by Peter Carey
On the other side of the door it was pitch bloody dark and I made my way slowly up the stairs, feeling my way past a landing filled with disgusting smoke-damaged carpet and another with cardboard boxes and then on the fourth floor I saw the flickering light of candles spilling from behind a battered open metal door. “How’s this?”
It was a loft, almost empty, almost white. Marlene stood in the center. Her big black handbag was on the floor behind her, beneath the big deep-silled window, amidst the mess of wooden splinters which announced her entry. Abandoned on the sill was a fucking Stanley Super Wonder Bar, a heavy-duty piece of steel with a ninety-degree-angle claw for pulling nails and, at the other extremity, a deadly point.
“Honey, is this yours?”
She took it from me without a word.
I observed how familiarly she hefted it. “Whose place is this we’re in?”
She was studying me closely, frowning. “New South Wales Government Department of the Arts,” she said. “They have it for artists-in-residence.”
“Where is the artist?”
“You?” She approached, a supplicant, her shoulders bending to fit against my chest.
I snatched the pry bar from her. “Who lives here?”
I had hurt her hand, but she smiled, soft and bruised as peaches in the grass. “Baby, we’ll have money from Tokyo tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow I have to fly home.”
“Michael,” she said. And then she broke apart and she was weeping, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, fractured, her beauty divided against itself by cracks and fissures, a pit, eyes like animals, God have Mercy I threw the bar away and held her, so shockingly tiny against my chest, her little head within my hands. I wanted to wrap her tight inside a blanket.
“Don’t go,” she said.
“He’s my brother.”
She turned her big wet eyes up to me.
“I’ll bring him here,” she said suddenly. “No, no,” she said, jumping away from my nasty laugh. “No, really.” She joined her palms and did a weird sort of Buddhist thing. “I can do this,” Marlene said. “He can come with Olivier.”
Oh no, I thought, oh no. “Olivier is coming here?”
“Of course. What did you imagine?”
“You never said a thing.”
“But he’s the one with the droit moral. I can’t sign.”
“He’s coming here? To New York?”
“How else could I do it? Really? What did you think?”
“I thought this was some little romantic tryst.”
“It is,” she said. “It is, it is.”
For this I had betrayed my mother and my brother? So fucking Olivier could be witness to adultery?
“Don’t you fuck with me, Marlene.” I was Blue Bones’ son and don’t know what else I said. I certainly kicked the nasty wonder bar against the wall. “What’s that?” I roared. “What the fuck is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit you don’t know.”
“I think it’s called a pry bar.”
“You think?”
“Yes.”
“And you really carry this in your purse?”
“I had it in my suitcase until Penn Station.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “If I was a man you’d never ask me that.”
That was when I walked out. I found a place called Fanelli’s up on Prince Street where they were nice enough to let me pay 1,000 yen for a glass of scotch.
36
One Sunday in the Marsh.
One Sunday in the Marsh there came a Bishop walking out of the vestry like a crab he had been in Sydney that very morning but before that time he had been tortured by Chinese communists. He had his back split open by whips and his flesh had hardened rough and raw as a Morrisons road full of dried tyre tracks after heavy rain. Following the first Psalm he explained why no-one should vote for the Australian Labor Party and then he removed his vestments in full sight of the CONGREGANTS and my mother said Lord save us but when invited to respond my daddy wished to know what time did the bishop have his breakfast in Sydney.
What was the question?
How long did it take to fly from Sydney?
One hour, said the bishop.
My mother kicked my father but he was Blue Bones and he did not give a tinker’s damn about the opinion of the men in the vestry and he certainly would not modify his behaviour on account of a size-four female shoe. Our father was a well-known MARSH IDENTITY. The flight from Sydney was a bloody miracle as far as he was concerned, so he wanted the bishop to answer him—was it rough or smooth?
The bishop told him smooth.
Lord knows what my father would say now if he rose from the grave to find me prisoner in the utility room of Jean-Paul’s nursing home. No doubt give me the STROP to punish me for destroying PRIVATE PROPERTY. Fair enough. Only when justice had been done would he understand that Butcher had flown all the way to New York, had abandoned me again.
That would get my father straightaway. Ah, he would ask, how long would that take?
Thirteen hours.
Good heavens.
My daddy was a REAL CHARACTER, as the saying is. Everyone remembers him. WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?
The police are little Hitlers according to Butcher Bones but when I was in arrears at the Nursing Home they did not charge me with a crime. As long as I remained inside the utility room everything was hunky-dory. They brought me interesting objects they had discovered in their travels including a bear used to advertise a donut shop.
My father was a hard man living in an age of miracles and wonder. I would come upon him in the night as he contemplated the wonder of REFRIGERATION. Before refrigeration he drove his wagon to Madingley to meet the Melbourne train, then back to fill the ice chamber. Then came the fridge EUREKA you would think but the GENERAL PUBLIC did not like cold meat and would only buy what was hanging in the shop THE MORONS as my father said. He was always for progress, including widening the main street even if it meant we had to kill the trees. My father was a well-known REALIST. The leaves blocked up the gutters anyway, as he said more than once in the public bar of the Royal Hotel.
I was sitting on my chair in front of the shop. This was several years ago, bless me, Blue Bones had not been taken from us. Two Melbourne fellows came by traveling in a Holden which was a new BRAND never heard of before that year. One had a pinstripe suit the other tartan shorts you would split your sides to look at him. The one in the suit asked may we take your picture. Not being certain of my GROUND I fetched Blue Bones and I could see from his face he agreed they were a pair of POOFTERS but he did not mind if he and I posed together father and son. The poofters had what is called a POLAROID. When the photograph was taken, we stood around and I watched myself appear like a drowned man floating to the surface of a dam.
Look at this, my daddy said. See, this didn’t work at all.
I saw his point immediately, but it took some time for the poofters to understand my father’s objection which was you could see no more of Blue Bones than his apron. They then agreed to take a second Polaroid and he could keep it, welcome to it, no trouble to them at all.
When they had made a portrait to Blue Bones’ satisfaction they presented it to him and then SKEDADDLED. Who can ever imagine where they went to?
Fancy that, my father said, studying his likeness as it bloomed before him. He had a face like a hatchet and angry red eyes but when he placed the Polaroid on the mantel he was a different man. Fancy that, he said. He cocked his head. He almost smiled. Fancy fucking that now.
Later the Polaroid began to fade and then it got much worse because within a week it had completely VANISHED. You would expect our father to get into a whipping rage, but he never did, not once, and the Polaroid stayed on the mantel for as long as he lived and sometimes I would see him checking on it as if it were a barometer or clock. Then he died, everything gone and weeds coming through the floor of the sleep-out.
I stayed
in the utility room for many days waiting for my brother to deal with the ARREARS. It was an ugly room with a basin and a bucket and a gas hot-water service that roared to life in the middle of the night. WHOOMP. WHOOMP. It would put the fear of God in you. I arranged the bear and the wreath and turned on the radio and although it would not play its green light was always comforting.
I opened my eyes one morning and saw steam from the laundry, sun streaming through the clouds and the HEAVENLY CREATURE was there even though he was a MALE he was as beautiful as the famous painting by FILIPPINO LIPPI—his suit was a dusty white silver like the underside of moth wings when they are dying in the holy light.
And thus the stone was rolled away and I followed him along the hallway where the old people came out to tell me I would trip on the cord trailing from my radio and it must have been before eight o’clock because Jackson was still sitting at the desk.
The angel creature said, Give him his money.
Jackson gave me an envelope. He said no hard feelings.
In the street outside there was waiting a white Mercedes-Benz as if it was a wedding. I got in next to the angel creature. He had dark ringlets glistening, freshly blessed. He said I am very pleased to meet you. He said, It appears we are traveling together. Good grief. Where to? Suddenly I was afraid.
He said I am Olivier Leibovitz and you and I are going to New York today. Forgive me, all I could think was my brother was ROOTING his wife. Should I tell him? What would become of me? I told him I did not have my chair. I said I must return for it.
There are many chairs in New York, said he. I’ll buy you one at the Third Street Bazaar.
At Kingsford Smith International Airport Olivier took a pill. Here, he said, you better have one too. He gave me a Coke and two pills. I took them both and soon after that I discovered I had a passport. I never knew I had one, or what one looked like. When I went into the airplane I was thinking of my father.
I asked Olivier how long it would take to get to America.
He said thirteen hours to Los Angeles, Bless me, bless my poor dead darling daddy. He could not have borne it, to see Slow Bones sitting in his seat.
37
There were only two bars in SoHo in those years. One of them was Kitty’s and the other was Fanelli’s, and it was here that a swollen-eyed Marlene found me thirty minutes later. She arrived at my back-room table, light as a moth, carrying two Rolling Rocks, one of which she placed circumspectly before me.
“I love you,” she said. “You have no idea how much.”
Being filled with raw emotion, I did not trust myself to speak.
She slid onto the opposite bench, raising her bottle to her lips. “But you can’t love me unless you know what it is you’ve got yourself involved with.”
As this was exactly what I had been thinking I lifted my beer and drank.
“So,” she placed her own beer, carefully, on the tabletop. “I’m going to tell you.”
She paused.
“You know, when you saw me first…in those ridiculous shoes that got you so excited.”
“I hated the shoes.”
“Yes, but don’t hate me. That would be unbearable. Don’t worry about Hugh. I’ll look after Hugh.”
I snorted at this, but I must tell you, it touched me. No-one had even lied to me about this sort of thing before.
“Olivier authenticated Dozy Boylan’s painting,” she said finally. “I had been away. By the time I was back in Australia he had done it. Jesus! So dumb. Boylan was a friend of a client of Olivier’s and Olivier was too embarrassed to admit he didn’t know a rat’s arse about his father’s work.”
“It’s a famous painting. Where’s the risk?”
“If he had looked past his nose he would have discovered it had been deaccessioned by the Museum of Modern Art. In other words, dumped.”
“I know what it means, baby.”
“I know you know, but shouldn’t that have been a red flag? Why would they have dumped it? Even Olivier should have thought of this.”
“But you said it’s fine. It’s almost the first thing you ever said to me. ‘The good thing is that Mr. Boylan knows his Leibovitz is real.’”
“Shoosh. Listen.” She took ahold of both my hands and lifted them to her lips. “Listen to me, Michael. I’m telling you the truth.”
“His Leibovitz is not real? Is that it?”
“In my opinion? It was an unfinished postwar canvas that Dominique and Honoré removed the night the old goat died.”
“Fuck, Marlene!”
“Shoosh. Calm down. This was not a valuable painting, but they doctored it. They dated it 1913. Then it was a valuable painting. MoMA snapped it up as soon as it came on the market in 1956. It came straight from the estate. It had a perfect provenance and it was commonly reproduced. But it was a fixer-upper. Honoré, of course, knew exactly how much and in what way it had been tampered with. He didn’t need an X-ray. He probably watched Dominique do it.”
“But you found the paint receipts in the archive? Oh shit. You printed the receipt yourself?”
“Baby, please don’t hate me. I really wasn’t always a crook. We should have just taken back the Boylan canvas, but who would have loaned us the one and a half million U.S. dollars we would have had to pay? No-one.”
“So you faked a receipt for titanium white.”
“That was just plugging a leak with chewing gum. For about two days the painting was legit again. But before too long there would be a real X-ray and then we would be, excuse me, totally fucked.”
So now I understood. “It was insured. You arranged to have it stolen.”
Her eyes were a little puffy and the light from Prince Street was soft and blue. For all the time she had told the story she had seemed dejected and I was therefore slow to spot the shadow of a smile which was now showing in the corner of her mouth.
“You personally stole it.”
“Well, Olivier was not going to do it.”
“You walked a mile through the bush at night?”
In New York it had begun to rain, great fat drops which struck Fanelli’s window and cast dance-floor shadows on that lovely rather lonely face as she explained, checking my reaction constantly, how she had paid cash for a pair of nipple-tipped gardening gloves, a set of screwdrivers, carpet knife, wire cutters, wood chisel, nail pullers, a flashlight, a roll of duct tape and a Wonder Bar. She lived for two days in a Grafton motel and when she knew Dozy had left for Sydney she drove along those lonely back roads to the Promised Land. The rental she parked on an abandoned logging road and from here she walked along a ridgeline through scrubby country, and although she had some difficulty locating the pole, she climbed it easily and disconnected both power and telephone.
“How did you know how to do all that?”
She shrugged her left shoulder. “Research.”
By the time she arrived at Dozy’s front door the night was a shower of crystalline stars in a velvet sky. Working with no more than moon and starlight, she used the Wonder Bar to remove the mouldings on the glass panes in the door. This was something I remembered from the press report, the local detectives saying the robber had been a “neatness freak.” Marlene had left the mouldings tidily stacked on top of the dishwasher.
Dozy had already shown her exactly where the painting was and how it was secured. Now she used a bolt cutter to sever the cable, and carefully removed the frame which had always offended her. She covered the painting with a number of pillowcases, wrapped the entire thing with duct tape, and walked up through the bush.
“What then?”
Her lowered eyes were suddenly wide and hard. “Do you still want to have anything to do with me, baby? That is really the question.”
I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. “I’ll have to hear the whole story.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You want a written confession?”
“The whole story.”
“Oh really. Indeed,” she said, a little rattled.
“Do you remember, when you first came to my place and you saw what I was working on?”
“I’ve never lied about your work. Never. Ever.”
“I don’t mean the paintings.”
“Yes, you had some lovely drawings of insects.”
“Flies, wasps, some butterflies.”
“I remember thinking, Thank God, he can draw.” She coloured. “I was ahead of myself.”
“Well, the stalk-eyed signal fly, for instance …”
“Michael, you did tell me this before. It’s called Borobodur. It’s rare except that Boylan found it near his house.”
“Borboroidini. That’s the Wombat Fly.”
“I know.”
“When we were looking at Tour en bois, quatre in Mr. Mauri’s office, there was a stalk-eyed signal fly caught in a spiderweb on the back. That’s a very local insect also.”
It took her a moment, but when she got the point she seemed almost pleased.
“You’re a very clever man.” She smiled.
“I am.”
“So, my sweetheart, tell me how I made it smaller?”
“You tell me.”
Just then someone turned the light off in the bar, and she leaned across the wet laminated table and kissed me on the mouth.
“You figure it,” she said.
Fanelli’s was closing and we stumbled out, down along the slippery cobbles to the big dark loft. We said nothing much really, but when we made love that night it was as if we wished to tear ourselves apart, to death, devour. Hide inside the secret wonder of the other’s skin.
38
The aircraft seat too narrow the roof too low but then Olivier gave me two more yellow pills and soon it was very nice to be above the clouds. My father never saw this sight. Not in all his life. Nor the Kings of England. No-one in the Holy Bible witnessed such a thing unless views are granted in the process of ASCENSION. Blue Bones could not have imagined me, his DISAPPOINTMENT, suspended above the earth, angels and cherubs all around, my heart and arteries clearly seen, being bounced through the heavens like a ping-pong ball inside a gum boot.
At night the eternal river of the sky, my soul like blotting paper dropped in ink. Olivier could not look out the window he said it reminded him that he was nothing. Then he said he wanted to be nothing. He said he only wanted Marlene. He didn’t care she had burnt down the Benalla High School. It had been a shock to discover but it made no difference to him now. He was all for burning down.