Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“What do you make of your rival, Henry Burke?” she asked Ralph abruptly with a leering glint of hostility.

“I have never met the man.”

“You two should go out for drinks, compare notes, divvy up the chores.”

Ralph said, poker-faced, “Maybe so.” He turned off the tape recorder, gathered his things together, and stood up. “I have taken up far too much of your time already,” he said. He raised his hand to Katerina, who was waving good-bye to him from the far corner, then went to the door and, without another word or look in Maxine’s direction, let himself out into the hallway.

After Ralph left, Maxine wandered around with an unsettled feeling, smoking. She felt trembly and nauseated, maybe from the heat and cigarettes, or maybe because she had been so angry while she’d been talking to Ralph, angry without really knowing it. Damn it, it was out of her control. It was getting worse with age, not better. She had meant to be gracious and generous, knowing Katerina was listening, but the interview had run away with her — or rather, from her. Something was very wrong with having so much unrealized ambition. It acted like some kind of poison, insidious and slow-acting. So much fuss and furor, so much bitterness, envy, sorrow, and regret, all over splotches of paint on canvases.

“Katerina,” she said harshly.

“What is it?” Katerina called. Of course she’d heard the entire conversation between Ralph and Maxine. She was worried about Maxine now, and expected to be lashed out at for something minor. She wouldn’t take it personally; she never did. She loved Maxine, and she understood her nature.

“I don’t feel well,” Maxine said. “I’m going to lie down.”

“Would you like some ice water?”

Maxine, ignoring the question, went into her bedroom, kicked off her shoes, and lay on her bed.

The thing Maxine had always most feared when she imagined dying was the moment following her last breath — lying there airless, empty-lunged, finished with inhaling forever: the emptiness after that last gasp, the whiteness, the freedom from need. That particular terror and literal breathlessness was what she had been trying to get into her painting this morning. She thought about the canvas as it now stood. Katerina was right: It was raw and bleak. If she added any more paint, it might tip the balance, and the painting might lose its sense of suspension in nothingness. She suspected, humbly and without ego, that it might be a very good painting. Maybe it was finished. She envisioned it on the walls of her closed eyelids with mounting internal excitement: It might be very, very good.

Katerina arrived in the doorway with a gentle clinking sound. “Ice water,” she said, and came over to set it down on Maxine’s nightstand.

“You heard the conversation,” said Maxine without opening her eyes.

“Yes,” said Katerina.

“I shouldn’t have said all that about Oscar.” Maxine spoke flatly, without overt regret.

“It was harsh,” said Katerina. “But everyone says things like that. It’s human. What’s done is done.”

“What’s done is absolutely fucking done,” Maxine repeated, smiling wryly, freed for now from the loop-de-loop of self-loathing. “And cannot be undone.”

“Claire St. Cloud called again,” Katerina said. “She’s going to bring her friend with her.”

“That bitch.”

“She sounded like a bitch.”

“She is a bitch. She was so controlling of my brother…. That little husband thief. Never could stand her. Needed a good slap. And he just ate it all up, while his poor wife stayed home alone with her shwartze maid and her books and her retarded son. Of course he’s not retarded. You know what I mean.”

“She’s coming at three,” said Katerina, smiling.

“Get out the needles and knives,” said Maxine with an answering smile in her voice. “Listen, I think that painting is done.”

“The one you’re working on?”

“It’s done.”

“Can I go and look at it?”

“You can have it.”

“To keep?”

“Or leave on the subway.”

Katerina sat next to Maxine and took her hand. Maxine had never given her a painting before. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“It only took me about an hour to paint the damn thing,” said Maxine. She willed her hand to lie inert in Katerina’s without clutching or squeezing or betraying any feeling.

“I’ll treasure it!” Katerina said.

Maxine turned her head on the pillow to find a cooler spot, happy to have Katerina hold her hand like that and react with such feeling to being given the painting.

“Now go away and let me sleep,” said Maxine. “I want to rest up for that horrible little mistress.”

Katerina went away, leaving the cold, dewy glass of water behind. Maxine opened her eyes and looked at it and realized that she was thirsty. It seemed to her that she’d never been so thirsty in her life. After she’d rested a little more, she would sit up and guzzle the whole thing.

The apartment Abigail and Oscar Feldman had shared until he died had been a wedding present from Abigail’s father, a furrier who’d died a multimillionaire and left everything equally divided among his three daughters, like a rational, nondemented Lear. He’d bought this place on Eighty-fourth and Riverside in 1958 as an investment, and then, when Abigail, his youngest and favorite daughter, had gotten married, he’d given it to her and her new husband. Oscar Feldman had been a choice Abigail’s father had approved grudgingly and only because of Isaac Feldman’s business acumen. Back then, everyone, meaning Oscar’s parents and Abigail’s and even Abigail herself, had assumed Oscar would give up his notions of being a painter and go into the meat business with his father. The fact that Abigail could have known her husband so little amazed her now. The idea of Oscar getting up before dawn to trundle down to the Meatpacking District was ridiculous. He had never shown any interest in business. He’d wisely married a rich Jewish girl, and had lived off her father’s money until his work started to sell, but even then, it was her father’s money that had sustained their daily lives. Oscar’s father hadn’t been rich, although he’d been successful, but he left his wholesale meat business to an enterprising nephew and not much to either of his children.

The apartment was big, hushed, and dim, so well-insulated that no noise filtered in, either from the city or from any of the neighboring apartments. It took up the rear half of the second floor of a nineteenth-century building; there was no view, but Riverside Park was just across the street, and Abigail’s synagogue was only a few blocks away. The apartment smelled clean but dense and shut-in, as if the windows were never opened. It was either an oasis or an entombment, depending on Abigail’s mood. Since Oscar and her maid, Maribelle, had died, she had been feeling a little restless. Whole days went by now of almost unbroken silence, Ethan rocking, his right hand holding his left ear, while Abigail read. She had reread most of Henry James recently, and was taking a break now from Great Literature with a few light, earnest, simple contemporary novels by women. Whenever she ran out of books, she went on-line and ordered more from Amazon.com. Because of the Internet, which she used to order not only books but also groceries and clothes and just about whatever else she and Ethan needed, she almost never had any real reason these days to leave the apartment; she took Ethan to Shabbat services most Friday nights but no longer bothered on Saturday mornings, and once or twice during the week she took him down to the park for some fresh air. Except for these excursions and an occasional visit with Maxine or her one surviving older sister, Rachel, who lived on Long Island, Abigail spent her days in the apartment with Ethan, completely alone except for the girl who came to clean the apartment and run small errands on Mondays and Ethan’s nurse, a soft-spoken young man named Marcus, who came every other day to bathe him and give him physical therapy.