Michael leaned in toward Maxine, his eyes narrowed in that deliberately charming way she had always found laughably obvious but was always suckered in by all the same. He asked in his intimate, gravelly voice, “How are you, Maxie? Are you working?” He liked to call his artists by pet name — like diminutives, as if he thought of his gallery as a species of animal charity, a caretaking project for barely domesticated beasts. His breath smelled sweet and rich, like roast chestnuts. He was the human equivalent of advertising, in your face but impossible to resist.
Just as it had been with her brother, she saw through his charming warmth to the amoral selfishness beneath and loved him anyway. “I’m a fucking genius, Mikey,” she told him.
“Of course,” he replied.
“Really,” she said, “I’m doing some of my best work.”
“When can I come and see it?”
“Very soon.”
Slender young men and women in black pants and white shirts began rushing about, setting out baskets of bread on tables, uncorking wine.
“Almost dinnertime! Better find Natalie,” said Michael. “Excuse me.”
Charles and Liza had struck up a conversation. Charles looked terror-stricken, Liza focused and impatient. “Well,” he was saying, “for now, I’m most interested in the possibilities of pure color and shape.”
“I’ll let you two chat,” said Liza, and disappeared.
“You’re Oscar Feldman’s sister, aren’t you?” said Charles.
“My one claim to fame.”
“What was it like to have a brother who was a painter, too?”
“We argued. We were hard on each other. We both wanted to be right; we both had something to prove. Now he’s been dead for five years, and two young men are writing separate biographies of him.”
“That’s great,” said Charles uncertainly.
“After a glass of whiskey, I’m glad he’s getting his due. It was good to meet you, Charles,” she added, shaking his hand, “and you must send those slides to Michael.”
“I promise,” he said. “Thank you.”
“And now I’d better find my table.”
Natalie and Michael subscribed to the inevitably awkward convention of place cards. After some simple sleuthing, Maxine found, at the table nearest the apartment’s front door, which would facilitate her retreat in an hour or so, a card with her own name on it, flanked by those of two men she hadn’t met but both of whose names she recognized in the usual art-world way. This table had only six instead of the usual seven chairs; Natalie had evidently thoughtfully left an opening for Katerina, or whoever Maxine might have rustled up as a date. She went around the table and beheld cards for Jane Fleming, who she’d heard was now a tenured art history professor at Columbia, and with whom she had had a brief but passionate affair more than thirty years before. Next to her was Michael Rubinstein himself, and on his other side, of all people, was Paula Jabar.
Maxine looked up and down the long, crowded room. Jane Fleming was a small, pale moth of a woman, or at least she appeared so initially, until you got to know her; she could easily go unnoticed among these forty-plus guests, but Paula Jabar’s ostentatious coppery dreadlocks would have attracted the notice of everyone in the place within twenty seconds. So either Paula hadn’t arrived yet or she wasn’t planning to show. Maxine felt simultaneous twinges of anticipation and disappointment; she disapproved of Paula and her work and everything she said and stood for, but at least she could hardly be called boring, and boredom was Maxine’s bugbear.
“There you are!” came Jane’s familiar voice over her left shoulder.
“We’re both midgets,” said Maxine, turning to smile at her. “If just one of us were taller, I’m sure we’d have seen each other an hour ago.”
Jane kissed Maxine’s cheek and looked into her face with an open, steady, unblinking expression.
“I look like crap, I know,” said Maxine. “But don’t forget I’m eighty-four.”
“I’ve missed you, Maxine,” said Jane.
“You have?”
“Well, yes.” There was a very brief pause, with many unsaid things hanging in it. “I know I could have called you,” Jane went on, “but it wasn’t that kind of missing; it was the kind where I wanted to run into you at a party.”
“And here we are.”
Their affair had begun and ended remarkably civilly at the end of the summer of 1978. After several months of extremely good sex (great sex, really; Jane was hotly sensual, uninhibited as a dolphin; not only did she laugh a lot in bed but she had a way of taking Maxine’s nubbin, as they called it as a private joke, between her lips with a vacuum suck and mashing it with exactly the right amount of pressure with her tongue and then backing off at precisely the right instant, thereby giving Maxine orgasms the transcendent, intense likes of which she’d never known before or since) and interesting conversations and mutual respect and all that, they had agreed that they liked each other, but they weren’t in love, and they were much too busy with their careers, both of them, to see each other so often if it wasn’t going to be a grand lifelong passion. But something had always rankled a little about this for Maxine: She’d half-suspected, whenever she’d thought about it later, that they’d let each other off too easily. They were a lot alike, which was part of their mutual attraction — equally driven, reserved, proud, independent, determined not to need anything from anyone. The trouble was, any lengthy love affair required at least one participant who was willing to be the fool, and ideally two; maybe the real problem had been that neither was willing to fall, to lose control. So they had let each other go.
Maxine, twenty-three years older than Jane, had been in the throes of what she’d half-mockingly called her “midlife crisis” that summer, so she was acutely aware that her pursuit of a much younger woman might mean she was a desperate, aging dyke. It was anyone’s guess why Jane had put her cards down and left the table, but in hindsight, Maxine sometimes wondered whether it was a similarly misguided pride. Back then, Jane was thirty-three and still working on her Ph.D. thesis, whereas Maxine was enjoying the beginnings of her professional heyday, a sudden, inexplicable ten-year-long interest in her work that translated into articles and interviews and a rash of sales that, thanks to shrewd and timely investments and frugal habits, might last the rest of her life.
“How have you been?” Jane asked.
“I have a new assistant,” said Maxine. “She’s a young painter, Hungarian, very talented, and she came to me out of nowhere and offered to work for me for almost nothing. Now I don’t know what the hell I ever did without her.”
“I see,” said Jane.
“How have you been?”
“Oh,” said Jane. “Well. I’m dating someone new these days, a colleague for a change. Also for a change, a man,” she added. “I wanted to bring him tonight, but he couldn’t make it.”
Maxine tried not to show how shocked she was by this. And something else besides shock, something more personal. “I hope he’s nice.”
“Oh, very nice,” Jane replied with a sly sidelong look no doubt meant to convey something erotic.
“Well, I’m happy for you,” said Maxine. “Listen, there are two different guys writing books about Oscar right now.”
“Good for him,” said Jane with some skepticism; she had barely known him, but even so, she had never thought much of Oscar, either as an artist or as a person.
“Just in case they contact you,” said Maxine. “Don’t say a word about that bet.”
“They would never in five million years contact me, because I hardly knew the guy,” said Jane. “But, Maxine, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see the truth get out about all that.”