Abigail opened her apartment door as Henry came down the hallway. She let him in right away. “Let’s sit in the kitchen,” she said before he could apologize for being late. “I’ve got Oscar’s favorite lunch, and he always wanted to eat lunch in the kitchen. He said it was haimish.”
Henry followed her into the narrow, somewhat cramped kitchen, at the very end of which was a breakfast nook, whose table was set and laden with food.
“He spoke Yiddish, then,” he said.
“Well, but you have to understand, he spoke it ironically. He always made fun of American Jews of our generation who tried to sound echt, as he called it, again ironically.”
Abigail fluttered over to the fridge, aware of the three bottles of beer in there left over from a visit from Maxine months before. Maxine had brought a six-pack of Mexican beer and drunk two herself, while Abigail had sipped carefully at about one-eighth of one and poured the rest down the sink later.
“Would you like a beer?” Abigail asked Henry, trying to sound as if she said this every day.
“Sure,” he said with enthusiasm as he slid into the kitchen nook and sat next to Ethan, who was humming to himself in a tone so low, it was almost like Mongolian throat singing, and who seemed not to notice Henry’s presence at all. Henry got out his notebook and, there being not one inch on the table that wasn’t covered with food or dishes, tucked it under his thigh and put his pen behind his ear. He took a swig of the bottle of Tecate Abigail handed him.
Ethan stopped humming and rocking. Without looking directly at Henry, he sent a gentle, fluttering hand over to touch Henry’s shoulder.
“He’s saying hello,” said Abigail. “Help yourself to lunch; it’s from Zabar’s.”
“Do you keep kosher?” asked Henry.
“Well, I’m Conservative,” said Abigail, “so no, not strictly, but Itry.”
“Do you take care of this place all by yourself?” he asked her.
“Oh God no,” she said. “A girl cleans it once a week. I use the word clean very loosely. Since Maribelle died, it’s been a big problem. No one seems to know how to dust moldings or get behind couches. Maxine told me to hire a Filipina, but they all seem to be taken, or else I just don’t know how to find one.”
Henry took a daub of whitefish salad, a piece of cheese, a few lumps of potato salad, a piece of rye bread. “This looks great,” he said.
“He hated lox and cream cheese. And bagels. He said it was all too slippery. The texture of the bagels, slippery. Lox, slippery. Cream cheese, ditto. He called them ‘the Jewish Unholy Trinity.’”
Henry laughed. Abigail sat down, afraid she was babbling. She spooned whitefish salad onto some bread and took a big bite to shut herself up, then did the same with another piece of bread and put it onto Ethan’s plate. Ethan, without looking at it, immediately lifted it to his mouth, touched it to his lips, then set it down again.
Henry took another swig of beer. “I wonder,” he said through a gentle burp, “whether you remember those photo portraits of schoolgirls Oscar took in high school. I went out to Brooklyn College yesterday and found them, and at least half of them were of you, or someone who looked a lot like you.”
“That was me,” she said, startled. “That’s right, I’d forgotten about those things.”
“I didn’t realize you were high school sweethearts. I thought you met in college.”
“We weren’t,” said Abigail. “I barely knew him in high school. Frankly, I hardly remember him shooting me, but now that you mention it, he did come around me a lot with a camera. I thought he was very funny; I knew he was out of my league romantically, so I didn’t even bother playing coy with him. When he asked me on our first real date in college, when I was a freshman and he was a senior, I was very surprised, but of course I went, but even then I felt there weren’t many sparks between us, so I didn’t bother getting too worked up about it.”
“But he really liked you,” said Henry.
“He kissed me good night, sure, but to me it felt friendly and polite. We didn’t become, as they say, romantically involved until I was a junior and he was living in the Village…. In my mind, it happened by default, since we were hanging out together so much, so I tried not to expect anything from it. The girls were all crazy about him, and none of them took his thing with me seriously. They kept buzzing around even when I was there.”
“What did you and Oscar do on your dates?”
“We went and heard a lot of jazz, which I hated, and he thought it was the funniest thing, to hate jazz. One day, he asked if I would marry him. We were out at Coney Island, on the roller coaster, of all places. What a way to propose! I said I’d think about it, I was so surprised. Inside, I was just singing. I always thought we were mostly pals, and sleeping together was just something our crowd did back then — to be different from our parents, I guess. Well, we really were just pals, but we were great pals, and it turned out that’s the kind of wife he wanted.”
“I had the strong impression,” Henry said, “seeing those photographs, that he was in love with you even in high school. I could see it in how he kept the camera on you. And you were so—”
“If you say pretty, I’ll laugh,” she said.
“I was going to say ‘comfortable with yourself.’”
She shot him a shrewd look. “Oscar liked to say he married me because he knew he would always feel he could be fully himself with me. Not the most romantic reason, is it?”
“How long did it take?” Henry asked, writing doggedly in his notebook. “Before you accepted?”
“My sister Rachel said to me when I told her about it, ‘He’s a good man.’ Rachel is one year older than I am, a psychiatrist in Great Neck, or was — she’s retired now. Even back then she knew I didn’t have it in me to be a professor, which was what I always said I wanted to be. I always loved to read, but I didn’t do so great in college. I didn’t like to think that way about books; I just liked reading them. All that analysis gave me a headache. So Rachel told me to marry Oscar because she said I’d be much happier that way. I knew she was right; plus, I loved him like crazy. The next day, I told him the answer was yes. He seemed relieved, which shocked me…. He acted like he’d been really worried I’d say no. Ethan,” she said suddenly to her son, “let me do it for you.” She picked up his piece of bread and held it to his mouth. Ethan took a snapping bite and began to chew savagely, staring sideways at the ceiling.
“I imagine he broke a lot of hearts when he married you,” said Henry. He checked his watch by tilting his wrist slightly and stealing a quick glance.
“Of course not,” said Abigail quietly. His glance at the time, along with the question, had hurt her feelings. She tamped down her disappointment. It wasn’t Henry’s fault, it was her own. In the old days, she wouldn’t have minded. Maybe she had spent too much time alone with Ethan. She never should have gone to so much trouble to get her hair done and all that; now she felt foolish.
“Actually,” she said, her voice steady, “it broke some sort of tension, a question hanging in the air between Oscar and all the girls he flirted with. He was off the market, but that just made him somehow more interesting to them, so they wanted him even more. And they got him, or part of him anyway. I’m just conjecturing. I don’t know this for a fact.”