Patron of the Arts

by William Rotsler

  “That’s the impression people always have of others, that they are full and complete, but that you are uncertain, fragmented, incomplete. But it isn’t true. We are all in the process of growth. Even a rock becomes gravel, and gravel sand, and sand becomes sandstone, and sandstone becomes rock.” Then I laughed in the dark and grumbled that I slipped off the edge and got my foot wet in philosophy.

  “What were you like as a little girl?” I asked. I knew the photographs from her dossier, but not her.

  “I was plain and I had no breasts and I wanted breasts and hips so that I could be a real woman. Then, when I got breasts and hips and all the rest, I found out there was more than that to being a woman. I learned. I survived. What were you like as a boy?”

  I thought a moment and said, “Small. Isolated. Full of dreams. Ignorant. Pig-headed. Inquisitive.”

  “Did you want to be an artist?”

  “Yes. But some connections were missing.”

  “But you are famous as an art lover—”

  “That’s a long way from being an artist,” I said. “A long way.”

  Madelon said with a smile, “I love going to museums with you, to galleries and studios and things. You say what’s in your mind and you don’t try to phony it up.”

  I took a sip of wine and swirled the glass. “I’ve never been a man who thought you should be especially quiet in a museum. As long as I don’t really bother anyone else, or intrude on their privacy, I’ve always felt free to talk, laugh, discuss, or be silent. Art isn’t holy to me, not in that way.

  “Something in a frame or on a pedestal does not require either my silence or my speech. Something in a frame is not automatically art, it is just something someone framed.”

  “Sturgeon’s Law?” suggested Madelon. “Ninety percent of everything is crud. Including this statement.”

  “Yes, and I’m afraid that’s even more so with art. All my adult life people have kept close to me in galleries, because if I am with someone, I talk of what I see and feel, and some people, strangers even, seem to find that interesting. Or maybe it’s just unusual. I try not to talk of what I think the artist meant or felt, but of what I felt, of what the artist communicated to me.”

  “Oh,” exclaimed Madelon, “how I dislike those who explain it to you!”

  I laughed, too. “You will never hear me say ‘A unique synthesis of the purely somatic and the archly conceptualized with an almost verbal communication in his aesthetic cognitions.’ I will never attribute motives and intellectualizations to men I don’t know personally, and well.”

  “But there are obvious influences,” Madelon said.

  “Remember that Peruvian exhibit we saw? In the jungle world that those potters and craftsmen lived in, which was their only reality—their only concept of reality—they created those jaguar pots that are as fierce and as deadly a manifestation of fear and respect as I’ve ever seen. I might talk of the impact of the Church on some artist, who painted what he felt, then added haloes and touched in the symbols of the saint he had selected.”

  “But all artists are influenced by their times,” Madelon insisted.

  “And the times by the artists.”

  “Of course. But I always speak for me, not the artist. If he or she is any good at all the work speaks louder, clearer, and more concisely than anything I might say, and for a hellava lot longer.”

  “What about those new ones, the Fragmentalists? They work with computers and cloud chambers, and never see their work; only knowing that it happened.”

  “Yes, it existed, for a nanosecond or two, and then was gone. Since no one can see their art, I suppose that’s why they prattle so much about it. It can’t speak, so they will.”

  Madelon smiled at me in the dusk. “Brian, I’ve never known anyone who wasn’t an active, working artist to be as involved with art as you are.”

  I shrugged. “It is simply part of my life. I dislike it when people buy art for investment. Art futures is a phrase I’ve heard far too often. It might be like buying future orgasms, I don’t know.” I looked again at the fading firetrails. “I have always tried to be myself. But the best possible me. My greatest failures are when I fail myself.”

  I turned and smiled at the most beautiful woman I knew. “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “Me,” she said. “Only the best possible me.”

  “Would you be interested in investing in a future orgasm?” I asked.

  She unwound gracefully from the chair, smiling and silken. “Are you asking me to forsake Hilary’s many pleasures, my dear sir?”

  “I am. I had something more intimate in mind.”

  “I was hoping you had been taking your ESP pills, darling. I was thinking along those lines myself.”

  We flew to San Salvador and rode through the tall grasses on my cattle ranch there and made love by a stream. Madelon was witness to me disciplining a sloppy supervisor, who had permitted the cattle to consume too high a percentage of precious grains. She didn’t mention it until after our visit to the ecology preserve off the Great Barrier Reef and we were walking on the beach at Bora Bora at sunset.

  Madelon looked at me after a long silence. “Sometimes you are very hard on people, you know. You demand much.”

  “No. Just the best. You become mediocre when you are satisfied with mediocrity.”

  She kicked some sand and grinned as she said, “Modern civilization has placed mediocrity on a level with excellence . . . and then looks down on excellence for having lowered itself.”

  “My, my,” I said. “And I’m supposed to be hard on people.”

  “Well, you’re famous, and people expect it, I suppose.”

  “I have a reputation,” I said. “That means they’ve heard of you, but know nothing about you. If you are famous, they know all about you. If you are notorious, they know all about you whether they want to or not.”

  “It sounds as though you’ve made a study,” she said, the setting sun reddening her face.

  “Defense mechanism. A public figure is one who has been on the vidstats more than once. A celebrity is someone whose face you know and whose name you can’t remember. Or vice versa. A famous figure is an old celebrity. A noted figure is an old famous figure, while an actress is a young and famous figure.”

  She stopped and put her arms around my neck. “I knew you would get around to sex.”

  “I thought we had pontificated enough for one evening,” I said, and kissed her.

  “Pontificate me right here,” she said, slipping out of the shimmercloth sarong.

  “Suppose I dogmatized you.”

  “Oh, marvelous!” she said, pulling me down to dark sands under purple clouds edged with rose.

  At Ankara we visited the tomb complex carved from a rocky cliff, where three generations of a family had carved a marble fantasy and leased tomb space to the affluent. Madelon commented on all the years of cutting and sanding. “Time has nothing to do with the creation of art,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it took ten years or ten minutes or ten generations. The art must stand by itself. The artist can’t stand next to it saying, ‘Look, this part took me three years and that part was a whole winter.’ Hemingway wrote two of his best short stories before lunch, then went back to work. The Sistine Chapel took years. It only matters to the artist how long something takes. If he works slowly it might be difficult to hold the vision together for the time needed. It also limits his total output, and he might be frustrated in not being able to say everything he wants. But working slowly might give more chance to interact with the work. It all depends on the artist.”

  “Don’t you like this?” she asked, gesturing toward the cliffline of facades and loggia and columned fronts.

  “Yes, but the important fact is that it exists, not the time it took to do it. It’s like saying something is better because it took a long time to do, and that is certainly not true.”

  “Then what is important is the artist’s vision, and his abil
ity to communicate that vision?”

  “To the viewer, yes. To the artist it might be that he had done it, and how close he was to satisfying the ethereal vision with the reality.”

  “Then the closer the reality is to the vision the better it is?”

  “Well, the more successful, yes. We still have to deal with the worth of the vision.”

  “Oh, god, this is endless! How many visions dance on the head of a paintbrush?”

  “One at a time.”

  The world was a playground, a beautiful toy. We could deplore the harsh, but necessary, methods they were using to reduce the population in India, even as we flew high overhead to Paris, for Andre’s fête, where the most beautiful women in Europe appeared in sculptured body jewelry and little else.

  I took her to the digs at Ur in the hot, dusty Euphrates Valley, but stayed in an air-conditioned mobile-villa. We sailed the Indian Ocean with Karpolis even as the Bombay riots were killing hundreds of thousands. The rest of the world seemed far away, and I really didn’t care much, for I was gorging at a love-feast. My man Huo handled the routine matters, and I put almost everything else off for awhile. We went up to Station One and “danced” in the null-gravity of the so-called “Star Ballroom” in the big can of the central hub. We took the shuttle to the moon, for Madelon’s first visit. I saw Tycho Base with fresh eyes and a sense of adventure and wonder which she generated. We went on up to Copernicus Dome then around to the new Young Observatory on Backside. We looked at the stars together, seeing them so clearly, so close and unblinking. I ached to go all the way out and so did she. Bundled into bulky suits we took a walk on the surface, slightly annoyed to be discreetly watched over by a Lunar Tour guide, there to see that the greenhorns didn’t muck up.

  We loved every minute of it. We lay spoon-fashion in our bed at night and talked of the stars and alien life and made lover’s plans for the future.

  I was in love. I was blind, raw, sensitive, happy, insane, and madly foolish. I spent an emotional treasure and counted it well-used. I was indeed in love.

  But love cannot stifle, nor can it be bought, not even with love. Love can only be a gift, freely given, freely taken. I used my money as a tool, as Cilento might use a scan pattern, to give us time and pleasure, not to “buy” Madelon.

  All these trips cost a fortune, but it was one of the reasons I had money. I could have stopped working at making it long before, except I knew I would seriously drain my capital with commissions and projects and joy rides and women. I was already starting to think of going to Mars with Madelon, but it was a one month trip and that was a big chunk of time to carve from my schedule.

  Instead, I introduced her to my world. There were the obvious, public events, the concerts and exhibitions and parties. She shared my enthusiasm in finding and assisting young artists in every field, from the dirt-poor Mexican peasant with a natural talent for clay sculpture to the hairy, sulky Slav with the house full of extraordinary synthecizor tapes, that few had heard.

  Madelon’s observations on art, on people and events, on philosophy, on things large and small were always interesting, often deeply probing and full of insight. “Reality is unreal to those not sane,”

  she said once. “And insanity unreal to the sane.”

  During the premiere of Warlock, the opera by Douglas Weiss, she whispered to me, “Actors try to fuse the wishes of childhood with the needs of adultery.” I raised my eyebrows at her and she grinned, shrugging. “My mind wanders,” she said.

  During a party in a bubble amid the Ondine complex, while a storm raged a hundred fathoms up, she turned to me from watching a group of people. “If you can be nothing more than you are, you must be careful to be all that you can be.”

  Lifting from the Thor Heyerdahl plankton skimmer she said, “I always say goodbye. That way I am not burdened with appointments I cannot keep.”

  She also commented that Texas was the largest glacier-free state in the Union, and that Peter Brueghel was an artist that could draw a crowd.

  But life with Madelon was hardly a life of one-liners and sex. It was varied and complex, simple and fast, slow and comfortable—all of those things.

  “How did you get so rich?” Madelon asked one night, after seeing me authorize a considerable expenditure on a project. “Is your family rich?”

  “No, my father was an engineer and my mother was a musician. We weren’t poor, but we were certainly not rich. Sometimes I do wonder why I’m rich—or rather, how I got that way. I know why, I suppose. It was to indulge myself. There were things I wanted to do and they took money. I found I had the talent. If you want money badly enough, you can get it.”

  “Isn’t that a cliché?” she asked. “I know lots of people who are desperate for money.”

  “Desperate, yes, but not willing to do those things that must be done. Or don’t have the talent for it. I’m an exploiter, I suppose. I see a need, and I fill it as best I can. I try not to create a need, which is really just a want. My luck was good, my talent was sufficient, and I was willing to do the homework. I worked long hours, hard hours.”

  “I’ve worked long, hard hours, too,” Madelon said, “and I had to do a lot of things I didn’t want to do, but I’m not rich.”

  “Is that what you want, to be rich?”

  “I suppose not. But I want freedom, and that usually takes money.”

  “Yes, sometimes. Having money at all offers freedom, too, but there are problems with that condition as well. I know, I’ve had both.”

  I continued to show Madelon that private world of the rich, my world, with the “secure” houses in various parts of the world, the private beaches and fast cars, the collections and gatherings and nonsense. I introduced her to worthy friends, like Burbee, the senator, and Dunn, the percussionist; like Hilary, Barbara, Greg, Joan, and the others. She had gowns by Queen Kong, in Shanghai, and custom powerjewels by Simpson. She had things, and experiences, and I shared her delight and interest.

  I learned about her, I learned those small, intimate things that are idiomatic, but revealing—the silly, dumb things. She rarely used makeup, but carried five kinds of shampoo. She rarely became ill, but was subject to ingrown toenails. She insisted on sleeping on the right side of the bed and always seemed to get up an hour before I did. She insisted on carrying certain clothes with her everywhere, even though we had wardrobes in houses all over the world. If we were scheduled to meet someone of importance or prominence she read up on them religiously, but always seemed to give that person the impression she reacted to him or her as a person, not as a shah or a crown prince or a Beaux Arts prizewinner.

  She had everything she wanted, or so I thought, which was probably my first mistake.

  3

  I wanted Madelon and I got her. Getting a woman I wanted was not all that difficult. Standing on my money and fame, I was very tall. Sometimes I wondered how well I might do as a lover without money, but I was too lazy to try.

  I wanted Madelon because she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and the least boring. Sooner or later all women bored me, and most men. When there are no surprises even the most attractive people grow stale. Madelon may have aroused a great variety of emotions in me, from love to hate, at times, but she never bored me and boredom is the greatest sin. Even those who work at not being boring can become boring because their efforts show.

  But Madelon was beautiful inside as well as out, and I had had my fill of beautiful flesh and gargoyle minds.

  It wasn’t so much that I “got” Madelon as that I married her. I attracted her, our sex life was outstanding, and my wealth was exactly the convenience she needed. My money was her freedom. I opened up to her as I had not to anyone else. I tried to show her my world, at least the art part of it. The business part was the game part, a sort of global chess, or interplanetary poker, and dull to most people.

  I took her to a concert by a young synthecizor musician whose career one of my foundations was sponsoring. Afterwards we lay on
a fur-covered liquibed under the one-way glass dome of my New York apartment and watched the lights in the towers and the flying insect dots of helos.

  “Are all musicians as arrogant as that electronic music composer who cornered you in the foyer?” Madelon asked.

  “No, thank god. But when you are convinced you have conceived something the world must experience, you are anxious to have it presented.”

  “But he was demanding you sponsor it!” She shook her head angrily, spreading out her hair on my chest. “What an ego!”

  “Everyone has one,” I said, my fingertips on her flesh. “People are certain I have a very big one because of all the art and events I assist. But I want the art to come into existence, not to further my own fame or ego.”

  “Oh, Brian,” she said, flipping over and pressing her voluptuous body to mine. “Sometimes you just modest yourself right out the back door!”

  I didn’t reply. People never understand. She would, I hoped, in time. I wanted to midwife creativity, not scratch my ego onto the base of greatness.

  I took a deep breath and said it. “Why don’t we get married?”

  Her eyes opened wide in astonishment. “Married?” She sat up and waved her hand around at the jewel towers of New York. “You mean legally, in front of God and everybody?”

  I nodded and she seemed amused. “What is the point of that?”

  she asked. “If I should find I am in that small percentage for whom the shots don’t work, I can always abort, or you could sign on as the father. There’s no need for marriage, Brian.”

  “What about your family?” I asked. “From what you tell me your father is an old-fashioned tiger.”