She and Benny had for years shared the tacit knowledge that visiting Lewis was a bit of a chore for her. Lewis never came to Teddy’s house, not, she suspected, out of any snobbism about her neighborhood or the circumstances in which she lived, because Lewis was not a snob in any way. She suspected the reason was that he didn’t want to be reminded of Oscar, even though Oscar had never set foot in the India Street house. Greenpoint had been Oscar’s turf, and Lewis’s feelings for Oscar when he was alive had been complicated and mixed at best. Lewis had been Oscar’s lawyer, and, as such, had had to tolerate being taken for granted and treated by the great artist as a sort of repository for his furies and resentments toward the art world. Oscar was given the brush-off by one of his best collectors; when Emile Grosvenor died, his son Laurent had taken over the gallery and started giving Oscar fewer shows; the modern art museum in Amsterdam hung one of his subway nudes in an alcove, which he had considered insulting; always, Lewis had been there to take the brunt of Oscar’s outrage, although there was very little he could do about any of it. And meanwhile, Lewis had been not so secretly in love with Oscar’s mistress, who also happened to be his own secretary. Now that Oscar was dead, he had become something of an out-and-out bugbear for Lewis, his bête noire.
Benny made a left onto McGuinness Boulevard and the car went straight onto the Pulaski Bridge, crossing the Newtown Creek to Queens over a low-lying landscape with church spires and old houses that hearkened back to a nineteenth-century village just across the river from Manhattan. Teddy, who had never had a driver’s license, had always loved being driven through the city, looking through car windows as it all went by. Her daughter Samantha often said she turned into a cat when she rode in a car, staring unblinkingly and indiscriminately and fixedly out the window, sitting very still and tense, as if she were about to pounce on prey.
As she rode along, she pictured Lila lolling amorously in her big bed next to a good-looking, slightly younger man, both of them naked. In her mind, Lila was an odalisque, glossy, voluptuous, and aglow.
“The view of Manhattan from this bridge is one of the wonders of this city,” she said out of nowhere to Benny as they climbed high into the sky, heading east above Queens on a sinuously curving ramp, past billboards that seemed to float in thin air, and then curved around 180 degrees onto the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.
“I never tire of it,” said Benny.
Benny had lived in the States for more than thirty years, but his accent was as strong as if he were still in London. Teddy’s father had been the same way; he’d lived in New York for almost twenty years, but he’d spoken like a British nobleman till the day he died, but he wasn’t moneyed from birth; although his family had lived on an estate in Gloucestershire, the old family money was fairly well depleted by the time he came along. He had been educated, but just barely. As a young émigré to New York, in the 1920s, out of some maverick financial genius native only to him and evident nowhere else in his lineage, he’d made millions on Wall Street out of thin air, and that was where it had all gone back to when Teddy was nineteen. Still, riding in a chauffered car all these decades later was still as ingrained in Teddy as Benny’s accent was in him. No matter where you ended up, you never lost where you came from, never shook that particular dirt from your feet.
As Benny pulled up under the awning of Lewis’s building, on East Seventy-seventh between Park and Lexington, the doorman was immediately on hand to open Teddy’s door for her and help her out of the car. “Miss St. Cloud,” he said with slightly bowed head. “Mr. Strathairn is expecting you.” He took her bag of food from her and ushered her through the lobby, with its bronze-framed mirrors, hand-painted wallpaper, and brocade upholstery, and then into the elevator, finally relinquishing the bag of food just before the doors closed.
Lewis was standing at his open door when she stepped out of the elevator. He immediately took her bag from her while kissing her fervently on both cheeks. They were about the same height. Lewis, like Teddy, was thin, and he was almost completely bald. His face was lean, angular; he had piercing blue eyes that were now examining her with frank rapaciousness.
“You’re really here,” he said. “Come in, come in.”
“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, walking past him, bracing herself for the inevitable attack of claustrophobia. Lewis was constantly redecorating the place in hopes, perhaps, of creating spaciousness, letting in a little air, but he and his longtime decorator, Ellen, had been locked for years in battle over his accumulation of things — bric-a-brac and mementos from his travels, old Playbills, dog-eared paperback books, enamel dishes filled with paper clips, foreign coins, defunct subway tokens, fortune-cookie slips, cuff links, heaps of “claptrap,” as Ellen called it. He even stockpiled the flyers that were handed out to passersby in the street, those glorified coupons for a free eye exam or trial gym membership or cell phone with purchase of a package plan; there were always twelve or fifteen of these on his coffee table alone.
“I’m very hungry,” he said, laughing. “But don’t worry, if I weren’t, I would pretend to be.”
Teddy headed straight into his kitchen, the one room in the apartment that had a little space to move around in, if only because Lewis wasn’t a cook and had little in the way of equipment. Still, the countertop was covered with stacks of old Sports Illustrateds. “Move your porn, please,” she commanded, handing him an armload.
Teddy unpacked the bag, found a skillet in a cupboard and some butter in the refrigerator, and got to work chopping the red pepper and chives and sausage, beating the eggs. When the omelette was done, she cut it in half, spread it thickly with sour cream, and put the pieces on two plates with a mound of fruit salad on each. She carried the plates into the dining room and used one of them to shove aside a stack of mail on Lewis’s place mat. She set the other plate on the place mat across from his chair and sat down. He had set the table with cutlery, glasses of orange juice, and cups of hot coffee, finding room to put it all amid stacks of mail, half-read books and magazines, an inexplicable bag from the hardware store, and eight or ten equally inexplicable carved masks. Teddy busied herself with cream and sugar while Lewis leaned his face over his plate and happily inhaled sausage-scented steam.
“You’ve outdone yourself,” he said. Lewis loved to eat well, but he had never bothered to learn to cook. Teddy knew, because he had told her, that he ate his dinners at a little candlelit bistro on Lexington or stayed in and heated up ready-cooked gourmet meals from a private catering company. But nothing, he’d added pointedly, tasted as good as a meal made by someone he loved. Teddy had chosen through the years to ignore this appeal; she made a deliberate point of not cooking in his kitchen more than twice a year. She was not and had never been particularly wifely, and she’d never wanted to give Lewis any romantic encouragement of any kind, because that would lead immediately to a profound and intense entanglement she had always been a little afraid of, although she had never been exactly sure why. Anyway, it galled her that he wouldn’t simply take it upon himself to learn to grill a simple filet or steak, steam some broccoli, for God’s sake. Cooking was far too easy, and Lewis far too intelligent, for him to have to resort to eating either restaurant or premade meals. Also, he could easily have hired a cook.
“Where did the masks come from?” Teddy asked. “And more important, why are they on the table?”
“Bali,” said Lewis. “Ellen thinks they’ll go up on that wall above the sideboard.”