The Forgery of Venus

by Michael Gruber

  “Which he bought on your recommendation, of course.”

  He laughed. “Of course. We stipulate the guy’s sharp. So what this guy can’t buy yet is major art: Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, they’re all out of range, not to mention Rembrandt, Breughel, the old masters. It’s a gap in his self-image. Also, let’s say his wife likes traditional furnishings. He can’t hang a Butzer or a Miyake up there, it’d look like shit. But what if I can sell him a nice little Cézanne fake, a nice almost-Reni madonna, the gilt frame, the little brass light above it. No one but an expert can tell it from the real thing. Obviously, we’re not going to do Girl with the Red Hat or the Mona Lisa, not at all. We’re going to do obscure stuff, small but beautiful. The guests come in and they say, ‘Hey, is that a Cézanne?’ And our guy says, ‘It may be. I picked it up for a song.’”

  “These will be signed?”

  He wrinkled his face disapprovingly. “Of course not signed! Jesus, that’s all I need! No, it’d be exactly like, you know, fake gems, cubic zirconiums. A woman has a forty-carat ring, she doesn’t wear it to the grocery store or the country club. It’s in a vault and she wears a custom-made fake, which all her friends accept because one, they all do the same thing, and two, because they know she’s got the real jewels. So our guy is demonstrating he’s got taste, and also-and this is the big selling point-maybe he’s got a lot more money than his pals thought, because look what’s on the walls-Cézanne, Corot. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a terrific idea, Mark. It’s pretentious and false, yet at the same time completely legal. I can’t think of another gallery owner who could have come up with it.”

  Mark sells a lot of irony but he has a little trouble actually getting it in real life. He gave me a big smile.

  “You really think so? That’s great. So, are you interested? I mean, in doing some pieces.”

  “Let me ask you something first: I ran into Jackie Moreau the other day and he said you’d set him up with a hot deal in Europe doing paintings in many styles, as he put it. Was that what you’re talking about now?”

  Mark waved his hand dismissively. “No, that was something completely different. I mean, Jackie’s okay, but he’s no you. So what do you say? Are you in?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “No? Why the fuck not?”

  “I just don’t think I’d like the work. And…I’ve got some big projects I want to work on now and I might not have the time.”

  He swallowed this lie, or seemed to, and shrugged. “Okay, man, but if you ever want to make some serious cash, give me a call. Meanwhile, I’ll set up this Castelli thing. Who knows, it could turn into something for you.”

  “Who knows, indeed,” I said, and then the waiter bustled up and we had to have a conversation about dessert. Over this, Mark wanted to know more about salvinorin, so I gave him the short version of what Shelly had given me, and then he asked me why I thought I’d stopped visiting my own past and started visiting what seemed to be the past of someone else, and I said I didn’t know, but the sense of it was like being inside a baroque painting, maybe late cinquecento, and then I mentioned that the place I was in was a real place and that I’d looked the address up on Google, Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop, in Seville, and his eyes bulged out when I said that. Slotsky’s a fucking encyclopedia of art history, and he asked me whether I knew what the kid’s name was, and I said yeah, he said it was Gito de Silva, and Mark said, “Holy shit!”

  So I go, “Oh, you heard of this guy Gito de Silva? I mean, he’s a painter?”

  And he goes, “You could say that. ‘Gito’ is a short form of ‘Diegito,’ ‘little Diego.’ He was born in Seville at number one Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop in 1599,” and when he said that I swear there were sparks coming out of his eyes. And he goes on, “His father was Juan de Silva, just like you said, but because it was the custom in Seville to use your mother’s name professionally, when he started painting he called himself Diego Velázquez.”

  So, okay, I’d been painting like Velázquez recently and I must have had him on my mind and that’s where that came from. I explained that to Slotsky and he said, “Yeah, but you didn’t know all that stuff until I told you about it; where did that come from?”

  I said, “I must have read it somewhere, what other explanation is there?”

  He shook his head. “No, you’re really going back in time, you said yourself that it was real, not like a vision or a fantasy, your dad’s funeral and all that; maybe you’re in some psychic contact with Diego Velázquez.”

  And I said, “I didn’t know you believed in that shit,” and he said, “I don’t, but it makes you think, maybe your mind is preparing you to paint like Velázquez.”

  I said, “My mind would do something like that, one more thing to fuck up my life and get me to produce even more unsalable paintings.” So we had a laugh about that and he bugged me a little more about selling my stuff through him until he saw I wasn’t paying attention.

  Well, that was an interesting day, followed by a restless night. I couldn’t fall asleep. I had a strange sort of vibrational energy, like my life was going to change radically, and I’m resisting the urge to fight it, to take a pill, for example, a couple of pinks out of the trove of Xanax I had from my rehab days. I’d made a damned fool of myself at Lotte’s, and afterward I was thinking maybe it would be different if I had some real money, because the plain fact is that for all her business about the purity of art, Lotte hates being poor, especially because of Milo and the medical expenses. So it was kind of strange that just then up steps Slotsky with this offer.

  So I thought then that this thing with Slotsky could be the solution-if I could just get a little ahead, get free of this crazy rat race, maybe then I could, I don’t know, get back to that place again, when I was painting for love; maybe that’s the place to start.

  That Friday-I remember it was October first-I had the kids for the weekend again so Lotte could do her show. No smoking around the kids, so I was covered with nicotine patches, and it wasn’t the same; they made me slightly sick all the time, and there was none of the good stuff about smoking, the taste and the look of the smoke curling upward that mysteriously unlocks the creative process.

  After dinner, I called my sister Charlie at her place in Washington. She always likes to talk to the kids, and after they’d had their chatter, I got on with her. She asked me how I was doing and I said fine, and she said, you don’t sound fine, she’s using her “sisdar,” as we used to call it, and I kind of gave a nervous laugh and said yeah, something’s happening. And I told her about the drug trial and seeing her again at our father’s funeral and Mom again when she was young, and I asked her what she thought was going on, Charlie always my gateway into the strange, and she asked me what she’d said when we talked back then (or just the other day, depending on how you looked at it). I told her we’d talked about her life and how she was thinking about leaving her order and doing something else, and she said, yeah, I remember that conversation, it was an important conversation, I was really confused about my vocation and talking it out with you really helped, and I said, I didn’t recall it at all until it happened again.

  Then I asked her what she made of the Velázquez stuff and she asked me what Velázquez meant to me, and I said, he was a great painter, you know, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez…and she said, “No, what he means to you, what he represents.”

  I said, “What, you think it’s some kind of Freudian thing, I’m fantasizing being Velázquez because I want a substitute father, my father didn’t love me enough?”

  “I don’t know what I think yet, although I’m a little concerned you’re playing around with your brain, given your history with drugs.”

  “It’s not the same thing at all-this is a perfectly safe experimental drug under medical supervision.”

  “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Anyway, you had plenty of love. You were everyone’s golden child.”

  “You always say that, but I ne
ver felt it. I always felt like the prize in a grab bag or the ball in soccer. I think they spent a lot of time competing for me. I thought you were the one they loved.”

  “Oh, please! Plain, gawky Charlotte, who could barely finger paint, in a house where beauty and talent were the be-all and end-all? And Mother actively disliked me, if you recall.”

  “I must have missed that. Why did she?”

  “Because I was the thing that trapped her into her marriage. She didn’t have the guts to face the social death that would follow ditching a kid, and besides, I worshipped Dad. Hopelessly, of course. Why I fled into the Church, or so I tell myself. I think I probably warped you more than they did, the way I doted on you. Your total slavey. Spoiled you rotten for a normal woman, may God forgive me.”

  “Yeah, I remember that,” I said. “I used to think we would grow up and get married. You remember that time when you explained to me that it didn’t work that way? I must’ve been six or so, and I went wailing away. We were on the beach out at the point and I got lost.”

  “Oh, yes, I couldn’t forget that. You got cosseted and I got a whipping for losing you. As I say, spoiled rotten.”

  “Of course, now that there are no more rules, maybe we should try it. The kids love you, anyway…”

  Raucous laughter, she’s got a big booming laugh like a man, like our father, in fact, and it went on for a while, and then she said, breathless, “I’m sorry, I was just imagining myself in the archepiscopal palace: ‘Um, Archbishop, I know we just got through the process of releasing me from my formal vows, but there is one other little thing…’”

  “So it’s a possibility?”

  Another hoot. “If it were, my lad, I wouldn’t have you on a plate. You’re far too hard on the girls.”

  “I beg your pardon-I happen to be nice as pie.”

  “In your dreams, bozo. You’re exactly the kind of wonderfully decent guy who somehow manages to totally destroy any woman he gets involved with. How do you do it? It’s beyond me, unfamiliar as I am with the ways of men, but you know, I always thought you and Lotte were going to last.”

  “Oh, Lotte! I thought we were sort of making up, but now she hates me again.”

  And I told her about our fight in the gallery in some detail and she went, “You said what?”

  I said, “Well, you know, she was going on about how I never got to be the rich and famous artist that my so-called talent warranted, like she always does-”

  “That’s not what you just said at all. You said she was talking about you ruining your gift, so it curdled, not about being a success and famous.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Oh, Christ Jesus, give me strength! What’s the difference? The difference is the heart of life, you dunce! Don’t you understand, that woman would scrub floors, she’d do anything short of whoring on the street so you could paint what you wanted to? Don’t you understand anything about love at all? I’m surprised she didn’t brain you with a hammer.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Yes, I know, but I have some work to do and I haven’t time to explain it all just now-not that you’d listen, not that you listened the last fifty times I tried…”

  “Work? It’s nighttime.”

  “Not in Uganda it isn’t.”

  “As usual, blowing me off for the distant poor.”

  A long sigh. “Oh, Chaz, you know I love you and you take terrible advantage of it. If I’m sharp it’s a form of self-protection. And also, when you spend time with desperate, starving, brutalized people who pass their short, shitty lives wailing over dying children, you tend to lose patience with brilliant neurotics who can’t seem to find a way to be happy. Good night, baby brother.”

  “What is this, you stop being a nun and that gives you a ticket to be extra mean? You used to be nice.”

  “The nice got all burnt up in Africa. God bless, kid.”

  She hung up. I’m always strangely invigorated when Charlie gives me a spanking. Probably part of our sick quasi-incestuous relationship. But that was the last time I talked to her for a real long time.

  On Saturday afternoon I took the kids to MoMA; Milo asked for an audio guide and wandered off, and I took Rose and was her audio guide myself. She wanted to know what the pictures were really about, and I had to make up a representational story for each one. I think that shows something about what we want in art. She didn’t whine once, a patient kid, an art lover maybe, but I think mostly it was having a monopoly on Dad for a couple of hours, looking at art. Oldenburg was of course a favorite-who doesn’t like gigantic silly everyday objects-but also Matisse and Pollock. She tells me Pollock’s big Number 31 is really about a little mouse, and a story went with this appreciation, pointing out the various places where the mousie had adventures in the tangled grass; I wish I could have got it down, it would have revolutionized Pollock scholarship.

  After that, lunch and went to watch Buster Keaton movies. Rose announced afterward she is going to be an artist like me, but better, watching my face for signs of dismay, which I provided, then she held her thumb and fingers up barely separate and said just a little better. Milo did his Steven Wright jokes on the street and subway, he has the timing and the deadpan down cold. Terrible to love your kids this much, and this mixed with guilt because of the mess I made of Toby-maybe if I’d spent more time with him, but I had to work like a demon in the city to keep up the damn house and all that, which we bought in the first place so he could have a happy childhood among the birds and bunnies.

  Around eleven that night Lotte called from the gallery and said three of the five actress paintings had been sold, for five grand apiece.

  “Mark bought the Kate Winslet Velázquez three minutes after he walked in the door,” she said. “He insisted on taking it off the wall right then and paid us extra for the trouble. I had to wrap it in brown paper and he walked out with it clasped to his chest like a girl with a new dolly.”

  “That’s strange,” I said. “Mark usually plays it fairly cool. He must’ve had a customer in mind. Or we’ll see it in his gallery marked up two thousand percent. Who bought the others?”

  “Some media mogul and his girlfriend. This is wonderful, Chaz, you know? Everyone loved them!”

  I tried to be enthusiastic for Lotte’s sake. The money’s nice, but not so nice the thought that I could paint these things forever, maybe add a male line, Cruise and Travolta by suitable masters, and wouldn’t that solve all my money problems? I could go back on dope too, really crank the fucking things out, and I looked at Milo and listened to him drag each breath in while he slept and thought, How can I be such a selfish piece of shit, not to fucking burn myself to a crisp to buy him absolutely top-of-the-line medical care. I don’t understand anything.

  Except that in between my little domestic and parental tasks, and despite my obsessional shit about making money, I was boiling with ideas, filling page after page of my sketchbook. I was practically nauseous with the flow of creative juice; it started with those silly paintings, images of fame. I mean really, what is the world now? I mean visually. Image after image on the screen, but the kicker is we aren’t allowed to see them, I mean actually study them long enough to derive meaning, it’s all quick cut and on to the next one, which essentially destroys all judgment, all reflection.

  By design, I think. I mean, what does the president actually look like, what does anything actually look like? You can’t get it in a photograph, or only a hint, and so there was opened up to me a whole potential universe of realistic, penetrating, analytic painting, picking it up where Eakins left it, but adding all the stuff painting’s done since. You’d have to push it, but not like Bacon did, or Rivers, or that new kid, Cecily Brown, not so obvious, not the screaming Pope, not so on the nose-what if you pushed it from inside, up from the hidden structure of the painting? So that it worked subliminally almost, like Velázquez, it would be devastating, yeah, if you could bring it off, you could light up this whole blighte
d era. Neue Neue Sachlichkeit. If anyone can still see.

  On Sunday morning I took the kids over to Chinatown for dim sum, and in the restaurant Milo started coughing. I thought he had something caught in his throat, and I got up and he threw his head back with his tubes all shut down and started to go blue around the lips, and I dropped him down and did CPR until the paramedics came. His face was gray by then, and matte, like a bag of lint. Then at the NYU Medical Center when they heard I didn’t have health insurance they were going to ship him over to Bellevue after they got him stabilized and I said he had familial progressive pulmonary dystrophy and he’d been treated here before, and I made the stupid woman call Dr. Ehrlichman and she took my credit card grudgingly-she’d have been even more grudging if she knew it was blown. I called Lotte from the hospital and before I could say anything she told me I’d sold out, little red dots on all five actresses, and this time I didn’t even pretend I gave a shit and told her about our boy. So she came to the ward and we waited until we knew he was going to survive this one, and she stayed and I took Rose back to my loft.

  After Rose was asleep I sat out on the fire escape in my parka chain-smoking and thought about being the kid Velázquez-funny what the mind constructs, another thing to talk with Shelly about. After smoking my throat raw, I went back through the window into the loft and sat at my desk and calculated my riches: twenty-five grand for the actresses plus the kill fee Condé Nast promised makes 30K, enough to pay off the really embarrassing debts, and Slotsky’s job in Italy will fix everything for the indefinite future; I’d have to stick Lotte with the whole child-care load for a while, but what else can I do? She won’t mind if there’s serious money involved, she’s got the nanny. I thought I could finally get even with the fucking medical bills and have a chance to take a breath.