The Great Man (22 page)

Maxine had painted the portrait of Jane by impersonating her brother, looking at Jane through his eyes. It had been more an exercise in identification than a technical challenge. She had reached back to her art-school training for the feints and finesses of making paint look like expression, gesture, living skin. These had come back to her surprisingly easily; the difficult part had been forcing herself to view Jane with Oscar’s predatory aggression. In particular, Oscar had had a way of painting women’s genitalia; he slightly exaggerated the labia, made the pubic hair just a little more copious than it could possibly have been. “Pussies are like faces,” he had once said to Maxine when she’d asked him about this. “No two are alike. I can tell you everything about a woman by looking at her cunt. I could set myself up as a cunt reader at a carnival and make a killing. Some look like little buttocks. Some are flowers. Some are oysters. Some are other things. They’re the focal point of every portrait, whether you can tell in the end or not. I start with a woman’s cunt and work from there. I hate it when she’s got so much hair you can’t see anything. Sometimes I ask my models to trim it away. Teddy’s an oyster, with long, ruffled inner lips. Abigail is a—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Maxine had told him.

According to Oscar’s taxonomy, Jane’s cunt was a flower; Maxine, impersonating Oscar, exaggerated the plumpness of her petal-like outer labia, emphasized the tiny protrusion of the inner lips, like the flirtatious tip of a tongue, the honey brown quiff of pubic hair that left the lips nearly bare and traveled down her inner thighs. Then she looked at Jane’s face as she had examined her genitalia: as representative of the whole woman, assertively idiosyncratic. When the portrait was finished, Maxine had the grimy, unsavory feeling that she understood her brother now better than she had ever wanted to. She’d scrubbed her hands afterward, and had kept scrubbing even after all the paint was gone.

Discussing this on the phone with Dexter earlier, she had, of course, said nothing along these lines; she had talked instead about seeing through Oscar’s eyes into the soul of her subject, trying to erase herself and become the woman she was painting. But it was all hogwash; the thing Oscar was famous for, she had discovered, wasn’t at all how he went about painting. He metaphorically and, for all she knew, literally raped his models with his brushes and somehow ended up evoking inner strength, an inviolable selfhood. Very odd. She still wasn’t sure why that happened, but she knew how he did it as no one else possibly could have.

“Yes, I was amazed that you saw me that way,” said Jane. “You seemed to be seeing some better version of me, or so I thought at the time, but then, I was excessively self-conscious when I was younger.”

“Did I idealize you back then?” Maxine asked with horror.

“God, I don’t know,” said Jane. “Honestly, I can’t remember back that far. I just know that painting is definitely worthy of Oscar. Brilliant. It’s satirical. Such a sly joke, making an über-WASP society girl portrait of a white-trash Southern Baptist like me, and then also passing your own dyke girlfriend off as one of your brother’s conquests…So clever, Max, just so stunningly smart. Class, gender, stylistic appropriation. And on top of that, by using
Mercy
as the model for
Helena,
in pairing the two paintings, you made both of them about race, as well.”

Maxine furrowed her brow.

“Good God!” said Jane. “Don’t disillusion me and tell me it was all unintentional.”

“I was just trying to win a bet,” said Maxine, taking a slug of whiskey. “I don’t know about all that other crap. Want a tuna sandwich?”

“In a bit,” said Jane. “Let me get a buzz on first.”

“Tell me about this boyfriend of yours,” said Maxine.

Jane took a sip of wine with the kind of smug, thoughtful little grin people used to attribute to the Cheshire cat from
Alice in Wonderland,
a book that had always given Maxine mental hives.

“All right, then,” said Maxine, “don’t tell me.”

“No no,” said Jane, “I like talking about him. It’s just that he’s very quirky. It’s hard to describe him.”

“I never knew you were bisexual,” said Maxine, trying to sound nonjudgmental, without accusation.

“I’m not,” said Jane. “I’m as gay as you are. It’s just that…”

“What’s his name?” Maxine asked, stifling a sigh.

“Sylvester Beely,” said Jane. “Syl, he’s called.”

“What’s he like? Sensitive and artistic, or manly and rugged?”

Jane laughed. “Well, he’s not…artistic, to say the least. Actually, he’s far more effeminate than you are. He calls himself a girl with a penis, and in many ways he is.”

“Oh,” said Maxine.

“But in some ways he’s quite rugged,” said Jane. “He’s not American…so his idea of masculinity is more complex and inclusive than that of most men who were born and raised here. He was born in Bombay to a Dutch father and an English mother, raised in India and Africa, schooled in England and at Harvard, where he got an M.B.A., and now he’s a self-made millionaire who retired early. He’s fifty-seven. A little younger than I am.”

“What does he do now that he’s retired?” Maxine asked through a welter of frustration.

“He coordinates charitable and humanitarian efforts for AIDS victims in the Third World. And when he’s not doing that, he goes white-water kayaking in Canada and studies ancient Greek. He’s working his way through Homer’s
Odyssey
in the original. He sounds too good to be true, doesn’t he? But he’s got a lot of mental problems, a lot of fragility, unresolved conflicts, demons…. He needs me desperately, which is as much a part of his appeal to me as the rest of it, his success, his intelligence. He’s a mess inside. His childhood was hell. His ambitions always kept him from the things he really wanted to do—find love, get married, have a family, emotional stability….”

“And you fulfill all his needs,” said Maxine. “You mother him; you fulfill his longing for intimacy.”

“No need to be snotty,” said Jane. Her tone was light, but her smile was sharp-toothed.

“Yeah,” said Maxine. “Well, after I saw you the other night, I kicked myself. I couldn’t remember why we broke up, to be honest.”

“Give me some more wine,” said Jane, holding up her glass.

Maxine poured a good dollop into her glass.

Jane leaned back and fingered the glass’s stem, looking up at the ceiling. “I was heartbroken by our affair, Max,” she said after a moment. “It took me years to get over you.”

“You
were
? It
did
?”

“You didn’t know?”

“I had absolutely no idea.”

“Oh yes. I was catatonic for a few months after you dumped me.”

“I
dumped
you?” Maxine felt as if she’d been plunked down in an alternate universe. She could feel how bug-eyed she looked. She was sick to her stomach with shocked regret.

“Well…” said Jane, still not looking at Maxine. “You said you didn’t want to see me anymore. I took that to mean I was being dumped. Perhaps I overreacted.”

Maxine stared slack-jawed at her hands, which were twisted together on the table.

“You are a tough nut to crack,” said Jane. “You mean to say you had no idea that’s what happened?”

“I saw it somewhat differently,” said Maxine. “It seemed to me we were both unwilling to show our cards. We were both too proud and insecure at once. No one seemed to be willing to fall headlong.”

“I fell headlong!” Jane said, half laughing, half angry. “Never before or since did I give or have I given of myself so completely. I felt you couldn’t handle my intensity. I felt you were put off by it. Whenever we would start to get close, you would back off, shut the door, say you had a lot of work to do. I mean, hell, it only lasted a few months. But it devastated me. It’s amazing how very brief affairs can go so deep, cut to the bone, so it takes years to get over what lasted only hours.”

Maxine felt weak, ashen, befuddled. “I didn’t know,” she said. “Truly, Jane. I had no idea. I would have loved to be with you for a long time, to be with you still. I feel awful. I mean this. I was very sorry to see you go.”

“‘Very sorry to see me go,’” said Jane. “Sounds like you didn’t suffer too much.”

“I can’t very well take a lie-detector test about this,” said Maxine. “But Jane, I never knew how you felt about me; I had not the slightest idea. This whole conversation has me feeling as if you and I were in two different affairs. I wanted to fall in love with you but felt somehow blocked. I don’t know why.”

Maxine and Jane looked at each other.

“I thought you were such a coward,” said Jane.

“I thought you were remote,” said Maxine. “I wanted to know you better, but I had no idea how to get there.”

Their mutual gaze deepened a little.

“I’m glad you’ve found love,” said Maxine.

“Well, thanks,” said Jane. “I wish you had found it, too.”

“I’m horrified that you felt the way you did and I never knew it.”

“I never really saw what I had to offer you,” Jane replied. “You were so interesting and famous and all that. I was this boring academic type.”

“What?” Maxine said.

“You were so exciting. You had such strong opinions about everything. I loved being with you. It made me feel bohemian and unconventional, corny as it sounds, instead of a kid from a trailer park masquerading as an academic, which is what I am. You were the kind of woman I had hoped to meet all my life.”

“Why the hell couldn’t you show me you felt like that?”

“I did show you,” said Jane.

“Hell no,” said Maxine. “You did not. This is not all my fucking fault. I was not the villain here. If you had felt so passionately about me, don’t you think I should have had an inkling of that? I am not stupid. And I had no frigging idea.”

“Well then, I don’t know what the problem was,” said Jane.

“You should have told me,” said Maxine. “The problem was that you didn’t tell me.”

Jane was silent, twisting her glass by the stem, biting her lower lip.

“You were too proud and insecure to tell me,” Maxine went on. “Just like I was too proud and insecure to admit I was falling for a woman so much younger than me. We both screwed up, Jane.”

“All right,” said Jane. “We both screwed up.”

“Well, I’m glad that now you have the worldly, rich, white-water-kayaking, humanitarian Syl Beely to shower you with feelings and open his heart to you. I’m sorry to sound so bitter.”

Jane reached across the table and put her cool, dry hand over Maxine’s hot, hard one. “Maxine,” she said, “I wish things had been different.”

Maxine felt herself stiffen at the unexpected touch, so dearly welcome, so deeply threatening. As she had when Katerina had taken her hand, she willed her own to lie inert, for fear of scaring Jane’s hand away.

“And you should know,” Jane went on, “that you were loved. I loved you.”

Maxine, with an effort that rivaled all the great efforts of her life, forced herself to turn her own hand so it was holding Jane’s as Jane’s was holding hers. She looked into Jane’s sharp, plain, intelligent face. “Time for dinner?” she said.

“I love how it’s always time for dinner once a day,” Jane said, “no matter what human tragedies are going on; even in places where sometimes there is no dinner, as Syl would point out, there’s still that time in the evening when you hunker down with your fellow humans and try to keep warm.”

Maxine managed to hold back, all at once, a sharp comment about the bromides of politically correct Syl, an affection-deflecting remark about how this hand-holding was too little, too late, and a self-deprecating joke about her own dinners, which were almost always solitary, totally devoid of warm fellow humans. Instead, she briefly tightened her hand around Jane’s—she hoped not too awkwardly—and smiled—she hoped warmly—then got up to assemble the sandwiches.

Twelve

When Abigail saw the story about
Helena
in the
Times
the next day, she reached for her phone and immediately called Maxine. “They quote you here,” she said right away to Maxine when she answered, not bothering with pleasantries. “You told the whole story. Why did you do that?”

“Because they were going to run the story with or without my side of it.”

“Well, Lila Scofield told them ‘No comment,’” said Abigail. She was sitting with Ethan in the breakfast nook, feeding him two soft-boiled eggs with a piece of buttered wheat toast torn up and soaked in the soft yolks. “She didn’t say a word!”

“They uncovered my signature,” said Maxine. “Jane Fleming is the one who told them. The model. My old girlfriend. I hadn’t reckoned with her.”

“I bet you’ve been getting calls all day.”

“Everyone seems quite excited, the people at the Met not least of all.”

“What a headline,” said Abigail, looking at the first page of the “Arts and Leisure” section. “‘After More Than Thirty Years, Truth Revealed: Met Masterpiece Painted by Artist’s Sister.’ All the feminists will be having a party, assuming there are any left anymore.”

“There must still be three or four hairy-legged trolls around here somewhere,” Maxine said through a mouthful of something. She swallowed. “Sorry, I’m in the middle of a tuna fish sandwich.”

Abigail cleared her throat. “You broke your promise to Oscar!”

“The story was out,” said Maxine.

“You didn’t have to add to it.”

“Well, I know that, but since they were going to write it anyway, I figured they might as well get it right the first time around. I didn’t want them to screw it up and then I’d have to be setting the story straight for months. It’s a big story, and I figured it ought to come out right the first time, and I’m the only one who could tell it.”

“Okay,” said Abigail, slightly mollified. “Anyway, you must be very glad it’s finally out.”

“Honestly,” said Maxine, “how could I not be. I got a call from Michael Rubinstein, my dealer, and he’s talking about having a retrospective as soon as we can get one together. He’s hoping the Met will lend
Helena
to his gallery.”

“Oh,” said Abigail. “That’s marvelous.”

“Isn’t it,” said Maxine. “Meanwhile, Jane Fleming came for dinner last night. She’s pitching an interview with me to
Art in America.
And here’s the real twist in the story. I just got a call from an editor at
Artforum.
They want to do a piece, as they call it, on me and my nemesis, Paula Jabar, a woman I cannot personally or professionally tolerate. They want me to paint a nude portrait of her in the style of
Helena
and
Mercy
while she interviews me. But how can I say no to
that
?” Maxine laughed, a rich chuckle Abigail hadn’t heard from her before.

“Ironic,” said Abigail. “But wonderful.”

“I’m disgusted by having to associate with Paula,” said Maxine with gusto and, Abigail suspected, a large dollop of disingenuousness. “Anyway, they’re probably just trying to get me to prove I really can paint a portrait, that
Helena
wasn’t a fluke, which it may well have been. Why can’t the piece just be about my real work?”

“You’re complaining about the premise of an
Artforum
piece about you?”

“I’m hardly complaining,” said Maxine.

There was a pause as both of them realized there was no more either of them wanted to say on the topic, at least for now.

“Guess who I’m having over for lunch today?” Abigail offered.

“I’m sure I can’t,” said Maxine.

“Teddy’s daughter and her two children,” said Abigail. “Samantha. She wants to come and meet her half brother. She called the other day, very shy and apologetic, wondering if I’d mind. I said, ‘No, of course not. Come up for lunch, but be forewarned: He’s not able to converse or make interpersonal contact.’ She said she knew that; she just wants to see him.”

“I think I see her sister at the dog run,” said Maxine. “Ruby.”

“How do you know it’s her?”

“She looks exactly like Oscar, and she’s the right age, and her dog is registered to Ruby Feldman.”

“Gosh,” said Abigail. “Why don’t you say something to her?”

“Because that’s not my style,” said Maxine. “Meanwhile, that’s all very modern and convivial, Teddy’s spawn having lunch with you.”

Abigail thought Maxine sounded uncommonly mellow today, but that made perfect sense. Long-thwarted ambitious people tended to be suddenly much nicer when they got the attention they felt they deserved. Oscar had been exactly the same way. So Maxine was at peace now; Abigail felt nothing but happiness for her.

After they hung up, she resumed feeding Ethan. “I wonder,” she muttered to him, wiping egg off his chin, “whether Maxine somehow engineered this. I just wonder. I wouldn’t put it past her….”

The phone rang again. Abigail put the spoon down and answered it. It was Ralph.

“Have you read today’s
Times
?” he asked, sounding aggrieved.

“I just got off the phone with Maxine,” said Abigail. “She’s being interviewed for
Artforum
by Paula Jabar and
Art in America
by Jane Fleming. Her dealer is talking about a retrospective. And I’m sure that’s just the beginning. This is the best art scandal of the year. She’s on her way to superstardom.”

“But what about Oscar?” Ralph said. “Assuming I took you up on your offer, how would I make this look good for him in any way?”

“I do not see how this detracts from Oscar’s achievements or his greatness. So he lost a bet with his sister! Big deal! He painted
Mercy,
didn’t he? The answer is yes, because I was there; I watched him. It’s as great as
Helena,
if not greater. And this sudden bright light shining on Maxine will certainly be refracted or reflected, or whatever the word is, onto Oscar. This notoriety is only good for your book.”

“‘All publicity is good publicity,’” Ralph quoted in a tone that suggested he didn’t altogether buy it. “Sure.”

Abigail, hearing the anguish in his voice, said with compassion, “You shouldn’t idealize Oscar, Ralph. It’s not realistic. He was flawed in so many ways.”

“I know that,” said Ralph. “I have criticized him several times. I don’t idealize him, I don’t think.”

“Maybe that was the wrong word,” said Abigail. “I meant you shouldn’t be too disappointed as new truths about him come to light.”

“Maxine painted
Helena,
” said Ralph. “I don’t believe it. That diptych changed my life. And one of the reasons it affected me so deeply was the actual juxtaposition of
Mercy
to
Helena,
a painting of a black woman and a painting of a white one. I was amazed at how one white male American painter was able to transcend race, paint a black woman the same way he painted a white one, without condescending or fetishizing. If he didn’t paint
Helena,
then how am I to interpret
Mercy
?”

“I guess you could look at it as a portrait of my housekeeper,” said Abigail. “Not a bad one, either.”

Ralph was silent.

“Can you explain exactly why this upsets you so much?” Abigail asked.

“In the European tradition,” Ralph said, as if he hadn’t heard her, “black women in paintings are servants who kneel or stand behind the white women, holding their jewels or the trains of their robes—but also providing contrast, to show up the fair purity of their mistresses. You may be aware of the quote by Ruskin that goes, ‘I always think the main purpose for which Negroes must have been made was to be painted by Van Dyke and Veronese.’”

“I wasn’t aware of that quote, no,” said Abigail. “Well, what about Gauguin?”

“What about him?”

“His paintings of Polynesian women.”

“Sexual fantasies. Fetishizing. Pure romanticization of the
femme sauvage.
They’re about his own ego, his own damn self.”

“If you say so,” said Abigail. “But they’re beautiful.”

“
Mercy
is about the woman herself. It’s about a Woman, capital
W
—not a black woman.”

Abigail could hear him inhale self-importantly through his nostrils and waited with half-annoyed trepidation to hear what he would say next.

“Oscar accorded her the same selfhood he accorded his white portraits,” Ralph went on when she didn’t say anything. “There is no self-congratulation in the painting, nor is there either lust or a sense of Other. That is remarkable.”

“But Oscar did paint
Mercy,
” Abigail pointed out.

“But now it’s all changed.”

She smiled; he sounded so earnestly perturbed, like a child. “Why has this affected your opinion of
Mercy
? Oscar painted
Mercy;
that hasn’t changed.”

“I was under the impression that he had painted
Mercy
and
Helena
as a diptych,” Ralph answered. “The brush strokes in both paintings are a departure from Oscar’s other work. They are bolder, more primitive. The colors are blockier, jazzier. The woman in
Mercy
is a nightclub singer: Did he employ this technique because it’s more, quote/unquote, negroid? No! Because look, he painted his blue-blooded society butterfly with exactly the same vivid, aggressive style, the same jazzy palette, the same reds and mauves and absinthe undertones.” He paused. “Except he didn’t. Maxine did.”

He stopped talking, but he wasn’t waiting for Abigail to contribute anything to this conversation; he was gathering his thoughts. Abigail noticed that her telephone mouthpiece smelled weirdly of broccoli. Had she been eating too many cruciferous vegetables?

“Both women represent stereotypes, but Oscar transcends these clichés of debutante and chanteuse by imbuing each one with an independent character that seems to break away from the artist’s brush and possess her own soul. I thought, seeing those paintings for the first time, that
Mercy
represented a real breakthrough in the representation of black women in mainstream, which is to say white male, art. I couldn’t put into words what I thought at the time; I was simply awestruck by the power I felt emanating from the juxtaposition of two women whose lives would hardly, in real life, touch each other.”

“Well,” said Abigail, “maybe you’re right, and
Mercy
has turned out to be as racially dubious a painting as anything Gauguin ever did, and
Helena
was just a stylistic imitation by another painter trying to win a bet. But maybe you also need to see Oscar clearly instead of needing him to be some great racial equalizer. He was as far from a racist as anyone I’ve ever met. Take it from me. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“I believe you…” said Ralph with gloomy resignation.

Abigail reassured him again that this would all be to the good, then got him off the phone.

She went to her computer, put on her glasses, and checked her E-mail. Abigail loved the computer; the chatty immediacy of E-mail, the instant gratification of Google, the Internet’s global intimacy. It made her feel less lonely to play on-line Scrabble with live people and chat with them late at night sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. She loved looking at gossip Web sites, on-line newspapers, young people’s startlingly intimate blogs. This plastic box contained the entire world, allowed access to the goings-on of so many people without having to expose herself. Often, when she was on-line, whole swaths of time went by. She found this both alarming and unavoidable.

She had three E-mails, two of which were spam, one of which was from Ralph.

“I Give Up,” the header said. The message read in its entirety: “Dear Abigail, we have a deal! Ralph.”

Well! That was fast; they had just hung up the phone a few moments before. Then she saw that it had been sent just before midnight the night before, when he hadn’t seen the article about
Helena
yet.

Abigail thought about this for a moment. Then she hit the reply icon and wrote back craftily, taking his E-mail at face value despite all the new information: “Dear Ralph, I am very glad to hear it. We will hammer out the details later. Abigail.”

Then she went to the Google page and typed in “Nicoise salad recipe,” found one that looked plausible, and printed it out. Then she typed in “Chilled cantaloupe soup recipe,” looked at several, chose one, and printed that out, too. She felt a surge of rare domestic inspiration, an unfamiliar excitement at being about to prepare from scratch a good meal for important strangers.

The moment Marcus arrived, Abigail put her shopping list into her purse and went out to the elevator. When she came out of her cool, dark building onto the street, the morning air was already staggeringly hot. She blinked a few times with the shock of it, then made her way over to Broadway, feeling like a slow, lumbering, half-blind rhinoceros. In the grocery store, nothing looked familiar to her. Had everything been replaced with new brands? She saw strange fruits and vegetables that seemed to have just been invented. She filled her cart and paid for everything, then started back to her apartment. The bags were almost too heavy to carry; she hadn’t thought about how much a cantaloupè weighed. She thought about getting a cab, but the whole thing seemed like so much trouble, it daunted her just to contemplate hailing one. The sunlight glinting off windshields and metal and broken glass hurt her eyes. On West End Avenue, she set the bags down on a stoop for a moment and sat; it was undignified and unlike her to do this, but she was sweating and her arms were tired. She should have thought ahead, should have ordered from FreshDirect. Oh well.

She wiped her forehead on the back of her hand, sat there until the hot pulse calmed in her wrists and temples. Then she pulled herself to her feet and managed to get herself and all her groceries home. The cool, dim air of her apartment felt welcoming and safe; she was so glad to be home, and she felt as if her jaunt to the store had been a metaphorical pilgrimage, a difficult journey with some high, imperative meaning. She hoisted the bags onto the kitchen counter, then went to see how things were going with Ethan and Marcus.

She found them in Ethan’s room. Ethan lay on a mat, and Marcus was helping him through his leg lifts. Abigail was always amazed at how rigorous these exercises were and how well Ethan was able to do them. Marcus was a big believer in the therapeutic benefits of exercise, and he had convinced Abigail several years ago in her initial interview with him that this would help Ethan more than anything else. And he had been right: Ethan’s mood swings had stabilized; his sleep was better.