Henry had written several books but only published a couple. In another twenty-five years, he’d become a millionaire for his straight manner and engaging way of writing someone out of trouble and into the land of the swine where you no longer give a shit about anything that’s not happening to you at that very moment.
“To lose, to be a loser, is a wonderful thing, don’t you know” Henry said.
I looked at his face closely, at the oval mask of indiscretion that was both appealing and repulsive, but most of all friendly. Kindness punctuated his every word. He spoke like a piano, being played staccato, like a dream dancing on top of the failures that you try and come to terms with in your sleep.
The three of us sat there for hours, impervious to the diners, to their loud complaints and demonstrative expressions of incest. A man sat down eating with his young daughter, maybe twelve or thirteen. He would take the food off his plate and smear it on his daughter’s thigh. It tickled her and she would laugh as her father licked the food off.
I felt like I was in a madhouse, I told Henry. He laughed heartily and told me that, yes, I was in a madhouse, and the place of release from the plagues of daily life where gratuitous pleasure is felt by all whether they want it or not.
“You’ll get over it,” he assured me.
Then, I told Henry about my experience in the Seychelles, about the separation from my wife. I went on forever, painting my tale of woe in rich colors, confessing to him that I was a failed artist, a painter who was not accepted.
“You want to be accepted,” Miller said with a snarly laugh. “Then become a bank teller or a personnel manager. Give people what they want even though it makes them even more stupid and trapped in this gob of spit that’s called life.”
Henry made a sound that was part grunt and part humming. He ordered more Retsina. We drank the pepper-flavored urine for another hour and, while we did so, Henry and his tales took me on a trip around the world, his world. The man was so defiant that he overlaid his world on top of the so-called real one like someone would place a translucent piece of plastic over a map.
Henry chose what he wanted to believe, felt what he wanted to feel. When he had been in the agony of living, he would drink Retsina and spend the few drachmas he had left on a fine meal. He would sit in the sun for hours, occasionally smoking a cigarette, enjoying his time on this earth. He had no dark obsessions like I had, no need to cultivate his mental illness.
In an afternoon, Henry did for me what it would take years of psychoanalysis to accomplish. And he did it with lust and a light touch, not with the heavy-handed analysis that made me crawl up the walls of my open air prison from which I would always fall back into this world.
But I wasn’t in this world after a few days with Henry and Katsimbalis. They took me to the worlds of Greek Mythology, to the origin of our Western Civilization, through all the absurd reasoning that created our present chaos from an earlier chaos.
On a walk one day, a conversation which spanned the life of man on this planet, Henry brought up the Tibetan people, how their lives are enriched and made durable because of one man, the Dalai Lama, the God-King of Tibet who had been returning as a reincarnated being for thirteen times at that counting. He was only a few months old then but “that baby,” Miller said, “had the kind of expansive spirit that can keep planets in orbit and cause wars to be put to tests of their relevancy.
“He’s keeping you and me talking right now,” alluding to the Dalai Lama’s presence in the nearby water. He knelt down at the shore’s rocky edge and lifted up a handful of water. “His power runs through you like this water. It’s harmless and refreshing unless you’re caught in it during a storm. But if it ever does catch you in a storm, the power of this single solitary infant is capable of saving you. Meet him and you’ll be cured of your attachment to your sufferings. And he’s a newborn, don’t you know” Miller said, stopping on our path to impress me with his incredulity over this fact. “We should leave here and meet him.”
“Go to Tibet?” I inquired.
“Why not? Here we are, a Greek and a couple of guys from the States, on the eve of a World War, trying to find some way to end it before it begins. The Dalai Lama can teach us something – if we can’t stop the war and lop off Hitler’s head, he can bring us to a place where we’d have a compassion a thousand times greater than a butterfly’s compassion for a caterpillar.”
While Miller continued to rant and rave about the mission we’d just assigned to ourselves, a real life pilgrimage to the source of the world’s peace, I was brought back to a childhood that I might have shared with Miller, had I been born twenty years earlier and with the unquenchable energy to perform pirouettes over the suffering of others.
As I stood there, I became removed from the constancy of suffering. I was on a mountaintop, entering the grand palace of my childhood dreams. It didn’t really matter what Miller said at this point, every word stuck to me like fly paper and I became enmeshed in Henry’s spiritual rhetoric.
Henry had the energy, I had the money, Katsimbalis had the education, and we all had the foolishness to make a trek to the world’s most remote location to find answers to questions that we hadn’t even asked yet.
“Tibet it is,” Miller cackled, and then lifted up his magic wand while I made the financial commitment to our trek. I bought plane tickets, boat tickets, bus tickets, documents of passage, clothes, and even a few bottles of the Retsina that was fueling our imaginations. I fully prepared us for a trip that we would never make.
Back in the present time, in my bedroom, I continued to work on my painting of Miller, adding a sheen to the skin on his face and capturing that sense of humor that had saved my life.
INTO THE NIGHT
At the studio, we shot Norma Desmond’s bridge game with the people that Gillis called “the waxworks” – a collection of old actors from the silent days that would gather in Norma’s living room, playing games that would fill their wistful days of decrepitude.
When I watched Joe Gillis sitting by Norma, I thought of myself sitting near Michel’s casket in the funeral parlor. It was unpolished, like Gillis’s car, like the car that was being towed away when Norma asked Gillis to empty the card players’ ashtray.
When Max informed Gillis about his car, the downtrodden screenwriter sprang into action. He went to Norma, who was deep in her game, and whispered “I want to talk with you for a minute.”
Norma’s whole focus was on her card game. “Not now my dear, I’m playing three no trump.”
“They’ve come for my car.”
“Please, now I’ve forgotten how many spades are out.”
“Look, I need some money right now.”
“Can’t you wait until I’m done?”
“No,” Gillis said in a clear loud and demanding voice but Norma only turned to him and said “Please!” Gillis looked around at the old actors – Anna Q Nillson, Buster Keaton and H. B. Warner. They displayed shock at the young gigolo’s rudeness and demanding interruptions. Gillis then retreated in defeat. He was a young man in an old world where his needs were secondary to the importance of the waxworks’ card game.
It was the last scene of the day and, as usual, Billy and I walked back to his office with observations of the day’s shoot and discussions about what was to come. Billy was thriving, in the midst of his own game while I was more like Gillis, needing to have someone listen to the dark thoughts that raced through my mind.
When we walked into his office and Billy switched on the lights, he turned to me. “Why so grim?”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
“Nothing is always something big. What gives, Alex?”
What gave, of course, were my memories of Katharine. The Grecian memory of the night before had given way to my recollections of trying to get Katharine back in those years since she left me and took our child with her.
“Sometimes I wish the war was still going on.”
“Nostalgic, huh,” Billy said while
pouring me a glass.
I picked it up and took a gulp. “Look, Billy, not tonight. It’s too late for me to start bleeding all over you.”
“Bleed away,” Billy said while smiling.
I sat down. “During the war, I had Katharine,” I told him. “Or at least the fantasy of Katharine. We kept in touch and there were always times when I thought we’d get back together.”
“Troubles with Sabrina,” he asked.
“If it were, I could do something about it. She’s still alive.”
“Doesn’t the picture give you a little break from your self torture?”
“Look, I’m sorry Billy, but…”
Out of nowhere, an explosion rocked the studio like we were back in the war. We left his office and stood under a curling cloud of black smoke, smoke that covered the sky and obliterated the stars.
Billy and I walked on the lot, against our better judgment, but we were both too entranced by the danger to do anything else. We watched as the roaring fire grew on the back lot, as an armada of fire trucks rumbled down the narrow streets between the sound stages. I remember seeing a group of horses, trapped in a corral. I raced to the fences, opened them and freed the horses to run wildly through the studio lot.
The inflammatory war scene made me think of Katharine, of when I met her in Spain, at Guernica, where I pleaded with her to leave the city because I intuited that something catastrophic was going to happen there. I couldn’t believe that she’d take Mara with her into combat. She had a Spaniard family baby-sitting her, so she wasn’t exactly in combat, I suppose, but she put her in such danger.
Katharine was working alongside the famous war photographer, Robert Capa, writing first hand accounts of the Republican’s heroic efforts to win back the country. She finally heeded my warning and left Guernica before the Nazis appeared the next day with the fire bombing experiment, not too different from what we did to the Japanese when we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When the three of us had made it safely to Paris, I told her what I did after we broke up in the Seychelles. Not about seeing Henry Miller but about a business arrangement I had entered into with her lover, about representing his work in my gallery. At first, I thought that she arranged it but she told me that she hadn’t, that Michel approached me on his own.
By that time, Billy and I had returned to his office. The fire was under control and we both needed some spirits to soothe our overworked nerves.
I started telling Billy about my strange memories of Michel’s murder. “I was back on that sailboat, again.”
“The one where you kill your brother, I imagine.”
“I was alone at sea with him. We would drink and laugh late into the night as the halyards twanged on the mast. He was showing off his paintings, talking about his travels and women.”
“And you were talking about taking your shared woman back?”
“I wouldn’t mention Katharine in front of him. I was afraid of what might happen.”
“You’d destroy your representation deal?”
“No, I’d destroy him. And as a matter of fact, I did,” I told Billy. “While you and I were silently strolling through the lot, I was strangling Michel in my mind. I left him on his sailboat, his eyes open in alarm, his body frozen in death.”
“Remember not to tell your Tahitian detective about this one.” “Then, I took his canvases and hurled them into the sea.”
“Donating money again,” Billy said, “What did you do with the
murder weapon?”
“But I didn’t kill him, Billy.”
“Just in your imagination, huh?”
“My imagination is my whole world. Every time I leave the
studio, I start to think about Michel and his death. That is, if I’m not reminiscing about Katharine.”
“Or working your way into Sabrina’s bed.”
“Funny you should say that. Just a few nights ago, when I was
in Sabrina’s apartment, I lay there in her bed and had an epiphany. I realized, then, that no matter what happened to me, I’d always be in a serene place. Whether I killed Michel or not, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the delicious darkness in Sabrina’s bedroom. After fucking like animals, my mind was cleaned. For a brief while, Katharine’s suicide didn’t matter, Michel’s murder didn’t matter.”
“You were at peace with your insanity, you mean?”
I stared at Billy, offended for a moment before we both broke out in laughter.
ENDOWMENTS
While Sabrina and I were having dinner one night, at our table, at Perino’s, she dropped a bomb.
“I met Margaret, today.”
“Margaret?”
“You know, the woman who ‘started’ your gallery.”
“She’s just a patron.”
“How come I never heard about her?”
“What’s to hear? I have a lot of patrons.”
“Are they all as condescending as this one?”
“What did she say?”
“It was her attitude. She seemed disappointed that you never
told her about me.”
I laughed. “Yeah, well Mrs. Wilcox thinks she owns the place because she put on a big show there ten years ago.”
“Oh.”
“Her art works saved the gallery.”
“Does Potala need saving again?”
“Why?”
“Because she was talking about another ‘big show.’ How come I hear about this from her?”
“This is the first I’ve heard of a new Margaret Wilcox Exhibit.”
“Maybe she wants to surprise you.”
“Margaret’s not worth fighting with.”
Sabrina backed down. “I guess you don’t want to confront her too much.”
“I don’t see her much.”
“That’s what I was really asking.”
“Margaret is an old headache, Sabrina.”
I toyed with my glass of champagne, staring into it.
“I guess you don’t want to talk about it,” she asked me.
“It’s been ten years.”
“Was it her money?”
I released the glass in my hand, smiled at Sabrina. “Isn’t it always?” I sighed and continued, ignoring my meal. “Things weren’t going too well at the gallery when Margaret presented herself. Exhibition after exhibition had failed and I was just about to close down the shop. But Margaret came in with an enthusiasm about the place.”
“And enthusiasm about you?”
“I don’t know how she managed that.”
“False pride hardly becomes you.”
“Okay, she needed somewhere to sell part of her collection.”
“And in exchange, you became part of her collection.”
I took a good swig of my champagne. “Yes, something like that.” I finished my glass, then the bottle. I signaled to the waiter to get us another.
“I don’t want her to tell me how to lay out an exhibition.”
“Is that what she was doing?”
Sabrina glared. “Listen, Alex,” she said, “I don’t have any rights to your past, but…”
“I’ll talk to Margaret.”
“About me?”
I looked gently at Sabrina. “About her new show.”
“You’re going to do it.”
“I know what art she’ll probably sell and it’ll make me a fortune. Just this once. After that, I won’t have another one.”
“You sound like a gambler.”
“I don’t want her around the gallery after that.”
“Margaret doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who would let herself be thrown out of her home.”
The new champagne bottle arrived. The waiter popped open the bottle and poured two glasses. Then he placed the bottle in the champagne bucket and walked away.
“Margaret doesn’t like a lot of things but that’s not going to stop me.”
Sabrina looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you st
ill display some of your brother’s work?”
“Because it sells.”
“Not as well as Mrs. Wilcox’s contributions.”
I smiled at her. “They aren’t contributions. All we get are the commissions.”
“What was it like before Margaret?”
“I told you. I was about to close down.”
“So you owe her?”
“I don’t owe Margaret anything! And I want you to stop thinking about her. She’s not worth it.”
“It’s hard to stop thinking about the person who bosses you around.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Don’t bother.”
“She has no right to do that. I’ll take care of it.” I grabbed the glass in front of me, and then took a long gulp.
“Do you still have that power?”
Pause.
“It’s been over a long time, Sabrina. I just see her to keep the flow of valuable works in Potala.”
“What about all the other artists? The ones you connected with in Europe? The émigré’s who needed somewhere to show their works?”
“Oh, they sell well enough…”
“But not as well as Margaret’s endless collection.”
“She’s doesn’t own our only collection.”
“And how have you come by our other artists?”
I started talking about my earlier days, in Paris, with Katharine, when I was gathering artists to represent.
DECEPTIONS
In 1937, when Katharine came back to me again, we were in Paris and planning to meet my father…for the first time.
I was in La Rotonde, a big watering spot for the artists and writers before the war. I was sitting there with Katharine.
“I can represent anyone in America,” I told the group of painters and illustrators gathered around my table. Paris had their own dealers, men ready and willing to rob the artists with enormous takes on their artworks. I came to the fore with the modest offer of a 10% commission that included storing the works, framing them, and displaying them in galleries in the wealthy environment of America.
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