The Great Man (9 page)

Henry shook his head. “No one knows about them.”

“Well, they’re awfully silly.”

“Why?”

“They were of silly movie star–struck, soldier-worshiping Jewish girls on the Lower East Side in the forties, mostly daughters of immigrants. Our European cousins were beaten and raped, gassed to death, skeletal, shivering with cold, while we put on lipstick and read Emily Dickinson…. It was just the luck of the draw. No doubt our cousins would have done the same in our shoes.”

“Why aren’t they known, these photos?”

“Well, they’ve been right there all along,” she said. “For some reason, I thought you might already have somehow magically divined they were there and dug them up. You have that eager-beaver look about you.”

“Yes, and I’m going to eager-beaver my way over there as soon as I can,” Henry said. “I’ll give you five bucks not to tell that other biographer about them.”

“You’re joking,” she replied, “but I won’t tell him because I don’t like him, so that’s your good luck.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Would it be an intrusion if I asked to see some of the work you’re doing now?”

“Not at all,” she said, gesturing to her studio. Paintings hung on walls and leaned on the floor in stacks. They were, without exception, composed of spare, feathery black fillips against a white background. This new work was more austere even than the older works Henry was familiar with.

“This is my primary work surface,” said Maxine. She pointed to a long steel table painted gunmetal gray, on which, lined up like ammunition in an armory, were a series of tubes and brushes. “I use fifteen different blacks and seven different whites. All oils, of course. I buy them at two different places. One is Pearl Paint, which of course you’re familiar with, on Canal Street. The other is a tiny hole-in-the-wall in the East Village, a place any painter would be smart to know about. And these are my brushes. Sable, camel, and so forth. I am passionate about my brushes and don’t let anyone else touch them.”

Henry set his notebook on the edge of the table while his son lolled against his chest like a drunk in a deli doorway.

Maxine’s cell phone rang. She answered it with mingled hope and dismay. “Yeah?”

There was a brief silence. Henry, who wasn’t looking directly at Maxine, nonetheless felt a sudden chill blow off her skin like dryice fog. “I’ll have to call you back. Henry Burke is here at the moment and we’re in the middle of—”

“You wrote my best friend a threatening letter,” Teddy shot back from across the East River. She was standing in her living room, looking out at an eighteen-wheeler that was trying to negotiate a turn onto her little street, making a hog-killing ruckus of squealing and hissing and grinding as the driver maneuvered its cab between parked cars and tried to ease the massive trailer after it. Why did these meathead truck drivers even try? “Why on earth should she call you before she talks to the biographers, assuming they even contact her?”

“Like I said,” said Maxine with little pointy icicles emphasizing the spaces between each word, “I can’t talk right now.”

“Don’t bother hanging up on me,” said Teddy. “Leave Lila alone. She’ll say whatever the hell she wants to anyone.”

“Except me, apparently,” said Maxine, feeling her lips stretch into the thin reptilian smile of a Dickensian villain. “Since you’re calling me on her behalf.”

“You’re worried she’s going to say something about the bet,” said Teddy. “You didn’t think I knew about it, but I do.” The truck driver’s potbellied partner had climbed down from his comfy shotgun seat high up in the cab and was now standing between two parked cars, trying to wave his arms, as if that would thread the truck through the eye of the needle. The driver went right on with his fruitless racket. What the hell did they want with India Street? Maybe they thought they were taking some sort of crafty shortcut up to McGuinness, inexplicably bypassing the wide, smooth, easy-to-negotiate Greenpoint Avenue.

Maxine was pacing around her studio, trying to seem nonchalant while she felt both of Henry’s inner ears waving all their little antennae toward her conversation, even though he was pretending to be absorbed in his baby. What sort of friendship do Lila and Claire have, Maxine wondered, if Claire knows about this? Maxine had no close friends, unless you counted Oscar’s widow, Abigail, and her assistant, Katerina, but these were friendships born of proximity and shared concerns, not inspired by deeply personal confidences exchanged over tea or bourbon, or whatever people exchanged them over. The habit of solitude was too deeply innate and ingrained for Maxine ever to even think of seeking out someone else’s company for no other purpose than exposing her soul and seeing another’s laid bare. Social commerce was nothing but a big chore. She didn’t understand what hidden, silent, well-oiled mechanisms linking two people would cause Lila to tell Claire—or maybe Oscar had told her.

Here was Henry’s scandalous little secret about Oscar. Of course he could never find out about it.

“I will call you back later,” Maxine said. “I have your number stored in my cell phone now.”

“Isn’t that a neat invention,” said Teddy; she hated the very thought of cell phones and had kept Homer Meehan’s monstrous old telephone, which appeared to date from the dawn of the Touch-Tone era. It still worked fine except for a loose wire; you had to jiggle the receiver every so often, but it always paid off.

Maxine grunted a good-bye, then closed her phone, shoved it back into her hip pocket, and strode in horror about her studio, which suddenly looked as unfamiliar and naked in its new anal-retentive cleanliness as her own shorn head in the mirror appeared to her after a particularly blistering haircut.

“That was Claire,” she informed Henry. “As the old Italians say, she gives me
agida.
”

“Is that unusual for her to call you?”

“Unusual,” said Maxine, “like a sighting of the Loch Ness monster, or even more so, because she’s never called me before. I think she wants to make nice, now that you boys are poking around. Extend the olive branch.”

“And you weren’t biting.”

“I’ll call her back. We’ll kiss and make up.”

“My first biography was of Greta Church,” said Henry, “which was published three years ago and which I bet you haven’t read.”

“Who is Greta Church?”

“A great twentieth-century poet. Anyway, while I was almost finished researching the biography, the woman I had thought was her great-niece suddenly revealed that she was really Greta’s granddaughter, and her mother Greta’s daughter, whom Greta had given up to her younger sister to adopt at birth. I was the first person outside the family to know. She wanted the record to be straight, that was all.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Maxine asked with some uneasiness she tried to mask.

“I don’t know,” said Henry, whose inner-ear antennae, as Maxine had correctly sensed, had picked up more from her side of the conversation with Teddy than his conscious mind was yet aware of. “Maybe because Teddy—I mean Claire—suddenly wants to reconcile after so many years of this—is
cold war
the right term?”

“Not bad,” said Maxine, uneasy.

“What I mean is that I find it interesting how the unexpected suddenly comes to light among the living in the course of writing about a dead subject’s life.”

“What’s your book called?”

“
Sing Me a Cloud of Tears.
It’s from her poem ‘The Cloud.’ It begins, ‘Sing me a wall/ Of bread so I may eat./ Sing me a cloud/ Of tears that I may feel./ Oh you choral tongues,/ You cannot know the need,/ You cannot know the terror and the need.’” He paused.

Maxine cocked her head and squinted at him. “A little melodramatic,” she said.

“No,” he said, “it isn’t when you hear the whole thing, and especially when you know about her life, it’s all in context. She was a morphine addict at the end of her life. She could hardly write.”

“Well,” she said, “that sounds very sad for her, but not so terrible in the scheme of things. Go on, recite the rest of it.”

But Chester chose that moment to empurple his face with his own cloud of tears, his own terror and need, so Maxine had to content herself with trying to imagine where on earth the poem might have gone to redeem itself from there, and what, given Henry’s evident predilection for aggrandizing mediocrity, Oscar would have made of the biographical company he was in.

Five

That evening, Maxine stood in one corner of Michael and Natalie Rubinstein’s dauntingly enormous and radiantly lit living room, holding a sweating glass of whiskey and ice. She couldn’t see a single person she wanted to talk to. One thing about getting old was that your openness to new people shrank through the years from a naïve embrace to a narrow squint. By the time you hit old age, you barely had the ability to be civil for one minute to any stranger, let alone get through a whole evening of “interesting” conversation.

The real problem was that the human race was so disappointing. Why had she expected it to be otherwise? As a young woman, Maxine had tended to leap with open arms, like a wet-eyed, splayed-out nincompoop, toward everyone she met, but she had quickly encountered enough snideness, selfishness, neediness, cruelty, rejection, and indifference to enable her to gradually develop the social crankiness that had by now become thick and insuperable as an old toenail.

The Rubinsteins had said she should “feel free to bring a friend” tonight. Well, she had come alone in a taxi, and so what? She had left Katerina a message this morning asking her to come, but Katerina had never called her back. Of course she hadn’t, Maxine told herself with characteristic self-cruelty; she was making violent Slavic love with a Ukrainian man with ice blue eyes, a man who was good with his hands. Anyway, being here with Katerina, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her, aware of the warmth of her skin, would only have made her feel even more abject and lovelorn.

She swallowed some whiskey and enjoyed the hot-cold burn in her gullet. It was that awkward hour when people were still arriving and no one was drunk yet and the hors d’oeuvres were off to a slow start. Even more so than usual, Maxine didn’t feel like talking to anyone tonight, but luckily for her, an ugly and unfashionable old woman standing alone generally attracted no attention. As long as she could keep herself out of Natalie’s sight line, she might be left in peace to eat her dinner unnoticed while everyone around her talked among themselves, then thank the hosts before dessert, make a hasty getaway, and be home in bed by 10:30. Everyone was secretly glad when old people had to leave early.

“Oh, you can’t ever believe what he says,” she heard a male homosexual voice announcing just behind her.

“I always believe him,” said a slightly deeper but just as obviously homosexual voice. “That’s my problem.”

“Your problem,” said the first voice, “is that you believe everyone. You’re such a child.”

They were speaking softly, not theatrically, so Maxine assumed they were a couple and this conversation was private, which only made her want to eavesdrop more. She half-turned so she could see who they were, and with a flash of a glance, she beheld two slenderly muscular young men with identical haircuts, short and sleek as ocelot pelts over their scalps, which accentuated their features. One of them was exotically olive-skinned and black-haired, with almond-shaped eyes. The other, a redhead with bright blue eyes, had a tricky complexion, the pale, mercurial kind that flushed easily and sunburned badly and broke out in pimples and rashes and boils.

“I’m not a fucking child,” said the redhead.

“About him you are,” said the olive-skinned one. He caught Maxine’s eye, realized she was listening, and looked blandly away.

Natalie Rubinstein appeared in front of Maxine with a glass of red wine in one hand and kissed her on both cheeks. She wore a very expensive-looking, subtly matronly sleeveless burgundy silk dress that showed off her full breasts and her round, dusky arms without eroticizing her in any way. Her dark hair tumbled around her shoulders; her brown eyes glowed with the ease and goodwill born of the confluence of financial security and a lucky disposition apparently free of fatal introspection.

“Maxine,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I got waylaid. I’m so glad you’re here! How are you?”

“I’ve been better, truthfully,” said Maxine, but she smiled back at her hostess. Natalie was the devoted, unflappable mother of three small children, a self-professed “huge, huge fan” of Maxine’s work, and also, it happened, the wife of Maxine’s longtime dealer, Michael Rubinstein. In spite of herself, Maxine genuinely liked her—it was impossible not to—although she didn’t understand a thing about Natalie, and vice versa.

“Oh, why?” said Natalie.

Maxine waved a hand. “Old age is nothing but a big drag. Do everything you can to stave it off.”

“Seth and Charles,” said Natalie, “come here and meet Maxine Feldman. She’s a great, great, great, very famous painter Michael has the incredible honor to represent.”

The two homosexuals dropped their conversation and obediently extended their hands to Maxine. Their hands were smooth and warm as suede.

“Seth’s my little brother,” said Natalie, slipping her arm through the olive-skinned boy’s and drawing him closer so he had to enter Maxine’s radius. Charles automatically followed Seth as if by magnetic pull; now they formed a little social clump, which had, of course, been Natalie’s aim all along. “He’s visiting us from Chicago.”

Seth glanced at his sister, a complicated look filled with roughly equal parts affection and bemusement; Maxine imagined that the latter was caused in a larger sense by something to do with his visit, but more immediately by being forced to make conversation with the old bag who’d been spying on his private conversation a second before.

“That’s right,” he said briefly.

“And I hope you stay here forever,” said Natalie.

“Well, if I do, I promise I’ll get my own place.”

“We have plenty of room,” said Natalie.

Seth gave his sister another complicated look.

Natalie smiled joyfully at the cozy little trio she’d created, then sidestepped away to greet a newly arrived couple, kisses on all cheeks.

“Are you enjoying your visit to New York?” Maxine asked Seth, throwing the question into the sudden cold pool of silence like a depth-sounding pebble. As senior member of this enforced huddle, it was the least she could do.

“He’s actually moving here,” the redheaded Charles said, looking at Seth, “but he can’t admit it yet.”

“So you’re a painter,” said Seth to Maxine, ignoring what Charles had said.

“I am a painter,” she replied, as if she were saying, “I’m nothing but a pawn in this lovers’ spat and I wish I were home right now.”

“So is Charles,” said Seth cruelly.

“Who are some of the artists you admire?” Maxine asked; the old trick of sussing out the competition.

“I love your work,” said Charles with endearing alacrity. “De Kooning, Kandinsky, Kline, and Rothko are great influences also.”

“Anyone more contemporary?”

Charles looked at Maxine with sidelong hesitation, as if he were trying to gauge her own opinions before he answered in order to avoid offending her. “A lot of what I see these days, I can’t relate to,” he said. “I guess that makes me an anachronism. That seems to be the general opinion anyway; I’m still trying to get a gallery to show my work.” His face was mottled now.

“Getting a gallery solves very little,” said Maxine. “It only creates more headaches and terrors than you had before.”

“I’ll take them,” said Charles. She saw the force of ambition undergirding his quip like a massive glacier slow-moving in the sunlight.

“I invited him here to meet my brother-in-law,” said Seth, “but he’s too shy to let me introduce him.”

“Not yet,” said Charles. “I just got here.”

“You mean,” said Seth, “you’re not drunk enough yet.”

“I’ll introduce you,” Maxine told Charles. “I’ll say you’re my protégé. That carries more weight with him than a family connection.”

“You’ve never seen my work,” said Charles.

“Don’t shoot yourself in the foot,” Maxine snapped. “Come with me. Play along.”

She turned and stumped toward the kitchen without looking to see whether he was following. If he wasn’t, that was his mistake.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she heard Charles mutter behind her. “Just a friend.”

“Glad to hear it,” she shot back. “What’s your last name?”

“Emerson,” he said. “Thank you so much for doing this.”

“Oh, painters are like a big Irish family in the potato famine: There’s never enough of anything to go around—collectors, galleries, grants, prizes…. But I’m so old now, I’ve got nothing to lose.”

Michael Rubinstein was standing by his own refrigerator, deep in conversation with a very young woman with cocoa-colored skin who was wearing a slinky vintage cocktail dress and a lot of berry-colored lipstick. In the time it took to cross over to them, Maxine deduced that the girl worked at Michael’s gallery, he wasn’t sleeping with her, and they were flirting around the fact that he could if he wanted to.

“Michael,” said Maxine, interrupting them without apology, “I’d like you to meet Charles Emerson. He’s a painter. You should take a look at his work.”

“Hello, hello,” said Michael to both Maxine and Charles, kissing Maxine on the cheek, shaking Charles’s hand. He was a short, broad-chested man in early middle age, with a lionlike head. “Sorry, your name is?”

“Charles Emerson,” said Charles. He cleared his throat. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“You’ll remember his name, Liza,” said Michael to the girl. “Maxine, of course, you know.”

Maxine the person, of course, Liza didn’t know, but the name at least she recognized. “Nice to see you,” she said, and shook Maxine’s proffered hand. She had an English accent. “Hi, Charles,” she added brusquely, not bothering to meet his eye.

Liza was, Maxine was certain, a painter herself, for whom every day as a minion at the Rubinstein Gallery was like working as a scullery maid in a house she hoped to own someday. To her, Charles was nothing but competition. Maxine was certain Liza would have decided to forget his name and everything else about him by the time his slides arrived, or his CD, or whatever they sent around now.

Maxine took a swig of whiskey, swallowed, and said to Charles, as a veiled threat to Liza, “Listen, Charles, I’ll call you in a week to make sure you’ve sent your work to Michael.”

“Thank you,” said Charles with a tentative disbelief that touched her. It was so easy to help someone, so nice when they showed proper gratitude. Good, now she was free to die: she’d passed the torch, however tenuously, however disingenuously. Out of nowhere, she had a vision of her body being slid into a crematorium oven, her soul finally having decamped from squatness and thwarted ambition alike.

Michael leaned in toward Maxine, his eyes narrowed in that deliberately charming way she had always found laughably obvious but was always suckered in by all the same. He asked in his intimate, gravelly voice, “How are you, Maxie? Are you working?” He liked to call his artists by pet name–like diminutives, as if he thought of his gallery as a species of animal charity, a caretaking project for barely domesticated beasts. His breath smelled sweet and rich, like roast chestnuts. He was the human equivalent of advertising, in your face but impossible to resist.

Just as it had been with her brother, she saw through his charming warmth to the amoral selfishness beneath and loved him anyway. “I’m a fucking genius, Mikey,” she told him.

“Of course,” he replied.

“Really,” she said, “I’m doing some of my best work.”

“When can I come and see it?”

“Very soon.”

Slender young men and women in black pants and white shirts began rushing about, setting out baskets of bread on tables, uncorking wine.

“Almost dinnertime! Better find Natalie,” said Michael. “Excuse me.”

Charles and Liza had struck up a conversation. Charles looked terror-stricken, Liza focused and impatient. “Well,” he was saying, “for now, I’m most interested in the possibilities of pure color and shape.”

“I’ll let you two chat,” said Liza, and disappeared.

“You’re Oscar Feldman’s sister, aren’t you?” said Charles.

“My one claim to fame.”

“What was it like to have a brother who was a painter, too?”

“We argued. We were hard on each other. We both wanted to be right; we both had something to prove. Now he’s been dead for five years, and two young men are writing separate biographies of him.”

“That’s great,” said Charles uncertainly.

“After a glass of whiskey, I’m glad he’s getting his due. It was good to meet you, Charles,” she added, shaking his hand, “and you must send those slides to Michael.”

“I promise,” he said. “Thank you.”

“And now I’d better find my table.”

Natalie and Michael subscribed to the inevitably awkward convention of place cards. After some simple sleuthing, Maxine found, at the table nearest the apartment’s front door, which would facilitate her retreat in an hour or so, a card with her own name on it, flanked by those of two men she hadn’t met but both of whose names she recognized in the usual art-world way. This table had only six instead of the usual seven chairs; Natalie had evidently thoughtfully left an opening for Katerina, or whoever Maxine might have rustled up as a date. She went around the table and beheld cards for Jane Fleming, who she’d heard was now a tenured art history professor at Columbia, and with whom she had had a brief but passionate affair more than thirty years before. Next to her was Michael Rubinstein himself, and on his other side, of all people, was Paula Jabar.

Maxine looked up and down the long, crowded room. Jane Fleming was a small, pale moth of a woman, or at least she appeared so initially, until you got to know her; she could easily go unnoticed among these forty-plus guests, but Paula Jabar’s ostentatious coppery dreadlocks would have attracted the notice of everyone in the place within twenty seconds. So either Paula hadn’t arrived yet or she wasn’t planning to show. Maxine felt simultaneous twinges of anticipation and disappointment; she disapproved of Paula and her work and everything she said and stood for, but at least she could hardly be called boring, and boredom was Maxine’s bugbear.

“There you are!” came Jane’s familiar voice over her left shoulder.

“We’re both midgets,” said Maxine, turning to smile at her. “If just one of us were taller, I’m sure we’d have seen each other an hour ago.”