“She apologized,” said Ruby in a tone that conveyed what she thought of her sister’s apology. “I think she’s reluctant to talk to you, Ralph. She didn’t get along with Dad. She’s still mad at him.”
“Ruby,” said Teddy. Although she was older by only eight minutes, Ruby had always been much more assertive and mature, so naturally Teddy had been more protective of Samantha. As a mother, you played the cards you were dealt. “I don’t think Samantha would appreciate your revealing that.”
“Probably not,” Ruby admitted. “But it’s just so annoying.”
“By the way, Ralph, did you know you had competition?” Teddy asked him point-blank.
He swallowed his mouthful and looked at her.
“It’s true,” she said. “Another biographer is writing a book about Oscar; he interviewed me several days ago. Has no one told you?”
“No,” said Ralph. He lifted his napkin and wiped his lips.
“His name is Henry Burke. Maybe you know each other.”
“I have never heard his name before now,” said Ralph.
“Oh dear,” said Teddy, who was enjoying this a little. “I can see that this is bad news, and I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you. He interviewed me just this week.”
“I haven’t spoken to him yet,” said Ruby. “Well, except on the phone. So I’m virgin territory, Ralph; he hasn’t gotten to me yet.”
Ralph tried to laugh through his consternation. “Does he…does he have a book contract, do you happen to know?”
“Yes,” said Teddy. “With Yale University Press.”
“My contract is with Norton,” said Ralph. “Does he know about me?”
“I haven’t told him,” said Teddy.
“Me, neither, obviously,” said Ruby. “But I bet Maxine will. She’ll love playing you both off against each other.”
“Oh, we all will,” said Teddy, laughing. “Why not? Two young men vying for Oscar like vultures over a dead hyena—”
Ralph laughed ruefully. This time, his laughter suited the scale of the joke.
“All right,” said Teddy, softening toward him a little now that she’d sprung bad news on him, “coffee, anyone? I’ve made a fresh blueberry cake. It’s still warm, and there’s ice cream.”
“No coffee for me, thank you,” said Ralph. “And I’m sorry to say no cake, either; I have to watch my sugar; diabetes runs in my family.”
“Too bad for you,” said Ruby. “My mother’s blueberry cake could launch ships. I’ll have his piece, too, Mom.”
Teddy got up and went into the kitchen, laden with empty soup bowls and salad plates.
Ruby took a drink of wine, then looked hard at Ralph. “What’s your grand theory about my father?” she asked. “I know you have one.”
“My grand theory about Oscar?”
“Come on.”
“He was a great painter.”
“Obviously, you think that; otherwise, you wouldn’t be going to all this trouble. I mean the guiding idea you’re going to marshal these interviews and all your research around.”
“What makes you think I have one?”
“I know you have one,” she said. “Come on, what do you think of his work, honestly?”
There was a silence brimming with all sorts of thoughts in both their heads.
“My only criticism of Oscar’s work,” said Ralph slowly after a moment, “if that’s what you’re looking for, is that his adherence to figuratism made him great and original but paradoxically might have kept him from achieving his full potential. I say might—this is pure hypothetical speculation. Maybe, if he had allowed himself to flower into abstraction the way de Kooning did with his female nudes, he would have become both one of the foremost painters of his generation and one of the greatest. As it was, he was simply one of the greatest, which is nothing to sneeze at. But the way de Kooning stretched the female form, pushed it as far as it could go into abstraction without losing the integrity of the woman’s individual self…His nudes are glorious and remarkable for their perfectly balanced tension between paint and flesh. Oscar’s nudes, in light of de Kooning’s, have a slight tendency to seem didactic and self-limiting, but only in their literalness, and only in that one respect.”
“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.”