“I drove myself,” said Lewis. He didn’t seem nervous at all, which thrilled her. “Benny is far away.”
She stretched along the length of him and felt the rasp of his body hair on her skin. Their bellies were pressed together; they both breathed for a moment, getting used to this.
“Mmm,” he said. “Now this I like.”
“Remember when I worked for you?”
“You were a slave driver.”
“I still am,” she said, driving him deeper into herself and resting her open mouth on his shoulder. Many pulses went by as they fucked each other hard.
“Aggh,” she said. “If I had only known before what this would be like…”
His voice was as easy as ever, right in her ear. “Oh ye of little faith.”
“Will you spend the night?”
“Fuck it,” said Lewis, “I’ll stay here till I die of sexual exhaustion.”
“Don’t talk about death,” she said.
More pulses went by in silence. Then she felt him shaking with laughter underneath her.
“What?” she asked, pulling back to look down at him.
“Death,” said Lewis. “What a joke.”
Teddy convulsed with a completely unexpected orgasm, which left her gasping with a residue of tears against his chest. She watched his slack-jawed, helpless face as he came.
They looked at each other.
“Look how perfectly beautiful you are,” he said. “You look about twenty-five years old.”
“I’m so hungry,” she said.
“You’re hungry?”
“I’m starving.”
“What should we eat?”
“I know you came expecting a home-cooked meal,” she said. “But I can’t move. There’s a new Peruvian place that just opened nearby; they left a delivery menu on my stoop yesterday.”
“I have a bottle of champagne in that briefcase, too. I meant to put it on ice before we got carried away. Should we call now and order up a feast?”
“Use your cell phone,” said Teddy. “I can’t possibly lift that heavy receiver right now.”
“Helpless thing,” he said.
She looked at him suspiciously.
“Just the way I like you,” he added, and got up. While he ordered food and opened the champagne, Teddy lay on the ancient bottle green couch and inhaled its decades of smells. How extremely odd, to be madly in love with Lewis. How extremely odd, to be lying here naked, inhaling the smell of her old couch and luxuriating in the memory of babies’ diapers changed, Oscar’s sweat, Samantha’s childhood vomit, Ruby’s high-school incense and pot, fur and dander from a succession of cats. How odd, to be calling out for Peruvian food. What was Peruvian food, anyway? And Teddy didn’t normally drink champagne, but right now she craved it. She was zooming inside, her brain zipping and popping. Funny, she had fallen in love this way twice in her life, and both times the experience was intensified by the knowledge that this could never be a whole love. The barrier with Oscar had been circumstantial, but the one with Lewis was temporal, and that was much harder to bear. If she’d made a different decision, she and Lewis might have had a long life together of fellowship and adventure…. Well, at least it wasn’t over quite yet. At least they had this now. There was no point to regret.
Lewis sauntered in naked with two glasses of champagne. She gazed at him through the pearly summer light.
“Hello, old boy,” she said.
“Drink your champagne, old girl,” he replied. “I hope you like steak with eight different kinds of starch.”
“I’ve never heard of anything so perfect in my life,” she said. “I’ll answer the door when they come; I’ve got a bathrobe somewhere.”
“They’ll think you’re a senile old shut-in.”
“They’ll think I’m somebody’s abandoned great-grandmother.”
He landed next to her on the couch. They floated together in the sea of her living room, drinking and eating, talking and listening to music, until much later, when they resurfaced and found themselves cross-legged, naked, looking at each other in the dim yellow light from the streetlamp outside.
“Your house is crammed as full of stuff as mine is,” said Lewis, surprised, looking around him as if for the first time.
“I was hoping you’d never notice.”
“Do you ever find yourself perversely thrilled by accumulating so much junk?”
“No! It’s just been this way since Oscar died. I haven’t had the energy to keep on top of it all. Frankly, I’m horrified at myself for it.”
“It comforts me,” said Lewis. “As death approaches…”
“You’re obsessed with death!”
He smiled. “Not anymore. Suddenly not.”
“Well, you talk about it an awful lot.”
“Yes, but now I feel it there in the abstract. Until recently, it was ever present and painful as an open wound. Now it seems far off and unreal.”
“What’s made the difference?”
“You,” he said. “My fixation with death was caused by loneliness.”
“Even though you had Ellen,” said Teddy slyly.
“Teddy, you are evil. I have never felt less lonely in my life. Let’s go to Tuscany and rent a big house with no stuff in it and live there in sexual bliss for a while. Will you? Or anywhere else you want.”
“Oh, yes, why not, a villa in Tuscany will do,” said Teddy, feeling joy rising in her gorge like a bubble of helium gas. “Although Tuscany is such a cliché. Let’s leave all these piles of old magazines behind and just…run off together.”
“I can hardly believe it,” said Lewis. “I can hardly grasp my luck. I never thought this would happen.”
“Yes you did,” said Teddy. “You never gave up for a second, and that’s why we’re here. I owe you one.”
“You can never repay me,” he said, “but I look forward to seeing you try.”
Lila and Abigail met for lunch at an old bistro in the West Village where Lila had often eaten with her first husband. They settled into their booth under the high ceiling in the cool air.
“I hate summer,” said Lila. “The older I get, the more I hate it. It just gets so hot.”
“What about winter? Winter is no better.”
“Winter is brutal,” said Lila.
“I never thought I’d get old in New York. I always planned to move south somewhere.”
“But then you don’t,” said Lila. “I know. Because everyone you know is here.”
“Seeing you and Teddy in the same room the other day,” said Abigail, “I was surprised it wasn’t more dramatic.”
“Of course,” said Lila, “we hadn’t known you’d be there, so we weren’t prepared. Maybe that was why it wasn’t as horrible as it might have been.”
“Maxine insisted. She’s very bossy, and I can’t say no to her.”
“Maxine strikes me as lonely,” said Lila.
Abigail rolled her eyes. “By choice,” she said. “Anyway, I have to confess that I didn’t expect to admire Teddy, but I did. I admire her.”
“I’ve admired her for about a thousand years,” said Lila. “It’s impossible not to.”
“On another note,” said Abigail as two bubbling glasses of prosecco arrived, “how’s your love affair going?”
Lila ducked her head and looked at Abigail through her eyelashes with a coy little smile. Abigail found this expression slightly irritating and wished Lila wouldn’t make it. It was what the Victorian novelists used to call a “moue.” She had never liked it in fictional characters, and she didn’t like it in real people. More than anything else, she felt disappointment. She had dressed as carefully for this lunch as if she were meeting a lover. The prospect of this new friendship had caused her so much hopeful excitement, she had hardly been able to sleep the night before.