“I’m not a fucking child,” said the redhead.
“About him you are,” said the olive-skinned one. He caught Maxine’s eye, realized she was listening, and looked blandly away.
Natalie Rubinstein appeared in front of Maxine with a glass of red wine in one hand and kissed her on both cheeks. She wore a very expensive-looking, subtly matronly sleeveless burgundy silk dress that showed off her full breasts and her round, dusky arms without eroticizing her in any way. Her dark hair tumbled around her shoulders; her brown eyes glowed with the ease and goodwill born of the confluence of financial security and a lucky disposition apparently free of fatal introspection.
“Maxine,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I got waylaid. I’m so glad you’re here! How are you?”
“I’ve been better, truthfully,” said Maxine, but she smiled back at her hostess. Natalie was the devoted, unflappable mother of three small children, a self-professed “huge, huge fan” of Maxine’s work, and also, it happened, the wife of Maxine’s longtime dealer, Michael Rubinstein. In spite of herself, Maxine genuinely liked her — it was impossible not to — although she didn’t understand a thing about Natalie, and vice versa.
“Oh, why?” said Natalie.
Maxine waved a hand. “Old age is nothing but a big drag. Do everything you can to stave it off.”
“Seth and Charles,” said Natalie, “come here and meet Maxine Feldman. She’s a great, great, great, very famous painter Michael has the incredible honor to represent.”
The two homosexuals dropped their conversation and obediently extended their hands to Maxine. Their hands were smooth and warm as suede.
“Seth’s my little brother,” said Natalie, slipping her arm through the olive-skinned boy’s and drawing him closer so he had to enter Maxine’s radius. Charles automatically followed Seth as if by magnetic pull; now they formed a little social clump, which had, of course, been Natalie’s aim all along. “He’s visiting us from Chicago.”
Seth glanced at his sister, a complicated look filled with roughly equal parts affection and bemusement; Maxine imagined that the latter was caused in a larger sense by something to do with his visit, but more immediately by being forced to make conversation with the old bag who’d been spying on his private conversation a second before.
“That’s right,” he said briefly.
“And I hope you stay here forever,” said Natalie.
“Well, if I do, I promise I’ll get my own place.”
“We have plenty of room,” said Natalie.
Seth gave his sister another complicated look.
Natalie smiled joyfully at the cozy little trio she’d created, then sidestepped away to greet a newly arrived couple, kisses on all cheeks.
“Are you enjoying your visit to New York?” Maxine asked Seth, throwing the question into the sudden cold pool of silence like a depth-sounding pebble. As senior member of this enforced huddle, it was the least she could do.
“He’s actually moving here,” the redheaded Charles said, looking at Seth, “but he can’t admit it yet.”
“So you’re a painter,” said Seth to Maxine, ignoring what Charles had said.
“I am a painter,” she replied, as if she were saying, “I’m nothing but a pawn in this lovers’ spat and I wish I were home right now.”
“So is Charles,” said Seth cruelly.
“Who are some of the artists you admire?” Maxine asked; the old trick of sussing out the competition.
“I love your work,” said Charles with endearing alacrity. “De Kooning, Kandinsky, Kline, and Rothko are great influences also.”
“Anyone more contemporary?”
Charles looked at Maxine with sidelong hesitation, as if he were trying to gauge her own opinions before he answered in order to avoid offending her. “A lot of what I see these days, I can’t relate to,” he said. “I guess that makes me an anachronism. That seems to be the general opinion anyway; I’m still trying to get a gallery to show my work.” His face was mottled now.
“Getting a gallery solves very little,” said Maxine. “It only creates more headaches and terrors than you had before.”
“I’ll take them,” said Charles. She saw the force of ambition undergirding his quip like a massive glacier slow-moving in the sunlight.
“I invited him here to meet my brother-in-law,” said Seth, “but he’s too shy to let me introduce him.”
“Not yet,” said Charles. “I just got here.”
“You mean,” said Seth, “you’re not drunk enough yet.”
“I’ll introduce you,” Maxine told Charles. “I’ll say you’re my protégé. That carries more weight with him than a family connection.”
“You’ve never seen my work,” said Charles.
“Don’t shoot yourself in the foot,” Maxine snapped. “Come with me. Play along.”
She turned and stumped toward the kitchen without looking to see whether he was following. If he wasn’t, that was his mistake.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she heard Charles mutter behind her. “Just a friend.”
“Glad to hear it,” she shot back. “What’s your last name?”
“Emerson,” he said. “Thank you so much for doing this.”
“Oh, painters are like a big Irish family in the potato famine: There’s never enough of anything to go around — collectors, galleries, grants, prizes…. But I’m so old now, I’ve got nothing to lose.”
Michael Rubinstein was standing by his own refrigerator, deep in conversation with a very young woman with cocoa-colored skin who was wearing a slinky vintage cocktail dress and a lot of berry-colored lipstick. In the time it took to cross over to them, Maxine deduced that the girl worked at Michael’s gallery, he wasn’t sleeping with her, and they were flirting around the fact that he could if he wanted to.
“Michael,” said Maxine, interrupting them without apology, “I’d like you to meet Charles Emerson. He’s a painter. You should take a look at his work.”
“Hello, hello,” said Michael to both Maxine and Charles, kissing Maxine on the cheek, shaking Charles’s hand. He was a short, broad-chested man in early middle age, with a lionlike head. “Sorry, your name is?”
“Charles Emerson,” said Charles. He cleared his throat. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“You’ll remember his name, Liza,” said Michael to the girl. “Maxine, of course, you know.”
Maxine the person, of course, Liza didn’t know, but the name at least she recognized. “Nice to see you,” she said, and shook Maxine’s proffered hand. She had an English accent. “Hi, Charles,” she added brusquely, not bothering to meet his eye.
Liza was, Maxine was certain, a painter herself, for whom every day as a minion at the Rubinstein Gallery was like working as a scullery maid in a house she hoped to own someday. To her, Charles was nothing but competition. Maxine was certain Liza would have decided to forget his name and everything else about him by the time his slides arrived, or his CD, or whatever they sent around now.
Maxine took a swig of whiskey, swallowed, and said to Charles, as a veiled threat to Liza, “Listen, Charles, I’ll call you in a week to make sure you’ve sent your work to Michael.”
“Thank you,” said Charles with a tentative disbelief that touched her. It was so easy to help someone, so nice when they showed proper gratitude. Good, now she was free to die: she’d passed the torch, however tenuously, however disingenuously. Out of nowhere, she had a vision of her body being slid into a crematorium oven, her soul finally having decamped from squatness and thwarted ambition alike.