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

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