Theft: A Love Story

by Peter Carey

  Our interview was conducted on either side of his big empty desk on which there was a folder containing not only my press file, but a considerable number of transparencies and these my new patron or owner occasionally held up to his desk lamp, speaking about each at some length. I could understand almost everything he said, and often recognised the sources of his sentences, some praise for me from Herbert Read (1973), a little from Elwyn Lynn (1973) and Robert Hughes (1971). I sat, thinking about the Japanese education system, the benefits of learning things by rote. I looked to Marlene but she would not catch my eye. She sat on the edge of her chintz-covered chair, her hands upon her lap, nodding from time to time.

  Once more I was in a room watching the dark come down in Tokyo, the sky outside the uncurtained window filled with pink and green neon advertising bars and go-go and Bangkok Massage. Mr. Mauri finished with his dissertation and led us into another room, much more comfortable, with overstuffed armchairs and a number of early-twentieth-century paintings—there was a very plausible Matisse.

  One of these, reflecting so much quartz halogen from its shrieking gold perimeter, was Tour en bois, quatre. If I experienced a lurch of disappointment, it was not because this was the study, but because, at this momentous meeting, Leibovitz appeared to be a smaller talent than the one I knew when I was a jerk-off teenager with no more data than a black-and-white sixty-five-screen reproduction. I had imagined something ethereal, transporting, mythic, colours glowing with layers of obsessive underpainting.

  “My goodness,” said Marlene and she was straight at the canvas without any Japanese preliminaries. Mauri was beside her too, a pig at trough, I thought, his gold-rimmed spectacles twirling like a spastic top in the hand behind his back.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  Is that all there is? I thought. The canvas was almost homely, a chip missing from the blouse, a slight grubbiness on the surface of the cadmium yellow. All this—little things, easily repaired in restoration—was exaggerated by the gaudy criminal frame, and it took a real act of will to escape the pin-up of my youth, to actually see what was in front of me, the lovely witty squirrelly brushwork of the lathe, and, more generally, the brave decisions the old goat had made at a time when no-one, certainly not Picasso, had entered this particular arena of nonsynthetic cubism. Here, in the products of the lathe, in cylinders and cones, there was a clear straight line from Cézanne to Leibovitz.

  “May I?” Marlene asked.

  She lifted the work off the wall and turned it over. “Look,” she said to me. Mr. Mauri bowed me forward so I could see the shadowy secret discoloured canvas, the tracks of staples from its loans and travels, the Japanese characters stamped upon the stretcher which, I guessed, marked its appearance at Mitsukoshi in 1913. There was also a desiccated stalk-eyed signal fly, I might not have noticed if I had not spent so many nights drawing the enemies of art. This little bugger had freshly hatched, and found itself behind a Leibovitz, and here it had been caught and died but somehow never eaten. This sad little death would continue in my mind for days.

  “Perhaps a problem,” said Mr. Mauri, “I do not wish to sell it in Japan.” He smiled painfully. “Japanese people don’t like so much.”

  “Of course.”

  “St. Louis perhaps?”

  I was slow to realise what was happening in front of me. Mauri was asking her to sell this work. I looked to her but she would not catch my eye.

  “The first thing,” she told him, cool as ice, “would be to get it to New York.”

  “Not Freeport?”

  “No need.”

  Mr. Mauri paused and looked at the painting. “Good,” he said.

  He bowed. Marlene bowed. I bowed.

  And that, I realised, was it. It was done. Presumably there would be paperwork, a signature from the owner of the droit moral, but the painting was now all but authenticated. That much I got completely.

  I had expected Mr. Mauri would wish to discuss his clever strategies for driving up the price of my nine paintings, but nothing like that occurred and a few minutes later we had passed through the famous Blue Bar and were on the streets of High Touch Town amongst the jostling crowds. Marlene took my hand and swung it high, literally skipping down the steep stairs to the Oedo line.

  “What happened?” I asked as we fed our coins into the ticket dispenser.

  “Oh baby, baby,” she said, “I am so happy. I love you so.”

  She turned to me and lifted her chin and her eyes were glowing, clear as water on the subway stairs.

  “I’m onto you.”

  “Sure you are,” she said and we kissed there, before the turnstiles, in front of the white-gloved ticket collector, beside the flood of High Touch girls and gaijin hopefuls who pushed around us, buffeting us, not knowing what worlds they were connecting to, threads of history joining us to New York, Bellingen and Hugh, always Hugh, sitting on the footpath with his dripping pram.

  33

  Jean-Paul came to visit in shirt cuffs and perfume. He was very cross because Marlene Leibovitz had wired him fifteen thousand dollars. What had offended him? He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at me.

  He had spent the MORNING WITH LAWYERS. Christ Almighty, Marlene Leibovitz had tricked him into signing over the right to sell If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die in Japan. This painting was his PROPERTY. It had been NOT FOR SALE AT ANY PRICE so Marlene was an EMBEZZLER and a CON ARTIST. He said he would report her to INTERPOL as soon as he could find out how.

  I thanked him for being so kind—suck up suck up. Immediately he asked to see my room and I was sorry I had spoken but my FEW POSSESSIONS were in their proper place including the wreath and radio given me by the police. Jean-Paul turned very thoughtful. He put his cigarette under the running tap and said he was worried for my safety. I said Butcher would soon return to fetch me and he gave me a look so full of pity it made my stomach turn.

  MINUTES LATER I was informed by Jackson that my bed was needed for a new CLIENT and I must remove my pram and second trolley to the utility room where I would live until my position was made clear. My brother was IN ARREARS. What would happen to me now? My brother had once forced me to live in the back of his FC Holden. I had been LEGALLY IN HIS CARE in the streets of St. Kilda, Mordiallac, East Caulfield and other places he was drawn to by his pursuit of women who would hold his ugly head between their breasts. Yellow streetlights, redbrick flats, designated parking, oil stains on the concrete, no soul alive except, every now and then a single REFFO or a WOG or BALT each man driven from his place of birth condemned to roam the Earth at night.

  The FC Holden stank of wet cigarette butts, potatoes sprouting in the damp rusting floor, piles of newspapers moldering and all this FLOTSAM meant the LAYBACK SEAT could not be lowered, all sleep denied.

  At East Ryde, even Bellingen and Bathurst Street I had thought those bad days over but the utility room had been always waiting at the end of the L-shaped hallway, down five steps, beside the laundry, the sour smell of cleaning rags worse than the smell of AUSTRALIA’S OWN CAR. I asked Jackson was there a nicer room. He said no, and then he tried to give me money off the books but I dare not take it.

  He said suit yourself.

  Not wishing the clients to know I was being paid I had never talked to them. Now they thought I was Jackson’s friend so naturally they did not like me. It was my own stupid fault I was all alone. I missed my brother and could not think how he might ever hear my voice.

  And Samson called O LORD GOD, REMEMBER ME? He said, I PRAY THEE, ONLY THIS ONCE. AND HE TOOK HOLD OF THE TWO MIDDLE PILLARS, ONE WITH HIS RIGHT HAND, AND OF THE OTHER WITH HIS LEFT.

  It was wrong they should upset me thus.

  34

  We fled the subway at Shinjuku and then zigzagged down a lane of bars and she was bright as silver, a fish rising in the night, up a set of stairs until we were—4F—in this huge dark shouting place—Irasshaimase!—where they cooked mushroom, shrimp, lumps of dog shit for all I knew, but they kept the sake coming and M
arlene sat beside me at the horseshoe bar, her face washed by orange pops of flame, starry night, Galileo blazing in her almond eyes. As she lifted her sake to me I was reminded of how she sniffed the catalogue in the glassine bag. This thought was not so sudden. I had been seeing that fast sniff all day long. She clinked my glass. Cheers, she said. She had had a coup. To victory. She had never seemed stranger, more lovely than right now, with those long threads of mushroom in her mouth, all alight, her neck was warm and fragrant, and I was bursting with desire.

  “Exactly why did you sniff that catalogue?”

  Her mouth tasted sweet and earthy. She wagged her finger and took another sip, then she laid her hand on my thigh and rubbed my nose with hers. “You figure it.”

  “1913 ink?”

  She was beaming. The shouting cooks sliced squid and hurled it onto the metal plate where it leapt like something in my mother’s hell.

  “The catalogue’s not old at all? That old bugger, Utamaro, he printed it for you?”

  Instead of contradicting me, she grinned.

  “Look at you!” I cried. “Jesus, look at you!”

  She was keyed up, adorable, her lips glistening. “Oh Butcher,” she said, shifting her hand to my upper arm. “Do you hate me now?”

  I have told this bloody story so often. I am accustomed to the expression on my listeners’ faces and I know there must be some essential detail I omit. Most likely that detail is my character, a flaw passed from Blue Bones’ rotten sperm to my own corrupted clay. For I can never have anyone really feel why her confession so thrilled me, why I devoured her slippery soft-muscled mouth in the dancing light of country barbecue near the Shinjuku railway station.

  So she was a crook!

  Oh the horror! Fuck me dead!

  Yes: she had a dodgy painting, or one with a murky past. Yes: she invented a history with a bullshit catalogue. Yes: it’s even worse than this. Well: my complete abject fucking apologies to all the cardinals concerned, but the rich collectors could look after themselves. They would steal my work when I was desperate and sell it for a fortune later. Fuck them. Up their arse a squeegee. Marlene Leibovitz had manufactured a catalogue, a title too as you’ll soon learn. She had turned a worthless orphan canvas into something that anyone would pay a million bucks for. She was an authenticator. That’s what she did.

  “There was really a cubist exhibition in Tokyo in 1913?”

  “Of course. God is in the details.”

  “You have the clippings? Leibovitz was in it?”

  She nestled against my neck. “Japan Times, Asahi Shim-bun too.”

  All through this, the pair of us were smiling, could not stop.

  “Of course this particular painting of Mauri’s was nowhere near this show?”

  “You hate me.”

  “There were no contemporary reproductions, were there? And of course, newspapers don’t report the size of paintings.”

  “Do you hate me?”

  “You are a very bad girl,” I said.

  But the art business is filled by people so much worse, crocodiles, larcenists in pinstripe suits, individuals with no eye, bottom feeders who depend on everything except how the painting looks. Yes, Marlene’s catalogue was fake but the catalogue was not a work of art. To judge a work, you do not read a fucking catalogue. You look as if your life depended on it.

  “You don’t hate me?”

  “On the contrary.”

  “Butcher, please come with me to New York.”

  “One day, sure.”

  We had been drinking. It was noisy. I was slow to understand she did not mean one day. Also, once again, she was astonished that I had not understood something she thought had been clearly said. Hadn’t I heard? Mauri had asked her to sell the Leibovitz? She had asked him to ship it to New York. She hadn’t had a choice.

  “You heard me, baby.”

  “I guess,” I said but nothing was so simple. There was Hugh, always Hugh. And I know I said I didn’t think about him in Tokyo, but how could anyone believe such shit? He was my orphan brother, my ward, my mother’s son. He had my brawny sloping shoulders, my lower lip, my hairy back, my peasant calves. I had dreamed of him, had seen him in a Hokusai print, an Asakusa pram.

  “He’s in good hands.”

  “I guess.”

  “He likes Jackson.”

  “I guess.” But it was not just Hugh either. It was Marlene. How had this painting turned up in Tokyo? The fake catalogue said it had been there since 1913.

  “Tell me,” I said. I held both her hands in one of mine. “Is this Dozy’s painting?”

  “Will you come with me to New York if I tell you the truth?”

  I loved her. What do you think I said?

  “No matter what I tell you?” Her smile had a gorgeous rosy lack of definition you might more normally explain with paint, a thumb, a short and stabby brush.

  “No matter what,” I said.

  Her eyes were bright and deep, dancing with reflections.

  “How big is Dozy’s painting?”

  “This one’s smaller.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I shrank it?”

  “It can’t be Dozy’s,” I said.

  “Come, Butcher, please. It’s just a few more days. We’ll stay at the Plaza. Hugh will be fine.”

  About Leibovitz, Milton Hesse’s high-school dropout had become completely, improbably, expert. In the case of Hugh, however, she had not the faintest fucking clue. I could not have the same excuse.

  35

  It was in the reign of Ronald Reagan, at three o’clock on a September afternoon, that we arrived in the heart of the imperium. For a moment it was more or less O.K., but then, at the limo counter, everything began to come undone. Marlene’s Australian bank card was rejected by a tall black woman with rhinestone spectacles and a thin wry mouth. “O.K.,” she said, “let’s try another flavour.”

  It had been an eighteen-hour flight. Marlene’s hair looked like a paddock of hail-damaged wheat.

  “Any card at all, Miss.”

  “I’ve only got one card.”

  The dispatcher examined my travel-soiled beauty slowly from top to bottom. “Uh-huh,” she said. She waited just a moment before holding out her hand to me.

  “Oh, I don’t have cards.”

  “You don’t have cards.” She smiled. You don’t have cards.

  I was not going to explain the terms of my divorce to her.

  “You don’t neither of you have no credit card?” Then, shaking her head she turned to the man behind us.

  “Next,” she said.

  Of course I had two hundred thousand dollars coming to me, but I didn’t have them on me. As for Marlene’s credit, something had fucked up at Mauri’s office or his bank, but it was three in the morning in Tokyo and we could not find out. Well, fuck that, I phoned Jean-Paul from Concourse C, and I did reverse the charges but we had just wired the little bugger fifteen thousand bloody dollars—my entire gallery advance—for If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die, so he had made a profit on the painting he had lost. It was five in the morning in Sydney, early, yes, but no reason to scream into my ear about all the litigation he had planned for me. It was his phone bill so I let him rant. He calmed after a while, but then he started in on Hugh who he claimed was smashing up his “facility.”

  “He pulled the washstand off the wall.”

  “What do you want me to do? I’m in New York.”

  “Fuck you, you thief. I’ll have him locked up for his own protection.”

  After the nice patron slammed the phone down in my ear we found a bar and I drank my first Budweiser. What a jar of cat’s piss that turned out to be. “Don’t worry,” Marlene said, “it’ll be all right tomorrow.”

  But it was Hugh I was thinking of. And although I held Marlene’s hand, I was alone, rank with shame and weariness as I was led onto the bus to Newark Station where we caught New Jersey Transit to Penn Station and then changed to an art-encrusted loony bin to Prince Street. It was SoHo
but not the SoHo where you bought your Comme des Garçons. I had no idea where I had surfaced, only that I had destroyed my brother’s life and that the sirens were hysterical and cabs would not shut the fuck up and that, somewhere, near here, there was a place to stay. I wanted a gin and tonic with a great fat fistful of anaesthetic ice.

  At dusk we finally arrived on Broome and Mercer, that is at an hour when the sheet-metal factories were dark, the power was off, the aging pioneers of Colour Field and High Camp Anaesthesia were presumably crawling into their fucking sleeping bags while the web of fire escapes was weaving a last lovely filigree of light across the factories’ faces.

  On the corner of Mercer Street, Marlene said, “I’m going to stand on your shoulders.”

  I obediently held out my hands, and Marlene Cook climbed up me like a full forward in the goal square in the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This was the first time I glimpsed the size of what might be still hidden from me. With her big handbag still across her shoulder my intimate companion leapt from my hands to my shoulders. Only one hundred and five pounds but she departed with such force that my knees bent like tired old poppy stems and by the time I steadied myself she was pulling herself up on the rusty ladder, then zigzagging through the filigree to the fifth floor. I heard a resistant window break free, a kind of pop, like a locked-up vertebra achieving independence. Who was this fucking woman? There was a police car approaching, lumbering slowly along the broken street, headlights up, headlights down. And who the fuck was I? My money was all Japanese. My passport was with my bags in a locker in Penn Station. A silver key fell from the night and bounced across the cobbles. The police car braked and waited. I entered the spotlight, picked up the key, retreated. Then the car lumbered onwards, dragging its muffler like a broken anchor chain.

  This was not Sydney. Let me list the ways.

  “Come on up,” my lover called. “Fifth floor.”