, the words surging forth as if they’d been dammed up for years in his head and were finally being released into the air, “that the reason he’s not as famous as he should be is that he refused to ‘join the gang,’ so to speak? He didn’t hobnob at the White Horse or the Cedar Tavern. He didn’t go to their openings. He deliberately spurned their dealers and gallery owners. Clement Greenberg had a vendetta against him, and he didn’t seem to care. He essentially sat out the dance after the abstract expressionists’ big party.”

“You’re certainly obsessed with this so-called isolation. Oscar had a party of his own; who needed theirs?”

“That’s true,” said Ralph. “And now there’s Lucien Freud and John Currin to prove it. Tell me Oscar didn’t influence them both tremendously.”

“Lucien Freud. Lucien Freud. Oscar couldn’t wrap his mind around how that man avoided becoming a laughingstock. And he said he wouldn’t touch one of John Currin’s menopausal drones and booby freaks with a cattle prod. He called him ‘the modern-day Antonio Villapardo.’”

“I’m not familiar with that name,” said Ralph bemusedly, writing it down in his notebook to look up later.

“Exactly my point. That’s what Oscar said people will say about Currin in a little while.”

“Was he a Renaissance Florentine?” Ralph asked. “I thought I knew them all.”

Teddy chewed an olive, shaking her head: Antonio Villapardo was Oscar’s made-up scapegoat. This was her little private revenge on Ralph for talking about Oscar as if he were a maladjusted stick-in-the-mud. And for his stiff, academic diction, which had annoyed her since he’d arrived. She would have bet anything it was his adult overcompensation for having grown up a very bright but underprivileged and probably fatherless black kid uncomfortably out of place in the ghetto, then just as uncomfortably out of place at Harvard or wherever he’d gone to school on full scholarship. Actually, he struck Teddy as someone who wouldn’t ever feel comfortable anywhere, and this made her more sympathetic to him, but it was too late to tell him the truth about Villapardo.