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wasn’t her type. There was something a little moist about him; her impression of him as wet-lipped on the phone hadn’t been too far off the mark. She wondered what steely depths of driven egomania undergirded his studious eagerness, the ghosts from the past he had to shove to the back of his mind as he got on with his mission.
    She splayed one hand on the table and moved it up and down so it resembled a tarantula, the gesture Oscar had made when he was worked up. “The female figure was the only real subject as far as Oscar was concerned,” she told Ralph. “Cheese and oysters and bottles of beer were all very well if you were a medieval Dutchman and they were imbued with morality and social context. Landscapes had their power, their beauty, of course they did. But the female body was the most beautiful thing on earth, the most powerful and mysterious of all subjects and objects, animate or inanimate, the most familiar, the most earthly, and the most sacred. He used to chant it: “‘mother, queen, goddess, bitch, whore, saint, virgin, milkmaid.’”
    Teddy drank some wine, tried a bite of a cheese biscuit. She had bought the cheap cheddar at the C-Town, where she bought all her cheese now. She missed the exciting, expensive cheeses she’d hand-selected every week from her favorite Manhattan shop before her commute home on the subway, with its big cut wheels, its tangy smells of milk fat and good mold. But these biscuits weren’t bad at all.
    â€œAnd do you think,” Ralph asked, the words surging forth as if they’d been dammed up for years in his head and were finally being released into the air, “that the reason he’s not as famous as he should be is that he refused to ‘join the gang,’ so to speak? He didn’t hobnob at the White Horse or the Cedar Tavern. He didn’t go to their openings. He deliberately spurned their dealers and gallery owners. Clement Greenberg had a vendetta against him, and he didn’t seem to care. He essentially sat out the dance after the abstract expressionists’ big party.”
    â€œYou’re certainly obsessed with this so-called isolation. Oscar had a party of his own; who needed theirs?”
    â€œThat’s true,” said Ralph. “And now there’s Lucien Freud and John Currin to prove it. Tell me Oscar didn’t influence them both tremendously.”
    â€œLucien Freud. Lucien Freud. Oscar couldn’t wrap his mind around how that man avoided becoming a laughingstock. And he said he wouldn’t touch one of John Currin’s menopausal drones and booby freaks with a cattle prod. He called him ‘the modern-day Antonio Villapardo.’”
    â€œI’m not familiar with that name,” said Ralph bemusedly, writing it down in his notebook to look up later.
    â€œExactly my point. That’s what Oscar said people will say about Currin in a little while.”
    â€œWas he a Renaissance Florentine?” Ralph asked. “I thought I knew them all.”
    Teddy chewed an olive, shaking her head: Antonio Villapardo was Oscar’s made-up scapegoat. This was her little private revenge on Ralph for talking about Oscar as if he were a maladjusted stick-in-the-mud. And for his stiff, academic diction, which had annoyed her since he’d arrived. She would have bet anything it was his adult overcompensation for having grown up a very bright but underprivileged and probably fatherless black kid uncomfortably out of place in the ghetto, then just as uncomfortably out of place at Harvard or wherever he’d gone to school on full scholarship. Actually, he struck Teddy as someone who wouldn’t ever feel comfortable anywhere, and this made her more sympathetic to him, but it was too late to tell him the truth about Villapardo.
    â€œIn fact,” she said instead, “toward the end of his life, when he had softened slightly, but only slightly, Oscar said he thought