Free The Great Man by Kate Christensen Page A

Teddy.
    â€œInedible?”
    â€œNo! Incredible,” Ruby said, laughing. “Is there grated ginger in it?”
    â€œGood guess, but no,” said Teddy, looking pointedly at Ralph, who was eating slowly and offhandedly, without noticing a single flavor, she would have bet. He struck her as a man made more of spirit and mind than of flesh, someone for whom bodily pleasure was a sometimes guilty and generally abstracted afterthought. It had long been Teddy’s theory that you could tell how someone was in bed by the way he or she ate; she was sure that Ralph would be ethereal and self-abnegating.
    â€œA tiny bit of mace?” asked Ruby.
    â€œNope,” said Teddy again. “You’re way out on a limb.” It was a game she’d taught her daughters to play as children: guess the ingredients. She’d always put one secret thing into a dish to test them. Whoever guessed it got the satisfaction of her mother’s approbation.
    The telephone rang. Ruby put her hand on Teddy’s to keep her from getting up, then answered it herself in the front hall.
    â€œIt’s me,” her twin sister said. Ruby heard squalling in the background. “Buster’s having a meltdown. I can’t make it to Mom’s. Can you tell her for me?”
    â€œThis is important,” said Ruby. “Dad’s biographer is here. Can’t Ivan take the kids for a couple of hours?”
    â€œIvan had to go into the lab today. Please tell Mom I’m sorry.”
    â€œSo bring the kids.”
    â€œIvan’s got the car,” said Samantha.
    â€œSo I’ll treat you to a cab.”
    â€œThe car seats are in the car; Ivan would kill me if I went anywhere with the kids without them. And I wouldn’t wish Buster on anyone right now. No one would get a word in.”
    Ruby happened to know that Buster, a three-year-old boy whose given name was Peter, behaved with admirable civility in the care of his aunt and grandmother. She suspected that Samantha exacerbated rather than soothed Buster’s tantrums, and that, in fact, he threw these tantrums to distract Samantha’s attention from her husband, then kept them up when he figured out that as long as he acted horribly, he had her undivided attention. If Samantha hadn’t been so vapor-locked on Ivan, their son might have been calmer and better adjusted. But no one could tell Samantha anything: She often acted, Ruby thought, as if she were the first person on the planet to give birth to a human child, as if mothering were so sacred and rarefied, anyone who wasn’t a mother couldn’t possibly understand how profoundly it changed you. But Ruby guessed she had to act this way in order to make herself feel better about being in the thrall of a two-foot-tall manipulative, punitive tyrant and a small screaming bag of stinking humors who sucked her dry. Whenever Samantha described the amazingness of breast-feeding or the miracle of watching her child take his first shit on a potty, Ruby would think of the quiet little apartment she’d lived in alone for fifteen years. There was no greater joy she knew than going home alone to find everything as she’d left it, her bed, her books, her computer, her refrigerator, her bathtub, her solitary self.
    â€œSam,” she said, “come on. It won’t kill them to take a cab ride without car seats this one time.”
    â€œBuster,” Samantha replied in a deadly, cold, even voice. “I think you need a time-out. Sorry, Rube, I gotta go. This little ape child needs to take some deep breaths.”
    Ruby returned to the dining room. “Samantha has bagged out,” she said. “Peter’s apparently being a monster.”
    â€œPeter,” said Teddy, “is never a monster. I’m very disappointed she won’t come.”
    â€œShe apologized,” said Ruby in a tone that conveyed what she thought of her sister’s apology. “I think