The Forgery of Venus

by Michael Gruber

  The girl gets pregnant and either you get rid of it or you have it and your life flows into a different channel than you thought it would. We went back and forth about it quite a few times; first she wanted to abort and I didn’t, and then she didn’t and I did, and I guess the Catholic thing is still there, but not only that, it’s something about the flow of life, it makes me crazy to think of the hole you’d have to live with for the rest of your life, and that can’t be good for a relationship. But what did I know? Charlie always said go with life, love your fate. Amor fati is the expression. I’d have given anything to be able to talk this through with her, but when I called the number of her society they said she was en route to Uganda.

  And so was my life set on a false course, which is another reason why I’m telling you all this ancient matter. For lust will languish and its heat decay, says Petronius Arbiter, you’ll recall that from the class we had on Renaissance translations from the Latin masters-one of my rare B grades, I think-and it’s so true. By the time I marched up the aisle with Suzanne my attachment was more than half guilt, but I thought I could fix that somehow, through fidelity, through affection, and somehow lay the curse my father had passed on. Unfortunately, it turns out the habit of self-betrayal tends to spread. It pollutes the other parts of life, in my case my painting, and it acts as a marker for others, like those cruel experiments where they paint a monkey green and the other monkeys tear it to pieces. If you’re false to yourself, I think, other people find it easier to be false to you. I mean, there’s no one there to begin with, so what’s the big deal?

  It’s a shame, in a way, that I didn’t actually tape my life like old Krapp did. The present effort is not an adequate substitute because-how should I put this-I’m not entirely sure who I am anymore. Maybe that was Beckett’s point in his play, that none of us are anyone anymore, we’re all hollow men, heads filled with straw, as Eliot says in the poem, colonized by the media, cut off from the sources of real life. Why art with any soul in it is grinding to a halt.

  So let’s run through my life from then, quickly, because it’s not much fun for me, and also, I have to say, because it may or may not be my life. But stay with me here.

  Okay, the girlfriend’s pregnant, we go to visit the parents in Wilmington. Max, the dad, is a big, jovial slab of beef; Nadine, the mom, is a slightly withered Southern ex-belle. They are not pleased with the catch, I detect, but they’re resigned, whatever the little girl wants. Max takes me aside, asks how I’m going to support Suzanne in the manner to which she’s become accustomed, and I say I intend to work as an artist, and he goes, lots of luck, sonny, I hope you intend to be a commercial artist, because you’re buying into a high-maintenance package, don’t be fooled by the bohemian styling.

  We got married anyway and lived in the loft and had the baby, which was Toby. The fact is me and Suzanne should have been three hot weeks in a Spanish hotel room, not a ten-year marriage, although you can build a lot of plans on guilt. It was going to be great, I thought, the opposite of my parents’ marriage, or her parents’ marriage, and we were going to be artists together, that was the basis, really, a life together in art. Then it turned out that for whatever reason I wasn’t going to be the hot young painter of the season and she was not going to be one of the defining singer-songwriters of that decade, and the funny thing is, despite our mutual mediocrity we both made a shitload of money for a while, which muffled the pain, as it often does. I could barely keep up with the ad work, and she had one of her songs covered by the thrush of the moment and it was a Top 40 hit for a while. Terrible song, I still hear it now and then if there’s a radio tuned to an oldies station, all her songs anodyne and slightly sappy, tinkly, no real juice, easily distinguished from Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, etc.-like my painting, unfortunately.

  Then, because she said you can’t raise a kid out of a loft in SoHo, we bought a house in the country, a four-bedroom in Nyack on three and a half acres, with a barn; God alone knows what it’s worth now, but way back then those big houses were going for a hundred and a half, two hundred, which seemed like a lot of money, and I started to work all week in the city, and I should have been the one to have affairs, I mean come on, I was rich in New York and that was the era for it, but I never did, not once, guilt again, probably-no, yet another example of schmuckhood. Mark was burning up the bedsheets during that time, and he used to invite me along to the meat markets downtown, but no, I was the opposite of Dad in that respect. I was just like Mom. It actually took me years to catch on about what Suzanne was doing; I thought I had an okay marriage until one evening she got drunker than usual and set me right with the list of guys.

  Somewhere in those years she gave up music, decided clay was more her thing, then printmaking, then book design, then video, then back to clay, but at a higher level, she wrote a play too, and film scripts, an all-around artistic type, Suze, no focus in any of them, just a desperate desire to be in a scene, be noticed.

  Or so I think, but I have no idea who she is. “Late for the Sky,” that Jackson Browne song, from the days when we thought rock lyrics held the key to all mysteries, I still think about her when they play it on the oldies. I have to say, I can’t carry the freight for the breakup of my first marriage. I don’t have it in me to be the complaisant husband; I might have looked the other way for a long time, like they do in Cheever stories, sophisticated and all that, cool, but she brought the guys into the house, into our bed, and they were universally scuzzballs, bartenders, drifters, arty fakes, lawn guys with rusted-out pickup trucks. I’d come home on Friday after a week in the city and there’d be some gap-tooth skinny asshole on my deck drinking my booze, her new friend, and one week I just didn’t bother coming back and that was it. I guess my first marriage was based on a secret deal: I would take care of her and she could do what she wanted, and I would always be there when she got tired of it, but in the end I couldn’t; and the reason, I have to say, was I just didn’t care for what she produced. The sad fact is that only the great artists have different rules, and the patzers have to live like everyone else or settle for being pathetic.

  As for Toby, all there is now is a kind of helpless sorrow, although why I should feel sorry for someone who’s doing a lot better than his dad, a pillar of the community and his church, three lovely children he’s never introduced me to-no, I don’t think I want to go there. Although, it was really amazing, as soon as he developed a personality he rejected everything I was, I mean he actually broke crayons deliberately, snap snap snap, and left good drawing paper out in the rain, and ruined the expensive German markers I bought him, and he fixated on my first father-in-law.

  And Max just took him over and raised him according to his strict principles, which hadn’t taken all that well with Suzanne but did for her son, and the kid went out for football in high school and was a quarterback and went to Purdue just like granddad and was a star there just like, and became an engineer, ditto. Each year I get a dutiful Christmas card with the beautiful family depicted thereupon, a pleasant-looking group of strangers.

  So then back into wonderful singlehood, until I met Lotte and we got married and we had Milo and Rose and then split up. For a while, I thought Lotte would save me, because I could speak to her in a way I could never speak to Suzanne, and I thought I could store the real Chaz kind of in her, like a constant mirror. She has a Memorex-like memory, never forgot a conversation or a dream or one of my many fuck-ups, maddening actually when I think about it, you can’t do that to another person, however much they might love you. No substitute for the true self. Making this recording, together with what remains of my memory after all the dope I sucked into my system while I was with her, and what happened with Zubkoff and later, I have to admit what I did to her. Basically, I walked whistling into my father’s tomb, just like I said I was never going to do, ha ha, and it broke her. The poison leaked into her the way it leaked into my mother. I think it’s why she betrayed me in the end, the most honest and decent person I ever met. An
d right she was to do it too.

  I’d never really understood what she wanted from me. Self-expression? It can’t just be that. I used to do paintings for her all the time, pure self-expression if you like, and the best thing I ever did for her when we were married sent her into a shit fit. It was our fifth anniversary and we’d been fighting on and off for a couple of weeks, and I wanted to make it special for a change. What we’d been fighting about was this goddamn magazine cover I’d done for New York about Giuliani’s wedding, the one to Judith Nathan.

  They wanted the obvious pastiche, van Eyck’s Wedding of John Arnolfini, so I did that, in oils on a real oak panel just like the original. I got the arrogant hypocrisy on the face of the man and the Persian-cat self-satisfaction on the face of the woman, and I used the convex mirror behind them to paint in the wedding party, all the pols and celebs, all grinning like skulls, and also I used the ten little lunettes around the edge of the mirror to illustrate scenes from his career and the breakup of his two previous marriages. I mean, it was good. It was a real painting, not a cartoon, and it had some of the authority of the original.

  I brought it home after the magazine was finished with it and she went ballistic, her usual business about how could I do this to myself, like my talent was like a god that had to be worshipped in a certain way, and how all the bozos at the magazine had no idea what I was doing, the details wouldn’t even reproduce, and all the time I was wasting on crap like that, my only life. That was one of her phrases-how can you spend your only life this way? But I didn’t see her spending her only life making the kind of money we needed for Milo, I mean it wasn’t like she was maximizing her talent in that little gallery, when any of the big guys would’ve hired her in a heartbeat, she was that good-no, that was down to me, thank you, and around then was when I started in with the amphetamines, to get more work out in my only life and bring in the cash.

  Anyway, about mid-May that year, a Sunday, it was, one of the first really nice days we had, maybe a month before our anniversary, I was making coffee or something in the kitchen and I heard this sound of giggling and laughter coming from our bedroom and I went to the door, which was open just a slit, and I looked in. They were on the bed, Lotte and Milo, he must’ve been around four then, and they were playing some kind of tickling game. She was in a white batiste nightgown and he was in Spider-Man pj’s, and it just knocked me out, the sunlight streaming in and lighting them up on the white duvet and the brass of the bed glinting. It was like I was in on some secret, the kind of semierotic play that mothers and sons get into at that age, and for a second I almost remembered-like a sense memory, not like something in my head at all-doing the same kind of thing with my mother.

  And that afternoon I went to the loft and stretched and primed a biggish canvas, maybe three feet by five, and I started painting what it was like. I made the boy slightly turned away from his mother, with an expression of delight on his face, and I had the mother sitting up in the center of the bed braced on one arm and with her other arm extended, touching his head, her index finger barely wrapped in a dark curl of his hair. And I got lost in it and for the next few weeks it was like a refuge; I’d grind out my daily bread and then turn back to it, and it was fine, everything was working right, the child’s mouth rendered with three quick strokes, perfect, glistening with the juice of life, and the same with the flesh tones of the mother’s skin I knew like my own, showing through the translucent fabric of her gown in the morning light, pink and pearly, you could almost breathe in the bed-scent of a woman.

  And it could’ve been just a genre piece, but it wasn’t; the painted surface was alive and really existent, like it is in serious painting, not mere image at all, and I made the white duvet into what I really have to say was a gorgeous blizzard of the innumerable shades that white can take in morning light. And the vital line of the mother’s arm connecting her to the child, and the set of her haunch on the bed, and the other, supporting arm-perfect, sculptural, vital. I couldn’t believe it.

  And I wrapped it up and I was so happy and I thought she’d be too. But when she took the paper off she just stared at it for a long time, as if she was stunned, and then she ran into the bedroom and burst into weeping, just sobbing her heart out, and when I went to her and asked her what was wrong she said something crazy, like, you’re going to kill me, you’re going to kill me. And it turned out that she didn’t get that I could do stuff, I mean in painting, for love that I couldn’t do for money, and she seemed to calm down, and we hung the damned thing in the bedroom, but she wouldn’t talk about it and it was like a bad fairy gift in a fairy tale: instead of bringing us together like it was supposed to, it drove us apart. So after that I didn’t do anything but commercial work.

  Which would have been fine, except around then Photoshop came in and art directors who wanted pastiches of famous paintings could just buy the rights from Bill Gates or whomever and pop in new faces, and they even had tools to give that impressionistic effect or craqueleur, and there went half my business. So I had to work twice as hard, especially after we found out that our Milo had those bad lungs, familial pulmonary dystrophy, a disease not attracting much research attention and barely controllable by means of a set of drugs that might have been compounded of powdered diamonds if you looked at the damned bills. And naturally I had to up my own dosage, and one night I lost it and wrecked our house and apparently I slugged Lotte and they had to come and take me away. I say “apparently” because I can’t really recall any of it.

  I went into rehab like a good boy and did my program, but when I got out she said she couldn’t live with me anymore, she couldn’t carry the weight of the demons. I moved back into my loft then, and since then I’ve been living from check to check, magazine work mainly, newspapers, a few ads, never enough, sinking ever deeper into plastic hell, IRS hell…

  Maybe.

  That brings us up to last summer, a day in June; I was at Vanity Fair that day talking to Gerstein, the art editor, about a project they wanted to do, a series of pieces on the great beauties of the day illustrated with oil portraits in the manner of the great masters. They got the idea, of course, from the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer and Scarlett Johansson, that was the hook: Madonna by Leonardo (ho ho!), Cate Blanchett by Gainsborough, Jennifer Lopez by Goya, Gwyneth Paltrow by Ingres, Kate Winslet by they hadn’t decided yet. And he thought of me, naturally, and he went on and on about how he had to fight management to get to do them as real paintings rather than Photoshopped photos, and I asked him had they agreed to pose, and he looked at me funny and said of course they’re not going to pose, you’ll work from existing photographs. I argued with him for a while but it’s impossible to get anyone, especially a magazine fart director, to understand the difference between a posed portrait and one cocked up from photographs, and he knew I needed the money, so we shook on it, $2,500 per, a bargain. I suggested Velázquez for Kate Winslet and he said great idea. I called Lotte and told her about the sale, just to hear her happy with me for once, and she was. I could practically hear her mental calculator clicking over the phone.

  There was a fairly short deadline on the project, and by the time I got back to the loft I was thinking about painting and trying not to think about where in the bottomless money pit I was going to stuff that twelve and a half grand. Since I turned whore I have all the art books, and it’s kind of cool to look through them and summon up the originals I’ve seen. The funny thing is I know that when I actually have the palette set up and brush in hand I won’t give a shit what the finished product is, I’ll be stoned off the process of painting.

  Lotte, in her art gallery head, used to calculate that I made about eight bucks an hour with the kind of work I put into a project, and I could never explain to her why I do it, why I have to work like that in order to get out of bed every morning, because I knew what she would say. She would say, why don’t you paint then for yourself, Chaz, and give up this connerie? Then I’d get mad and say, how the fuck are we g
oing to pay for Milo’s goddamn pills, five grand a month at least, and are you going to pull that out of your little gallery? And then she’d say, but I can sell your work, your work is wonderful, people would love to have your work. And there it would sit, like a fresh turd on the table, the thing that busted us up, Chaz Wilmot’s principled refusal to paint real work for the commodity market. So I would storm out to the studio and work on a magazine cover or a record album and smoke dope until everything seemed just peachy.

  I was just sitting down with a book of Ingres portraits when the phone rang and it was a secretary asking me if I would hold for Dr. Zubkoff, and my belly dropped because I thought it was one of Milo’s docs with more bad news. So when he came on and I figured out who it was and found out what he wanted, I was so relieved that I would have agreed to practically anything.

  The next day I took the subway up to the Columbia medical school campus and walked to the building I’d been told to find, a four-story brick-and-glass structure on St. Nicholas Avenue at 168th Street. Inside, the usual medical smell, the over-cooled reception room with the tattered magazines, the white-coated receptionist behind her little window. They were expecting me. I filled out a medical form, lied about my drug use and my smoking like everyone else, and was turned over to a nurse in pale blue scrubs who took me into a little room and told me to get into a gown. They said they wanted to make sure I was totally disease-free before they let me into a major drug study, so if I had a prior condition I couldn’t come back at them with an accusation that their drug messed me up.

  A couple of hours later, I found I was healthy, despite my lifestyle, still sound as a bell, apparently, just like Krapp. It was an impressive medical workup, bloods, scans, the whole nine yards, and after it I had an even greater sympathy for my poor kid.