Theft: A Love Story

by Peter Carey

  The bedroom was a cabin with space for nothing but the sole essential item. Thirty-year-old steel windows opened onto a sixth-floor garden of white river stones and split-bamboo awning. The bedroom was tiny but one wall was filled with sky and although the stones produced a blinding glare by day, in moonlight we lay face to face inside an abalone shell, rumpled shadows like Ingres, a range of whites washed in pearly pink and green.

  Hugh had not begun sleeping on the roof. So the almost-famous actor downstairs was not yet complaining about the crunching pebbles above his head and we were not only spared Hugh’s intrusions but the neighbour’s phone calls of complaint. We could, for three blessed bloody weeks, leave all the shutters open and lie in the moonlight and, finally, be unhurried in our lovemaking. Her eyes. They were what is called baby blue, that is the precise colour of a baby’s eyes before the melanin arrives and here was a pleasure even greater than her taut young skin, a clear view of her naked soul—a deep kind of transparency without a single speck or flaw or smut. The weather remained warm and we lay above the sheets with the yacht rigging playing chimes through sleep and half sleep. There was nothing in the room but us, no past, no wardrobe, nothing of anyone else excepting the fingerprints of amateur glaziers held by the lumpy Pompeii putty in the rusty window frames.

  We were alone, until we were not.

  I woke suddenly one Sunday night and there it was, something, looking down at me. I was not drunk, but I had been very deep asleep, and now, Jesus, there was, at the foot of the bed, a whatchamacallit, a creature dressed in a pearly gown. Then it was a man, tall, handsome as a movie star, with heavy-lidded eyes and lips so bluish violet, they must have really been bright red. What I had thought a gown then became a suit or shirt covered in dry-cleaner’s plastic and this membrane caught and held the moonlight like a floating lethal thing in an aquarium.

  “Olivier?”

  Who else would have a key? He sneezed, a sudden noise like ripping curtains, and there was a crumpled rush of light, and in a moment the front door had slammed and I heard his oddly unhurried leather soles descending the stairs.

  Ten years earlier I would have made a big bloody scene and even now I was inclined to wake his wife, but it’s no good getting old if you don’t get cunning, and after a tumbler of Lagavulin, my nerves settled and my outrage subsided. I woke with the incident fresh in my mind but then Hugh burnt his socks while attempting to dry them on the toaster and I saw that Olivier Leibovitz was too big a subject for this kitchen. I collected my thermos and my sandwich, saying I would change her lock that evening when I returned.

  Marlene was cleaning the injured toaster but she paused, clocked me with those transparent eyes, rubbed her nose with the back of her wrist, and nodded.

  “O.K.,” she said.

  We both thought we knew what the other meant.

  Indeed, in bed that night, she began to tell me how she met Olivier Leibovitz in New York and she lay with her lovely small head on my chest and stroked my head. The lock produced the story, that was clear to me.

  When she met Olivier Leibovitz on Third Avenue she was only four years out of Benalla, that is she was just twenty-one years old, and she had never tasted French Champagne and certainly had not the least bloody idea of who Olivier was, nor had she ever heard of his father or Miró or Picasso or Braque or even Gertrude Stein who is reported to have said of the newborn Olivier, “I don’t like babies but I like this one.”

  All the evidence available at McCain Advertising—from the size of his office to his place in the distribution list of the conference reports—made it very clear Olivier Leibovitz was no-one of particular importance. He looked after a decidedly peripheral group of Garment District advertisers and had only one real national client, a family business based in Austin, Texas, whose executives, Mr. Tom, Mr. Gavin and Mr. Royce, exhibited both slavish respect for their grandfather’s ugly pink packs of dental adhesive, and a creepy fascination with Olivier, their international Jew. But as I said, she was only twenty-one, and from Benalla. She had never met a Jew before. All she knew was that he was very cute and he kept a horse in the Claremont Stables on West Eighty-ninth Street and rode it on the bridle path in Central Park each morning. So there was always this lovely perfume about him, beneath the talc, the smell of horse, which to her mind was aristocratic, a word she might have also applied to Cary Grant, an impression strengthened not only by Olivier’s physical grace but his clear separation from the general desperate ambition which marked McCain Advertising then and probably still does now that it has become McCain, Dorfman, Lilly. But Marlene, of course, was Australian, and Olivier’s refusal to push harder than was absolutely necessary never seemed lazy, the opposite, something on the very, very acceptable side of arrogant.

  She herself was absolutely no-one, an assistant to an assistant, a typist with a hot red IBM Selectric, its entire font contained in a dancing ball that spun and slashed at those pages headed CONFERENCE REPORT. She wore Bill Blass blouses and Paco Rabanne shoes with fuck-me heels but she lived in a hot stuffy walk-up on the scary edges of West Fifteenth Street, bathroom in the kitchen, number 351, only four houses away from Ninth Avenue, and she stayed in the office in the evenings because it was cooler and no-one was urinating on the stairs or anywhere but where you might expect. Olivier Leibovitz often worked late, and once, having gone to steal Finepoint pens from the McCain art department, she discovered him operating a Lazy Lucy one of those huge tracing machines worked by wheels and pulleys, which enlarged and reduced images in the days before computers.

  Only later did it occur to her that he was an Account Executive and therefore had no more business being in the art department than she did. At the time she registered his embarrassment as a puzzle.

  “You didn’t know I was an artist?” He raised an eyebrow and smiled. He had the most charming accent, not French, but not American either.

  She took a step towards him, but only to hide the box of sixty black Finepoints behind her back. I won’t tell, she smiled back.

  “Here, look. I’ll show you.”

  He moved aside so she might step up on the low platform and then they both poked their heads through the curtained hood, like a couple making funny faces for an instant picture at Penn Station. What did she expect to see?

  “Dentures,” she told me. “Denture adhesive.”

  There was a sheet of illuminated tracing paper, and—breathing that very heady smell of talc and man—Cary Grant would surely have smelt just like this—she saw projected on the paper the most unexpected thing. It was, in fact, an image of Chaplin Mécanique, from the collection of the Musée Leibovitz in Prague. All this she would learn later. Now Olivier, as artful as a tennis coach, leaned carefully around her in order to rack up the flatbed a notch. It was August 1974 and Marlene Cook had never really seen anything even vaguely like the tumbling cans, the shimmering pearly pyramids, the scary charming moustached child beaming in the window frame. It was an angel or the devil, who could know or tell?

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m just cropping it.”

  “Is it modern art?”

  He looked at her quickly, with a peculiar sort of attention.

  She frowned, feeling foolish, but certainly not only that, something stubborn and excited too. For this was clearly, totally, in no way fucking nothing. Later she would discover that she had an eye, but even now she had something which told her that this was immense. Of course she did not know what to say, and her confusion, and her embarrassment at her own ignorance, got mixed up with his smell and the feeling of that arm brushing against her while it slowly turned the wheel of the machine.

  “Do you really have a horse?”

  He turned to her, the pale palette of Chaplin Mécanique washing across his cheek, reflecting in his eyes.

  “Indeed I do.”

  “Oh.”

  “And do you ride?”

  “Not very well I suppose.”

  Outside the black velvet curtain he appraised her ve
ry frankly and confidently, and she thought, We Australians are really shit. We know nothing. We are so bloody ugly. Almost everything about him was perfectly proportioned, and the things which were not, like the heavy eyelids and the slightly thicker lips, were what gave his face its extraordinary distinction, made it both surprising and familiar, something one wished to return to again and again.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Not really.”

  “We could go to Sardi’s. Do you like Sardi’s?”

  “The Sardi’s?”

  “The Sardi’s,” he said, returning with amusement to his machine.

  She pushed the Finepoints away as if she were simply making room to sit on the filing cabinet. After a few minutes, he turned off the machine, retrieved a very small rather scratched transparency and, holding it up to the light, showed her how he had traced its tiny heart, so he could wrap a part of it—the grinning maniacal boy—around a coffee mug.

  “What then?” she asked. It was the slight smell of horse that made him seem so familiar.

  “I take it to my little Russian on Thirty-first Street and he produces one hundred and twenty thousand of them at twenty-three cents each.”

  “Why?”

  It was an endearing smile, tight and turned down at the corners, suddenly, unexpectedly shy. “Let’s say, not for my wife.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I thought you were divorced.”

  He put a long finger to his lips. “Exactly. This is my horse money. It’s a secret.”

  It was years before she understood he always ate at One Fifth and he would have taken no-one else to Sardi’s which he thought a joke. His invitation had been, if not exactly cynical, then very well judged, for he impressed her hugely but lazily, sweetly, even shyly, and if she had not been so embarrassed by the battered bath in the middle of her kitchen he would have been welcome to have come home with her that very night. And she was not fast. But she could not take her eyes off him, the loping walk, the heavy eyes, the sense that all of life was a wry and complicated joke.

  Soon afterwards he left for vacation in Morocco and in the sudden and unexpected absence she had plenty of time to discover Jacques Leibovitz was his father, and other stuff besides. McCain Advertising was on Third Avenue at Fifty-third Street and the New York Public Library was on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street and this was an easy enough walk at the end of those stinking August days. She was no student, anyone in Benalla could tell you that. She was a dunce, or if not a dunce then a troublemaker, but the dear old queen librarian with the dandruff on his jacket did not know that, and he led her to Milton Hesse’s monograph and to Gilbert’s Stein, and Philip Tompkinson’s Picasso’s Circle, and to the character Levine the Goat in a novel by Simenon.

  Just before Thanksgiving they did go out, two or even three times she recalled, although it always seemed to happen as an afterthought, or at least without any apparent planning, so their outings involved a great deal of walking from one restaurant where they had not booked to another where the kitchen was just closing and the combination of her teetering heels and Abe Beame’s bankrupt sidewalks, made the evenings perilous or irritating or both. She let him, finally, drop her home outside her real apartment and on two occasions they made their farewells in the backseat of a taxi while the skuzzy life of West Fifteenth Street continued in cars and doorways all around them. She had no idea that she was living with the ghosts of painters, that Marsden Hartley had rented in that same address, that Ernest Roth had a small back room around the corner at 232 West 14th Street, the famous art rookery. I myself did not really want to know any of this shit, not Marsden, not Roth, certainly not the son of Jacques Leibovitz sticking his tongue down her throat and his hand up her skirt. I smiled and nodded. Fuck him. It makes me sick to think about, even more now than before.

  24

  Butcher bought a plastic wading pool and then constructed a metal crossbar and once this was bolted to the floor we would drag the canvas like a reluctant beast through a cattle dip of paint. One on each side, we brothers took the canvas by the ears and pulled it through the DUNNY CAN, across the bar, then lay it out upon the floor so the Butcher could argue against it with a plumber’s trowel. He now talked only of Japan and his breath was like a dead SHAG stinking of raw fish and suddenly it was DOMO ARIGATO and MUSHY MUSH although he had the greatest TIN EAR ever nailed to a bald head and he had failed Intermediate French and had been INCAPABLE of learning the language of the German Bachelor except the word BOW-HOUSE which was where the German had studied before being forced to enter Bacchus Marsh his tail between his legs.

  Would my brother dare leave Australia? I did not think so.

  I spoke no syllable of Japanese and no-one suggested I should learn. This meant one thing or it meant another. Where Marlene and Butcher went I followed. Wheresoever they turned AS THE BIBLE SAYS then I was there, my ear attentive. At Go-Go Sushi in Kellett Street Jean-Paul came to allegedly negotiate terms for lending Butcher’s painting for the show in Tokyo. Butcher bought Krug champagne but then John-Paul refused the TWO-HUNDRED-DOLLAR BAIT so Butcher ordered SASHIMI DELUXE $15 and they quickly agreed Jean-Paul would lend the painting for Tokyo and that the catalogue would be printed in the same quality as for the recent Barnett Newman show and that Jean-Paul would be permitted to see the proofs for purposes of CONSULTATION ONLY that is, he did not have the right to MAKE A NUISANCE OF HIMSELF and that the painting PHFAAART would be attributed to the Collection of Jean-Paul Milan and his address and phone number would be provided for the benefit of the Japanese punters. Not once did Butcher say that he would actually leave the country.

  Jean-Paul began to make WILD GUESSES about how much the show might be costing and what the paintings would be sold for. It was clear he was trying to get a SLICE OF THE PIE and he suggested he could help with both the airfares. Whose airfares he did not say. I remained still and shiny as a stone. My brother turned on me suddenly, loudly demanding to know if I liked the raw fish because that was all people ate in Tokyo.

  I asked was I going to Japan.

  For answer he forced me to consume sea urchin, it was very slimy, as disgusting as shark vomit and I gagged. I looked at Marlene and she was a BEETROOT and I suddenly saw I would be abandoned in Sydney and she would be able to FUCK HER BRAINS OUT as the saying goes.

  In the Marsh there once lived Muldoon and also Barry an Englishman who wore a wig which was often remarked on in the Royal Hotel. Muldoon was the rope-skipping champion of Victoria before his motorcycle accident which was when he went into PARTNERSHIP with Barry. It was never clear exactly where they slept, but soon they opened two shops, one up by Geelong Road, the other down by the Royal Hotel and every morning they would meet to have a little chat by the post office. Everyone knew this was WINDOW DRESSING and the fellows used to tell them, Why don’t you get on the phone if you want to talk. But it was a joke as they were HOMOS. Then Barry decided to open a third business in Geelong and Muldoon hanged himself in public, from the verandah of the post office where they used to meet.

  The point is people often get CARRIED AWAY with their own plans so I asked where I would sit on the airplane. And then the conversation ignited like PENNY CRACKERS bursting open and scraps of red Chinese paper flying in the air and Jean-Paul remembering shearing sheds for NO GOOD REASON and next thing we were discussing Armidale and then the river Styx and there were brown snakes everywhere and the COW COCKY was telling Butcher, If you get bit by a brown, don’t bother wearing out the horse. Just write down what you want done with your things ha-ha.

  Ha-ha. Fuck you.

  I was shocked to learn the heartless buggers would abandon me so I would no longer DIGNIFY them with my presence and I took my chair out to Kellett Street to watch the punters enter and depart from the brothel across the road. My so-called friends MADE NO COMMENT about me but soon they relaxed and I could overhear them scheming like PUDDING THIEVES sharpening their knives over a grinding stone.

  Also FYI the Japanese killed many of o
ur boys. Buddy Guilline was tortured by the Japanese, also Moth White—if there’s a light on he’ll be there. Moth White was beheaded in Penang. Why would I wish to go to suck up to the Japanese if I could be at home making sausages, that was a job they were always happy for me to do, until our father purchased the hydraulic filler. I was also required for such unpleasant tasks as cooking tripe. Hit the dead white stomach with a stick, good boy Hugh, BEAUTY BOTTLER, but no-one would trust me with the knife. They gave the scabbard to my brother. In return he would forget our boys and kowtow to the Crown Princess of Japan. PHTHAAA God save him. He is lucky that his father’s dead.

  At night my brother would now lie beside Marlene and I would hear them agitating the mattress and when they had finished with that they would talk, on and on they went I do not grudge them a NATTER of course not. Out on the terrace it was very pleasant, and I lay down quiet as an old cow on the gravel my bum up in the air HEAD DOWN AND ARSE TO THE BREEZE as my father always said. Sometimes afterwards I wrote down certain of the comments I overheard by chance, or just an individual word like a stone in your shoe or a knife pressing between the ridges of your spine. Sticks and stones, vertebrae, pigs’ knuckles, for amusement, flicked in the air, caught on the back of the hand.

  25

  If you come from the Benalla Coffee Palace it will never occur to you, not in your fucking wildest dreams, that you might ever possibly talk to someone who wrote a book, so when, in the New York Public Library, Marlene read the young Milton Hesse’s monograph on Leibovitz, she was naturally slow to understand that its author was living down the road. It was her friend the gay librarian who showed her the ad in the Village Voice—DRAWING LESSONS FROM AMERICAN MASTER. MILTON HESSE. There was an address on Allen Street.

  “That’s him?”