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Excerpt
Chapter 1
"I'll lay a bet," said Sancho, "that
before long there won't be a
tavern, roadside inn, hostelry, or barber's shop where the story of
our doings won't be painted up; but I'd like it painted by the hand of
a better painter than painted these."
"Thou art right, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for this painter is
like Orbaneja, a painter there was at Ubeda, who when they asked him
what he was painting, used to say, 'Whatever it may turn out; and if
he chanced to paint a cock he would write under it, 'This is a
cock,' for fear they might think it was a fox.
Wilmot showed me that
one, back in college, he'd written it out in his casually elegant calligraphy
and had it up on the wall of his room. He said it was the best commentary he
knew about the kind of art they were showing in New York in the eighties and he
used to drag me to galleries back then and wander through the bright chattering
crowds muttering in a loud voice, "This is a cock." A bitter fellow, Wilmot,
even back then, and it should not have surprised me that he came to a bad
end. Whether the story he tells is merely remarkable or literally fantastic I
still cannot quite decide. I would have said that Wilmot was the least
fantastic of men: sober, solid, grounded in the real. Painters have a rep of
course—we think of Van Gogh and Modigliani flaming out in madness—but there's
also stodgy old Matisse and, of course, Velázquez himself, the government
employee and social climber, and Wilmot was always, even back in college, on
that zone of the spectrum.
Did this all begin in
college, I wonder? Were the lines of relationship, envy, ambition, betrayal
set that early? Yes, I believe so, or even earlier. Someone once said life is
just high school, on and on, and it does seem that the great of the world are
only familiar schoolyard figures, the obnoxious little shit we recall from
ninth grade becomes the obnoxious little shit in the White House, or
wherever. There were four of us then, thrown together by chance and by our
mutual dislike of dorm life at Columbia. Columbia is technically an Ivy League
school, but it is also neither Harvard, Yale, nor Princeton and has the
additional misfortune of being located in New York City. This tends to make
its undergraduates even more cynical than undergraduates tend elsewhere to be:
they're paying all this money and yet they might as well be attending a
suburban community college. And so we were cynical, and affected also a
paint-thin coat of sophistication, for were we not New Yorkers too, at the
center of the universe?.
We lived on the fifth
floor of a building on 113th Street off Amsterdam Avenue, across the
street from the great futile mass of the unfinished Cathedral of St. John the
Divine. I roomed with a fellow named Mark Slotsky and in the other apartment
on the floor were Wilmot and his room-mate, a reclusive, pasty pre-med whose
name I had forgotten until reminded of it somewhat later in this tale. Aside
from the pre-med, the three of us became pals in the manner of students,
deeply, but provisionally: we all understood that school was not real life.
This was perhaps unusual at the time, the waning days of the great Patriarchy,
and there was still floating around in the air the notion that this experience
would mark one forever, that one would always be "a Columbia man." This none
of us bought, which is what pulled us together as a group, because it would
have been hard to find three young louts with less in common.
Slotsky's parents
only appeared at graduation, and I sensed that he might have excluded them then
had he been able. They were actual refugees from Hitler, with dense accents,
almost parodically overdressed, noisy and vulgar. Mr. S., had made a modest
pile as a soft-drink distributor and loudly wondered what items of the college's
property his money had paid for. They seemed, to my eye, oblivious to their
beloved college boy's desire to stay as far away from them as possible, indeed
to be mistaken, by reason of dress, speech and comportment, for another scion
of Charles P. Wilmot, Senior.
The name of C. P.
Wilmot (as he always signed himself in a thick black scrawl) is not as famous
now as it was then, but he was at one time considered the natural heir to the
throne occupied by Norman Rockwell. He'd made a rep as a combat artist during
the war, and had flourished as a delineator of American life in the mass
circulation magazines of the fifties, and at the time of our graduation it was
not at all obvious that his profession and livelihood would utterly vanish in
the succeeding decades. He was rich, and famous, and happy with his lot.
I should add that
upon this graduation day I was an orphan, parents killed on the road when I
was eight, only child, raised by a responsible but distant aunt and uncle, and
so forth, and therefore I always had my eye out for appropriate father
figures. During the various graduation ceremonials I found myself staring at
the elder Wilmot with filial lust. He wore on that occasion a soft
cream-colored double-breasted suit, with foulard bowtie and a panama hat and I
wished I could stick him in a shopping bag and take him home. I recall that
the Dean came by and shook his hand and Wilmot told an amusing anecdote about
painting the portrait of both the president of the University and the President
of the U.S. He was much in demand as a fellow who could paint into the faces
of world leaders a nobility of spirit not always apparent in their words and
deeds.
After the
graduation was over, the great man took us three friends and our families to
the Tavern on the Green, a place I had never been to before and which I then
regarded as the pinnacle of elegance rather than what it is, a sort of higher
Denny's with a terrific location. Wilmot sat at the head of the table, flanked
by his son, and I was down by the foot, with the Slotskys.
During lunch I
therefore learned a good deal about the distribution of carbonated beverages
and what little Mark had liked to eat as a child, but what I chiefly recall
about the afternoon ( and it's amazing I can recall anything, so generously
flowed the Champagne) was the senior Wilmot's voice, rising witty and mellow
above the restaurantish murmur and clink, the laughter of the company, and
once, the sight of Chaz's face, illumined by a chance bar of sunlight from the
park outside, and its expression as he regarded his father, a look that
combined worship and loathing in equal measure.
Or perhaps I am
interpolating this, based on what I later learned, as we so often do. Or I
do. But there can be no doubt about what I am now to relate, and this bears
more directly on the veracity of Chaz Wilmot's remarkable, horrible tale. He
was one of those sons who, looking upon their fathers' profession and finding
it good, set out to match or surpass the old guy's achievement. He was
therefore an artist, and a surpassingly good one.
I first met him in
our sophomore year as I was moving in. He happened to be going out while I was
struggling up the filthy marble stairs with an enormous suitcase and an
over-full grocery carton, and with hardly a word, he pitched right in and
helped me with my things and afterward invited me into his place for a drink,
which was not beer, as I had expected, but a Gibson, made in a chrome shaker
and served in a chilled stemmed glass. My first ever and it went to my head,
as did the appearance somewhat later that afternoon of a lovely girl who
removed all her clothes so that Chaz could paint her. I was reasonably
experienced in that area for an undergraduate but this was for me a new and
expansive level of the louche—Gibsons and naked girls in the broad light of
day.
After she was
gone, Chaz showed me his work. His room had the street side windows and for a
few hours a day the light was fairly good, and to obtain this light he had
agreed to occupy the smaller of the two bedrooms, even though he was the
lessee. There was an immense professional easel in it, a ratty pine table
smeared with paint, a junky student desk, a brick-and-board bookcase, a plywood
wardrobe, and a beautifully made antique brass bed, this last brought from
home. One wall was covered with pegboard, from the hooks of which depended an
astounding variety of objects: a stuffed pheasant, a German lancer's helmet, a
variety of necklaces, bracelets, tiaras, a stuffed beaver, an articulated
human skeleton, swords, daggers, odd bits of armor, a large flintlock pistol,
and an array of costumes representing the last half milennium of European
dress, with a few tastes of the Orient thrown in. This collection, I soon
gathered, was a mere overflow from his dad's, who had a virtual museum of
paintable objects installed in his studio at Oyster Bay.
The place stank of
paint, gin and cigarettes; Chaz was a heavy smoker—always Craven A's in the red
cardboard box—and you could see the yellow nicotine stains on his long fingers
even through the omnipresent blots of paint. I still have a little
self-portrait he did that year. I watched him do it, in fact, entranced: a
few minutes staring at himself in a dusty mirror of a Broadway saloon and there
he was—the pall of coarse black hair falling heavily over the broad forehead,
the elegant straight nose, the long jaw, those remarkable large pale eyes.
When I expressed appreciation he ripped it out of his sketchbook and handed it
to me.
On that first afternoon,
however, I woozily stood in front of his easel and caught my first sight of his
work, which was a smallish painting of that naked girl done against an ochre
ground. Without thinking I gasped and said it was terrific.
"It's shit," he
replied. "Oh, it's alive and all that, but overworked. Anyone can do a figure
in oils. If you screw up, you just paint over it, and who cares if the paint
is half an inch thick. The thing is to catch the life without trying, without
any obvious working. Sprezzatura."
He said the word
lovingly, with a roll; I nodded sagely, since we were both being formed into
little Rennaissance mannekins by the Columbia great books program and had both
read Castiglione's Courtier, with its admonition to achieve excellent results
without showing obvious effort. One was languid, therefore, one whipped out
brilliant papers at the last minute, one despised the sweaty grinds in the
pre-med program. I should mention here that Chaz rather set the tone of our
little community, which was as aesthetic as all get out. The three of us were
in the arts: Chaz painted, of course, and I was acting seriously at the time,
I had some Off-Broadway credits, in fact, and Mark had a super-eight camera
and was making short films of intense existential dreariness. In memory it
was a lovely era: bad wine, worse marijuana, Monk on the record player, and an
endless stream of lanky girls in black tights and heavy eye make-up with
straight hair down to their butts.
Strangely enough
it was something Chaz did that knocked me out of acting for good. This was at
the start of junior year, and they had brought in a visiting professor, a real
Broadway director who was mad for Beckett. We did a series of his plays and I
was Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape. Chaz went to all three performances, not, I
think to support me, for we sold out the Minor Latham Theater straight through,
but because he was genuinely fascinated with the idea of taping one's whole
life—of which more later. At the cast party I got into a drunken argument with
some frat boy gate crashers and there was a modest spasm of violence, the
police were called, but Chaz hustled me out through the restaurant kitchen and
back to our building.
We sat in his room
and we drank some more, vodka out of the bottle I recall, and I talked and
talked until I noticed that he was looking at me peculiarly and I asked him
what was wrong. He asked me whether I realized I was still in character, that
I was using the querulous, middle-aged voice I had devised for Krapp. I tried
to laugh it off but the realization generated a deadly chill that penetrated
through the booze. In fact, this happened to me a lot. I would get into a
character and not be able to get out, and now someone else knew about it too.
I changed the subject however, and drank even more sincerely until I passed out
in Chaz's armchair.
And awoke to dawn
and the sharp stink of turps. Chaz had set up a large canvas, maybe five feet
by three, on his easel. He said, "Sit up, I want to paint you." I did so, he
adjusted the pose and began to paint. He was at it all day, until the light
was gone, pausing only for the necessary toilet breaks and a Chinese meal
delivered to the door.
I should say that
although I had scrubbed the theatrical make-up off my face, I was still wearing
powder in my hair and my Krapp costume of collarless white shirt, baggy dark
trousers and waistcoat with watch-chain, and I'd grown a three-days beard to
add to the seedy effect. I believe I said, "Holy shit!" when at last he allowed
me to see what he'd done. I'd taken the obligatory history of art survey
course, and the apposite name popped into my head.
"Jesus, Chaz,
you're painting like Velázquez," I exclaimed, with a peculiar combination of
feelings: astonishment and admiration at the feat of art, and an absolute
horror of the image itself. There was Krapp, with the impotent lust and malice
playing on his face and the little lights of incipient madness around the eyes;
and beneath this mask there was me with all the stuff I thought I had
successfully hidden from the world staring out, naked. It was like the Picture
of Dorian Grey in reverse; I had to make myself look, and smile.
Chaz regarded it
over my shoulder and said, "Yeah, it's not bad. A little sprezzatura working
in there, finally. And you're right; I can paint like Velázquez. I can paint
like anybody except me." With that he snatched up a brush and signed it with
the black colophon he would use throughout his career, the CW with a downward
pothook drooping from the W, to indicate that it was Wilmot Junior who'd done
it. I have the thing still, rolled up in a carboard tube on the top shelf of a
storage closet in our house, never shown to anyone. A couple of days after he
made the painting I went to my advisor, dumped all my theater courses and
switched to pre-law.
I should say a
here a little something more about myself, if only to frame, as it were, the
story of Chaz Wilmot. My firm is one of those anonymous outfits denoted by
three capital letters, and we specialize in insuring the entertainment
industry, broadly speaking, everything from rock concerts to film locations,
theme parks and so on. Still in show biz after all, I like to say. We have
offices in L.A. and London and for about twenty years I was based out of town
in those places. Currently, my domestic arrangements are ordinary in the
extreme and related to my business life, in a way, for I married my travel
agent. Someone in my position necessarily spends a good deal of time on the
phone with the person who arranges flights and hotels and so forth and I
developed an attachment to the voice on the phone, so helpful and accomodating
at all hours, so unflappable in the many emergencies, blizzards and so forth,
that afflict the traveling man. And I liked her voice: Diana is a Canadian and
I grew accustomed to those long vowels and the perky little "eh?" she appended
to her sentences and I found myself calling her number late at night with
pretended routing changes, and then we dropped the pretence. We have been, I
suppose, happily married, although we see little of one another, except on
vacations. We have the canonical two children, both now in college, and a
comfortable house in Stamford. I am not rich, as wealth is calculated in these
imperial times, but my company is both rich and generous.
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, and then got his parents to set him up in a downtown
gallery when SoHo was just taking off and he flourished at it. I got
invitations to all his gallery openings and we occasionaly 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
anti-aircraft 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 and an expression on his face that is right out of Goya, or so I
recal from my liberal education.
In fact the whole
painting is Goyesque, a modern take on his famous The Shootings of May 3rd 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 that
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're
best buddies anymore.
I looked him
over. Pale, with what seemed to 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 now, 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 there 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
reclining face up, 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 believed 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 analyis of the
brushstrokes were exactly like the analyses from undoubted works from
Velázquez, and there was some thing 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 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
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 laughed 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 though it merely a figure of
speech, but apparently not.
"Great, 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?
Shouldn'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, and poured myself a scotch from the mini-bar 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, that I had declined in
terror long ago, had always represented to me. Perhaps 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 a
few times, whereupon the voice of Chaz Wilmot, Jr., came floating from the
speakers.
The foregoing is excerpted from The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
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