The Forgery of Venus (18 page)

“How’s he doing?”

“Fine, except the new drug makes him itch and he says he has no energy. I wish I trusted them more, but what can we do? At the end of the day our boy is a guinea pig, and that’s what we must put up with to keep him alive.”

I said, “You don’t have to worry about money for a while anyway, because I just told Slotsky to send you the proceeds from my restoration job. It should come to a little under two hundred grand.”

A small silence while she absorbed this, and then she said, “But, Chaz, what will you live on if you give us all of it?”

“Oh, that’s what I’m calling about, really. It sounds funny when you actually say it, but I have a patron.”

“A patron?”

“Yeah, like in the old days. A rich guy, a pal of the man I did the restoration for, he saw it and we got to talking and I sort of told him my sad story, and he said something like there’s no reason for an artist of your ability to have to grub in the marketplace, and he had a studio I could use rent-free and he’s promised to pay me a regular stipend and take everything I paint.”

“Who is this man?” she asked me, suspicion in her voice, warranted obviously; can she really tell a porker over the telephone? But not really a lie when you think about it; Krebs really is a patron and possibly
less
of a gangster than the old kings of Europe, considering the kind of shit they pulled as a matter of course—Krebs never sent his boys to burn a city and rape its women and burn people at the stake.

“His name’s Krebs,” I said. “He’s a German art dealer and collector. Mark set it up, but I’m not working through Mark. This is all directly for the collector.”

“That’s ridiculous. No one sells paintings like that. What will happen when your work is sold? Will you share in the proceeds?”

“Not clear, and I don’t care. I’m getting paid top dollar to please a single connoisseur who loves my work. Every artist in Europe had that arrangement before the modern period. Lotte, I’ve been looking for this all my life. And you’ve been yelling at me for years to do the best work I can, not jokes, Lotte, no more jokes. And the money…the money is
fantastic
. It means a completely new life for us.”

“As for example…”

“He’s going to give me a million for the painting I’m doing now.”

A longer pause here and a long, sad sigh. “Oh, Chaz,” she said,

“why do I even talk to you? I don’t know what to do.”

“What?”

“You are out of your mind, you are still in some kind of fantasy world. I’m sorry, I cannot do this—”

“Listen, it’s
not
a fantasy, Krebs is real. Ask Mark.”

“I don’t trust Mark. He’s perfectly capable of encouraging your insanity for his own purposes, and in any case, what you describe is impossible! No one could realize that much on your work in the market—”

“Lotte, there’s no market. That’s the
point.
He’s an eccentric zillionaire. He’s got private jets, private yachts, he can afford to have a private artist, just like Lorenzo the Magnificent and Ludovico Sforza and the rest of those guys.”

A long silence, and at last she said, “Well. Then I congratulate you. Honestly…I’m sorry if I sound doubtful, but it all seems like…I don’t know, some impossible and grandiose fantasy. You used to have them all the time when you were taking drugs, if you recall, so perhaps you’ll forgive me if I am not just now breaking out the champagne. By the way, my father rang and said he’d seen you and that you looked well.”

“So you know I’m not doping,” I said, maybe a little acerbic tone there, because she said, “I didn’t mean to imply any such thing. But, you know, it
is
my business—everyone is suspicious, the artists think they’re being cheated, the customers think the same, haggling, always haggling. No one comes in the door and says, I love this work and here is a check for what it says on the card. It’s always, if I buy two can I have twenty percent off? And I sell a work and then the artist sees it at auction and it sells for twice what he got, and he yells at me for undervaluing his work.”

“So quit. We don’t need the money for the gallery anymore.”

“Yes, your new fortune. I tell you, Chaz, I would like to meet this man and see with my own eyes what you have gotten into. Then maybe I’ll believe it.”

“Blessed are those who have not seen and believed.”

That got a laugh. “Well, if you quote the Bible I suppose I must become a little excited.” She sighed. “Ah, if only it were true! There are clinics in Switzerland that have had wonderful successes with children like Milo, where a month costs what I take in, gross, in my best year.”

“It’s covered. I’m telling you, Lotte, it’s a new world. Look, the other reason I called—I want you to come over here.”

“What, to Venice?”

“No, I’m in Rome. That’s where the studio is. I’ll send you first-class tickets, you’ll come, we’ll stay in a swanky hotel. When was the last time we did something like that? Never is when.”

“But the gallery. And the children—”

“The girl can handle the gallery for a few days and the kids’ll be fine with Ewa. Come on, Lotte, you can spare four, five days.”

And she agreed right away, which I thought was a little odd. Lotte’s response to poverty is the classic French one of bitterness, self-denial, and also resenting the pleasure others get in expending money. We used to fight about that a lot: we couldn’t ever go out for a nice meal, and when I did drag her out she always ordered the least expensive thing on the menu and drank a single glass of wine and sat like the chief mourner at a provincial funeral. She wasn’t like that when I met her; no, she knew how to let the good times roll. It was the kid getting sick. Or me. Maybe I have a special charism for making women bitter.

T
wo days later Franco and I picked her up at the airport and drove to the San Francesco, which is not quite the Danieli in Venice but is the best hotel in Trastevere. She was quiet, a little withdrawn, which I guess I had to expect, and when we got out of the Merc at the hotel, she gave me a look. Lotte, being a diplomatic brat, is used to the top end of things—or was before she married me—and the look said, can you
really
afford a place like this? And so I whipped out my magic black card and handed it to the desk clerk.

Who took it with both hands and made a little bow and was all smiles. He was about to check us into the room I’d reserved when Lotte put a hand on my arm and drew me aside.

“I want my own room,” she said.

“Why, you think I’m going to attack you in a frenzy of lust?”

“No, but I’m not here for a cozy holiday. A few months ago you were a raving maniac who pulled a knife on a gallery owner, and I would like to have at least one door between us if this maniac should happen to return.”

“Fine. So what is this, a tour of inspection, like a sanitary commission?”

Now she was standing in combat position, with her arms folded across her breasts and her jaw thrust out, and at that moment more than anything I wanted to tell her the whole thing. But I did not. I was terrified that if I spilled it her face would take on a certain look, one I was more than familiar with from the terminal stages of our marriage, in which shock, pain, and bone-deep disappointment each played a part. The suspicious and canny face she was now showing was not a natural part of her expressive repertoire, I knew. It was me that put it there, as surely as if I’d painted it on with oils. My mom used to wear it often, as a matter of fact, and now I’d given it to my beloved forever. Life is just
so
wonderful.

“If you like,” she said. “You say you have all this money, and I’ve
seen some of it, but I want to be sure you are not in some insane delusion about the rest of it. It’s about our child, Chaz, and about his future. You see why it’s hard for me to trust you—”

“Sure. Okay, no problem. Two rooms. Can they be adjoining or do you have to be heavily isolated from the maniac?”

“Adjoining is fine,” she said coolly, and I turned again to the desk.

An elderly porter with the manners of an ambassador ushered us up to our rooms and got a tip commensurate with his mien. When he’d gone, we agreed to meet in an hour and go out to dinner. I tossed my bag onto what would be my lonely bed and left for the bar on the roof of the hotel, where I drank a couple of Camparis and watched the sky go dark and the shadows creep up the ochre walls of the little convent across the street until they vanished into blackness.

When I returned and knocked on the door of Lotte’s room, I found her ready to go, wearing a dress of just the rose pink that Fra Angelico used to clothe his angels in and a worn velvet jacket colored a sort of verdigris, very quattrocento. It suited her coloring, the dark blond hair, the dark eyes, an unusual combo, but one you see often in paintings from that period. From her Italian mother. And it’s a habit of Lotte’s to dress in colors, when everyone in her circles in New York wears black, as a sign, she says, of mourning for the death of art.

We walked down to the river and north and went to a restaurant I liked off the Piazza di Sta. Cecilia in Trastevere. Both of us had decided to forget about the big issues and the tension of the afternoon, and we had our usual out-of-marriage good time. After dinner we walked back slowly, arm in arm, and talked about light matters or were companionably silent for long stretches on the dark streets. In the hotel, we both went to our separate rooms, after a set of Euro-style cheek kisses, very civilized.

I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep; I paced and watched Italian TV with the sound off for a while, and then found myself waggling
the knob of the door to the next room. It was unlocked. Meaning what? She’d neglected to lock her side? Or maybe this is how they did it in Italian hotels when a couple opted for adjoining rooms.

I walked in and sat at the little desk and watched her sleep, and after a while I took a couple of sheets of hotel stationery and the short pencil they supplied for taking phone messages and made a drawing of Lotte as she slept, the rich spill of hair, her ear, the lovely strong lines of neck, jaw, cheekbone. Then I went and retrieved one of the boxes of Staedtler pens I’d bought as presents for the kids and added color, and I was soon caught up in the technical problem of how to get interesting effects with the unsubtle chemical tones they put in these things, and I found myself cruising down the old expressionist highway, pushing the color with lots of overlayering, and it got to be kind of fun.

After that I went back to my room and did a portrait from memory of the two of us sitting up in bed, kind of Kirchneresque, but with the anatomy correct and more detailed, stronger drawing, a Wilmot, in fact, and this made me feel good, although I kept slipping into those strange dreamlike states you fall into at such times and then jerking awake.

And thinking, I have not been sleeping well; I wake from unpleasant dreams in which there are roaring monsters on the canals and half-naked women riding on their backs. And almost every night, even when I do manage to sleep, I am awakened by shouts and gunfire. During my time here there have been outbursts throughout the city, day and night, some affray between the great families of Venice, and the ambassador gives me to understand that it is ever thus. Yet also, Venice plays a dangerous game between the Pope and the power of Spain and the Empire; it was explained to me, but I cannot understand it, something to do with the principality of Montferrat. Assassins prowl the streets; yesterday I saw them fish a body
from the canal. My copy of the
Crucifixion of Our Lord
by Tintoretto is almost done, and after that I will copy his
Christ Giving Communion to the Disciples.
Now that I have seen the paintings that are here, I am ashamed of how I have composed my own, but I count it ignorance rather than lack of skill. Once you have seen it done scores of times, you say, of course, this is how to arrange figures.

I think the best thing I have seen is the altarpiece that Titian did for the Pesaro family; there is nothing like it in Spain. He commands your eye with masses of color, so that you see the different parts of the work in the order he prescribes. It is like a Mass in itself, one thing following another, and each wonderful—St. Peter and the Virgin and Child, and the banner and the captive Turk and St. Francis and the family of Pesaro, with that remarkable boy staring at an onlooker from out of the picture—that face alone would make a masterpiece, and the audacity of it! But I can do this as well.

Now I hear shots and cries from the direction of San Marco. I think I will leave as soon as I am done with my copies and go on to Rome.

T
hen I was wide awake, sweating, my heart going fast. I’d come to out in the street; somehow I’d pulled my pants and shoes on and got out there. Terrific! That must’ve been his first visit to Venice in 1629. I always liked that Pesaro Titian myself. Strangely, my memories of this hallucination include memories of dreams he’d been having, and it appeared that he was dreaming my twenty-first-century life. Or I was somehow recalling my life while I was being him. The whole thing was unspeakably terrifying and wonderful at the same time, if you can imagine that, like I suppose skydiving is, or would be if you dove through time rather than space, and the experience began all by itself.

Anyway, this little excursion into woo-woo knocked me out pretty good, and I went back into the hotel, getting an interested look from the night man, and returned to my own room. I slipped the drawings I’d done under the door to Lotte’s room, fell into bed, and was instantly asleep. I woke up late the next morning, a little past ten. I cleaned up and dressed and tapped on the adjoining door. No answer. Then I noticed one of the drawings had been slid back onto my side. She’d folded a note onto the double portrait, on which she’d written: “!!!” and a heart with little electric lines around it, and “At breakfast, L.”

I went up to the roof café and found Lotte. She was sitting at a table talking to Werner Krebs.

I was so startled that I froze at the entrance to the café and just watched them for a while. They seemed to be the best of friends, chatting away in French. Lotte had the look she has on whenever she’s speaking her native tongue, a certain relaxed formal look, if that makes sense, as if it’s taken her some effort to conform to the sloppy way that Americans hold their bodies and their faces and now she’s snapped back into a persona that was, paradoxically, more natural.