There was a brief silence, during which Teddy ran a hand through her hair and Henry somewhat peevishly turned the stem of his wineglass between forefinger and thumb slowly against the tabletop.
“Which is a worthy art,” Teddy said, “do not misunderstand me, but it doesn’t qualify one for sainthood. Women were his real obsession, more than painting. Painting was just an outlet for him, like the store is for the deli man. He saw women, he knew women, the way a deli man knows smoked meats: He knew how to pick them, weigh and touch and price and display them. His brush strokes were crude and he painted too many paintings and he cheated on his wife for more than forty years with me but couldn’t leave her and couldn’t give me up, not that I ever wanted him to do either. He waffled between two women and two families, the good Jewish wife with the damaged son and the bad shiksa mistress with the perfect daughters. He was a deli man at his utter root.”
“I can’t believe you’re debunking him,” said Henry.
“I knew you’d be a calf-eyed hero worshiper,” she said. “When oh when is Oscar going to get a real biographer?”
“You are not always right, Teddy. In fact, at the moment you’re wrong on all counts. Not only am I not sexually frustrated at all, but my wife will not stop hounding me for sex. She complains that now that I’m past forty, I can’t keep getting it up all night long anymore. We’ve been married eight years and she’s just getting hungrier.” His nostrils flared defiantly with the force of this wishful fantasy. “Twice in one night should satisfy any human. She’s a she-wolf.” He took a deep breath. “She’s a witch,” he added.
“She’s human all right,” said Teddy. “She’s forty?”
“Forty-two.”
“She’s how you were at eighteen.”
“That’s what she tries to tell me. But when I was eighteen, I didn’t have a girlfriend. I had no outlet for my horniness, and even if I’d had, I would have had no perspective on it. Women are lucky: They get it when they can use it. Men get it when they’re dumb as sheep. And then it ebbs away.”
“Nature is very cruel,” said Teddy. “Women get it when they’re on the edge of irrelevancy, sociobiologically speaking. One last great burst of white light and you’re a dwarf star, humpbacked and withered. Although women don’t wither anymore like they used to. But I bet Greta Church was withered. Morphine addicts always are.”
“She was a skeleton, actually.”
“And pierced to the utter root. I know what the utter root is, and it’s not the tongue, Henry. And incidentally, I think it’s all hogwash, every word you just said about your marriage. Maybe before the kid was born she wanted sex all the time, but I will bet you anything that she doesn’t anymore; she’s got a new newborn helpless love, and you’re feeling very left out.”
His eyes shifted briefly to the floor. “Spoken like someone who knows from experience,” he said.
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning that maybe Maxine’s theory about you and Oscar is true.”
She cast him a sharp look from the corners of her eyes. “In time, if you pay attention, you will learn that it’s not.”
“Do you live here alone?”
“Alone as a stone. My daughters call and visit, of course, but it’s complicated. Ruby loved her father. She looks like him. She reminds me of him. I think there’s a part of her that can’t forgive me for not making him marry me and be a real father to the girls and live with us instead of coming and going at odd hours, so that she hardly ever got to see him, and when she did, it was never on holidays, rarely on her birthdays. Of course she blames me for this, not him. Samantha was always my baby; she’s loyal to me. She looks like me. It’s funny how Oscar and I had twins, one in each of our images. It’s so fitting, somehow, and that they’re both girls, given his passion for women. Interesting, too, that his only male offspring is emotionally unknowable, a cipher, when all of Oscar’s women are outspoken as hell. Anyway, Samantha adores me, but she needs to keep some distance from me, too…. I imagine she’s unconsciously resentful at some perceived neglect on my part; she has accused me, on several occasions, of loving Oscar more than I loved her and Ruby. That isn’t true at all, although I certainly liked him more.”
“Liked Oscar more than your children,” Henry repeated.
“He was a man,” Teddy said, “and they were little girls. I always knew the difference. I never let my children dominate my life the way you parents do now with your children; they take over your lives!”
“My kid has not taken over my life,” said Henry.
“It’s all wrong,” she said. “I set limits; I had my own life. I wanted them to learn that even if you have children, you can have a life that doesn’t include them. I think therapists now are encouraging adult children to view this sort of old-fashioned parenting as neglectful, which makes them into victims of their parents and martyrs to their children. Kids need to know their place in the scheme of things, like dogs. And children, of course, leave you in the end…. It’s your contemporaries who stay, spouses and old friends. That’s who you have in your later years. Oscar’s death was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. My friend Lila of the delicious grandchildren is my most loyal and stalwart companion here at the withered root. She lives nearby. We know each other better than anyone else alive. Of course I can hardly bear her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You are half right.”
“I’m always half right,” he said, and caught her glance. They smiled at each other, suddenly battle-weary. A silence fell between them. They felt they’d earned it, and settled simultaneously into their chairs. Teddy drank some wine; Henry ate another chunk of sweet melon wrapped in salty prosciutto. The sounds of the backyards and streets mingled peacefully, the late summer afternoon, the humid air.
Henry swallowed his mouthful and yawned, rubbed his eyes. He’d drunk two large glasses of wine without knowing it. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in two months.
“You can nap on the couch,” said Teddy. “I’ll wake you when the meal is ready and you can ask me your questions over supper. I know you have a whole numbered and annotated list of them. Questions, subquestions, a, b, c, asterisks and arrows. You strike me as that sort of person.”
“Actually, I am that sort of person, but I wouldn’t mind a nap,” he said.
“There’s a very comfortable old couch in the living room,” she said, gesturing toward the front of the house. “Supper should take about half an hour.”
Henry lay fully stretched out, shoes off, on Teddy’s long green velvet couch, which smelled of dust and years-old incense. When he awoke half an hour later, the hot early-evening sunlight slanted along the hallway from the kitchen. He heard a pot lid clanking and water running in the kitchen and smelled something cooking.
He found Teddy in the kitchen, stirring a pot on the stove. “It’s almost ready,” she said without turning around. “You can wash up in the lav; the door’s just to my left.”
The “lav,” like the rest of the house, was in a comfortable state of semicleanliness, with deft cartoon faces drawn on cardboard glued to the wall in haphazard rows.