Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“Hello, Maxine,” said Teddy. “I’d like to come and see you today.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“You know why.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Maxine. “Come later, then. That biographer is coming here this morning.”

“Henry?” said Teddy possessively.

“The other one.”

“How’s three o’clock?”

“Oh, all right,” said Maxine, and hung up without asking whether Teddy knew where she lived. She had put her return address on her letter to Lila.

The doorbell rang then. While Katerina went to let Ralph in, Maxine turned the easel with the new painting to face the wall; then she went into the little bathroom in the back of the loft to wash her hands and face. When she came out, she could hear Katerina talking to Ralph, a bottle being opened, carbonated liquid being poured into a glass, chair legs scraping against the linoleum. She heard Ralph say, “I was unavoidably held up.”

Maxine strode into the kitchen. Ralph looked up as she entered, pushed his chair back, and stood up.

“Thank you so much for your time today,” he said. His face looked even blacker with its sheen of sweat. A glass of golden bubbly liquid sat on the table in front of him.

“Hello,” Maxine said, trying to sound far more friendly and welcoming than she felt. In front of Katerina, she felt compelled to dredge deep inside herself for whatever kindness and warmth she possessed, to live up to Katerina’s obvious respect for her. Without her here, she could have been as crabby as she’d wanted.

“Some ginger beer?” Katerina asked Maxine with her gap-toothed grin. “I brought it. It’s very cooling on hot days.”

“No, thank you,” said Maxine, hiding, she hoped, her extreme dislike of the stuff. She sat down.

“I’ll be in the office if you need me,” said Katerina, and went back to her chores.

Ralph turned on his tape recorder and set it on the table between him and Maxine, then glanced down at his notes. He took an expressionless sip of ginger beer. “I’ve been thinking,” he began. “Maybe wondering is a better word.”

Maxine sighed.

“You and your brother both being painters,” Ralph added.

“What’s your point?”

Ralph looked at the tiny bubbles clinging to the inside of his glass. “Could he have been rebelling against you in his refusal to allow his work to evolve into abstraction?”

Maxine laughed. “Do you have brothers or sisters, Ralph?”

“A younger brother.”

“So you’re the firstborn, too.”

“That’s right.”

“I see.” Maxine’s dog, Frago, lurched up from his bed in the corner and ambled under the table to put his chin on her knee. She toyed with his ear; he snorted and burrowed his head into her thigh. “I was a girl; I was expected to produce little Jewish children. Our parents were businesspeople, and I was their worst investment. I didn’t want children; I wanted to sleep with girls. Oscar at least gave them a grandson. Never mind that he wasn’t much of a grandson; at least Oscar got married, and he wasn’t queer.”

“And two granddaughters.”

“I have nothing to say about them.” Maxine became aware that she was palpating Frago’s ear as if she were trying to extract a pea from it. “What made you choose my brother as your subject?”

Ralph pursed his lips, which immediately irritated Maxine and made her wish she hadn’t asked. “I love his work,” he said with a fervent lack of irony. “He was a man who saw women clearly and deeply, and as his daughter Ruby pointed out to me recently, he wasn’t painting any version of himself. When he looked at a woman, he saw her, not some projected version of his own desire.” Ralph sat back in his chair and lifted his glass and turned it in midair, studying the pale gold liquid.

“You don’t like ginger beer,” Maxine observed.

“Frankly,” said Ralph, putting it abruptly back down onto the table, “I have often thought that Oscar’s work wanted to leave the runway and take off into abstraction. There are certain indications in some of the paintings that hint at an impulse toward blurring the lines between the women themselves and their backgrounds, transcending their features and bodies to show the essential fragmented nature of their personalities…. He stopped short of allowing his paintings to evolve in that direction, and in so doing, I believe, he hamstrung himself as an artist. It was out of some perverse rebellion. Which, I believe, was against you.”

“Oscar was incapable of abstraction. He was too lazy.”

Ralph blinked.

“He wasn’t self-reflective or adventurous,” Maxine went on. Something had risen in her gorge, and she was talking as if she could expel it with words. “His paintings have no suffering in them, because Oscar never suffered. He had all the women he wanted, and still his wife and mistress doted on him. He neglected his children, but apparently they all loved him anyway. He was not nearly as smart as he thought he was; he had an inflated opinion of his own intellect, and he had no idea how limited he really was. You couldn’t argue with him — or rather, you couldn’t win an argument with him in the usual sense of exchanging views and having it out on equal footing — because whenever it reached the point beyond which his mind couldn’t go, he took that to mean that he had won.”

“What would Oscar say if he heard you saying all that?”

Maxine smiled acidly. “It would not surprise him at all. Anyway, I recall, not that I saw it once he was past a certain age, that he had a very small penis.”

Ralph was clearly shocked and had nothing to say to this.

“Well, he must have,” Maxine went on. “For all his charm and all his good looks, he always refused to put himself in any situation in which he wasn’t in control. He allowed nothing and no one to challenge him. He chose women who were devoted to him in spite of their superficial appearance of independence and strength. He never approached a woman he wasn’t totally sure he could have. And he never did anything in his work that risked revealing any aspect of his own inner self. He refused to risk anything — rejection, failure, self-exposure. And he didn’t allow himself to truly suffer, because he was too weak.”

“So you think he didn’t deserve acclaim and success?”

“Of course not,” she said. “He painted good portraits, interesting and sometimes even beautiful portraits.”

“Did your parents prefer his work to yours?”

“Our parents didn’t like art. They didn’t see the use of it. By ‘they,’ of course, I really mean our father, but our mother felt the same way — in the background, like a good wife. She was smarter than my father, by the way. We were both a disappointment to them. They were happy when we sold paintings, and happy they didn’t have to support us, but to them, we might as well have been retards. That should have made us more allied, but it didn’t. In the end, Oscar and I each hoped the other one would take up the slack. I felt much guiltier, being older, being the girl, and not being married. Oscar was very distant from them. He treated them with outward respect but didn’t take to heart a single word they said. I, on the other hand, was embroiled in all sorts of ugly tensions and battles with them, both spoken and tacit. I got the brunt of it; he got away. I suffered because it’s in my nature, and it wasn’t in his. He was lucky.”

“But you believe you’re the greater artist.”

Maxine waved the whole topic away. “Will it bother you if I smoke? I’m only asking to be polite. The only answer is no.”

“No,” he said.

She tapped a cigarette out of the pack she always kept in the breast pocket of her shirt. She flicked the lighter and inhaled a lungful of smoke, then put pack and lighter back into her pocket and returned her free hand to Frago’s ear. He licked her palm.