The Forgery of Venus (8 page)

Saying this, I grabbed her and led her through a few steps, but her body was stiff as a manikin, not like it used to be.

“Chaz, what are you doing?”

“Oh, nothing, just thinking about old times. I’ve been spending a lot of time on memory lane recently, you know, bullshit about my life, how things could have been different, if only…”

“Yes, but that’s something you have to work on yourself. I can’t get into that with you. I tried once, if you recall, and it nearly killed me.
So, you know, you can’t come around here and be all sweet and loving and expect me to leap into your arms.” Looking bright darts of flame at me.

A little moment of heartbreak here, and then she pulled away and said, “So let’s see what these look like.”

We stood the paintings up against a wall. Paintings always look so helpless and wan against a white gallery wall, like they’re crying “save me!” but she thought they were terrific and decided right then to combine them in the show she was planning to open that Friday, guy named Cteki, from Bratislava, does Hopperesque alienation scenes from central Europe, empty cafés, rusting factories, people in shabby overcoats waiting for the trolley, not my idea of something for the living room, but he can draw at least, proud to have my crap on the same wall as his crap.

“They should fly off the walls,” I said lightly. “Everyone loves a celebrity.”

She ignored this and stood in front of Kate Winslet, staring for a long minute, and then the same with the others, shaking her head.

“My God!” she said. “Do you know, I can’t think of another contemporary painter who could pull this off, this incredible bravura.”

“You like them?”

“Honestly? Aside from their commercial value, I hate them. This is what’s between us, do you realize that? That you can do this, that you can take something that comes from God almighty to maybe three people on the whole planet and treat it as a big laugh. Kate Winslet! Madonna!”

I said, “I don’t see what the difference is between that and painting princesses in the seventeenth century or plutocrats’ daughters in the nineteenth.”

“That’s not the
point,
as you know very well. These are pastiches. But the paintings I saw that night at your show, I remembered them
all those years later. And when you showed up in that hotel it was the memory of them that made me fall in love with you, leave the very nice businessman I was with, and run off with you like a different kind of woman than I thought I was. Because those paintings were not pastiches. They were
you.
Not Velázquez, not Goya: Charles Wilmot.”

“Junior,” I said.

“Yes, and in a junior way you’ve let your gift curdle and turn to acid and eat away your heart, just like your father, as you never stop telling me.”

“Except not as rich. Well, dear, I’m sorry I didn’t become a famous, wealthy artist for you—”

“Oh,
fuck
you!” she shouted. “Fuck you and damn you to hell, you sucked me into this again, you bastard! Get out of here! Go on, scram! I have work to do. And don’t forget you promised to take the kids on Friday.”

With that, I was out on the street, feeling like shit, and then drove back to Bosco’s to drop the keys off and paid for the van use as usual by listening to his political rants and art theories. Most people know his work, life-size, anatomically correct stuffed cloth figures, giant rag dolls, with smooth, white, blank faces upon which he projects video loops. The effect is uncanny; despite the abstraction you read the doll as having a talking face. Some of them are animated by internal motors and pushrods, so that our president, for example, is seen having dog-style intercourse with a large stuffed pig as he gives a speech about Iraq. Given the politics of the art community in New York and L.A., Bosco sells a lot of this work.

Denny bent my ear about Wilhelm Reich, a current hero of his, and showed me an orgone box he built for one of his dolls, a lush beauty in shocking pink, but with the white face, and she’s lying on a cot in the box and there’s a mechanism that makes her writhe and move her hand against her crotch. He paid a couple of dozen girls to make videos
of their faces as they masturbated to orgasm, and we had a beer and watched as he ran them in a loop against the face of his boxed odalisque. With the accompanying cries and squishy noises, of course.

An interesting experience. We discussed the faces, whether you can tell acting from feeling, and about what warped desire for exhibitionistic fame would compel obviously middle-class young women to participate in such a project. Bosco said it was because none of them wanted to be president of the United States, which seemed to be the only restriction on behavior nowadays.

Then we talked about his next project, which involved dust from the 9/11 attacks. All of us living in lower Manhattan were showered with the gray cloud on that day, but Bosco had collected a whole barrel of it, consisting of pulverized buildings, computers, firemen, terrorists, bond traders, etc., and wanted to use it in a project that would piss all over the cult of 9/11 in the most offensive way possible. Most artists nowadays have made their peace with the bourgeoisie, the class from whence they arise and the class that pays their bills, in return for which they supply a little frisson of outrage, usually of a sexual nature, but Bosco still believes in the power of art and thinks that anarchy is the only proper politics for a conscious artist. He considers me a neolithic reactionary and accuses me of Republican sympathies. You’re a fucking fascist, Wilmot, he always says, in everything but the lust for gold and power. You’re like sex without orgasm—sweaty, uncomfortable, expensive, with no payoff. You’re a sellout who never collected the check.

We’ve been friends for twenty years, ever since the day of the drywall—nice guy, wouldn’t hurt a cockroach, two grown kids, been married for decades. Lives in a big Dutch Colonial house in Montclair, New Jersey, a perfect phony and a happy man.

And speaking of phony, after I got finished with Bosco I went over to Mark Slade Downtown to see what Slotsky wanted; it was
lunchtime and I figured he’d spring for a meal. The girl in black said he’d gone out but she expected him back soon, nice-looking kid, and I thought I recognized her from one of the orgasm clips, although Bosco said that since he collected the vignettes he’s been thinking that every woman between eighteen and forty he sees on the street is one of the ones on the doll’s face.

Slotsky was showing a kid named Emil Mono, big square tricolored abstracts in the loose dramatic style of Motherwell. One ground color, a blob of another color, and some blobs and streak of a third color, perfectly respectable work, suitable for corporate lobbies, hotel meeting rooms, and the Whitney Biennial. I really have no problem at all with work like this, in most cases a kind of wallpaper, anodyne, meaningless, or rather announcing the fact that meaning no longer inheres in painting.

Pretty colors, though. I recall once when I was in Europe a dozen or so years ago, in the Prado as a matter of fact, and I got caught in one of the endless corridors they’ve got stuffed with barely distinguishable academic painting, all brownish remakes of Rubens and Murillo, and I felt like I was drowning in sepia. I practically ran out of the place and walked down the Paseo to the Reina Sofía modern art museum and into a cool white room, and there was a Sonia Delaunay that was like a little girl singing on some bright terrace, lovely and fresh, just some watery stripes and numerals and letters, and it cleaned my eye, the way the art needed to have its eye cleaned around the tail end of the nineteenth century. And God bless them all, the nonfiguratives, but I can’t do it myself, I am chained to the world as it is; but, yeah, it’s a way to paint, and Cézanne is as good a daddy as anyone. Art is a universe in parallel with nature and in harmony with it, as he famously said; true enough as long as you keep a grip on the harmony-with-nature part. I just find 95 percent of it as exhausting to look at as those miles of brown, slick academic pap.

I hung around for forty minutes or so, drank some free coffee, and was just going to leave or strike up a conversation with the girl, maybe about
art,
when Slotsky came in. He was dressed for uptown, double-breasted suit, handmade shoes, he’s always reminded me of my father in his good clothes—maybe an actual model there, his own father did not dress like that. He seemed glad to see me, a hug, not a shake, that’s a newish affectation, Mark always trendy that way, and ran me back to his office behind the gallery.

He looked reasonably well, I thought, or as well as a short, pudgy fellow with floppy lips and white eyelashes ever looks. He still has his Harpo mop of yellow curls, now a little tarnished with age, but still his logo, as it was at school. Mark no longer wears all black. Since he started selling old masters some years ago he has adopted the English squire look, which suits him rather better, since combined with his features and general carriage his former all-black costume inevitably recalled the Hasidim rather than urban sophistication, although he doesn’t look much like an English squire either. For example, he’d left the last button on the sleeve of his suit jacket partially open, so that knowledgeable people could tell that he had real buttonholes, and therefore that the suit had been custom-made. I don’t know any actual English squires, but I kind of doubt they do this.

We took a cab to Chez Guerlin, the place du jour, I guess, not the kind of joint I would ever go to but sort of interesting in a natural history way. They seated us at a banquette table, right side front, which is the supreme place to be in this particular beanery, a fact he related to me shortly after we sat down. He then told me which famous people were dining with us, cautioning me not to stare, which I was in any case not inclined to do, except I stared at Meryl Streep. Mark’s shamelessness is a legend and is part of his charm.

There followed a good deal of tedious business with the captain, who came by to pay his compliments, and a discussion with the wait
er about what we should eat and what wine was drinking well this week, to which the two of them gave not quite as much discussion as Eisenhower held with his aides on the subject of D-day. I let them order for me. This done, Mark gave me a rundown on his business and dropped a dozen or so boldfaced names, which were largely lost on me, although when he observed this he helpfully provided the identifying surnames for the various Bobs and Donnas and Brads so dropped. Business was apparently booming. The art market was going nuts again: the sixteen-thousand-square-foot houses that people of a certain standing now require have lots of wall space that cannot be left blank, and since the rich are no longer paying taxes, money was squirting through New York like a firehose and a lot of it was going into high-end art.

Then we talked about his current artist, young Mono; he asked me what I thought. I told him wallpaper of a superior grade; he laughed. It’s his pretense that I’m opposed to nonrepresentational art on principle, like Tom Wolfe—I’ve never been able to explain to him why that’s not the case—and he spent a while bending my ear about the dynamic values and hidden wit of his kid’s wallpaper. Asked me how I was doing, I told him about the
Vanity Fair
fiasco but left out the part about the show at Lotte’s—he’s always trying to get me in with him in a business way and I won’t do it, don’t ask me why.

I admitted I was in deep shit, no shame in that, maybe fifty grand in the hole, and he said he’d just gotten back from Europe, buying pictures, talked about hotels, the luxe life, a completely insensitive guy, yeah, but I know him a long time now. I asked him what he’d bought and he said he’d gotten a nice small Cerezo and a couple of Caravaggisti I’d never heard of, and some Tiepolo drawings almost good enough to be genuine—laughed here, just kidding, but you have to be a shark over there, everyone wants to sell you a missing Rubens, and I said it sounded like a perilous life.

Then he asked me if I could work fresco and I said I hadn’t in a while, not since I’d done the St. Anthony seminary out on the Island with my father when I was a kid, and why was he asking, and he said he had a nice little project for me if I could get away to Europe, an Italian zillionaire he’d met in Venice had bought a palazzo with a Tiepolo ceiling in bad shape, ruined really, and he might be able to get me in there, and I said I wasn’t interested, and he said, you didn’t ask how much.

So I asked, and he said a hundred and fifty grand. He had a “gotcha” look in his eye that I hated, and I said I might be interested but it couldn’t be for a while, after Christmas really, because I was committed to participating in a drug study being run by Shelly Zubkoff. When he heard the name he laughed and we did the whole “small world” thing that people do in New York, and he asked about it and I told him the story of what had gone down while I was on the drug. He pumped me pretty dry on the subject, which I thought was a little funny because Mark mainly likes to talk about himself and
his
experiences. He said it sounded a little scary and I agreed that it did, but I still wanted to go on with it because of the effect it was having on my painting.

So we ate minuscule portions of pretentious food, the sort of stuff that Lotte calls gourmet cat food, and drank a lot of expensive Chambertin, and he filled me in on the gossip of the art world, who was up, rising, falling, or down, and while he talked I could not (as he’d obviously intended) get out of my mind the prospect of earning a hundred and fifty grand for a month or so of work.

I said, “Okay, you got me, tell me more about this palazzo job.”

And he did, and it turned out that the palazzo had been vacant for a while and the roof leaked and the ceiling had essentially collapsed, so it wasn’t a restoration job exactly but more like a reproducing job. Which kind of pissed me off, because it was getting into the forgery
zone, but he said, “Not at all, no way, not only do we have a photo of the ceiling, but we even have Tiepolo’s original cartoons for the thing, you’ll be one with the masters, except with electricity.”

“You know this Italian guy personally?” I asked.