by Auster, Paul
“I want to see my father,” she said, crossing her arms and clasping her elbows with trembling, nicotine-stained fingers.
Since Tom knew nothing about Harry’s former life, he had no idea what she was talking about. “You must be mistaken,” he said.
“No,” she shot back at him – suddenly agitated, bristling with anger. “I’m Flora!”
“Well, Flora,” Tom said, “I think you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“I can have you arrested, you know. What’s your name?”
“Tom,” Tom said.
“Of course. Tom Wood. I know all about you. In the middle of life’s journey, I lost my way in a dark wood. But you’re too ignorant to know that. You’re one of those little men who can’t see the forest for the trees.”
“Listen,” Tom said, speaking to her in a soft, mollifying voice. “You might know who I am, but there’s nothing I can do to help you.”
“Don’t get cheeky with me, mister. Just because you’re made of wood, that doesn’t mean you’re good. Comprendo? I’m here to see my father, and I want to see him right now!”
“I don’t think he’s in,” Tom said, abruptly reversing his tactics.
“Like hell he isn’t. The jailbird lives in the apartment upstairs. Do you think I’m stupid?”
Flora ran her fingers through her wet hair, spraying water onto a tower of newly acquired books that sat on a table near the front counter. Then, coughing deeply, she pulled out a pack of Marlboros from a pocket in her torn, loose-fitting dress. After she had lit up a cigarette, she tossed the burning match onto the floor. Tom hid his surprise and calmly snuffed it out with his foot. He didn’t bother to tell her that smoking was forbidden in the shop.
“Who are we talking about?” he asked.
“Harry Dunkel. Who else?”
“Dunkel?”
“It means dark, in case you didn’t know. My father is a dark man, and he lives in a dark wood. He pretends he’s a bright man now, but that’s only a trick. He’s still dark. He’ll always be dark – right up to the day he dies.”
DISTURBING REVELATIONS
It took Harry seventy-two hours to persuade Flora to go back on her medication – and a full week to talk her into returning to her mother in Chicago. The day after her departure, he invited Tom to join him for dinner at Mike & Tony’s Steak House on Fifth Avenue, and for the first time since his release from prison nine years earlier, he spilled the beans about his past – the whole brutal, asinine story of his misspent life, alternately laughing and weeping as he unburdened himself to his incredulous assistant.
He had started out in Chicago as a salesclerk in the perfume department at Marshall Field’s. After two years, he had advanced to the somewhat more exalted position of assistant window dresser, and no doubt that was where he would have stayed if not for his unlikely union with Bette (pronounced bet) Dombrowski, the youngest daughter of multi-millionaire Karl Dombrowski, commonly referred to as the Diaper-Service King of the Midwest. The art gallery that Harry opened the following year was created entirely with Bette’s money, but just because that money brought him hitherto unimaginable comforts and social status, it would be wrong to assume that he married her only because she was rich or that he walked into his new life under false pretenses. He was never anything less than frank with her on the subject of his sexual proclivities, but not even that could stop Bette from finding Harry to be the most desirable man she had ever known. She was already in her mid-thirties then, a homely, inexperienced woman who was rapidly heading toward permanent spinsterhood, and she knew that if she didn’t assert herself with Harry, she was destined to live out the rest of her days in her father’s house as an object of scorn, the clumsy maiden aunt of her brothers’ and sisters’ children, an exile stranded in the heart of her own family. Fortunately, she was less interested in sex than in companionship, and she dreamed of sharing her life with a man who would bestow on her some of the sparkle and self-confidence she lacked. If Harry wanted to indulge in an occasional dalliance or clandestine romp, she would have no objections. Just so long as they were married, she said, and just so long as he understood how much she loved him.
There had been women in Harry’s life before. From the earliest years of his adolescence, his sexual history had been an indiscriminate catalogue of lusts and longings that fell on both sides of the fence. Harry was glad he had been built that way, glad that he was immune to the prejudice that would have forced him to spend his life spurning the charms of one half of humanity, but until Bette proposed to him in 1967, it had never occurred to him that he might enter into a fixed domestic arrangement, let alone find himself transformed into a husband. Harry had loved many times in the past, but he had rarely been loved in return, and Bette’s ardor astonished him. Not only was she offering herself to him without reservation, but in the same breath she was granting him total liberty.
There were, of course, certain drawbacks to contend with as well. Bette’s family, for one thing, and the bullying interference from her blowhard father, who would periodically threaten to cut his daughter out of his will unless she divorced “that obnoxious pansy.” And then, even more unsettling perhaps, there was the matter of Bette herself. Not the person or the soul of Bette, but her body, the outer manifestations of Bette, with her small squinting eyes and the off-putting black hairs that adorned her fleshy forearms. Harry had an instinctive, highly developed taste for the beautiful, and he had never fallen for anyone who was less than attractive. If anything made him hesitate about marrying her, it was this question of her looks. But Bette was so kind, and ever so intent on pleasing him, that Harry took the plunge, knowing that his first job as a married man would be to mold his wife into a facsimile of a woman who could – in the proper light and under the proper circumstances – arouse a flicker of desire in him. Some of the improvements were simple enough to achieve. Her glasses were replaced by contact lenses; her wardrobe was revamped; her arms and legs were subjected to painful depilatory treatments at regular intervals. But there were other factors that Harry couldn’t control, efforts that his new bride would have to make entirely on her own. And Bette did make them. With all the discipline and self-abnegation of a holy sister of God, she managed to diet away close to one-fifth of her body weight in the first year of their marriage, dropping from a dowdy 155 to a slender 126. Harry was moved by the struggles of his strong-willed Galatea, and as Bette blossomed under the care and scrutiny of her husband’s watchful gaze, their growing admiration for each other developed into a solid, lasting friendship. Flora’s birth in 1969 was not the result of some prearranged one-night stand. Harry and Bette slept together often enough in the early years of their marriage to make a pregnancy almost inevitable, an a priori fait accompli. Who among Harry’s friends would have predicted such a turnaround? He had married Bette because she had promised him his freedom, but once they settled in together, he discovered that he had little or no interest in exercising it.
The gallery opened its doors in February 1968. It was the fulfillment of a long-standing dream for the thirty-four-year-old Harry, and he did everything he could to make the operation a success. Chicago wasn’t the center of the art world, but neither was it some Podunk backwater, and there was enough wealth floating around the city for a clever man to induce some of it to wind up in his pocket. After a period of deep reflection, he decided to call his gallery Dunkel Frères. Harry had no brothers, but he felt the name lent a certain Old World quality to the enterprise, hinting at a long family tradition in the business of buying and selling art. As he saw it, the marriage between the German proper noun and the French modifier would create an arresting, altogether agreeable confusion in the minds of his customers. Some would take the blending of languages to signify a background in Alsace. Others would think he was from a German-Jewish family that had emigrated to France. Still others wouldn’t have the first idea what to make of him. No one would ever be certain of Harry’s origins – and when a man can produce an air of my
stery about himself, he always has the upper hand when dealing with the public.
He specialized in the work of young artists – paintings mostly, but also sculptures and installation pieces, along with a couple of Happenings, which were still in fashion in the late sixties. The gallery sponsored poetry readings and soirées musicales, and because Harry was interested in all forms of the beautiful, Dunkel Frères did not confine itself to a narrow aesthetic position. Pop and Op, minimalism and abstraction, pattern painting and photographs, video art and the New Expressionism – as the years went by, Harry and his phantom brother exhibited works that embodied every trend and inclination of the period. Most of the shows flopped. That was to be expected, but more dangerous to the future of the gallery were the defections of the half dozen or so real artists Harry discovered along the way. He would give a young kid his or her first break, promote the work with his customary flair and panache, build up a market for it, begin turning a comfortable profit, and then, after two or three shows, the artist would decamp to a gallery in New York. That was the problem with being based in Chicago, and Harry understood that for the genuinely talented ones, it was a move they had to make.
But Harry was a lucky man. In 1976, a thirty-two-year-old painter named Alec Smith walked into the gallery with a packet of slides. Harry was absent that day, but when the receptionist handed him the envelope the following afternoon, he removed a sleeve of transparencies and held it up against a window for a quick look – expecting nothing, prepared to be let down – and realized that he was looking at greatness. Smith’s work had everything. Boldness, color, energy, and light. Figures swirled through fierce, slashing strokes of paint, vibrating with an incandescent roar of emotion, a human cry so deep, so true, so passionate, that it seemed to express both joy and despair at the same time. The canvases resembled nothing Harry had seen before, and so powerful was the effect they had on him that his hands began to shake. He sat down, examined all forty-seven pictures on a portable light table, and then immediately picked up the phone and called Smith to offer him a show.
Unlike the other young artists Harry had supported, Smith wanted nothing to do with New York. He had already spent six years there, and after being rejected by every gallery in town, he had returned to Chicago a bitter and angry man, seething with contempt for the art world and every blood-sucking, moneygrubbing whore who was in it. Harry called him his “surly genius,” but in spite of Smith’s rude and sometimes combative nature, the roughneck was a thoroughbred at heart. He understood the meaning of loyalty, and once he was corralled into the Dunkel Frères stable, he had no intention of trying to break loose. Harry was the man who had rescued him from oblivion, and therefore Harry would remain his dealer for life.
Harry had found his first and only major artist, and for the next eight years Smith’s work kept the gallery solvent. After the success of the 1976 show (all seventeen paintings and thirty-one drawings were gone by the end of the second week), Smith hightailed it out of town with his wife and young son and bought a house in Oaxaca, Mexico. From then on, the artist refused to budge, and he never set foot in America again – not even to attend the annual exhibitions of his work in Chicago, much less the museum retrospectives that were mounted in various cities around the country as his reputation began to grow. If Harry wanted to see him, he had to fly down to Mexico – which he did on average twice a year – but mostly they stayed in touch by letter and the occasional phone call. None of that posed a problem for the director of Dunkel Frères. Smith’s output was prodigious, and every other month new crates of canvases and drawings would arrive at the gallery in Chicago, to be sold for ever more delicious and elevated sums. It was an ideal setup, and no doubt it would have continued for many decades if Smith hadn’t filled his body with tequila three nights before his fortieth birthday and jumped off the roof of his house. His wife insisted it was a prank that had gone wrong; his mistress claimed it was suicide. One way or the other, Alec Smith was dead, and the S.S. Harry Dunkel was about to sink.
Enter a young artist named Gordon Dryer. Harry had given him his first show just six months before the Smith catastrophe – not because he was impressed by his work (severe, overly rational abstractions that produced not one sale nor one positive review), but because Dryer himself was an irresistible presence, a thirty-year-old who looked no older than eighteen, with a delicate, feminine face, slim, marble-white hands, and a mouth that Harry wanted to kiss from the first moment he saw it. After sixteen years of conjugal life with Bette, Tom’s future employer finally succumbed. Not just to some small, fly-by-night crush, but to a delirious, full-blown intoxication, an improbable, burning love. And the ambitious Dryer, so desperate to show his work at Dunkel Frères, allowed himself to be seduced by the squat, fifty-year-old Harry. Or perhaps it was the other way around, and Dryer was the one who did the seducing. However it happened, the deed took place when the gallery owner went to the artist’s studio to look at his most recent canvases. The beautiful boy-man was quick to divine Harry’s intentions, and after twenty minutes of inconsequential chatter about the virtues of geometric minimalism, he casually dropped to his knees and unzipped the dealer’s pants.
After the tepid response to Dryer’s show, the unzippings multiplied, and before long Harry was stopping in at the painter’s studio several times a week. Dryer fretted that Harry would eliminate him from the roster of his artists, and he had nothing but his body to offer as compensation. Harry was too smitten to understand that he was being used, but even if he had understood, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. Such is the madness of the human heart. He kept the affair a secret from Bette, and because the fifteen-year-old Flora was already beginning to manifest the first, incipient signs of her encroaching schizophrenia, he spent as much time at home with his family as his schedule allowed. The afternoons were for Gordon, but at night he slipped back into his role as dutiful husband and father. Then the announcement of Smith’s death came crashing down on him, and Harry began to panic. There were still a number of works to be sold, but after six months or a year the stock would be exhausted. Then what? Dunkel Frères hardly broke even as it was, and Bette had already thrown too much money into the place for Harry to turn to her and ask for more help. With Smith suddenly gone, the gallery was bound to go under. If not today, then tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the day after that. For the truth was that Harry had failed to grasp the first thing about how to run a business. He had relied on the cantankerous Smith to support his extravagances and self-indulgent methods (the opulent parties and dinners for two hundred people, the private jets and chauffeur-driven cars, the moronic gambles on second-and third-rate talents, the monthly stipends to artists whose work didn’t sell), but the goose had taken a swan dive in Mexico, and henceforth there would be no more golden eggs.
That was when Dryer came up with the plan to rescue Harry from his troubles. Sucking and fucking could go just so far, he realized, but if he could make himself truly indispensable, his career as an artist would be saved. In spite of the cold intellectualism of his work, Dryer had enormous natural gifts as a draftsman and colorist. He had suppressed them in the name of an idea, a notion of art that valued rigor and exactitude above all else. He hated Smith’s gushing Romanticism, with its florid gestures and pseudo-heroic impulses, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t imitate the style if he chose to. Why not continue to create Smith’s work after the artist was dead? The final paintings and drawings of the young master who had been cut down in his prime. A public exhibition would be too risky, of course (Smith’s widow would hear about it and eventually call their bluff), but Harry could sell the pieces from the back room of the gallery to Smith’s most fervent collectors, and as long as Valerie Smith knew nothing about it, the scam would yield a pure, one hundred percent profit.
Harry resisted at first. He knew that Gordon had hit on a brilliant idea, but the idea scared him – not because he was against it, but because he didn’t think the boy had the stuff to pull off
the job. And anything less than perfect, dead-on clones of Smith’s work would probably land him in jail. Dryer shrugged, pretending it had just been a passing thought, and then started talking about something else. Five days later, when Harry returned to the studio for another one of his afternoon visits, Dryer unveiled the first of his Alec Smith originals, and the astonished art dealer was forced to admit that he had underestimated the abilities of his young protégé. Dryer had reinvented himself as Smith’s double, purging every shred of his own personality in order to slip into the mind and heart of a dead man. It was a remarkable turn of theater, a piece of psychological witchcraft that struck both terror and awe in poor Harry’s brain. Not only had Dryer duplicated the look and feel of one of Smith’s canvases, copying the harsh palette-knife strokes, the dense coloration, and the random, accidental drips, but he had taken Smith ever so slightly farther than Smith had ever gone himself. It was Smith’s next painting, Harry realized, the one he would have started on the morning of January twelfth if he hadn’t jumped off the roof of his house and died on the night of the eleventh.
Over the next six months, Dryer produced twenty-seven more canvases, along with several dozen ink drawings and charcoal sketches. Then, very slowly and methodically, tamping down his enthusiasm in an uncharacteristic display of tight-lipped control, Harry began fobbing off the bogus works to various collectors around the world. The game continued for more than a year, in which time twenty of the paintings were dispensed with, netting close to two million dollars. Because Harry was the front man – and therefore the one who stood to have his reputation destroyed – the forgers agreed on a seventy-thirty split. Fifteen years later, when Harry poured out his confession to Tom over dinner in Brooklyn, he described those months as the most exhilarating and gruesome period of his life. He was trapped in a state of constant fear, he said, and yet notwithstanding the horror, notwithstanding the conviction that he would ultimately be caught, he was happy, as happy as he had ever been. Each time he managed to sell another faux-Smith to a Japanese corporate executive or an Argentinian real estate developer, his pounding, overtaxed heart would jump through forty-seven hoops of joy.
