“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 Most of the old SoHo artists had long ago fled to Brooklyn or Chelsea and been replaced by male models, Eurotrash, and bond traders, but Maxine had stayed, stubbornly.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.
“Have a seat,” said Maxine, setting out two cups and sugar. “I’m out of milk.”
“I don’t need it,” said Henry in a reassuring tone, which made Maxine suspect he did indeed take milk but was assuaging what he incorrectly took to be hostessy anxiety.
Henry unwrapped the baby from his gummy-looking swaddling blanket and spread it on the industrial-linoleum floor of Maxine’s kitchen, then set the baby down on his back. The baby, to his credit, appeared to take this indignity in stride. Frago, under the table, growled in the back of his throat but didn’t pounce.
“Chester likes to be on the floor, for some reason,” said Henry.
“Bodes well for his future,” said Maxine.
“Does your dog do all right with babies?” Henry asked.
“He doesn’t know any,” said Maxine. “But he’s harmless in general. All right, let’s cut to the chase. What did you come to ask me?”
Henry opened his notebook and consulted what Maxine took, upside down, to be a nearly illegible list of jotted questions. “I’ve been wondering about what you were saying about Abigail and Claire — or rather, Teddy, if you don’t mind my calling her that.”
“You can call her a two-headed hyena for all I care,” said Maxine, pouring tea.
“About Abigail, too, and the dynamics of their triangle,” he added, pressing on. “Do you think Oscar stayed with Abigail all those years out of guilt?”
“I see you’ve met Teddy and succumbed to her ‘charms,’” said Maxine, hoping the quotation marks were audible.
“What I’m trying to understand is why he kept two households going. I have one, and frankly, that’s more than enough. Why would a man want two? Why not divorce Abigail and move in with Teddy?”
Damn it, Maxine thought. She didn’t have it in her to be cooperative and cheerful and opaque today. She shouldn’t have let him come. “This biography mongering is just an excuse to stick your nose into Oscar’s private business, isn’t it?” she said. “A man you profess to admire and revere.”
“Why wouldn’t I be curious about his life?” he asked mildly.
In lieu of an answer, she took a loud slurp of tea. Then she lit a cigarette without asking whether it would bother the baby. Her own mother had smoked like a sailor through both her pregnancies and her children’s childhoods, and both she and Oscar had wound up chain-smokers themselves, but so what? Not the end of the world.
“Why don’t you like Teddy?” Henry asked.
“That’s what you’re really wondering, isn’t it,” Maxine said, “now that you’ve met her and been sucked in…. Isn’t there anyone you just don’t like?”
“Of course.”
“Call it biochemical, call it taste, call it bitchiness. I really don’t care what you call it. Unlike everyone else, apparently, I see right through Claire, and what I see I can’t stand.”
Henry leaned forward on his elbows, so the steam from his untouched teacup curled up to bathe his sweating face in yet more moisture. “What do you see?”
“Oh, think whatever you want,” Maxine said. “I have no interest in dredging up all that old shit with Oscar’s little mistress. That’s the last thing I feel like talking about. I’ve had a bad day.”