“What would Oscar say if he heard you saying all that?”
Maxine smiled acidly. “It would not surprise him at all. Anyway, I recall, not that I saw it once he was past a certain age, that he had a very small penis.”
Ralph was clearly shocked and had nothing to say to this.
“Well, he must have,” Maxine went on. “For all his charm and all his good looks, he always refused to put himself in any situation in which he wasn’t in control. He allowed nothing and no one to challenge him. He chose women who were devoted to him in spite of their superficial appearance of independence and strength. He never approached a woman he wasn’t totally sure he could have. And he never did anything in his work that risked revealing any aspect of his own inner self. He refused to risk anything — rejection, failure, self-exposure. And he didn’t allow himself to truly suffer, because he was too weak.”
“So you think he didn’t deserve acclaim and success?”
“Of course not,” she said. “He painted good portraits, interesting and sometimes even beautiful portraits.”
“Did your parents prefer his work to yours?”
“Our parents didn’t like art. They didn’t see the use of it. By ‘they,’ of course, I really mean our father, but our mother felt the same way — in the background, like a good wife. She was smarter than my father, by the way. We were both a disappointment to them. They were happy when we sold paintings, and happy they didn’t have to support us, but to them, we might as well have been retards. That should have made us more allied, but it didn’t. In the end, Oscar and I each hoped the other one would take up the slack. I felt much guiltier, being older, being the girl, and not being married. Oscar was very distant from them. He treated them with outward respect but didn’t take to heart a single word they said. I, on the other hand, was embroiled in all sorts of ugly tensions and battles with them, both spoken and tacit. I got the brunt of it; he got away. I suffered because it’s in my nature, and it wasn’t in his. He was lucky.”
“But you believe you’re the greater artist.”
Maxine waved the whole topic away. “Will it bother you if I smoke? I’m only asking to be polite. The only answer is no.”
“No,” he said.
She tapped a cigarette out of the pack she always kept in the breast pocket of her shirt. She flicked the lighter and inhaled a lungful of smoke, then put pack and lighter back into her pocket and returned her free hand to Frago’s ear. He licked her palm.
“What do you make of your rival, Henry Burke?” she asked Ralph abruptly with a leering glint of hostility.
“I have never met the man.”
“You two should go out for drinks, compare notes, divvy up the chores.”
Ralph said, poker-faced, “Maybe so.” He turned off the tape recorder, gathered his things together, and stood up. “I have taken up far too much of your time already,” he said. He raised his hand to Katerina, who was waving good-bye to him from the far corner, then went to the door and, without another word or look in Maxine’s direction, let himself out into the hallway.
After Ralph left, Maxine wandered around with an unsettled feeling, smoking. She felt trembly and nauseated, maybe from the heat and cigarettes, or maybe because she had been so angry while she’d been talking to Ralph, angry without really knowing it. Damn it, it was out of her control. It was getting worse with age, not better. She had meant to be gracious and generous, knowing Katerina was listening, but the interview had run away with her — or rather, from her. Something was very wrong with having so much unrealized ambition. It acted like some kind of poison, insidious and slow-acting. So much fuss and furor, so much bitterness, envy, sorrow, and regret, all over splotches of paint on canvases.
“Katerina,” she said harshly.
“What is it?” Katerina called. Of course she’d heard the entire conversation between Ralph and Maxine. She was worried about Maxine now, and expected to be lashed out at for something minor. She wouldn’t take it personally; she never did. She loved Maxine, and she understood her nature.
“I don’t feel well,” Maxine said. “I’m going to lie down.”
“Would you like some ice water?”
Maxine, ignoring the question, went into her bedroom, kicked off her shoes, and lay on her bed.
The thing Maxine had always most feared when she imagined dying was the moment following her last breath — lying there airless, empty-lunged, finished with inhaling forever: the emptiness after that last gasp, the whiteness, the freedom from need. That particular terror and literal breathlessness was what she had been trying to get into her painting this morning. She thought about the canvas as it now stood. Katerina was right: It was raw and bleak. If she added any more paint, it might tip the balance, and the painting might lose its sense of suspension in nothingness. She suspected, humbly and without ego, that it might be a very good painting. Maybe it was finished. She envisioned it on the walls of her closed eyelids with mounting internal excitement: It might be very, very good.
Katerina arrived in the doorway with a gentle clinking sound. “Ice water,” she said, and came over to set it down on Maxine’s nightstand.
“You heard the conversation,” said Maxine without opening her eyes.
“Yes,” said Katerina.
“I shouldn’t have said all that about Oscar.” Maxine spoke flatly, without overt regret.
“It was harsh,” said Katerina. “But everyone says things like that. It’s human. What’s done is done.”
“What’s done is absolutely fucking done,” Maxine repeated, smiling wryly, freed for now from the loop-de-loop of self-loathing. “And cannot be undone.”
“Claire St. Cloud called again,” Katerina said. “She’s going to bring her friend with her.”
“That bitch.”
“She sounded like a bitch.”
“She is a bitch. She was so controlling of my brother…. That little husband thief. Never could stand her. Needed a good slap. And he just ate it all up, while his poor wife stayed home alone with her shwartze maid and her books and her retarded son. Of course he’s not retarded. You know what I mean.”
“She’s coming at three,” said Katerina, smiling.
“Get out the needles and knives,” said Maxine with an answering smile in her voice. “Listen, I think that painting is done.”
“The one you’re working on?”
“It’s done.”
“Can I go and look at it?”
“You can have it.”
“To keep?”
“Or leave on the subway.”
Katerina sat next to Maxine and took her hand. Maxine had never given her a painting before. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“It only took me about an hour to paint the damn thing,” said Maxine. She willed her hand to lie inert in Katerina’s without clutching or squeezing or betraying any feeling.
“I’ll treasure it!” Katerina said.
Maxine turned her head on the pillow to find a cooler spot, happy to have Katerina hold her hand like that and react with such feeling to being given the painting.
“Now go away and let me sleep,” said Maxine. “I want to rest up for that horrible little mistress.”
Katerina went away, leaving the cold, dewy glass of water behind. Maxine opened her eyes and looked at it and realized that she was thirsty. It seemed to her that she’d never been so thirsty in her life. After she’d rested a little more, she would sit up and guzzle the whole thing.