The Forgery of Venus (3 page)

W
hen I made the European trip by myself in my twenty-first year, I skipped the Ritz and stayed at a one-star
albergo
three flights up on Calle de Amor de Dios at the corner of Santa Maria, an address Charlie would no doubt approve of and about a ten-minute walk to the Prado. I hadn’t been to the place since I was nine, but it seemed like I just stepped out for a minute, the pictures all in the same place. But my eye had been polluted with art history courses, and I knew that I’d never recapture that fucking explosion when I first saw it, because it was one of Dad’s ploys never to have art reproductions in the house, no coffee-table books spoiling the golden eye of young Chaz. My father took me into the big room through the back way, through the dreary mediocrities of the later seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, fussy brown paintings, and then Room Sixteen and there’s the
Surrender of Breda,
the first big Velázquez I ever saw. I wanted to spend my life looking at it, that Dutch soldier glancing casually out of the picture plane—how did he even
think
of doing that—and the lances the way they were, just perfect, but he wouldn’t let me stay, he grabbed my arm and pushed me past the famous portraits and the prophets in the desert with that wonderful black bird suspended in real air and through the grand room, the center of the cult, Room Twelve, and we hung a sharp right and there was
Las Meninas
.

The school of painting, Manet called it, and my father’s opinion was that taken all in all, it really was the best thing anyone had ever done in oils. He told me, and I can believe it, that when I first stood in front of it my mouth dropped open and I held my hands up to my cheeks, like a version of Munch’s
The Scream.
It was so wonderful at first sight, like the Grand Canyon or the Statue of Liberty, but more so, because I had been hearing about it for my whole life and I’d never even seen a postcard of it. And so I stood there trying not to disgrace myself by crying while he talked.

Nine-year-olds are not supposed to have that kind of reaction to paintings, but I suppose I was a kind of twisted prodigy. Can I even remember what he said? Maybe it’s been layered over in my mind by all the formal art criticism I got in college. There wasn’t much historical material, just a working painter’s admiration for a genius. He made me look at the light coming in through the window on the right, the way that light shines on the painted wood of the window frame. Vermeer made a whole career out of light shining on painted surfaces, he said, and never did anything better than that, and Velázquez just tossed it in as something extra.

And the playing with visual reality in a way that wouldn’t appear again in Western art until the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, he
said, Manet got all that business of flat tonality and bold clean outlines from this painting, and there wouldn’t be anything like the blurred treatment of the lady dwarf until the twentieth, it was like something out of de Kooning or Francis Bacon.

And the perfect, doomed little girl at the center, the most important little girl in the whole world, the heartbreaking look of pride and terror on her face, and the two attendant
meninas,
one superbly painted like her mistress, the other blocked in angular planes like a wooden doll, a little Cézanne
avant le lettre
(why? He didn’t know, a mystery) and the whispering nun and the waiting figure in a glory of yellow in the far doorway (terrifying! Who knew why?) and the unimportant king and queen in the dusty mirror, and every movement and gesture in the whole vast thing directing the eye to the guy with the mustache and the black tunic with the cross of a knightly order on it, standing calmly in the midst of it with his palette and brushes. He’s saying I made this all, my father told me, he’s saying I have stolen this moment from time, this is how God sees the world, each instant an eternity, and when the dwarfs and the dog and the nun and the courtiers and the royal family and their maids are forgotten dust, this will live and live forever, and I, Velázquez, have done this.

I
recall the expression on his face as he said it, and I guess I thought he was talking about himself, because at nine I thought my father was in the same class as Velázquez, the greatest painter in the world. No, not really true; I think after that trip to Europe, after really seeing the masters, even at nine I could tell the difference, and I think he could see that I could. Over the next year it made him increasingly cranky, more demanding, more authoritarian. He was the master; I was the student and always would be. But the fact is I’m better than
he was, maybe not as far above him as Velázquez was above his own master, Pacheco, but a discernible gap. Not that I could actually say that or claim that, even to myself, and I wonder how Velázquez handled it. Of course Pacheco wasn’t his father, just his father-in-law, but still.

All that crap came flooding back when I stood in front of
Las Meninas
for the second time and I realized that’s what I’ve always wanted from art, the ability to stand apart from the domestic whatever, the whispers, the favorites, the little cruelties.

And, my friend, you’ll see that, in a strange and unexpected way, I have succeeded. But also you may be thinking, hey, isn’t this supposed to be about the painting? Why is he giving me all this crap about his sad life? Because it’s not just about the painting. It’s about whether my memory has anything whatever to do with what really happened. Figure that out and the painting is explained one way or the other. Therefore I spread my memories before you as with a trowel. Are there inconsistencies? Impossibilities?

Pay attention, please.

T
he following day I met Suzanne Nore in the Prado.

I never pick up girls in museums, I can’t see them when I’m in my art head, but there she was, looking at Velázquez’s equestrian
Baltasar Carlos,
and I couldn’t take my eyes off her, that mass of red-gold hair down to her butt. I waited until we were alone in the room and then I just started talking like a maniac about the painting, the unbelievable mastery of technique, the paint so thin that it runs, the weave of the canvas showing through, all done in one go with practically no corrections, look at the damn background, it’s like a sumi-e painting or an aquarelle, and the texture of the costume, he taps the brush here and there and your eye reads it like gold embroidery, and
look at the face, it’s practically a sketch but the whole psychology of the kid is stripped bare, and so on and so on, I couldn’t stop, and she started to laugh and said, you really know a lot about painting, and I said, yeah, I do, I’m a painter and I want to paint you. I almost said I wanted to paint you naked, but I didn’t.

She was a singer, or wanted to be; she went to Skidmore, she was on a junior year abroad taking lessons at the Paris Conservatory, and she’d hopped the train down here for a long weekend. I took her through the museum, talking nonstop like some kind of nutcase; I thought she would disappear if I shut up. We were there until it closed, and afterward we went to a little bar I like on Calle de Cervantes and drank wine and talked until it got dark and it was time for tapas, and we ate and drank some more. We closed the place and I walked her back to her hotel by the Plaza Santa Ana, very respectable, and I kissed her there in the doorway, getting dirty looks from a couple of Guardia Civils—no public kissing allowed, Franco didn’t like it—and I thought, This wasn’t supposed to happen, I wasn’t set up for this,
love
or whatever it is. Crazy.

I
spent the next couple of days with her, every minute. She talked a blue streak, funny as hell, jokes about everything, wandering around the city. She made up a fantasy about us being in a war movie because of the soldiers in the Nazi helmets marching around everywhere—we’re hiding from the Nazis!—and it started to get real, it’s hard to explain. But the next night after we closed the tapas place again, and back at her hotel, I kissed her like before, but longer, and when I said good night like a dope, she grabbed my belt buckle and dragged me inside and up the stairs.

So, that was it, all the stuff the movies teach us about passion, all those scenes where the actors tear their clothes off standing up and
the actress jumps up and impales herself on his dick, we’re supposed to believe, and they fall on the narrow bed. I always thought I was a cool guy, in control, but this was a whole different kind of thing. I lasted about two minutes, and I was opening my mouth to apologize but she wouldn’t stop, she told me what to do, she worked on me with her hands and her mouth, and all the time she kept talking, telling me just what she was feeling; I never heard a girl say stuff like that, I couldn’t believe it was happening. “Insatiable” is probably not the right word, I don’t know what the right word is, but we did it until we were raw, we would’ve started hemorrhaging if we hadn’t fallen asleep. And laughing, giggling. I remember thinking, This is too good, there’s got to be something wrong with this, some punishment to come.

We stayed in bed almost all the next day. I staggered out for food and beer once, and then when night fell we got up and cleaned ourselves off, sneaking down the hall to the bathroom together and doing it again under the weak stream of the shower in the tin stall. We went out late like the Spaniards do and she knew clubs—this was all underground stuff, she had addresses from musician friends of hers—and there were kids there playing music. They had no records; rock and roll was banned by the government, so all they knew was what they could pick up on shortwave from the U.S. Armed Forces Radio, and they’d invented their own version, a weird combination of flamenco and Hendrix, incredible music. And I had my drawing stuff and I just drew like crazy, making portraits of the musicians, and her, of course, blazing away on a homemade electric guitar, drawing in ink and putting the gray tones in with spit and wine, ripping the sheets off and handing them out to anyone who wanted them. I thought, Okay, it doesn’t get any better than this, this is life.

W
hen she had to go back to Paris, I went with her. She said we’ll always have Madrid, like in that movie, and so now we have Paris too. I have to say a huge relief leaving fascism behind, it was getting old, that sense of people taking down what you were doing, and the Guardias in their shiny hats on every corner giving you the eye like you’re thinking about bringing down the state.

We stayed in her place off the Rue Saint-Jacques near the Schola Cantorum, third-floor walk-up, filthy bath down the hall. Her room was incredibly messy; I was the fascist in the relationship. She took voice classes at the Cantorum every morning, not the Conservatory, or maybe I got it wrong.
La vie bohème,
left bank, student demos, everyone in black, pretentious, smoking and drinking and doping like mad. While she was out I hit the museums and the galleries. Paris was dead as far as painting went at the time, all political shit and wannabe New York School.

But I went to an exhibition at the Orangerie, it was Weimar art: Dix, Grosz, and some people I never heard of before, like Christian Schad, Karl Hubbuch. Some terrific stuff, the style was called
Neue Sachlichkeit
, New Objectivity. So these guys were in the ruins of Germany after the first war and everywhere abstract modernism was the thing to be doing—Picasso, Braque—and there was Dada and Futurism cranking up, and these guys tried to rescue representational art from kitsch and they did it, especially Schad, a technique like Cranach’s, wonder
ful depth and structure, and shocking penetration. Look at the world you made, you bastards, this is what it looks like. I recall thinking, Can we do that now? Would anyone be able to see it? Probably not, and the world hasn’t changed that much, except we stick the war-wounded behind the walls of hospitals so we don’t have to look at them, and the rich are now thin instead of fat. But even if you did it, the rich shits would buy them up: oh, you have a
Wilmot,
appreciating very nicely, thank you, not as much as de Kooning but a good return on investment. Everyone is blind now, except if it’s on TV.

I
was going to stay in Europe for at least a year, but I came home that fall, to find some interesting developments. Mother had been moved to a care facility because of her worsening diabetes and the effects of the new stroke, which is probably a good thing considering more parts of her were turning black and falling off, and no one wants that around the house. They had to take the door off her room, and the frame too, and move her out through the French windows and the garden. My prayer is she had no brains left at the time. She loved that garden.

The wreckage from this demolition was still apparent when I returned, but Dad seemed disinclined to do much about it. Charlie left the day after Mother did, off to her novitiate somewhere in Missouri. She was going to be a missionary sister and help the far-off poor. She didn’t write or leave a note for me; I mean, I knew she was talking about, it but I didn’t think she was just going to leave, like sneaking off while I was gone. I used to tell her when she first started to get serious about it, I told her, you don’t have to do this, Charlie, we can run away together, we can make a life, but she just looked at me in a kind of holy blank way she’s developed and said, it’s not that, Christ was calling her and so on, and I didn’t believe her. She was never that reli
gious when we were growing up; I always thought it was a girl thing, like being crazy about horses. For a while I thought it was because he did something to her—you hear about shit like that all the time, even families around here in Oyster Bay, Daddy and Daddy’s little girl—I should have asked her, but I couldn’t, the one time I went to see her, not in a convent parlor, and I have to say, I never really believed it. He’s a monster, but not that kind of monster.

I missed her. I never thought, I mean I always thought we would be together, or close, anyway, my big sister, Chaz and Charlie together forever. I thought charity began at home, but I guess not. Dad was by that time boffing the lawn guy’s daughter, Melanie, a conventionally cute brunette with a face unlined by suffering or complex thought. She was about four years older than me, just a little younger than Charlie, and I actually went out with her a couple of times myself, which is really weird, even for chez Wilmot. He wasn’t painting much then, although he was anticipating a big commission to do a fresco in a seminary dining hall out on Long Island. He wanted me to help, part of his fantasy that I was his student and artistic heir.

You’ll want to know why the fuck I came home.

Yeah, a long pause there; but basically, it was Suzanne. When I said good-bye to her at the station in Paris before she got on the airport bus, and right, it was rainy and gray, and we were hugging and kissing there and she was crying, she said I was the love of her life and she’d never forget me and she just knew she’d never see me again, it was too good for her. What I was thinking, I’m ashamed to say, was, Whew, I’m glad to have a break from this consuming girl, and so long, darlin’, see you around.

So she left, and there I was with plenty of time on my hands, and it turned out all the movies and the popular song lyrics were true. Whatever sensible-Chaz thought—that she was too much to take on at this stage of my life, that I didn’t need the aggravation and grand
opera that were part of the Suzanne package, that I had work to do, you know, defining myself as a painter and all that crap—whatever, there was a part of me that just ached for her. I would pass a street corner where she used to sing sometimes with a group of scruffy French kids, American folk songs and standards, for tossed coins, and I’d see them singing with some other girl and I’d feel my heart clench up.

I kept her room, which was probably a mistake; I should’ve packed up and gone to Berlin or something, but I stayed on there, not doing much, while her smell gradually faded from the room. I found a miniature bottle of shampoo she’d left behind, with only a little smear of it left, and I kept it and opened it every night and sniffed it and remembered what her hair smelled like. Did I try other girls? Oh, yeah. It’s not hard to get laid on the Left Bank when you’re twenty-one and you can draw. Everyone wants to be immortal, and maybe I’ll be famous someday, I could practically hear them thinking.

But, God, you know? I couldn’t figure it out, why none of that was any good. I mean, I’m out with my pad, doing tourist sketches on the boul, just for something to do, and then the girl sits down and you make her look a little prettier than she is, and she’s blown away by it—these are not French girls, oh, no, they’re Americans, Brits, Danes—we’re speaking English here, and then some smooth talk, a date for a drink, and yeah, you have a terrific body, I can tell, and then up to the apartment where they take off their clothes and there you have it, a fling with a genuine Paris artist, and as far as I’m concerned I might as well be using someone else’s dick.

And then my work started to go downhill, I mean it was like there was a scrim over everything, my eye had no penetration, and the paint wouldn’t behave itself, it wanted to go to mud; it’s hard to describe, but there was no doubt about it. I’d rented a piece of a studio after Suzanne left, going to do some serious work now that I had more
time, and I thought I’d try to work on the kind of psychological portraits that I’d seen in the Orangerie, with a little Eakins precision thrown in, but even though I worked like fury, everything I did was garbage. I got frenzied, I broke brushes, I threw fucking canvases against the wall, but nothing came. And after a couple of weeks of this, the word “muse” started to float up through my mind, something I always thought was complete bullshit, but now I thought, Well, there was Rembrandt and Saskia, and van Gogh and his whore with the earlobe, and Picasso always had a short stack of girls on hand, and I thought, Okay, I found Suzanne and she’s mine, however that works, I needed her. And as soon as I started thinking that way, I saw that the stuff I’d done while she was there was the best stuff I’d ever done, it was vital and passionate, and I remembered what
I
was like with her, my base temperature was ten degrees higher, and you could see that in the lines of the drawings, especially the drawings of her.

And there was the sex, too: boy oh boy, screwing tourist girls—thin wine after that hundred-proof brandy. I mean, there’s a kind of sex you have when you’re floating off somewhere, kind of watching yourself have it, and the girl is too, who knows what they’re thinking, and you know that you’ll have nothing to say to them after, and even if the girl is cool and pretty there’s a moment when you can’t wait to see the last of her and you have a sense that she feels that way too. But Suzanne demanded the full presence, she held on like it was the end of the world, like this was the last fuck before the bomb went off, the last fuck in history, talking through the whole thing, narrating it, and her body never stopping, clenching, and totally
there
.