She regained control of her windpipe. “Good Lord,” she said. She cleared her throat. “What’s gotten into you?”
“All this talk about the grave.” He laughed. “What have we got to lose?”
Teddy smiled inscrutably at him. The clock behind her ticked loudly in the silence—tick-tock, tick-tock—hollow, skeletal clicks, too apropos for comfort.
Lewis sighed and said, “Two biographies about Oscar. Who cares about art anymore anyway? Who really gives a fig?”
“About art,” said Teddy, “very few people give a fig. About Oscar, even fewer. But these two boys have wild hairs. Well, not really so wild. Tame hairs. One of them, the white one, Henry, seems to see Oscar as an emblem of lost manliness, a kind of visceral, unapologetic masculinity that’s gone out of fashion. The other, the black one, Ralph, sees him, I would say, as an aesthetic maverick, but slightly disapprovingly so, or so it seems to me; he seems to think Oscar hamstrung himself by eschewing the abstract. But he reveres him nonetheless; they both do. The white one, who’s rather cute actually and extremely sexually frustrated, keeps quoting some hackneyed female poet he wrote a biography about, which gives me some pause. This poet; Oscar. Clearly he has no standards. Oscar was no genius, let’s face it. Henry seems to think they’re both unjustly forgotten.”
“I love how brutal you are,” said Lewis.
“I know you do,” said Teddy. “It’s entirely for your entertainment.”
“I think you’re being a little coy. Of course you think he was a genius.”
“Not coy at all,” said Teddy. Throughout this conversation, she had been half-aware of the fact that she had been watching his mouth more closely than usual; now she was noticing that his upper lip had a cleft above it, as if pressed there by a small child’s finger in clay. “A genius is someone who changes the fabric of his own time and stands above everyone around him. Oscar Feldman kicked around with the best of them, but he didn’t transcend them or show them the way.”
“Hitler was a genius?”
“An evil genius.”
“I like this sophomoric little game.”
“Sophomoric in the extreme!”
Lewis and Teddy both laughed.
“I’m planning a trip to Tuscany,” said Lewis. “Want to come along? My treat.”
“When?” Teddy asked with longing.
“November, December, whenever you want.”
“Why are you planning to go?”
“To get you to come with me.”
“Oh, Lewis,” said Teddy. She sighed. “You know I love you. You know I think you’re the best man in the world.”
“Besides your grandson,” said Lewis, as if he were forcing himself not to take too much pleasure in the compliment because of the implicit rejection behind it.
“He’s three.”
“And now that Oscar’s dead.”
“You’re a far better man than Oscar ever was.”
“That is so true,” he said, his blue eyes flashing, “but what mystifies me…I don’t need to say it. My wife left me for a real turd. And you stuck with the likes of Oscar.”
Teddy looked piercingly at Lewis for a moment or two. “I wonder why,” she said finally.
“Women seem to find assholes irresistible,” said Lewis. “It’s Darwinian, I guess. You want to be put in your place, left slightly askew, because then you know you’re with an alpha male. I have no desire to put you in your place or knock you off-kilter, which apparently translates into erotic nullity. But I’m arguably an alpha-male type. I just don’t care to beat my hairy breast and bellow about it the way Oscar did.”
“You’re pretty smart for an old guy,” said Teddy, laughing.
“Maybe Ellen wants to go to Tuscany.”
“I mean it. Most men of our generation don’t have a clue about women.”
“Well, the nice ones do, because we have plenty of time to study you without the mind-sapping distraction of actual entanglement.”
“I thought you said you’d had women.”
“I have,” he replied vehemently. “I’m no monk.”
“Why haven’t you fallen in love again?”
“I’ve been pining for you. It’s the truth.”
“No one pines this long. You must have wanted to pine.”
He said, “I haven’t entirely enjoyed it.”
They looked at each other.
“Lewis,” said Teddy.
“Teddy.”
She tried to say something, failed, then shook her head decisively. “I’m a bit flummoxed all of a sudden.”
“That’s a new one.”
Teddy stood and made her way over to where Lewis sat. “Stand up,” she said. “I want to try something.”
He stood, nudged his chair aside with his leg, and faced her. She looked right into his eyes and put her hands on his shoulders. “Dance with me a little,” she said.
“What are we, geriatrics?” he asked, laughing. Still, he put one hand on her waist and with the other lifted and took her hand from his right shoulder. He began to lead her in a medium-tempo foxtrot. They hadn’t broken their mutual gaze. Their eyes were almost on the same level. “We’re too young for this,” said Lewis. “Let’s get drunk instead.”
“Dance with me, I want my arm about you,” Teddy sang in an unpracticed voice that cracked a little with laughter. “The charm about you will carry me through to…”
Lewis laid his cheek against Teddy’s and danced her purposefully into the living room. “There’s liquor in here,” he said.
“Indulge me,” she said. “We’re characters in an old movie.”
“They drank whiskey in old movies,” said Lewis.
“Heaven, I’m in Heaven,” Teddy sang on, smiling but no longer laughing, leaning her head against his, feeling the satisfying intimate hardness of another human skull against her own, “and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak…”
“At least you can carry a tune,” he said. “It could be worse.” He turned his head and kissed her without breaking the dance.
“And I seem to find the happiness I seek,” she sang against his mouth as if she didn’t know it was there, “when we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.” Then she stopped singing; they stopped dancing. It should have felt far more odd than it did, kissing Lewis, but instead it felt like something long overdue and inevitable. He knows what he’s doing, Teddy thought, surprised. His mouth was firm and sensitive. She had not imagined it would be so; she had imagined he would be either overly enthusiastic with his tongue or that his lips would feel dry and uncommitted. Instead, his lips felt like something live and exciting against hers, dancing with her mouth; his tongue was barely there, tantalizingly. Their bodies pressed together warmly, with equal pressure, equal need. Suddenly she was so aroused, she could hardly stand up. She started to laugh again, out of giddiness and surprise rather than amusement. “Lewis!”
“I tried to tell you,” he said. “Now come to bed.”
In his bedroom, she clawed at his clothes. He stood, chuckling, helping her, while she undressed him. Then she stripped off her own clothes and they fell together onto his bed, naked and necking. The light coming in his bedroom window was bright and clear; she could see every gray hair on his chest, every small sag and wrinkle on his body, and she knew he could see hers, but they were both still slim and well shaped. Their bodies looked good together, like a matched set. They both looked so much better than she had expected. His thighs were well muscled, his flanks were lean, and his stomach was flat but endearingly slightly rounded, like a small boy’s. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and rocked him a little, looked into his blue, ardent, eternally humorous eyes, and was struck both by how well she knew him and how exciting this was. His skin against the length of her body felt warm and velvety; the hairs on his chest and legs rasped against her smooth skin, so she felt small, intensely pleasurable electrical shocks everywhere.