by Peter Carey
My brother was then SAVED. You could also say REVERTED. We traveled directly from Köln railway station and discovered his two best paintings facing each other across their own crypt in the Museum Ludwig.
I, THE SPEAKER, Michael Boone (Australia) b. 1943-Gift of the Dai Ichi Corporation
IF YOU HAVE EVER SEEN A MAN DIE, Michael Boone (Australia) b. 1943- Gift of the Dai Ichi Corporation
Being more knowledgeable re LAWN MAINTENANCE I did not understand that this strike of lightning would now be repeated in other places, bless me, London, New York, Canberra, poor Mum, beyond her ken, her private prayers held up in public, a raging mystery for the world to see. The sad battered grass-cutter confronted his WORKS he had wild eyes and a wobbly smile.
“Jesus Christ,” he said when he had read the plaque and saw the name of Marlene’s PARTNER IN CRIME.
You have no idea, he said to me.
But old Slow Bones understood exactly. This was a love letter from Marlene. It was what she promised him the day he threatened her a violent death.
There was a CURATOR DOCTOR present at our viewing and when Butcher had found a hanky and blown his nose this chap politely asked would we like to see the Leibovitzes.
Butcher’s answer was definite to the point of rude. N-O.
Well, said the Doctor, I thought you might enjoy the personal connection. We purchased a new Leibovitz from Mr. Mauri, your great collector.
Oh, said my brother. Oh, I see.
He stood staring at the Curator Doctor as if someone had sneaked up behind him and shoved a broomstick up his arse.
Lead on Macduff, he said.
Then we were off and galloping through the galleries, all of us large men, big feet, leather slapping the floors of the Museum Ludwig until we were arrived before a painting of a mechanical Charlie Chaplin which is said in French LE CHAPLIN MÉCANIQUE. I was concerned I was about to LET ONE OFF so stayed a certain distance but Butcher poked his sunburnt nose right into it.
He asked when it had been purchased from Mauri.
No, said the Curator Doctor. Not that one. This one. This is our new acquisition.
And there behind us, bless me, was the dreadful thing my brother had put up on the roof in SoHo. Since then it had become LE GOLEM ÉLECTRIQUE. I held my tongue, but you should have seen my brother’s face, like Melbourne weather, rain, sunshine, hail, smile, frown, scowl, blow the schnozzle, bless me, what will happen next?
How much?
Three point two said the Doctor slash Curator.
Deutschmark?
Dollars.
There was a wooden bench before this painting and my brother now sat down. He was very still. And then finally he gave a laugh right through his shiny nose. He looked from one of us to the other as he could choose who would be worthy of what he might say next. Not one of us. He spoke to no-one in particular: Best thing Leibovitz ever did.
And then he walked towards the bar, a great fat lumpy man one short arm in his pocket, the other hand rubbing at his speckled freckled sun-baked head.
56
I want to be liked, to be remembered fondly, and I would be an idiot to stand before you naked, but what else have I ever done?
MoMA, the Museum Ludwig, the Tate—I can’t list all the museums to which Mauri has donated my works, nor imagine the skuzzy deals these gifts were tied to. Enough to know I soon rose like a phoenix from the ashes of my Butcher life.
My saviour? A murderer. Actually, it’s worse than that, because even though I had once walked away from her, I was still a Bones, and all the blacks and whites, so clear that morning in New York, were destined to be wet on wet, slow-drying, ambiguous, a shifting tide between beauty and horror. It swelled beneath my skin, filled my mouth.
In those polluted summer suburbs when Hugh and I were chained behind our filthy Victa mowers, I was still—in spite of all the death and deception—a prisoner of this tangled past. While I trimmed the floral fucking borders in Bankstown, I was reliving those days before the fall, when my baby and I looked at light together, drank Lagavulin on the rocks, walked hand in hand in the Museum of Modern Art, all those nights she pressed her lovely head in against my neck and I breathed the jasmine air around her brow.
A better person may have run in horror, but I loved her and I will not stop. There, I’ve said it plain. She is gone, not gone, out there somewhere, sending messages to me via Sotheby’s and the Art Institute of Chicago. Is she taunting me or missing me? How will I ever know? How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?
Acknowledgments
Late in 2002, at a time when we were both living way too close to ’Ino on Bedford Street, I became friends with Stewart Waltzer. Many lunches later it had become clear to me that the New York art world, which Stewart knew in his own very particular and personal way, was colliding and arguing with the distinctly Australian worlds that were presently coalescing in my notebooks.
Stewart sometimes bought an extra bruschetta, although less often than he remembers. He certainly fed me a thousand scandalous, possibly reliable stories, and introduced me to the first of many expert individuals who, in their turn, would give me what I needed to make my creatures stand up and walk around.
The first of these (blameless) volunteers was the New York conservator Sandra Amman, who in turn led me to Tom Learner, a conservation scientist at the Tate in London. Dr. Learner enthusiastically engaged with the technical problem that Butcher Bones was going to have to solve. Jay Krueger, Senior Conservator of Modern Paintings at the National Gallery in Washington, would prove to be equally helpful, and it was he who later alerted me to the sample boxes of Magna paint that Butcher would later find at New York Central Supplies.
The sculptor Michael Steiner—another friend of Stewart’s—was wonderfully forthcoming, and I stole and reconstructed whole slabs of his opinions before giving them to Milt Hesse to pass on to Marlene Cook.
Writers are of course obsessive, so there was hardly a friend who did not contribute in some way—David and Kristen Williamson, David Rankin, Patrick McGrath, Maria Aitken, Paul Kane, Philip Gourevitch and Frances Coady thank you.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2007
Copyright © 2006 Peter Carey
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York, in 2007. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Australia by Random House Australia, Sydney, and in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited, London, in 2006. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.
Vintage Canada and colophon are trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Carey, Peter
Theft : a love story / Peter Carey
eISBN: 978-0-307-36863-8
I. Title
PR9619.3.C36T44 2007 823′.914 2006-904719-7
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