The Great Man (8 page)

“Have a seat,” said Maxine, setting out two cups and sugar. “I’m out of milk.”

“I don’t need it,” said Henry in a reassuring tone, which made Maxine suspect he did indeed take milk but was assuaging what he incorrectly took to be hostessy anxiety.

Henry unwrapped the baby from his gummy-looking swaddling blanket and spread it on the industrial-linoleum floor of Maxine’s kitchen, then set the baby down on his back. The baby, to his credit, appeared to take this indignity in stride. Frago, under the table, growled in the back of his throat but didn’t pounce.

“Chester likes to be on the floor, for some reason,” said Henry.

“Bodes well for his future,” said Maxine.

“Does your dog do all right with babies?” Henry asked.

“He doesn’t know any,” said Maxine. “But he’s harmless in general. All right, let’s cut to the chase. What did you come to ask me?”

Henry opened his notebook and consulted what Maxine took, upside down, to be a nearly illegible list of jotted questions. “I’ve been wondering about what you were saying about Abigail and Claire—or rather, Teddy, if you don’t mind my calling her that.”

“You can call her a two-headed hyena for all I care,” said Maxine, pouring tea.

“About Abigail, too, and the dynamics of their triangle,” he added, pressing on. “Do you think Oscar stayed with Abigail all those years out of guilt?”

“I see you’ve met Teddy and succumbed to her ‘charms,’” said Maxine, hoping the quotation marks were audible.

“What I’m trying to understand is why he kept two households going. I have one, and frankly, that’s more than enough. Why would a man want two? Why not divorce Abigail and move in with Teddy?”

Damn it, Maxine thought. She didn’t have it in her to be cooperative and cheerful and opaque today. She shouldn’t have let him come. “This biography mongering is just an excuse to stick your nose into Oscar’s private business, isn’t it?” she said. “A man you profess to admire and revere.”

“Why wouldn’t I be curious about his life?” he asked mildly.

In lieu of an answer, she took a loud slurp of tea. Then she lit a cigarette without asking whether it would bother the baby. Her own mother had smoked like a sailor through both her pregnancies and her children’s childhoods, and both she and Oscar had wound up chain-smokers themselves, but so what? Not the end of the world.

“Why don’t you like Teddy?” Henry asked.

“That’s what you’re really wondering, isn’t it,” Maxine said, “now that you’ve met her and been sucked in…. Isn’t there anyone you just don’t like?”

“Of course.”

“Call it biochemical, call it taste, call it bitchiness. I really don’t care what you call it. Unlike everyone else, apparently, I see right through Claire, and what I see I can’t stand.”

Henry leaned forward on his elbows, so the steam from his untouched teacup curled up to bathe his sweating face in yet more moisture. “What do you see?”

“Oh, think whatever you want,” Maxine said. “I have no interest in dredging up all that old shit with Oscar’s little mistress. That’s the last thing I feel like talking about. I’ve had a bad day.”

The baby opened his mouth and began to scream.

“So have I, actually,” said Henry. He picked up the baby and held him against his shoulder, gently patting his back. This looked to Maxine like a plausible solution, but it didn’t help. The baby wailed. Henry reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle. He stuck the nipple in the kid’s mouth. The kid fussed initially, then shut up and started to suck. “Breast milk,” Henry said. “Expressed from my wife’s breast, to be deployed in case of emergency.”

“I never had kids myself,” said Maxine. “And I don’t envy those who do.”

“I’m in no mood to argue,” said Henry. “Believe it or not, though,” he added, “it’s not
all
screaming and shitty diapers and sleep deprivation.”

“Really,” said Maxine.

“Every now and then…” Henry gave himself over to watching Chester’s mouth suck at the bottle. “It’s like they say. All the old clichés are true.”

“Probably why they’re old clichés,” said Maxine. “Listen, I’m sorry to cut this short, but I’ve got to take a nap before I go out tonight. Was there anything else—”

“Why don’t you like Teddy?”

She blinked at him. “You are persistent,” she said. “I suppose that’s an admirable quality.”

Henry waited; she didn’t say anything more. He switched to another tack. “Why did Oscar stay with Abigail?”

“I find it flattering that you credit me with the assumption that I would know the answer to that.”

Again, he waited; again, she clammed up.

“Why didn’t Oscar leave Teddy any of his paintings, or any money?” he asked.

Maxine finished her tea. “I guess because she had no claim to any of it.”

“I’m sorry to keep you,” said Henry. “I’m just trying to—”

“Was there anything else?”

“Why do you ignore Oscar’s daughters?”

“You mean Teddy’s daughters,” she said before she could stop herself.

“Why do I mean Teddy’s daughters?”

“You’ll have to ask them that.”

“But how do you know what they’d say if you never see them?”

“I pick things up through the air, like a radio.”

With a victorious expression Maxine didn’t care for at all, Henry said, “I will ask Ruby and Samantha. But I’m very interested to know why you chose not to recognize them as your nieces.”

“Chalk it up to a complete lack of interest,” said Maxine. “In children, you could say.”

“And in Teddy’s children especially.”

“It’s no secret,” said Maxine, “what I’ve always thought of her.”

“You’ve only said you don’t like her. You haven’t said why.”

Maxine declined to respond to this.

“Oscar was a complicated man,” said Henry. “A very different kind of man from me. I don’t judge him; in fact, I wish I were more like him. It’s an honor, writing his life, talking to his family.”

“I’m happy for you,” she said, standing up.

“Before I go,” said Henry without making a move to leave, “let me just say that I love your work. It makes me think of Franz Kline crossed with sumei painting—something about the powerful tension between control and wildness, your fluid and subtle but rigorous and tough-minded brushwork. Nothing sentimental, nothing extraneous, but what’s there feels both unerringly and passionately executed.” He took a hasty sip of tea. “I hope it’s all right that I said that.”

“Of course the Franz Kline comparison is music to my ears,” said Maxine. She was suddenly feeling a little more alert. “He was a great painter, an amazing painter. He influenced me in definite ways. And sumei painting, well, yes, of course sumei painting…I use Japanese brushes and techniques. But you wouldn’t tell a man his work was tough-minded. That’s something men say to women as a compliment, and it really means ‘masculine.’”

“You seem to have it in for men,” said Henry with a smile. “I’m used to it by now. My wife does, too.”

“I have nothing against men,” she replied. “I like men. Actually, I can’t stand most women, except the ones I’m attracted to. But I’ll be ninety in six years. I’ve had plenty of time to observe a few things.”

“I meant that your work is tough-minded,” said Henry, “like Kline’s. There is a similar achievement of absolute beauty without wishful thinking.”

Maxine cleared her throat. “Thank you,” she said against the upswell of words in her throat: I was always a much better painter than my brother; it was just that I was quiet. I didn’t make waves. I was never comfortable with interviews, publicity, all that. I just painted. Oscar was a showman, a charmer, an attentionmongerer, a flirt, even as a little boy, and I was a good girl, and look where it got me…. I never learned to play the game; I just waited on the sidelines for someone to notice me and see me for what I was, like the peasant girl in the fairy tale.

“Thank you so much for your time today,” said Henry. He bounced Chester a little in his arms, preparing to wrap him up and carry him back down to the car.

“The truth is, I’ve always felt like the peasant girl in the fairy tale,” said Maxine. It came out sounding strangled.

Henry closed his notebook and put it into his shoulder bag. “What do you mean?”

“Oh,” she said. “Just kvetching.”

“Why would you feel like a peasant girl?”

Maxine warmed to the surprise in his voice and felt her opposition to his questions soften a little, like slightly warmed wax. “There’s only so much fame that comes to those who don’t make themselves notorious in some way,” she said. “My greatest mistake was not allowing an aura of scandal around my name. I’m queer, as they say now—you’d think I could have turned that to my own advantage, but I’ve always been so naïve about those things, making the personal public, and vice versa. It’s not that I don’t have secrets. I have some great secrets. I just always preferred not to tell them.”

She walked off to the studio area of the loft, lifted something from a bowl on a table and looked at it, then set it down again and wandered absently from one table to another, patting the surfaces, fingering other objects—a brush, a glass, a charcoal pencil. Henry had taken his notebook out again.

“I admit I’m genuinely surprised to learn that you imagine yourself to be in the shadow of your brother. Do you not see him as all but forgotten now?”

He put his pen down. As he waited for Maxine to say more, he glanced around her small living area. She had cordoned off about two hundred square feet when she’d first moved in, forty-odd years before. Flanking one corner, in the kitchen area, were a deep enamel sink, a gas stove, a Formica counter atop two side-by-side floor cupboards with two wall cupboards above, and a refrigerator. On a shelf by the stove, the spices were arranged meticulously, as if she’d bought them, lined them up like knickknacks, and forgotten them except to dust them every so often. The pots hanging above the stove gleamed with disuse, and the countertop had not one crumb on it. In the middle of the kitchen was the large oak table where Henry sat, its surface scarred with dark cuts and small burn marks, which made Henry imagine a tableful of drunken artists sitting around with cigarettes and penknives. Dividing the kitchen from the sleeping area was a hanging Persian tapestry curtain, open now. Looking past it, Henry saw a neatly made bed, two bureaus, and a wardrobe. Against the opposite wall were a beat-up red couch and a large bookshelf that contained, among other things (he knew from his last visit, when he’d scrutinized it while she was in the bathroom), novels by the likes of Williams Gass and Gaddis, art books (along with the more obvious Kline and Kandinsky, Matisse and Fragonard appeared, inscrutably and incongruously—a master of the cutout and a rococo lightweight?), and, it appeared, every book about Sherlock Holmes ever written. Her living quarters were uniformly shipshape and orderly, but Maxine clearly had given extreme precedence to her work over her life; her studio sprawled over fifteen hundred or so square feet. Last time he’d been here, it had been a dismaying jumble, but today it bristled with cleanliness.

“Oscar’s success was not really about how good a painter he was,” said Maxine. “His women were so outrageously plural, so literally sexualized…. Looking at his paintings is like looking at the outward manifestation of his dick. Pardon my language. But it’s smutty, his work…. He fucked them with brushes. Even his own daughters as little girls. Scandalous. Brilliantly scandalous. Now no one gives a shit, but back then, it was a big, loud, bold statement. He was a good-enough painter to make some real waves. Clement Greenberg loathed him. He once wrote in a review, ‘Feldman hammers the same anachronistic note over and over, badly and off-key.’ Oscar just laughed. He liked being hated by Greenberg. He found it perversely flattering.”

“Greenberg also hated Oscar’s dealer, Emile Grosvenor.”

“He blacklisted the Grosvenor Gallery,” said Maxine, “so Emile moved his paintings to Grosvenor West. Oscar’s work sold in California through the sixties and early seventies. Back then, his biggest collectors were Hollywood directors and producers, the Roman emperors of their time.” She held up a small white object to the light, showing Henry, who squinted at it, unable to make out what it was from that distance. “This is a shark’s tooth. I use it to scrape lines in paint when I need fine definition. I like the idea of a shark’s tooth, but it also makes distinctive marks I can’t get any other way.”

“You used it in
Night of the Radishes
?” asked Henry. This was easily the best-known of her works. It was a triptych completed in 1967, which now hung at the Modern and was generally considered her masterpiece: Over three panels were amorphous blooms of black paint and razorlike black projectiles, a juxtaposition that had served through the decades as an aesthetic Rorschach test for feminist scholars, Marxist art historians, Freudian and Jungian art theorists, postmodernists, and various other-ists, who’d invested it with whatever qualities best suited their ends. Henry thought Maxine’s work was beautiful but stringently monochromatic, despite what he’d said to her earlier, but even he couldn’t deny that
Night of the Radishes
was the real thing, possibly a great work of art.

She nodded at him with a glimmering of respect. “Oscar took photographs of girls as a teenager. Black-and-white snapshots, just girls being girls, some pretty, some plain, girls in their bedrooms, riding the IRT, walking on the street, shopping, eating ice cream at Schrafft’s, whatever. He even took some of me, shooting from his bicycle as I rode mine up First Avenue, but as you can imagine, he had no trouble finding willing subjects.”

“I haven’t seen them,” said Henry, almost hyperventilating. And he had been on the verge of leaving. Thank God he hadn’t let her throw him out. “I didn’t even know they existed. Where can I get my hands on them?”

“Easily,” she said. “They’re at Brooklyn College.”

“He donated them to his college.”

“That’s right. They’re still there.”

“But he was an art history major! He wasn’t an artist until years later.”

“He fancied himself a good photographer. I admit the photos aren’t bad, some of them, especially the ones he took of Abigail as a girl. He kept all those photographs in a box in his studio for years. He donated them to the college’s archives only a short time before he died. I don’t know whether anyone at the college fully realizes what they are. It seems that they’ve been kept in a drawer, undisturbed since the day Oscar took them in.”