Free The Great Man by Kate Christensen

“What else?” she said. “Well, let’s go in and offer our opinions and see where that gets us.”
    Ruby put her arm through Teddy’s as they headed for the dining room. But Teddy couldn’t fully give in to her warmth. She felt that somewhere, very early probably, she had lost Ruby, and she had never been sure how to win her back. This made her act overly sensitive and cautious with Ruby, and also caused her to think critical thoughts about her, which for the most part she kept entirely to herself.
    Ruby sat down in the chair across from Ralph.
    â€œI’m Ruby Feldman,” she said.
    â€œRalph Washington,” he responded. “Very glad to meet you.” He had been looking over his notes.
    Ruby helped herself to some wine. “I hear you’ve been talking about the female form. A subject my father would have been happy to expound on all day and night.”
    â€œYour mother was just telling me that she and he differed in opinion about de Kooning and Pollock.”
    â€œOh, they argued all the time,” said Ruby. “It was their hobby.”
    â€œYour father disliked the work of many of his contemporaries.”
    â€œHis sister’s most of all,” said Ruby with a quick laughing glance at her mother.
    â€œOh, Ruby, he didn’t dislike Maxine’s work; he just thought it was too easy.”
    â€œYour aunt,” Ralph said to Ruby, “is widely considered a great artist in her own right.”
    â€œShe doesn’t acknowledge herself as related to me,” said Ruby, “but technically, I suppose, she’s my aunt.”
    â€œOscar 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.”
    â€œAccording 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?”
    â€œNo,” 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.”
    â€œThat 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.”
    â€œIt 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.”
    â€œI’m so sorry,” said Teddy. “I hope we can re-create him for you.”
    Ralph blinked at her, flummoxed.
    â€œThis soup is incredible,” Ruby told