Artist's Proof (32 page)

The Treasury Department had kept its word: It bought my painting
Seated Girl.
But later there was an unexpected development. Once I was in a position to buy back the painting, the Treasury Department refused to sell. A high-level IRS career civil servant had taken a fancy to the work and hung it in his Washington office. He wouldn't give it up.

Julie Klampf was in town around that time and she bought me lunch, in part to break this news. Julie said the aide, whom she refused to name, thought the dismembered figure in the painting eloquently conveyed the spirit of the average taxpayer on April sixteenth.

Whatever. I have always said the viewer has to bring his own baggage to my work. And it was probably best that
Seated Girl
hang where people were unaware of its subject's tragic end. My principal regret was that Cassie had fancied her portrait displayed at the very least in a shop window, and it had ended up in a location a good cut below even that.

Julie Klampf, by the way, is a totally different woman when she is not playing Tess Turkinton. At my suggestion, because I couldn't think of anyplace else, our lunch was at Muccio's. It ran so long, thanks to Enzo's industrial-strength drinks, that by the time we left Mona had come on duty. For some reason she sent us out the door with a head-pounding “Havanagila.” That almost spoiled a hell of a good afternoon, but not quite. I like Julie. We have been keeping in touch.

It turned out to be a fine summer. Both Alan and Sarah were out at the beach for all of it. I didn't have room to put them both up, so Sarah bunked in with Gayle Hennessy in her apartment over Gayle's Provocativo, where Sarah worked as a sales clerk all through the busy season. Gayle charged her up to the point where Sarah is considering going into fashion design. Gayle says she has a definite flair.

Alan I put to work beside me on
Large.
Was I founding a painting dynasty, like the Wyeths? The jury is still out on Alan's talent, but his pick and shovel contribution to the work (no greater than that of Rembrandt's disciples on many of his paintings) helped move the project along. I didn't tell him, but I had already decided to give Alan his great-grandfather's ring when he graduated high school; I had been waiting to make sure it wouldn't slip off his finger.

We finished the painting by Labor Day. By then I hated it, really hated the overheated monster. But in October, miracle of miracles, Lonnie managed to sell it to a department store conglomerate with headquarters in, I think, Waukegan, Illinois. Anyway, somewhere beyond the zone of influence of New York art critics. The chain's CEO was caught by Lonnie's title for the work,
Man's Eternal Striving.
Life began at the water's edge, she reminded him, and humankind crawled up from the beach to challenge nature and conquer it.

Again, whatever. The CEO planned to hang the behemoth in the conference room as an inspiration to his management team. I could have kissed Lonnie for
her
inspiration when she phoned with the news.

I did kiss her a couple of weeks later, at the end of a celebration of the sale that went late into the evening. Kissed her and a great deal more. Our relationship is undergoing changes. In exactly which direction and how far it is still too early to say, because I see Olivia Cooper fairly often, and Julie Klampf when she gets to New York. After a long drought, my cup really doth runneth over.

That's good and it's bad. Bad because the sexual energy I had redirected into my work I was now directing back into sex. I was drawing less, painting hardly at all. I needed a major project to help me sharpen my focus, and I am beginning to form an idea for a really big painting, a
Large III
that calls for more wall space than I've got. There may be a way to extend my shack a few feet to the west.

I am working on that.

ALSO BY GORDON COTLER

Prime Candidate

Shooting Script

The Bottletop Affair

The Cipher
(as Alex Gordon)

Mission in Black

ARTIST'S PROOF
. Copyright © 1997 by Gordon Cotler. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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First Edition: October 1997

eISBN 9781466884359

First eBook edition: September 2014