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came around, she sent them off to bed so she could take care of the insatiable, all-consuming needs of the great artist with undivided, clear-eyed attention. She argued with him, laughed at him. She lit fires and made midnight suppers and entertained him with stories about the lawyers she worked for, one of whom represented him, and their clients, some of whom were his fellow artists, many of whom were famous. He ate and laughed and drank and smoked and opined and argued and listened; then he took Teddy off to bed and left before the girls awoke.
    Whenever, during the sixties and seventies, Lila had managed to sneak away from husband and children and have an evening or afternoon to herself, it was Teddy’s house she went to, Teddy’s life they talked about—Oscar, his tantrums, his other women, the hilarious poetic notes he left on his pillow for Teddy in the mornings. Lila always felt both revitalized and soothed after a visit to the Calyer Street house, with its crazy old icebox and funky furniture, Oscar’s sketches pinned up haphazardly over the fireplace, filled year-round with the ashes left over from their firelit dinners. She breathed easier there, spoke more loudly, smoked cigarettes and took a snort or two of whiskey, listened to whatever records Oscar had brought over—Miles, Mingus, Monk, Sun Ra, Coltrane, Louis Prima, Harry Partch—as she ate the food Teddy cooked and put in her two cents if Oscar was around and there was an argument afoot. At the parties they gave, Teddy competed with Oscar for the limelight, teased him in front of people, disagreed openly with his pronouncements about his rival painters. Oscar seemed to get a huge kick out of Teddy’s jabs and jousts and never seemed to notice that Lila drank in everything he said and yearned to lick him all over like a big lollipop. If he ever looked Lila’s way at all, he treated her like a lesser adjunct of Teddy, like Teddy’s dimmer domesticated sister.
    While Teddy, without having graduated from college, lived out Lila’s youthful dream of hobnobbing with artists and living an unconventional life, Lila had capitulated to her own tame destiny, which even her Vassar degree hadn’t altered. She had planned to be a novelist, and had moved to Manhattan to pursue this plan, but then she promptly acquiesced to her parents’ unspoken but ironclad expectations and married Sam Scofield, a young English professor at NYU, at twenty-two. By thirty, she’d found herself the mother of three small boys. Until recently, she had been “nothing but” a wife and mother, and now she was “nothing but” a twice-widowed grandmother. She had always, through all those years, tried very hard not to compare exciting, sexy Oscar to faithful, gentle Sam, who stayed up late grading papers, who had tenure and was good at what he did but was never ambitious enough to publish, network, push himself out of his comfortable groove. She sustained and tortured herself with her own suppressed ambition, the idea that someday she would write the novels she’d been born to write.
    But shortly after Sam’s funeral, she’d been introduced by mutual friends to a wealthy retired engineer whose wife had also died recently, the kindly but not-quite-there Peter Williams, and a little later on Lila had married him, almost out of the habit of having a man around. He had lasted ten years with her before he, too, gave out, and during their marriage she had found that he, like Sam and the kids before him, took up all her time. Now that everyone was gone, she kept trying to start a novel, but no matter how many times she tried to get a narrative going, she discovered that the fire of inspiration she’d tried to keep burning in the pit of her stomach through decades of ministering to others seemed to have gone completely out.
    â€œWell, if either of these biographers wants to talk to you, are you available?” Teddy said,