The waiter took away the oyster tray and empty glasses, smirking.
“Did Oscar know about your affair?” Lila asked.
“I doubt it,” said Abigail, “but if he had, he wouldn’t have cared at all.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Lila.
“It’s true.”
“I bet he would have been devastated.”
“No,” said Abigail, thoughtfully. “Maybe at first, but he would have gotten over it.”
Lila let it drop, although it was clear she disagreed. “The old days,” she said. “I remember one night over at Teddy’s when Oscar was there, a party they were having. Does it bother you to hear about this?”
“After all this time, I’m well past anything but curiosity,” said Abigail.
“Well, they had on some sort of wild music, as usual. I always loved jazz, unlike you. And candles lit, a fire in the fireplace; it was magical and bohemian. Teddy was making something, probably a big paella, in the kitchen. Oscar was sketching a young dancer who must have been about his daughters’ age, twenty or thereabouts. Samantha and Ruby had both left home by then. The young girl was so smitten with him. I watched from a couch…. Oscar must have been in his early sixties then, which made him more than three times her age. She was sprawled on Teddy’s couch…long legs draped over one arm. Big brown eyes, hair messy in that seductive way, her limbs all sprawling. He drew her as if…you know. I remember watching her seduce Oscar, waiting to feel envious, and feeling only curiosity. It was then that I must have realized that I wasn’t pining for Oscar anymore. I watched her and admired her as if I were him.”
“Oh yes, I remember when young girls looked so delectable to me suddenly,” said Abigail. “It wasn’t a sexual thing, I don’t think; it was just getting on to the next phase of life. If we’d lived in a primitive sort of tribe or something, we’d have been elevated to wise old crone status, helping the young girls mate and raise their young. There must be a biological component to that feeling. It’s like lust, in that it’s a kind of sensual fascination, but it isn’t lust. But it makes us love to watch them all the same.”
“All right, I have to know something,” said Lila. The wine had arrived, and they were now well into their first glasses. The color in Lila’s soft cheeks was high. Her eyes sparkled. Abigail was smitten anew; Lila looked so much like Emily Robinson, the pretty blond girl she’d admired in her class at Brooklyn College. Emily had been sexily plump like Lila, with that same endearing, beguiling combination of earnestness and intelligence.
“Okay, what?” said Abigail.
“I can’t ask Teddy, for some reason,” said Lila. “All right, here it is. What was Oscar like in bed?”
Abigail burst into a guffaw. “Oh my!” she said. “What a question.”
“Sorry,” said Lila. “I hope you’re not offended.”
“Not at all,” said Abigail. She lifted her wineglass and took a sip. Then she put her glass down and said, “He didn’t interest me at all that way. We didn’t have great chemistry, I guess. I preferred Edward. Edward was sensitive and gentle, thoughtful. Oscar didn’t care about anything but his own pleasure. Like a big dog.”
Lila’s eyes turned inward, as if she were picturing this. “That’s what I thought,” she said. Abigail could almost see her mouth watering. “My husbands were both so irritatingly sensitive and gentle, I sometimes wanted to shake them. You know…not at the same time, of course. But somehow I always ended up with those poetic types. I really would have preferred a big dog.”
“Well, you should have shtupped Oscar! Everyone else got to.”
“My friend’s lover?”
“I agree, it would have been very bad form.”
“Anyway, he wasn’t interested in me.”
“Oh, sure he was.”
“I swear he wasn’t.”
“I don’t see how he possibly couldn’t have been,” said Abigail. “I am sure that the only reason you never went to bed with him was that you were loyal to Teddy. If you hadn’t been…”
Abigail and Lila both laughed.
“That’s funny,” said Lila, “you, reassuring me that your husband really did desire me.”
“I guess that’s just the kind of man Oscar was,” said Abigail.
“Actually, I think it’s more that that’s the kind of woman you are,” said Lila.
“That I’ll take as a compliment,” said Abigail, “although I don’t know why.”
“Yes you do,” said Lila.
Maxine had a sour taste in the back of her throat from all the smoking she’d been doing lately. It was incredible that she had avoided getting even a smoker’s hack, let alone emphysema or lung cancer. The only bad effect seemed to be this foul taste in her gullet. Maybe back in the dim, unremembered dawn of her life, she had made a pact with some devil or minor demon for consequence-free smoking in exchange for her mortal soul. What did she need with a mortal soul? She needed to smoke.
Lighting another cigarette, she said to Paula Jabar, “Well, I’m just about done. How are you coming along?”
For the past three hours, Paula had been asking Maxine questions, standing there naked in her studio while Maxine painted her in the style of Mercy and Helena. Some whiz kid at Artforum had decided that this would be a great idea, for Maxine to be interviewed by Paula while she painted Paula’s portrait, then to run a reproduction of the portrait alongside an edited transcription of the interview. Maxine didn’t like to talk while she painted. It felt unnatural. Her brain wasn’t made that way. Compounding her exhaustion was the fact that she wanted very badly to sound brilliant, unpretentious, original, and fascinating, and she wanted the portrait to be all of those things, too, as well as do justice to Paula’s beauty. And even worse, she had become aware of an increasing attraction to Paula, intensifying the longer they talked, the longer she was forced to stare at that lush young body and reproduce it in paint, the sexiest of substances. But the most complicated factor of all for Maxine during these past hours had been a definite, inescapable sinking feeling of humble hats-off respect for her once-despised nemesis. The girl was smart. She was warm, too, and funny. Her self-conscious ghetto patois was almost nowhere in evidence. Her questions were knowledgeable and provocative. In fact, she had enchanted and seduced Maxine from the instant she’d arrived, in a cloud of tropical scent, a shimmering, dusky vision in greens and blues, and slid out of her dress and underthings without an instant’s self-consciousness. Even if this had been little more than a carefully calculated ploy to disarm a hostile party, it had worked on an old tortoise as crusty and suspicious as Maxine, who had to admit to herself that Paula Jabar deserved every shred of her fame, fortune, critical success, and popular adulation. Admitting this to herself in the grip of all her simultaneous and equal desires was costing her a good deal of her limited energy.
“Just a few more questions, if you can hack it,” said Paula. “You’ve said a lot of tremendous things already, though, so if you want to stop…”
“No,” said Maxine with a burst of determination. “I spent eighty-four years waiting for this, I don’t want it to end an instant too soon.”
“Well then,” said Paula. “We’ve spent three hours discussing your influences and your techniques and your history and all that, so let’s get down to some brass tacks here.”