“Okay,” said Maxine, as if she were heading into a blizzard with an umbrella and a book of matches. “Shoot.”
“I was not exactly on my A game the other night, but I liked your bluntness. I get so much admiration and praise, it’s satisfying for someone I respect so much to take me to task. You made me think.”
“I thought you handled it perfectly,” said Maxine, feeling icy winds begin to shriek around her. She squinted at Paula through the smoke from the cigarette clamped between her teeth. Paula was standing in front of a bare white wall at the edge of the studio in full daylight from the windows. She stood with her arms at her sides, her legs slightly apart, looking directly at Maxine. It was a strong stance, simple and natural. Her muscular haunches were in alluring disproportion to her narrow torso. Her breasts were small and firm and tipped with brown nipples. Her biceps bulged; her skin was a glossy and perfectly consistent shade of half-French, half-Algerian caramel.
Paula smiled. “I handled it okay,” she said, as if that hadn’t been the point, to have Maxine reassure her. “But now I want to know, between you and me and your dog and the readership of Artforum; I want to hear you let fly about the current art world, what’s going on now with us kids. I imagine your statement the other night was only the tip of the iceberg. I bet you hate a lot of what you see out there. I bet it drives you up a wall.”
“I’m not sure I have anything to add to what I said that night,” said Maxine. She paused for a while as she added tiny dabs of acid green to Paula’s breastbone and lips and the deep reddish gloss of her hair. The portrait wasn’t entirely satisfactory. Something was off in Paula’s expression; Maxine hadn’t quite caught the brutal, cool, uncompromising ambition that lay just underneath her sexy warmth. She had painted a gorgeous young woman, not an artist.
She stepped back a moment to study Paula’s eyes as she had painted them, then looked up at her real eyes. She looked at her genitals, then at the genitals she’d painted. Paula’s black pubic hair had been waxed into a narrow vertical band, in which her cunt was set and displayed like a jewel. Her dark eyes were impermeable, tough, knowing. These were the key to getting Paula, her extreme lack of vulnerability, her self-possession. Her sexuality was marshaled by artifice and contained by her watchfulness. Oscar would have done something extreme to make eyes and labia pop out of the picture, but what? How the hell was she supposed to know how to do this? Why the fuck had she agreed to this silly exercise? Maybe Helena had been a fluke.
In a fit of intuitive irritation, she stabbed a daub of dark purple on each eyelid, a pointillist darkening, then duplicated it on Paula’s labia, then did the same with light jabs of pure white paint, the only pure white in the entire painting. That was it; that was the right direction. Suddenly, Paula’s eyes and cunt jumped out at the viewer, highlighted with equal menacing force. It gave the painting, Maxine thought, a startling focus. Eyes and cunt were connected to each other now in a way that both repelled and intrigued. That was Paula.
Maxine said in a confiding rush loosened by the sense of relief this gave her, “I don’t get out much to galleries. I’m not very interested in what you kids are up to now, frankly. The art world is no longer relevant. The only reason I’ve kept painting, speaking for myself, is that I have nothing better to do, and because people still buy them occasionally, so I can pay the electric bill.”
“You think no one cares about art anymore?”
“I think very few people care about art anymore, if by ‘art’ you mean painting.”
“Well, they ought to.”
“No, they shouldn’t,” said Maxine. “It’s been supplanted by more ‘exciting’ things. Conceptual hoo-ha and technical wizardry. Art is primarily special effects and marketing schemes. Beauty is apparently considered limp-wristed and useless now.”
Paula laughed, and didn’t deny this. “What do you think of these younger male artists who use their semen instead of paint?”
Maxine picked up a bigger brush and jabbed it repeatedly and lightly into a slick of a smoky, soft black, her favorite, to coat the tips of the bristles. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
Paula smiled with a glint of aggression. “You objected to my ghetto boxes; don’t you have anything to say about these art-star boys who come all over their work and sell it for half a million dollars? Semen!”
“I think,” said Maxine, jabbing the brush here and there on the canvas to create the spongy texture of shadows on the wall behind Paula, “it’s a great racket.”
“I expected you to rant about the aesthetic poverty of it all.”
“I might,” said Maxine, “in a different mood.” She said nothing more for a few minutes, concentrating on getting the subtle shadows right on Paula’s collarbone, under her lower lip. The bitter taste in the back of her throat was worse. She put the cigarette out in the ashtray by her elbow and looked at the portrait from about two feet away, then four, then six, then immediately touched the tips of the brush again very lightly to Paula’s clavicle. This thing was almost finished. The shocking white on the eyelids and labia had been a stroke of genius, or at least a stroke of inspiration brought on by desperation, which was often the same thing, in Maxine’s experience.
“To change the subject, what do you most regret doing or not doing in your life?” Paula asked.
“I regret,” said Maxine, “and you can print this, that I let the love of my life, Jane Fleming, get away about thirty years ago. My second-greatest regret is that I wasn’t more famous during my lifetime. I wish I had seized and pursued and hunted down the two things I most wanted and failed to secure for myself. Self-denial is pointless. Niceness is ridiculous. You’re a very smart young woman, to know this already.”
“You think I’m not nice?” Paula asked, dimples flashing.
“I think you’re perfectly nice, when you want to be. But if someone gets in your way, I imagine you would not stop to worry about anyone’s tender feelings. If something is in your way, it has to be gotten out of your way. You want to be famous, and that’s what it takes. There is no other way.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Paula.
“You live where? New Jersey?”
“Yes,” said Paula.
“In Montclair, I understand,” said Maxine. “Nice town. And you’re married?”
“Yes,” said Paula.
“To a white academic, am I correct?”
“My husband teaches philosophy at Rutgers, yes,” said Paula. “And he is white. But Irish.” She laughed. “The niggas of Europe.”
“Oh,” said Maxine, “Europe has many different kinds of niggers. So you’re married; I hope happily on the whole, and if so, I would say, hold on to him no matter what, because when you’re old, you’ll be glad you did. It is unnatural to grow old alone. I envy those lucky people who have longtime mates who remember them when they were young, remember them through the years.” She took a deep breath, put a hand on her chest. “Speaking of old age, my dear. We have taken up enough of each other’s time. In other words, I need to lie down now.”
Paula reached over and turned off the tape recorder and, without asking permission, went over to look at the portrait. She stood just behind Maxine, gazing. Maxine stiffened, suddenly worried.
“Oh my God,” Paula whispered into Maxine’s ear. “Girl, you are good.”
Maxine felt herself melt a little, felt her heart warm and tender in her own chest, almost like an ache. “Thank you,” she said.
“This is great, Maxine. I feel honored….” Paula kissed Maxine’s cheek, cupped her other cheek in one hand, and bumped her head briefly against Maxine’s. Maxine sighed like a small child being caressed by her mother, except this was Paula Jabar, and she was naked.