Grandma Petrie was a character, a beautiful, stupid woman, always concerned about whether her hair was right. She lived with us for twelve years after the old man died, becoming dimmer by the year and increasingly concerned with the Church and her place in the next world. A little Dickensian drama here on the shore of the Sound, or one of those other guys, a lavender-scented breath from the previous century. Dad, of course, smarming around, phony as hell about all the religious horseshit, entertaining fat monsignors right and left, making sure we were all raised in the Church, Catholic schools and all, Charlotte to Sacred Heart, of course, and me to Columbia only because the old man went there, instead of the decent art school I should’ve gone to. Grandma didn’t much like me. Charlotte was her favorite. They used to sit for hours, saying the rosary or looking at her thick, leather-bound photograph albums. I would ask Charlie how she could stand it and she’d say it was charity, a lonely old woman needing companionship, and after a while I learned not to tease her about it, and I took it as natural that my sister could be two completely different people, the quiet little nun-in-training and the tomboy in shorts and a T-shirt, palling around with me down on the beach, in our boats, always covered in sand, tracking it through the house.
When she died, I mean Grandma, it turned out that all the smarm was for naught. She left the bulk of the estate to the Church, with life grants to me (small), Charlotte (larger), and Mother. Mother got the house. In the will she said she expected Charlotte to pursue her vocation and enter religious life.
That’s a scene etched into my brain, the bunch of us sitting around listening to the lawyer read it out, all of us in black, like it was 1880, and when that part got read I rolled my eyes and nudged Charlotte, who was sitting next to me, expecting her to give me the elbow back, but she didn’t, she just turned and looked at me, and there was someone else looking out from behind her eyes and it fucking froze my blood.
Why he never left her, I guess, why he never had a real French-type mistress in a Manhattan apartment like he must’ve wanted. I remember looking at him when he realized he wasn’t going to get a dime, that he was stuck with us more or less forever; he went white, like he’d been punched in the gut. Funny, because his income was pretty high then; he was at the peak of his fame as a second-rate Rockwell, he could’ve split then, but he didn’t, he just kept grabbing the maids and the locals, waitresses and cashiers.
But he loved her once; you couldn’t paint a woman that way unless you did, or I couldn’t anyway, and there are photographs, God, are there photographs! They met in the last summer before the war, they were both at the Art Students’ League, he was an instructor, she was a student for her bohemian summer before she got serious and started settling down with a good Catholic boy, and I think he just blew her away with sheer talent. The Petries must’ve loved it when she dragged him home that summer, a heathen with no money, no family. But Mother was a hardhead when she wanted to be, and she was Daddy’s girl, the only child, a bit of a disgrace there in a fine Catholic family, only one kid, what’s wrong with them? And he converted, naturally, more Catholic than the Pope after a while; he could be charming too, charmed the old guy, but never Grandma, as it turned out. I bet she was praying that a Jap bomb would solve her problem, but he came back and they got married and he got famous, and then came Charlotte and then a set of miscarriages and a little girl who died of polio at age two, and then me, and that was it.
There it is, the sad story, for the record, this record, or at least what I’ve been able to gather. Not that anyone actually ever sat down and told me the truth. I get versions. Who to believe? More to the point, how to avoid it?
I finally settled on a plan to go to Europe -the geographic cure, always attractive at that age. I didn’t have enough money of my own and I thought he’d never give me any of his, although he spent enough of it on himself. I guess he assumed that I’d stay here, he had the stupid idea that we were going to be a father-and-son thing like the Wyeths or the Bassanos, a little atelier here in the cultural desert of Long Island. He was talking about how I could do the lesser portrait commissions, or maybe the liquor ads. But as it turned out he sprang for the whole thing. That’s what was so maddening about the bastard, you thought he never considered another human being besides himself, and then he goes and does something like that; he said, take as long as you want, you’re only young once, and remember to use condoms.
Of course I’d asked my mother for it first, and she’d said, ask your father. I couldn’t believe it, standing there in her room, trying not to gag from the smell of the disinfectant and her rotting feet. Her mouth drawn down from the stroke, her eyes almost invisible in the pads of flesh: ask your father.
Which I didn’t, no, I got drunk instead, a half bottle of bourbon, and passed out in the downstairs bathroom in a pool of puke, charming, and he found me there and cleaned me up. What was he trying to prove? That in the end he loves me more than she does, that he won the war of the Wilmots? Anyway, he wrote me out a check for five grand the next morning, and we talked about what I had to see and we sat there in his studio and talked about it, about the museums, London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Florence, the same trip we did together when I was nine, when I got to look at the European collections for the first time.
That first time with Dad we stayed at the Ritz-God, he could throw money around in his flush years-everyone was real nice to me there, and I thought it was because I was such a terrific kid before Charlotte set me straight, incredible embarrassment, though I never admitted it to her. She hated that part, and now that I think about it I guess it was then she started visiting churches and convents, insisted on going up to Ávila to see St. Teresa.
When I made the European trip by myself in my twenty-first year, I skipped the Ritz and stayed at a one-star albergo three flights up on Calle de Amor de Dios at the corner of Santa Maria, an address Charlie would no doubt approve of and about a ten-minute walk to the Prado. I hadn’t been to the place since I was nine, but it seemed like I just stepped out for a minute, the pictures all in the same place. But my eye had been polluted with art history courses, and I knew that I’d never recapture that fucking explosion when I first saw it, because it was one of Dad’s ploys never to have art reproductions in the house, no coffee-table books spoiling the golden eye of young Chaz. My father took me into the big room through the back way, through the dreary mediocrities of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fussy brown paintings, and then Room Sixteen and there’s the Surrender of Breda, the first big Velázquez I ever saw. I wanted to spend my life looking at it, that Dutch soldier glancing casually out of the picture plane-how did he even think of doing that-and the lances the way they were, just perfect, but he wouldn’t let me stay, he grabbed my arm and pushed me past the famous portraits and the prophets in the desert with that wonderful black bird suspended in real air and through the grand room, the center of the cult, Room Twelve, and we hung a sharp right and there was Las Meninas.
The school of painting, Manet called it, and my father’s opinion was that taken all in all, it really was the best thing anyone had ever done in oils. He told me, and I can believe it, that when I first stood in front of it my mouth dropped open and I held my hands up to my cheeks, like a version of Munch’s The Scream. It was so wonderful at first sight, like the Grand Canyon or the Statue of Liberty, but more so, because I had been hearing about it for my whole life and I’d never even seen a postcard of it. And so I stood there trying not to disgrace myself by crying while he talked.
Nine-year-olds are not supposed to have that kind of reaction to paintings, but I suppose I was a kind of twisted prodigy. Can I even remember what he said? Maybe it’s been layered over in my mind by all the formal art criticism I got in college. There wasn’t much historical material, just a working painter’s admiration for a genius. He made me look at the light coming in through the window on the right, the way that light shines on the painted wood of the window frame. Vermeer made a whole career out of lig
ht shining on painted surfaces, he said, and never did anything better than that, and Velázquez just tossed it in as something extra.
And the playing with visual reality in a way that wouldn’t appear again in Western art until the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, he said, Manet got all that business of flat tonality and bold clean outlines from this painting, and there wouldn’t be anything like the blurred treatment of the lady dwarf until the twentieth, it was like something out of de Kooning or Francis Bacon.
And the perfect, doomed little girl at the center, the most important little girl in the whole world, the heartbreaking look of pride and terror on her face, and the two attendant meninas, one superbly painted like her mistress, the other blocked in angular planes like a wooden doll, a little Cézanne avant le lettre (why? He didn’t know, a mystery) and the whispering nun and the waiting figure in a glory of yellow in the far doorway (terrifying! Who knew why?) and the unimportant king and queen in the dusty mirror, and every movement and gesture in the whole vast thing directing the eye to the guy with the mustache and the black tunic with the cross of a knightly order on it, standing calmly in the midst of it with his palette and brushes. He’s saying I made this all, my father told me, he’s saying I have stolen this moment from time, this is how God sees the world, each instant an eternity, and when the dwarfs and the dog and the nun and the courtiers and the royal family and their maids are forgotten dust, this will live and live forever, and I, Velázquez, have done this.
I recall the expression on his face as he said it, and I guess I thought he was talking about himself, because at nine I thought my father was in the same class as Velázquez, the greatest painter in the world. No, not really true; I think after that trip to Europe, after really seeing the masters, even at nine I could tell the difference, and I think he could see that I could. Over the next year it made him increasingly cranky, more demanding, more authoritarian. He was the master; I was the student and always would be. But the fact is I’m better than he was, maybe not as far above him as Velázquez was above his own master, Pacheco, but a discernible gap. Not that I could actually say that or claim that, even to myself, and I wonder how Velázquez handled it. Of course Pacheco wasn’t his father, just his father-in-law, but still.
All that crap came flooding back when I stood in front of Las Meninas for the second time and I realized that’s what I’ve always wanted from art, the ability to stand apart from the domestic whatever, the whispers, the favorites, the little cruelties.
And, my friend, you’ll see that, in a strange and unexpected way, I have succeeded. But also you may be thinking, hey, isn’t this supposed to be about the painting? Why is he giving me all this crap about his sad life? Because it’s not just about the painting. It’s about whether my memory has anything whatever to do with what really happened. Figure that out and the painting is explained one way or the other. Therefore I spread my memories before you as with a trowel. Are there inconsistencies? Impossibilities?
Pay attention, please.
The following day I met Suzanne Nore in the Prado.
I never pick up girls in museums, I can’t see them when I’m in my art head, but there she was, looking at Velázquez’s equestrian Baltasar Carlos, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her, that mass of red-gold hair down to her butt. I waited until we were alone in the room and then I just started talking like a maniac about the painting, the unbelievable mastery of technique, the paint so thin that it runs, the weave of the canvas showing through, all done in one go with practically no corrections, look at the damn background, it’s like a sumi-e painting or an aquarelle, and the texture of the costume, he taps the brush here and there and your eye reads it like gold embroidery, and look at the face, it’s practically a sketch but the whole psychology of the kid is stripped bare, and so on and so on, I couldn’t stop, and she started to laugh and said, you really know a lot about painting, and I said, yeah, I do, I’m a painter and I want to paint you. I almost said I wanted to paint you naked, but I didn’t.
She was a singer, or wanted to be; she went to Skidmore, she was on a junior year abroad taking lessons at the Paris Conservatory, and she’d hopped the train down here for a long weekend. I took her through the museum, talking nonstop like some kind of nutcase; I thought she would disappear if I shut up. We were there until it closed, and afterward we went to a little bar I like on Calle de Cervantes and drank wine and talked until it got dark and it was time for tapas, and we ate and drank some more. We closed the place and I walked her back to her hotel by the Plaza Santa Ana, very respectable, and I kissed her there in the doorway, getting dirty looks from a couple of Guardia Civils-no public kissing allowed, Franco didn’t like it-and I thought, This wasn’t supposed to happen, I wasn’t set up for this, love or whatever it is. Crazy.
I spent the next couple of days with her, every minute. She talked a blue streak, funny as hell, jokes about everything, wandering around the city. She made up a fantasy about us being in a war movie because of the soldiers in the Nazi helmets marching around everywhere-we’re hiding from the Nazis!-and it started to get real, it’s hard to explain. But the next night after we closed the tapas place again, and back at her hotel, I kissed her like before, but longer, and when I said good night like a dope, she grabbed my belt buckle and dragged me inside and up the stairs.
So, that was it, all the stuff the movies teach us about passion, all those scenes where the actors tear their clothes off standing up and the actress jumps up and impales herself on his dick, we’re supposed to believe, and they fall on the narrow bed. I always thought I was a cool guy, in control, but this was a whole different kind of thing. I lasted about two minutes, and I was opening my mouth to apologize but she wouldn’t stop, she told me what to do, she worked on me with her hands and her mouth, and all the time she kept talking, telling me just what she was feeling; I never heard a girl say stuff like that, I couldn’t believe it was happening. “Insatiable” is probably not the right word, I don’t know what the right word is, but we did it until we were raw, we would’ve started hemorrhaging if we hadn’t fallen asleep. And laughing, giggling. I remember thinking, This is too good, there’s got to be something wrong with this, some punishment to come.
We stayed in bed almost all the next day. I staggered out for food and beer once, and then when night fell we got up and cleaned ourselves off, sneaking down the hall to the bathroom together and doing it again under the weak stream of the shower in the tin stall. We went out late like the Spaniards do and she knew clubs-this was all underground stuff, she had addresses from musician friends of hers-and there were kids there playing music. They had no records; rock and roll was banned by the government, so all they knew was what they could pick up on shortwave from the U.S. Armed Forces Radio, and they’d invented their own version, a weird combination of flamenco and Hendrix, incredible music. And I had my drawing stuff and I just drew like crazy, making portraits of the musicians, and her, of course, blazing away on a homemade electric guitar, drawing in ink and putting the gray tones in with spit and wine, ripping the sheets off and handing them out to anyone who wanted them. I thought, Okay, it doesn’t get any better than this, this is life.
When she had to go back to Paris, I went with her. She said we’ll always have Madrid, like in that movie, and so now we have Paris too. I have to say a huge relief leaving fascism behind, it was getting old, that sense of people taking down what you were doing, and the Guardias in their shiny hats on every corner giving you the eye like you’re thinking about bringing down the state.
We stayed in her place off the Rue Saint-Jacques near the Schola Cantorum, third-floor walk-up, filthy bath down the hall. Her room was incredibly messy; I was the fascist in the relationship. She took voice classes at the Cantorum every morning, not the Conservatory, or maybe I got it wrong. La vie bohème, left bank, student demos, everyone in black, pretentious, smoking and drinking and doping like mad. While she was out I hit the museums and the galleries. Paris was dead as far as paintin
g went at the time, all political shit and wannabe New York School.
But I went to an exhibition at the Orangerie, it was Weimar art: Dix, Grosz, and some people I never heard of before, like Christian Schad, Karl Hubbuch. Some terrific stuff, the style was called Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity. So these guys were in the ruins of Germany after the first war and everywhere abstract modernism was the thing to be doing-Picasso, Braque-and there was Dada and Futurism cranking up, and these guys tried to rescue representational art from kitsch and they did it, especially Schad, a technique like Cranach’s, wonderful depth and structure, and shocking penetration. Look at the world you made, you bastards, this is what it looks like. I recall thinking, Can we do that now? Would anyone be able to see it? Probably not, and the world hasn’t changed that much, except we stick the war-wounded behind the walls of hospitals so we don’t have to look at them, and the rich are now thin instead of fat. But even if you did it, the rich shits would buy them up: oh, you have a Wilmot, appreciating very nicely, thank you, not as much as de Kooning but a good return on investment. Everyone is blind now, except if it’s on TV.
I was going to stay in Europe for at least a year, but I came home that fall, to find some interesting developments. Mother had been moved to a care facility because of her worsening diabetes and the effects of the new stroke, which is probably a good thing considering more parts of her were turning black and falling off, and no one wants that around the house. They had to take the door off her room, and the frame too, and move her out through the French windows and the garden. My prayer is she had no brains left at the time. She loved that garden.
The wreckage from this demolition was still apparent when I returned, but Dad seemed disinclined to do much about it. Charlie left the day after Mother did, off to her novitiate somewhere in Missouri. She was going to be a missionary sister and help the far-off poor. She didn’t write or leave a note for me; I mean, I knew she was talking about, it but I didn’t think she was just going to leave, like sneaking off while I was gone. I used to tell her when she first started to get serious about it, I told her, you don’t have to do this, Charlie, we can run away together, we can make a life, but she just looked at me in a kind of holy blank way she’s developed and said, it’s not that, Christ was calling her and so on, and I didn’t believe her. She was never that religious when we were growing up; I always thought it was a girl thing, like being crazy about horses. For a while I thought it was because he did something to her-you hear about shit like that all the time, even families around here in Oyster Bay, Daddy and Daddy’s little girl-I should have asked her, but I couldn’t, the one time I went to see her, not in a convent parlor, and I have to say, I never really believed it. He’s a monster, but not that kind of monster.
The Forgery of Venus Page 3