“Oscar’s success was not really about how good a painter he was,” said Maxine. “His women were so outrageously plural, so literally sexualized…. Looking at his paintings is like looking at the outward manifestation of his dick. Pardon my language. But it’s smutty, his work…. He fucked them with brushes. Even his own daughters as little girls. Scandalous. Brilliantly scandalous. Now no one gives a shit, but back then, it was a big, loud, bold statement. He was a good-enough painter to make some real waves. Clement Greenberg loathed him. He once wrote in a review, ‘Feldman hammers the same anachronistic note over and over, badly and off-key.’ Oscar just laughed. He liked being hated by Greenberg. He found it perversely flattering.”
“Greenberg also hated Oscar’s dealer, Emile Grosvenor.”
“He blacklisted the Grosvenor Gallery,” said Maxine, “so Emile moved his paintings to Grosvenor West. Oscar’s work sold in California through the sixties and early seventies. Back then, his biggest collectors were Hollywood directors and producers, the Roman emperors of their time.” She held up a small white object to the light, showing Henry, who squinted at it, unable to make out what it was from that distance. “This is a shark’s tooth. I use it to scrape lines in paint when I need fine definition. I like the idea of a shark’s tooth, but it also makes distinctive marks I can’t get any other way.”
“You used it in Night of the Radishes?” asked Henry. This was easily the best-known of her works. It was a triptych completed in 1967, which now hung at the Modern and was generally considered her masterpiece: Over three panels were amorphous blooms of black paint and razorlike black projectiles, a juxtaposition that had served through the decades as an aesthetic Rorschach test for feminist scholars, Marxist art historians, Freudian and Jungian art theorists, postmodernists, and various other-ists, who’d invested it with whatever qualities best suited their ends. Henry thought Maxine’s work was beautiful but stringently monochromatic, despite what he’d said to her earlier, but even he couldn’t deny that Night of the Radishes was the real thing, possibly a great work of art.
She nodded at him with a glimmering of respect. “Oscar took photographs of girls as a teenager. Black-and-white snapshots, just girls being girls, some pretty, some plain, girls in their bedrooms, riding the IRT, walking on the street, shopping, eating ice cream at Schrafft’s, whatever. He even took some of me, shooting from his bicycle as I rode mine up First Avenue, but as you can imagine, he had no trouble finding willing subjects.”
“I haven’t seen them,” said Henry, almost hyperventilating. And he had been on the verge of leaving. Thank God he hadn’t let her throw him out. “I didn’t even know they existed. Where can I get my hands on them?”
“Easily,” she said. “They’re at Brooklyn College.”
“He donated them to his college.”
“That’s right. They’re still there.”
“But he was an art history major! He wasn’t an artist until years later.”
“He fancied himself a good photographer. I admit the photos aren’t bad, some of them, especially the ones he took of Abigail as a girl. He kept all those photographs in a box in his studio for years. He donated them to the college’s archives only a short time before he died. I don’t know whether anyone at the college fully realizes what they are. It seems that they’ve been kept in a drawer, undisturbed since the day Oscar took them in.”
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.