She heard him — was his name Dexter? — inhale with predatory relief, an almost sexual sound.
“It started with an argument,” she went on, “about abstract versus figurative painting. The whole thing came about because I was a trained artist and he was mostly self-taught. I graduated from art school, and he dropped out after a couple of months. But I always drew, from the beginning, as a little girl. I always doodled and drew. Figures were my first impulse, artistically.”
“Your first impulse,” Dexter repeated. He was writing all of this down, of course.
“I taught Oscar to draw when we were kids, but that’s neither here nor there. What I’m trying to say is, it wasn’t a fluke. I always had a real aptitude for figurative art. Portraits were a strength of mine in art school. I studied the various techniques, the history of portraiture. Abstraction came later, after I had absorbed and rejected the more conventional painterly techniques. It seemed to me to be the best and in many ways the only way to describe human experience directly then. It transcended formalization, got at a deeper truth, a more direct relationship between painting and viewer, a direct visceral impression. I always intended my paintings to have a physical impact. Nothing effete or cerebral about them, but Oscar was mocking my work as if it were some prissy schoolgirl imitation. He told me he thought what I did was like mud pies, the easiest thing in the world, so I said, ‘I know how to paint a nude woman as well as you do.’ He said, ‘Oh yeah?’ It was like a schoolyard fight. I was mad as hell, and so was he. We bet each other a thousand bucks that we could each paint in the other’s style a work good enough to pass off as the other’s, the proof being that our dealers would accept them into our next shows. I used Oscar’s painting Mercy, which he had recently finished, as the template for my imitation of his work, and he borrowed a couple of paintings I had just finished to use as his, and we were off to the races. Helena is Jane Fleming, of course, the art historian. She was my girlfriend at the time. She posed for me. I painted her as if I were Oscar, as if I looked at women the way he did. Oscar painted something so nonsensically bad, I understood that he had no fucking idea what abstraction was about. Just not a single clue. Marks on paper, fairly well organized, but without any aesthetic intent, any painterly intelligence. I have it here in my studio; I kept it for, shall we say, sentimental reasons.”
“That is fascinating,” said Dexter. “Would you be willing to talk more about the process of painting Helena in terms of impersonating your brother?”
Twenty minutes later, Maxine bade him good-bye, then dialed the first of the two numbers she had for Katerina, neither of which was a cell phone. A surly young man answered at the apartment she shared with the young couple. He snarled that Katerina was not in and hung up. The second number was Katerina’s studio; it was unlikely she’d be there early on a Saturday morning; more likely, she was at her new lover’s, allowing him to manhandle her tiny body and twist it into exotic pretzel shapes and bite her sweet neck with his crooked tobacco-stained teeth. Maxine waited doggedly through four rings, then five. Then, to her surprise, Katerina herself answered.
“Yes?”
“Katerina,” Maxine stuttered, thrown off guard.
“Hello, Maxine!” said Katerina.
“I just got a call from the New York Times,” said Maxine, touched in spite of herself by the gladness in Katerina’s voice.
“Oh, that’s great,” said Katerina. “What did they want?”
“You mean you don’t have any idea?”
Katerina began, trying to put it all together to please Maxine, “Because…” She paused, clearly at a loss. “No, why?”
“You didn’t tell them about Helena?”
“Me!” Katerina cried. “Tell them your secret? I would never.”
Maxine blinked. “Well then, who was it? I just gave some five-year-old reporter the interview of his life. I figured there was no point playing footsie. Some Girl Scout at the Met has already uncovered my signature.”
“Well, I think that’s very exciting,” Katerina said. “I wanted to tell, because I thought you deserved credit. I’m glad someone told. I wish it had been me.”
“You can read all about it tomorrow,” said Maxine, “if you read the Times.”
“Not usually,” said Katerina, “but tomorrow I will. Congratulations. More papers will call you, of course. This is tremendous for you!”
“I suppose it is,” said Maxine. She found that she was fluttering with excitement. Her life had just changed; her fate was made.
“See you Wednesday! I will bring something, to celebrate.”
“Yes,” said Maxine, bracing herself for more ginger beer, “see you Wednesday.”
After she’d called the deli down the street and ordered the ingredients for tuna-salad sandwiches, Maxine clapped the phone’s hinged halves together and went to the couch to await the ingredients of her lunch. So who, then? Claire was out; Abigail was out. Lila? Certainly not. None of those three would have told, she would have bet anything in the world.
Then she remembered who else knew and almost hit herself in the forehead. And she would tell, too. Running into Maxine the other night had no doubt triggered Jane’s long-dormant memory of the whole thing, and then Paula Jabar’s spoutings had likewise awakened her feminist instincts; she’d probably gone home full of rancor at the male-dominated art world and had decided to right what she saw as a historical inaccuracy, make sure her old girlfriend Maxine got her long-overdue due. She was an art historian, after all; art history mattered to her. Although she’d taken a number of days to get around to it, maybe that was just because she’d had other things to do, dates with her new boyfriend and whatnot; that was no longer Maxine’s concern. Jane Fleming had spilled the beans; of course she had. And since Maxine had brought up the subject that night, she had to admit to herself that maybe she had been hoping this would happen all along. She had hinted to Henry about digging up a scandal, brought Helena up with Jane, and also, of course, with Lila and Claire, told Abigail about it, discussed it within earshot of Katerina. Of course she had been hoping this would happen. Her own loose-cannon rant to Ralph, revealing her lifelong jealousy of Oscar, should have tipped her off, as well. Maxine, like most people, had never been fully in control of her own motives and actions, but at least in hindsight she could see where they’d been leading. So it had come to fruition, this seed she had unwittingly planted all over town; she hadn’t broken her promise, but she’d made damn sure the truth got out.
She owed Jane one. In the interests of telling her this as soon as possible, she dug out her ancient little phone book and, squinting through her glasses, found a scrawled number in the F’s for “Fleming, Jane.” It was several decades old, and the black ink was now faded to brown. She punched the numbers into her phone and waited. What were the chances?
The number rang at least; so it was still live, maybe recycled by the phone company for the fourth time since Jane had owned it. One ringy-dingy, then two; on the third ring, someone picked up and said, “Hello?”
“Jane!” said Maxine, shocked.
“Who is this?”
Maxine was silent for an instant — who was she, anyway? Then she remembered. “Maxine Feldman,” she said, relieved.
What an odd experience. She had momentarily forgotten her own name. And she was talking to…Jane Fleming. Ah.
“Maxine,” said Jane. She sounded cautious.