Ralph smiled at her. “Older people always worry about younger people.”
“And younger people always think they know what older people don’t know,” said Abigail, smiling also. “I have a business proposition for you.”
He looked startled. “You do?”
“Hypothetically,” said Abigail, “say I offered to stake you to graduate school. You could quit your job, study whatever you wanted. I have plenty of money, and nothing really to do with it all.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because,” she said, “in return, you’re going to write a book praising Oscar without reservation. That other guy, Henry Burke, is probably going to try to stir up controversy and trouble. I want one biography of Oscar at least to be flattering.”
“I can’t!” he said, surprised.
“I knew you’d say that,” she said, “but just think about it. Oscar gave you so much, he inspired your career, and it’s the least you can do to repay him.”
“That may be,” he said. “But I don’t like feeling as if I’m being bought.”
“You’re not being bought; you’re being paid extra to write the book you want to write. Just think about it; that’s all I ask.”
Ralph stared at Abigail for a while. The whites of his eyes were aggressively white and showed top and bottom between his eyelids and corneas, which made him look intense and intimidating. Abigail stared right back at him, silently urging him to acquiesce to her will.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
The feeling of triumph this gave her — premature though it may have been — was like a snort of cocaine, not that she had ever actually tried cocaine, but she had read enough about it to know its biochemical simulacrum when she felt it.
PART FOUR
Ten
“I can’t have breakfast this morning,” Lila was saying to Teddy in a tone of bashful apology.
It was Saturday morning, just half an hour before their standing breakfast date. It was Lila’s turn to come to Teddy’s; Teddy had just been slicing fruit. The hand that held the receiver was slightly sticky with plum juice even though she’d rinsed her hands quickly when the phone had rung.
“Are you feeling all right?” Teddy asked.
There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone. “Oh, yes.”
“Then why can’t you come?”
Another silence.
“Stop being coy! It’s that man, isn’t it?”
“His name is Rex,” said Lila, laughing a little. “Yes, he’s here right now.”
Teddy blinked in surprise. She hadn’t actually thought Rex was at Lila’s; she had only been teasing. For some reason, she had assumed that Lila’s not coming over today had had something to do with her grandchildren.
“At your house?”
“Right here,” said Lila. “Next to me.”
“You’re still in bed?” Teddy asked, choking slightly on some foreign emotion.
Another silence.
“Well, you can bring him over if you want to,” said Teddy. “I’d like to meet him, and there’s plenty of food. I was thinking of making a kielbasa omelette; men love sausage, don’t they? Oscar always did.”
“Thanks,” said Lila, purring in spite of herself, Teddy could tell. “I think we’re all right where we are. Next Saturday, though, I promise, rain or shine.”
“All right,” said Teddy, “I’ll eat all the food myself. Say hello to him, assuming he knows who I am.” She hung up and stalked back to the kitchen, not hungry anymore. It was a hot, overcast morning, and the air felt like a wet towel. The back door was open; the smell of exhausted foliage blew in on a limp-wristed breeze. Teddy half-consciously hefted an uncut plum in one hand, squeezing it gently, the way physical therapists teach stroke victims to squeeze rubber balls to rehabilitate their hand strength. She took a small bite of it, then another bite. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty damn close. Juice ran down her chin, and she didn’t bother to wipe it off. So Lila and Rex were having a full-blown affair, and from the sound of Lila’s voice, it had been going on longer than just one night. When had she planned to tell Teddy about this? Maybe it was unfair of Teddy to mind having their breakfast canceled at the last minute because of a man, but she did mind. She didn’t begrudge Lila her sexual happiness, of course…or did she? No matter what, it just seemed impolite to call half an hour before Lila was supposed to arrive, after Teddy had shopped for their meal and was already preparing it.
Teddy threw the plum pit out into the yard, where it disappeared into the greenery. Now what? It was 7:30 on a Saturday morning, and the whole day lay yawning in front of her. Maybe because she had expected to have company, her loneliness, which she normally kept at bay, felt intolerable. Normally, she had a number of activities in reserve as bulwarks against this common sort of loneliness, among them reading The New Yorker carefully, from “The Talk of the Town” to the movie reviews, playing solitaire at the kitchen table while she listened to NPR, weeding the garden, or, in moments of real desperation, creating a time-consuming, nitpicky task like sorting through her thousands of recipe cards or piles of catalogs or boxes of papers….
She marched back to the telephone, picked up the receiver, and dialed Lewis’s number. He answered on the eighth ring, just when she had been about to give up.
“Hello?” He sounded out of breath.
“Were you running?”
“Teddy!”
The frank gladness in his voice cheered her up immediately. “Hello, Lewis. Lila just stood me up for my usual Saturday-morning date, and I just made fruit salad and walnut coffee cake and I’ve got a kielbasa and half a dozen eggs and some fresh chives and red peppers. Want to come over for breakfast?”
“Red peppers give me dyspepsia,” said Lewis.
“Lewis!” She laughed. “No one gets dyspepsia anymore.”
“Bring it all over here,” he said. “I’ll send Benny for you in the car. I have to stay home today because I’m supervising the decorator, who will be here in about an hour and who has to be watched every minute. She wants me to spend more on this living room than the queen of Persia.”
“How much did the queen of Persia spend on her living room?”
“Will you come?” Lewis asked.
“Why don’t I just call a car service?”
“Darling, you’re just over the Queensboro Bridge. He’ll be there before you know it.”
“The Midtown Tunnel is faster.”
“But the toll!” said Lewis.
She laughed again; Lewis was as rich as the queen of Persia, whoever she was. “I’ll be waiting with my little basket of delicacies all packed up.”
“Put on your bonnet,” said Lewis. “It looks like rain.”
Forty minutes later, a black Town Car pulled up in front of Teddy’s house. She got into it with a plastic shopping bag filled with food. Inside the car, it was air-conditioned and quiet and smelled of leather.
“Hello, Benny,” she said to Lewis’s driver. Benny, as always, looked very dapper. Today, he wore a plaid driving cap and an orchid yellow sweater vest over a flesh pink Oxford shirt; his smooth pink face was so well shaved, he gave the impression of being either prepubescent or unable to grow whiskers. His full head of short black hair gleamed with some sort of unguent.
“Someone’s over the moon that you’re coming,” he said in the Dickensian-orphan Cockney accent he never tried to modulate into anything more upper-crust.
“Is he,” said Teddy, settling back against the leather seat and watching scruffy, sweaty Greenpoint slide by, the store awnings — UNISEX SALON, FLORIST, BUTCHER — aluminum siding, spindly little trees growing out of the sidewalk. “As it happened, I was free today.”