The Great Man (7 page)

“If my father had heard you say that, he would have socked you in the eye.”

“No doubt.”

“I grew up here in Greenpoint,” said Ruby. “Where did you grow up, Ralph?”

“Born and raised in Fort Greene.”

“So you know how, walking down the street, you see people in motion, on the fly, blurred. One face jumps out of the crowd at you. It’s a blink, a glimpse, but you feel like you’ve really seen that person; then you’re on to the next…. Growing up in the city, you are constantly seeing the faces of strangers, your eye taking them in so intimately, so briefly.”

“Yes,” he said, leaning forward, his eyes alight, narrowed.

“And you know how at the end of a day of being in the streets, walking to school, messing around with your friends, you lie in bed and you remember the faces sort of like afterimages right before you fall asleep? They collect in your retinas and play themselves back like a slide show on your eyelids, all these strangers your eyes collected through the day.”

“Yes,” he said again in a rapt voice. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“Dad’s paintings always bring back that feeling to me. Some more than others. The mystery of strangers. It’s just stupid to think of his paintings as self-portraits.”

His bedazzled expression turned immediately blank and inoffensive. “Oh, I never said—”

“I know you didn’t, but a couple of clueless critics did, and it infuriated him. Nothing wrong with self-portraits, but it just completely missed the point. My father wasn’t portraying his own psyche in female nudes; that’s like saying he should have ‘flowered into abstraction.’”

She shot a glance at Ralph, who had assumed a blank, pleasant, attentive expression.

“Of course he was monstrously self-involved, my father, but when he looked at you, he saw you and not himself. He had an appetite for other people’s stories, their souls even. He was visceral, not reflective…. His paintings are about seeing people, not paint, not shapes, not abstraction, but people, women, in the flesh—not intellectualized, personalized, romanticized, anything-ized.”

“De Kooning also—”

“When I look at my father’s paintings, I get that same sort of kick you get on the street when you apprehend a stranger, whole.”

“Are you an artist, too?”

“No,” said Ruby. “I teach English at a public high school on the Lower East Side.”

“Well, it’s admirable how passionate you are about your father’s work.”

“Well,” said Ruby, “you’re passionate about it, too.”

“Of course.”

“But you’re wrong about abstraction.”

“No doubt,” he said without conviction.

Teddy came back in, carrying the cake on top of dessert plates, two forks in one fist. She set it all onto the table; then she bore away the soup pot. Ruby didn’t get up to help her mother.

When Teddy was out of earshot, Ruby said, “I think it’s hard for my mother to talk about my father like this. She was crazy about him. I’ve never seen anyone so crazy about anyone else as she was about him. He loved her back, but in a totally different way.”

“Must be wonderful,” said Ralph, “to be the daughter of two people so in love.”

“Not especially.”

“That’s not what I expected you to say.”

“My grand theory about my parents is this. My mother was the lover and my father was the beloved. From watching them, I drew the conclusion that it’s best to be the lover, the one who adores and pursues. Love is tangentially about power, and the beloved has less power than the lover, all appearances to the contrary. In other words, my mother had more power over my father than he did over her. That’s always how it works, no matter how it may appear on the surface.”

“Always?” said Ralph, mostly to keep her talking. “What about balanced relationships, where two people love and are loved in equal measure?”

“Oh, please, that’s impossible. From what I’ve seen anyway. One person is the adorer and cherisher and the other is the adored and cherished. Whenever Mom distanced herself from Dad, which was rarely, believe me, he sort of fell apart. I could see it, even as a little girl. He needed her; she made it a point not to need him. But she loved him.”

“That’s interesting,” he said.

“Sometimes it works the other way; sometimes a man is the lover, the uxorious husband…. That’s a word that means pathologically proud of his wife. Isn’t that a great word? No one uses it anymore. My brother-in-law, Ivan, for example. My sister is much younger than he is. She’s not intellectual really, although she’s smart and has a B.A. in art, and she’s a painter, but she never paints because she’s got two kids under four. Meanwhile, Ivan has a doctorate in biochemistry and is a senior research fellow at the Starr-McGee Institute. She’s thirty-nine; he’s fifty. He possesses and controls her. He needs to know where she is every minute. I think he’s the real reason she’s not here today; he doesn’t want her doing anything without him. I’m sure he took the car to keep her a prisoner in their house. And she loves this kind of treatment! She plays right into it. She always wanted to be close to Dad but never could, so obviously Ivan makes up for that in many ways.”

Ruby splashed more wine into her glass, drank some, set it down again, all while Ralph waited.

“Of course, my mother is proud that she was never controlling of my father, but that depends on what you mean by
controlling.
…For example, she loved to bait him and goad him and get him to go off about this and that in front of other people, show him off. She’d be right there, contradicting him so he’d reveal more and more of himself. She was so proud of him, of course; she adored him…. But it was a kind of power mongering, in a way. In a way, she controlled him with her love.”

“But what about her lack of possessiveness?” Ralph asked.

“Her lack of possessiveness was an illusion,” Ruby said.

“You mean,” he said cautiously, darting a glance toward the kitchen, “she gave him free rein as a paradoxical way of keeping him?”

“Yes…” said Ruby. “Exactly. But there’s more to it than that.”

Teddy stuck her head through the door and said, “Ruby, coffee?”

Ralph started a little; Ruby turned calmly and said, “Sure, Mom.”

After Teddy had gone back to the kitchen, Ruby looked at Ralph, shaking her head. “Aren’t I a terrible child, telling you my mother’s secrets while she waits on us hand and foot. By the way, I don’t get up to help her because she won’t allow it; she’s a total control freak in the kitchen. As well as in every other way. Anyway, her lack of possessiveness was an illusion. She was extremely possessive. Sexually, Dad was totally in Mom’s thrall—it was obvious to anyone with half an eye—so if he went off and had other women, it didn’t bug her. It was like the queen not minding if the king had consorts: She was still the queen. And meanwhile, kings always have their consorts; it’s part of the deal. Emotionally, she was very jealous. Like, for instance, she wouldn’t let us be close to him, his own daughters. She kept us all apart. She allowed him to go home to his poor fat wife only because she didn’t want him underfoot all the time and didn’t want him to get tired of her…. Did I mention that she’s a control freak?”

“But I don’t think you can boil marriages down into such codified structures. It seems more of a give-and-take to me, more of a flow. I think there must be much more to any relationship than people outside it can see.”

“Are you married?”

“No, are you?”

“No…”

“Not yet?” he asked.

“Maybe not ever.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” he said. “A woman as beautiful as you are.”

“Thank you,” said Ruby warily.

She’d meant to imply that she didn’t want to get married, and he’d meant “beautiful” as an abstract compliment; he hadn’t at all meant to come on to her, but all the same, an invisible bubble suddenly enveloped Ralph and Ruby and sealed them off, the filmy bubble of sexual possibility, which was awkward for them because they weren’t attracted to each other, but the continuation of this conversation, spooling itself out unspoken between them, nonetheless suggested something along those lines. Neither knew how to delicately convey this absolute lack of attraction to the other, so they just sat, not looking at each other, in a silence made more uneasy by the fact that it rode in the wake of their torrent of wine-fueled words, until Teddy strode in with the coffeepot and two cups and started pouring matter-of-factly, as if she hadn’t heard every word they’d said.

Four

Maxine Feldman woke up early in a state of panicky despair and decided to clean her studio, one of her preferred solutions to any emotional upset. (The others, none of them mutually exclusive, were chain-smoking, brushing her dog, Frago, with a Love Glove, taking baths, and/or listening to turbulent music at full volume—Beethoven or Sonic Youth, it didn’t much matter which.) As she cleaned, she chain-smoked and listened to Dave Holland’s
Conference of the Birds,
which wasn’t turbulent; it was flat-out joyful, but that suited the morning sunlight. She was wearing men’s black trousers, size twenty-six long, thirty-two waist (Maxine liked to think of herself as squarely built rather than squat) and a baggy gray short-sleeved sweater that had once been all cashmere but now was at least half dog hair. Frago lay under her worktable, well out of the way of all the activity, but keeping a close eye on it nonetheless.

Maxine’s assistant, Katerina, had confessed the day before that she had fallen in love with someone. Whether this someone was a woman or a man, she didn’t say, and Maxine was too proud to ask. Katerina was thirty-eight, or so she claimed; Maxine suspected that either she was almost ten years older than that or the Soviet diet had caused her to sag a little at the jawline prematurely, not that it mattered or diminished her appeal. She was a
jolie laide
Hungarian with a sweet, gamine, slightly gap-toothed face and the kind of gymnast’s body that had always driven Maxine mad: petite, leggy, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped. More than that, she was intelligent, courageous, stalwart, loyal, and warm, all the qualities Maxine felt she herself lacked but had nonetheless always yearned for in a mate.

Anyway, that wasn’t going to happen. It had been a ridiculous idea. She was almost fifty years older than Katerina, for God’s sake.

As she worked at setting everything in order, she ignored the twinges, some more painful than others, in her back and shoulders and the joints of her elbows and knees. She hated being old. She caught sight of herself in the mirror by accident: Her face was sagging and consternated, her mouth awry, the eyes behind thick glasses squinting in concentration. She looked to herself like an ugly dwarflike toad.

All around her, hanging on walls and leaning against tables and lined up on shelves like books, were her paintings, finished or in progress or temporarily abandoned. She didn’t dare look at any of them in this mood. It was so hard to wake up every morning and manufacture the energy to continue this whole endeavor when she had all but lost faith in it. Who cared? None of it mattered. Wisps of black on canvas after canvas. Why black? More important, why wisps? When she was younger, she’d stayed up all night working. Each fresh black mark on the white canvas was an electric impulse generated by the energy in her head. Black because it was the negative image of the hot light she saw. Negative because she rebelled at positivity, the finiteness of a figure, the decadent arbitrariness of a full palette of color. The shapes were the only thing that varied from painting to painting—feathered or blunt edges, large or small wisps and blobs, curves or angles. What moved her brush was whatever impulse issued from her core, the spark created by the intersection of whatever was in the room and outside it, in her head and outside it, her mood and the weather, the political climate and the condition of her stomach. She had used her body as a source of light and heat, a high-speed muscle car that needed periodic pit stops to refuel and regenerate.

The ashes of that self-immolating fire were stored in the urn of her skull now, her memorial of that young artist who had believed so fervently in art, her own art especially. Now, mired in cynicism and defeat, she wondered whether it had really been so wonderful, the heyday of her artistic career. She had drunk too much booze, slept with a lot of women who’d hurt her badly, and never found lasting love. She’d made some money, it was true, and established some degree of a name; her paintings hung in the Modern and other museums around the world, but she’d never achieved the kind of fame that her ambition required of her. In her own mind, therefore, she was a failure. As the years wore on and she felt herself and her name fading, disappearing, being replaced by fresher talents, names, egos, canvases, and careers, she found it increasingly difficult to prop herself up every day, to resurrect her flagging drive through willpower alone, since hope was gone. And so it went for anyone who’d lost his or her faith. “I can’t go on I’ll go on.” Because what else was there to do? It wasn’t as if she were being tortured or oppressed or forced to endure in a Third World stew of horror. No one needed her except Frago, a midsize mutt who had been listed as a Lab-boxer mix when she’d rescued him eight years before from the ASPCA, although he resembled a mournful miniature hippo more than anything else. But Frago’s needs were minimal and had a built-in end point. If she didn’t paint, she might as well die, and that was all there was to it.

As she was cleaning a jar’s worth of sable brushes soaking in turpentine, her cell phone trilled the little melody it had come programmed with, a cascading tumble of tinkly notes. At first, she heard it as part of
Conference of the Birds
and ignored it; then suddenly the phone’s chirps separated themselves aurally from the music and she realized someone was calling her.

Katerina!

She put the brush down, took the lit cigarette from between her lips and stubbed it out in a nearby ashtray, fished the phone from her back pocket, and checked the little screen on the cover. It wasn’t Katerina; it was a number she didn’t recognize. She said, “Fuck,” flipped it open, and said, “Yeah.”

“Maxine Feldman?” said a hesitant male voice.

“That’s me.”

“This is Henry Burke, your brother’s biographer?”

A lot of professional white men under the age of about forty-five, Maxine had noticed lately, were doing something that a few decades before had been the clichéd provenance of Valley girls, ending declarative sentences with a question mark. But unlike those prepubescent mall rats, they weren’t verbally sequestering themselves in a trendy colloquial clique; they were trying to declaw and deball themselves by appearing as unthreatening and sensitive as possible. Blatant masculinity was, unfortunately, out of favor.

“Henry,” said Maxine. She’d liked him well enough when she’d met him, despite his blandness. She might have felt differently about him if he hadn’t been lucky enough to contrast favorably with that other one, Rupert or Rufus, that pompous
shwartze
with his chummy condescension. He’d seemed to think that by subtly allying himself with Maxine and flattering her, he could win her over and get her to reveal things about Oscar that weren’t already a matter of public record. She could smell a mile off that he was only trying to bamboozle her by capitalizing on his knowledge of the rift between her and her brother. Ralph, his name was, she remembered then. Ralph’s little game of being “on her side” had conveyed the implication that it was generally understood that Oscar’s side had been diametrically and personally opposed to hers. This irked her no end. She preferred Henry’s strategy, which was to be openly worshipful of Oscar and wary of her: Maxine tended to feel more at ease with people who didn’t seem to like her than with those who tried to collude with her.

Not that these boys were going to get anything interesting out of her. She had decided to appear cooperative and sweet as pie, but to tell no one a damn thing he couldn’t learn by spending some quality time on Google. “Oscar was a confident and boisterous kid, whereas I was more shy and studious,” and “Oscar was never happy in art school—he was too rebellious—and that’s why he dropped out after one semester,” and “From a very early age, maybe even birth, Oscar loved his power to charm women,” that sort of claptrap. She had announced these things first to Henry, then to Ralph, with a confidential air meant to suggest that she was sharing secrets. Maxine hated the whole idea of someone writing Oscar’s biography. Part of it was her general distrust of the biographical venture and part of it was sibling rivalry—profiles in art periodicals aside, no one had written a full-length biography of Maxine yet, and here were two being written about Oscar! But he’d had to die first, so she supposed it was a fair trade-off.

“I was wondering,” Henry was saying, “whether I could come by today. If you’re not too busy?”

“Well, I’m busy now and there’s a dinner party I have to go to later on,” Maxine said then. “Come at five. That should give us plenty of time.”

Henry started to tell her that was the worst-possible time for him to come, because his wife had asked him to stay home with Chester from 4:00 to 5:30
P.M
. so she could go to a yoga class.

“Better make it four-thirty, so I have time to bathe and dress,” Maxine said, interrupting him. “See you then. Good-bye.” She shoved the phone back into her pocket and stalked over to the window, harrumphing a little as she lit a fresh cigarette. She was not in any mood to entertain today. When Frago lurched to his feet and ambled to her side, she bent down and took one of his silky ears in her hands. “Frago Fragonardo Fragonard,” she crooned. “My sweetest pea, my sweet good boy. Who’s my sweet pea?” Frago looked into her face, his eyes seemingly devoted but, Maxine knew, totally unfathomable. Even so, she felt an answering well of love for him as pure as any feeling she’d ever had. On their walk this morning, she’d lost her temper with him. She liked to feed him his breakfast kibble as they walked, instead of giving it to him in a bowl; even after all these years, he’d never learned to heel very well without a steady stream of bribes, and she no longer had the strength to restrain him if he pulled too hard. Sometimes her fingers and his mouth suffered a misunderstanding, and today had been one such time: She’d held the kibble too deeply in her bunched fingertips, so his teeth had had to sink into her fingers so he could tongue it from her grasp. It had hurt her, but usually this passed without remark from Maxine, since they were both too old to learn otherwise. Today, however, the indignity of being bitten by her own dog as she was feeding him had been too much to stand. “Fuck you,” she’d muttered, giving his muzzle a quick squeeze, so hard that he’d squealed. Just then, she’d met the eye of the Korean woman in front of the deli on the corner. For some reason, every time this woman saw Maxine, she happened to be in the grip of her worst self: haggling over the price of coffee, falsely accusing the cashier of shortchanging her…. This terrible, low morning, caught in the woman’s gaze, Maxine had felt herself at once reduced to the evolutionary status of a slug.

“Frago,” Maxine crooned now. He nuzzled her hand with the same nose she’d squeezed to the point of pain; she wished the Korean woman could see him now. Outside, the street below was still fairly empty, but before too long it would be thronged with the usual slow-moving herds of tourists and outer-borough nimrods buying three-hundred-dollar pairs of shoes and low-level TV stars and other horrible people. Maxine’s loft, which she’d bought for “nothing” (actually, $27,000) in the seventies, was on the fourth floor of an old factory on Greene Street. Most of the old SoHo artists had long ago fled to Brooklyn or Chelsea and been replaced by male models, Eurotrash, and bond traders, but Maxine had stayed, stubbornly. Where was she supposed to go, anyway? For about the past ten years, sales of her work had pretty much been in the crapper, but she had saved enough from the flush eighties to keep her going, she hoped, till she croaked.

Maybe, it occurred to her now, these biographies of Oscar would shed a little secondary light on her….

Oh God, she was going to die alone.

Maxine mashed her smoked-down filter into an ashtray and went back to the brushes. By the time Henry was due to arrive, her worktable was austerely clean, the floor mopped, paints and brushes, tools and inks perfectly organized. She’d sorted through a lot of new sketches and drawings and put them away in flat files, emptied months’ worth of jars full of gray turpentine, and even scrubbed the little toilet in the tiny hallway. Katerina always offered to clean the studio, but letting someone else clean in here felt intrusive and stressful to Maxine, even Katerina, who kept the rest of the loft beautifully tidy and mopped.

Maxine waited in her kitchen for the water to boil for Earl Grey, put some gingersnaps out on a plate, then noticed she was out of milk. Well, Henry would just have to drink it without. She had never been much for entertaining; she always invited people to show up between mealtimes so she wouldn’t be called upon to provide food.

She was bone-weary, she realized suddenly. She’d awakened at 7:30, which was very early for a night owl like her, and had walked Frago over a mile; then she’d cleaned steadily all day in a state of manic despair, without stopping to eat, and she’d smoked too much. She wanted nothing in the world so much as to crawl into bed and pass out. Her heart was fluttering arrhythmically, the way it did sometimes. She’d be damned if she’d go to a doctor, though. All they ever had was bad news and cures that just made things worse. She’d made it this far; she was as tough as a weed.

The buzzer rang. She got up and went to her front door and pushed the button to open the door downstairs without bothering to ask who it was over the intercom, then went back to the table and slumped in her chair and fell into a momentary waking nap. She heard the elevator doors clang open and shut, but she didn’t move until she heard Henry’s irritatingly soft knock on her door.

To her consternation, he was carrying a backpack that contained a baby. Even worse, it had a pinched-looking face, whose expression suggested that he either had a foul-smelling diaper or was about to launch into a two-hour squall. How rude, to bring a baby!

“Come in,” she said through clenched teeth.

“Sorry about the kid,” said Henry, who was red-faced and a little sweaty. “It couldn’t be helped; it was either this or wreck my marriage.”

“I’ve made hot tea,” said Maxine crabbily.

Henry took the backpack off and scooped the baby from it and cradled him in one arm. With his free hand, he extricated a notebook and pen from his shoulder bag. It was almost feminine, his way with the baby. And why did so many younger men wear shoulder bags now? Men were turning themselves into women now, the way women had turned themselves into men during the feminist heyday. Maxine, despite the fact that she was a rather mannish-looking lesbian who’d always lived her life on her own terms, nurtured a great fondness for the 1950s, the era of cartoonish sexual display, glossy painted lips and pointed breasts and full skirts on women, men in squared-off suits and hats shaped like circumcised penis heads…. “People knew who you were then; girls were girls and men were men….” She was with Archie Bunker all the way, in that at least.