The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (32 page)

Go to the kitchen drawer for a paring knife, and be a slasher.

Precedent the First: 15 June 1985, the young man who slashed crotch and then splashed concentrated sulphuric acid across Rembrandt’s
Danaë
, and there was little chance for restoration.

Precedent the Second: Munch’s
The Scream
, vandalized with a felt-tip marker. And too, too true, the scrawl, “Could only have been painted by a madman.”

Precedent the Third: 10 March 1914 and Mary Richardson’s meat-cleaver savagery against Diego Velázquez’s
Rokeby Venus
. Seven slashes. Slashes seven. She said later, “Because the way men visitors gaped at it all day long.”

Precedent the Fourth: Repeated attacks against Rembrandt’s
Night Watch
(1642).

Precedent the Fifth: Twice decapitated, “The Little Mermaid” in the harbor of Copenhagen. 24 April 1964, “sawn off and stolen by politically oriented artists of the Situationist movement, amongst them Jørgen Nash.” Then, only five (or six?) months ago, 28/1/98, decapitation again, perpetrators returned the head, but were never apprehended.

Too many examples, and these only those of which I am aware.

BUT

Precedent the Sixth (and most Relevant to the Case at Hand): Claude Monet, April 1903, an exhibition of his work, and this time it was the artist himself who entered and took blade and paintbrush spatters
to his own work.

This is all fair fucking warning, you Thoth-headed avatar fuck of my undoing perched there on your too-ripe avocado hill. I am
your
god, and not around that Other way. I have knives. I can part delicately curved beak from cranium, jaws from quadrate, skull from almost human shoulders, etcetera. You do well to remember that, afterbirth.

31/7/98

Bad night last night. Faithful Dorothée came round to find me hung over and puking sick. No lasting damage done, to myself or the execrable (or excremenitious painting).

1/8/98

“Things are entirely what they appear to be and
behind them
…there is nothing.”

1938, Sartre,
La Nausée

1/8/98

It may be a dream. Hardly matters. I meant to write
this
hours ago, but scuttled off to Sartre, instead, being lowly, loathsome coward that I am. Being coward. Hiding in history and words not of my own devising. Words not even wholly suitable, but pilfered stolen appropriated
pirated
nonetheless. Privateering as avoidance. I meant, instead, to write this what might have been dream and this what might have been waking, or this WHAT might have been liminal space straddling the two mythic kingdoms, SLEEP and AWAKE. I walked la Rue Saint-Denis, so crowded with prostitutes and those paying supplicants seeking out the ministrations and sordid deliverances of their services, but so many, so many, walking la Rue Saint-Denis was to thread a needle. I cannot prove I wasn’t actually there. I can’t prove I wasn’t. My head choked, eyes choked with memories of bright lurid brothel signage: Club 128, “Sex Center” Projection Video, Top Sexy, Sexy Center, generic Peep Show. Video 121, generic Sex Shop;
La rue Saint-Denis est surtout constituée de sex shops
, yes and fine and true, but almost or no signs that were not in fucking English. Oh, but half times half a memory of stopping to purchase a pear at a fruit stand called
la Palais du Fruit
. Make of that what you goddamn will and pardon my murdered
Français
. In my head, the recollections are of cobblestones sticky with cum, gutters running silver-white with cum. This cannot be actual. Delusion or dreaming delusion. Faces all around like carnival masks, that painted and bright and plastic.
Those
faces, but also others of an entirely different breed. Filthy waifs and gaunt women with tarry blobs for eyes, jaundiced walking skeletons lurking in back of neon and cheap, sleazy glitz. The lure of an anglerfish comes to mind, or the tongue of a snapping turtle. Fakeout. I am asking everywhere after lost Gautier, whom I have come to believe stole something of me away when he left my studio. Same as the transvestite left the ring. My cock so hard I barely can even walk, but the thought of hands and knees in the semen-wallow gutter, no way, no way. Hands on me, hands of every comprehendible gender, and at first my polite refusals, and then I was shouting for them not to touch me, because I felt the microbes slithering from skin to skin, transepidermal, them unto me, and it might be, though I, not bathe ever again, (
what?
) but infection so deep I’ll be bones in the semen by dawn. Do not fucking touch me. Only show me the way to Gautier. You must know him, that face and shyness, and if I’d had a photograph I would have shown them all. See?
This
, this here, right here, is the very man or the boy child I am seeking. And I did find him. That’s the miracle of it. The loaves and fishes, manna from the sky, pillar of fire (Exodus 13:21-22; Exodus 14:24; Nehemiah 9:19, & etc.), bleeding statues, falling frogs, stigmata, Fátima (13 October 1917), miracles of modern goddamn medicine. He was standing in an alley near the intersection with rue de la Cossonnerie (a street, supposedly, with a far more savory character). It struck me in no way a surprise to see him on his knees, blowing a fellow with a wolf’s head, which soon after my arrival became, instead, the head of an ibis. I was even less surprised when the man sprouted wings and flew away into the streetlight-tainted nighttime sky. Gautier stood up, wiped his mouth, and tucked his thirty pieces of silver into a front pocket of his tight, tight jeans. Don’t think I don’t know I was meant to see each act in its turn and interpret their meanings for precisely what they were. “Miss me?” he asked (though, didn’t he
not
speak English?), and I shrugged and stepped into the alleyway, glancing first over my shoulder at the way I’d come. I wanted no followers. I wanted to be certain a line hadn’t formed, impatient for the boy whore’s favors. There was nothing back there but the neon and throng. Relief. How often do I ever feel relief these days? But in that moment I
did
feel relief, and I turned back to Gautier. “Do you think I missed you?” I replied, tit for tat, and he raised his eyebrows and spat into a pile of wet cardboard boxes. “I dreamed of your painting,” he said, oh so very softly he said that, and by then I was sweating, and if I’d not been, that would have done the trick. “I dreamed you finished it, and then gave it to me. I dreamed I sold it to an American for a great deal of money.” And I said, “You have good dreams,” and he said, “Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. What about you,
peintre
. What are your dreams? Does an incubus come and crouch on your chest when you sleep?” I saw, then, that as we’d been speaking, his eyebrows had grown so that they met in the middle, and it occurred to me a contagion had been passed from the wolf/ibis-headed john. If I cut fair Gautier, would I find a second skin turned inside out? If I cut him, would I find fur? There was plenty of space in even that narrow, stinking alley for a trial, an inquisition, and, quick as thieves, I weighed the wants of my cock against my interest in the Truth, and, too, the fact that I could have both. But the contagion might be catching, might it not? Did I wish to join Gautier in this lycanthropy of the soul? Why, if I chose that route, I could go to Gévaudan, after all. I could pick up where Marguerite and her unnamed compatriots had left off more than two hundred years before, yes? “Can’t stand here all night,” Gautier said, and he said it with a haughty, impatient air that made up my mind then and there. I drew the paring knife from my belt and, stepping quickly towards him, moving fast and leaving only inches to spare, drove the blade into his chest to the hilt. He didn’t scream, so all the better. I twisted the blade, as I’ve seen done in action flicks. His blood spilled so warmly it was almost hot over my right hand, near to steaming, and I considered the possibility all over again. Maybe I’d be numbered among the infected, despite my sloppy caution. I looked into his eyes, and he looked into mine. I twisted the blade again, and he only looked a little disappointed before slumping to the ground at my feet. His descent was in no especial way different from the position he’d have assumed were I then a paying customer and not an executioner. “Does he know my name?” I asked the dying boy. He answered, words death rattling from his slight and violated chest, “All our names are known to him, Sir. ‘I am thy writing palette, O Thoth, and I have brought unto thee thine ink-jar. I am not of those who work iniquity in their secret places; let not evil happen unto me.’ Thought you were Monsieur Myth Savvy. Thought you’d know that for sure.” For good measure, I kicked him, and turned to walk away in the same instant I became quite convinced I’d never drawn the paring knife. I stood with my back to the living Gautier, and he was saying that he was available, if I was interested. Why would I have sought him out, were I not interested. It was a nasty trick (adianoeta noted and no pun intended), turning the tables on me like that. Dying at my feet and condemning me with the taint of wolf and ibis blood, then my having never even pulled the knife, much less plunged it into his jaded heart. “Will you come home with me,” I asked, but he inquired, “Do you have a home, Monsieur?” So I put the question to him a second time. “If you have the cost of my company,” he said. Which is to say, he said no. And I recalled the Hag of Montparnasse: “You smell very much of a lonely man…” I stared at a flashing sign promising LIVE GIRLS (supposing the dead ones are unpopular or in short supply), and eventually I said to him, “Not what I had in mind, Gautier.” Car horn. Beat for emphasis. Sharp intake of breath. “You know I’m your money’s worth.” And I replied, “No. Wait here, and I’m sure you will attract the attention of some other pantheon. A forgotten god or goddess will come along, sooner or later.” He said not another word, and I left him standing there. I’ll never go looking again. A black dog followed me almost all the way back to the flat, though I took a taxi. I glimpsed it now and then. It wore many faces.
Many gods and many voices
.

3/8/98

Found, today, pinned to the door of my flat (unsigned; provenance unknown; we shall not think on that):

Mater luporum, mater moeniorum, stella montana, ora pro nobis. Virgo arborum, virgo vastitatis, umbra corniculans, ora pro nobis. Regina mutatum, regina siderum, ficus aeterna, ora pro nobis. Domina omnium nocte dieque errantium, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae, ora pro nobis.

Which I translate as:

Mother of wolves, mother of walls, star of the mountains, pray for us. Virgin of trees, virgin of desert, horned moon’s shadow, pray for us. Queen of changes, queen of constellations, eternal fig-tree, pray for us. Mistress of all who by night and day wander, now and at the hour of our death, pray for us.

The piece was titled “The Magdalene of Gérandan.”

4/8/98

This morning I read in
Le Monde
of the death of a young male prostitute in an alley off rue Saint-Denis. He was stabbed repeatedly in the throat and face. His genitals were missing. The paper didn’t give his name. 

The painting is finished. 

I put in a call to Manhattan. 

Excerpt from Baillargeon, Gautier.
Gilded Thomas Art Review
(Vol. 31, No. 7, Fall 2006; Minneapolis, MN):