Maxine smiled. “Between you and me and the place cards, I feel the same way, but I have a good reason to want to keep it a secret.”
“Well, it must be a very good reason, that’s all I can say,” said Jane.
Before Maxine could reply, Michael bore down on them with two men in tow.
“Maxine Feldman, I’d like you to meet two of your collectors!” he said. “This is Saul Unger, and this is his partner, John Sipperley.”
“We love our new one,” said Saul Unger, the shorter, older, uglier, and no doubt richer of the pair.
“And we’ve given it a prime spot over our fireplace,” said John Sipperley, who was probably in his early fifties but was still willowy and elfish — he looked like a ballet dancer turned choreographer.
They all took their places at the table. Maxine’s previously unknown collectors flanked her. She felt very grateful to Michael and Natalie for putting her between them, essentially giving her their ears, the opportunity to sell them new work over the course of a friendly dinner.
“Where do you live?” she asked John.
“In New Canaan,” he replied. “We bought an old barn and moved into it.”
“I bet it’s beautiful,” said Maxine.
“It’s all right,” said John.
“Of course it’s beautiful.” Saul leaned across Maxine to say this sternly to John. “John designed the whole place.”
“You’re an architect?”
“No,” said John with puckish apology, “just an amateur decorator. He talks me up too much.”
Waiters set down bowls of vegetal consommé with tiny bits of green, algae probably, floating on top. Maxine took a spoonful, thinking as she did so that this was the kind of food invalids were given when they were almost dead, either to bring them back from the brink or to sustain them on their journey to the underworld.
Across the table, Jane and Michael were discussing Paula: Where could she be? Why hadn’t she come?
“Michael tells us you have a new series under way,” John said to Maxine with what looked to her to be genuine interest. “What’s it like?”
“I’m obsessively preoccupied with mortality lately,” Maxine said after a slight pause. “I’d be silly if I weren’t, at my age. It’s a few lines here, some brush strokes there, a lot of bare white canvas. Philip Larkin has a great poem about getting old and dying called ‘The Old Fools,’ but I promise I won’t bore you by quoting from it. It’s about how old people are protected from the constant, crazy-making terror of death by an emotional trompe l’oeil; otherwise, we’d all be bonkers. I’m trying to remove that illusory perspective, show what it looks like when you force yourself to see where it’s all going to end up.”
“I love it,” said John.
“I’d like to see them,” said Saul.
She took another spoonful of soup and settled more comfortably in her chair, which had padding on the seat, the sort of luxury Michael and Natalie would naturally have, even on chairs they’d rented.
“There she is!” Michael said, looking at someone coming through the front door.
“It’s Paula Jabar,” John crooned under his breath to Maxine, turning to see. “I’ve never met her.”
Maxine hunched over her cooling soup.
“I am so sorry,” came Paula’s voice, which managed to be both loud and velvety at the same time. “I got held up. Where’s Natalie? Hey there, girl! You’re looking good.”
She passed by Maxine in a cloud of flowery smells, something ghetto and feminine, undulating dreadlocks, a dress made of a shimmery tropical bird — colored material, cut to reveal just enough luscious thirty-five-year-old café au lait skin, heavy on the lait.
The soup bowls were whisked away and plates of summery salad replaced them: a Japanese woodcut sea of curly pale green frisee lettuce on which floated almond slice rafts, each holding a tiny, near-translucent poached baby shrimp as pink and naked as a newborn. Crisp blanched haricots verts darted through the sea like needle-nosed fish. Cerise-rimmed radish slices bobbed here and there like sea foam. The dressing was a briny green lime juice and olive oil emulsion. Maxine stared at the thing, trying to imagine the person who had so painstakingly made it. It would be demolished in three bites. She would have been perfectly happy with a wedge of iceberg with a glop of bottled Russian dressing, like you got in the olden days. Food had become so fussy and contrived.
Paula took her place between Jane and Michael with a quick sidelong comment to Jane that made Jane laugh and lean over and give her a kiss on the cheek. How did they know each other well enough for that? As Maxine munched a big forkful of the fussy, preposterous salad, Michael performed the requisite hostly introductions so that everyone at the table could know beyond any doubt that Paula Jabar had just landed in their midst. The waiters came around and refilled wineglasses with a feathery-light, crisp white wine — Maxine had no idea what, but on top of her glass of whiskey, it was making this whole thing infinitely more tolerable, especially now that the easy warmth she’d felt at the table was now revealed to be as fugitive as all unexpected intimacies.
“Hey, how have you been, Maxine?” Paula asked suddenly.
Maxine set her salad fork down and gave her the fish eye. “Very well, Paula, and you?”
“Working, working. Sometimes I think that’s all I do.” Paula tossed a handful of dreadlocks over one bare shoulder. Maxine looked somewhat curiously into her eyes, which were impenetrable, as if they’d been spray-coated with something shiny and tough.
“How is your work going?” John asked tentatively, as if it might be construed as rude to inquire.
Paula’s face gave away nothing. “Today not at all, ’cause I had these people, asking questions.”
“What are you working on now?” Jane asked.
Paula had made a career out of making small dioramas, the shoe-box worlds children made in grade school — or rather, used to make, back when children did such things. Her best-known one was Beautiful Day in the Hood, which showed a woman in a project apartment cowering with her daughters on a couch as gang-warfare gunfire raged outside; the gunfire was represented by “Pow!” and “Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak!” coming out of the windows in a dialogue bubble rimmed with fiery orange and red. And so forth. Paula Jabar was about as famous as you could get in the art world these days. Four of her “ghetto boxes” had been shown in the previous year’s Whitney Biennial; she had even made an appearance on Oprah.
Maxine happened to know, because she’d read an interview with Paula a number of years ago, back when Paula was less savvy about marketing herself and more unguarded about the truth of her past — that after the age of five, Paula’s childhood had taken place miles from anything resembling a ghetto. Moreover, her white maternal grandparents had moved to the States from France, and her father was a lawyer from Algeria. Paula had, it was true, been born in a scruffy neighborhood; her parents hadn’t had much money then, because her father was still in law school, while her mother supported them as a high school French teacher, but once he had passed the bar and joined a law firm, the Jabars had bought a house in a tony suburb and Paula’s mother had quit her job; the three kids were sent to private schools, and Paula later studied art at Bennington. She had been more naïvely candid in that long-ago interview, but these days, being much smarter about her career and image, Paula allowed her interviewers to gather that she’d grown up on the South Side of Chicago and had gone through some hard times.
Fortunately for her, even if the truth had come out, it was considered poor manners to question anyone’s racial authenticity. She could have countered any untoward skepticism with the line she’d used in that interview: “There’s a saying among Jewish people when their racial purity is called into question by their fellow Jews: ‘I’m Jewish enough for the ovens.’ Well, I’m black enough for slavery.”