The Forgery of Venus Read online

  Chaz and I were fairly close up until our senior year, and then I went off to law school in Boston and we lost touch. I saw him for about twenty minutes at our fifteenth college reunion, when he walked off with my date. She was an arty type with a wonderful name-Charlotte Rothschild-and I seem to recall that they eventually got married, or lived together or something. As I say, we lost touch.

  Mark kept in touch, being a keep-in-touch kind of guy, active in alumni affairs, always a call for the annual contribution. He tried his hand as a screenwriter in Hollywood for a season, got nowhere, then got his parents to set him up in a downtown gallery when SoHo was just taking off, and he flourished at it, but not before changing Slotsky to Slade. I got invitations to all the Mark Slade gallery openings and we occasionally went to them.

  We didn’t discuss Chaz much on those occasions, and I gathered that he was working as an artist with some success. Mark mainly likes to talk about himself, somewhat tediously, if you want to know the truth, and in any case I am not terribly interested in the art scene. I own only one original work of any distinction, curiously a painting by none other than C. P. Wilmot, Senior. It’s one of his wartime paintings-the crew of a gun tub on a carrier at Okinawa, the antiaircraft cannons blazing away, and hanging in the air in front of them like a hideous insect is a kamikaze on fire, so close you can make out the pilot and the white band wrapped around his head, and there’s nothing they can do about it, they’re all going to die in the next few seconds, but the interesting thing about the picture is that one of the crew, a boy really, has turned away from the oncoming doom and is facing the viewer, hands outstretched and empty, with an expression on his face that is right out of Goya, or so I recall from my liberal education.

  In fact, the whole painting is Goyesque, a modern take on his famous The Shootings of May Third 1808, with the kamikaze standing in for those faceless Napoleonic dragoons. The navy did not approve, nor did the magazines of the time, and the painting remained unsold. Thereafter, it seems, Wilmot was more careful to please. Chaz had it on the wall of his bedroom all through college, and when we were packing up just before we graduated he gave it to me, casually, as if it were an old Led Zeppelin poster.

  As it happened I had just flown into town the weekend Mark threw a party at the Carlyle hotel to celebrate his coup in acquiring the painting that has become known as the Alba Venus. I’d followed the saga of the painting’s discovery with more than my usual interest in things artistic, mainly because of Mark’s involvement, but also because of the value of the object. They were quoting crazy figures for what it was expected to bring at auction, a couple of units at least, a “unit” being a movie mogul term I like to toss around for fun-it’s a hundred million dollars. I find that sort of money very interesting, whatever its source, so I decided to stay at my firm’s suite at the Omni for the evening and attend.

  Mark had rented one of the mezzanine ballrooms for the party. I spotted Chaz as soon as I walked through the door, and he seemed to spot me at the same time-more than spot, he seemed to be looking for me. He stepped closer and held out a hand.

  “I’m glad you could come,” he said. “Mark said he’d invited you, but your office told me you were out of town, and then I called later and they said you’d be here.”

  “Yeah, Mark really knows how to throw a party,” I said, and thought it was strange that he’d taken all that trouble to establish my whereabouts. It’s not like we were best buddies anymore.

  I looked him over. Pale, with what seemed to be the remains of a tan, and waxy looking, with his bright eyes circled with grayish, puffy skin. He kept glancing away, over my shoulder, as if looking for someone else, another guest, perhaps one not so welcome as I. It was the first time I’d ever seen him in anything like what he was wearing then, a beautiful gray suit of that subtle shade that only the top Italian designers ever use.

  “Nice suit,” I said.

  He glanced down at his lapels. “Yes, I got it in Venice.”

  “Really?” I said. “You must be doing okay.”

  “Yeah, I’m doing fine,” he said in a tone that discouraged inquiry, and he also changed the subject by adding, “Have you seen the masterpiece yet?” He indicated the posters of the painting that hung at intervals on the ballroom walls: the woman lying supine, a secret, satisfied smile on her face, her hand covering her crotch, not palm-down in the traditional gesture of modesty, but palm-up, as if offering it to the man revealed smokily in the mirror at the foot of the couch, the artist, Diego Velázquez.

  I said I had not, that I’d been out of town during the brief period it had been on public display.

  “It’s a fake,” he said, loud enough to draw stares. Of course, I’d seen Chaz drunk often enough in college, but this was different, a dangerous kind of drunk, I realized, although Chaz was the mildest of men. The taut skin under his left eye was twitching.

  “What do you mean it’s a fake?” I asked.

  “I mean it’s not a Velázquez. I painted it.”

  I believe I laughed. I thought he was joking, until I looked at his face.

  “You painted it,” I said, just to be saying something, and then I recalled some of the articles I’d read about the extraordinary scientific vetting of the painting and added, “Well, then you certainly fooled all the experts. As I understand it, they found that the pigments were correct for the era, the digital analysis of the brushstrokes was exactly like the analyses from undoubted works by Velázquez, and there was something about isotopes…”

  He shrugged impatiently. “Oh, Christ, anything can be faked. Anything. But as a matter of fact I painted it in 1650, in Rome. It has genuine seventeenth-century Roman grime in the craqueleur. The woman’s name is Leonora Fortunati.” He turned away from the posters and looked at me. “You think I’m crazy.”

  “Frankly, yes. You even look crazy. But maybe you’re just drunk.”

  “I’m not that drunk. You think I’m crazy because I said I painted that thing in 1650, and that’s impossible. Tell me, what is the time?”

  I looked at my watch and said, “It’s five to ten,” and he laughed in a peculiar way and said, “Yes, later than you think. But, you know, what if it’s the case that our existence-sorry, our consciousness of our existence at any particular now-is quite arbitrary? I don’t mean memory, that faded flower. I mean that maybe consciousness, the actual sense of being there, can travel, can be made to travel, and not just through time. Maybe there’s a big consciousness mall in the sky, where they all kind of float around, there for the taking, so that we can experience the consciousnesses of other people.”

  He must have observed my expression, because he grinned and said, “Mad as a hatter. Maybe. Look, we need to talk. You’re staying in town?”

  “Yes, just for the night, at the Omni.”

  “I’ll come by in the morning, before you check out. It won’t take long. Meanwhile, you can listen to this.”

  He took a CD jewel box out of his inside pocket and handed it to me.

  “What’s this?”

  “My life. That painting. You remember Krapp?”

  I said I did.

  “Krapp was crazy, right? Or am I wrong?”

  “It’s left ambiguous, I think. What does Krapp have to do with your problem?”

  “Ambiguous.” At this he barked a harsh sound that might have been a laugh in another circumstance and ran his hands back through his hair, still an abundant head of it even in middle age. I recalled that his father had such a crop, although I couldn’t imagine Mr. Wilmot wrenching his tresses in the way Chaz was now doing, as if he wanted to yank them out. I had thought it merely a figure of speech, but apparently not.

  “Great,” I said, “but if you don’t mind me asking, why are you handing this to me?”

  I can’t describe the look in his eyes. You hear about lost souls.

  He said, “I made it for you. I couldn’t think of anyone else. You’re my oldest friend.”

  “Chaz, what about Mark? S
houldn’t you share this with-”

  “No, not Mark,” he said with as bleak an expression as I’d ever seen on a human face. I thought he was going to cry.

  “Then I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” I said. But I sort of did, as a queasy feeling cranked up in my gut. I have little experience with insanity. My family has been blessed with mental health, my kids went through adolescence with barely a blip, and the raving mad, if you except the people who make movies, are not often found in the fields where I have chosen to work. Thus I found myself tongue-tied in the presence of what I now saw was a paranoid breakdown of some kind.

  Perhaps he sensed my feelings, because he patted my arm and smiled, a ghost of the old Chaz showing there.

  “No, I may be crazy, but I’m not crazy in that way. There really are people after me. Look, I have to go someplace now. Listen to that and we’ll talk in the morning.” He held out his hand like a normal person, we shook, and he vanished into the crowd.

  I went back to the Omni then, poured myself a scotch from the minibar, and slipped Chaz’s CD into the slot in my laptop, thinking, Okay, at worst it’s eighty minutes, and if it’s just raving, I don’t have to listen, but it wasn’t just a recording. It was a dozen or so compressed sound files, representing hours and hours of recorded speech. Well, what to do? I was tired, I wanted my bed, but I also wanted to find out if Chaz Wilmot was really around the bend.

  And another thing. I have sketched my life here, a singularly bland existence strung around the cusp of the century, and I suppose I wanted a taste of, I don’t know, extravaganza, which is what the life of an artist, which I had declined in terror long ago, had always represented to me. Perhaps that’s why the Americans worship celebrities, although I deplore this and refuse to participate, or only to a slight degree. But here I had my own private peep show, and it was irresistible. I selected the first file and clicked the appropriate buttons, whereupon the voice of Chaz Wilmot, Jr., came floating from the speakers.

  Thanks for listening. I realize this is an imposition, but when I heard Mark was throwing this party and he said he’d invited you, I thought it was perfect timing. There’s other stuff I want to talk about, but that can wait until I see you again. It’s a shame you haven’t seen the actual painting-those posters are shit, like all reproductions-but I guess you’ve read the stories about how it was found and all that. These are lies, or may be lies. Reality seems to be more flexible than I’d imagined. Anyway, let me set the stage for this.

  Did you ever do any acid, back in the day? Yeah, now that I think about it, I believe I gave you your first hit, blotter acid, purple in color, and we spent the day in Riverside Park walking, and we had that conversation about seagulls, what it was like to be one, and I seem to recall you transmitted your consciousness to one of them and kited along the Hudson, and then later we spent the bad part of the trip in your room in the apartment. It was just before spring break our senior year. When I asked you how you liked it after, you said you couldn’t wait for it to be over. Oh, yes.

  And that’s my point-it implied that you knew you were doping, knew you were hallucinating, even though the hallucinations might have seemed totally real. One time-did I ever tell you about this?-I was tripped out on acid and I happened to have this triangular tortoiseshell guitar pick on me, and I spent half the night staring at it, and all those little brown swirls came alive and showed me the entire history of Western art, from Lascaux cave painting, through Cycladic sculpture and the Greeks and Giotto, Raphael, Caravaggio, right up to Cézanne, and not only that-it revealed to me the future of art, shapes and images that would break through the sterile wastelands of postmodernism and generate a new era in the great pageant of human creativity.

  And of course after that I couldn’t wait to trip again, so the next weekend I got all my art supplies lined up and the guitar pick in hand and I dropped a huge fucking dose, and nothing. Worse than nothing, because the guitar pick was just what it was, a cheap piece of plastic, but there was a malign presence in the room, like a giant black Pillsbury Doughboy, and I was being squashed and smothered under it and it was laughing at me, because the whole guitar pick event was a scam designed to get me to trip again so this thing could eat me.

  You remember Zubkoff, don’t you, my old roommate? Pre-med? The guy who stayed in his room studying all the time. We called him the Magic Mushroom? I heard from him again, out of the blue. He’s a research scientist now. I joined a study he was doing on a drug to enhance creativity.

  Did you ever wonder how your brain worked? Like, say, where do ideas come from? I mean, where do they come from? A completely new idea, like relativity or using perspective in painting. Or, why are some people terrifically creative and others are patzers? Okay, being you, maybe the whole issue never came up.

  But it’s always fascinated me, the question of questions, and even beyond that I desperately wanted to get back to the guitar pick, I wanted to see what’s next. I mean, in Western art. I still can’t quite believe that it’s all gurgled down to the nothing that it looks like now, big kitsch statues of cartoon characters, and wallpaper and jukeboxes, and pickled corpses, and piles of dry-cleaning bags in the corner of a white room, and “This is a cock.” Of course you might say, well, things pass. Europeans stopped doing representational art for a thousand years and then they started up again. Verse epics used to be the heart of literature all over the world and then they stopped getting written. So maybe the same thing has happened to easel painting. And we have the movies now. But then you have to ask, why is the art market so huge? People want paintings, and all that’s available is this terrible crap. There has to be some way of not being swamped in the ruthless torrent of innovation, as Kenneth Clark called it. As my father was always saying.

  I mean, you really have to ask, do we love the old masters because they’re old and rare, just portable chunks of capital, or do we love them because they give us something precious and eternally valuable? If the latter, why aren’t we still doing it? Okay, everybody’s forgotten how to draw, but still…

  Drifting here. Back to Zubkoff. He called me up. He said he was running a study out of the Columbia med school, lots of funding from the government, National Institutes of Mental Health, or whatever, to explore whether human creativity could be enhanced by taking a drug. They were using art students, music students, and he also wanted to get some older artists in on it, so they could check if age was a variable. And he thought of me. Well, free dope. That was never a hard sell.

  Anyway, I volunteered, and here we all are. And I’m sure you’re wondering now why, after however long it is, old Wilmot is dropping all this on me. Because you’re the only one left, the only person who knows me and who doesn’t care enough about me to humor me if I’m nuts. I’m being blunt, I know, but it’s true. And while I’m being blunt, of all the people I’ve known, you’re the one with the solidest grasp of what the world calls reality. You have no imagination at all. Again, sorry to drop this on you. I’m dying to know what you think.

  Setting the stage, interesting phrase, that, like our life is a drama, act one, act two, act three, curtains. So let’s start with me at twenty-one, just out of college. Did you ever wonder how I graduated? How could I be an art major and flunk three art courses? This my advisor asked me. Well, sir, the reproductions make me sick, I can’t look at them and I can’t write about painting, the words seem like jokes. It took me three years to learn how to fake it, and if it wasn’t for Slotsky I would’ve failed the other courses too. A genius at doing art papers, Slotsky; if they hung twelve-hundred-word art papers in museums, Slotsky would be one of the great artists of our generation.

  I was home in Oyster Bay, home sweet home, and all I could think of was how to get out of there before I killed myself or him. My dad. I don’t think I ever mentioned this to you, but Dad had a little problem.

  He was chasing Kendra the maid again, although she’s practically deformed. How could he? Maybe he stopped seeing them as they
are. It was worse before Mother started hiring the maids, not that she cares anymore, but we kept losing maids, and of course she needed a maid by then, she could hardly function by herself.

  I remember you invited me out to your aunt’s place one summer, and you might have wondered why I never reciprocated. Well, Dad’s problem is one reason; maybe he would’ve behaved himself with guests-always a sense of decorum in public-but I didn’t want to risk it. Another reason: there are nude portraits of my mother on every fucking wall in the house. Interesting progression though, from Pre-Raphaelite sylph (my favorite, if that’s the word, she’s maybe a couple years older than I am now: naked, hair shoulder-length, leaning against a wall, looking out at all of us-am I not beautiful?), to classical Venus, to the Titian version, finally to Rubens, and then he stopped painting her, or maybe she stopped posing. I wonder what she tipped the scales at that summer, four or even five hundred, I couldn’t look anymore, but she got even with him in a sort of Dorian Gray self-destructo way.

  Anyway, you have to imagine me skulking around that huge, echoing house, wishing I had the balls to join a cult, the kind where you get a tattoo on your forehead, and other stupid thoughts, and decided I was never going to play into his hands, I was never going to wreck myself to get even like she did. Why didn’t she leave him? I never figured that out. It’s not like she didn’t have any money.

  Her dad had plenty, made it in switching equipment for the railroads. All that complicated electromechanical machinery that relayed current to the right switches in railyards and out along the line. There used to be something called a Petrie junction that got some use in telephone exchanges too. Westinghouse bought him out right after the war for something like thirty million, which was serious money in those days. He died when I was seven or so, but I knew my grandmother pretty well.