The Great Man by Kate Christensen

treatment! She plays right into it. She always wanted to be close to Dad but never could, so obviously Ivan makes up for that in many ways.”
    Ruby splashed more wine into her glass, drank some, set it down again, all while Ralph waited.
    “Of course, my mother is proud that she was never controlling of my father, but that depends on what you mean by
controlling.
…For example, she loved to bait him and goad him and get him to go off about this and that in front of other people, show him off. She’d be right there, contradicting him so he’d reveal more and more of himself. She was so proud of him, of course; she adored him…. But it was a kind of power mongering, in a way. In a way, she controlled him with her love.”
    “But what about her lack of possessiveness?” Ralph asked.
    “Her lack of possessiveness was an illusion,” Ruby said.
    “You mean,” he said cautiously, darting a glance toward the kitchen, “she gave him free rein as a paradoxical way of keeping him?”
    “Yes…” said Ruby. “Exactly. But there’s more to it than that.”
    Teddy stuck her head through the door and said, “Ruby, coffee?”
    Ralph started a little; Ruby turned calmly and said, “Sure, Mom.”
    After Teddy had gone back to the kitchen, Ruby looked at Ralph, shaking her head. “Aren’t I a terrible child, telling you my mother’s secrets while she waits on us hand and foot. By the way, I don’t get up to help her because she won’t allow it; she’s a total control freak in the kitchen. As well as in every other way. Anyway, her lack of possessiveness was an illusion. She was extremely possessive. Sexually, Dad was totally in Mom’s thrall—it was obvious to anyone with half an eye—so if he went off and had other women, it didn’t bug her. It was like the queen not minding if the king had consorts: She was still the queen. And meanwhile, kings always have their consorts; it’s part of the deal. Emotionally, she was very jealous. Like, for instance, she wouldn’t let us be close to him, his own daughters. She kept us all apart. She allowed him to go home to his poor fat wife only because she didn’t want him underfoot all the time and didn’t want him to get tired of her…. Did I mention that she’s a control freak?”
    “But I don’t think you can boil marriages down into such codified structures. It seems more of a give-and-take to me, more of a flow. I think there must be much more to any relationship than people outside it can see.”
    “Are you married?”
    “No, are you?”
    “No…”
    “Not yet?” he asked.
    “Maybe not ever.”
    “Oh, I doubt that,” he said. “A woman as beautiful as you are.”
    “Thank you,” said Ruby warily.
    She’d meant to imply that she didn’t want to get married, and he’d meant “beautiful” as an abstract compliment; he hadn’t at all meant to come on to her, but all the same, an invisible bubble suddenly enveloped Ralph and Ruby and sealed them off, the filmy bubble of sexual possibility, which was awkward for them because they weren’t attracted to each other, but the continuation of this conversation, spooling itself out unspoken between them, nonetheless suggested something along those lines. Neither knew how to delicately convey this absolute lack of attraction to the other, so they just sat, not looking at each other, in a silence made more uneasy by the fact that it rode in the wake of their torrent of wine-fueled words, until Teddy strode in with the coffeepot and two cups and started pouring matter-of-factly, as if she hadn’t heard every word they’d said.



Four
    Maxine Feldman woke up early in a state of panicky despair and decided to clean her studio, one of her preferred solutions to any emotional upset. (The others, none of them mutually exclusive, were chain-smoking, brushing her dog, Frago, with a Love Glove, taking baths, and/or listening to turbulent music at full volume—Beethoven or Sonic Youth, it didn’t much matter which.)