“I’ll get dressed and go now,” said Paula, “and let you rest….”
When Paula had dressed and gone, taking her perfume with her, her bright brown eyes, her flowing gestures and shimmering outfit, Maxine went in search of Katerina. She found her crouched over a box of drawings at the back of the studio.
“Did I say everything all right?” Maxine asked her.
Katerina looked up from the box. There was a smudge of dust on her chin. “I didn’t listen to everything,” she said apologetically. “But I could tell you were brilliant.”
“Katerina,” said Maxine, “I told you a while ago, you are the executor — or should I say executrix — of my will.”
“I know,” said Katerina. “When you die, I have to make sure your will is honored, and call your lawyer, and see that your ashes are thrown into New York harbor.”
“But what you don’t know is that I’ve left you everything,” said Maxine. “All of my paintings, my dog, this loft, and the money in my bank account. You can have all of it, and my paints, and my journals, and everything else. All I ask is that you walk Frago twice a day and make sure my retrospective is done right. Work closely with Michael Rubinstein. You know more than anyone else the work I’m most proud of.”
Katerina had stood up during this little speech, and now she grasped Maxine’s hand and said, “Are you going to die?”
“Yes,” said Maxine, then added through her bone-weary muzziness, “eventually I am, so I wanted you to know all of this from me before I go. You’ve been an absolute angel to me these past few years, and I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather leave it all to.”
“What about the tefillin?” Katerina asked.
“Give them to Abigail. Let her decide whether or not that little kid should get them. Everything else, all my crap, what little money I have, you keep. You can live here or sell the place and move somewhere more interesting. I don’t care.”
Katerina said, “I don’t deserve this.”
“Now I’m going to go lie down,” said Maxine, letting her hand go. “If I’m not up by the time you leave, don’t forget to come and wake me.”
“I won’t forget,” said Katerina, looking dazed.
In her bedroom, Maxine kicked off her shoes and flopped onto her bed with a grunt of relief. She lay on her back and looked up at her ceiling. Several things flitted through her mind at once — regret about a few of the things she’d said to Paula this afternoon, which sounded fatuous when she replayed them in her memory; an image of her niece Ruby at the dog run, looking so much like Oscar; a sudden craving for vanilla ice cream; a brief memory of Oscar as a young man walking down Broadway snapping pictures of a young Maxine, who was thirsty and hot and out of sorts; a momentary fear that Frago needed to go out and was suffering from an overfull bladder; a sudden recollection of the newsstand on Houston Street her father had always taken her to every morning, where the old Armenian always cackled at little Maxine as he handed her father his newspapers, one in Yiddish, one in English. The Armenian had lost his front teeth and half his fingers; his cheeks were bristled with black whiskers like spiders’ legs. Every morning, he had given Maxine a lollipop. He was like the troll who lived under the bridge in the old story. With the image of the Armenian handing over the lollipop, eyes bulging with frightening goodwill, as vivid in her mind as if it were happening right that moment, Maxine drifted into a deep and dream-filled sleep.
Epilogue
Henry Burke and Ralph Washington stood alone together at Maxine’s retrospective with glasses of red wine. They were the only ones in the broad hallway of the Michael Rubinstein Gallery, where Helena hung next to Paula. People were just starting to arrive; a few early birds milled about, examining Maxine’s new series of black-and-white abstracts in the main gallery. Upstairs in the smaller galleries was a selection of the best of her older works.
Both men wore tuxedos. Henry’s was rented and fit him imperfectly; Ralph had recently bought his, and wore it with dapper enjoyment. Henry looked peaked and ill at ease; he had lost a good deal of weight over the past months. Ralph, on the other hand, had gained a few pounds, and had achieved a courtly, gleaming plumpness, which oddly became him.
“Well,” said Henry, not looking Ralph in the eye. “Maxine’s work looks good, all hung up like this. I had wondered how it would be, in the aggregate. And these two portraits are great in their own right.”
“How’s your book?” Ralph asked.
“It’s coming along,” said Henry, not altogether honestly. “There’s so much rich material to mine.”
In truth, he was flummoxed by the richness of the material he’d amassed. And distracting him from writing the book was the fact that he had somehow managed to fall into a sexually passionate love affair with Ruby Feldman. Adultery was exhausting, he found; he didn’t have the stomach for it. He was on the verge of mental collapse at the moment. His wife, Melanie, was wandering around in the main gallery. Soon, she and his mistress would be in the same room. He thought he might faint, throw up, or both at once.
“That’s for sure,” said Ralph, chuckling. He had cut off his devil’s horn dreadlocks and now sported a close Afro, a neat cap of hair. “It was an honor to get to know all these women in his life. I have become especially close to his widow, Abigail.”
Henry stared at him. “When I started out,” he said with a tinge of bitterness, “I thought Oscar was the most enviable man in human history. I thought he was the guy who had it all.” He took a gingerly sip of wine. He was drinking it to help himself relax, but every acidic sip brought him closer to vomiting, so it was a careful balancing act. “Now, after talking to all the people who knew him best, I see him very differently. I see him as a very lonely man. Very isolated among all these devoted women. I learned a lot from my research, you could say.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Ralph with preacherly consolation. His lips gleamed redly with the wine. “I had the opposite experience. I discovered how truly lucky Oscar was, how blessed. I had originally thought of him as a sort of outsider, isolated, as you say, by his own self-imposed limitations. Now I see that he created his own inside. He was always true to himself.”
Henry stared at him again, formulating a question. “I wonder,” he said after a moment, “what you make of his two households. It strikes me that he needed to have a toehold in both places to avoid real intimacy.”
Ralph laughed, throwing his head back. Henry blinked, surprised at the force of the other man’s amusement. “Oh ho ho,” Ralph said, laughing. “Oscar would think it was funny to hear you say that.”
“Maybe,” said Henry. He scratched his chin. “I’m sure he would.”
“What would Maxine make of all this hoopla if she were alive to see it?” Ralph asked, looking around. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had loaned Helena to the gallery. Out of gratitude, Michael Rubinstein had offered in return to host, instead of the usual free opening for all the riffraff in street clothes, an invitation-only black-tie party to raise money for the museum. “They called her a feminist art pioneer in the Voice yesterday.”
“Maxine would have choked on her own tongue before she would have had anything to do with the word feminist,” said Henry. “She said she thought feminism was boring and didactic.”
Ralph looked up at the portrait of Paula. “Do you think these are as good as Oscar’s portraits, the way a lot of people are saying?”