“I owe you a drink, it appears,” said Maxine. “I won’t pretend I’m not glad you outed me. Or rather, us.”
There was a silence. Then Jane said, “How did you know it was me?”
“I ruled out everyone else,” said Maxine with a chuckle.
“You’re not angry with me?”
“No. Why would I be angry?”
“You asked me not to say anything the other night. But my conscience got the better of me. This is about your artistic legacy, and not only yours. Too many female artists have been overlooked and underestimated for too fucking long. So I called Dexter. He’s a young hotshot at the Times, their contemporary art writer. I figured he’d do the story justice, and I thought it would be fun to see what happened if just one guy got the story, then everyone else had to scramble to play catch-up.”
Maxine laughed. “It was fun to tell the story, finally, I have to admit.”
“I’m glad,” said Jane.
“Why don’t you come down for dinner tonight?” Maxine said. Talking to Jane again felt as if no time had passed and reminded Maxine of how much she’d always liked her. Why had they ever parted ways? What fools they’d been. “I can offer the best tuna sandwich in Christendom and Jewry. And whiskey on the rocks. It’s the least I can do, and I would be interested to hear what you’ve been up to all these years.”
Jane said, “I’d love to,” but then she hesitated.
“I hear a ‘but’ hanging somewhere in the air between us.”
“No,” said Jane. “I had plans, but I can change them. I’d rather do this.”
“I’m flattered,” said Maxine. “I still live in the same dump. Come whenever you get hungry.”
“I’ll be there at seven,” said Jane.
This left many hours for Maxine to fill. She paced around for a little while. Then her buzzer rang and she let the delivery boy in. Fumbling in her wallet for a couple of bucks to tip him, she went to the door to await his arrival. He came bearing a large box on a dolly, a black kid of about twenty, sweating mightily.
“Thanks!” said Maxine, and shoved some money at him. He departed without changing his expression, without a flicker of either scorn or gratitude at the tip.
A sandwich, a nap, and still the afternoon stretched in front of her. Might as well try to paint the experience of looking through those layers between eyes and sky.
Her buzzer rang at seven o’clock exactly: Jane had always been prompt. She came in bearing a paper cone of flowers and a bottle of something.
“You brought more than I’m providing,” said Maxine with mock grumpiness, kissing her on the cheek and noticing as she did so that Jane looked very spiffy, much less mousy than she had the other night. She’d put on some subtle, barely colored lipstick that made her look quietly glamorous, and she wore a blouse with some sort of sparkly stuff on it, sequins maybe. Should I be flattered by this? Maxine wondered. She didn’t know, but doubted so very much.
Maxine put the daylilies in a jug of water, then took the bottle out of its liquor-store bag and examined the label. “Hey, nice,” she said, although she had no idea about wine. “Pinot noir.”
“I wouldn’t say no to a glass right this minute,” said Jane, seating herself at the table. “The place hasn’t changed at all, Max! I remember that curtain from thirty years ago.”
“Except now it’s caked with dust,” said Maxine, trying for lightness, trying for banter. She was nervous, but she hoped it didn’t show. “If you touched it, it would probably crumble.” She wrested the cork out of the wine and managed to locate a wineglass. Setting it in front of Jane, she added, “I think I bought new dish towels in the eighties.”
She sat across from Jane and gently shook her glass of whiskey to hear the ice tinkle.
“To you,” said Jane. “The painter of Helena.”
“And you,” said Maxine, “the model.”
They clinked glasses. Maxine examined Jane’s face closely, in a way she hadn’t been able to the other night at Michael Rubinstein’s. She had always been interested, visually, in the different ways faces could show age, the way gravity pulled through the years on different features in different people. Jane had puffy, wrinkled, slightly darkened bags under her eyes, but her chin was still taut, the skin around her mouth fairly unlined. Gravity had concentrated its effects in one place for her; she was lucky. She was still sexy in that flyaway, rumpled, academic way Maxine had always liked in her. Her once-brown short hair was half gray now, but still downy and fluffy, like a newly hatched chick.
“Remember,” said Jane, smiling. “You painted like a madwoman. You had something to prove. And the thing doesn’t look a bit like me.”
“It looks exactly like you!”
“That simpering wheat biscuit of a girl?”
“Is that how you see her?”
“How do you see her?” Jane asked.
“She’s thoughtful and lovely, yet she’s tough. Very much how I saw you at the time.”
“Hilarious,” said Jane. “Every time I visit that portrait, I marvel that it has anything to do with me.”
“It really had more to do with Oscar than with either of us,” said Maxine.
Maxine had painted the portrait of Jane by impersonating her brother, looking at Jane through his eyes. It had been more an exercise in identification than a technical challenge. She had reached back to her art-school training for the feints and finesses of making paint look like expression, gesture, living skin. These had come back to her surprisingly easily; the difficult part had been forcing herself to view Jane with Oscar’s predatory aggression. In particular, Oscar had had a way of painting women’s genitalia; he slightly exaggerated the labia, made the pubic hair just a little more copious than it could possibly have been. “Pussies are like faces,” he had once said to Maxine when she’d asked him about this. “No two are alike. I can tell you everything about a woman by looking at her cunt. I could set myself up as a cunt reader at a carnival and make a killing. Some look like little buttocks. Some are flowers. Some are oysters. Some are other things. They’re the focal point of every portrait, whether you can tell in the end or not. I start with a woman’s cunt and work from there. I hate it when she’s got so much hair you can’t see anything. Sometimes I ask my models to trim it away. Teddy’s an oyster, with long, ruffled inner lips. Abigail is a—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Maxine had told him.
According to Oscar’s taxonomy, Jane’s cunt was a flower; Maxine, impersonating Oscar, exaggerated the plumpness of her petal-like outer labia, emphasized the tiny protrusion of the inner lips, like the flirtatious tip of a tongue, the honey brown quiff of pubic hair that left the lips nearly bare and traveled down her inner thighs. Then she looked at Jane’s face as she had examined her genitalia: as representative of the whole woman, assertively idiosyncratic. When the portrait was finished, Maxine had the grimy, unsavory feeling that she understood her brother now better than she had ever wanted to. She’d scrubbed her hands afterward, and had kept scrubbing even after all the paint was gone.
Discussing this on the phone with Dexter earlier, she had, of course, said nothing along these lines; she had talked instead about seeing through Oscar’s eyes into the soul of her subject, trying to erase herself and become the woman she was painting. But it was all hogwash; the thing Oscar was famous for, she had discovered, wasn’t at all how he went about painting. He metaphorically and, for all she knew, literally raped his models with his brushes and somehow ended up evoking inner strength, an inviolable selfhood. Very odd. She still wasn’t sure why that happened, but she knew how he did it as no one else possibly could have.