The Forgery of Venus

FOR E. W. N.

Wilmot showed me that one, back in college; he’d written it out in his casually elegant calligraphy and had it up on the wall of his room. He said it was the best commentary he knew about the kind of art they were showing in New York in the eighties, and he used to drag me to galleries back then and wander through the bright chattering crowds muttering in a loud voice, “This is a cock.” A bitter fellow, Wilmot, even back then, and it should not have surprised me that he came to a bad end. Whether the story he tells is merely remarkable or literally fantastic I still cannot quite decide. I would have said that Wilmot was the least fantastic of men: sober, solid, grounded in the real. Painters have a rep, of course—we think of van Gogh and Modigliani flaming out in madness—but there’s also stodgy old Matisse and, of course, Velázquez himself, the government employee and social climber, and
Wilmot was always, even back in college, on that zone of the spectrum.

Did this all begin in college, I wonder? Were the lines of relationship, envy, ambition, and betrayal set that early? Yes, I believe so, or even earlier. Someone once said life is just high school, on and on, and it does seem that the great of the world are only familiar schoolyard figures—the obnoxious little shit we recall from ninth grade becomes the obnoxious little shit in the White House, or wherever. There were four of us then, thrown together by chance and by our mutual dislike of dorm life at Columbia. Columbia is technically an Ivy League school, but it is also neither Harvard, Yale, nor Princeton, and has the additional misfortune of being located in New York City. This tends to make its undergraduates even more cynical than undergraduates tend elsewhere to be: they’re paying all this money and yet they might as well be attending a suburban community college. And so we were cynical, and affected also a paint-thin coat of sophistication, for were we not New Yorkers too, at the center of the universe?

We lived on the fifth floor of a building on 113th Street off Amsterdam Avenue, across the street from the great futile mass of the unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I roomed with a fellow named Mark Slotsky, and in the other apartment on the floor were Wilmot and his roommate, a reclusive, pasty pre-med whose name I had forgotten until reminded of it somewhat later in this tale. Aside from the pre-med, the three of us became pals in the manner of students, deeply, but provisionally: we all understood that school was not real life. This was perhaps unusual at the time, the waning days of the great patriarchy, and there was still floating around in the air the notion that this experience would mark one forever, that one would always be “a Columbia man.” This none of us bought, which is what pulled us together as a group, because it would have been hard to find three young louts with less in common.

Slotsky’s parents only appeared at graduation, and I sensed that he might have excluded them then had he been able. They were actual refugees from Hitler, with dense accents, almost parodically overdressed, noisy and vulgar. Mr. S. had made a modest pile as a soft-drink distributor and loudly wondered what items of the college’s property his money had paid for. They seemed, to my eye, oblivious to their beloved college boy’s desire to stay as far away from them as possible, indeed to be mistaken, by reason of dress, speech, and comportment, for another scion of Charles P. Wilmot, Senior.

The name of C. P. Wilmot (as he always signed himself in a thick black scrawl) is not as famous now as it was then, but he was at one time considered the natural heir to the throne occupied by Norman Rockwell. He’d made a rep as a combat artist during the war and had flourished as a delineator of American life in the mass-circulation magazines of the fifties, and at the time of our graduation it was not at all obvious that his profession and livelihood would utterly vanish in the succeeding decades. He was rich, and famous, and happy with his lot.

I should add that upon this graduation day I was an orphan, parents killed on the road when I was eight, only child, raised by a responsible but distant aunt and uncle, and so forth, and therefore I always had my eye out for appropriate father figures. During the various graduation ceremonials I found myself staring at the elder Wilmot with filial lust. He wore on that occasion a soft cream-colored double-breasted suit, with a foulard bow tie and a Panama hat, and I wished I could stick him in a shopping bag and take him home. I recall that the dean came by and shook his hand, and Wilmot told an amusing anecdote about painting the portrait of both the president of the university and the president of the United States. He was much in demand as a fellow who could paint into the faces of world leaders a nobility of spirit not always apparent in their words and deeds.

After the graduation was over, the great man took us three friends
and our families to Tavern on the Green, a place I had never been to before and which I then regarded as the pinnacle of elegance rather than what it is, a sort of higher Denny’s with a terrific location. Wilmot sat at the head of the table, flanked by his son, and I was down by the foot, with the Slotskys.

During lunch I therefore learned a good deal about the distribution of carbonated beverages and what little Mark had liked to eat as a child, but what I chiefly recall about the afternoon (and it’s amazing I can recall anything, so generously flowed the champagne) was the senior Wilmot’s voice, rising witty and mellow above the restaurantish murmur and clink; the laughter of the company; and once, the sight of Chaz’s face, illumined by a chance bar of sunlight from the park outside, and its expression as he regarded his father, a look that combined worship and loathing in equal measure.

Or perhaps I am interpolating this based on what I later learned, as we so often do. Or I do. But there can be no doubt about what I am now to relate, and this bears more directly on the veracity of Chaz Wilmot’s remarkable, horrible tale. He was one of those sons who, looking upon their father’s profession and finding it good, set out to match or surpass the old guy’s achievement. He was therefore an artist, and a surpassingly good one.

I first met him in our sophomore year as I was moving in. He happened to be going out while I was struggling up the filthy marble stairs with an enormous suitcase and an over-full grocery carton, and with hardly a word, he pitched right in and helped me with my things and afterward invited me into his place for a drink, which was not beer, as I had expected, but a Gibson, made in a chrome shaker and served in a chilled stemmed glass. My first ever, and it went to my head, as did the appearance somewhat later that afternoon of a lovely girl who removed all her clothes so that Chaz could paint her. I was reasonably experienced in that area for an undergraduate, but this was for me a new and
expansive level of the louche—Gibsons and naked girls in the broad light of day.

After she was gone, Chaz showed me his work. His room had the street-side windows and for a few hours a day the light was fairly good and to obtain this light he had agreed to occupy the smaller of the two bedrooms, even though he was the lessee. There was an immense professional easel in it, a ratty pine table smeared with paint, a junky student desk, a brick-and-board bookcase, a plywood wardrobe, and a beautifully made antique brass bed, this last brought from home. One wall was covered with pegboard, from the hooks of which depended an astounding variety of objects: a stuffed pheasant, a German lancer’s helmet, a variety of necklaces, bracelets, tiaras, a stuffed beaver, an articulated human skeleton, swords, daggers, odd bits of armor, a large flintlock pistol, and an array of costumes representing the last half millennium of European dress, with a few tastes of the Orient thrown in. This collection, I soon gathered, was a mere overflow from his dad’s, who had a virtual museum of paintable objects installed in his studio at Oyster Bay.

The place stank of paint, gin, and cigarettes; Chaz was a heavy smoker—always Craven A’s in the red cardboard box—and you could see the yellow nicotine stains on his long fingers even through the omnipresent blots of paint. I still have a little self-portrait he did that year. I watched him do it, in fact, entranced: a few minutes staring at himself in a dusty mirror of a Broadway saloon and there he was—the pall of coarse black hair falling heavily over the broad forehead, the elegant straight nose, the long jaw, those remarkable large pale eyes. When I expressed appreciation he ripped it out of his sketchbook and handed it to me.

On that first afternoon, however, I woozily stood in front of his easel and caught my first sight of his work, which was a smallish painting of that naked girl done against an ochre ground. Without thinking I gasped and said it was terrific.

“It’s shit,” he replied. “Oh, it’s alive and all that, but overworked. Any
one can do a figure in oils. If you screw up, you just paint over it, and who cares if the paint is half an inch thick. The thing is to catch the life without trying, without any obvious working.
Sprezzatura.”

He said the word lovingly, with a roll; I nodded sagely, since we were both being formed into little Renaissance manikins by the Columbia great books program and had both read Castiglione’s
Courtier,
with its admonition to achieve excellent results without showing obvious effort. One was languid, therefore, one whipped out brilliant papers at the last minute, one despised the sweaty grinds in the pre-med program. I should mention here that Chaz rather set the tone of our little community, which was as aesthetic as all get-out. The three of us were in the arts: Chaz painted, of course, and I was acting seriously at the time—I had some off-Broadway credits, in fact—and Mark had a Super 8 camera and was making short films of intense existential dreariness. In memory it was a lovely era: bad wine, worse marijuana, Monk on the record player and an endless stream of lanky girls in black tights and heavy eye makeup with straight hair down to their butts.

Strangely enough it was something Chaz did that knocked me out of acting for good. This was at the start of junior year, and they had brought in a visiting professor, a real Broadway director who was mad for Beckett. We did a series of his plays and I was Krapp in
Krapp’s Last Tape
. Chaz went to all three performances, not, I think, to support me, for we sold out the Minor Latham Playhouse straight through, but because he was genuinely fascinated with the idea of taping one’s whole life—of which more later. At the cast party I got into a drunken argument with some frat boy gate-crashers and there was a modest spasm of violence. The police were called, but Chaz hustled me out through the restaurant kitchen and back to our building.

We sat in his room and we drank some more, vodka out of the bottle, I recall, and I talked and talked until I noticed that he was looking at me peculiarly and I asked him what was wrong. He asked me whether I
realized I was still in character, that I was using the querulous, middle-aged voice I had devised for Krapp. I tried to laugh it off, but the realization generated a deadly chill that penetrated through the booze. In fact, this happened to me a lot. I would get into a character and not be able to get out, and now someone else knew about it too. I changed the subject, however, and drank even more sincerely until I passed out in Chaz’s armchair.

And awoke to dawn and the sharp stink of turps. Chaz had set up a large canvas, maybe five feet by three, on his easel. He said, “Sit up, I want to paint you.” I did so; he adjusted the pose and began to paint. He was at it all day, until the light was gone, pausing only for the necessary toilet breaks and a Chinese meal delivered to the door.

I should say that although I had scrubbed the theatrical makeup off my face, I was still wearing powder in my hair and my Krapp costume of collarless white shirt, baggy dark trousers, and waistcoat with watch chain; and I’d grown a three-day beard to add to the seedy effect. I believe I said “Holy shit!” when at last he allowed me to see what he’d done. I’d taken the obligatory history of art survey course, and the apposite name popped into my head.

“Jesus, Chaz, you’re painting like Velázquez,” I exclaimed, with a peculiar combination of feelings: astonishment and admiration at the feat of art, and an absolute horror of the image itself. There was Krapp, with the impotent lust and malice playing on his face and the little lights of incipient madness around the eyes; and beneath this mask there was me with all the stuff I thought I had successfully hidden from the world staring out, naked. It was like the picture of Dorian Gray in reverse; I had to make myself look, and smile.

Chaz regarded it over my shoulder and said, “Yeah, it’s not bad. A little
sprezzatura
working in there, finally. And you’re right; I can paint like Velázquez. I can paint like anybody except me.” With that he snatched up a brush and signed it with the black colophon he would use through-
out his career, the “CW” with a downward pothook drooping from the “W,” to indicate that it was Wilmot
Junior
who’d done it. I have the thing still, rolled up in a cardboard tube on the top shelf of a storage closet in our house, never shown to anyone. A couple of days after he made the painting I went to my advisor, dumped all my theater courses, and switched to pre-law.

I should say here a little something more about myself, if only to frame, as it were, the story of Chaz Wilmot. My firm is one of those anonymous outfits denoted by three capital letters, and we specialize in insuring the entertainment industry, broadly speaking, everything from rock concerts to film locations, theme parks, and so on. Still in showbiz after all, I like to say. We have offices in L.A. and London, and for about twenty years I was based out of town in those places. Currently, my domestic arrangements are ordinary in the extreme and related to my business life, in a way, for I married my travel agent. Someone in my position necessarily spends a good deal of time on the phone with the person who arranges flights and hotels and so forth, and I developed an attachment to the voice on the phone, so helpful and accommodating at all hours, so unflappable in the many emergencies, blizzards and so forth, that afflict the traveling man. And I liked her voice: Diana is a Canadian, and I grew accustomed to those long vowels and the perky little “eh?” she appended to her sentences; I found myself calling her number late at night with pretended routing changes, and then we dropped the pretense. We have been, I suppose, happily married, although we see little of one another, except on vacations. We have the canonical two children, both now in college, and a comfortable house in Stamford. I am not rich, as wealth is calculated in these imperial times, but my company is both successful and generous.