He stopped writing, looked up. “Why didn’t Oscar paint portraits of you? He obviously loved having you as a subject in those photographs.”
“I wouldn’t let him,” she said, wiping Ethan’s mouth with a napkin.
“Why not?”
“I didn’t like how it made me feel. I had to be quiet and try not to move while he looked at me. Some painters talk while they paint, and maybe he talked to his other models, but I could feel myself disappearing. I told him to stop and walked away, and that was the end of it. Later he asked why, and I tried to explain, but it was the one thing I think he never could understand. The real reason was, when he painted me, it was one of the rare times with Oscar when I felt—” She stopped talking abruptly. How could she be revealing these things? She was a private and dignified person, or at least she always had been, until now. She had been about to say that it was the only time Oscar made her feel like a purely sexual object, and she hadn’t liked that feeling at all.
The telephone rang then, and with relief Abigail got up and went out to the hall and picked up the cordless phone from its bay. “Hello?”
“Abigail,” came Maxine’s harsh voice. “Can you come down here this afternoon? That horrible Claire is coming to talk about something, and I think you should be here.”
“Claire!” said Abigail.
“Yes, I know,” said Maxine. “I need you to be whatever it’s called in duels, the person who hands the pistol over, then carts off the body or escorts the victor from the scene, whichever.”
“A second?” said Abigail. The last person she wanted to see was Claire, but she was not in the habit of standing up to Maxine. “What is this all about, Maxie?”
“Eccch, it’s these biographers,” said Maxine.
“One of them is here right now,” said Abigail.
“The black one or the white one?”
“The white one,” said Abigail. “Why is Claire coming?”
“Because I sent a note to her best friend. They’re both coming at three. Can you get here at a quarter of?”
“Why did you send a note to her best friend?”
“I want to explain all this in person. I don’t know whether Oscar ever told you about this, but if he didn’t, I can imagine that you’re going to need a little time to adjust to the news before she arrives.”
Abigail pinched the bridge of her nose between forefinger and thumb. She wanted to say, So there’s some big secret that I don’t know about but that you, my dead husband’s former mistress, and her best friend are all in on that you’re going to drop on me fifteen minutes before I have to protect you from her? Hell no!
“Gosh,” Abigail said instead. “Like I said, Henry Burke is here right now. I’m not sure I can get away.”
“Well, if you can’t, you can’t,” said Maxine in a tone that suggested that if Abigail couldn’t, she was a terrible person. “Anyway, I have to go.”
Abigail hung up the phone and went back into the kitchen. She was shaking.
“I’m so sorry, Henry,” she said with a thundercloud in her chest. “Where were we?”
He was peering through reading glasses at the old leather-bound diary of Oscar’s she had loaned him the week before. “Let’s see,” he said. “I had a couple of questions about June 1984. His childhood friend Morris Treitler totally falls off the radar screen after June seventeenth. There is no other reference to him anywhere in Oscar’s diaries or calendars. Did something happen?”
“Yes, but you’ll have to ask Moe about that yourself, because Oscar wouldn’t tell me, but look out, he’s an unreliable windbag. He lives down in SoHo, not too far from Maxine. Speaking of which.” She blew out air through her nose. “That was Maxine on the phone just now. She asked me to come down this afternoon. I’ll need to leave in about an hour.”
He looked up at her. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “That’s no problem.”
“Are you sure?” she said. “I know you blocked out this afternoon to work on the 1980s.”
“We can get as far as we can and then finish another time,” he said. “I can give you a lift if you’d like. I drove here.”
“Oh, no, I’m sure it’s out of your way.”
“I honestly don’t mind.”
“Well,” said Abigail, “gosh.”
About an hour later, after Abigail had put the remnants of the lunch away and cleaned up and discussed nearly a year of Oscar’s life day by day while Henry filled many notebook pages with jotted notes, Abigail and Henry led Ethan into the elevator and rode it down to the street, where Henry’s car was parked not too far from Abigail’s front door. Ethan moved sideways, scuttling crablike, staring up at the sky, his knees slightly bent, arms flapping gently from the elbows; Abigail was always afraid, now that she was old and not strong, that she wouldn’t be able to support him if he tripped, but somehow, he rarely did.
After they’d managed to fold Ethan into the backseat of the car like an enormous, gawky bird, they were off. Ethan shrieked for the first few blocks, disoriented by being in an unfamiliar car. Abigail made a constant shushing sound but didn’t look at him or touch him. Finally, he stopped and seemed to accept his new whereabouts. Henry took the West Side Highway down the island; Abigail leaned back in her seat and looked out the window at the rotting, monstrous, gorgeous old cruise-ship docks. She caught a glimpse of herself in the little mirror on the side of the car and remembered that her hair was freshly dyed and styled; she felt suddenly glad that she had gone to all the trouble of fixing herself up. Seeing Claire, even now, was going to be tricky enough without having to worry that she looked like a wreck of an old woman. She felt Ethan’s fingertips on top of her head, touching very lightly; then they were gone, quick as a spider. She looked back at him. He was looking out his window with an expression of aching blankness. His face looked exactly the same to her as it had at five, eleven, twenty-four. He hadn’t aged; he was still as perfectly beautiful as he had always been.
She had always believed, like most of the other mothers of the most deeply autistic children she had met, that he understood much more than he could show, but he was so completely locked in that his IQ was untestable. She was always careful to talk to him in a low, steady voice, because whenever he heard a sudden, loud, or piercing noise, he flapped his hands by his ears as if it caused him physical pain. It was almost exactly the same gesture Oscar had used when he thought someone was being stupid or nuts. When Ethan did it, she found it poignant, even now that he was forty-seven years old. When Oscar had done it, she had often laughed. Even though she had never fully understood his manifest, arrogant, and (in her opinion) unjustified impatience with his fellow man, she could see the humor in his impatient hands flapping by his ears, unless he was reacting to something she herself had said or done, in which case it hurt her feelings. She thought she should have been granted immunity from Oscar’s judgmental superiority, she who so devotedly forgave his transgressions against her and their marriage.
“For some reason, Ethan reminds me of a certain poem by a poet named Greta Church,” said Henry. “It starts like this: ‘There is a thing within a thing./ The thing itself is all it is./ The thing is just the thing it is,/ No more no less than what is it,/ It is the thing within the thing.’”
“Is that the whole poem?”
“No, it goes on, but that’s the part Ethan has been making me think of. It’s called ‘On looking at El Señor de la Misericordia in the Cathedral at San Cristóbal de las Casas, April 1949.’”