The Great Man (6 page)

“In fact,” she said instead, “toward the end of his life, when he had softened slightly, but only slightly, Oscar said he thought the only one around here with any balls was a girl, Cecily Brown. He thought she had a real knowledge of how to paint bodies, and technical mastery. But he also believed that a woman couldn’t really paint another woman. She’s too close to her subject. He thought only a man could paint a woman with the proper sense of awe, lust, the sense of otherness, the necessary distance.”

“I see,” said Ralph with a dubious look at Teddy through his rather long eyelashes. He had eyes like a deer’s, far apart, elongated. Yet there was nothing deerlike about him. The animal he most resembled, to Teddy, was a dog: a hungry jaw full of strong teeth camouflaged by a domesticated, eager-to-please smile. Was that a racist thought? she wondered, then ceased to worry about it.

“I take it you’re already familiar with Oscar’s views on the subject of his fellow painters,” she said, “and you disagree with them.”

“Frankly,” said Ralph. “I disagree with him on many points. It doesn’t in any way lessen my reverence for his work.”

“No doubt you think de Kooning is a great painter,” Teddy said.

“Guilty as charged.”

“You’ll be taken out in the yard and kneecapped later,” said Teddy. “I’m an excellent shot.”

Ralph laughed with his whole head and torso, as if this were very funny.

She disliked overlaughter; it always irked her. “Actually,” she said, “I disagreed with him for years about de Kooning and Pollock and much more. All my arguments never made a dent in his convictions.”

“Of course not,” said Ralph with an echo of fulsome laughter in his voice.

Not sure whether he was implying that Oscar was a stubborn old wing nut of a goat or that she was an uneducated nonartist unworthy of influencing a great painter, or both, Teddy smiled a secret smile and took a bite of her lentil soup. Limited access to the best ingredients, she thought, was a real test of any cook’s mettle. This soup was rich and complex and full of
umami,
the meatiness and soul that undergirded all the other flavors, sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness. The lentils had a satisfyingly mealy give between the teeth. A suggestion of cardamom in the broth hinted at duskiness. She had added the artichoke hearts because they had an enzyme that made everything taste sweeter, a different quality of sweetness from sugar, hitting a different part of the tongue. She had added the lamb sausage because it was so good.

The doorbell rang. Teddy got up and went to the front door. Peering through the peephole, she saw Ruby.

“Well,” said Teddy, opening the door, “you’re just in time to meet your father’s biographer. He’s in full interview mode.”

Ruby kissed Teddy on her cheek, and Teddy put a hand against Ruby’s cheek as she did so. It was their familiar, affectionate greeting. Teddy didn’t sense any coolness in Ruby’s manner, but she felt wary about expecting too much affection from her. She stood back and looked at her dauntingly voluptuous, nearly forty-year-old daughter. Ruby’s face was wide and very pale; her mouth was red and full, and her naturally thick eyebrows had been plucked into fine arches over her smoky, slanted blue eyes, Oscar’s Slavic eyes, black-lashed, heavy-lidded. Her dark curly hair was piled on her head. She looked so much like Oscar…and she was so young still…. It was very complicated, being such a mother of such a daughter. Ruby’s nonidentical twin sister, Samantha, resembled Teddy; she was slinky and catlike, delicate and sensitive, whereas Ruby and Oscar were robust and sensual, blunt and unselfconscious. Because they were so much alike, mothering Samantha had been so easy, whereas Ruby, who loved her father more, had always been a challenge.

“We’ve been discussing the female form,” Teddy said.

Ruby laughed. “What else?” she said. “Well, let’s go in and offer our opinions and see where that gets us.”

Ruby put her arm through Teddy’s as they headed for the dining room. But Teddy couldn’t fully give in to her warmth. She felt that somewhere, very early probably, she had lost Ruby, and she had never been sure how to win her back. This made her act overly sensitive and cautious with Ruby, and also caused her to think critical thoughts about her, which for the most part she kept entirely to herself.

Ruby sat down in the chair across from Ralph.

“I’m Ruby Feldman,” she said.

“Ralph Washington,” he responded. “Very glad to meet you.” He had been looking over his notes.

Ruby helped herself to some wine. “I hear you’ve been talking about the female form. A subject my father would have been happy to expound on all day and night.”

“Your mother was just telling me that she and he differed in opinion about de Kooning and Pollock.”

“Oh, they argued all the time,” said Ruby. “It was their hobby.”

“Your father disliked the work of many of his contemporaries.”

“His sister’s most of all,” said Ruby with a quick laughing glance at her mother.

“Oh, Ruby, he didn’t dislike Maxine’s work; he just thought it was too easy.”

“Your aunt,” Ralph said to Ruby, “is widely considered a great artist in her own right.”

“She doesn’t acknowledge herself as related to me,” said Ruby, “but technically, I suppose, she’s my aunt.”

“Oscar would have thrown a fork at you if he’d heard you say Maxine was great,” Teddy said, handing Ruby a bowl of soup. “In his opinion, she made black splotches bold enough to thrill the boys but not big enough to threaten them. Consummate game player. Not an artist at all. A politician, second-rate. Like a state representative.”

“According to what my father told me about their arguments, Maxine always thought he was limited and stuck in his ways,” said Ruby to Ralph. “You can imagine how amicable their relationship was. She got a show at Leo Castelli’s gallery and Dad went ballistic and ranted all over our house, saying she wasn’t any good and she was just making a fool of herself. Do you come from a family of artists, Ralph?”

“No,” Ralph said, turning to Teddy, “my parents are both college professors, but I had the immense good fortune to be taken as a teenager by my uncle, who was a painter himself, to Oscar’s retrospective in 1991 at the Jewish Museum. I knew nothing about women then, but I felt I did after I saw
Helena
and
Mercy
—the society girl and the nightclub singer.”

“That retrospective was a strange time for Oscar,” said Teddy, amused at the thought of the teenaged Ralph beholding it. “Exciting, of course, but a retrospective implies encroaching obsolescence.”

“It was the contrast with
Mercy
that struck me at the time. That you could see into these two different women’s souls, the trapped bird in the debutante’s chest, the wild flame in the chanteuse’s eye—I had never been so moved before by the presence of greatness. Now, of course, I have seen many of his paintings, and I am never disappointed, not even by the sixties subway nudes, which I venture to say are among his riskiest, most out-there work…. Anyway, that adolescent experience I had of
Mercy
and
Helena
…” Ralph closed his eyes. “I went to art school after I graduated from college and studied painting, partially in hopes of one day meeting Oscar and writing his life. Then he died before I had the chance to talk to him.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Teddy. “I hope we can re-create him for you.”

Ralph blinked at her, flummoxed.

“This soup is incredible,” Ruby told Teddy.

“Inedible?”

“No! Incredible,” Ruby said, laughing. “Is there grated ginger in it?”

“Good guess, but no,” said Teddy, looking pointedly at Ralph, who was eating slowly and offhandedly, without noticing a single flavor, she would have bet. He struck her as a man made more of spirit and mind than of flesh, someone for whom bodily pleasure was a sometimes guilty and generally abstracted afterthought. It had long been Teddy’s theory that you could tell how someone was in bed by the way he or she ate; she was sure that Ralph would be ethereal and self-abnegating.

“A tiny bit of mace?” asked Ruby.

“Nope,” said Teddy again. “You’re way out on a limb.” It was a game she’d taught her daughters to play as children: guess the ingredients. She’d always put one secret thing into a dish to test them. Whoever guessed it got the satisfaction of her mother’s approbation.

The telephone rang. Ruby put her hand on Teddy’s to keep her from getting up, then answered it herself in the front hall.

“It’s me,” her twin sister said. Ruby heard squalling in the background. “Buster’s having a meltdown. I can’t make it to Mom’s. Can you tell her for me?”

“This is important,” said Ruby. “Dad’s biographer is here. Can’t Ivan take the kids for a couple of hours?”

“Ivan had to go into the lab today. Please tell Mom I’m sorry.”

“So bring the kids.”

“Ivan’s got the car,” said Samantha.

“So I’ll treat you to a cab.”

“The car seats are in the car; Ivan would kill me if I went anywhere with the kids without them. And I wouldn’t wish Buster on anyone right now. No one would get a word in.”

Ruby happened to know that Buster, a three-year-old boy whose given name was Peter, behaved with admirable civility in the care of his aunt and grandmother. She suspected that Samantha exacerbated rather than soothed Buster’s tantrums, and that, in fact, he threw these tantrums to distract Samantha’s attention from her husband, then kept them up when he figured out that as long as he acted horribly, he had her undivided attention. If Samantha hadn’t been so vapor-locked on Ivan, their son might have been calmer and better adjusted. But no one could tell Samantha anything: She often acted, Ruby thought, as if she were the first person on the planet to give birth to a human child, as if mothering were so sacred and rarefied, anyone who wasn’t a mother couldn’t possibly understand how profoundly it changed you. But Ruby guessed she had to act this way in order to make herself feel better about being in the thrall of a two-foot-tall manipulative, punitive tyrant and a small screaming bag of stinking humors who sucked her dry. Whenever Samantha described the amazingness of breast-feeding or the miracle of watching her child take his first shit on a potty, Ruby would think of the quiet little apartment she’d lived in alone for fifteen years. There was no greater joy she knew than going home alone to find everything as she’d left it, her bed, her books, her computer, her refrigerator, her bathtub, her solitary self.

“Sam,” she said, “come on. It won’t kill them to take a cab ride without car seats this one time.”

“Buster,” Samantha replied in a deadly, cold, even voice. “I think you need a time-out. Sorry, Rube, I gotta go. This little ape child needs to take some deep breaths.”

Ruby returned to the dining room. “Samantha has bagged out,” she said. “Peter’s apparently being a monster.”

“Peter,” said Teddy, “is never a monster. I’m very disappointed she won’t come.”

“She apologized,” said Ruby in a tone that conveyed what she thought of her sister’s apology. “I think she’s reluctant to talk to you, Ralph. She didn’t get along with Dad. She’s still mad at him.”

“Ruby,” said Teddy. Although she was older by only eight minutes, Ruby had always been much more assertive and mature, so naturally Teddy had been more protective of Samantha. As a mother, you played the cards you were dealt. “I don’t think Samantha would appreciate your revealing that.”

“Probably not,” Ruby admitted. “But it’s just so annoying.”

“By the way, Ralph, did you know you had competition?” Teddy asked him point-blank.

He swallowed his mouthful and looked at her.

“It’s true,” she said. “Another biographer is writing a book about Oscar; he interviewed me several days ago. Has no one told you?”

“No,” said Ralph. He lifted his napkin and wiped his lips.

“His name is Henry Burke. Maybe you know each other.”

“I have never heard his name before now,” said Ralph.

“Oh dear,” said Teddy, who was enjoying this a little. “I can see that this is bad news, and I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you. He interviewed me just this week.”

“I haven’t spoken to him yet,” said Ruby. “Well, except on the phone. So I’m virgin territory, Ralph; he hasn’t gotten to me yet.”

Ralph tried to laugh through his consternation. “Does he…does he have a book contract, do you happen to know?”

“Yes,” said Teddy. “With Yale University Press.”

“My contract is with Norton,” said Ralph. “Does he know about me?”

“I haven’t told him,” said Teddy.

“Me, neither, obviously,” said Ruby. “But I bet Maxine will. She’ll love playing you both off against each other.”

“Oh, we all will,” said Teddy, laughing. “Why not? Two young men vying for Oscar like vultures over a dead hyena—”

Ralph laughed ruefully. This time, his laughter suited the scale of the joke.

“All right,” said Teddy, softening toward him a little now that she’d sprung bad news on him, “coffee, anyone? I’ve made a fresh blueberry cake. It’s still warm, and there’s ice cream.”

“No coffee for me, thank you,” said Ralph. “And I’m sorry to say no cake, either; I have to watch my sugar; diabetes runs in my family.”

“Too bad for you,” said Ruby. “My mother’s blueberry cake could launch ships. I’ll have his piece, too, Mom.”

Teddy got up and went into the kitchen, laden with empty soup bowls and salad plates.

Ruby took a drink of wine, then looked hard at Ralph. “What’s your grand theory about my father?” she asked. “I know you have one.”

“My grand theory about Oscar?”

“Come on.”

“He was a great painter.”

“Obviously, you think that; otherwise, you wouldn’t be going to all this trouble. I mean the guiding idea you’re going to marshal these interviews and all your research around.”

“What makes you think I have one?”

“I know you have one,” she said. “Come on, what do you think of his work, honestly?”

There was a silence brimming with all sorts of thoughts in both their heads.

“My only
criticism
of Oscar’s work,” said Ralph slowly after a moment, “if that’s what you’re looking for, is that his adherence to figuratism made him great and original but paradoxically might have kept him from achieving his full potential. I say
might
—this is pure hypothetical speculation.
Maybe,
if he had allowed himself to flower into abstraction the way de Kooning did with his female nudes, he would have become both one of the foremost painters of his generation and one of the greatest. As it was, he was simply one of the greatest, which is nothing to sneeze at. But the way de Kooning stretched the female form, pushed it as far as it could go into abstraction without losing the integrity of the woman’s individual self…His nudes are glorious and remarkable for their perfectly balanced tension between paint and flesh. Oscar’s nudes, in light of de Kooning’s, have a slight tendency to seem didactic and self-limiting, but only in their literalness, and only in that one respect.”