Teddy smiled at him, appreciating the phrase. “We all adore our babies beyond reason; it’s the way we’re made. And I didn’t say I thought all women harbor a small amount of dislike for their children; obviously, I couldn’t possibly know that.”
“Abigail Feldman talked at length to me a few days ago about Ethan,” he said. “How it feels to love someone who can’t express love back…She talked about how pure her love for him has always been, untainted by resentment of any kind.”
“That’s love, Henry. You’re not making the distinction. He’s so deeply autistic he’s locked up in his own mind; it’s impossible to dislike someone who isn’t fully there. Dislike requires presence.”
“She was very open with me. You are, too. I appreciate that. I had expected it to be much harder to get you all talking.”
“Then you didn’t know Oscar. He always got us all to spill everything, hold nothing back, so we’re well trained.”
“In that case,” said Henry gingerly but with a daring expression, as if he thought he was about to cross a line, “since the subject has been brought up, Maxine suggested to me that the reason Oscar stayed with you was that he felt displaced. That when Ethan was born, of course all Abigail’s energy and time went to her son. Maxine suggested that Oscar replaced her with you.”
“Did she say that?” asked Teddy, hoping she sounded calm; she’d never liked Oscar’s sister one bit, and knew it had always been mutual. It enraged her that this version of her affair with Oscar might make it into Henry’s book in any form. “I’m not surprised that Maxine would draw such a crude, wrongheaded, idiotic conclusion about why Oscar loved me.”
“It’s understandable that someone might draw such a conclusion…. It seems like elementary psychology, doesn’t it?”
“I was right,” Teddy snapped. “Those moths are eating into your brain. Burrowing into the wet gray folds and gouging tunnels.” She stopped and looked hard at him, something working in her expression. “I bet,” she said, “you’re one of those failed painters who think they can redeem themselves if they pay homage to Saint Oscar. And I bet you’re projecting your own sexual frustration onto Oscar.”
Henry coughed, probably with surprise.
“Here, have some melon,” she said. “Trust me, the prosciutto is some of the best in Brooklyn.”
“You were right about the wine, I’ll give you that,” he said.
“I’m always right,” she said. “It would be much easier for both of us if you just accepted that now and proceeded accordingly. Oscar came to me, in short, because I was exciting. I always liked Abigail, by the way, when I met her at openings and so forth, but I never thought she had much juice. Oscar married her to please his family. He took up with me to please himself.”
“Fair enough,” said Henry.
She imagined he was probably thinking he should appease her, or else he was feeling sorry for her for just being Oscar’s mistress all those years, and never his wife.
“Fair enough,” he repeated.
Nettled, she turned to the window to look out at the pale blue Brooklyn sky, crisscrossed by wires and leaf-filled branches.
“This prosciutto is perfect,” Henry blurted through a mouthful of cantaloupe. “I was going to say ‘delicious,’ but I was afraid you’d stab me.”
“It’s such a precious word,” said Teddy. “No one should use it to refer to anything but food, and even then, with caution. My dearest, oldest friend uses it to describe her grandchildren, the summer morning, a cello sonata on ‘Evening Music,’ and the way her bare feet feel on the sands of Shelter Island. I can’t believe she’s still my friend, but we were college roommates, and then we raised our children together.”
“Lila Scofield,” said Henry, taking another piece of melon.
Teddy laughed. “You are diligent,” she said. She stood there, her hands on her hips, looking at him. She wore a straight ankle-length off-white skirt, a long-sleeved white crew-necked T-shirt, and white sneakers without socks. In these plain and timeless clothes, she had a fresh, oddly modern angularity, a wiry strength. Her bones, revealed now by the paring down age seemed to confer on some women, were long and elegant, her chin-length hair shot through with a glinting silver that only heightened her aura of indestructible glamour.
She sat opposite him with her own glass of wine. “Finally you’re writing something. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
He covered his writing with his hand as if it were his naked crotch. “I’m not a failed anything, by the way,” he said in a clipped voice. “I have a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley. I got my M.F.A. from UC Irvine. To make a living, if you can call it that, I teach creative writing at Columbia. A few years ago, I published my first novel with Random House. It sank to the bottom of the pond without a trace, but I’ll write more of them, and at least it saw the light of print. I’ve also published another biography, of Greta Church, an obscure but very brilliant poet no one’s ever heard of but who should be in every canonical anthology. She died a penniless morphine addict in Chicago in 1932 at the age of sixty, living in a rented room with a hot plate.”
“She died like a male artist, then,” said Teddy. “How’s her work?”
Henry quoted raptly, looking down at the table, “‘The light of winter stands/ On the silent road, waiting to kill me/ With a cold shot to the heart,/ Tapping its booted foot/ Its gray gun aimed and cocked,/ And I am pierced to the utter root.’”
“Good Lord,” said Teddy, laughing. “‘The utter root.’ Almost as bad as delicious.”
“You were a secretary for how many years?” Henry asked tightly.
“Oh, you think I make fun of these so-called great artists because I’m a never-was? Maybe I could never take myself seriously enough to muster the kind of ego and sense of self-mystique you need to write ‘the utter root’ with a straight face. Come to think of it, that didn’t help her either at the end, did it? At least I have a house and I’m not a junkie.”
“She uses the word utter complexly,” Henry said. “She’s talking about her own writing. Her ‘utter root’ is her tongue. The winter light is the clarity of self-knowledge that comes with age. She could hardly write at the end; she was too beaten down by poverty and addiction and the inescapable knowledge that it was all her own fault. Read my book; you’ll see what she meant. I defy you to read my biography of her and then laugh at that line.”
“You’re a romantic,” she said. “Aren’t you? You love artists; you think they’re better than the rest of humanity. Like modern-day saints. So my reference to Saint Oscar wasn’t far from the mark. They suffer for humanity. They absorb our failings and weaknesses, transmogrify them, reflect them back to us in the light of truth and beauty.”
“Why are you psychoanalyzing me? I’m here to interview you about Oscar.”
“You can’t ‘interview’ me ‘about Oscar,’” she said. “I can tell the truth about Oscar and tell you my incidental observations about you. Take it or leave it. And my guess — not that you asked, but you deserve it after that crack about my being nothing but a secretary and therefore unqualified to criticize Great Art — is that your wife is very distant now that she’s in thrall to new motherhood. I’m guessing that her interest in sex is next to nothing, and who can blame her? And I can tell you what you’re doing wrong and how to get her to want you again, but you have to listen to what I say and not interrupt, and, most of all, not come back at me with your starry-eyed wishful thinking about what was going on. Oscar was the furthest thing from a genius I ever knew. He was a very good painter with a shtick and a way with women. He knew how to stir up a scene, how to create a buzz before anyone ever heard of buzz. But you should go back to his paintings and really look at them. Really look. What you see through all those moths’ wings is a slapdash crudeness in his brush strokes, a boyish swagger in his adulterous success. If you look at him clearly without needing to see him a certain way, you’ll see that he was like a grocery man with three barrels of pickles, an apron, a roll of waxed paper, and a nose for excellent meat. He painted like a grocer; fucked like a grocer; lived and died like a grocer. No more and no less. The art of the delicatessen.”