“Indeed.”
The F train is just minutes from the Reading Room. Delancey Street is seven stops south. Marlene found Milton Hesse off the Bowery, in charge of twenty filthy windows above a shirt factory. Here he was in the process of becoming that creature we all fear the most—a bitter old painter whose friends are famous, whose own walls are now stacked with twenty-foot-long canvases no-one wants to buy.
Milt was a few years under sixty, a short dark bull with almost black eyes and a rumpled creased forehead.
“Do you have a folio?” he asked the visitor. He had a dripping strainer full of lentils in his broad and chalky hand.
“I’m from Australia,” she answered.
He left the lentils to pool water on a table, dragged out a splintered easel, and set up the visitor with some cubes and spheres on the window ledge. He provided a pencil and watched. Who knows what he was thinking? Even at this age, even in this defeated situation, Milt would say almost anything for the sake of cunt.
“Gorgeous, you can’t draw worth a damn.” He laughed in astonishment, deep in his chest.
“I know.”
“Oh, you know.” He raised his thick eyebrows and bugged his eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
“I can’t give you talent, doll-face.”
“I need to learn about Jacques Leibovitz. It’s personal,” she said.
That stopped him. “Ah!” he said.
She coloured.
“Don’t tell me it’s the useless son?” Again, he was delighted. Beside himself. “It’s the playboy?”
“I’ll pay” she said, now very red. She must have been so fucking cute or he would have kicked her out of there.
“Where are you at college?”
“I’m a secretary.”
“Well, aren’t you something!”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you afford ten dollars an hour?”
The answer was no, but she said yes.
“Why not,” he laughed. “Why not! God bless you!” he cried, and tried to kiss her on the cheek.
Of course this was not how he talked to his fellow painters, part-time scroungers and dealers who he ran into at the auction houses—then every single one of them had sold out, then he alone had not licked ass, and he would tell them, still, after all these years, how to paint—if you wished to see you had to become wood and if you were going to remain flesh you would never see anything, on and on, as if he could still elevate himself, raise himself up to the pantheon by pushing them down into the mud.
Yet even to those who now steered clear of him, it was accepted that his passion for Jacques Leibovitz was the genuine article and whilst almost every other painter in the world was still—in Milt’s mind anyway—his competitor, he remained an acolyte to Jacques Leibovitz. In the toilet of his studio he had a shamelessly framed letter from the master: vous présentez un peintre remarquable. Milton Hesse est un américain, jeune, qui posséde une originalité extraordinaire.
Two years later, visiting with Marlene, I was encouraged to go to the toilet, first gently and finally, when I stubbornly refused to understand what I was required to do, with very explicit directions to read the fucking letter on the fucking wall. And of course French is not a language spoken in the Marsh and so Milt had the added pleasure of having me unhook his letter and deliver it to him so he might, sentence by sentence, recite it to me in both French and English. He adored Jacques Leibovitz as if he were still twenty-six years old, in Paris on the G.I. Bill, at the great man’s feet.
When a woman tells you a man is her “friend” you know the description will finally be exposed as so much worse. So I didn’t like Milt when I heard about him.
Introducing me at last, Marlene said, “This is Michael Boone, he’s a great painter.”
Milt looked at me as if I were her pet cockroach. Sixty-two or not, I could have smacked him across the shoulders with his Mahl stick. But I am stuck with imagining the horny little toad, and not because he doubtless fucked my beloved sideways on his drop sheet, but because he changed her life.
Two times a week, he and the secretary went to the Met, the Modern, up and down Madison Avenue, and he never asked again why she would wish to know what he was teaching her. Interesting—his silence on that point. Did he fear he was a whore working for a whore? There is so much fog around the moral high ground. He could never have seen exactly who she was or what he caused to happen.
He said she should not worry about her ignorance. You should, doll-face, treasure it. He taught her that the only secret in art is that there is no secret. Nor should she imagine that there is a hidden strategy. Forget about it. Real artists don’t have strategy. When you look at a painting never look to see who did it. Keep your mind open. Good art cannot explain itself. Cézanne could not explain himself, nor could Picasso. Kandinsky could explain everything Q.E.D. Looking at pictures, he said, is like a prize fight. You should eat well and sleep well before you begin. He quoted Joyce and Pound and Beckett, and bought Pound’s ABC of Reading for his protégé. He quoted Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson: “When I feel like the top of my head would come off, I know that’s poetry—is there another way?”
It was his fate to have become a part-time dealer. He hated dealers and their clients even more than he hated Marcel Duchamp. (“He played chess because there was no television. If there’d been TV, he would have watched it all day long.”) There was nobody he said, who would lie and cheat like an art dealer. There was no-one so frightened of being made a fool of as a rich client.
Sometimes he charged only five dollars. Sometimes nothing at all. That’s all we need to know.
MoMA had four Leibovitzes, only three of them ever displayed. The fourth was generally known to have been “fixed up” by Dominique and this was, from Marlene’s point of view, more than fortunate. Milton had spent a lifetime sucking up to curators and board members and administrators and although he had not yet had anything more than a lithograph accepted by MoMA he was able to get Marlene downstairs where they could look closely at the doctored canvas and it was through this single work, no more than eighteen inches by twenty since destroyed, that she became so familiar with Dominique’s messy brushwork, so different to Leibovitz’s solid grouping of parallel hatching. Of course this was not clear at first but in the end she wondered how she could ever have failed to see the way Olivier’s father had so carefully constructed a sense of visual mass with each parcel of brushstrokes.
Of course I am only repeating what she told me. I was not there to check the facts. I was in Sydney, in East Ryde, with a scabby-kneed son and apples rotting in the summer grass and—anyway—it doesn’t matter why anyone did anything only that, by accident—let’s say—the Benalla High School dropout came between the orbits of two men, one beautiful and damaged, the other an egotistical monster and, within the confusion of their gravitational pulls, somehow managed to slide upwards and sideways, so although she remained an assistant to an assistant, and continued to live three houses from the corner of Ninth Avenue, she quietly, triumphantly, entered a completely unmapped ocean, and was gobsmacked, like Cortez, or like Keats himself, to see what the conditions of birth and geography had hidden from her i.e. the true wonder of bloody everything, no less.
26
Having once become a German for the sake of art, Butcher now wished to convert into a Jap. I watched with interest as he removed the down pipe from Marlene’s gutter and replaced it with a length of chain, all so the storm water would flow down along the links AS SEEN IN a so-called masterpiece of Japanese Cinema. Did this mean he would go to Tokyo where no-one knew his name? That’ll be the day that I die.
Just the same, I silently observed how everything was now turned oriental without relent, resulting not only in raw fish and parasites inside his bowels but also the FAXES growling through the night, hot paper falling, curling, not inches from my aching head.
Until I heard the fax machine I never understood the expression MILLS OF GOD but as t
his nightmare roared inside my brain I saw my mother as she embroidered THOUGH THE MILLS OF GOD GRIND SLOWLY, YET THEY GRIND EXCEEDING SMALL; THOUGH WITH PATIENCE HE STANDS WAITING, WITH EXACTNESS GRINDS HE ALL. Poor Mum, she could not breathe without imagining her end.
After she died Butcher got in an awful rage with Jesus, throwing handicrafts on the Darley Tip, but our mother’s life had already been absorbed into our blood, five quarts of memory pumped through our bodies, spewing out across my brother’s canvas, forgive him, Lord, a dickhead in your sight.
Butcher and Marlene were in the bedroom with the door shut, her eyes always alight when she looked upon his ugly face his GORMLESS COUNTENANCE. When I inquired of Butcher if she permitted him to put it up her bottom he smacked me across the lughole. I WAS ONLY ASKING. Many mothers with boys at Sydney Grammar are happy to oblige. The autumn rain made it impossible to overhear them talking, even from the garden. The FOUNTAINS OF THE GREAT DEEP were broken up, the WINDOWS OF HEAVEN were opened and the cord of water from the roof was ducking and diving along its ARTISTIC chain and splashing the walls and flooding the actor downstairs who lost the part of KENNY in The Removalists as a result.
Were they leaving me? I could not hear.
One sunny morning we three traveled in contravention of the court order across the Gladesville Bridge, Marlene’s arm lay across his shoulder, her fingers playing with the hog’s bristles at the base of his thick neck.
This was to do with Japan, that’s all I knew.
Out the back of Jean-Paul’s house the shade was deep as dirt and in the green shadow of the palms and bougainvillea there were HINDOO GODS with black-and-white checked coverings on their stone particulars. Dead wasps, bless us, in the swimming pool. All light waving, nothing constant.
The collector was wearing a bathing suit to show himself to best advantage.
Will I be left behind?
Marlene explained to the patron that there was a green cast on the Japanese reproduction of I, the Speaker and she was taking PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for its correction.
Jean-Paul had begun by admiring Marlene’s legs but now his eyes turned as dead as the grey wood of his own back fence. He would not sign his MONIKER until the colour was corrected.
Then words were spoken HALLELUJAH. I thought, That’s it, it’s over, thank the Lord. Watching Jean-Paul attempting to scoop the proofs out of his pool I thanked God for my brother’s temper.
Alas there was soon a SECOND ATTEMPT at the Sushi Go-Go on Kellett Street and even before Jean-Paul arrived I had a very bad feeling because my brother tried to once again prove that I would hate Japan, insisting I eat LIVE sea urchin from its shell a soup like monkey brain or worse.
I sat before the vomitous creature waiting to hear my sentence. Instead I saw a man, no more weight than a streak of GUANO as the saying is. It was the vandalising policeman my brother had vowed to fold and staple to a hardwood floor.
Marlene clocked Detective Amberstreet, her eyes lowering as she smiled and blushed.
Butcher leapt up and I thought he was going to murder him, but instead he laid his hand on his shoulder like they had been best mates from school. My brother beaming, Detective Amberstreet all creased with smiling like a lizard in the mouth of a dog.
So, the policeman says to Butcher, meanwhile tucking his satchel underneath a chair. So, I hear you and Marlene are going to Japan.
So I learned my fate.
27
Having shoved his arm inside my painting and pulled it inside out, you would expect Detective Praying Mantis to be afraid, but in spite of his scaredy-cat haircut, his eyes showed no more agitation than might be caused by the sight of something nice to eat. And no, it did not help to have my moron brother smashing his fist into his open palm. Marlene moved away. Hugh followed her. I did not even pause to think of why they should. I was wholly occupied by this little vandal with the creased-up eyes. After he sat down he constructed an “X” with the chopsticks and then retrieved one in order to wag it in my face.
“Michael,” he said.
“That’s me.”
“Michael.” He ducked his head, and used the chopstick to construct a “V” “Michael, and Marlene.”
“Oh, you are a clever boy.”
“That’s right, Michael,” he said, using my first name in a style beloved by the New South Wales police. (Now pull over, Michael. What do we have, Michael? Have you been using drugs, Michael?) “I’ve got an M.A., Michael,” he said, “from Griffith University”
“I thought you left the force.”
He blinked. “No mate, you’re not going to be that lucky.”
“How do you know I’m going to have a show in Tokyo?”
From beneath his chair he produced a cheap canvas satchel, a design I would later recognise as being popular with elderly single visitors to the Museum of Modern Art. From this he conjured up a recent copy of Studio International, an issue not yet available in Sydney.
“You’ve been overseas?”
He blinked twice rapidly but held my gaze, and I was so concerned with combatting his character, whatever that might be, that I was slow to see the full quarter-page ad he was sliding out towards me: “MICHAEL BOONE,” I finally read, “Mitsukoshi, Tokyo. August 17-31.”
My mouth, I’m sure, went slack.
“Congratulations, Michael.”
I was mute.
“You’ve gone international, mate. You must be proud.”
Well I was. No matter who was saying it or why. Beyond description. If you are American you will never understand what it is to be an artist on the edge of the world, to be thirty-six years old and get an ad in Studio International. And, no, it is in no way like being from Lubbock, Texas, or Grand Forks, North Dakota. If you are Australian you are free to argue that this cringing shit had disappeared by 1981, that history does not count, and that, in any case, we were soon to become the center of the fucking universe, the flavour of the month, the coalition of the willing, etc., but I will tell you, frankly, nothing like this had been conceivable in my lifetime and I did not care there was a dirty green cast across the reproduction—I should have cared, but I am saying that I did not give a fuck and on the facing page there was a late Rothko. Do you understand? I mean—how far this was from the life of reproductions taped to the sleepout wall? From Bacchus Marsh? From the life of a celebrated Sydney painter?
“Everything all crated is it?” he asked.
“Oh yes.”
“But not through customs yet.”
“I think it may have gone.”
“No, mate, not yet.”
The little fuck was grinning like he’d just won the trifecta.
“Marlene set this show up for you, Michael?”
“She did, yes.”
He smiled at me and began flipping through the Studio International.
“‘Rothko’s death changed everything,’” he read out loud. “That’s what they’re saying here, Michael. It transformed the meaning of his work, gave every encounter with his painting a terrible gravity That’s how they’re reading it, like True Confessions. I don’t see it that way, not at all. I don’t think you would either.”
He closed the magazine and beamed at me.
“I’m so pleased the Japs are into the work. In all sincerity.”
My work, I thought, don’t you talk about my work.
“Who’s doing it, the crating?”
“Woollahra Art Removals.”
“Fantastic, mate, no-one better. Here, I can see you’ve got your eye on my Studio International.”
I received his magazine without caution, unprepared for the three typed yellow pages which slid out of it and came whispering like weapons across the tabletop. “Jacques Leibovitz,” the first page read, “Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois. A Condition Report.”
I thought, You cagey little cunt. What are you up to?
“Read,” he encouraged. He wiped his bloodless lips with the back of his hand. “Very interesting,” he said, “in my
opinion. Did you ever look at a Condition Report before?”
It was a strange document, very distinctive, bright yellow with a band of pink across the top. I wondered was this the report from Honoré Le Noël. If so, it was very credible, like a dentist’s record of the most fastidious inspection, and this one began with the gums, so to speak, the frame, describing how it was constructed, what—in the case of Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois—the condition had been before it was removed and abandoned by the thief beside the pancake mix on Dozy Boylan’s kitchen countertop. It gave me bloody goose bumps, to read how Leibovitz had made “a light-duty strainer of beveled construction”—those were the actual words—“with no structural element touching the surface of support.” The corners were half-lapped, glued and nailed with small brads. The back of the strainer was labeled in paint: 25 avril XIII.
“What’s avril?”
“April,” he said. “Spring.”
There was so much more. The support was of close linen weave, estimated to be of commercial preparation with rabbit-skin glue, or words to that effect. The policeman watched me closely as a cat, but I was inhabiting a space he would never reach, not even if he died and went to heaven.
On the back of Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois were three labels, the first put there by Leibovitz or perhaps Dominique or even Le Noël himself, assigning it a number 67, and an address at 157 rue de Rennes. This was undated. Next to that was a label from an exhibition in Paris at Galerie Louise Leiris in 1963, nine years after the artist’s death. There was also an envelope containing a four-by-five-inch photograph taken by Honoré Le Noël.
The policeman pushed close. I moved my chair away, though not beyond the whiff of the carbon tetrachloride rising from his shiny suit.
“Short-sighted,” he said. “You read out loud.”
“Fuck you. You do it.”
To my great surprise, he obeyed.
“‘There are numerous and intermittent abrasions,’” he recited, “‘showing loss of paint and material at the top edge from the left center to the right-hand corner. They extend into the painting approximately three blah-blah. Ultraviolet examination was made …blah blah …The examination revealed …’ Here we are, young Michael Boone, here it is. ‘The loss of paint and subsequent replacement of an area 13 millimeters by 290 millimeters from the top left corner to the center point. Brushstrokes measuring between 4 and 6.5 centimeters thus out of character with artist’s known work.’ You see this? It’s bloody wonderful. See, see …here …‘subsequent X-ray analysis has revealed that the upper layers cover what appears to be a work similar to that produced by the artist after 1920.’ You understand that, Michael. Monsieur et Madame Tourenboisis dated 1913 but it can’t be 1913, because it’s painted on top of something done in 1920. I smell a little ratty, don’t you? A little ratty rat.”