Kate Christensen - The Great Man

Lighting another cigarette, she said to Paula Jabar, “Well, I’m just about done. How are you coming along?”

For the past three hours, Paula had been asking Maxine questions, standing there naked in her studio while Maxine painted her in the style of Mercy and Helena. Some whiz kid at Artforum had decided that this would be a great idea, for Maxine to be interviewed by Paula while she painted Paula’s portrait, then to run a reproduction of the portrait alongside an edited transcription of the interview. Maxine didn’t like to talk while she painted. It felt unnatural. Her brain wasn’t made that way. Compounding her exhaustion was the fact that she wanted very badly to sound brilliant, unpretentious, original, and fascinating, and she wanted the portrait to be all of those things, too, as well as do justice to Paula’s beauty. And even worse, she had become aware of an increasing attraction to Paula, intensifying the longer they talked, the longer she was forced to stare at that lush young body and reproduce it in paint, the sexiest of substances. But the most complicated factor of all for Maxine during these past hours had been a definite, inescapable sinking feeling of humble hats-off respect for her once-despised nemesis. The girl was smart. She was warm, too, and funny. Her self-conscious ghetto patois was almost nowhere in evidence. Her questions were knowledgeable and provocative. In fact, she had enchanted and seduced Maxine from the instant she’d arrived, in a cloud of tropical scent, a shimmering, dusky vision in greens and blues, and slid out of her dress and underthings without an instant’s self-consciousness. Even if this had been little more than a carefully calculated ploy to disarm a hostile party, it had worked on an old tortoise as crusty and suspicious as Maxine, who had to admit to herself that Paula Jabar deserved every shred of her fame, fortune, critical success, and popular adulation. Admitting this to herself in the grip of all her simultaneous and equal desires was costing her a good deal of her limited energy.

“Just a few more questions, if you can hack it,” said Paula. “You’ve said a lot of tremendous things already, though, so if you want to stop…”

“No,” said Maxine with a burst of determination. “I spent eighty-four years waiting for this, I don’t want it to end an instant too soon.”

“Well then,” said Paula. “We’ve spent three hours discussing your influences and your techniques and your history and all that, so let’s get down to some brass tacks here.”

“Okay,” said Maxine, as if she were heading into a blizzard with an umbrella and a book of matches. “Shoot.”

“I was not exactly on my A game the other night, but I liked your bluntness. I get so much admiration and praise, it’s satisfying for someone I respect so much to take me to task. You made me think.”

“I thought you handled it perfectly,” said Maxine, feeling icy winds begin to shriek around her. She squinted at Paula through the smoke from the cigarette clamped between her teeth. Paula was standing in front of a bare white wall at the edge of the studio in full daylight from the windows. She stood with her arms at her sides, her legs slightly apart, looking directly at Maxine. It was a strong stance, simple and natural. Her muscular haunches were in alluring disproportion to her narrow torso. Her breasts were small and firm and tipped with brown nipples. Her biceps bulged; her skin was a glossy and perfectly consistent shade of half-French, half-Algerian caramel.

Paula smiled. “I handled it okay, ” she said, as if that hadn’t been the point, to have Maxine reassure her. “But now I want to know, between you and me and your dog and the readership of Artforum ; I want to hear you let fly about the current art world, what’s going on now with us kids. I imagine your statement the other night was only the tip of the iceberg. I bet you hate a lot of what you see out there. I bet it drives you up a wall.”

“I’m not sure I have anything to add to what I said that night,” said Maxine. She paused for a while as she added tiny dabs of acid green to Paula’s breastbone and lips and the deep reddish gloss of her hair. The portrait wasn’t entirely satisfactory. Something was off in Paula’s expression; Maxine hadn’t quite caught the brutal, cool, uncompromising ambition that lay just underneath her sexy warmth. She had painted a gorgeous young woman, not an artist.

She stepped back a moment to study Paula’s eyes as she had painted them, then looked up at her real eyes. She looked at her genitals, then at the genitals she’d painted. Paula’s black pubic hair had been waxed into a narrow vertical band, in which her cunt was set and displayed like a jewel. Her dark eyes were impermeable, tough, knowing. These were the key to getting Paula, her extreme lack of vulnerability, her self-possession. Her sexuality was marshaled by artifice and contained by her watchfulness. Oscar would have done something extreme to make eyes and labia pop out of the picture, but what? How the hell was she supposed to know how to do this? Why the fuck had she agreed to this silly exercise? Maybe Helena had been a fluke.

In a fit of intuitive irritation, she stabbed a daub of dark purple on each eyelid, a pointillist darkening, then duplicated it on Paula’s labia, then did the same with light jabs of pure white paint, the only pure white in the entire painting. That was it; that was the right direction. Suddenly, Paula’s eyes and cunt jumped out at the viewer, highlighted with equal menacing force. It gave the painting, Maxine thought, a startling focus. Eyes and cunt were connected to each other now in a way that both repelled and intrigued. That was Paula.

Maxine said in a confiding rush loosened by the sense of relief this gave her, “I don’t get out much to galleries. I’m not very interested in what you kids are up to now, frankly. The art world is no longer relevant. The only reason I’ve kept painting, speaking for myself, is that I have nothing better to do, and because people still buy them occasionally, so I can pay the electric bill.”

“You think no one cares about art anymore?”

“I think very few people care about art anymore, if by ‘art’ you mean painting.”

“Well, they ought to.”

“No, they shouldn’t,” said Maxine. “It’s been supplanted by more ‘exciting’ things. Conceptual hoo-ha and technical wizardry. Art is primarily special effects and marketing schemes. Beauty is apparently considered limp-wristed and useless now.”

Paula laughed, and didn’t deny this. “What do you think of these younger male artists who use their semen instead of paint?”

Maxine picked up a bigger brush and jabbed it repeatedly and lightly into a slick of a smoky, soft black, her favorite, to coat the tips of the bristles. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

Paula smiled with a glint of aggression. “You objected to my ghetto boxes; don’t you have anything to say about these art-star boys who come all over their work and sell it for half a million dollars? Semen!”

“I think,” said Maxine, jabbing the brush here and there on the canvas to create the spongy texture of shadows on the wall behind Paula, “it’s a great racket.”

“I expected you to rant about the aesthetic poverty of it all.”

“I might,” said Maxine, “in a different mood.” She said nothing more for a few minutes, concentrating on getting the subtle shadows right on Paula’s collarbone, under her lower lip. The bitter taste in the back of her throat was worse. She put the cigarette out in the ashtray by her elbow and looked at the portrait from about two feet away, then four, then six, then immediately touched the tips of the brush again very lightly to Paula’s clavicle. This thing was almost finished. The shocking white on the eyelids and labia had been a stroke of genius, or at least a stroke of inspiration brought on by desperation, which was often the same thing, in Maxine’s experience.