The Great Man by Kate Christensen Page A

a little, like slightly warmed wax. “There’s only so much fame that comes to those who don’t make themselves notorious in some way,” she said. “My greatest mistake was not allowing an aura of scandal around my name. I’m queer, as they say now—you’d think I could have turned that to my own advantage, but I’ve always been so naïve about those things, making the personal public, and vice versa. It’s not that I don’t have secrets. I have some great secrets. I just always preferred not to tell them.”
    She walked off to the studio area of the loft, lifted something from a bowl on a table and looked at it, then set it down again and wandered absently from one table to another, patting the surfaces, fingering other objects—a brush, a glass, a charcoal pencil. Henry had taken his notebook out again.
    “I admit I’m genuinely surprised to learn that you imagine yourself to be in the shadow of your brother. Do you not see him as all but forgotten now?”
    He put his pen down. As he waited for Maxine to say more, he glanced around her small living area. She had cordoned off about two hundred square feet when she’d first moved in, forty-odd years before. Flanking one corner, in the kitchen area, were a deep enamel sink, a gas stove, a Formica counter atop two side-by-side floor cupboards with two wall cupboards above, and a refrigerator. On a shelf by the stove, the spices were arranged meticulously, as if she’d bought them, lined them up like knickknacks, and forgotten them except to dust them every so often. The pots hanging above the stove gleamed with disuse, and the countertop had not one crumb on it. In the middle of the kitchen was the large oak table where Henry sat, its surface scarred with dark cuts and small burn marks, which made Henry imagine a tableful of drunken artists sitting around with cigarettes and penknives. Dividing the kitchen from the sleeping area was a hanging Persian tapestry curtain, open now. Looking past it, Henry saw a neatly made bed, two bureaus, and a wardrobe. Against the opposite wall were a beat-up red couch and a large bookshelf that contained, among other things (he knew from his last visit, when he’d scrutinized it while she was in the bathroom), novels by the likes of Williams Gass and Gaddis, art books (along with the more obvious Kline and Kandinsky, Matisse and Fragonard appeared, inscrutably and incongruously—a master of the cutout and a rococo lightweight?), and, it appeared, every book about Sherlock Holmes ever written. Her living quarters were uniformly shipshape and orderly, but Maxine clearly had given extreme precedence to her work over her life; her studio sprawled over fifteen hundred or so square feet. Last time he’d been here, it had been a dismaying jumble, but today it bristled with cleanliness.
    “Oscar’s success was not really about how good a painter he was,” said Maxine. “His women were so outrageously plural, so literally sexualized…. Looking at his paintings is like looking at the outward manifestation of his dick. Pardon my language. But it’s smutty, his work…. He fucked them with brushes. Even his own daughters as little girls. Scandalous. Brilliantly scandalous. Now no one gives a shit, but back then, it was a big, loud, bold statement. He was a good-enough painter to make some real waves. Clement Greenberg loathed him. He once wrote in a review, ‘Feldman hammers the same anachronistic note over and over, badly and off-key.’ Oscar just laughed. He liked being hated by Greenberg. He found it perversely flattering.”
    “Greenberg also hated Oscar’s dealer, Emile Grosvenor.”
    “He blacklisted the Grosvenor Gallery,” said Maxine, “so Emile moved his paintings to Grosvenor West. Oscar’s work sold in California through the sixties and early seventies. Back then, his biggest collectors were Hollywood directors and producers, the Roman emperors of their time.” She held up a small white object to the light,