Kate Christensen - The Great Man

Of course she wouldn’t introduce herself to Ruby. What did someone like Ruby need with a decrepit old dyke of an aunt who’d never professed anything more kindly than indifference to her existence for her whole life? It was much too late for any kind of touching familial rapprochement, but here were their two dogs, lying side by side in the wood chips, panting in amicable unison in the summer heat. That was something in and of itself.

It was time to go home. Maxine heaved herself up, clapped her hands to alert Frago to their departure, and gimped toward the exit. As she did so, she caught Ruby’s eye again, and looked quickly away; no point in inviting trouble. At the gate, Frago sat without being told and she clipped his leash to his collar, aware that her niece was watching. She thought, You see how he sits? You see how he lets me go out first? That’s the way to have a calm and well-adjusted animal. They want you to be the leader; they want you to be strong. She waited for Frago to sit at her left heel, then closed the gate and led him home.

She walked in to the tumbling melody of her cell phone ring. She let Frago off the leash, made sure his water bowl was full, then went to the worktable and picked up the phone and answered it. “What?” she said.

“Maxine Feldman,” said that same voice from earlier.

“Yeah,” she replied. “You finally got me. I’m amazed you didn’t wear out the battery of my phone. I should have turned it off.”

“Sorry about that,” said the young man. “I’m very sorry to disturb your morning. I just have a couple of questions. It shouldn’t take long, five minutes at the most.”

Maxine tapped her foot and bided her time, staring out the window at the sky, thinking about what she’d have for lunch. There was a can of chunky chicken noodle soup, some rye crackers…. Was there any tuna fish? Maybe there was some tuna fish. She was hungrier than usual; why was that? Then she realized she hadn’t had breakfast.

“Hello?” the young man said.

“I was just wondering whether I have any tuna fish,” said Maxine.

Dexter Harris laughed.

“Okay,” said Maxine, “I give. Ask your questions so I can get to my lunch.”

“You’re of course familiar with your brother’s diptych that hangs in the Met.”

“Of course,” said Maxine, amused by this polite little game. It reminded her of the matador’s tricky dance with the confused, unsuspecting bull. “So who told you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh, come on,” said Maxine. “Who told you about Helena ?”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

“I mean I would love to know who told you the truth about that painting.”

“Could you be more specific?”

Maxine looked through her thick lenses at the bright summer sky outside her windows. As her gaze shifted, black motes in both her eyes moved like schools of fat black fish through water. There were so many layers separating her from a pure view of the sky: motes, lenses, glass panes, chicken wire. Maybe she could get that into a painting.

She became aware of the phone, still pressed to her ear. What the hell were they talking about? She was hungry.

“The truth about Helena, ” said Maxine. The hell with it, she thought. He knew, she knew he knew, and if he was going to write some sort of story about it, she couldn’t stop him. Well, she’d done her best to keep her promise to her brother, and now she was going to break it; there was no point anymore in keeping it. She went on, “It started when I made a bet with my brother in 1978 in the Washington Square Diner.”

She heard him — was his name Dexter? — inhale with predatory relief, an almost sexual sound.

“It started with an argument,” she went on, “about abstract versus figurative painting. The whole thing came about because I was a trained artist and he was mostly self-taught. I graduated from art school, and he dropped out after a couple of months. But I always drew, from the beginning, as a little girl. I always doodled and drew. Figures were my first impulse, artistically.”

“Your first impulse,” Dexter repeated. He was writing all of this down, of course.

“I taught Oscar to draw when we were kids, but that’s neither here nor there. What I’m trying to say is, it wasn’t a fluke. I always had a real aptitude for figurative art. Portraits were a strength of mine in art school. I studied the various techniques, the history of portraiture. Abstraction came later, after I had absorbed and rejected the more conventional painterly techniques. It seemed to me to be the best and in many ways the only way to describe human experience directly then. It transcended formalization, got at a deeper truth, a more direct relationship between painting and viewer, a direct visceral impression. I always intended my paintings to have a physical impact. Nothing effete or cerebral about them, but Oscar was mocking my work as if it were some prissy schoolgirl imitation. He told me he thought what I did was like mud pies, the easiest thing in the world, so I said, ‘I know how to paint a nude woman as well as you do.’ He said, ‘Oh yeah?’ It was like a schoolyard fight. I was mad as hell, and so was he. We bet each other a thousand bucks that we could each paint in the other’s style a work good enough to pass off as the other’s, the proof being that our dealers would accept them into our next shows. I used Oscar’s painting Mercy, which he had recently finished, as the template for my imitation of his work, and he borrowed a couple of paintings I had just finished to use as his, and we were off to the races. Helena is Jane Fleming, of course, the art historian. She was my girlfriend at the time. She posed for me. I painted her as if I were Oscar, as if I looked at women the way he did. Oscar painted something so nonsensically bad, I understood that he had no fucking idea what abstraction was about. Just not a single clue. Marks on paper, fairly well organized, but without any aesthetic intent, any painterly intelligence. I have it here in my studio; I kept it for, shall we say, sentimental reasons.”

“That is fascinating,” said Dexter. “Would you be willing to talk more about the process of painting Helena in terms of impersonating your brother?”

Twenty minutes later, Maxine bade him good-bye, then dialed the first of the two numbers she had for Katerina, neither of which was a cell phone. A surly young man answered at the apartment she shared with the young couple. He snarled that Katerina was not in and hung up. The second number was Katerina’s studio; it was unlikely she’d be there early on a Saturday morning; more likely, she was at her new lover’s, allowing him to manhandle her tiny body and twist it into exotic pretzel shapes and bite her sweet neck with his crooked tobacco-stained teeth. Maxine waited doggedly through four rings, then five. Then, to her surprise, Katerina herself answered.

“Yes?”

“Katerina,” Maxine stuttered, thrown off guard.

“Hello, Maxine!” said Katerina.

“I just got a call from the New York Times, ” said Maxine, touched in spite of herself by the gladness in Katerina’s voice.

“Oh, that’s great,” said Katerina. “What did they want?”

“You mean you don’t have any idea?”

Katerina began, trying to put it all together to please Maxine, “Because…” She paused, clearly at a loss. “No, why?”

“You didn’t tell them about Helena ?”

“Me!” Katerina cried. “Tell them your secret? I would never.”

Maxine blinked. “Well then, who was it? I just gave some five-year-old reporter the interview of his life. I figured there was no point playing footsie. Some Girl Scout at the Met has already uncovered my signature.”