Stealing Picasso (5 page)

In the morning Harry is hung-over. He is reading
The Saturday Age
, in which there is a big black and white close-up of him, a contrail from his Camel curling in front of his face. The journalist in the aqua cashmere cardigan has called him the newest kid on the bleak blue block of post-modernism. Says he's a nut who inhabits a loft and wants to hunt down Sidney Nolan. ‘Look out, Sidney,' is the vote of confidence with which she finishes her article.

Harry snatches a carving fork out of a drawer and stabs himself right in the mouth, through the whole Arts and Entertainment section and on into the wilderness of Real Estate.

Suddenly they're talking about him, and it makes him sick with fear. Where will it lead? It will lead to them finding out he's a fake. It will lead to them finding out his paintings are just a thousand consecutive decisions made snappish and random to get his
arm moving and the paint flowing: big nose or small? Red hair or blue? Floating on the water or in a dark room? His sister or a chick from Greek mythology? A Scottie dog or the king of beasts? Make a choice. Fast. One minute with Pink Floyd cranked up to ten, wielding his brush like a conductor with a baton, swooping and swaying before the canvas, naked and clueless as a caveman. Next minute on guard, stabbing at the canvas with his brush, like Zorro. No cohesive theory. No all-embracing vision. Just Zorro slashing Zs into a chubby jailer's shirt. Is this what artists are?

The world has discovered him, and the world can't help but discover this about him. Look out, Sidney? Did he really say he was hunting Sidney Nolan? His stomach churns and he scrambles for the sink, where he vomits a floodtide that launches a flotilla of empty bean cans.

The Saturday Age
isn't fooling Harry Broome. He knows Mireille bought him out of a close shave with anonymity. He knows he should feel grateful, and he tries for some moments to admire what she's done for him. But his attempt at gratitude quickly curdles into resentment. As he showers and his hangover recedes, his resentment grows. Once he has had coffee and is in his T14 Renault driving to her address, and has lit his first Camel, his resentment turns into anger and he damns her name out loud. ‘Bloody Mireille.'

Now he's strong again he is no longer afraid to admit that he really is an artist who has Sidney Nolan in his sights. And if only this menopausal skank hadn't leapt in and bought all his works before the true connoisseurs could unfog their pince-nez and winkle their chequebooks from their sports-coat pockets, he might be hanging in boardrooms this morning. He might be hanging in galleries. Weston Guest, director of the NGV, might have anointed him by buying one. But none of them was given a chance.

Worse, he suspects she purchased his paintings as a means of purchasing him, and that he is now beholden to her and expected to pay with himself. The big reward the world has to offer this fifty-year-old is a twenty-two-year-old, taut in the gut and veins, smooth skin tight with muscle. Last night's artistic success was a fraud, a sale of bicep and cock, not heart and eye. She's a rich woman and he's been purchased like a gigolo.

In raised lettering high on the front of her building a sign reads: THE HELL'S BELLS. This was once a waterside pub, a blood-house where, at day's end, wharfies would pay for drinks with cargo they had smuggled off the docks. On 3 December 1954, in the front bar of the Hell's Bells, dock workers were trying to trade half-thawed Narragansett turkeys for whisky, brandishing the birds at the publican like the treasures of Montezuma, when a lone customs agent held his badge aloft and shouted, ‘That poultry is the property of Macintosh and Sons Importers. Everybody is arrested.'

The wharfies looked around, back and forth, to confirm he was alone, before clubbing him with the thawing birds until both he and they were at room temperature. Nineteen fifty-four is still known as the Year of Premature Christmas in Port Melbourne, because on the night of the third the whole suburb reeked joyously of yuletide feast as the murderers ate their weapons and toasted Santa, and Macintosh and Sons.

Mireille will answer the door barefoot and bright-toenailed in a silk nightshirt blaring nipples, he thinks. With minted breath she will pretend to be surprised to see him, then pivot on emeritus ballerina's legs, carefully oiled, into her apartment where incense burns and Serge Gainsbourg plays.

Except when the door opens she is wearing grey overalls spattered with paint, brush smears on her thighs, the fingers of her right hand covered in wet green. She is so sure he is bought and paid for, she hasn't even stooped to the clichés of allure. No lipstick or mascara, no cleavage, no lingerie, not a whiff of perfume. He's insulted anew. Wiping her hand on a cloth she tells him, ‘You look like shit, kid.'

‘I don't dress up for odd jobs.' He has been bought, but he doesn't have to be nice about it.

‘Death warmed up, I mean.'

‘I did some nightclubs.'

She stands back and he walks past her into the house. ‘Up the stairs.' Up a flight of pressed metal stairs and into an enormous room, the floor of which is covered in sisal matting rained on with paint here and there where easels have stood. Floor-to-ceiling windows look over Port Phillip Bay, the clouds bulging low and cerebral atop the water. His bubble-wrapped paintings are stacked against a wall.

On an easel sits the canvas she has been working on, and across which, at the sound of the doorbell, she has run her fingers back and forth to deface it to a cross-hatch of greens, yellows, pinks – nothing of its previous structure discernible.

‘You paint?' he asks.

‘Everyone paints sometime. I used to hike in the mountains. Next I do piano, maybe.'

He sits on a sofa of embroidered French farm scenes, submerged in a jigsaw of spillage and stain. Popping his press-stud shirt open, he rubs his hands across his flat stomach, his eyes half-closed and his lips pouting gently, wanting to bring the crass commerce of this situation out into the open, not let her get away with kidding herself this is an affaire de coeur. You
paid for it, come and get it. He reaches down and caresses himself through his jeans.

She backs away from him as if he might be some sort of dangerous fiend liable to attack ladies before lunch. Her face whitens and she takes up a brush and begins to wash it in a jar, studying its bristles closely. ‘What are you doing?' she asks softly.

‘What you paid for.' He strokes his fingers across his nipples and smiles, happy to have unmasked her, to have told her what she really is.

‘Get out,' she says softly.

‘Hard to get? Hard to get's good. Good for the soul.' He undoes the button on his jeans.

‘Get out.' She throws the paintbrush and it leaves a wound of green on his chest.

‘Hey?' His voice lifts an octave in confusion.

She looks up at him. ‘Go on.'

He buttons his jeans and shirt slowly, allowing her time to recant, not quite believing she wants him to go. Her anger could be all part of her masquerade that this is a natural affair of lust and hormones, and not a transaction.

‘I won't come back,' he tells her at the door.

‘I am throwing you out. You are talking about coming back?'

Slowly his face slackens with disbelief, his jaw hangs loose. ‘You're really throwing me out? You don't want to – you know …' Harry feels a surge of happiness throb in his jaw and chest. ‘You like my stuff?'

She shakes her head. ‘You are a strange kid, kid.'

He reaches out and takes her hand and shakes it, stooping, nodding and smiling. His gratitude floods back so strongly it makes his breath shallow. She really bought his paintings. She didn't buy him. He's an artist. ‘Thank you. Thank you.'

‘Thank you?' She touches her fingertips to her head to show his insanity. ‘For throwing you out?'

‘I thought – you wanted to …'

She takes her hand back from him. ‘Kid, I like your stuff. That is all.'

To hang Harry's pictures they have to take down pictures that are already on the wall. Serious, famous art. ‘This is a Pugh,' Harry says, holding it at arm's length. ‘You can't take down a Pugh to put me up.'

‘Pugh needs a holiday.'

‘A Drysdale. You can't replace a Drysdale with me.'

‘Put it in the corner. It is not his best.'

‘It's a Drysdale.'

‘You are not helping.' She laughs, takes the Drysdale from him, thumps it down in the corner.'

‘Shit. Be careful. Russell Drysdale.'

He leaves her apartment that day scared again – Drysdales are being taken down to make way for him. As he walks the street he keeps his head bowed and his eyes down, so no one will recognise him from the newspaper or as the guy who is replacing Drysdale on walls.

On Tuesday morning Harry takes half a dozen deep breaths before dialling Mireille's number with a beer in his hand. He drinks with his head laid back as he listens to her phone ring.

‘Mireille speaking.'

He nearly hangs up.

‘Ah … hello.'

‘Hello. Who is that?'

‘Harry.' She doesn't answer. ‘Kid,' he tells her.

‘Ah, kid. How are you?'

‘Your cheque bounced. The cheque you gave Chloe Gwyther for my paintings, it was dishonoured. She's … she's calling me everything under the sun. Saying we pulled some sort of sting on her.'

‘We did, kid.'

‘We did?'

‘I do not have that sort of money. Especially for paintings by kids who are unknown.'

‘You've got Drysdales in your house.'

‘Not mine. Bought for a client, on my recommendation, with his money. They are shipped off to him now.'

‘Bitch,' Harry says to himself in admiration.

‘Hey, kid. I got you in
The Age
. You are a star and it cost you nothing, and it cost me nothing. And Chloe got enough free publicity to pay for her champagne. She has done the same thing, one time or another, I will bet. Welcome to the art world. Smoke and mirrors. Come get your paintings any time.'

‘You said you liked my stuff,' he accuses her.

‘I do. I think the world might, too. Sometimes the world must be told it is all right to like something. A sold-out first exhibition can do that. And this is a sold-out first exhibition to everyone but you, me, and Chloe. And none of us will tell. Will we, kid?'

‘But … I didn't sell any paintings, then.'

‘Yes, you did. Ask anybody.'

Harry hangs up on her, a nauseating uncertainty inside him, not knowing now if he is an artist or a fake. Not knowing if she's ruined him or saved him.

Three days later he is standing, drunk, at her door again. She doesn't look angry or surprised, as he had feared she would. She laughs at him swaying there, paint-smeared and smiling. She takes him inside and turns on the wall spots and leaves him sitting, blinking at his own art hanging there. From his chair he watches her through her unclosed bedroom door taking off her
clothes. Wriggling out of a skirt. Balancing on one leg as she unrolls a stocking over thigh, knee, and calf. Unfastening her bra behind her back. He can't take his eyes off her – her neck and shoulders, the flare of her buttocks. Only much later does he realise it has been a performance. That she, a woman with silver in her hair, is proud of her young body.

She takes control. Tells him where to touch her, and how. Straddles him on the chair and rides him while he smiles at the paintings that have driven Drysdale and Pugh from the room. He watches her, nostrils flaring and her breasts rising and falling. When she comes her left eye winces, fluttering, half-closed, as if she was sucking something sour.

‘You're so beautiful.'

It is not just her body that captivates him, but the way she holds herself. Her movements show a long culture of lovemaking, choreographed by a hundred carnal stars that have lit her nights. The fluttering of her fingers and the flickering light in her eyes as she orgasms make him think of the rose windows in Notre Dame, some jewel wrought by ancient masters. He falls in love with her this first night, and is amazed such a thing can happen.

He asks her to sit for him while he paints her. She agrees and each day for weeks she sits still, watching him painting her for hours before she will take him to bed. He compliments her on her patience. ‘My family is a good-looking family. They have often modelled for artists,' she tells him.

Eventually, her dress pooling around her feet, she takes the brush from his hand and kisses him as she strips him. If he tries to touch her before she is ready, she slaps his hand away. She
controls every advance they make on each other. His hands are wet with paint and she places them on herself, leaving his fingerprints in blue and green and red. He feels totally subordinate, but enjoys having his pleasure directed.

He asks about her accent – where it comes from, where her life has been lived. She waves a finger in the air and recites a roll-call of place names. She lives in the here-and-now and won't tell him of her past life. He takes this to mean some man has scarred her. Harry hates that man, imagining him as Marcello Mastroianni. He confronts him in his tuxedo and thrashes him in a casino of dukes and viscounts.

‘Have you been hurt by someone?' he asks her, lying beside her in her bed.

She pouts, as if considering this. Tears form at the corners of her eyes. ‘On the contrary, I have hurt men. Cursed by beauty, I have been a danger to men just by being alive, my mere existence an intoxicant of the sort that has made them challenge each other to knife fights and jump from high buildings through atrium roofs. Good young men have died for me in the most gaudy fashion. I remember their faces, though their names I sometimes did not even know. One fellow, Gerard, threw himself to the bears in the Paris zoo. It was winter and they were hibernating. He was openly mocked in
Le Figaro
as being a failed lover, and his photograph set alongside a photograph of sleeping bears. “Who is the dubious beauty who launched Gerard at hibernating pandas?”
Le Figaro
asked. It was seen as a great insult to me. Next day Gerard threw himself in with the lions, who slumber, but do not hibernate.'

Harry is propped up on an elbow, an eyebrow lifted, agog at her story, feeling pity for Mireille for the curse her beauty has been to her. Damn that show-off Gerard, though, who went and aggrandised his broken heart by throwing himself to lions, when he could have just as easily stepped in front of a bus. Damn him. My love is the equal of his, Harry tells himself. But I wouldn't advertise it in such a way. I'd throw myself off a bridge. Or in front of a tram. Whatever fate best communicates the heartbreak of the modern-day lover to the woman concerned. I'd do it. But I wouldn't need zoo animals and newspapers.

He looks so serious that she reaches out and runs her fingertips across his face; tries to lift his frown, smooth his forehead.

‘Do not be afraid, Harry. Now my hair is silver my beauty is dimmed from the dangerous luminescence of my younger years, and a man is able to woo me without staking his life on success.'

‘No, you're still beautiful,' he insists.

‘I am a memory of beauty. And I am happy that way. I do not want you to throw yourself to bears.'

He feels the rocking of the bed before he sees it in her face. Muscles spasming in laughter.

Weeks go by. Harry, in love, and knowing he is a hero who has won a goddess, and feeling that having achieved this it is not beyond him to also reinvent the whole of art and become a known genius, attends school less and less. He and Mireille drink late in bars and eat tapas for breakfast at the Victoria Market, and return to her apartment, where Harry paints her with Miles Davis lowing on his horn from the bedroom.

He is sketching her in this room, sunshine through the window lighting the silver in her hair, when the phone rings. ‘Stay still. I'll get it. Stay still.' He answers the phone.

‘Hello. Yeah, it's Harry … Okay … Stay cool. Stay cool … I will. Yeah, I understand …'

He puts down the phone, the colour drained from his face. ‘That was Chloe Gwyther. She tracked me here. How did she track me here? She's still pissed off. She's going to send “people” now. And she's going to tell everyone what we did. She thinks “we” set her up. Like … I did it.'

He rubs his fingertips anxiously up and down his thighs, wiping off paint. ‘She says I'm a conniving little shit who's going to be ruined before I even begin, if I don't pay her. I shouldn't believe for a moment that I'll ever get exhibited in this country again, she says.'

Harry's paintings are still hanging in this room. He looks around at them now with his lip curled. How did these works, for which he held such great hopes, become such a burden? None of them are sold; none of them will ever hang anywhere significant, yet he owes money on them.

Mireille breaks from her pose and comes to him and takes him in her arms. ‘You should not have ripped her off, kid. You stole from a bigwig of art there. It is no surprise if she put out a death contract for you.'

‘On you. A contract on you. And it's not funny, Mireille. I owe her the best part of twenty grand, which is a shitload of money to pay for not selling even one painting. And considering I'm a broke student.'

‘I would pay her … if I could.'

‘I really think she might fuck my chances. Put the word out on me. I'm a swindler. I'm a dud. I cheated the gallery that took a chance on me.' He pauses and shakes his head. ‘She could do it.'

‘She is being so unreasonable. Why would she demand commission when she knows none of them sold?'

‘She's somebody and I'm nobody. She could fuck me.'

‘This is my fault, Harry. I am sorry. I will get the money. It could not be that hard, getting money. We will get it.'