The Forgery of Venus (4 page)

S
o I came back and we met and it was the same in New York as it was in Paris, couldn’t get enough, and the first thing I did was rent a loft on Walker Street, a hundred bucks a month, five flights up, an old wire factory, full of scrap and filth, and that was where we stayed, on a big slab of foam I bought on Canal Street. We’d turn the lights off and light dozens of thick plumber’s candles and afterward wash up in the tiny workman’s toilet. I decided to turn it into a living loft; I would dump the scrap out the window into the air shaft or carry it down. I would paint it white and put in a sleeping platform and lighting and partitions and a kitchen, and we would live there and be happy.

In the meantime I stayed in Oyster Bay with Dad, keeping out of his way as much as I could. He had some idea that we were going to be a family again—were we ever that kind of family?—the pair of us and Melanie, the girlfriend. The stepgirlfriend? And he kept going on about this church fresco, how it’s going to be a gigantic revival of that great art, with Wilmot
père
and
fils
as the ringleaders.

When I happened to run into him I could barely stand it, those affectations, that straw sombrero he wore, and the walking stick, and the cape, strolling through the increasingly ragged garden. Maybe the gardener was not that delighted his daughter’d shacked up with a client thirty years older than her, or maybe it was just the lack of money. Mother’s entire income went to the luxurious madhouse she was in, and he was living on whatever commissions he could wrangle.
Collier’s
was long gone by then, and the
Saturday Evening Post
and the others. His main business had become fat cat portraits and selling originals of his old work, but this fresco was going to make everything okay again.

J
ust before I moved out I had a conversation with his girlfriend. I was sitting on the living room sofa watching a fire I’d just made and thinking about my sister and how that was one of our favorite things to do in the winter, make a big fire and watch it burn and throw in stuff we hated—bad photographs of us or toys we’d outgrown, anything that wouldn’t make an actual stink or explode, but occasionally that stuff too—and Melanie came in and plopped down in the leather armchair where my father usually sat. After a while I realized that she was staring at me. I stared back a little and then I said, “What?” and she started in on why was I being so cold and cruel to my father, who loved me so much and was so proud of me and all that. And I said, “You know, for someone who just walked in the door you have a lot of opinions about the nature of this family. For example, they just dragged my mother out of here with a crane. That might have something to do with how I feel about my father.”

“You think that was his fault?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s been screwing nearly every woman and girl around this place since practically day one. That might have an effect on a woman’s self-esteem, might make her inclined to excessive eating and the use of drugs. Who knows, if you stay here long enough you might get to see what it’s like.”

This produced a shrug that made me want to reach for the poker. She said, “He’s a great artist. Great artists play by different rules. If she couldn’t handle that…I mean, I’m sorry for her and all, but…”

I said, “He’s not a great artist. He had a great talent. It’s not the same thing.”

“That’s crazy—what’s the difference?”

“Oh, you want an art lesson? Okay, Melanie, just wait here. I’ll be right back.”

With that, I went to the racks in the lumber room where he kept all his old stuff, the salable and the unsalable carefully divided, and from the latter section I removed a portfolio and went back to the living room. I threw the portfolio open on the coffee table and fanned out the contents.

I said, “When I was a little kid, starting from about age six through about age eleven, my father would take me out to our dock or down the beach, nearly every day when it wasn’t raining or freezing, with watercolor sets and portable easels and canvas chairs, and we would paint together. I had a set just like Dad’s, with Winsor and Newton colors and sable brushes, and we used expensive cold-pressed D’Arches watercolor blocks, twenty-four by eighteen. My father doesn’t believe in cheap materials, even for little kids. And we painted together, for an hour, two hours, depending on the light. We went down at different times of the day, so we could catch all the varieties of light and what the light did to the water and the sand and the rocks and the sky. In the warm weather we painted figures, people on the beach, and boats out on the Sound, and in the winter, we just painted the beach, the sea, and the sky, the same view, over and over again. It was our Mount St. Victoire, our Rouen Cathedral. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Not really,” she said.

“No. But anyway, what do you think of the paintings? These are his, by the way. I used to tear mine up afterward because it made me so mad that I couldn’t do what he did with a brush.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“Yes, they are. This one, for example, a fleshy woman and a child sitting on the beach, early in the morning. Look at the heft and presence of the figures, all done freehand with a loaded brush, ten strokes and there they are. And look at the sweep of the wet sand! That perfect color, and the white of the paper showing through just enough to make it shine. And this one: winter on the Sound, and three seagulls made out of the white of the paper, just chopped in against the gray sky, and they’re perfect and alive. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get those effects in aquarelle? This is not the kind of kitsch you buy in resort souvenir shops, it’s nearly as good as anything Winslow Homer or Edward Hopper ever did in the medium. You get that word, ‘nearly’? I use it because that’s the story of his life as an artist—‘nearly.’ He didn’t ever take it that extra foot into greatness. He checked at the fence. And it wasn’t just that he was an illustrator. Homer did illustration, Durer, for Christ’s sake, did illustration. No, there was something missing, or maybe, yeah, something stifled in him. That’s why he put these away, he doesn’t want to be reminded of how close he came. You need more than talent to be a painter. You have to take risks. You have to not give a shit. You have to be open to…I don’t know what it is—to life, God, truth, some kind of
other
stuff. It’s a business, art, but not
just
a business.

“And you know what the really horrible thing is? He knows it. He
knows
it. He knows what kind of gift he threw away, and that knowledge made a poison in this house, a curse, and that sad, ruined woman they just dragged away knew it too and she took it all in, she tried to absorb the poison, she fucking
carried
it, so that he could still be jaunty C. P. Wilmot, with his little straw hat and his romantic cape, traipsing about her house and chasing cunt. He’s a vampire: perfect manners, charming, beautiful clothes—come
innnn,
I only vant to suck your
bluuuuhd
. I can see he’s got his fangs into you too,
darling. He’s given you the line about how he needs a woman who understands genius, about how the rules that regular people have to follow don’t apply in his case, how he’ll make you immortal with his brush…”

And so on and on. She looked at me like I was a traffic accident, one of those mashed-beer-can ones with blood on the glass, where you can imagine what happened to the people inside, but you can’t take your eyes away. She jumped to her feet while I was still yapping away and walked out of the room without another word.

The strange thing about this little encounter was that while I was talking it came into my mind why I was so reluctant to leave Oyster Bay. Looking at those pictures—it was like a concentrated elixir of my childhood, the beach, the flats, the water, the boats, my mother wrapping me in a sweater on the beach on a cool evening, and Charlie’s hand over mine on the warm tiller of her little sailboat the summer she taught me how to sail. And the smell of low tide, and always the sparkle and play of light on the water; I used to lie facedown on the dock and stare at it like a mystic stares at a mandala, the door to a higher existence. I was born there, I never really lived anywhere else but there and in the city during school, and even then I’d come home every summer.

After Melanie walked out I went up the back stairs to the widow’s walk, and stood out in the breeze, and looked at the lights on Lloyd Point and Centre Island, and the channel markers, red and green, and beyond the black Sound the glow of Stamford on the Connecticut shore. Charlie and I used to sneak up here at night when we were kids, we’d stand by the railings wrapped in blankets and be pirates and explorers until Mother came up and yelled us back to bed, but not much of a yell because she used to do the same thing when she was a girl, and now Charlie’s entombed and
Mother’s entombed, rotting alive, and he’s still trotting around like nothing’s wrong, with his new honey, although he’s probably in a deeper tomb than either of them, when you think about it, but not me, I said to myself, I’m not going to be buried alive, not here, not anywhere. It fucking broke my heart, but that day I performed a homectomy on myself, without anesthesia, and left and never lived there again.

I
seem to recall you had a car and helped me move out, or maybe it was someone else, and I started living in the ruined factory on Walker Street. I worked like a bastard for five weeks, throwing out a ton of trash, tangles of wires, rusted machinery, then putting down tile on the splintered floors, wiring the place, hauling cabinets up five flights of stairs, plus a stove, a kitchen sink, and the hot-water heater. If I’d known what it would be like, I probably wouldn’t have started. A hot-water heater up five flights of stairs by myself!

The only thing I had help on was the drywall. The guy on the second floor took pity on me, Denny Bosco, another painter, he saw the ton of drywall stacked on the sidewalk and told me I should hire some guys from the labor exchange on the Bowery to haul it up, and I did: who knew? And he helped me with the drywall too, one thing it’s real hard to do by yourself, you can’t hold a panel up over the baseboard and nail it in unless you have three hands. He was the Oldest Inhabitant around there, been living in the building since SoHo was a decaying industrial neighborhood; you had to have an AIR sign outside the building, “artist in residence,” so that if there was a fire the firemen would know to look for a charred corpse. He said he used to sit up on the roof at night—this was back in the late sixties—and look out toward Canal, and except for the neon glow from Chinatown, which
was a quarter the size it is now, you could see nothing but blackness and a few little lights from the lofts of the pioneers. He told me that it was going to get worse, that the parasites were moving in, like they do anytime the artists generate a little life in a neighborhood—the rich come to suck at it and make it dead again. A prescient guy, Denny, as it turned out.

A
week later I rented a paint sprayer and masked the windows and my face and sprayed the whole interior white. The paint was barely dry when, as we’d arranged, Suzanne showed up with a U-Haul full of furniture. I was glad to see her and I carried the stuff up in a pretty good mood, although it was mainly really heavy pieces from her parents’ house, and I thought it would be a nice day, moving into a place we were going to live together in, but I noticed she was in one of her dark phases; she sat on a chair smoking, and didn’t really respond when I started joking and playing around about where we were going to put the different chairs and dressers and all, like I was an interior decorator. Really the place looked kind of grungy still, despite all my work, and I thought that was what was bringing her down, she was disappointed.

But no. She said, “I’m pregnant.” And the usual, are you sure, yeah, almost two months late, and she’s had the tests and all, and how did it happen, I thought you were on the pill, and she sort of lost it then, like, oh, I knew you’d say it was my fault and my life is over, and my career is just taking off. Which was mainly that she sang on open mike nights in a couple of clubs in the East Village and there was a guy who said he was from a record company and gave her a card, but I didn’t mention that. And I said, well, what do you want to do? She was crying by then, and I hugged her and said I loved her and whatever she wanted was okay with me, abortion or have the baby, we’d manage.

T
he girl gets pregnant and either you get rid of it or you have it and your life flows into a different channel than you thought it would. We went back and forth about it quite a few times; first she wanted to abort and I didn’t, and then she didn’t and I did, and I guess the Catholic thing is still there, but not only that, it’s something about the flow of life, it makes me crazy to think of the hole you’d have to live with for the rest of your life, and that can’t be good for a relationship. But what did I know? Charlie always said go with life, love your fate.
Amor fati
is the expression. I’d have given anything to be able to talk this through with her, but when I called the number of her society they said she was en route to Uganda.

And so was my life set on a false course, which is another reason why I’m telling you all this ancient matter. For lust will languish and its heat decay, says Petronius Arbiter, you’ll recall that from the class we had on Renaissance translations from the Latin masters—one of my rare B grades, I think—and it’s so true. By the time I marched up the aisle with Suzanne my attachment was more than half guilt, but I thought I could fix that somehow, through fidelity, through affection, and somehow lay the curse my father had passed on. Unfortunately, it turns out the habit of self-betrayal tends to spread. It pollutes the other parts of life, in my case my painting, and it acts as a marker for others, like those cruel experiments where they paint a monkey green and the other monkeys tear it to pieces. If you’re false to yourself, I think, other people find it easier to be false to you. I mean, there’s no one there to begin with, so what’s the big deal?