“I do not see how this detracts from Oscar’s achievements or his greatness. So he lost a bet with his sister! Big deal! He painted Mercy, didn’t he? The answer is yes, because I was there; I watched him. It’s as great as Helena, if not greater. And this sudden bright light shining on Maxine will certainly be refracted or reflected, or whatever the word is, onto Oscar. This notoriety is only good for your book.”
“‘All publicity is good publicity,’” Ralph quoted in a tone that suggested he didn’t altogether buy it. “Sure.”
Abigail, hearing the anguish in his voice, said with compassion, “You shouldn’t idealize Oscar, Ralph. It’s not realistic. He was flawed in so many ways.”
“I know that,” said Ralph. “I have criticized him several times. I don’t idealize him, I don’t think.”
“Maybe that was the wrong word,” said Abigail. “I meant you shouldn’t be too disappointed as new truths about him come to light.”
“Maxine painted Helena,” said Ralph. “I don’t believe it. That diptych changed my life. And one of the reasons it affected me so deeply was the actual juxtaposition of Mercy to Helena, a painting of a black woman and a painting of a white one. I was amazed at how one white male American painter was able to transcend race, paint a black woman the same way he painted a white one, without condescending or fetishizing. If he didn’t paint Helena, then how am I to interpret Mercy?”
“I guess you could look at it as a portrait of my housekeeper,” said Abigail. “Not a bad one, either.”
Ralph was silent.
“Can you explain exactly why this upsets you so much?” Abigail asked.
“In the European tradition,” Ralph said, as if he hadn’t heard her, “black women in paintings are servants who kneel or stand behind the white women, holding their jewels or the trains of their robes — but also providing contrast, to show up the fair purity of their mistresses. You may be aware of the quote by Ruskin that goes, ‘I always think the main purpose for which Negroes must have been made was to be painted by Van Dyke and Veronese.’”
“I wasn’t aware of that quote, no,” said Abigail. “Well, what about Gauguin?”
“What about him?”
“His paintings of Polynesian women.”
“Sexual fantasies. Fetishizing. Pure romanticization of the femme sauvage. They’re about his own ego, his own damn self.”
“If you say so,” said Abigail. “But they’re beautiful.”
“Mercy is about the woman herself. It’s about a Woman, capital W—not a black woman.”
Abigail could hear him inhale self-importantly through his nostrils and waited with half-annoyed trepidation to hear what he would say next.
“Oscar accorded her the same selfhood he accorded his white portraits,” Ralph went on when she didn’t say anything. “There is no self-congratulation in the painting, nor is there either lust or a sense of Other. That is remarkable.”
“But Oscar did paint Mercy,” Abigail pointed out.
“But now it’s all changed.”
She smiled; he sounded so earnestly perturbed, like a child. “Why has this affected your opinion of Mercy? Oscar painted Mercy; that hasn’t changed.”
“I was under the impression that he had painted Mercy and Helena as a diptych,” Ralph answered. “The brush strokes in both paintings are a departure from Oscar’s other work. They are bolder, more primitive. The colors are blockier, jazzier. The woman in Mercy is a nightclub singer: Did he employ this technique because it’s more, quote/unquote, negroid? No! Because look, he painted his blue-blooded society butterfly with exactly the same vivid, aggressive style, the same jazzy palette, the same reds and mauves and absinthe undertones.” He paused. “Except he didn’t. Maxine did.”
He stopped talking, but he wasn’t waiting for Abigail to contribute anything to this conversation; he was gathering his thoughts. Abigail noticed that her telephone mouthpiece smelled weirdly of broccoli. Had she been eating too many cruciferous vegetables?
“Both women represent stereotypes, but Oscar transcends these clichés of debutante and chanteuse by imbuing each one with an independent character that seems to break away from the artist’s brush and possess her own soul. I thought, seeing those paintings for the first time, that Mercy represented a real breakthrough in the representation of black women in mainstream, which is to say white male, art. I couldn’t put into words what I thought at the time; I was simply awestruck by the power I felt emanating from the juxtaposition of two women whose lives would hardly, in real life, touch each other.”
“Well,” said Abigail, “maybe you’re right, and Mercy has turned out to be as racially dubious a painting as anything Gauguin ever did, and Helena was just a stylistic imitation by another painter trying to win a bet. But maybe you also need to see Oscar clearly instead of needing him to be some great racial equalizer. He was as far from a racist as anyone I’ve ever met. Take it from me. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“I believe you…” said Ralph with gloomy resignation.
Abigail reassured him again that this would all be to the good, then got him off the phone.
She went to her computer, put on her glasses, and checked her E-mail. Abigail loved the computer; the chatty immediacy of E-mail, the instant gratification of Google, the Internet’s global intimacy. It made her feel less lonely to play on-line Scrabble with live people and chat with them late at night sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. She loved looking at gossip Web sites, on-line newspapers, young people’s startlingly intimate blogs. This plastic box contained the entire world, allowed access to the goings-on of so many people without having to expose herself. Often, when she was on-line, whole swaths of time went by. She found this both alarming and unavoidable.
She had three E-mails, two of which were spam, one of which was from Ralph.
“I Give Up,” the header said. The message read in its entirety: “Dear Abigail, we have a deal! Ralph.”
Well! That was fast; they had just hung up the phone a few moments before. Then she saw that it had been sent just before midnight the night before, when he hadn’t seen the article about Helena yet.
Abigail thought about this for a moment. Then she hit the reply icon and wrote back craftily, taking his E-mail at face value despite all the new information: “Dear Ralph, I am very glad to hear it. We will hammer out the details later. Abigail.”
Then she went to the Google page and typed in “Nicoise salad recipe,” found one that looked plausible, and printed it out. Then she typed in “Chilled cantaloupe soup recipe,” looked at several, chose one, and printed that out, too. She felt a surge of rare domestic inspiration, an unfamiliar excitement at being about to prepare from scratch a good meal for important strangers.
The moment Marcus arrived, Abigail put her shopping list into her purse and went out to the elevator. When she came out of her cool, dark building onto the street, the morning air was already staggeringly hot. She blinked a few times with the shock of it, then made her way over to Broadway, feeling like a slow, lumbering, half-blind rhinoceros. In the grocery store, nothing looked familiar to her. Had everything been replaced with new brands? She saw strange fruits and vegetables that seemed to have just been invented. She filled her cart and paid for everything, then started back to her apartment. The bags were almost too heavy to carry; she hadn’t thought about how much a cantaloupè weighed. She thought about getting a cab, but the whole thing seemed like so much trouble, it daunted her just to contemplate hailing one. The sunlight glinting off windshields and metal and broken glass hurt her eyes. On West End Avenue, she set the bags down on a stoop for a moment and sat; it was undignified and unlike her to do this, but she was sweating and her arms were tired. She should have thought ahead, should have ordered from FreshDirect. Oh well.