Kate Christensen - The Great Man

Katerina didn’t bother repeating what she’d said, but that was to be expected; Maxine knew that Katerina knew she’d heard every word.

Maxine dipped her brush in the paint and sent it on another series of animal skitterings up to the shoreline of what she now imagined was a frozen lake. She wanted the shock of so much unfilled whiteness to evoke a sort of internal gasp, both a dying breath and a living astonishment that so much space was left unexplored. She could feel her own lungs suspended as she worked, and she forced herself to inhale, suddenly frustrated by the insurmountable inability to make the paint correspond exactly and precisely to what was in her head. It was always doomed from the outset, but here she was, making another goddamned painting.

It was 10:00 A.M. Katerina had come at nine o’clock, as she did every Wednesday. She had settled right in to work, as always. No small talk had passed between them; they had met once, at the coffeemaker in the kitchen, to pour themselves fresh cups, but Maxine hadn’t asked why Katerina had never returned the weekend’s phone call, and Katerina hadn’t offered any apology or explanation. Now an hour had gone by and it hadn’t come up, so Maxine was fairly sure it never would: The window of opportunity had passed. Katerina wasn’t the type to apologize or overexplain things, which Maxine, in her current frame of mind about Katerina, suddenly found irksome and impolite. Before today, she had always loved Katerina’s stoic reserve, but during these past few days she had worked herself into a state of not caring about Katerina, which had involved a lot of tricky mental gymnastics. She had twisted and warped Katerina’s stellar character traits into a craven bunch of faults, had pinned all her good qualities to a corkboard and viewed them, squinting, through a cynical lens until they morphed into manipulations and illusions. It had taken some doing, but Maxine was skilled at doing this to people who had disappointed her; she had had a lot of practice. That damned Slavic stone face, the nerve of it.

Five years before, Katerina had come here to see Maxine, a stranger whose phone number she’d looked up in the White Pages, an artist she considered one of the greatest living painters. She had asked for the minimum hourly wage to perform the most menial of tasks in return for the privilege of watching the master at her work. Grudgingly, Maxine had agreed to let Katerina come once a week, on the condition that she stayed out of her hair when she was working. This, she had done.

When Ralph had called a few moments before, Katerina had been sorting Maxine’s receipts into two piles: those that were tax-deductible and those that weren’t. Her understanding of the American tax system had improved vastly since she’d gotten her green card and become a taxpaying citizen. She worked as a waitress at a cheap Polish restaurant in the East Village, the primary advantage of which, besides the great kindness of the elderly owners, was that it was only four blocks away from the one-bedroom apartment she shared with two fellow Hungarian émigré artists, a young married couple in their late twenties who fought passionately in the kitchen over cigarettes and straight vodka, then disappeared into the bedroom. Katerina, who was almost never there except to sleep, had only the pullout living room couch and a small bureau in the entryway. Because of this economy, she had a tidy savings account and could just barely afford the small studio, a cubbyhole in an industrial loft she shared with seven other painters, in a patchy neighborhood in Brooklyn, four stops in on the L train. Out of both economic necessity and a perverse pleasure in being smart about what little money she had, she was stringent and disciplined with her own deductions and receipts, and she brought the same zealousness to Maxine’s finances. She considered anything other than groceries, toiletries, or clothing tax-deductible. Paints were, of course, and so were MetroCards, restaurant receipts, and books. Since Maxine was haphazard, disorganized, and stubbornly lax about remembering to put all her receipts into the box Katerina had marked “For Taxes,” she always went through Maxine’s coat pockets, her grocery-carrying backpack, and the bits and pieces on her bureau. Still, she could never make it add up to enough to make a real difference. Katerina was often tempted to augment Maxine’s patchy receipts with some of her own, but she had thus far resisted the temptation to bestow this sort of ridiculous and unasked-for charity on someone who would grumpily wave it away if she ever caught wind of it.

“So what time is what’s his name coming?” Maxine shouted suddenly.

“He said he’ll be about fifteen minutes late,” Katerina said, smiling. “He will be here soon.”

Maxine heard the smile in Katerina’s voice and felt murderous. She could smell Katerina’s new love affair on her like a cheap perfume.

“Didn’t he ask everything last time?”

“Should I tell him not to come?”

“What is the fucking point of all these goddamned paintings?”

Katerina didn’t answer. They both went back to work.

A moment later, Maxine called, “Come look at this painting, would you?”

“Okay,” said Katerina, approaching the canvas with a cautiously eager expression. Maxine despaired at the sight of her; Katerina was dressed in a black tank top that revealed her muscular arms, and a pair of olive green canvas pants with many pockets that rode her narrow hips, low-slung and fetching, showing an inch or so of flat belly. Her face looked wide open, soft, like a small child’s, as if she had just awakened from a deep sleep and was anticipating ice cream. Maxine felt strongly that her advanced age should have granted her some kind of immunity from the humiliation of unrequited lust. That it didn’t was yet another of the many indignities of old age.

After a moment, Katerina said slowly, “Mostly negative space. A quiet painting, a little bleak.”

“Bleak,” repeated Maxine.

Katerina paused again. She had learned by answering wrongly that these requests of Maxine’s to tell her what she saw in a particular painting always had one right answer only. Last time, Katerina had looked at cross-hatchings of black, a claustrophobic schemata of webbing and fencelike filigree, and said the painting created a feeling of suspense and anticipation. Maxine, not bothering to hide her disappointment, had told her that actually the painting was supposed to make her feel buried alive. The one before that had been intended to make her feel punched in the gut. Apparently, Maxine’s paintings were intended to punish the viewer for failing to see what they were about.

“There is just bare white on the right side,” Katerina went on, “and very small black marks on the left side…. It feels unfinished.”

“Yes,” said Maxine. “Anything else?”

“Well…” Katerina took a deep breath. It made her feel as if she were being drowned? dragged by horses? dismembered and eaten alive by a polar bear?

The cell phone in her hand chirped. She pressed the green button, put it to her ear, and said, “Maxine Feldman’s studio, Katerina speaking.” It was her own choice to answer the phone in this way; Maxine had never told her what to say.

“Katerina,” came a robust but unmistakably elderly female voice. “This is Claire St. Cloud. May I speak to Maxine, please?”

“Just a moment.” Katerina pressed hold and said to Maxine, “It’s Claire St. Cloud.”

“God fucking damn it,” said Maxine, reaching for the phone. “Claire,” she said with guttural displeasure. “Hello? Hello? Oh good, she hung up.”

“You have to press the hold button again,” said Katerina.

Maxine mashed the button, then repeated — this time with less venom because she’d been distracted—“Claire?”