The Great Man (11 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I suppose, aesthetically.”

“Aesthetically,” Paula repeated in a teasing voice. “I don’t know about aesthetically, but essentially it’s just one statement, part of an ongoing dialogue. Conceptually, it’s about shifting the paradigms while engaging in the act of replicating something real and making it as lifelike as possible, to scale, in an artistic context. And thematically, it’s about the African American matriarchy. I’m dialoguing in mainstream, accessible terms about an underrepresented sector, giving a voice to the voiceless and, in the process, playing with the traditional power structures of representation. To put it colloquially, in black culture, women are the ones who step up. Sure, black teenage girls are having babies, but the family raises them together, grandmothers, aunts, cousins. Black men are off in prison or on the streets and the women are holding everything together with faith and discipline and courage.”

“Yes, I see that,” said Maxine. “What I don’t see is how life-size subway benches or fast-food booths can be considered art in the same way as a Kandinsky painting or a Rodin sculpture.”

“That’s partly the point,” said Paula. She sounded as if she were congratulating Maxine. “The African American family structure is, of necessity, self-invented and free-form in the same way African American art has to be. We have to make it up. We have to invent. We have to use what we’ve got, which is nothing. Our own lineage was broken by slavery. Our heritage was lost. Our families were divided and separated again and again—out of existence. African American art is pure American energy, tapped into something positive instead of the negativity of gangland killings and crime and unwed motherhood and drugs. It’s the flip side, the bright side of ghetto darkness. You could say that we have to write our own song, and we are singing it any way we can.”

“Beautifully put,” said John softly.

“And, all due respect,” Paula added with a glint of fight in her eye, “but you haven’t seen these replicas. Radically different subject matter aside, they are solidly part of tradition, if you want to get into that. I’m dialoguing with Ed Keinholz, of course, and Red Grooms…Duane Hanson and H. C. Westerman…. And just because they were white men and I’m a black woman doesn’t mean it’s any less valid as art, Maxine. You, as a woman artist, ought to know that as well as anyone.”

“Bravo,” Jane said, tapping her fingers together in miniature applause.

Maxine opened her mouth to ask Paula how she could possibly consider herself an African American descended from slavery when her mother was of French descent and her father was from Algeria and she’d grown up in the suburbs and gone to Bennington.

Instead, she said, “I have done my best to avoid becoming familiar with conceptual art. It seems like a lot of clever, cold hoo-ha to me. As for so-called dialoguing—if that is really a verb—I have no idea what that means. I paint out of direct experience, and I’m not talking to anyone when I work, least of all to myself. I have to get everyone out of my head, including my own voice, in order to be able to paint. Please excuse me if the answer is obvious and the question is retarded, but what the hell ever happened to truth and beauty?”

The whole table erupted into conversation all at once.

“So is it really
art
?” said Saul Unger softly in Maxine’s ear. “That’s the question. It should be called something else, because it
is
something else.”

Maxine looked over at him, surprised to have an ally at the table after all.

“Really,” Saul said stubbornly. “The same way Scientology is not a religion, this is not art. Yom Kippur is not easy. Kandinsky is not easy.”

Suddenly, another plate appeared in front of Maxine, this one containing two grilled lamb chops, boiled new red potatoes, chickpea-mint salad, and steamed baby squash. The chickpeas looked like round infant heads with cowlicks. So whoever was masterminding this dinner was attempting nothing less than the re-creation of the history of evolution, from primordial soup to water babies to land babies. She supposed there would be meringue chicks in baklava nests for dessert. She could imagine the cook back there, his breast simultaneously puffed with pride and racked with despair: No one would understand his brilliant work, no one would apprehend its true meaning, and then it would be gone.

“Speaking of aesthetics,” she said jovially across the table to Michael, indicating her plate. “This is like the upscale version of
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
”

Michael responded with an impatient, tight look Maxine felt was meant to function as a slap. She surmised in a flash that she had committed a double faux pas. Apparently, you weren’t supposed to question Paula’s artistic merit; rather, you were supposed to say, “This dinner is amazing. Who is your chef?” instead of comparing it to a Buñuel film. But why the fuck not? It made no sense, any of it. In the old days, the painters at such a party could well have been pissing in corners, drunk as bums, arguing so hard that they spat at one another. She missed her brother with a sharp pain in her chest; she thought for a moment that she was having a heart attack until she realized that it was just nostalgia.

Six

The brush was moving on the canvas as if it had volition, liveliness, as if it were made of nerve endings and electrical impulses instead of dead wood and hair, or as if it were a dog or a badger, something instinctive, intent on prey. It leapt over the surface and left tracks, deposited a trail of feathery flakes, then a smudge, as if the wind had smeared it. The tracks ended before the entire bare right side of the canvas. It looked as if the creature had become airborne and lifted off.

Ashes and Dust,
Maxine had named this series. She stood back to look at what she’d done. From this angle, at this remove, it pleased her, but Maxine knew all too well that the eye of the beholder was a fickle thing when the beholder was also the maker. Five minutes from now, from another angle, it would look like shit.

“Ralph Washington will be a little late,” Katerina called from the office area in the back of the loft, which was little more than a desk made of a door on two filing cabinets, with phone and computer on it, stacks of papers, bills to be paid.

“What?” Maxine called. Whenever Katerina was here, she took charge of Maxine’s cell phone, which was a relief, but even so, Maxine hated to be interrupted when she was working, even by Katerina. Being dragged from the world of painting back into the world of life was as difficult as forcing herself from the world of life back into the world of painting. A thick but permeable membrane separated them. Going from one to another required a shape-shifting in the brain. She was never entirely safely ensconced in either world; the demands of the other one could be heard, muffled from whichever one you were in, so no matter where you were, you felt a tug of anxiety that something might go wrong in the other one in your absence, something you’d failed to account for before you left. It would have been much easier if the transition could have been accomplished through a series of soundproof air locks, decompression chambers. It felt as if there were only room in one lifetime to inhabit one of these parallel worlds, but here she was, trying to cram them both in. Each parallel life sucked the air out of the other one. When she was deep in her painting, she felt how short her time there was and panicked because she would never get to do it all before she died. It only got harder as she got older, harder because, as with sleep, she could never be as fully in either world as she’d been when she was younger. The membrane had become worn and weakened with age, like everything else.

Katerina didn’t bother repeating what she’d said, but that was to be expected; Maxine knew that Katerina knew she’d heard every word.

Maxine dipped her brush in the paint and sent it on another series of animal skitterings up to the shoreline of what she now imagined was a frozen lake. She wanted the shock of so much unfilled whiteness to evoke a sort of internal gasp, both a dying breath and a living astonishment that so much space was left unexplored. She could feel her own lungs suspended as she worked, and she forced herself to inhale, suddenly frustrated by the insurmountable inability to make the paint correspond exactly and precisely to what was in her head. It was always doomed from the outset, but here she was, making another goddamned painting.

It was 10:00
A.M
. Katerina had come at nine o’clock, as she did every Wednesday. She had settled right in to work, as always. No small talk had passed between them; they had met once, at the coffeemaker in the kitchen, to pour themselves fresh cups, but Maxine hadn’t asked why Katerina had never returned the weekend’s phone call, and Katerina hadn’t offered any apology or explanation. Now an hour had gone by and it hadn’t come up, so Maxine was fairly sure it never would: The window of opportunity had passed. Katerina wasn’t the type to apologize or overexplain things, which Maxine, in her current frame of mind about Katerina, suddenly found irksome and impolite. Before today, she had always loved Katerina’s stoic reserve, but during these past few days she had worked herself into a state of not caring about Katerina, which had involved a lot of tricky mental gymnastics. She had twisted and warped Katerina’s stellar character traits into a craven bunch of faults, had pinned all her good qualities to a corkboard and viewed them, squinting, through a cynical lens until they morphed into manipulations and illusions. It had taken some doing, but Maxine was skilled at doing this to people who had disappointed her; she had had a lot of practice. That damned Slavic stone face, the nerve of it.

Five years before, Katerina had come here to see Maxine, a stranger whose phone number she’d looked up in the White Pages, an artist she considered one of the greatest living painters. She had asked for the minimum hourly wage to perform the most menial of tasks in return for the privilege of watching the master at her work. Grudgingly, Maxine had agreed to let Katerina come once a week, on the condition that she stayed out of her hair when she was working. This, she had done.

When Ralph had called a few moments before, Katerina had been sorting Maxine’s receipts into two piles: those that were tax-deductible and those that weren’t. Her understanding of the American tax system had improved vastly since she’d gotten her green card and become a taxpaying citizen. She worked as a waitress at a cheap Polish restaurant in the East Village, the primary advantage of which, besides the great kindness of the elderly owners, was that it was only four blocks away from the one-bedroom apartment she shared with two fellow Hungarian émigré artists, a young married couple in their late twenties who fought passionately in the kitchen over cigarettes and straight vodka, then disappeared into the bedroom. Katerina, who was almost never there except to sleep, had only the pullout living room couch and a small bureau in the entryway. Because of this economy, she had a tidy savings account and could just barely afford the small studio, a cubbyhole in an industrial loft she shared with seven other painters, in a patchy neighborhood in Brooklyn, four stops in on the L train. Out of both economic necessity and a perverse pleasure in being smart about what little money she had, she was stringent and disciplined with her own deductions and receipts, and she brought the same zealousness to Maxine’s finances. She considered anything other than groceries, toiletries, or clothing tax-deductible. Paints were, of course, and so were MetroCards, restaurant receipts, and books. Since Maxine was haphazard, disorganized, and stubbornly lax about remembering to put all her receipts into the box Katerina had marked “For Taxes,” she always went through Maxine’s coat pockets, her grocery-carrying backpack, and the bits and pieces on her bureau. Still, she could never make it add up to enough to make a real difference. Katerina was often tempted to augment Maxine’s patchy receipts with some of her own, but she had thus far resisted the temptation to bestow this sort of ridiculous and unasked-for charity on someone who would grumpily wave it away if she ever caught wind of it.

“So what time is what’s his name coming?” Maxine shouted suddenly.

“He said he’ll be about fifteen minutes late,” Katerina said, smiling. “He will be here soon.”

Maxine heard the smile in Katerina’s voice and felt murderous. She could smell Katerina’s new love affair on her like a cheap perfume.

“Didn’t he ask everything last time?”

“Should I tell him not to come?”

“What is the fucking point of all these goddamned paintings?”

Katerina didn’t answer. They both went back to work.

A moment later, Maxine called, “Come look at this painting, would you?”

“Okay,” said Katerina, approaching the canvas with a cautiously eager expression. Maxine despaired at the sight of her; Katerina was dressed in a black tank top that revealed her muscular arms, and a pair of olive green canvas pants with many pockets that rode her narrow hips, low-slung and fetching, showing an inch or so of flat belly. Her face looked wide open, soft, like a small child’s, as if she had just awakened from a deep sleep and was anticipating ice cream. Maxine felt strongly that her advanced age should have granted her some kind of immunity from the humiliation of unrequited lust. That it didn’t was yet another of the many indignities of old age.

After a moment, Katerina said slowly, “Mostly negative space. A quiet painting, a little bleak.”

“Bleak,” repeated Maxine.

Katerina paused again. She had learned by answering wrongly that these requests of Maxine’s to tell her what she saw in a particular painting always had one right answer only. Last time, Katerina had looked at cross-hatchings of black, a claustrophobic schemata of webbing and fencelike filigree, and said the painting created a feeling of suspense and anticipation. Maxine, not bothering to hide her disappointment, had told her that actually the painting was supposed to make her feel buried alive. The one before that had been intended to make her feel punched in the gut. Apparently, Maxine’s paintings were intended to punish the viewer for failing to see what they were about.

“There is just bare white on the right side,” Katerina went on, “and very small black marks on the left side…. It feels unfinished.”

“Yes,” said Maxine. “Anything else?”

“Well…” Katerina took a deep breath. It made her feel as if she were being drowned? dragged by horses? dismembered and eaten alive by a polar bear?

The cell phone in her hand chirped. She pressed the green button, put it to her ear, and said, “Maxine Feldman’s studio, Katerina speaking.” It was her own choice to answer the phone in this way; Maxine had never told her what to say.

“Katerina,” came a robust but unmistakably elderly female voice. “This is Claire St. Cloud. May I speak to Maxine, please?”

“Just a moment.” Katerina pressed hold and said to Maxine, “It’s Claire St. Cloud.”

“God fucking damn it,” said Maxine, reaching for the phone. “Claire,” she said with guttural displeasure. “Hello? Hello? Oh good, she hung up.”

“You have to press the hold button again,” said Katerina.

Maxine mashed the button, then repeated—this time with less venom because she’d been distracted—“Claire?”

“Hello, Maxine,” said Teddy. “I’d like to come and see you today.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“You know why.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Maxine. “Come later, then. That biographer is coming here this morning.”

“Henry?” said Teddy possessively.

“The other one.”

“How’s three o’clock?”

“Oh, all right,” said Maxine, and hung up without asking whether Teddy knew where she lived. She had put her return address on her letter to Lila.

The doorbell rang then. While Katerina went to let Ralph in, Maxine turned the easel with the new painting to face the wall; then she went into the little bathroom in the back of the loft to wash her hands and face. When she came out, she could hear Katerina talking to Ralph, a bottle being opened, carbonated liquid being poured into a glass, chair legs scraping against the linoleum. She heard Ralph say, “I was unavoidably held up.”

Maxine strode into the kitchen. Ralph looked up as she entered, pushed his chair back, and stood up.

“Thank you so much for your time today,” he said. His face looked even blacker with its sheen of sweat. A glass of golden bubbly liquid sat on the table in front of him.

“Hello,” Maxine said, trying to sound far more friendly and welcoming than she felt. In front of Katerina, she felt compelled to dredge deep inside herself for whatever kindness and warmth she possessed, to live up to Katerina’s obvious respect for her. Without her here, she could have been as crabby as she’d wanted.

“Some ginger beer?” Katerina asked Maxine with her gap-toothed grin. “I brought it. It’s very cooling on hot days.”

“No, thank you,” said Maxine, hiding, she hoped, her extreme dislike of the stuff. She sat down.

“I’ll be in the office if you need me,” said Katerina, and went back to her chores.

Ralph turned on his tape recorder and set it on the table between him and Maxine, then glanced down at his notes. He took an expressionless sip of ginger beer. “I’ve been thinking,” he began. “Maybe
wondering
is a better word.”

Maxine sighed.

“You and your brother both being painters,” Ralph added.

“What’s your point?”

Ralph looked at the tiny bubbles clinging to the inside of his glass. “Could he have been rebelling against you in his refusal to allow his work to evolve into abstraction?”

Maxine laughed. “Do you have brothers or sisters, Ralph?”

“A younger brother.”

“So you’re the firstborn, too.”

“That’s right.”

“I see.” Maxine’s dog, Frago, lurched up from his bed in the corner and ambled under the table to put his chin on her knee. She toyed with his ear; he snorted and burrowed his head into her thigh. “I was a girl; I was expected to produce little Jewish children. Our parents were businesspeople, and I was their worst investment. I didn’t want children; I wanted to sleep with girls. Oscar at least gave them a grandson. Never mind that he wasn’t much of a grandson; at least Oscar got married, and he wasn’t queer.”

“And two granddaughters.”

“I have nothing to say about them.” Maxine became aware that she was palpating Frago’s ear as if she were trying to extract a pea from it. “What made you choose my brother as your subject?”

Ralph pursed his lips, which immediately irritated Maxine and made her wish she hadn’t asked. “I love his work,” he said with a fervent lack of irony. “He was a man who saw women clearly and deeply, and as his daughter Ruby pointed out to me recently, he wasn’t painting any version of himself. When he looked at a woman, he saw her, not some projected version of his own desire.” Ralph sat back in his chair and lifted his glass and turned it in midair, studying the pale gold liquid.

“You don’t like ginger beer,” Maxine observed.

“Frankly,” said Ralph, putting it abruptly back down onto the table, “I have often thought that Oscar’s work wanted to leave the runway and take off into abstraction. There are certain indications in some of the paintings that hint at an impulse toward blurring the lines between the women themselves and their backgrounds, transcending their features and bodies to show the essential fragmented nature of their personalities…. He stopped short of allowing his paintings to evolve in that direction, and in so doing, I believe, he hamstrung himself as an artist. It was out of some perverse rebellion. Which, I believe, was against you.”