The Great Man (26 page)

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.”

“Okay,” said Maxine, as if she were heading into a blizzard with an umbrella and a book of matches. “Shoot.”

“I was not exactly on my A game the other night, but I liked your bluntness. I get so much admiration and praise, it’s satisfying for someone I respect so much to take me to task. You made me think.”

“I thought you handled it perfectly,” said Maxine, feeling icy winds begin to shriek around her. She squinted at Paula through the smoke from the cigarette clamped between her teeth. Paula was standing in front of a bare white wall at the edge of the studio in full daylight from the windows. She stood with her arms at her sides, her legs slightly apart, looking directly at Maxine. It was a strong stance, simple and natural. Her muscular haunches were in alluring disproportion to her narrow torso. Her breasts were small and firm and tipped with brown nipples. Her biceps bulged; her skin was a glossy and perfectly consistent shade of half-French, half-Algerian caramel.

Paula smiled. “I handled it
okay,
” she said, as if that hadn’t been the point, to have Maxine reassure her. “But now I want to know, between you and me and your dog and the readership of
Artforum
; I want to hear you let fly about the current art world, what’s going on now with us kids. I imagine your statement the other night was only the tip of the iceberg. I bet you hate a lot of what you see out there. I bet it drives you up a wall.”

“I’m not sure I have anything to add to what I said that night,” said Maxine. She paused for a while as she added tiny dabs of acid green to Paula’s breastbone and lips and the deep reddish gloss of her hair. The portrait wasn’t entirely satisfactory. Something was off in Paula’s expression; Maxine hadn’t quite caught the brutal, cool, uncompromising ambition that lay just underneath her sexy warmth. She had painted a gorgeous young woman, not an artist.

She stepped back a moment to study Paula’s eyes as she had painted them, then looked up at her real eyes. She looked at her genitals, then at the genitals she’d painted. Paula’s black pubic hair had been waxed into a narrow vertical band, in which her cunt was set and displayed like a jewel. Her dark eyes were impermeable, tough, knowing. These were the key to getting Paula, her extreme lack of vulnerability, her self-possession. Her sexuality was marshaled by artifice and contained by her watchfulness. Oscar would have done something extreme to make eyes and labia pop out of the picture, but what? How the hell was she supposed to know how to do this? Why the fuck had she agreed to this silly exercise? Maybe
Helena
had been a fluke.

In a fit of intuitive irritation, she stabbed a daub of dark purple on each eyelid, a pointillist darkening, then duplicated it on Paula’s labia, then did the same with light jabs of pure white paint, the only pure white in the entire painting. That was it; that was the right direction. Suddenly, Paula’s eyes and cunt jumped out at the viewer, highlighted with equal menacing force. It gave the painting, Maxine thought, a startling focus. Eyes and cunt were connected to each other now in a way that both repelled and intrigued. That was Paula.

Maxine said in a confiding rush loosened by the sense of relief this gave her, “I don’t get out much to galleries. I’m not very interested in what you kids are up to now, frankly. The art world is no longer relevant. The only reason I’ve kept painting, speaking for myself, is that I have nothing better to do, and because people still buy them occasionally, so I can pay the electric bill.”

“You think no one cares about art anymore?”

“I think very few people care about art anymore, if by ‘art’ you mean painting.”

“Well, they ought to.”

“No, they shouldn’t,” said Maxine. “It’s been supplanted by more ‘exciting’ things. Conceptual hoo-ha and technical wizardry. Art is primarily special effects and marketing schemes. Beauty is apparently considered limp-wristed and useless now.”

Paula laughed, and didn’t deny this. “What do you think of these younger male artists who use their semen instead of paint?”

Maxine picked up a bigger brush and jabbed it repeatedly and lightly into a slick of a smoky, soft black, her favorite, to coat the tips of the bristles. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

Paula smiled with a glint of aggression. “You objected to my ghetto boxes; don’t you have anything to say about these art-star boys who come all over their work and sell it for half a million dollars? Semen!”

“I think,” said Maxine, jabbing the brush here and there on the canvas to create the spongy texture of shadows on the wall behind Paula, “it’s a great racket.”

“I expected you to rant about the aesthetic poverty of it all.”

“I might,” said Maxine, “in a different mood.” She said nothing more for a few minutes, concentrating on getting the subtle shadows right on Paula’s collarbone, under her lower lip. The bitter taste in the back of her throat was worse. She put the cigarette out in the ashtray by her elbow and looked at the portrait from about two feet away, then four, then six, then immediately touched the tips of the brush again very lightly to Paula’s clavicle. This thing was almost finished. The shocking white on the eyelids and labia had been a stroke of genius, or at least a stroke of inspiration brought on by desperation, which was often the same thing, in Maxine’s experience.

“To change the subject, what do you most regret doing or not doing in your life?” Paula asked.

“I regret,” said Maxine, “and you can print this, that I let the love of my life, Jane Fleming, get away about thirty years ago. My second-greatest regret is that I wasn’t more famous during my lifetime. I wish I had seized and pursued and hunted down the two things I most wanted and failed to secure for myself. Self-denial is pointless. Niceness is ridiculous. You’re a very smart young woman, to know this already.”

“You think I’m not nice?” Paula asked, dimples flashing.

“I think you’re perfectly nice, when you want to be. But if someone gets in your way, I imagine you would not stop to worry about anyone’s tender feelings. If something is in your way, it has to be gotten out of your way. You want to be famous, and that’s what it takes. There is no other way.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” said Paula.

“You live where? New Jersey?”

“Yes,” said Paula.

“In Montclair, I understand,” said Maxine. “Nice town. And you’re married?”

“Yes,” said Paula.

“To a white academic, am I correct?”

“My husband teaches philosophy at Rutgers, yes,” said Paula. “And he is white. But Irish.” She laughed. “The niggas of Europe.”

“Oh,” said Maxine, “Europe has many different kinds of niggers. So you’re married; I hope happily on the whole, and if so, I would say, hold on to him no matter what, because when you’re old, you’ll be glad you did. It is unnatural to grow old alone. I envy those lucky people who have longtime mates who remember them when they were young, remember them through the years.” She took a deep breath, put a hand on her chest. “Speaking of old age, my dear. We have taken up enough of each other’s time. In other words, I need to lie down now.”

Paula reached over and turned off the tape recorder and, without asking permission, went over to look at the portrait. She stood just behind Maxine, gazing. Maxine stiffened, suddenly worried.

“Oh my God,” Paula whispered into Maxine’s ear. “Girl, you are
good.
”

Maxine felt herself melt a little, felt her heart warm and tender in her own chest, almost like an ache. “Thank you,” she said.

“This is great, Maxine. I feel honored….” Paula kissed Maxine’s cheek, cupped her other cheek in one hand, and bumped her head briefly against Maxine’s. Maxine sighed like a small child being caressed by her mother, except this was Paula Jabar, and she was naked.

“I’ll get dressed and go now,” said Paula, “and let you rest….”

When Paula had dressed and gone, taking her perfume with her, her bright brown eyes, her flowing gestures and shimmering outfit, Maxine went in search of Katerina. She found her crouched over a box of drawings at the back of the studio.

“Did I say everything all right?” Maxine asked her.

Katerina looked up from the box. There was a smudge of dust on her chin. “I didn’t listen to everything,” she said apologetically. “But I could tell you were brilliant.”

“Katerina,” said Maxine, “I told you a while ago, you are the executor—or should I say executrix—of my will.”

“I know,” said Katerina. “When you die, I have to make sure your will is honored, and call your lawyer, and see that your ashes are thrown into New York harbor.”

“But what you don’t know is that I’ve left you everything,” said Maxine. “All of my paintings, my dog, this loft, and the money in my bank account. You can have all of it, and my paints, and my journals, and everything else. All I ask is that you walk Frago twice a day and make sure my retrospective is done right. Work closely with Michael Rubinstein. You know more than anyone else the work I’m most proud of.”

Katerina had stood up during this little speech, and now she grasped Maxine’s hand and said, “Are you going to die?”

“Yes,” said Maxine, then added through her bone-weary muzziness, “eventually I am, so I wanted you to know all of this from me before I go. You’ve been an absolute angel to me these past few years, and I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather leave it all to.”

“What about the tefillin?” Katerina asked.

“Give them to Abigail. Let her decide whether or not that little kid should get them. Everything else, all my crap, what little money I have, you keep. You can live here or sell the place and move somewhere more interesting. I don’t care.”

Katerina said, “I don’t deserve this.”

“Now I’m going to go lie down,” said Maxine, letting her hand go. “If I’m not up by the time you leave, don’t forget to come and wake me.”

“I won’t forget,” said Katerina, looking dazed.

In her bedroom, Maxine kicked off her shoes and flopped onto her bed with a grunt of relief. She lay on her back and looked up at her ceiling. Several things flitted through her mind at once—regret about a few of the things she’d said to Paula this afternoon, which sounded fatuous when she replayed them in her memory; an image of her niece Ruby at the dog run, looking so much like Oscar; a sudden craving for vanilla ice cream; a brief memory of Oscar as a young man walking down Broadway snapping pictures of a young Maxine, who was thirsty and hot and out of sorts; a momentary fear that Frago needed to go out and was suffering from an overfull bladder; a sudden recollection of the newsstand on Houston Street her father had always taken her to every morning, where the old Armenian always cackled at little Maxine as he handed her father his newspapers, one in Yiddish, one in English. The Armenian had lost his front teeth and half his fingers; his cheeks were bristled with black whiskers like spiders’ legs. Every morning, he had given Maxine a lollipop. He was like the troll who lived under the bridge in the old story. With the image of the Armenian handing over the lollipop, eyes bulging with frightening goodwill, as vivid in her mind as if it were happening right that moment, Maxine drifted into a deep and dream-filled sleep.

Epilogue

Henry Burke and Ralph Washington stood alone together at Maxine’s retrospective with glasses of red wine. They were the only ones in the broad hallway of the Michael Rubinstein Gallery, where
Helena
hung next to
Paula.
People were just starting to arrive; a few early birds milled about, examining Maxine’s new series of black-and-white abstracts in the main gallery. Upstairs in the smaller galleries was a selection of the best of her older works.

Both men wore tuxedos. Henry’s was rented and fit him imperfectly; Ralph had recently bought his, and wore it with dapper enjoyment. Henry looked peaked and ill at ease; he had lost a good deal of weight over the past months. Ralph, on the other hand, had gained a few pounds, and had achieved a courtly, gleaming plumpness, which oddly became him.

“Well,” said Henry, not looking Ralph in the eye. “Maxine’s work looks good, all hung up like this. I had wondered how it would be, in the aggregate. And these two portraits are great in their own right.”

“How’s your book?” Ralph asked.

“It’s coming along,” said Henry, not altogether honestly. “There’s so much rich material to mine.”

In truth, he was flummoxed by the richness of the material he’d amassed. And distracting him from writing the book was the fact that he had somehow managed to fall into a sexually passionate love affair with Ruby Feldman. Adultery was exhausting, he found; he didn’t have the stomach for it. He was on the verge of mental collapse at the moment. His wife, Melanie, was wandering around in the main gallery. Soon, she and his mistress would be in the same room. He thought he might faint, throw up, or both at once.

“That’s for sure,” said Ralph, chuckling. He had cut off his devil’s horn dreadlocks and now sported a close Afro, a neat cap of hair. “It was an honor to get to know all these women in his life. I have become especially close to his widow, Abigail.”

Henry stared at him. “When I started out,” he said with a tinge of bitterness, “I thought Oscar was the most enviable man in human history. I thought he was the guy who had it all.” He took a gingerly sip of wine. He was drinking it to help himself relax, but every acidic sip brought him closer to vomiting, so it was a careful balancing act. “Now, after talking to all the people who knew him best, I see him very differently. I see him as a very lonely man. Very isolated among all these devoted women. I learned a lot from my research, you could say.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Ralph with preacherly consolation. His lips gleamed redly with the wine. “I had the opposite experience. I discovered how truly lucky Oscar was, how blessed. I had originally thought of him as a sort of outsider, isolated, as you say, by his own self-imposed limitations. Now I see that he created his own inside. He was always true to himself.”

Henry stared at him again, formulating a question. “I wonder,” he said after a moment, “what you make of his two households. It strikes me that he needed to have a toehold in both places to avoid real intimacy.”

Ralph laughed, throwing his head back. Henry blinked, surprised at the force of the other man’s amusement. “Oh ho ho,” Ralph said, laughing. “Oscar would think it was funny to hear you say that.”

“Maybe,” said Henry. He scratched his chin. “I’m sure he would.”

“What would Maxine make of all this hoopla if she were alive to see it?” Ralph asked, looking around. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had loaned
Helena
to the gallery. Out of gratitude, Michael Rubinstein had offered in return to host, instead of the usual free opening for all the riffraff in street clothes, an invitation-only black-tie party to raise money for the museum. “They called her a feminist art pioneer in the
Voice
yesterday.”

“Maxine would have choked on her own tongue before she would have had anything to do with the word
feminist,
” said Henry. “She said she thought feminism was boring and didactic.”

Ralph looked up at the portrait of Paula. “Do you think these are as good as Oscar’s portraits, the way a lot of people are saying?”

Henry peered first at one portrait and then the other, as if he had never thought much about the question before and was considering it for the first time. Maybe it was just his mood, but the painting of the younger Jane Fleming seemed just slightly self-conscious, and the new one, of Paula Jabar, seemed a little unbalanced, overly vivid. He contrasted them in his memory’s eye to
Mercy,
which he recalled was jazzy without being garish, joyful and full of life.

“No,” said Henry. “Frankly, I think
Mercy
is by far the best of the three. Do you think these are as good?”

“I’m afraid I do,” said Ralph. “I wish I didn’t. I feel disloyal to Oscar.”

“Maybe I’m seeing them differently, knowing they’re imitations of Oscar by Maxine and not really genuinely her own artistic vision,” said Henry.

“Could be,” said Ralph. “Knowing that changed everything for me. I tried not to let it.”

Just then, a group of five women entered from the street, coming in at the far end of the gallery, chattering, patting and smoothing their hair to repair the ravages of the windy evening outside: Teddy and her two daughters, her friend Lila, and Oscar’s widow, Abigail, dressed in evening gowns, all in striking colors. They appeared to be laughing together at something Teddy was saying.

Henry’s heart constricted at the sight of Ruby. Where was Melanie? Ruby was wearing a strapless green dress and had her hair piled on top of her head. She looked breathtakingly glamorous; Henry couldn’t imagine how he had managed to win her, assuming she could ever be won. He had fallen madly, adolescently in love with her, and now felt that he couldn’t live without her. This had not been part of his plan. He had only meant to follow Teddy’s advice to have an innocent but passionate affair of the heart so his wife would sleep with him again. He had never meant for it to get so out of hand. He wished Melanie would magically vanish off the face of the earth so he could marry Ruby. He would never have either the nerve or the heartlessness to leave Melanie; for the sake of his son, he would have to give Ruby up before Melanie found out about the whole thing and his life exploded. But the thought of going on for the rest of his life without Ruby, now that he knew what it was like to be with her, felt like being locked in a stone tower with no windows. But if Melanie found out…He swallowed hard to tamp down a rising tide of nausea.

“What’s Abigail doing with Teddy and her little coterie?” he asked.

“Oh, they’re all very friendly with one another now,” said Ralph.

“Why?”

“Why not?” said Ralph. “No reason not to be, anymore.”

Surrounding the group of five women, escorting one or more of them apiece, were three men. Henry recognized Samantha’s tall, gangly, exceedingly dorky husband, Ivan Sandusky, with his thatch of white hair and potbelly, and he had a feeling the bald, slender old man was Teddy’s old friend and new beau; she had mentioned him the week before when they’d talked on the telephone. But he had no idea who the slouching young man was, his hand hovering near Ruby’s elbow, his hair unnecessarily copious. All Henry knew was that he didn’t like the way Ruby leaned her shoulder against that boy’s so intimately. The idea that she might have other lovers besides himself had never occurred to Henry before, and now that it had, he found himself violently jealous, on top of all the other terrible things he was already feeling.

The deejay suddenly got his act together; music leapt from the speakers. After a moment, Henry recognized Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring.

Michael Rubinstein came bustling through the hall. Behind him scuttled an officious-looking, glamorous young black woman.

“Hello,” he said to the two biographers, and dove into the gathering crowd.

“Get something to drink if you like,” said the assistant just before she vanished behind her employer.

“We are drinking,” said Henry to Ralph.

Ralph nodded at Henry. “I’ve been looking forward to this evening,” he said. “I imagine you have, too.”

“Oh, God no,” said Henry.

“Why not?”

Henry looked at Ralph. “I barely know you,” he said. “But I have no one else to tell this to. I’m having an affair with Oscar’s daughter Ruby. My wife is here tonight, too; wild horses and five armies couldn’t have kept her away. They’re both here. We couldn’t get a baby-sitter for Maxine’s memorial service, so she stayed home that day; I was hoping the same thing would happen tonight, but no such luck. I’m terrified one of them will make a scene. My wife will smell it out the minute she sees Ruby and me together; she’ll just
know.
And Ruby won’t back down if Melanie comes at her; she has no sentimental ideals about the sanctity of marriage. She thinks it’s absurd for people to be one another’s property or to impose the unnatural restrictions of monogamy on human nature.”

Ralph looked at Henry with dawning empathy. Then he burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Henry asked.

“Oscar would
love
that,” said Ralph. “He would love it! Relax, man. They’re not going to make a scene, not here. Just enjoy yourself. Ruby? Well done. She’s a lovely girl. She doesn’t seem the type to be confrontational or dramatic. You should just enjoy yourself.”

“She brought a date,” said Henry.

“Pretend you’re Oscar for one night. Enjoy yourself, drink up, and get that look off your face like you’re about to pass out on the floor.”

“Fuck,” said Henry. He put his hand on Ralph’s shoulder to steady himself and finished his wine.

Ralph said, “Come on, let’s join the party.”