Theft (28 page)

No more was said about Mauri or the stolen Leibovitz.

"Well," he said, as we arrived on the street. "I'm off to Greenwich. I've got a map of artists' houses."

"You mean the Village."

"You know I'm going to get you, Marlene," he said. "You're going to go to gaol." And then he winked, the little creep, and we watched him head up towards Houston with his stupid coat floating like a squid in the snowstorm.

Marlene took my arm and squeezed it.

"It was a feint?" I asked her. Of course I didn't think it was, and I should have been furious that she smiled back so readily. In fact I was simply pleased she had not been caught. I laughed and kissed her. My friends all tell me I should have hated her. Oh, what a cheat she was. What a sucker I was, to fall for all that Tokyo bullshit. The best canvas I had managed to produce had been used like a matador's cape. Surely I was angry?

No.

But was it not true that, even as we walked across Canal Street and down into the huge dark silence of Laight Street, amongst the soot-covered ghosts of the former railway-freight terminus, surely as that rat ran across the cobbles, seven of my nine paintings had vanished from the face of the fucking earth? Might they not, for all I knew, be now discarded like pretty paper ripped from Christmas presents, stuffed in black plastic body bags, dumped out on the Roppongi streets?

No.

But couldn't I see my own denial? Had all my boring speeches about my art been forgotten?

No.

But why would I not turn away from her, now, as we passed this scratched-up metal door from under which wafted the inexplicable odours of cumin and cinnamon?

I did not wish to turn away.

So I really believed that a self-confessed liar and cheat really loved my paintings.

I had no doubts. Ever. But why?

Because the work was great, you dipshit.

As we walked down Greenwich Street, with a bitter wind whipping off the Hudson, sheets of newspaper lifting into the lonely air like seagulls, Marlene made herself small beneath my arm and I was not angry because I knew no-one had ever loved her until now. I understood exactly how she created herself, how she, like I, had entered a world which she should never have been allowed into, the same world Amberstreet crept into when he nicked the piece of paper off Bill de Kooning's floor.

We had been born walled out from art, had never guessed it might exist, until we slipped beneath the gate or burned down the porter's house, or jemmied the bathroom window, and then we saw what had been kept from us, in our sleep-outs, in our outside dunnies, our drafty beer-hoppy public bars, and then we went half mad with joy.

We had lived not knowing that Van Gogh was born, or Vermeer or Holbein, or dear sad Max Beckmann, but once we knew, then we staked our lives on theirs.

This was why I could not seriously dislike Amberstreet, and as for my pale and injured bride, my gorgeous thief, I wished only to hold her in my arms and carry her. And I could see, even in the dark of what is now Tribeca, the miserable lino on her mother's kitchen floor. It was close to being a vision, watereddown Kandinsky in mad and frightening detail: then the kerosene refrigerator, the chipped yellow Kookaburra stove, the neighbours all called Mr. This and Mrs. That, none of them with any idea that they were being starved to death. Who is Filippino Lippi, Mrs. Clover-dale? You've got me there, Mr. Jenkins. I'd have to say I didn't have a clue.

Do not make fun of the lower-middle classes, you can get in trouble, get a ticket, be roared up, reported, dobbed in, cut down to size, come a cropper, fuck me dead. A nation that begins without a bourgeoisie does face certain disadvantages, none of them overcome by setting up a concentration camp to get things started. By now of course Sydney is so bloody enlightened it is impossible to board a train without being forced to overhear arguments about Vasari conducted by people on mobile phones.

Who is Lippi, Mrs. Cloverdale? Excuse me, Mr. Jenkins, do you mean Filippo or Filippino?

But in the times and places where Marlene and I were born it was different and it was sheer chance that we stumbled onto what would be the obsession of our untidy hurtful lives. Look at all the murder and destruction that led dear little queeny Bruno Bauhaus to the Marsh. And what did he have to feed me when he got there? Nothing but his mad passion for Leibovitz. Not even a real oil painting. There were none for thirty miles around.

From zis shithole, he told me, you must go.

And I obeyed him, the strange blue-eyed miniature. I abandoned my mother and my brother to the mercies of Blue Bones and went down to Melbourne on the train, a bruiser, unlettered, with white socks and trousers to my ankles. I had no choice but to play the cards I had been dealt, and I tried to make a virtue of them, deliberately arriving at life class with blood still on my hands. For what was I judged to be but a kind of raging pig? I had not read Berenson or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard but still I argued. Forgive me, Dennis Flaherty, I had no right to knock you down. I had no right to speak. I knew nothing, had seen sweet fucking all, had never been to Florence or Siena or Paris, never studied art history. At lunch break at William Angliss's wholesale butchery, I read Burckhardt. I also read Vasari and saw him patronise Uccello, the prick. Poor Paolo, Vasari wrote, he was commissioned to do a work with a chameleon. Not knowing what a chameleon was, he painted a camel instead.

Well fuck you, Vasari. That was the level of my response. I thought, You went to the finest schools all right but you are nothing more than a gossip and a suck- up to Cosimo de Medici.

I was a butcher and I came in through the bathroom window and how could I do anything but hold Marlene? I had never been so close to another human being, not even, forgive me, my darling son. And I kissed my thief at ten o'clock at night, on Greenwich, between Duane and Reade, not because I was blind, or because I was a fool, but because I knew her. I was on her side, not Christie's, not Sotheby's, not the dead-eyed pricks from 57th Street who presumed to judge my paintings and then went out to bid up Wesselmann or some piece-of-crap de Chirico. I kissed her wet smudgy lids and then, in the blue light, with the wind lifting her straw-coloured hair straight up into the air, she smiled.

"Do you want to know why the Leibovitz is a different size to Boylan's?" I waited.

"Dominique," she said. "The catalogue raisonne!"

"Dominique was a drunk," she said. "The catalogue raisonne says thirty by twenty-and-a-half inches. It's wrong. I must be the first one to ever measure it." She kissed me on the nose. "And I know your secret too."

"No you don't."

"You're painting a new Leibovitz.". "Maybe."

"You're a very naughty boy, but did you consider, for a moment, how a new Leibovitz might possibly acquire a provenance?"

"You'll find a way," I said, and I meant it, for I had thought of this so many times before.

"I will," she said and then we kissed, winding, pressing, pushing, swallowing, wet clay, one entity, one history, one understanding, no air left between us. You want to know what love is?

Not what you think my darling young one.

46

I've been back since, to that corner where we each formally declared our wholehearted criminal intent. There should be a blue plaque there, but there's only a Korean nail salon, a pet shop, the sort of wine store that sells Bordeaux futures. The streets are filled with thousand-dollar strollers, wheels as big as SUW, every third one carrying twins. IVF. Sci-fi. Doesn't matter.

I don't mind. Here I became a counterfeiter, how fucking shameful. Please let me publicly apologise for my fall from grace. Of course Leibovitz himself, as everybody knows, had been part of what they used to call a "Rembrandt factory". That was in Munich, in his early teens. He was the pencil man in the employ of a kind of German Fagan, that is, he was the one who went to the ghetto to draw "characters". These were then handed to a Swiss who would take them to the Pinakothek and there carefully daub them a la Rembrandt. Leibovitz, having walked through ankle-deep mud all the way from Estonia, was just trying to stay alive and his forgeries cannot be compared-- morally, artistically, good grief-- with what I was making in that cold liquid-blue room above Mercer Street. Here, with the door locked and bolted, I began to prepare that famous lost Leibovitz which had been continually admired by Picasso and described by Leo Stein in his journal. The original hung for a while in the dining room at 157 rue de Rennes, but it is not to be seen in any of Dominique's boring dinner-party photographs. Forty-eight of these survive, each one the same--that is the guests have been required to turn and face the hostess, each one to raise a glass.

The painting, I guess, was behind her back, hidden from her subjects and from history.

It's a fair guess that the painting was spirited away on that snowy night in January 1954, and that it went into the garage by the Canal Saint-Martin, but after that, who knows? Everything about it was thought to be remarkable, not least--Stein mentions this--that it was painted on canvas at a time when canvas was impossible to obtain.

So when you read the signature and date--Dominique Broussard, 1944--what does it tell you about Dominique, that she dared to use a square inch of precious canvas for herself?

It is also important to remember that the artist was a Jew in Vichy France and by his very refusal to leave Paris had placed himself in mortal danger. The complete and utter seriousness of his situation coincides with his decision to abandon the popular sentimental Shtetl Moderne style he had drifted into since the heights of 1913.

Leo Stein describes a cubist work, made in the characteristic Leibovitz cones and cylinders, which suggests to a reader, sight unseen, his younger oeuvre. Stein however is at pains to make it clear that this was "an unexpected leap". The thing that tickled him the most was a raging golem, "like a circus beast", a bright yellow robot with wires and a generator and five frightened villagers turning the generator like a windlass. Anyone who has seen Chaplin mecanique (1946) will recognise the style here being described, one that owes more to Leger than to Braque while being undeniably a Leibovitz. Writing at a time when Chaplin mecanique did not yet exist, Stein beautifully evokes the severe mechanical planes, steely grey, smoke grey, and the armoured victims of the Golem's wrath, "springs like men, lethal centipedes in terror", tumbling towards

the bottom left, nails, screws, washers, all in the most "elegant geometric chaos of defeat".

If the buzzer sounded, forget it. Hugh? Come back later.

Marlene? She had a key but even she was denied any sight of the work-in- progress, a great deal of which in any case-- took place solely in my head. That is, I sketched and read, filling my Gentile imagination with I. B. Singer's imps and golems, Marsden Hartley, Gertrude Stein. This was not Leibovitz. I didn't say it was.

I sought out the prewar loonies, the futurists, the vorticists of whom it can at least be said that they were kind enough to write more than they painted. Not that Leibovitz the Jew would ever have placed himself amongst their number, but because he had always shown a great communist hope for the technological future. I found a ridiculous bookstore upstairs on Wooster Street where, amongst a lot of creepy comics and works by Aleister Crowley, there was Gaudier-Brzeska: HUMAN MASSES teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again.

HORSES are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside. DOGS wander, are destroyed, and others come along.

I had to somehow feel the past as if it would not arrive until tomorrow, feel it in my gut as it was born, the collision of violent vectors, contradictions driven by Cossacks, Isaac Newton, Braque, Picasso, fear and hope, the dreadful Bosch.

I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE SURFACES, I shall

present my emotions by the ARRANGEMENT OF MY SURFACES, THE PLANES AND LINES BY WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED.

You can class all the above as getting in the mood. It was not the subject which was... paint. If I was to outwit my opponents at Sotheby's I could not be complacent. I prepared the ground with a white lead paint, and on top of this I made a charcoal sketch, the broad cartoon form of the work which would show against the lead with X-ray when they called their buddies at the Met. The work then had to be "about"--not the Golem--but lines and planes, space fractured and reconfigured by an angel of the future toiling along the road from Mont Sainte- Victoire to Avignon.

Then there was the handwriting, the little stabby brushstrokes which the old goat massed in those groups of parallel hatches.

This sounds so bloody easy, I am sure, but it involves more than a wrist and a red-sable brush. It is how you stand, how you breathe, whether you paint flat or on an easel. And there was the very particular modelling of the cylinders and cubes which I aimed to make a fraction--just a fucking smidgen--less confident than the Chaplin.

As I worked on my sketches I discovered and then adopted the mad joy in the Golem. He had an electric-light globe burning on his shoulder and blazing blue eyes, spheres of cobalt blue. So although wreaking vengeance, he was--like Stein had said--"a circus animal". I did not even plan this. It happened, partly a function of the palette, but only partly. Le Golem electrique, 1944, as I was later free to write upon its reverse side, was like a raging vengeful funfair ride.

I have never minded working in public view, but I would not let Marlene see me walk the wire until I was safely on the other side.

She had the eye, the intelligence, I've said that all before, but at this moment these qualities would not help the task at hand.

This is why I went ahead and baked my masterpiece before submitting it for her approval. The canvas fitted perfectly inside the GE oven and I gave it sixty very bloody nervous minutes at a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit. If I had used linseed oil this would not have been enough but because the medium was Ambertol it set like bakelite. Its skin was dry and hard as if it had stood in air for sixty years.