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.