The Forgery of Venus (12 page)

“Man, what a crowd!” said Bosco. “And television. This is great!” He was grinning; his teeth went red then yellow as they alternately glowed in the cop light and the overhead crime-lights. He said, “Hey, let’s get in there before all the champagne’s gone,” and strode off toward the crowd.

Or the mob, as I ought to call it. Even at half a block away I could tell that it wasn’t a crowd of art lovers. I heard the sound of glass breaking and a scream, and then distant sirens. Behind me a large black van appeared from Broadway, halted near the patrol cars, and disgorged a squad of tactical police in black uniforms with helmets, face shields, and long batons. They started to form a line and I spun on my heel and ran away. Then I went calmly to a Chinese restaurant and ordered some take-out. Shameful, yes, but what could I have done?

When I got back to my place I sat down with my lo mein and turned on the TV. There was a woman anchoring the local news with the grave look and lowered voice suitable for portentous matters, and she was talking to someone offscreen; it was a breaking-news moment, and then the scene flashed to a guy with a microphone who was standing not far from where I’d last seen Bosco. Behind him you could see what remained of the gallery, its window smashed, its blackened smoking interior, and firemen walking through the ruins doing their usual after-fire cleanup. The reporter was saying, “No, Karen, we don’t know the condition yet of the artist, Dennis Bosco, but witnesses say he was badly beaten and taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital. We’ll get back to you as soon as we have any more information.”

Some more questioning back and forth about injuries and arrests, and then they showed some footage of Bosco’s 9/11 piece and a tape taken earlier at the gallery, the stuff I’d seen the start of in real life, Bosco walking into the crowd around the front of the gallery and then being recognized and getting shoved and screamed at by a group
of big guys and then going down in a flurry of kicks and blows, and the cops shoving through to rescue him, not very enthusiastically I thought. And then a trash can going through the window, and then the mob pushing through into the gallery and screaming art lovers streaming out and getting their lumps too, some of them, and then there was a blaze of fire that made the video go white and there were shouts and screams. The final shot was the tactical police finally moving in like imperial storm troopers and clearing the street.

I couldn’t stop watching, even through the talking heads and the stupid street interviews, some of which had to have the obscenities bleeped out. Then later there was video of Bosco, his face a pudding of blood, on a gurney being loaded onto an ambulance, from which they cut to more interviews, every one of whom agreed that it was obscene to make fun of 9/11 and especially to use the actual ashes of that day, and that the artist had gotten what he deserved. There was a spokesman from the mayor’s office who said the usual about free speech and our constitutional values and that the culprits would be prosecuted, but he didn’t sound too enthusiastic about it either, and why should he be, since the affray was clearly the doing of off-duty cops and firemen. The whole thing was a work of art.

I tried to call Connie Bosco in Jersey, but the line was busy. Then I called St. Vincent’s and found that Bosco was in surgery and they were only giving information out to family members. So I went to sleep.

I visited the hospital the next day but they wouldn’t let me in to see him. The floor was guarded by three big cops, two at the nurses’ station and one by Bosco’s room, so I had to use my charm on one of the nurses; she agreed to take a message in to Connie, and after a while Connie came out and told me I could go back in with her. From what I overheard of the police conversation, I gathered that they resented having to guard him and would have liked to add some lumps of their
own; ironic postmodernism has obviously not penetrated the consciousness of the police.

Connie Bosco is from Mexico and is a potter of some distinction. She seemed distraught and confused by what had happened to her husband. She understood getting your ass kicked by the cops—that’s what the cops did in her native land—but she didn’t get the part about them doing it for art rather than money. Bosco, however, got it just fine. He was as happy as a man with internal injuries, three busted ribs, and a smashed face could be. It hurt him to grin, he said, but he grinned all the same. This was what he’d wanted all his life—to get a rise out of society with his art. He’d tried pornography, he’d tried absurdity—ho-hum. But he’d finally located a sacred cow in the ashes of 9/11, and at last he was one with Monet, van Gogh, and Marcel Duchamp. A urinal moment, and to be savored.

“Apparently, the thing’s gone,” I said. “You heard there was a fire?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “The memory will live on. Besides, I have a lot more ashes. I could build it again. Maybe I will.”

“You do and I’ll kill you myself,” said his wife.

I
left Bosco and took a sharp left onto Eleventh Street and into a sour depression. Okay, he’d found one of the last few sore spots in the culture and stuck his blade in there pretty good and paid the price. He’d literally suffered for art, which was supposed to be part of the deal, but it wasn’t a deal I was ever interested in. What I wanted was…What I
wanted
was…

It struck me that I didn’t know. That was strange. In the what-I-really-want section of my brain there was a dusty shelf with nothing on it. Instead there was a longing.

Thinking this shit and walking down the
via negativa
this way, I found myself in Gorman’s, where I drank away the evening under
my silly painting of Hillary. I fell into conversation with a fellow who said he was an unemployed philosophy teacher, and we talked about the nature of reality through a serious number of rounds and then staggered out into the glowing dark of the city. He needed a cab and said he’d drop me off at my place and he hailed one and…actually I can’t recall the tail end of the occasion very well. I remember Wittgenstein and “the world is whatever is the case,” and the cab, but I don’t have any memory of getting out of the cab and walking up my stairs, which has often served to burn a lot of alcohol out of my system. I do remember waking up.

I wasn’t in my bed but in a king-size item with sheets far finer and cleaner than mine, looking up at a ceiling higher and cleaner than the one in my loft. I had a brief and ridiculous thought that I’d been seduced by the unemployed philosopher. I called out; nothing. Whereupon I rose carefully, so as not to move the spiked thing in my skull, and cast around for the bathroom.

Someone had spent a lot of money here, all the latest European fixtures and a huge glassed-in shower enclosure, quite a gap between it and my old tin job up on stilts, with its mildewed curtain. I washed my face and opened the medicine cabinet, looking for aspirin; I found a bottle of Advil, took three, and checked out the rest of the stuff there. The usual, and I learned from the high-end makeup and face treatments that a woman also lived in this place, but when I examined the amber drug vials I got a shock: one of them was for amoxicillin, and the name on the label was mine.

I recalled that I’d had the vial for nearly a year, since the cough I picked up last winter, and yeah, it was the same vial, with about the same number of residual pills and the smear of blue paint on the cap. So the little quivers were starting up around the heart, and the higher brain parts were thinking explanations: maybe I lent it to someone and forgot about it, and he lent it to someone else, et cetera, and it
ended up here. I put it back and went out into the loft and looked out the window. As I’d expected I was in Tribeca; I could see Greenwich Street and a slice of shining river, so I was probably in one of the elaborately gutted and rebuilt loft buildings catering to media stars and the upper crust of the art world.

Running along under the window was a long painted shelf full of family photographs, and I glanced at them casually, as one does with the photographs of someone else’s family, and then looked at them again, and looked at them again, each one, and now my heart was really pounding, and fat drops of sweat burst out all over my face because it was my family in all the pictures, mine and Lotte’s, my dad in his jaunty cape, and my mother when she was young with her two children in our best white outfits, and Lotte’s parents and her grandparents from old Europe, all photographs I’d seen throughout my married life. And others were strange, for example me and Lotte, somewhat younger, on what was apparently the Great Wall of China, a place we’ve never been. That I can recall.

I went exploring on wobbly legs. Bedrooms for the kids, and in them I recognized a lot of their gear—although Milo had a better computer than he does in real life—and Rose’s room with her stuffed animals and a big corkboard for her drawings.

The huge living room held a good collection of contemporary art on the walls, including one work by Wilmot, Jr., that painting of Lotte and Milo I’d given her for our fifth anniversary, plus comfortable, expensive furniture, a great black piano lurking in the corner, shiny, hideous; the kitchen all à la mode, granite counters, Sub-Zero fridge, with pictures of my kids, their school stuff magneted up there, the Vulcan range, Lotte’s stained and worn cookbook on its stand on the counter.

So then I thought, This must be a drug thing, some strange reaction to the drug, like the Velázquez, but no, it was entirely different
because in those I
was
Velázquez, at ease in himself, and here I was just me, pissing myself in terror.

But I had to see it all, so I followed my nose, chasing the turpentine scent to a door, and when I went through there was the studio, skylighted, spacious, with a big oak Santa Fe easel smack in the middle with the latest by the supposed me on it. I seemed to be doing groups now, a big one, maybe four by six feet. This was of four people, three women and a man, on a rose madder–colored velvet love seat, all slumped to one side, limbs entwined like they’d all stumbled and fallen down in a heap of beautifully painted and glazed pink limbs, slick Barbizon-style surface, invisible brushstrokes, good as Bouguereau any day. The faces were clearly recognizable: Suzanne and Lotte and my mother, all in the full bloom of their youth, and the man was Dad. It was unspeakably more horrible than the family photos. I ran out of there without another look.

Elevator down to the lobby, and this was indeed a fancy building renovation rehab because there was a real lobby, not the usual loft building hallway: it had potted plants and indirect lighting and a little desk for the doorman. Who greeted me cheerfully: “Hi, Mr. Wilmot. Looks like we gonna have a nice day.”

He was a short, dark man in a gray uniform, labeled
AHMED
on a chromed pin. I approached him and said, “You know me?” and my tone and face must’ve been something else, because his formal smile jelled and he answered, “Sure, I know you. You’re on the top front. Mr. Wilmot.”

“How long have I been living here?”

“I don’t know, sir. I been here six years and you were here when I got hired. Is there something wrong, sir?”

I left without responding to this inane question and took off, and in a little while I was running up Broadway and I didn’t stop until I got to my loft building. The street door was propped open, which was
unusual, but people sometimes did it when they were expecting deliveries. I ran up the stairs to my loft and stood in front of my loft door.

Only it wasn’t my door. My door has the original battleship-gray paint with a universe of old chips and stains I know like the palm of my hand, and the door I was gaping at now was new and painted a cheery cerulean blue, and it had a brass cardholder and an engraved card stuck in it bearing an unfamiliar name. It took me a while to push my door key in the hole, my hands were shaking so badly, but in any case the key wouldn’t turn. I pounded on the door until I skinned my knuckles, but there was no answer.

So I went down the stairs to Bosco’s, not running anymore, but slowly, like if I moved fast now the world would shatter. Bosco’s door was painted shiny red. Bosco was still in the hospital, but I knew that Connie had moved in so she could be in town while he was recovering. I knocked. The door opened and there was a tall, athletic black man standing there, looking at me inquiringly.

“Where’s Connie?” I said.

“Who?” said the guy.

“Connie Bosco. This is her husband’s loft.”

“Sorry, there must be some mistake. This is my loft.”

“No, Bosco’s been living here for over twenty years,” I insisted.

“No, you must have the wrong building. This is Forty-nine Walker.”

“I know it’s Forty-nine Walker, goddamnit! I live upstairs on five. I’ve been living there for years. What the fuck is going on here?”

The guy’s face tensed up then, and he started to close the door. He said, “You need to take a break, boss. Patty Constantine lives up there, and I doubt you live with her and Yvonne. I don’t know who you are, but you sure as hell don’t live in this building.”

He slammed the door. I pounded on it and yelled, “I’m Charles Wilmot!” a number of times, until my throat was sore and I heard the man threaten to call the police unless I left.

So I did. When I reached the street I was crying, just blubbering like a little lost kid. I was saying, “Okay, change back! Change back now! Change back!” but it kept on being the same merciless twenty-first-century New York, except that I’d been squeezed out of it like a zit and replaced by a painter who was doing just fine and was still married to the woman he loved and was painting just the kind of stuff I could’ve done and wouldn’t.

Then I had my cell phone in my hand and I was punching Mark’s private number, not Lotte, never Lotte, because she couldn’t see me this way, she couldn’t know about the drug or any of that, and what if she confirmed it, that we all of us lived in that beautiful rich-guy’s loft together and all my memories of the last twenty years were false?

Mark answered and I jabbered, and he said he was with a client and couldn’t talk but he’d try to break away, but for Christ’s sake calm down. In fact, his voice through the tiny earpiece
was
calming, it was contact with someone who knew me, the real me. I took some deep breaths and felt the sweat start to cool on my face and agreed to meet him at Gorman’s in half an hour.