Read Online The Great Man by Kate Christensen - Free Book Online

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.
    “And 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.”
    “You’re certainly obsessed with this so-called isolation. Oscar had a party of his own; who needed theirs?”
    “That’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.”
    “Lucien 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.’”
    “I’m not familiar with that name,” said Ralph bemusedly, writing it down in his notebook to look up later.
    “Exactly my point. That’s what Oscar said people will say about Currin in a little while.”
    “Was 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.
    “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