‘Well,’ began Oscar uncertainly, suddenly nervous in the glare of the camera’s eye, ‘I actually want to paint.’
‘Cut. Oscar, what are you doing? It’s about modeling, remember. Don’t be a toad. Let’s go again.’
The cameraman nodded to Lush.
‘And ready. Let’s try it as a close-up.
‘Go.’
There was silence.
‘Cut,’ said Lush. ‘What are you doing, Oscar?’
‘I’m sorry, was I meant to say something?’
‘Yes, you were meant to answer the question.’
‘What was it again?’
‘Look, forget that. Just talk about why you nude model. Okay, let’s roll. Number one ready, and action.’
‘I nude model,’ Oscar began hesitantly, but growing more confident as he went on, ‘because...I feel alive...when I’m on the dais, naked...It doesn’t require me to speak...it saves me from that. Because speaking is hard, as you can see from these efforts of mine. Modeling makes no promises; it’s neutral, like an unused bullet. I can watch, observe. Before, when I worked at the cinema, I was dying, shriveling up, but...on the dais, I’m peeled clean, and what I notice is my mind buzzing, and I feel what it means to be a body, to have a brain that commands, limbs which obey...but also...stillness...can be beautiful. I’ve learnt that the body is miraculous, a perfect engine....The only way I can put it is that when I first started it felt like I was being baptized without water in front of all those strangers, who ceased to be real people and became more like features of the landscape, if you know what I mean. Whatever they did, it didn’t matter. Perhaps they saw me as a kind of puppet; that didn’t matter either. Because I had mental freedom, in that stillness my mind could roam into shores of the celestial, then come back to earth. I was able to transcend the circumstances in which I found myself. Perhaps because at first I was so aware of them.
‘Have I said too much?’
Lush yelled ‘Cut!’ then shook Oscar by the hand with a vigor Oscar hardly thought him capable of.
‘That was brilliant, Oscar. Brilliant. How the hell did you think up the bit about the unused bullet? I haven’t a fucking clue what it means, but it sounded fantastic. A few false starts, but I knew I was right about you. I’d get the champagne, but unfortunately the girls drank it. Oh well. Five minutes, everyone. Oscar come with me.’
They made their way to the back of the studio and Oscar found himself wondering how much of his speech had been molded by Bloch’s story. As he was thinking about this, Lush’s foot became entangled in some cables and he had to yank his leg back and forth to free himself. From afar it looked like he was performing some kind of strange tribal dance. A tall, malevolent looking man, dressed in a stylishly cut suit, appeared to be waiting for them, seated, or rather reclining, on a deck chair. Lush immediately recognized him and at the same instant his stomach whined in protest, so that he had to clutch his middle protectively. A frantic impulse to go to the toilet asserted itself but he couldn’t afford to leave at such a critical moment. The stranger stood up, summoning up an air of magnificent and limitless indulgence.
‘Hello, Lush,’ he snorted and then, to Oscar, oozing considerable charm, in an astonishingly different tone of voice, said, ‘I am Donald Inn. I’m a talent scout for, associate and emissary of, the über-publicist Mr. Ryan Rees – his name is doubtless familiar to you.’
Oscar’s eyes instantly dilated in surprise and puzzlement.
‘Ace material up there in that noodle of yours, if a little confused. Care to forge an association with Mr. Rees?’
‘Back off, Inn; Oscar’s mine,’ Lush interjected.
‘Oscar,’ Inn continued, icily ignoring him, ‘you may be just what we are looking for: an authentic voice, not marred by cliches or gimmicks, not pandering to the masses. What a stroke of luck, my running into you like this. Ryan Rees could easily turn you into a household name.’
Oscar stared at nothing in particular. He realized he was expected to speak.
‘No, thank you, Mr. Inn, but I prefer to stay with Mr. Lush. Besides, this is a one-off arrangement, and I doubt if I have any other insights to offer.’
‘Listen, Oscar, people would readily pay money to hear someone like yourself speak. Have you heard of Ryan Rees? He could set you up as a state-of-the-art sage, showing people the way. Somehow I feel you can’t know his reputation, otherwise you wouldn’t be so cavalier about such a twenty-four-carat gold opportunity. Ryan Rees is one of the most respected publicists in the world. As an agent he was famous for getting his clients astronomically high fees.’
He extracted a menacing black card from a slit in his jacket – where it had previously been secreted in readiness – and deposited it into Oscar’s palm in one deft, skilled motion.
‘Call us if you know what’s good for you.’
Then he marched off into a synthetic and neon world, a world which had long ago eclipsed the actual one. Both he and his boss hovered on the fringes of it like birds dipped in mercury.
Lush muttered, his voice thick and indistinct, ‘You’re doing the right thing. Stick with me. Chuck that card away; it’s evil. Excuse me, I need to have a bowel movement.’ He scrambled to the men’s room, the shadow of incontinence hanging over him like some dark, frightening animal.
Donald Inn speed-walked through the corridors. He whipped out a cellular phone, pressed some buttons and spoke slick, carefully chosen words. Had he just chanced, by accident, on the perfect candidate?
*
Ryan Rees had kicked off his illustrious career by writing advertising copy for Bentley and Rolls Royce. After leaving advertising he had edited Scandalous!, a glossy magazine specializing in important facts about the famous: the number of times they went to the hairdresser; whether or not they had dandruff, halitosis, or body odor; the prescription or recreational drugs they were currently addicted to; whether or not they were rumored to be pregnant, anorexic, homosexual, or autistic; the size of their penises, and so forth. During its lifetime the magazine attracted libel suits rivaling in number the amount of corpses floating down the Ganges.
After he had resigned his post, Ryan Rees decided to set up shop as an agent, and eventually accumulated over two hundred clients in the world of television and broadcasting. During this time he had lunch with most of the important players in journalism and the arts, always very careful to conclude their meetings by showering them with gifts: picnic hampers from Fortnum and Mason, bottles of Chateau Talbot, eau de cologne and silk handkerchiefs from Jermyn Street, tickets to La Scala, tins of Russian caviar and (occasionally) cocaine.
In the end he decided to act as the publicist for a cluster of very important clients, while also inventing sensational or scandalous stories for those after such items (by no means confined to editors of the tabloids). But he had grown bored with his own game and needed something new and anthropologically interesting to occupy him – something different; concocting far-fetched stories just wasn’t that exciting anymore. When Donald Inn had recently come up with the idea of manufacturing the myth of a contemporary messiah, a sage, a guru, Rees had found it tantalizing and for once a strategy didn’t spring fully formed into his mind. This presented a real challenge...any braindead imbecile could be turned into a celebrity, but to take a complete nobody and turn him into a prophet – that required exceptional levels of propaganda, cunning, and inventiveness, a miracle of spin that only he was up to. To manufacture another Jesus Christ, to conjure one out of thin air would mean than Ryan Rees could literally do anything, would mean that the loftiest goal of all sat within the palm of his freely roving and yet manacled hand.
At one time Rees had been intrigued by the possibilities of money counterfeiting. And during his second divorce, he had forged documents to the effect that his wife was mentally ill, all signed by Dr. Manfred Feltersnatch, a fictional psychiatrist. He had the soul of an anarchist-nihilist whose blood has exploded yet remains inert and whose main longing in life is to bring ridicule and ruin upon
all those who cross him or his path, just for the scorched hell of it.
7
The small cloakroom was overflowing with people. The fat man with the thick glasses, wearing a badly fitting uniform marked “The Earl Gallery,” stood behind the counter, dishing out coats. He looked terribly upset because the coats he was producing were not the ones people had asked for. Those he had taken down from the hangers began to accumulate on the counter, forming a tower which threatened to topple at any moment. The air was crackling with impatience. In a little while all the coats had journeyed from their hangers to the counter. Precisely nothing had been achieved except this mass migration. The tower finally gave in and those who had been standing by dumbly, hoping the situation would resolve itself despite their complete failure to do anything, uttered little cries. Whereupon a military looking man, perhaps an ex-colonel (who always wore a monocle and a perpetually outraged expression – which in this instance coincided with what he was actually feeling) started rifling through the scattered pile. The others joined in and soon the small cloakroom was gripped by primal instincts and threatened to cave in as the bodies pressed against the walls. But one by one the coats were returned to their rightful owners and the room began to clear. It was quiet again. The fat man with the thick glasses was able to breathe.
He squinted through his glasses. The first thing he saw was a delicately embroidered handkerchief. The second, the hand that held it. Only then did he notice the person attached to all this.
‘Mr. Earl, sir, we don’t see you here very often, sir.’
‘Buzby,’ said Nicholas, speaking very rapidly, ‘put that in the safe would you? I’ve just found it after a long search. It was given to me by a woman I serviced in Heidelberg.’ He strode up, deposited the handkerchief on the counter and darted back, as if Buzby was manifesting the symptoms of full-blown leprosy.
Buzby, in addition to being grotesquely myopic, was rather deaf. All he had really caught of the speech was the word ‘serviced,’ and he assumed Nicholas was talking about his Jaguar.
‘You’re having your car serviced, sir, are you, sir?’
‘What? Was speaking of an old flame of mine.’
Here Buzby heard, ‘What? Was making a cold flame all the time.’
‘Why’s that, sir? Better get it checked, sir.’
‘I reckon I’d better have you checked.’
Here Buzby heard, ‘I beckon bed wetter crab blue flecked,’ but couldn’t think of an appropriate response and wondered what this statement had to do with Mr. Earl’s car. Nicholas stomped off in frustration, said, ‘Forget it,’ still clutching the handkerchief. In the hallway he brushed against a woman dressed in flowing purple shawls who was rummaging around inside her handbag. He stared at her for a moment, considered a rude remark, decided against it, drifted into his office, and started gathering pamphlets about the current exhibition. His mind flashed with imperfect remembrances of the different canvasses, until finally an uninvited image erased them all: that of a very clean incision in flesh, the crimson cascade that came spilling out ravishing until he stopped to realize it was fresh blood.
A few minutes later Oscar walked in. The woman in the shawls had by now emptied the contents of her handbag all over the floor and was sifting through them. Oscar stood and watched her. She was fully engrossed in her search, on her hands and knees, lipstick, keys, mirrors spreading around her in a circle.
He had just come from the Mermaid Academy. It was a cold day, and his bones felt chilled from standing around in the nude. He wanted to tell this strangely un-self-conscious woman he felt as if he’d been freed from the cage his body was turning into, tell her modeling was becoming a bore and a burden, despite the ecstatic account he’d given of it in the television studio. But he said nothing and just kept watching. At last she found what she wanted, refilled her handbag and stood up. As she straightened her clothes and brushed her knees she noticed him watching her. Even at that point of contact she reacted unexpectedly. Neither taken aback by his gaze nor ruffled by it she gaped back at him. The smile she left him with tantalizingly acknowledged the comedy of what had just happened. Then she was gone.
After a pause he followed her not knowing why, or what he hoped to achieve. Outside she appeared to be lost in the throngs, but then he made her out, her shawls trailing behind her, gathering dust. He watched her figure shrinking, watched that little dot of purple until she finally vanished. It was as if by eking out the moments in which she remained visible the blow of her eventual loss would be softened. He stood there, watching the afternoon traffic, so locked into immobility that the accumulated cars seemed like one massive engine humming and buzzing with life. He counted twelve double-decker buses laid end to end like a gigantic red centipede.
He had to face the fact that she wasn’t going to return, not going to hurry back through the crowds. Their moment of intersection was over.
He shook off his melancholy.
As he finally passed through the hallway Oscar felt like he was entering someone’s house, not a gallery, given the emblems of domesticity all around: an armchair; a small, cracked flower pot full of white roses; shaded lamps perched on small tables. But the arrestingly large words on the red, fluttering drape left no doubt as to the space’s purpose.
THE ART OF NICK NAIDIREM: ILLUMINATING SHADOWS AND MASKS
Who’s he? he thought.
He walked through a narrow corridor and entered a large, deserted central room painted in dazzling white. Only two or three canvasses hung on each wall. Oscar welcomed this uncluttered feeling, the sense that he could consider each painting at a leisurely pace.
But then out of nowhere dozens of people stomped in and he was caught up in the crowd’s motion as a piece of driftwood is in a whirlpool. It took awhile for people to disperse, creating sufficient room to study the paintings. Oscar planted himself near the doorway in case he needed to bail out. As he did so his eye was struck by the nearest painting and he was immediately drawn by it.
It was called “The Eleventh Hour.” In it an abstract face and skull were superimposed, like a double-exposure. The androgynous face was boldly realized and had large eyes of Prussian blue, with unblemished, pale-ochre skin. By contrast, the skull was faint and spectral and appeared to dissolve, the lines less assured, charcoal grey teeth still visible, decaying. While the face embodied the essence of youth, the presence of the skull continually undermined this and so the painting pulled in two directions.
Two other paintings particularly impressed him. The first was entitled “Damaged Lake” – less ambiguous, more figurative. A small island in olive green formed the lower left quarter of the frame and a ruined, primitive church of wood and stone sat in its center. The two were surrounded by a circular lake and in the distance spectral mountains loomed. The eye was led naturally to link the cerulean blue of the lake with the cobalt blue sky. But while the lake seemed to stir and move, the sky was an inert, etched field. On viewing the painting as a whole, an atmosphere of Mediterranean balminess leapt out. The artist had refined color to a point of extraordinary purity, while at the same time managing to create a living, visceral landscape.
But the third piece was his favorite, technically adept and perfectly composed. “Butterfly” was a work of sheer exuberance. The frame was filled with the boldest, brightest colors as the wings of a butterfly hovered in a crystalline conception. Fresh yellow and light sienna blobs of color contrasted with long, unbroken reaches of gold, vermilion and copper. The painting was aglow, its subject on the point of taking life, its colors threatening to ignite the canvas.
As he stared into the painting, trying to discover its secret, the deadening blanket of habit slipped away and Oscar’s consciousness came to rest on a plane where impressions pulsed and danced. The paint that had dripped and dried was speaking to him from the past with a voice only for him, as it seemed. And slowly, as this paint worked its magic, the anonymous figures milling around him began to resolve into symbols of an ineffable lov
e.
There was a sharp metallic clang. Oscar looked around to see what it was. A wizened woman was kneeling to retrieve her keys. It was taking forever. The spell was shattered. He forced himself to move on.
He stopped in front of a simple portrait, trying to recapture that fecund state of mind, but it was gone. As he stood there a hand touched his arm.
‘Oscar,’ someone said quietly.
He turned to see Nicholas standing next to him.
‘Nicholas. I’d forgotten all about you. I was going to pop in and see you. But Mr. Naidirem’s paintings seduced me.’
‘Yes, they are good, aren’t they? The artist is a great love of mine, even now, after all this time. The richness of the colors, the bleeding light. I wish I had a quarter of that talent. Very gifted, don’t you find? And how’s your own work going? Progress report?’
‘I’ve nothing...to show you. I haven’t done a stroke since that sketch I made of you.’
Nicholas turned away. When he next spoke, after a pause, he appeared to be addressing the wall.
‘Well, we all make mistakes, don’t we?’
‘I don’t really think I deserve success. I’d rather just taste pleasure for a bit.’
Nicholas turned back to him, no longer happy with the wall. ‘Are you serious? But you’re changing the subject. I won’t say I’m disappointed in you, because people no longer disappoint me. I just expect them to let me down at some point.
‘Let’s take Najette for a minute. I’d like to, I’d like to take her, but she was too much to take. She saw through me. I had to admire her for that. Her honesty, she couldn’t abide pretension. I was too impure. Oh yes, she was feisty; yes, she had spirit; she had talent, no doubt. But in the end she couldn’t laugh at herself, she took herself too seriously; in the end she was just that little bit lethal. I realized that our affair had been about her, all along, her precious art, her visions. I thought I’d have some say, but she was the one making the decisions, setting the agenda. Do you know how impotent that made me feel, how useless and voiceless?’
The Fabrications Page 10
