She and Maxine locked eyes then and both of them looked startled.
Maxine was positive then that the girl was her niece and that she knew Maxine was her aunt. But she had thought this same thing at various times before, and had no proof either way about it.
The girl and her swain went laughing to a bench at the far end and sat there, entwined together, while Svetlana stumbled clumsily but with transparently good intentions into various canine social groups. When she came to Frago, he gave her a benign crotch sniff and nose touch and seemed to be done with her, but she stuck around him, as she sometimes did, loitering hopefully, sensing that he was less snooty than others, less inclined to give her the brush-off. Maxine had a strong feeling that she’d been a rescue dog, abused or abandoned, then brought into a shelter and adopted by this girl as a fully grown dog. She didn’t seem properly able to connect with her own kind, for all her pedigree. She was like an inbred duchess, a brain-damaged blue blood.
Frago and Walter exchanged a look: Would they let this weird young beauty into their elderly perambulations? They seemed to agree with a kind of “What the hell” mutual shrug, because Svetlana fell in peaceably enough with them, seemingly calmed by their gentlemanly indifference. The three dogs came toward Maxine’s bench, led by Frago, and surrounded her feet in a panting trio of fur and tongues and haunches. She could smell them in the hot morning sun, their doggy muskiness. She had never been this close to Svetlana; leaning down to pet her, she had a sudden urge to read her tag, something people almost never did in the dog run. It was considered a breach of etiquette for humans in here to express too much curiosity about one another’s identities. Everyone felt perfectly free to ask the most intimate and nosy questions about one another’s dogs’ names, habits, funny proclivities, type of food, texture of feces, neuroses, and history, but nobody here revealed their own particulars; it just wasn’t done.
Daringly, her heart beating a little faster, under cover of the girl’s distraction with her boyfriend, Maxine grabbed Svetlana’s tag and looked right at it. Her old eyes, behind thick bifocals, focused on the engraved name and address, and then Svetlana jerked away and began licking her own pink, hairless crotch. Maxine was left with a blurred impression of the name Ruby Feldman, but she wasn’t sure. Yet she was sure. The girl looked like a female Oscar, uncannily; even her gestures were Oscar’s, the careless way she flung her hands around when she talked, her expansive smile, that self-aware marshaling of her undeniable beauty and charm.
So this was Ruby, then, not Samantha. Maxine had never wanted anything to do with either of them, officially, since the day they’d been born. But having watched this girl — for what, two years now? — here at the dog run struggling with her poor sweet misfit of a dog, Maxine had become inadvertently, instinctively proprietary toward both girl and dog. She’d often itched to give advice to Ruby about Svetlana: “Be firmer with her. Don’t let her walk ahead of you. Make her sit before you put her leash on.” Auntlike advice, that was what it was; it came out of nowhere, involuntary, completely uncharacteristic, like the words bubbeleh, shayneh maydeleh, kind. Maxine’s own Tante Esther had dispensed such advice, her mother’s older sister, and Maxine had always chafed at it: “Such a pretty girl. You should smile more, maydeleh, wear something flattering, bubbeleh!” Maxine had wanted to smack her, had hated the way she smelled, sharp cologne undergirded with stale chicken fat; it had made her nauseous, and this sort of advice always brought that smell back, cloyingly intimate….
Of course she wouldn’t introduce herself to Ruby. What did someone like Ruby need with a decrepit old dyke of an aunt who’d never professed anything more kindly than indifference to her existence for her whole life? It was much too late for any kind of touching familial rapprochement, but here were their two dogs, lying side by side in the wood chips, panting in amicable unison in the summer heat. That was something in and of itself.
It was time to go home. Maxine heaved herself up, clapped her hands to alert Frago to their departure, and gimped toward the exit. As she did so, she caught Ruby’s eye again, and looked quickly away; no point in inviting trouble. At the gate, Frago sat without being told and she clipped his leash to his collar, aware that her niece was watching. She thought, You see how he sits? You see how he lets me go out first? That’s the way to have a calm and well-adjusted animal. They want you to be the leader; they want you to be strong. She waited for Frago to sit at her left heel, then closed the gate and led him home.
She walked in to the tumbling melody of her cell phone ring. She let Frago off the leash, made sure his water bowl was full, then went to the worktable and picked up the phone and answered it. “What?” she said.
“Maxine Feldman,” said that same voice from earlier.
“Yeah,” she replied. “You finally got me. I’m amazed you didn’t wear out the battery of my phone. I should have turned it off.”
“Sorry about that,” said the young man. “I’m very sorry to disturb your morning. I just have a couple of questions. It shouldn’t take long, five minutes at the most.”
Maxine tapped her foot and bided her time, staring out the window at the sky, thinking about what she’d have for lunch. There was a can of chunky chicken noodle soup, some rye crackers…. Was there any tuna fish? Maybe there was some tuna fish. She was hungrier than usual; why was that? Then she realized she hadn’t had breakfast.
“Hello?” the young man said.
“I was just wondering whether I have any tuna fish,” said Maxine.
Dexter Harris laughed.
“Okay,” said Maxine, “I give. Ask your questions so I can get to my lunch.”
“You’re of course familiar with your brother’s diptych that hangs in the Met.”
“Of course,” said Maxine, amused by this polite little game. It reminded her of the matador’s tricky dance with the confused, unsuspecting bull. “So who told you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Oh, come on,” said Maxine. “Who told you about Helena?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“I mean I would love to know who told you the truth about that painting.”
“Could you be more specific?”
Maxine looked through her thick lenses at the bright summer sky outside her windows. As her gaze shifted, black motes in both her eyes moved like schools of fat black fish through water. There were so many layers separating her from a pure view of the sky: motes, lenses, glass panes, chicken wire. Maybe she could get that into a painting.
She became aware of the phone, still pressed to her ear. What the hell were they talking about? She was hungry.
“The truth about Helena,” said Maxine. The hell with it, she thought. He knew, she knew he knew, and if he was going to write some sort of story about it, she couldn’t stop him. Well, she’d done her best to keep her promise to her brother, and now she was going to break it; there was no point anymore in keeping it. She went on, “It started when I made a bet with my brother in 1978 in the Washington Square Diner.”