The Great Man (20 page)

“Hello, sailor,” she said.

“Hello, beautiful,” he whispered back. “You should have done this about twenty years ago. I had a real erection to offer back then.”

She took his penis in her hand and looked down at it; it was just about firm enough for her purposes, and perfectly shaped. “Your cock is beautiful,” she said with joy. “You should have warned me!”

He was silent for a moment, his head pressed between her breasts, shaking with laughter. Then he looked up at her and said with a roguish smile she had never seen on him before, “I really should have warned you about my cock.”

She laughed, too, and then they had nothing more to say to each other for a long time.

Eleven

“Yeah?” said Maxine into her cell phone, cigarette still in her mouth.

“Maxine Feldman?” said a youngish man’s voice she didn’t recognize.

“That’s me.”

“This is Dexter Harris from the
New York Times.
How are you today?”

“Ducky, thanks,” said Maxine.

“I wonder if you have time to answer a couple of questions?”

“Of what nature?”

“Concerning,” said the young man, “your brother’s famous diptych,
Helena and Mercy.
”

Maxine clapped the phone shut and pitched it across the room. It clattered onto her worktable and lay still among the brushes like a dead beetle. She stumped into her bedroom and got dressed. It was eight o’clock on a Saturday morning, for God’s sake. She wanted to throttle that Claire St. Cloud with her bare hands. But of course it wasn’t Claire who had told; Claire, naturally, wanted to protect Oscar, too. They all did, or so it had seemed. The only people who knew about the painting’s real author besides the mousy little man who had hidden Maxine’s signature all those years ago were the four of them around that table the other day. And Ethan, of course, assuming he was capable of knowing anything.

And Katerina. Maxine’s hands paused on the buttons of her shirt. Well, if Katerina had told, there wasn’t much Maxine could say. She couldn’t deny that she’d painted
Helena
. Her signature would be easy enough to uncover. She had signed the damn thing because, of course, subconsciously she must have hoped that someday this would happen.

This was just the sort of nice little story that people loved to read about over their breakfasts. “Look here, John, some painter named Maxine Feldman passed off one of her paintings as her brother’s and it’s in the Met and no one ever knew! It says here it was because of a bet, and she promised him at the end of his life that she would never tell, but someone else told….”

Her cell phone tinkled its lilting little melody again. There was nothing she could say to these people; either she had to lie or break her promise to Oscar. She poured coffee, wandered into her studio, walked over to the window. The phone stopped ringing, but a few minutes later, as she was just finishing her first cup of coffee, it rang again. She ignored it again and rubbed Frago’s head; Frago always followed her everywhere in the mornings until he’d been given his walk, which also involved feeding him his breakfast, and then, sated and exercised for the day, he would subside into a comatose sleep under the table or on the couch. He looked up at her, his eyes liquid with yearning.

“I know,” she told him in the exaggeratedly gruff voice she always used when she spoke to him. “I know what you want. I read you loud and clear; you are not a mystery to me in any way.”

She got out his leash, clipped it to his collar, put her keys and wallet in her pants pocket, and left her cell phone behind.

Outside, the street was completely empty except for a couple of boys in their twenties or early thirties, swaying arm in arm along the sidewalk, looking dreamy, either on their way to brunch after a night of sex or coming home drunk or drugged from a club or party. Their footsteps echoed a little in the hazy morning air. As they passed Maxine, one of them said, “Good morning!”

Unused to being visible to anyone under fifty, surprised, Maxine said, “You, too!” She set off toward the little grassy enclosure near Houston Street where dogs were allowed to run unhindered by leashes. As they walked, she pulled bits of kibble from her trousers pocket and fed them to Frago, who took each piece with undiminished enthusiasm and eagerly resumed his wait for the next one. The kibble was the same crap she’d been feeding him for years, baked nuggets of pulverized meat by-products, cheap grain, preservatives, and God knew what else. Poor mutt, he lived for it. He didn’t know any better. Occasionally, he found a chicken bone or a bit of pizza on the sidewalk and managed to swallow it before Maxine could jerk his head away, but other than those windfalls, he never got anything good. Maxine didn’t believe in pampering animals. Anyway, he seemed perpetually grateful to receive these dubious tidbits from her hand every morning on their slow rounds.

The dog run near Houston Street was already full of dogs and their owners when Maxine and Frago got there. Maxine scanned the crowd before she let Frago loose. There was no sign of the psychotic German shepherd, so she let him go. Frago immediately shuffled off to the far corner to sniff the anus of his old friend Walter, a dignified beagle of about the same vintage. Walter acquiesced to this greeting with a doleful expression, returned the favor, and then the two old dogs began their usual lope around the fence together, sniffing pee and adding their own elderly dribbles to the mélange. Maxine watched with a smile she was unable to help. She was amused by the way dogs were so insatiably curious about one another, just like people. No wonder the two species got along so symbiotically.

She turned her attention to the human population of the run. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was looking for the black-haired girl who looked exactly like Oscar. Of course, she didn’t know for certain that this girl really was her niece, but she suspected that she was, and had covertly watched her, wondering whether she also suspected who her aunt was. Maxine sometimes caught the girl watching her curiously and was certain suddenly that she recognized her aunt, but later, at home again, Maxine always dismissed this idea as ridiculous. How would she recognize Maxine? Maxine looked nothing like Oscar; he had taken after their mother, and she took after their father, which was why Oscar had been tall and beautiful and she was squat and ugly. Their father had been a peasanty shtetl Jew, their mother an aristocratic urban Jew, and the siblings had each inherited one parent’s evident caste. If the girl noticed her aunt at all, Maxine had always concluded, it was because she was obviously intensely interested in other people. Sometimes Maxine made eye contact with her, and when that happened, the words that almost always rose to her tongue from some ancient genetic instinct were
bubbeleh, shayneh maydeleh, kind,
words she had never, to her memory, spoken aloud in her life.

But the girl who might have been either Ruby or Samantha wasn’t here today. Maxine dawdled by one of the benches, debating whether or not to sit down. If she sat down, she would have to get up again. Such were the decisions necessitated by old age. Frago came up and briefly nuzzled her, then ambled off with Walter again. Here at the dog run, he was in his element; she was a visitor.

Maxine lowered herself to the bench seat and allowed her bones to settle there, to rearrange themselves to fit the ninety-degree angle of wood. She leaned back, sighed, wishing she’d had another cup of coffee. As she was lighting a cigarette, the girl who might have been her niece (girl? she was forty or thereabouts, but she looked girlish to Maxine) arrived, looking even more beautiful than usual in a red dress and cowboy boots, bare-legged, her hair loose and wild around her wide, pale face. She was arm in arm with a man who looked much younger than she, a sapling of a boy, lithe and sinewy, with his jeans slung so low that his hipbones showed, a head of hair so lively and self-possessed, it seemed to move independently of his head, like a tiny dog. Samantha/Ruby’s dog was enormous, a Russian wolfhound named Svetlana. Svetlana bounded ahead of the two lovers into the run and disrupted a knot of smaller dogs who’d been tangling passionately together. “Svetlana!” yelled the girl in her husky voice.

She and Maxine locked eyes then and both of them looked startled.

Maxine was positive then that the girl was her niece and that she knew Maxine was her aunt. But she had thought this same thing at various times before, and had no proof either way about it.

The girl and her swain went laughing to a bench at the far end and sat there, entwined together, while Svetlana stumbled clumsily but with transparently good intentions into various canine social groups. When she came to Frago, he gave her a benign crotch sniff and nose touch and seemed to be done with her, but she stuck around him, as she sometimes did, loitering hopefully, sensing that he was less snooty than others, less inclined to give her the brush-off. Maxine had a strong feeling that she’d been a rescue dog, abused or abandoned, then brought into a shelter and adopted by this girl as a fully grown dog. She didn’t seem properly able to connect with her own kind, for all her pedigree. She was like an inbred duchess, a brain-damaged blue blood.

Frago and Walter exchanged a look: Would they let this weird young beauty into their elderly perambulations? They seemed to agree with a kind of “What the hell” mutual shrug, because Svetlana fell in peaceably enough with them, seemingly calmed by their gentlemanly indifference. The three dogs came toward Maxine’s bench, led by Frago, and surrounded her feet in a panting trio of fur and tongues and haunches. She could smell them in the hot morning sun, their doggy muskiness. She had never been this close to Svetlana; leaning down to pet her, she had a sudden urge to read her tag, something people almost never did in the dog run. It was considered a breach of etiquette for humans in here to express too much curiosity about one another’s identities. Everyone felt perfectly free to ask the most intimate and nosy questions about one another’s dogs’ names, habits, funny proclivities, type of food, texture of feces, neuroses, and history, but nobody here revealed their own particulars; it just wasn’t done.

Daringly, her heart beating a little faster, under cover of the girl’s distraction with her boyfriend, Maxine grabbed Svetlana’s tag and looked right at it. Her old eyes, behind thick bifocals, focused on the engraved name and address, and then Svetlana jerked away and began licking her own pink, hairless crotch. Maxine was left with a blurred impression of the name Ruby Feldman, but she wasn’t sure. Yet she was sure. The girl looked like a female Oscar, uncannily; even her gestures were Oscar’s, the careless way she flung her hands around when she talked, her expansive smile, that self-aware marshaling of her undeniable beauty and charm.

So this was Ruby, then, not Samantha. Maxine had never wanted anything to do with either of them, officially, since the day they’d been born. But having watched this girl—for what, two years now?—here at the dog run struggling with her poor sweet misfit of a dog, Maxine had become inadvertently, instinctively proprietary toward both girl and dog. She’d often itched to give advice to Ruby about Svetlana: “Be firmer with her. Don’t let her walk ahead of you. Make her sit before you put her leash on.” Auntlike advice, that was what it was; it came out of nowhere, involuntary, completely uncharacteristic, like the words
bubbeleh, shayneh maydeleh, kind.
Maxine’s own Tante Esther had dispensed such advice, her mother’s older sister, and Maxine had always chafed at it: “Such a pretty girl. You should smile more, maydeleh, wear something flattering, bubbeleh!” Maxine had wanted to smack her, had hated the way she smelled, sharp cologne undergirded with stale chicken fat; it had made her nauseous, and this sort of advice always brought that smell back, cloyingly intimate….

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.