Theft: A Love Story

by Peter Carey

  Oh no no, she couldn’t.

  For Chrissakes, why?

  It was complicated, but no.

  Why?

  Not now.

  She was distracted, irritated and sometimes I was irritated too. Just the same I tried to please her—who wouldn’t? I really believed that if we could bring this off, we could get the hell out away from Olivier and—thank God—the fucked-up drama of his mother. Sometimes I began to imagine buying Jean-Paul’s place in Bellingen—a ridiculous idea, please don’t point it out.

  Money had not been part of it at first but as I began to imagine our escape from the droit moral, a million dollars was clearly no small thing. I bought a copy of Mayer’s Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques in whose eight hundred pages I attempted to find the answer to a crossword puzzle built on chemistry and chronology, believable paints, a likely solvent which would safely dissolve the veil. I slept badly in a merry-go-round of chemicals, ripolin, gouache, white spirits, turpentine, everything ending in disaster, myself in a foreign prison, the Golem washed away. I became the victim of sudden starts, cries, violent awakenings. Marlene was not much better.

  “Are you awake?”

  Of course. She was, on her back, her eyes glistening in the dark.

  “Look,” she said. “Listen to me. He was licensing his father’s work for bloody coffee mugs. Can’t you understand? He was a complete philistine ignoramus.”

  “Shoosh. Go to sleep. It doesn’t matter.”

  “He was lazy and disorganised. The only reason he kept the advertising job was that he would fly to Texas to see his client who would take him to dinner and fuck him up the arse.”

  “No! Really?”

  “No, not really, but I saved the weasel from his nightmare. I looked after him. I really, really took care of him. I made sure he could ride his horses and drive in car rallies. And I would have kept on doing that, fuck him.”

  “Let him be. He can’t hurt us.”

  “He has already, the prick.”

  And yet she snuggled into me, my sweet baby, fitting her lovely head in against my neck and shoulder and her warm little pussy against my thigh and I could feel her as she sniffed my clavicle, inhaling my skin, and her whole lithe body fitted my lumpen Butcher mass.

  “Don’t stop loving me,” she said.

  I blew out the altar candles and stroked her neck until she went to sleep. Her breath smelt of toothpaste and the air was smoky, waxy, like after evensong, once upon a summertime.

  50

  New York Central Supplies on Third Avenue had a great back room, a sort of junkyard of artists’ paint and brushes, and it was there that I stumbled onto a museum piece, that is, twenty-three sample boxes of thirty-five-year-old Magna paint. If you’ve heard of Magna it’s because Morris Louis used it, Frankenthaler used it, Kenneth Noland too I think

  Magna was invented by Sam Golden, a great chemist, the partner of Leonard Bocour, a great proselytiser. From 1946, when Magna went into production, Bocour had sent these sample boxes out all over the world. Here, try it, Morris Louis. Here try it, Picasso. Here try it, Leibovitz, Sidney Nolan. He threw in handfuls of greens or yellows, such an odd assortment of colours in each box. He didn’t make it easy for me, but when I finally picked myself off the dusty floor at New York Central Supplies, I had chosen thirteen boxes which contained, in sum, the quantity and palette I required.

  If you’re a painter, you’re already ahead of the story. You know Magna was a breakthrough, an acrylic you could mix with oil. The finished result looked like oil, not Dulux.

  If I used Magna on the Broussard the conservator, examining the finish, seeing the date, would confidently assume it was an oil. She would therefore use a solvent like white spirit, completely safe for oil. Ha-ha. Imagine. There is the little hamster—sniff, sniff, gently, gently—little Q-tip, smidgen of solvent, and lo and fucking behold: the pigments are coming off in floods.

  A Red Flag, as they say.

  This is not oil paint. Sniff, sniff.

  Jesus Christ, Eloise, it’s Magna! Another Red Flag. Magna not made till four years after the title.

  By now we would have her attention. She knows Broussard is married to Leibovitz. If she thinks for just a second the title will not match the Broussard mud pie.

  None of this is enough, but it’s almost enough. If we can draw the creature a little closer, if I could just keep her applying that white spirit, she could remove all the Magna and reveal the gorgeous oil beneath. But she’s a conservator. She won’t do that.

  Just the same, I returned to Mercer Street filled with optimism, my thirteen vintage packs of Magna in two huge plastic bags. On the worktable I revealed them to my lover. I was such a fucking genius, such a big bad criminal. I needed pliers to remove the caps, but the contents of every single tube was fresh as the day it was packed.

  You would think this would be enough to make Marlene calm down about the droit moral, but no. Just the same: I have been divorced, it isn’t easy. I thought, Her divorce would come and go as divorces finally do. When it was over she would probably still continue to vent about the droit moral. Likewise I would rage about alimony whores. But we would, meanwhile, have achieved a very satisfactory private victory in New York. No-one would know. We did not need them to.

  It took exactly four hours to paint the Broussard, and even then I think I took more care than Dominique had done. Being Magna, it dried fast and I was soon able to spray it with a solution of sugar and water. I left it on the roof to pick up New York grime.

  Did anyone say, Oh you clever bugger?

  No, but it didn’t matter. I had put the canvas on the rack above Hugh’s spattering sausages and when they had added their contribution of grease I “cleaned” the surface roughly with a filthy sponge.

  Hugh watched all this, of course, but he was mostly absorbed with a copy of The Magic Pudding Marlene had unburied in the Strand.

  At night I propped the filthy canvas near the bed and lit four altar candles before it, happily observing the carbon deposits build above the grease. This would really need a damn good clean.

  Lying on my side, with Marlene against my back, I sometimes thought of money. It was very sweet.

  “Here’s the Broussard, toots,” Milton Hesse would say to Jane Threadwell. “I know it’s crap, baby, but it has some historical value, and anyway, the family wants it cleaned.” Something like that. “Don’t go nuts about it,” the mule would say. “This is not brain surgery they’re asking for.”

  Jane Threadwell would not get to the canvas immediately, and then she would be too busy saving a cracking Mondrian or some Kiefer which had aged like a pig farm in a drought. She would give the Broussard to someone in her studio, a little chore, a sentimental favour for Milt Hesse. But then the lowliest assistant would start to clean it and then, dear Jesus, Marlene would get the call from Milt.

  It was not just the anachronistic paint. When they removed the frame they had discovered, under the rabbet, that the frame had rubbed away a deal of the paint and there—how did that happen?—was what appeared to be an earlier oil painting. Given the marital history of the artist concerned, what did Marlene want to do?

  Then Marlene would be duly hesitant and then Milt would call Threadwell and Threadwell would call her buddy Jacob at the Met and then they would go for the raking light, the infrared, the X-ray, and finally they would all have themselves in a huge bloody state. Le Golem Électrique.

  “Mrs. Leibovitz, we really think you should give Jane permission to go ahead.”

  Now it would be gently Bentley as they removed the Magna, sniff, sniff, sniff. Little white spirit. Oh, it would come away in floods.

  Call the Times, call the Times. Milton would have his moment. “I cried,” he would say. “I cried like a baby when Jacques died.”

  And I suppose there’s something nasty in my satisfaction, the vengeance of the hick, the man from Iron Bark against the city barber, a perfect, provincial rather Bacchus Marsh affair, not l
oud, not public, but deeply fucking satisfying to those who knew. Oh how lovely, Mr. Bones, how bloody lovely. Congratulations to you and yours.

  51

  WHO WOULD STEAL MY CHAIR?

  I asked and Marlene said I must have lost it on the stairs so I took a flashlight and peered in amongst all the dust and filth there was a dead mouse bless the poor dried heart who would steal my chair?

  I must have done something that SLIPPED MY MIND. Once when I was a boy I went walking in my sleep only waking when my bare feet touched the wet path to the dunny Another time I drew with a biro across the sheets. Bless me, I could not explain it. Perhaps I stole my chair myself. There was a secret in the room like bad meat, a nasty odour, so FAMILIAR, from my very sad and disappointing birth, the long afternoons, sun through the flywire, the buzz of flies outside HOWLING FOR BLOOD, Mum’s breath like roses, like communion wine.

  WHO WILL SAVE ME NOW?

  Butcher painted in DEATHLY SILENCE the strange opposite of his normal practice which is to EAR BASH to the point of madness SKITING and BOASTING he would TALK THE BACK LEG OFF A DONKEY. Look at this Hugh, this will be a bloody beauty. This will knock their bloody socks off. This will be a bull ant in their pants. In previous times he had rolled the canvas out across the floor and then he would need me to perform my ACT OF GRACE but now he had a tricky little nest of sticks like a surveyor out on the Darley Road. He had become, forgive him, AN EASEL PAINTER so he could put me on the wrong side of the canvas as if I was the floor.

  All my life I lived amongst the perfumes of secrets, blood, roses, altar wine, who can say what happened to us all in Main Street, Bacchus Marsh, not me. We might have all continued as butchers, drawing the red line, all death arriving kindly. How I might have loved those beasts, me better than any man before. Never mind. They would not give me the knife and so I went to live with the so-called butcher and the darling boy peaches in the grass, the sweet rotten aroma of his marriage, I knew it but could not name it as I circled round the boy, trying to keep him safe and then it was me that hurt him. Everything always wrong, badness at the center, the sound of flies excited in the sun, the thin squeak and fat slap of the swinging door as one person entered and another left. This was the Marsh, voices in another room. I was not born slow, I know it.

  In New York I sat on my CANAL STREET MATTRESS my mind was puzzling back and forth why my brother was now painting like a MEDIOCRITY. He did not say I did not ask. This was the worst feeling that there is.

  In the Marsh I poked into the big drawer beneath Mum’s wardrobe, when alone I was a STICKY BEAK, forgive me. They said I was born Slow Bones and broke my mother’s heart. But something was taken from me. Something happened, never found, just the smell of camphor in a drawer. We walked around it then, as we now walked around my missing chair, as if circling some strange and dirty thing for why else would he paint a MEDIOCRITY? It made my head ache. I could not hold it still, as slippery as an earthworm before the dreaded hook.

  My brother had come to New York and no-one at a restaurant knew his name and he was angry they did not bow down to the great EX-MICHAEL BOONE and therefore he became small and shriveled, dark as coal from the Madingley open cut. He bought ink sticks from Pearl Paint and off he went, rubbing and rubbing, as if he could erase himself, rub himself away to dust.

  Whatever happened we can never know.

  Walk around, walk around.

  Marlene Cook from Benalla. Mchael Boone from Bacchus Marsh. Kings and Queens on Mercer Street. He climbed up to the roof of the building and there lay his painting to the eye of night. Egg white, black grit, burnt souls falling.

  WHO WILL SAVE ME NOW?

  52

  Hugh never changed from the morning I picked him up to take him down to Melbourne. He had attempted to drown his daddy, also vice versa, but still he glared at me as though I was the author of his misery. It was in my mother’s low-ceilinged kitchen that I found him that day, blocking the light from the Gisborne Road window, like a giant Jehovah’s Witness with his black church shoes, Fletcher Jones trousers, a short-sleeved white shirt and a tie. Brylcreem had turned his hair a wet burnt umber and his little seashell ears were burning red. And the eyes, they were the same, little baleful eyes which he now cast upon Marlene.

  In Mercer Street I asked him, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  No answer.

  “Have you been taking your pills?”

  He stared at me belligerently, then retreated into the deep unhappy tangle of his bed, where, in company of toast crumbs, beneath the cowl of his quilt, he now watched my beloved read The New York Times, bestowing on her a special quality of attention you might think more suited to a dangerous snake.

  Marlene was dressed for running, in baggy daggy shorts and a soiled white T-shirt. Until now she had ignored my brother’s close attention, but when she stood Hugh cocked his head and raised an interrogative eyebrow.

  “What?” she asked.

  The buzzer sounded.

  Hugh started, and went back under cover.

  He was a silly bugger, but my own relation with that buzzer was not much better. I certainly did not want to have Detective Dickhead enquiring about the painting I had wrapped so carefully with newspaper the night before. It lay now exactly where it had lain in its freshly sanded state, leaning against the wall.

  Thinking to move it, I stood, but not before Milt Hesse walked in. It was the first time I was ever pleased to see the old cunt-hound, for he had come to take our treasure to be cleaned. As he entered my brother glared at him so fiercely I feared that he might charge.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Whoa Dobbin.”

  Before Milt had a chance to properly understand his situation, he advanced on the huge swaddled creature, his arm outstretched. “I haven’t met you sir. Are you another Aussie genius?”

  But Hugh would not touch him and Milt, doubtless having a New Yorker’s well-calibrated judgment of all forms of madmen, swerved sideways to the table where he kissed Marlene.

  “Doll-face.”

  His left arm, having been injured in a fall, was supported by a sling and he now allowed Marlene to tuck the parcel beneath the right.

  Hugh meanwhile was all hunched over, knees to his chest, rocking sideways. If you did not know him you would think he was ignoring the guest but I was not at all surprised when, as Milt was leaving, my brother suddenly lurched to his feet.

  “I’ll see you out,” Marlene said suddenly.

  Hugh dropped back to his knees, burrowing in the tangle of bedclothes where he finally found his coat and separated it from quilt and sheet and then, with Marlene and Milt not too far ahead of him, he was heading towards the door.

  “No, mate, you don’t want to do that.”

  I blocked his way, but he shouldered me away.

  “Please, mate. No trouble.”

  He paused. “Who is he?”

  “He’s going to clean the painting.”

  “Oh.”

  He drew back, puzzled at first, but finally displaying a stupid knowing smirk, as if he, of all people, was privy to some hidden truth.

  “What is it that you’re thinking mate?”

  He tapped his head.

  “You’re thinking?”

  “Roof,” he said.

  The fucking smirk was physically unbearable. “What roof, mate?”

  He withdrew further, back towards the mattress, his mouth now impossibly small, his ears slowly suffusing with blood. As he settled back into his nest his dry hair, confused by static, rose slowly on his head. He was still like this, a dreadful grinning fright, when Marlene came back from her run.

  She also was on edge, had been on edge in any case, and no matter how she ran or worked her weights, nothing would give her any peace.

  Sitting at the table, she went straight back to the Times.

  “You burnt down the high school,” my brother said.

  Oh Hugh, I thought, Hugh, Hugh, Hugh.

  Marlene’s colour was already high, a l
ovely pink that revealed the tiniest palest freckles.

  “What did you say to Marlene?”

  Hugh hugged his big round knees and giggled. “She burnt down Benalla High School,” he said.

  Marlene smiled. “Hugh, you are very strange.”

  “You too,” my brother said, somehow seeming contented, as if some puzzle had been solved. “I heard you burnt down Benalla High School.”

  Marlene was staring at him now, and for a moment her eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened, but then her face relaxed.

  “Why Hugh,” she smiled, “you are as full of tricks as a bag full of monkeys.”

  “You too.”

  “You too.”

  “You too,” until the pair of them were laughing uproariously and I went to the dunny to get away.

  At lunchtime, Milt called to say Jane had the painting which appeared, she said, to have been hung in someone’s kitchen. That night I cooked sausages for Hugh and after Marlene had taken her evening run, she and I went to dinner at Fanelli’s where we drank two bottles of fantastic burgundy.

  I didn’t feel drunk, but I fell into bed and passed out like a light. I woke to find Marlene crawling back into bed. I had a splitting headache. She was freezing cold. At first I thought her shivering but when I touched her face it was aflood with tears. As I held her, her body shook convulsively.

  “Shush, baby. Shush, it’s all right.”

  But she could not stop.

  “I’m sorry,” said Hugh, standing in the doorway.

  “For fuck’s sake, go back to fucking sleep. It’s three o’clock.”

  “I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “It’s nothing to do with you, you idiot.”

  I heard him sigh and Marlene was almost choking, a dreadful noise like someone drowning. I could see her by the light from the street, all her smooth lovely planes crushed and broken inside a fist. It was the dumb divorce, I thought, the bloody droit moral. Why she had to have it, I really, really could not see.