The Forgery of Venus

by Michael Gruber

  I still had the EEG leads trailing from my head and I’d lost a sneaker. I managed to croak out the lie that I was all right, that I was fine, and the man said I had dashed out the door of Shelly’s building and run into him full tilt. Like I was blind, he said. We were at Haven Avenue and 168th Street and he’d been en route to making a delivery at the Neurological Institute. In a minute or so, Harris came running up and apologized to the guy and led me back into the building.

  She had me down on the recliner and was taking the leads off my head when Shelly Zubkoff popped in, looking a little ruffled. Apparently, without warning, I had jumped off the bed, knocked Harris away when she tried to stop me, and somehow got out of the building, where I’d bounced off the delivery man. Shelly apologized and observed that I was lucky that the man hadn’t been driving his truck. I had no memory at all about this. One second I was a kid in some other age struggling with a priest, and the next I was out on the street with the UPS guy. Disorienting is barely the word.

  He made me stay for an hour, for observation he said, although I felt perfectly okay, really good, calm and kind of blank, and again without the usual internal dialogue going on, the crap that constantly fills up our heads, and it turns out, you know, that without that script running, you can really focus down on the world around you, and if you do that everything is really interesting. Everything.

  There’s a feeling you get on crank or cocaine where you think you have super powers: anything seems possible, and worse, sensible, which is why you get people painting six-room apartments with a one-inch brush or doing mass murders. But what I felt when I left Zubkoff’s office wasn’t like that at all. I felt perfectly myself, but more so, like there were forces behind me, encouraging me, stroking me. Again that kitten-licking sensation in my head. It was exactly like being a well-beloved child, it was that kind of omnipotence, at home in the universe (a book title I’ve always liked), and everything was just as it should be and everything was interesting.

  Right, I keep saying that, “interesting” is the word, because as I rode downtown on the subway, the car crowded with the end of rush hour, ordinary people going home to supper and their lives, I couldn’t help staring at the faces and the patterns of the people in random juxtaposition, but it wasn’t random at all-everything was loaded with meaning, and you could point that out with art, I saw, you could make sense of it. I cursed the hours I’d spent being bored and pissed off and getting high because real life wasn’t quite perfect enough for me, and I was nearly crying with the desire to paint these faces and this choir of people arranged for me and paint everything so that people would look at it and say oh, yeah, that’s true, it all makes sense. This vibrating moment.

  I won’t say it was an epiphany, because God wasn’t involved, but I knew there was something else going on, that time itself is the real hallucination, that the material world isn’t all there is of existence. I could see divine stuff peeking through the cracks, I felt supported by Creation and it was flowing through me stronger than ever, and I thought, Okay, this was what Fra Angelico must’ve felt like all the time.

  I was home and in bed before it occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about that other thing that had sent me running through the streets, the little boy in the red dress and the house with the strange smells and the girl with the carnations, and when I started thinking about it I realized that the people were all speaking a language I didn’t know, like Spanish but not quite, but I could understand it just like English. And who the hell was Gito de Silva? What was he doing in my head?

  The next week was fairly rotten, even for my life, because I got a call from Vanity Fair. Gerstein was real apologetic, but his editor didn’t like the paintings, and they weren’t going to use them. They thought they were too spooky and weird, he said, and they didn’t look enough like the stars, he said, and I controlled my temper and I said they looked exactly like the stars, as those stars would be seen by the five old masters concerned, which I thought had been the fucking point of the exercise, and we went around the barn for a while on this, and what it turned out to be was they really had no idea that anyone had ever seen things differently from the way they do now. They thought that the current view of everything was the stone reality, that this week stood for all time.

  And I guess if you’re running a style magazine with cultural pretensions, that’s the way you have to see the world. Such an enterprise can’t really handle much penetration. If people looked and thought deeply they wouldn’t read magazines, or at least not magazines like Vanity Fair. I have to say they were generous; they paid me a kill fee of a grand per painting and said I was free to sell them elsewhere.

  I was pretty calm, compared to what I would have been at another time, and I couldn’t help wondering whether that was a side effect of the salvinorin, a kind of tranquilizer thing, although I didn’t feel in any way dulled out, really the opposite in fact. A kind of acceptance, maybe, of what I’ve been fighting my whole life, that I can do something extremely well that has absolutely no exchange value as artwork. People can see that quality in the old masters, or at least they write about seeing it, but not in something made yesterday.

  So my work’s a complete fucking waste of time, at least where money is concerned. I used to think I’d been born out of my proper era. I mean, it’d be like a major league pitcher being born in 1500. His ability to throw a small ball at a hundred miles an hour through any sector of an arbitrary rectangle is totally unsalable, so the guy would spend his life shoveling shit on some estate, and the only time he does his thing is at the fair, hey, guys, look what Giles can do! But basically it’s not all that interesting, not even to Giles.

  Meanwhile, there was over seven thousand bucks I would not be seeing, and I dreaded going around to the creditors I’d promised it to and having to eat shit, again. Mark Slotsky had left a message on my cell phone, which I hoped was about money, and I called him back, but his phone said I had to leave a message.

  Later that day, I went into Gorman’s on Prince Street, the only place in SoHo where I still have credit. Clyde the bartender has a soft spot for artists. Behind the bar is a painting of mine, the original of a cover I’d done for New York magazine a couple of years back, Mrs. Senator Clinton as Liberty leading the people in the Delacroix painting with her breast hanging out. Clyde had loved it, and I gave him the painting in exchange for my bar tab and a year of free drinks. Gorman’s used to be a cop saloon when the police headquarters was still in that palace on Centre Street, and then it was artists for a while, until most of the painters moved out when the rents went up, and now it is all retail people from the boutiques and the galleries. This is fine with me. I don’t have much to say to painters nowadays; I can’t stand the hacks and the serious ones make me ashamed of myself. I’m a little isolated, actually, all alone in the big city, a cliché, but there it is. From week to week the only people I see are Lotte, Mark, and a guy named Jacques-Louis Moreau, who, as it happened, was sitting at the bar in Gorman’s when I walked in. He usually is, with a glass of wine and the French papers and a cell phone.

  I wouldn’t exactly call Jackie a pal of mine, he’s actually more Lotte’s friend, a fellow diplo-brat, been to the same schools in various capitals and here in the city. Whether they’d ever been an item I don’t know, she would never tell me. Although after we broke up she’d been seeing a lot of him, and I had the mixed feelings you have about a guy who’s sniffing around your beloved even when she’s not exactly yours anymore. He’s a big guy, a soccer player, with that roundheaded neat French look, close-cropped dark hair and a ready smile. Our relationship consists mainly of drinking at Gorman’s in the afternoons and bitching about our hard lives. Maybe that’s why I went into the bar that day.

  Jackie’s a painter too, but unlike me he yearns for gallery success. Unfortunately, while he has all the technique in the world he has no creativity at all. Ever since I’ve known him he’s been pursuing the fashions, always a little too late. He started out doi
ng big splashy abstracts and then, in turn, op art, color fields, pop art, and now he’s into conceptual. One winter a few years ago I walked into his loft on Crosby Street and found him feeding big Warholian-wannabe canvases into the Ashley stove he used to heat the place. No loss, that, but he seemed curiously cheerful about it, and I recall being a little envious that he honestly didn’t give a shit about his work. He thought the whole art scene was a scam and that sooner or later he’d hit it right and cash in.

  Anyway, when I came in he waved me over, and I ordered a martini and unloaded about the Vanity Fair fiasco. He commiserated and, unlike Lotte, didn’t ask me why I didn’t do the gallery thing, which was restful at least, and then he said he was leaving New York for Europe. Yeah, some rich guy wanted some paintings done, a variety of styles, money up front.

  “This is hotels?” I asked him, but he got a sly look on his face and said, “For private customers, yes, you know, yachts and beach houses, and this man I am working for, he says he’ll represent me on the European market, all these Russian billionaires now, they want paintings, so it will be very big.”

  I asked him what Mark had to say about that, because Mark’s his gallery and I happen to know that Mark had been carrying him for a while, but he said, “No, it was Mark who turned me on to this. It is partly his idea.”

  So fine, I was happy for him and I figured that if I wanted to bitch I could use the bartender. Or the back-bar mirror.

  I walked out of there with a couple of martinis in me easing the pain and strode up to Prince Street and Lotte’s gallery to pick up the kids, it being my night for them, and to tell her that there wouldn’t be quite as much money as expected this month. I received a lot less sympathy than I’d just had from Jackie, but when I showed her photographs of the rejected paintings, she thought they were terrific and she said she was sure they’d sell, if I wanted, and I did want, I couldn’t stand the sight of them. She let out one of her famous sighs, the meaning of which I perfectly understood-the insoluble, neurotic business about why I mind selling this stuff to people for their walls, as opposed to a magazine. It’s totally irrational, selling is selling, but still…I think it’s because the buyers won’t see what’s there either, they’ll say, oh, I love Kate Winslet, and they’ll buy it as a kind of kitschy joke, like it was the same as Andy Asshole’s silk screens of Marilyn, a pure pop object, and that brought up the thought that maybe it is, maybe I’m just kidding myself. I’m a joke too, after all, like I said, but a poor one.

  The kids are fine with self-entertainment in my loft, all kinds of stuff for them to play with, cut themselves with, poisons galore, and nothing’s ever happened, not a scratch; is it luck or just growing up around a non-childproof environment? While the two of them messed around with paints on the floor I went to my old Dell and Googled some of the weird stuff I’d experienced in that second drug session. I drew a blank on “Gito de Silva,” but I had a hit on “Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop,” which it turns out is a street in the old quarter of Seville, in Spain. I brought it up on Google Earth and zoomed down as far as it would let me. A tiny little street, and I could see the route he (or I) took from his (or my) house to the plaza. I told myself that I was in fact a tourist in the old city of Seville once, age nine, with my father, and therefore it was some kind of dredged-up residual memory.

  Had a good time with the kids, our usual drawing contest, we all sat around and drew each other and Rose won by popular acclaim like always. She’s pretty good for four years old; maybe she’ll be a famous artist like her daddy, God forbid. Milo can draw too, but I think he’s mainly a word guy. Walking down the street behind them, I almost had to cry. Milo is so frail and Rose is such a sturdy little truck, and she worships him, it’s just going to tear her apart, when…Another thing I have to talk to Shelly about; he’s a research guy, maybe there’s some program I can get Milo into, or move to a country where you don’t have to be rich to live. But what he needs is a new set of lungs.

  After they were asleep I went out on the fire escape and smoked some dope and had a funny little reverie about my first and only gallery show, and it was interesting because of the contrast between it and what I’d experienced on the salvinorin. Or maybe the salvinorin was somehow enriching the experience in some neurophysiological way. Anyway, I recalled being late because I’d decided I had to drop some stuff off at an ad agency in midtown, and then I had to have an after-work drink with a couple of people from the agency. A couple three drinks or so, and then I called Suzanne from a phone booth and told her to go on without me, I’d be there soon. The show was in Mark Slotsky’s gallery on West Broadway off Worth Street, and she got all steamed at that, was I nuts, this was my big break and I was screwing around with some crappy ad, and didn’t I know who’d be there, Mark had called in all these chips to get a good crowd and had spent a fortune on the spread, not shitty wine and cheese but catered from Odeon and so on and so on. What it was, she wanted to make an entrance with the star, and now she’d have to just walk in like everyone else.

  I remember walking down West Broadway and feeling like I was going to my execution. I was still wearing my work clothes, paint-smeared, not that clean, a hoodie and jeans and really awful raggedy-ass sneakers, and I felt embarrassed, like I had wanted to look like this to impress all the art lovers that I don’t give a shit about.

  And I arrived, the place all lit up and people spilling out on the sidewalk, chattering and holding flutes of champagne. They looked at me, and I felt like the skeleton at the feast, but then I was recognized: Mark shouted out my name and he and Suzanne came running over to me, my wife dressed in a black spaghetti-strap outfit that would have been racy underwear in my mother’s day, and I collected slaps on the back and kisses, and they were all beaming and happy, because the show looked to be a hit, there were little stick-on red dots on many of the paintings, they were sold, I was selling, this is success. And then I had to meet the buyers, the art hags, women in black with ethnic jewelry hanging from neck and ears, and chunky gold and diamonds like fetters on their wrists, and I was trying to be happy like them, and I heard how wonderful it was for them to have paintings that look like something, and Mark was talking a mile a minute about appreciation, he means appreciation in value, a good investment, they were getting in on the ground floor with Charles Wilmot, Jr.

  And while this was going on I was chugging champagne as fast as I could grab the flutes off the silvery trays; the bubbles brought up a froth of bile from my stomach and I wanted to vomit. The paintings on the white walls were unbearable to look at, the paint looked like shit, muddy and dull, and all the avid faces around me looked like birds of prey, carrion beasts. Yes, neurotic, self-destructive, I know it, and I was wondering why I thought about that show just then. It’s a memory I don’t treasure, except that was the night I first saw Lotte Rothschild, although I was able to turn that into shit as well.

  The next day I took the kids off to their school and I came back to my place and borrowed Bosco’s van to take my rejected paintings from the magazine offices in the Condé Nast Building over to Lotte’s gallery. The place was empty and we had a nice talk, almost like old times, so much so it made my heart hurt. And then I recalled that fire escape reverie and I said, “Do you remember my first show?”

  “When we met,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  And naturally I was not going to tell her about sitting out on the fire escape doing dope while the kids were with me, so I said, “No reason, really, but I was just thinking about it last night and I remembered how I felt, the sensation of…I don’t know what you’d call it, terror, revulsion.”

  “Yes, you seemed miserable. And I couldn’t understand why; you were selling out the show and the paintings were wonderful.” Here her face fell a little. “Our old tape. Do we have to run through it again?”

  “No. But I remembered how I noticed you in the crowd. You were wearing a green velvet jacket with glass buttons, a lace blouse, sort of very pale ochre, like parchment, and
an ankle-length skirt, in some rustling material. And red boots. Everyone else was all in black.”

  “Except you. You looked like a derelict or an ‘artist’ in quotation marks. I thought, Oh, no, make him not a poseur, he’s too good for that.”

  “I noticed your eyes too. Les yeux longés. Wolf eyes. You used to say you fell in love with me through my paintings first.”

  “I did used to say that,” she answered, looking straight at me, those beautiful eyes, huge and slanted and gray as clouds, but without the warmth I often used to see there. “What a pity you never did any more like them.”

  I pretended I hadn’t heard this, and added, “And then I didn’t see you for years afterward, and Suzanne and I broke up, and then Mark dragged me to the college reunion, the fifteenth, and there you were, dating a friend of mine-”

  “Don’t remind me!”

  “How did you ever meet up with him? I forget.”

  “I forget too.”

  “And I stole you away from him right there in the Hilton ballroom. We eloped to that club on Avenue A, one of those black basements, and we danced until three in the morning and I took you back to my loft.”

  Saying this, I grabbed her and led her through a few steps, but her body was stiff as a manikin, not like it used to be.

  “Chaz, what are you doing?”

  “Oh, nothing, just thinking about old times. I’ve been spending a lot of time on memory lane recently, you know, bullshit about my life, how things could have been different, if only…”

  “Yes, but that’s something you have to work on yourself. I can’t get into that with you. I tried once, if you recall, and it nearly killed me. So, you know, you can’t come around here and be all sweet and loving and expect me to leap into your arms.” Looking bright darts of flame at me.

  A little moment of heartbreak here, and then she pulled away and said, “So let’s see what these look like.”