Six
The brush was moving on the canvas as if it had volition, liveliness, as if it were made of nerve endings and electrical impulses instead of dead wood and hair, or as if it were a dog or a badger, something instinctive, intent on prey. It leapt over the surface and left tracks, deposited a trail of feathery flakes, then a smudge, as if the wind had smeared it. The tracks ended before the entire bare right side of the canvas. It looked as if the creature had become airborne and lifted off.
Ashes and Dust, Maxine had named this series. She stood back to look at what she’d done. From this angle, at this remove, it pleased her, but Maxine knew all too well that the eye of the beholder was a fickle thing when the beholder was also the maker. Five minutes from now, from another angle, it would look like shit.
“Ralph Washington will be a little late,” Katerina called from the office area in the back of the loft, which was little more than a desk made of a door on two filing cabinets, with phone and computer on it, stacks of papers, bills to be paid.
“What?” Maxine called. Whenever Katerina was here, she took charge of Maxine’s cell phone, which was a relief, but even so, Maxine hated to be interrupted when she was working, even by Katerina. Being dragged from the world of painting back into the world of life was as difficult as forcing herself from the world of life back into the world of painting. A thick but permeable membrane separated them. Going from one to another required a shape-shifting in the brain. She was never entirely safely ensconced in either world; the demands of the other one could be heard, muffled from whichever one you were in, so no matter where you were, you felt a tug of anxiety that something might go wrong in the other one in your absence, something you’d failed to account for before you left. It would have been much easier if the transition could have been accomplished through a series of soundproof air locks, decompression chambers. It felt as if there were only room in one lifetime to inhabit one of these parallel worlds, but here she was, trying to cram them both in. Each parallel life sucked the air out of the other one. When she was deep in her painting, she felt how short her time there was and panicked because she would never get to do it all before she died. It only got harder as she got older, harder because, as with sleep, she could never be as fully in either world as she’d been when she was younger. The membrane had become worn and weakened with age, like everything else.
Katerina didn’t bother repeating what she’d said, but that was to be expected; Maxine knew that Katerina knew she’d heard every word.
Maxine dipped her brush in the paint and sent it on another series of animal skitterings up to the shoreline of what she now imagined was a frozen lake. She wanted the shock of so much unfilled whiteness to evoke a sort of internal gasp, both a dying breath and a living astonishment that so much space was left unexplored. She could feel her own lungs suspended as she worked, and she forced herself to inhale, suddenly frustrated by the insurmountable inability to make the paint correspond exactly and precisely to what was in her head. It was always doomed from the outset, but here she was, making another goddamned painting.
It was 10:00 A.M. Katerina had come at nine o’clock, as she did every Wednesday. She had settled right in to work, as always. No small talk had passed between them; they had met once, at the coffeemaker in the kitchen, to pour themselves fresh cups, but Maxine hadn’t asked why Katerina had never returned the weekend’s phone call, and Katerina hadn’t offered any apology or explanation. Now an hour had gone by and it hadn’t come up, so Maxine was fairly sure it never would: The window of opportunity had passed. Katerina wasn’t the type to apologize or overexplain things, which Maxine, in her current frame of mind about Katerina, suddenly found irksome and impolite. Before today, she had always loved Katerina’s stoic reserve, but during these past few days she had worked herself into a state of not caring about Katerina, which had involved a lot of tricky mental gymnastics. She had twisted and warped Katerina’s stellar character traits into a craven bunch of faults, had pinned all her good qualities to a corkboard and viewed them, squinting, through a cynical lens until they morphed into manipulations and illusions. It had taken some doing, but Maxine was skilled at doing this to people who had disappointed her; she had had a lot of practice. That damned Slavic stone face, the nerve of it.
Five years before, Katerina had come here to see Maxine, a stranger whose phone number she’d looked up in the White Pages, an artist she considered one of the greatest living painters. She had asked for the minimum hourly wage to perform the most menial of tasks in return for the privilege of watching the master at her work. Grudgingly, Maxine had agreed to let Katerina come once a week, on the condition that she stayed out of her hair when she was working. This, she had done.
When Ralph had called a few moments before, Katerina had been sorting Maxine’s receipts into two piles: those that were tax-deductible and those that weren’t. Her understanding of the American tax system had improved vastly since she’d gotten her green card and become a taxpaying citizen. She worked as a waitress at a cheap Polish restaurant in the East Village, the primary advantage of which, besides the great kindness of the elderly owners, was that it was only four blocks away from the one-bedroom apartment she shared with two fellow Hungarian émigré artists, a young married couple in their late twenties who fought passionately in the kitchen over cigarettes and straight vodka, then disappeared into the bedroom. Katerina, who was almost never there except to sleep, had only the pullout living room couch and a small bureau in the entryway. Because of this economy, she had a tidy savings account and could just barely afford the small studio, a cubbyhole in an industrial loft she shared with seven other painters, in a patchy neighborhood in Brooklyn, four stops in on the L train. Out of both economic necessity and a perverse pleasure in being smart about what little money she had, she was stringent and disciplined with her own deductions and receipts, and she brought the same zealousness to Maxine’s finances. She considered anything other than groceries, toiletries, or clothing tax-deductible. Paints were, of course, and so were MetroCards, restaurant receipts, and books. Since Maxine was haphazard, disorganized, and stubbornly lax about remembering to put all her receipts into the box Katerina had marked “For Taxes,” she always went through Maxine’s coat pockets, her grocery-carrying backpack, and the bits and pieces on her bureau. Still, she could never make it add up to enough to make a real difference. Katerina was often tempted to augment Maxine’s patchy receipts with some of her own, but she had thus far resisted the temptation to bestow this sort of ridiculous and unasked-for charity on someone who would grumpily wave it away if she ever caught wind of it.
“So what time is what’s his name coming?” Maxine shouted suddenly.
“He said he’ll be about fifteen minutes late,” Katerina said, smiling. “He will be here soon.”
Maxine heard the smile in Katerina’s voice and felt murderous. She could smell Katerina’s new love affair on her like a cheap perfume.
“Didn’t he ask everything last time?”
“Should I tell him not to come?”
“What is the fucking point of all these goddamned paintings?”
Katerina didn’t answer. They both went back to work.