Theft: A Love Story

by Peter Carey

  When there were medical emergencies and lost memories, Jackson took MATTERS IN HAND and was not always thanked as he should be. He also made arrangements with the SAFEWAY MANAGER when the patients took those carts down the hill and left them on the lawn outside Jackson’s office. Many is the evening he pushed the long line of carts up the hill on Edgecliff Road, a cruel punishment, he said so often. Fate had spurned him. All God gave him was a big dick FOURTEEN INCHES LONG you would never guess it to look at his skinny freckled arms.

  I had my own folding chair and was now EMPLOYED OFF THE BOOKS to push the carts instead of Jackson. I was happy to spare him all that pain. Also, in the parking lot of the Safeway I was fortunate to come across an abandoned pram, a story too sad to imagine so I blocked it from my mind, the child and mother, who knew where they were?

  Just the same, the pram was waterproof in very good condition and I could fill it with crushed ice and then set my Coca-Cola in the ice and my chicken sandwich in the top and in the days after my brother ran away I was not afraid but lived in the lap of luxury in front of the nursing home.

  The police came but soon they knew I was a LOCAL CHARACTER and when Jackson found me the PSYCHEDELIC GLASSES then the police liked me even more and soon they would stop for a chat and look at what I had inside the pram which was always dripping. They once bought me a DISPOSABLE DIAPER for my Coke bottle. They knew that I could take a joke.

  Edgecliff Road is fast and winding. It might make your electrics fire off like jellyfish stingers through your hair, to see all the cars screaming around the bend and tradesmen’s trucks losing bricks off their loads at 4 p.m. I never thought there could be a local character in such a busy place but soon I was that very thing.

  What a BLESSED RELIEF it turned out to be so far away from the constant raging about art, and all the world trying to prevent my brother having the publicity to which he was entitled. Strange to say, I never knew such peace as camping on the shore of Edgecliff Road, a river in flood, roaring with rubber tyres and bricks and blasphemies.

  I truly hoped my brother was happy eating raw fish and fucking himself stupid. His broken promise was his own to suffer bee-bop, shee-bop, it hurt me not at all.

  31

  I have said some dreadful things about Business Class, some in print, but I am an artist and I had often need to make myself at home amongst the purchasing class. I let the lackey fill my glass with, as it happened, Tasmanian bloody Pinot Noir and after the last chocolate and second Armagnac Marlene lay her head upon my chest and we slept damn near all the way to Narita. Even with a bursting bladder, I was as weightless as an astronaut.

  Of course I would be punished for this trip, but that would be later and this was now and not since the bawling screaming murderous year I ran away to study life drawing at Footscray Tech had it ever once occurred to me that it might be possible to ever be free of my brother’s bony elbow, his stinky breath, his sweaty sudden arrivals in the middle of my sleep. During the Boeing’s descent, and then through all the wait at Immigration, on the train, through the following days, I continued to feel so high and happy. Forgive me, I did not worry about Hugh. Not for a second did I try to imagine how he felt.

  In Tokyo they are intent on concreting themselves to death, but I found the city beautiful, a three-dimensional representation of my neon leaping heart.

  As Marlene had predicted, my paintings had been delayed in Sydney while Amberstreet and his fellow geniuses ripped the crates apart. Why else send my paintings to Japan if not to hide a stolen Leibovitz? Go suck my dick!

  Of course they failed to find the Tourenbois so they spent a few hundred taxpayers’ dollars to crate them up again. By some miracle they didn’t hurt my canvases, which I saw unpacked at Mitsukoshi only two days late.

  I would normally have driven the gallery nuts with hanging and rehanging, but I found myself agreeing to leave matters in their hands, and for the next three days we did the honeymooner special, and I will spare you the cute postcards of Asakusa, and the cries of the caged birds who staffed the front desk at our hotel. I was happy in Japan, happy with Marlene, happy to wake and look at those clear bright inquisitive, mischievous eyes.

  To do the simplest thing with her was a pleasure, to look at anything, to drift, light as gossamer down a lane, to be confused by the labyrinth of Lego-coloured subway symbols, to discuss the gauze of August light falling across the billowing curtains of construction sites. We finally arrived at Mitsukoshi just as the white-gloved greeters began their morning work, and on the thirteenth floor we found my paintings and even if my name was spelled BONE I did not care, even if they had lit each canvas so fastidiously there was no spill of light onto the wall and there was, let us say, a slightly precious decorated element which was a very fucking long way from Bellingen, I did not care. The work could still bite your leg off and spit the crunchy pieces on the floor.

  Marlene was so close, a shadow, a touch of sleeve, a whisper of hand, a living breath of kindness on my cheek.

  “Do you see that?” she asked me.

  “See what?”

  “That.”

  She indicated, I thought, the general way the gallery was arranged—five rooms, nine big canvases, impossible to see more than one work at any time. The numbers and titles were placed away from the work, on the adjoining wall where it was both clearly attached but also separate.

  “The titles?”

  “You moron, Butcher. Look.” Beside each of the titles was a small Japanese character, black on white. “Here,” she whispered. “This is the Japanese version of a red sticker. It means no longer available. Sold, yes. You’ve sold out, my love.”

  And there, in the middle of the empty gallery she leapt on me, pinned her legs around my waist.

  “Shit.”

  “Yes, shit. Congratulations.”

  This was what Amberstreet could not get his provincial little head around. The show was not even open, and I had sold it without a suck-up dinner or dangerous conversation with a critic. This was so much better than Australia. Even in my good years I had never had a sellout before the drinks were poured and while I kissed her soft, wide mouth, I was—forgive me—doing calculations, multiplying, subtracting. I had two hundred bloody thousand dollars after commission and freight. Just like that.

  Later there would be the opening celebration about which there is nothing much to say. Certainly, in the country of Hokusai and Hiroshige I did not expect an introduction by lesbian trick riders, but by then much stranger things had happened.

  It was to a printer’s shop we went a few days later, carrying a professionally wrapped bottle of Lagavulin. We were to pay our respects to Mr. Utamaro who had printed the catalogue for my show. That was all I knew about him, and that he had his offices at the end of a blank-faced lane in Ikekuburo. God knows what the other buildings were, warehouses or something else—I have no idea. Mr. Utamaro met us at the elevator in a canvas printer’s apron and led us into one of those very simple rooms you might normally expect to find at a framer’s. His steel windows were so close to the expressway you could see no more than five speeding Hondas at any time. Below the windows and around the room were deep wooden studio drawers, each one neatly labeled, not in English naturally. With infinite courtesy, he removed a poster for Pollock, a catalogue for Matisse, and with the freeway rumbling in our ears, set them carefully upon the pale scrubbed table which occupied the center of the room.

  The old codger was handsome, strangely freckled, with a high forehead from which he swept his mane of silver hair. There was a delicacy in his mouth and a softness to his hands that soon made it clear that he was a great deal more than a common printer. I never, for a second, underestimated him, but he was very hard to understand and—also, by the way—I had not expected an extended visit. It was not until my face was aching from politeness that I helped myself to the second glass of scotch. Well, fuck it, I was Australian. What else was I meant to do?

  When the cars on the expressway turned on their
lights, we were still stuck with Mr. Utamaro and then the glow of the passing faces, all separated in their own cocoons of life, reminded me of the melancholy parade that cut the Marsh in half on Sunday nights. I topped up my glass again, why not?

  Mr. Utamaro rolled down a soft grey cloth on the wooden table and on top of this he placed a glassine bag. Then, having looked up expectantly at Marlene, he slid out a very ordinary brochure, maybe eight inches by six inches, black-and-white, glossy but discoloured with age.

  “Michael!” she cried, but although she reached for my hand, what she was looking at was the brochure, on the cover of which was, so I thought, the painting Dozy Boylan had bought years later.

  Marlene made a dove noise. “Oh.”

  Mr. Utamaro bowed.

  “Christ,” I said. “It’s Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois.”

  Mr. Utamaro smiled.

  “No, no, shoosh.” Marlene’s colour was very high, a sort of aspen pink. She pointed at the title and dimensions which were, in the midst of all the Japanese, in English. “It’s a different work,” she said.

  Well I already knew she had an eye but I have one as well, and I had grown up with a black-and-white reproduction of Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois.

  “No, it’s the same.”

  “Yes, darling,” and she stroked my hand as if to soften the contradiction. “Except it’s smaller. It’s twenty-eight by eighteen inches. A study.”

  Having had my own painting ripped apart by morons because a piece of collage was allegedly thirty by twenty-one and a half inches, I was not likely to forget the number.

  “See,” she said, “the title of this one is Tour en bois, quatre, ‘Wood-lathe, number four.’”

  If I was somehow irritated by this coincidence, I had no good reason to be—artists can do twenty studies for a major work. In fact it was not even a coincidence, but somehow this thing pissed me off.

  “Tour en bois,” I said. “I know what it means.”

  “Shoosh baby. I know you know. But look anyway.” Watching her slip on a pair of white cotton gloves you would swear she had spent twenty years working at the Tate. She held the old catalogue in her open palms and sniffed it like a rose. Then, softly, deftly, she brought it back to the grey cloth and Mr. Utamaro, having gravely bowed, returned this ridiculously ordinary item to its glassine bag.

  By now dark had fallen and the cars ran past the window in such a way that the whole wall became like a canvas by the great Jim Doolin who had been driven out of Melbourne in 1966. Now, surely, we could go, but no, we moved to a small alcove where Mr. Utamaro formally refilled my glass and I learned the story of Tour en bois, quatre which had come to Japan as part of an exhibition of works by Dumont, Léger, Leibovitz, Metzinger and Duchamp organised by Mitsukoshi to introduce the Japanese public to cubism. This was in 1913. Mr. Utamaro’s father had photographed the paintings and met with M. Leibovitz himself. And bless me, if there was not one more exhibit—a very solid-looking Japanese gentleman side by side with the old goat in a fancy restaurant with heavy black Empire chairs.

  “Do you know who this is, Michael?”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “This is Mr. Utamaro’s friend, Mr. Mauri, who bought Tour en bois, quatre in 1913.”

  I nodded.

  “Michael, you know his son.”

  I don’t think so.

  “Michael! His son is the gentleman who bought your entire show. I told you,” she said, colouring intensely enough for me to realise she was not excited but upset.

  “I’m sure you didn’t say the name.”

  “Oh, never mind,” she said, and was suddenly fond, stretching out her hand across the table to hold my arm. “So when we do meet him, baby, perhaps he will show us Tour en bois, quatre.”

  I looked to Mr. Utamaro and bowed from my chair. I hoped that would be polite enough for a hairy barbarian.

  Marlene stood. Mr. Utamaro stood.

  Thank Christ, I thought, that’s over.

  I was, as they say, mistaken.

  32

  Marlene said, You must be over the moon with your success.

  I said it was a damn good feeling. It was a dirty lie, but it is completely unacceptable to tell the truth—that it is very bloody unpleasant to have all your paintings hoovered out of you by strangers. If it had been a museum, O.K., that’s completely different. But the punter was someone I understood to be a corporate Japanese. Buy the Empire State Building, you’re welcome. Take every Van Gogh you want. Have a Leibovitz, why would I care? But what the fuck was this Mr. Mauri going to do with I, the Speaker? The so-called Plaintiff had all the “precommencement” paintings and now this bugger had the rest. Was there a faster way to be erased from history?

  All of these nasty ungrateful thoughts I kept buttoned up for at least twelve hours, until, that is, we were sitting on tatami beside forty Japanese men drinking beer and eating raw fish for their breakfast.

  When I said the unsayable, Marlene leaned across to touch my butcher hands, and held each ugly sausage finger as if it had been, individually, miraculously, responsible for The Last Supper. And then, without for a second interrupting this particular series of caresses, she very quietly drew my attention to the benefits of my situation. For instance, she revealed that she had authenticated a Leibovitz for Henry Beigel, a South African millionaire and had learned, in the process, that the fucker had squirreled away 126 works by the American painter Jules Olitski. Beigel was a total bastard, she said, but he had an eye, she said, a real eye, and he was slowly driving up Olitski’s prices and he, like Mr. Mauri, had been known to buy a damn show. So, she told me, her very long eyelashes delineated like pen strokes in the ever-present neon light, if you were Jules Olitski you would know your prices were protected and that your best work would end up in a good museum. You would have your future underwritten, not by some flake like Jean-Paul but by an educated, greedy art collector, no-one better.

  Fine, yes, Henry Beigel, but Mr. Mauri, who the fuck was he? I did not mean to be abrasive. I was happy, of course I was bloody happy. I was grateful. I loved her, more than the eyelashes and cheeks, her tenderness, her generosity, and—even if this sounds weird—her guile. I was at home with her, with her light, slight body, her bottomless eyes.

  That morning, after breakfast, we both returned to the scene of the crime at Mitsukoshi. I expected I would feel better when we entered. We both expected it, I think. But instead my work seemed lost and alien, almost meaningless, like wretched polar bears in a northern Queensland zoo. What did these punters think? I asked a fellow with a blonde streak on his head, but that was later, after lunch. I had been drinking, and Marlene shooshed me and we went out in the streets and walked a little, not stopping at the bars.

  The faxed invitation from Mr. Mauri was waiting at the so-called Ryokan. It consisted of two pages, the first a delicately drawn map, the second a very formal letter that read like a comic translation from The Government Inspector.

  I decided that I would be a gentleman and stay away from Mr. Mauri.

  To this very generous offer, Marlene made no response, not until we were inside our tiny room. Even there she took her time, removed her sandals, and squatted quietly before the little table.

  “All right, Butcher,” she said, “time to cut the crap.”

  She fixed me with her snake eyes.

  “First,” she said, “this man is a very important collector. Second, I do a lot of business with him. Third, you are not going to disgrace me now.”

  In my ugly early life this would have been the starting point for a fearsome row which might have run into the early hours of the following day and ended with me alone in some Ukrainian bar at dawn. To Marlene Leibovitz I said, “O.K.”

  “O.K. what?”

  “O.K. I won’t disgrace you.”

  I was embarrassed, I suppose, to give in without a fight. I could easily have worked myself into a fury, but when I slipped into my Armani jacket she reached up to tie my tie.


  “Oh,” she said, “I do love you.”

  With Marlene I was always in a foreign country.

  Of course everyone but me knows about Roppongi. It was here apparently, in High Touch Town, that Mr. Mauri’s father had the famous bar where American spies and gangsters and visiting movie stars would hang out all night long. It was Mr. Mauri’s father who claimed to have turned the pinball machine Japanese, by setting it on end and—having made sure a lot could fit into a small space—devised a sly system, involving soft stuffed toys and very fucking narrow alleyways, where it became pachinko, a gambling machine. Some dispute this, but no-one argues that Mauri San was both a thug and a very serious art collector, well before the war. The son was filial to a fault. So to enter Mauri’s office you had to walk through the ancestral shrine, the bar, the chalkboard menu featuring shitty pizza and Italian meatballs, leftovers from the cowboy years of occupation.

  At that hour, before the famous lighting did its trick, Mauri’s Blue Bar had all the fusty dullness of a theatre with the house lights on, and it really took a lot of imagination to understand how anyone would pay twenty dollars for a martini in this joint. This was where my art had always been headed for, how depressing. We entered the lift and ascended to the eighteenth floor where young Mr. Mauri ran something called the Dai Ichi Corporation, dai ichi meaning “number one.”

  The receptionist was a very dour long-chinned lady with a helmet cut and dull grey suit, but she did not punish us for long and soon we were brought, through an anteroom, to my new collector’s office which was as dull as ply and aluminum can be made to be. Nothing suggested taste or sensitivity at all, and I was taken aback to find myself treated with such veneration by Mr. Mauri who appeared to be an earnest, even studious man of thirty.