A moment later, Maxine called, “Come look at this painting, would you?”
“Okay,” said Katerina, approaching the canvas with a cautiously eager expression. Maxine despaired at the sight of her; Katerina was dressed in a black tank top that revealed her muscular arms, and a pair of olive green canvas pants with many pockets that rode her narrow hips, low-slung and fetching, showing an inch or so of flat belly. Her face looked wide open, soft, like a small child’s, as if she had just awakened from a deep sleep and was anticipating ice cream. Maxine felt strongly that her advanced age should have granted her some kind of immunity from the humiliation of unrequited lust. That it didn’t was yet another of the many indignities of old age.
After a moment, Katerina said slowly, “Mostly negative space. A quiet painting, a little bleak.”
“Bleak,” repeated Maxine.
Katerina paused again. She had learned by answering wrongly that these requests of Maxine’s to tell her what she saw in a particular painting always had one right answer only. Last time, Katerina had looked at cross-hatchings of black, a claustrophobic schemata of webbing and fencelike filigree, and said the painting created a feeling of suspense and anticipation. Maxine, not bothering to hide her disappointment, had told her that actually the painting was supposed to make her feel buried alive. The one before that had been intended to make her feel punched in the gut. Apparently, Maxine’s paintings were intended to punish the viewer for failing to see what they were about.
“There is just bare white on the right side,” Katerina went on, “and very small black marks on the left side…. It feels unfinished.”
“Yes,” said Maxine. “Anything else?”
“Well…” Katerina took a deep breath. It made her feel as if she were being drowned? dragged by horses? dismembered and eaten alive by a polar bear?
The cell phone in her hand chirped. She pressed the green button, put it to her ear, and said, “Maxine Feldman’s studio, Katerina speaking.” It was her own choice to answer the phone in this way; Maxine had never told her what to say.
“Katerina,” came a robust but unmistakably elderly female voice. “This is Claire St. Cloud. May I speak to Maxine, please?”
“Just a moment.” Katerina pressed hold and said to Maxine, “It’s Claire St. Cloud.”
“God fucking damn it,” said Maxine, reaching for the phone. “Claire,” she said with guttural displeasure. “Hello? Hello? Oh good, she hung up.”
“You have to press the hold button again,” said Katerina.
Maxine mashed the button, then repeated — this time with less venom because she’d been distracted—“Claire?”
“Hello, Maxine,” said Teddy. “I’d like to come and see you today.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“You know why.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” said Maxine. “Come later, then. That biographer is coming here this morning.”
“Henry?” said Teddy possessively.
“The other one.”
“How’s three o’clock?”
“Oh, all right,” said Maxine, and hung up without asking whether Teddy knew where she lived. She had put her return address on her letter to Lila.
The doorbell rang then. While Katerina went to let Ralph in, Maxine turned the easel with the new painting to face the wall; then she went into the little bathroom in the back of the loft to wash her hands and face. When she came out, she could hear Katerina talking to Ralph, a bottle being opened, carbonated liquid being poured into a glass, chair legs scraping against the linoleum. She heard Ralph say, “I was unavoidably held up.”
Maxine strode into the kitchen. Ralph looked up as she entered, pushed his chair back, and stood up.
“Thank you so much for your time today,” he said. His face looked even blacker with its sheen of sweat. A glass of golden bubbly liquid sat on the table in front of him.
“Hello,” Maxine said, trying to sound far more friendly and welcoming than she felt. In front of Katerina, she felt compelled to dredge deep inside herself for whatever kindness and warmth she possessed, to live up to Katerina’s obvious respect for her. Without her here, she could have been as crabby as she’d wanted.
“Some ginger beer?” Katerina asked Maxine with her gap-toothed grin. “I brought it. It’s very cooling on hot days.”
“No, thank you,” said Maxine, hiding, she hoped, her extreme dislike of the stuff. She sat down.
“I’ll be in the office if you need me,” said Katerina, and went back to her chores.
Ralph turned on his tape recorder and set it on the table between him and Maxine, then glanced down at his notes. He took an expressionless sip of ginger beer. “I’ve been thinking,” he began. “Maybe wondering is a better word.”
Maxine sighed.
“You and your brother both being painters,” Ralph added.
“What’s your point?”
Ralph looked at the tiny bubbles clinging to the inside of his glass. “Could he have been rebelling against you in his refusal to allow his work to evolve into abstraction?”
Maxine laughed. “Do you have brothers or sisters, Ralph?”
“A younger brother.”
“So you’re the firstborn, too.”
“That’s right.”
“I see.” Maxine’s dog, Frago, lurched up from his bed in the corner and ambled under the table to put his chin on her knee. She toyed with his ear; he snorted and burrowed his head into her thigh. “I was a girl; I was expected to produce little Jewish children. Our parents were businesspeople, and I was their worst investment. I didn’t want children; I wanted to sleep with girls. Oscar at least gave them a grandson. Never mind that he wasn’t much of a grandson; at least Oscar got married, and he wasn’t queer.”
“And two granddaughters.”
“I have nothing to say about them.” Maxine became aware that she was palpating Frago’s ear as if she were trying to extract a pea from it. “What made you choose my brother as your subject?”
Ralph pursed his lips, which immediately irritated Maxine and made her wish she hadn’t asked. “I love his work,” he said with a fervent lack of irony. “He was a man who saw women clearly and deeply, and as his daughter Ruby pointed out to me recently, he wasn’t painting any version of himself. When he looked at a woman, he saw her, not some projected version of his own desire.” Ralph sat back in his chair and lifted his glass and turned it in midair, studying the pale gold liquid.
“You don’t like ginger beer,” Maxine observed.
“Frankly,” said Ralph, putting it abruptly back down onto the table, “I have often thought that Oscar’s work wanted to leave the runway and take off into abstraction. There are certain indications in some of the paintings that hint at an impulse toward blurring the lines between the women themselves and their backgrounds, transcending their features and bodies to show the essential fragmented nature of their personalities…. He stopped short of allowing his paintings to evolve in that direction, and in so doing, I believe, he hamstrung himself as an artist. It was out of some perverse rebellion. Which, I believe, was against you.”
“Oscar was incapable of abstraction. He was too lazy.”
Ralph blinked.
“He wasn’t self-reflective or adventurous,” Maxine went on. Something had risen in her gorge, and she was talking as if she could expel it with words. “His paintings have no suffering in them, because Oscar never suffered. He had all the women he wanted, and still his wife and mistress doted on him. He neglected his children, but apparently they all loved him anyway. He was not nearly as smart as he thought he was; he had an inflated opinion of his own intellect, and he had no idea how limited he really was. You couldn’t argue with him — or rather, you couldn’t win an argument with him in the usual sense of exchanging views and having it out on equal footing — because whenever it reached the point beyond which his mind couldn’t go, he took that to mean that he had won.”