The Great Man by Kate Christensen Page B

name fading, disappearing, being replaced by fresher talents, names, egos, canvases, and careers, she found it increasingly difficult to prop herself up every day, to resurrect her flagging drive through willpower alone, since hope was gone. And so it went for anyone who’d lost his or her faith. “I can’t go on I’ll go on.” Because what else was there to do? It wasn’t as if she were being tortured or oppressed or forced to endure in a Third World stew of horror. No one needed her except Frago, a midsize mutt who had been listed as a Lab-boxer mix when she’d rescued him eight years before from the ASPCA, although he resembled a mournful miniature hippo more than anything else. But Frago’s needs were minimal and had a built-in end point. If she didn’t paint, she might as well die, and that was all there was to it.
    As she was cleaning a jar’s worth of sable brushes soaking in turpentine, her cell phone trilled the little melody it had come programmed with, a cascading tumble of tinkly notes. At first, she heard it as part of
Conference of the Birds
and ignored it; then suddenly the phone’s chirps separated themselves aurally from the music and she realized someone was calling her.
    Katerina!
    She put the brush down, took the lit cigarette from between her lips and stubbed it out in a nearby ashtray, fished the phone from her back pocket, and checked the little screen on the cover. It wasn’t Katerina; it was a number she didn’t recognize. She said, “Fuck,” flipped it open, and said, “Yeah.”
    “Maxine Feldman?” said a hesitant male voice.
    “That’s me.”
    “This is Henry Burke, your brother’s biographer?”
    A lot of professional white men under the age of about forty-five, Maxine had noticed lately, were doing something that a few decades before had been the clichéd provenance of Valley girls, ending declarative sentences with a question mark. But unlike those prepubescent mall rats, they weren’t verbally sequestering themselves in a trendy colloquial clique; they were trying to declaw and deball themselves by appearing as unthreatening and sensitive as possible. Blatant masculinity was, unfortunately, out of favor.
    “Henry,” said Maxine. She’d liked him well enough when she’d met him, despite his blandness. She might have felt differently about him if he hadn’t been lucky enough to contrast favorably with that other one, Rupert or Rufus, that pompous
shwartze
with his chummy condescension. He’d seemed to think that by subtly allying himself with Maxine and flattering her, he could win her over and get her to reveal things about Oscar that weren’t already a matter of public record. She could smell a mile off that he was only trying to bamboozle her by capitalizing on his knowledge of the rift between her and her brother. Ralph, his name was, she remembered then. Ralph’s little game of being “on her side” had conveyed the implication that it was generally understood that Oscar’s side had been diametrically and personally opposed to hers. This irked her no end. She preferred Henry’s strategy, which was to be openly worshipful of Oscar and wary of her: Maxine tended to feel more at ease with people who didn’t seem to like her than with those who tried to collude with her.
    Not that these boys were going to get anything interesting out of her. She had decided to appear cooperative and sweet as pie, but to tell no one a damn thing he couldn’t learn by spending some quality time on Google. “Oscar was a confident and boisterous kid, whereas I was more shy and studious,” and “Oscar was never happy in art school—he was too rebellious—and that’s why he dropped out after one semester,” and “From a very early age, maybe even birth, Oscar loved his power to charm women,” that sort of claptrap. She had announced these things first to Henry, then to Ralph, with a confidential air meant to suggest that she was sharing secrets. Maxine hated the whole idea