The Forgery of Venus (13 page)

The lunch rush was just clearing out when I got to the saloon, and I took a seat at the bar. “Where’s Clyde?” I asked the young woman behind the bar. I’d never seen her before, and Clyde has been the day barman at Gorman’s since the Beame administration.

“Clyde?” she said, clueless, obviously, and my insides started to wobble again and I ordered a martini to make them stop. I drank it and ordered another one and I noticed that my Hillary painting wasn’t up on the wall anymore. It had been replaced by a framed vintage prize-fight poster. I asked the girl what happened to it and she said she didn’t know what I was talking about, and I was about to give her an argument—in fact, I was yelling at her—when Mark came in and dragged me to one of the corner tables and asked me what the fuck was up with me.

I told him. I told him about the fancy loft and my key not working in my door and the guy in Bosco’s place and it added up to…what? Someone had stolen my life and replaced me with someone else? And even as I said the words they seemed the very definition of crazy to me, a short step from conversations with space aliens and the messages from the CIA. But he heard me out and then said, “We got a problem, kid.”

“We?”

“Oh, yeah. I just guaranteed Castelli you’re going to do his ceiling and now you’re having a nervous breakdown on me.”

A little glow of hope here. “So the ceiling is a real job and I, like, wouldn’t have taken a job like that unless I was a starving hack commercial guy, would I?”

“I don’t know, Chaz. Maybe you needed a break. Maybe you’re fascinated by Tiepolo. Who knows what artists will do? Hockney did all those Polaroids for years—”

“Fuck Hockney!” I said, louder than I had intended, and people in the bar looked our way. “And fuck you! What happened to my Clinton painting?”

“What are you talking about, Chaz? What Clinton painting?”

“That one, the one next to the bar that’s been there for years, and the bartender’s wrong—”

“Chaz! Calm yourself the fuck down!”

“Just tell me I’m who I am!” I was shouting now, and he replied, in just the sort of soothing voice that does more than anything else to inflame incipient madness, “What good would that do, man? If you’re as nuts as you say, you could be imagining me saying just what you want to hear. Or the opposite. Look, let’s get out of here, you’re going to get eighty-sixed if you keep screaming like that.”

He threw some money on the table, more than necessary to cover our tab with a generous tip, and hustled me out into the street. There
he used his cell to call his black car, and in a few minutes it appeared and we got in. Which was fine with me at that point. Black car, Mark talking on his cell to some client, a normal situation—he wasn’t particularly concerned with what had happened to me, so why should I be? Yes, crazy logic, but just then that was all the logic I had.

We pulled up in front of his gallery and got out. He had some business to transact; I could wait in his office, upstairs from the showroom. I was content to do so; I had no pressing engagements. I sat in Mark’s big leather chair and closed my eyes. Maybe I could go to sleep, I thought, and when I woke up everything would be back to normal. No, that wasn’t going to work, I was wired despite the drinks. Okay, I kept coming back to the idea that this had to be a side effect of salvinorin, something they hadn’t figured on, some delicate system in my brain had collapsed and I was hallucinating an alternate reality as a successful painter of the kind of paintings I happened to despise.

Then I thought, Wait a second, I have a
life,
with all kinds of physical traces, bank accounts, paper trails, websites, I’ll just check it out right now, and so I turned to Mark’s computer and Googled myself. I had a website, it seemed, a beautiful one, all about my wonderfully slick nudes, and strangely enough it displayed some paintings, early stuff, that I actually recalled doing. The website I remembered, with my magazine illustrations on it, was gone.

I tried to get into my bank account online. My password didn’t work.

I pulled out my cell phone and brought up my phone book. I had the name of every magazine art director in New York in that list, and they were all gone, replaced by a bunch of names I didn’t recognize. But Lotte’s name was there, and almost without volition I found myself ringing the home number associated with her name, a number I didn’t recognize, a Manhattan number. It rang; then a message tell
ing me that I’d reached the home of Lotte Rothschild, Chaz Wilmot, Milo, and Rose, and I could leave a message at the beep. I left no message.

No hope then, the hallucination was complete. The me I remembered no longer existed. Except for Mark. And now I was terrified of Mark. Mark was God now; he could erase me with a word. So I passed the time until he chose to reappear. I played computer solitaire. I cleaned my nails with my Swiss Army knife. While I had the knife out I carved my monogram into the side of his desk drawer, so in case this was a complete hallucination and I was really someplace else, I could come back and check. If I remembered.

I
t turns out that when you’re going crazy it’s probably better to be with a complete narcissist like Slotsky than with a caring person. Your agony is so trivial to him that in a strange way it stops being so all-consuming to you. Mark came bouncing in with a big smile, talking about some killing he’d just made on a painting. He was in the mood to celebrate and he just happened to have an invitation to a big opening at Claude Demme in Chelsea. Sushi from Mara was promised, and unlimited Taittinger. My little difficulty was apparently forgotten, and I was willing to pretend it was no big deal for the nonce, because I was waiting to wake up. One day at a time, as they say in rehab. It goes for the minutes too.

So I followed him out like a wooden pull-toy and we traveled in the black car to Claude Demme on West Twenty-sixth Street. It was a three-man show by guys who were fifteen years younger than me; their work was about what you’d expect, and the people too, art hags, Eurotrash, dealers, a couple of A-list celebrities. Mark filled a plate with pricey sushi and started his usual schmoozing and air-kissing. I air-kissed not and filled my belly with champagne. After half a dozen flutes I felt the need for air and strolled out down the street toward Eighth Avenue.

All the galleries were lit, and I passed them without much interest until I came to a large storefront with a plaque on the wall that said
ENSO GALLERY
in artful calligraphy, white on black, and stopped to stare at a large painting in the window. It was of a nude woman
unusually well rendered, and she was clutching tenderly to her breast a miniature version of herself, another spasm of irony wrung out of the corpse of surrealism, although the guy could really draw. It took me a couple of seconds to realize it was in exactly the same style as the unfinished piece I’d seen in the fancy loft. I stopped breathing and looked at the window card. It read
RECENT WORK BY CHARLES WILMOT, JR.,
and sure enough, there was my monogram painted in the lower right of the painting.

I went in, shaking all over. There were a few people in the small white space and maybe ten paintings on the walls. All nudes, a few men, mostly women, more than a few young girls. The technique was realistic: flat lighting, concealing nothing, a good deal of crotch hair depicted, a soft-core effect, a little Balthus, a little Ron Mueck, a little Magritte. I recognized some of the models, women I’d known; Lotte and Suzanne were there too. The prices were up in the high five figures and quite a few had been sold. I’d never seen any of them in my life.

I went up to the girl behind the desk, a pretty blue-eyes with extra-large round spectacles and gelled punk-black hair. She looked up and gave me a big smile: “Hello, Mr. Wilmot,” she said, and I said, “What the hell is going on here?”

Her smile faded and she asked, “What do you mean?”

“You know me?” I demanded.

“Uh-huh.” Carefully. “Yeah, you’re the artist. Is something wrong?”

And I snapped.

The poor failed bastard I was in my every memory grew knuckle hair and tusks and shouted, “Is something wrong? Is something
wrong
? Yeah, I’ll tell you what’s wrong, darling: I never painted any of this shit.”

I gave a yell and took out my knife and attacked the paintings, slashing through the beautiful, oh-so-salable surfaces, and my God, it felt good! The art lovers were screaming and running out and the
girl screamed too and called out, “Serge!” and reached for the phone. I ran over to the window display and grabbed the card that had my name on it, and I was trying to slice it up with the knife when I was grabbed from behind by, I imagine, the Serge whom she’d called. The card with the knife still stuck in it fell from my hand as we struggled. I broke free and threw the first serious punch I’d let loose since the schoolyard, and he slipped it with an ease one doesn’t really expect in a gallery manager and connected with a left jab, then a powerful right cross, and I went down and out.

I came to in the back of a patrol car in handcuffs. Dimly, I observed a cop in conversation with Serge and the gallery clerk on the sidewalk, and then they drove me to what I assumed was their precinct and took my ID, watch, belt, and the laces from my sneakers away from me and put me in a cell, where I puked Claude Demme’s expensive champagne and some partly digested Chinese food all over myself.

Now I was officially a crazy person, and a dangerous one too. New York has a system for dealing with such emotionally disturbed people, as we are known, and I was now part of it. They are supposed to notify your next of kin, but when they asked I stayed mute. Many of us EDPs are similarly bereft, so it was no big deal. They shipped me to Bellevue with the vomit still caked on me, and there I was cleaned up, given a gown and a robe and paper slippers, shot full of Haldol, and left tied to a bed.

Some time passed. There was a painful swelling under the injection site on my shoulder, and I complained about it; they said they’d use the other arm if I needed another, but I was a good boy and didn’t make any trouble. A couple of days later, they switched me to pills and then I had my interview, fifteen minutes with an intern half my age. He asked me who I was and I told him I didn’t know. He asked me if I had someplace to go and I said I did. That was the magic answer, for it seemed that the Enso Gallery did not care to press
charges. A little artistic misunderstanding, happens all the time. I got a scrip for olanzapine and a boot out the door, back into the world’s largest open-air aftercare facility, the streets of Manhattan.

Once there I fished my cell phone out of the envelope with my personal effects in it and brought up my phone book. It was my old one, with the art directors on it. Oh, good, I thought, the Haldol has kicked in. I called Mark.

He wanted to know where I’d been, and I said the mental ward at Bellevue, and he said, “Well, that was probably for the best. Are you back to being you?”

I said I was.

“You’re going to do my guy’s fresco, right?”

I said I would. In fact, I wanted to leave that very day.

“Not a problem,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

I went back to Walker Street, and my old door was there and my key worked. I looked around at the familiar environment, but it gave me no comfort. It was like I didn’t fit into that life anymore; it’s hard to explain, but I had the feeling that whatever happened I’d never live there again. I took a shower and dressed and packed a small bag. While I was packing, Mark called and told me I could pick up the tickets and the other stuff I’d need at his gallery that evening, and I did, and his black car took me to Kennedy and out of my old life.

T
hey flew me to Venice on Alitalia, in first class. People complain about air travel a lot nowadays, but this was considerably better than being in Bellevue. I had a pint or two of Prosecco to start and the
gnocchi alla Romana
with a good enough Montepulciano. I was picked up at the airport as promised by a silent and efficient man who introduced himself as Franco, then taken by private launch to a boutique hotel off the Campo San Zaninovo, convenient to the palazzo, which is right on
the Zaninovo Canal between the Ponte Storto and the Ponte Corona. I was just settling into my room when my cell phone rang, and it was Lotte calling. A renewed pang of terror and I refused the call. She left an angry message: according to her I should be in a psychiatric hospital and not swanning around Europe. She knew all about my recent craziness because someone at the gallery had used a cell phone camera to snap me being dragged from the gallery with blood all over my face, and it had made the tabloids, and she’d called Mark, who filled her in on the whole story, the rat. I didn’t return the call.

After a day of rest in my lovely room, Franco took me to the palazzo and turned me over to Signor Zuccone, who is the majordomo of the place and responsible to the big cheese for this abortion. Well, you know, it’s real
damp
in Venice, and the palazzo was built in 1512, and they probably spent fifty bucks on the roof since then, and when I looked up at the dining room ceiling I saw a sagging gray porridge, lightly smeared with angels and clouds. I told Zuccone that the whole thing had to come down. He didn’t blink, and the next day the demolishers were at work. While that was going on I had a look at Tiepolo’s cartoons. This was the actual working set, complete with the tiny holes and the marks of the red chalk pounce he’d used, miraculously preserved. So that was okay as far as the design went, which was an Assumption of the Virgin with angelic choir and saints, lots of lush clouds, no deep feeling, just pure gorgeousness. I loved it, and in a strange way it blew my recent identity problem right out of my skull. A consuming art project will do that sometimes, stifle the little voices of ego—or, in my case, madness—and let you exist in the realms of form and color when nothing’s of concern except the next stroke of the brush.

It was, of course, not a restoration in any real sense. It was a forgery. I still loved it—how cheaply sold my long-protected virginity!

The first thing I had to do was to find someone who knew fresco
plaster. I thought about my father and the St. Anthony job, his great fresco fiasco, on which a Mr. Belloto was our plaster guy. He looked about a hundred years old, the last man in America to wear a bowler hat, came to work in a suit and a tie with a diamond stickpin in it, changed into coveralls at the job site, kept the tie on. The deal was that some rich bastard son of the Church had given a dining hall to a seminary in Suffolk County and there was money to do a fresco of the life of the patron saint, and of course immediately Father was Michelangelo revived. This job was his bid for immortality, so the fresco had to be right, had to last for the ages, as long as Pompeii at least. I was the apprentice, so if the quattrocento ever rolled around again, I’d be set to cash in—crazy, of course, but thanks, Dad, it eventually came in real handy.

I spent the better part of that year—I was twenty-two—doing all the things that people do on a fresco besides the actual painting, under the hand mainly of Mr. Belloto. It’s not like plastering the kitchen. The trick is that your slaked lime has to be really old. You don’t want any unslaked lime in your mix because it might slake up on the wall and generate gas that’ll bubble the surface.

Footnote: immortality, in this case, lasted around ten years. There were over a hundred seminarians in there when we started, a number that sank to around six not too long after the Second Vatican Council finished trashing the grand old Tridentine Church. So the diocese sold the barn to a nondenominational retirement home that didn’t want scenes from the life of St. Anthony staring down at the crocks while they ate; they wanted the artworks of the residents up there, flowers and clowns and so forth, so they painted a nice peach color over the fresco. No great loss, as a matter of fact, it was typical Late Dad, beautifully drawn, utterly spiritless. I think even Mr. Belloto knew that; he used to grip my shoulder and sigh while viewing each
giornata.

After asking around a little I found Signor Codognola, also about
a hundred years old, and he said he had a trove of plaster from before the war—I think maybe he meant World War I. He was slow but good, worked with a couple of relatives, grandsons or great-grandsons, I don’t know, took them a week to get the
trullisatio
in, the coat that sticks to the lath, and another week to adhere the brown coat to it, what they call the
arricciato
. I didn’t even pretend to supervise; mainly I toured the city by foot and vaporetto, checking out all the Tiepolos I could find to pump up my sense of how he handled form and color. One of the great natural draftsmen, yeah, but almost over-slick. The famous comic book illustrators of the golden age were all Tiepoloesques. So I am right at home. But really, beautiful work with the small brush, used like a pen. I spent my time grinding colors and waiting for the brown coat to cure up.

F
resco work fixes your mind on a day at a time; all you think about is how you’re going to handle the next
giornata
. Obviously it was a lot easier for me because Tiepolo marked his
giornata
right on the cartoon. You have, let’s say, a section of fluffy cloud and a triangular chunk of blue sky between some clouds, and another lump of darker cloud, and that’s about all you can do in one day’s work—your
giornata
—on the wet plaster of the
intonaco,
or surface layer. We had modern scaffolds and lights, so no candle stuck on the head for Chaz. I just mixed my colors with lime water, set up the palette, and up I went. And Marco, or another one of the grandsons, helped pin up the cartoon and I pounced it with red chalk, and then we took off the cartoon and I incised the lines of chalk dust with a wooden stylus, and then they laid the
intonaco
and I painted on it wet, using the incised lines as guides.

It was like a gigantic paint-by-numbers, only in the style of Tiepolo; it looked clumsy from close up, but from the floor it looked like old Giambattista did it yesterday. It had that don’t-give-a-shit ease
in it, true
sprezzatura
, total authority laying down the paint, like I’d been doing Tiepoloesque frescoes every day of my life. In the center, the Virgin exalted, the most important part; I took the liberty of giving her Lotte’s face, nice Jewish girl after all, or at least the Rothschild half, and why not, I’m sure Tiepolo stuck his honeys on ceilings all over Europe.

About three weeks into the project, say the middle of November, I got a surprise visit from my ex-father-in-law—I mean Lotte’s father, not the side-of-beef one. He was in Venice for a conference. Interesting guy, pushing eighty now but still active, had a long career in the UN diplomatic service, then moved on to art scholarship. Calls himself an amateur, but he’s written a lot, apparently quite respected in European art-history circles. Not one of
those
Rothschilds, as he likes to say, consequently went through a rough time as a kid, lost his family to the Nazis and survived by being sheltered in a convent in Normandy. Married an Italian woman; she had the one kid and then died, cancer, when Lotte was about twelve. He never remarried. Lotte had told him where I was and I sensed that this visit was in the nature of an inspection tour. I didn’t mind; I kind of wanted to know how I was too.