“Oscar must have been there a lot of the time, too. What did he make of all this?”
“We waited on him and didn’t rock any boats. It never occurred to me to try to change anything in my own life. But oh, I admired those women who just left their husbands and went off on their own! A lot of them with children, to graduate school and into the work world! Maribelle was one of them, but she never saw herself that way.”
“Did she sing a lot?”
“Only around the house. Ethan liked her voice.”
“So it wasn’t out of the blue for him to paint her singing.”
“Oh no! She was singing while she was posing for him.”
“Then how did he miss the point of her?”
She picked up her wineglass and said abruptly, “Is this wine supposed to be so fizzy?”
Ralph swirled the wine around in his glass very fast, keeping the glass on the table, then lifted it to his mouth and inhaled before he tasted it. “It tastes excellent,” he said, puzzled. “Spot-on, in fact.”
“Oh,” she said. She took another sip, determined to choke it down and not look like a schnook. “He missed the point of her,” she said, “because he didn’t really know her. He didn’t take the trouble to know her. Not out of racism, but because to him, it must have been like when he painted me, and why I didn’t let him paint me after a couple of times. The way he looked at you while he was painting you…”
Ralph compressed his lips uncomfortably, glanced down at the napkin in his lap, then looked up at Abigail again. “How was that?” he asked patiently.
“As if he were using you for his own ends,” Abigail replied shortly, having strongly sensed Ralph’s distaste for this topic. She sighed and tried another sip of wine. It tasted exactly as horrible as it had on her first sip. Well, the food would arrive soon, and then she could busy herself with a good lunch.
“But he was famous for not doing that,” said Ralph.
“Well, of course,” said Abigail, immediately regretting having said anything negative about Oscar, the way they’d all agreed they wouldn’t. It was funny, the way she felt so loyal and loving toward him in her heart but came out with critical-sounding things when the biographers started asking about him. “That’s right. I don’t know why I felt that way. Maybe it was all in my head. And also, he was my husband. It was probably very different to model for him if you didn’t know him that well. Are you a painter?”
“No,” said Ralph, “not at all. Just a writer and an appreciator.”
“You have a degree in art history, I think you said?”
“A master’s,” he said modestly, “from Columbia, and I’m thinking of going back for my Ph.D. I’d like to be a college professor, ultimately.”
“So did I, once.”
“In what?”
“English literature. I’m a big reader. But I’m not an academic type; I don’t like thinking about books that way. You have to have a very analytical mind for that kind of thing.”
“That is true.”
“I would get into a classroom and just go mute. I would have thought so much about a book like Jude the Obscure, and then when my classmates started talking about all the themes and images and whatnot, my mind went completely blank. I only cared about Jude and Sue as people. How terribly, unbelievably sad the book was. And it spoiled it for me to have to think about how it was constructed; it felt like pulling apart your favorite toy as a kid to see what was inside.” The wine must have been going to her head; she felt quite worked up about this all of a sudden. “It just killed the magic for me,” she added before she could stop herself.
Ralph looked at her expressionlessly for a moment. Abigail thought she must have sounded like an ass.
“Something similar is happening for me with Oscar, but in the opposite direction,” he said with measured precision, as if he were resisting the temptation to match her vehemence but privately shared it. “Maybe I should have written a purely intellectual book about him and never tried to find out about his life. But they convinced me that a biography was the way to go.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“My agent,” he said. “And the editor who acquired the project. They both said it would be a better book if I wrote it from a biographical standpoint, and so I started to feel like that might be interesting and worthwhile, to do the research and tell Oscar’s life story.” He pushed his gold glasses up the bridge of his nose.
His soup and her salad appeared. The cockles were golden puffballs. They weren’t at all what she’d expected from the waiter’s description. She stole an envious look at Ralph’s soup. It looked cool, green, and light.
Ralph picked up his spoon and took a small, appreciative taste of his soup while Abigail speared a cockle with her fork. Finding it sizzling hot against her tongue, she set it back down and nibbled an asparagus spear.
“How is everything?” the waiter asked Ralph.
“Wonderful,” said Ralph.
The waiter sighed and glided off. Ralph watched him go.
“Can I ask you something?” Abigail said.
“Well of course,” he replied warily.
“This is very forward of me. I don’t want to offend you. But this might be the only chance in my life to ask this question.”
“Go ahead,” he said even more warily.
“Oh, I’ve overstepped already,” she said, horrified at herself. “Never mind.”
“Please feel free. I can always choose not to answer it.”
“Oh, well,” she said. She took another sip of the fizzy fishy-tasting wine to steady herself. “I was just wondering what it’s been like for you,” she said in a tentative voice. “To be who you are.”
“A black man?” he said. “You’re wondering what it’s like to be black?”
“Yes,” she said. “Black, and…and, well, and homosexual. I wonder how that is, because I imagine it must be very hard. I’m asking out of great sympathy, believe me, thinking that you’ve had a hard time. I admire those who struggle with their identities and…” She stopped and looked down at her plate. Ralph was silent, staring at her, his expression unreadable. “I have terribly overstepped. I apologize.”
Ralph still didn’t say anything.
“Well,” said Abigail, laughing, trying to hide the fact that she was close to tears of mortification. “I certainly have ruined a nice lunch!”
“No,” he said. “Not ruined. But I never said anything about myself. I just wonder how you got that idea. About me.”
“Oh, I always know,” said Abigail, unbearably contrite. “I don’t know how, but I do.” She shrugged.
“You just know?” he said. There was an unmistakable note of teasing in his voice, almost relief that she had guessed his secret. “No one ever guessed before. My brother has no idea. My best friend from childhood keeps introducing me to girls. I mean women. I have a very straight personality.”
“Well, maybe you could let all that go,” she said.
“Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s…” She ate a cockle. The crust was crisp and savory; the little animal inside was meaty and sweet. “Oh my! This is very good,” she said.
“I’m not one of those people who needs to tell the whole world every detail of his life.”
“And you don’t mind, you don’t feel lonely, that your brother and your best friend have no idea…”
“I prefer it that way.”
“But what if you fall in love and want to be with someone…settle down with him?” She put down her fork and held up both hands. “I’m overstepping again. I know, I know, but I’m very interested.”