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 modeling 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 Électrique, 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 105 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.
I left Le Golem Électrique, 1944 to cool like an apple pie on an American sill, and then I took the paints and threw them into a skip, not the one nearby on the Prince Street corner, but right over on Leroy Street, almost on the West Side Highway where the marauding relentless Amberstreet would not bring his pointy red-tipped nose. It was here that I also discovered, along with broken plaster and bricks from a demolished garage, a gorgeous prissy frame, a smoky grey with grapes and garlands in low relief. Too big, but that was better than too small. This I carried home in triumph, down streets which were slowly becoming familiar, Leroy Bedford, Houston, Mercer. I let myself in, finally comfortable in the darkness of the stairs.
Marlene was still not home. I turned the easel, set the painting on it, angled to catch what little light there was. It was a lovely, lovely thing, believe me, and I was about to celebrate, was searching for a corkscrew on the worktable, when I heard the scream. Or not a scream, a screech. Marlene!
47
I ran to the door, no weapon but the corkscrew, leapt into the dark, entered the confusion of trash and carpet, fell, tumbled, broke nothing, and arrived finally on the street level to find her, sitting in the open door. The worm was in the apple but I did not know. I pulled her to her feet but she shrugged me violently away. She dropped a Kodak envelope. I picked it up. She said: “He said, Are you Marlene Leibovitz?”
Just as I had once thought we were being evicted because of Evan Guthrie’s metacarpal, I now imagined this crisis was something to do with the Kodak envelope. Opening it, I discovered photographs of Dominique’s painting, the one I had sanded to make the Golem. I was thinking, We’ve been caught. She’s been caught.
“No, no, not that.” She snatched the photographs away from me and thrust a quite different sheaf of papers at my chest, but I could not concentrate on this because I had a whole different story running like a train, steel rails all the way from here to gaol.
“How did he get it?”
“Who?”
“Amberstreet.”
“No! No!” she cried, and she was in a fury, with me, with the world. “Read it!”
We were still at the open doorway, half in Mercer Street, and it was here I finally understood the sheaf of papers. A writ. Some bastard in a London Fog had served a writ on her, an action for divorce issued by Olivier Leibovitz (plaintiff) against Marlene Leibovitz (defendant).
“This is what upset you?”
“Well, what do you think?”
But why would she be upset? She didn’t love him. He had no money. Her reaction was a complete surprise to me. Also: we did not talk to each other like this, were never abrasive, sarcastic, hostile. Suddenly I was an enemy? A fool? These were not roles I liked to play. They turned me nasty
“Then what about the photographs?”
“The photographs don’t matter. They’re not the point.” Her voice was trembling and I embraced her, trying to wring out all the anger from us both, but she would not be held and I felt a great wave of annoyance as she rejected me.
“I am the authenticator,” she said. “It is me.”
Oh fuck, I thought. Who gives a fuck?
As I ascended the stairs, two steps behind, I could actually feel her heat. When we arrived in the loft where my painting stood waiting, her cheeks were pink, her eyes narrowed. She glanced at the painting briefly, and nodded.
“Now listen,” she said. “This is what we’re going to do.”
So what about my bloody painting? No doubt she saw the Golem but there was no—Well done, Butcher, who else could have ever made such a thing?
Rather she was busy hurling the writ across the room then laying out the Kodak prints like a hand of patience. There was the original Broussard in all its glutinous vanity. The photographs were extremely unsettling in other ways, suggesting an interest Marlene had managed to hide from me completely.
“You took these?”
“You didn’t understand I knew what you were doing?”
“But why?”
She was completely without humour, all hot and closed down. “You said I had to establish the provenance. Well this is how we’re going to do it. You’re going to paint the Broussard back on top.”
I laughed. “Perhaps you’d like to look at it before I cover it!”
“Of course I’ve looked at it. What do you think I’ve been thinking about, baby?”
“You peeked.”
“Of course I peeked. What did you expect?”
“You like it?”
“It’s brilliant, O.K.? Now you’re going to paint this back over your Golem.” She slid the photographs around like a pea-and-thimble man on lower Broadway. “Not exactly as it was, but close. Trust me. You’re going to use the same pigments, exactly.”
“I threw them out.”
“You what?”
“Hey, calm down baby.”
“You what? Where did you throw them?”
“In a skip.”
“Skip where?”
“Leroy.”
“Leroy and what?” But she already had one foot in a running shoe.
“Leroy and Greenwich.”
She tied up the second shoe and she was gone. I watched her from the fire escape. Although I had often seen her set off for exercise, I had never actually seen her run. On another occasion it would have made my fond heart beat faster, for she ran over those cold grey cobbles as across the surface of a hamburger grill, so straight that she might have had a string attached to that little springy tuft of hair on her straw-coloured head. Seeing her then, my lover, my supporter, my tender funny angel, I was frightened by my own complacency.
48
Re: sexual intercourse. They say you DO NOT LOOK AT THE MANTELPIECE when you are poking the fire so I poked her, bless me, what blazing logs,
she squealed and HOLLERED as if consumed by BUSHFIRE, crimson edges on the floating leaves, by crikey it was a long time between drinks.
It is true the BARONESS was not TOP HOLE. No kids at Sydney Grammar, etc., if Olivier did not have a job I would not have visited the Rousseau Houses at all. Olivier went to work, taking his bottles of LORAZEPAM and ADDERALL, but no SUBSTANCE could make him happy and he was continually saying bad things about Marlene. When he began to cry at breakfast I knew I had chosen the losing side, forgive me, bless me, I wish I was a nicer man.
I tried to return to Butcher but he would not answer the bell.
I had made UNSUITABLE friends, whose fault was that? They were often artists from the movies and the stage i.e. Vinnie and the Baron. I went to see them with my chair and they encouraged me to put my sausage in the baroness. Too many dead pigs cooked in that apartment. No LILAC and ROSEMARY as in A TOUCH OF CLASS when Butcher would sit out in the car reading ART NEWS wishing he could find his long-lost name.
The Baron said he respect me man but he took the money from my back pocket and also Olivier’s VALIUM. But I was ON THE JOB, just on the foothills as they say, the tide just turning, seaweed floating, little fishes, bless me. Then Vinnie and the Baron took RABBIT EARS off the TV and used them to jab my bum. Then they went too far. The room was dark and small with six lava lamps and I knocked Vinnie on his bright red little SNOUT so he left a SNAIL TRAIL of black boot polish across the wallpaper as he descended. I should have done the Baron with a BELAYING PIN but not being a character in The Magic Pudding I was forced to use my chair instead. The Baroness, so-called, was screaming like a STUCK PIG in the backyard of a house in STARKVILLE MISSISSIPPI from where she came hoping to be a dancer although only five foot tall. I never hit a woman. I picked up my clothes and it was WALTZING MATILDA TA-TA BYE-BYE.
I had already given the Baroness twenty dollars, enough for all of them to have another Twenty-fourth Street BLOCK PARTY bless me but I had to walk down twenty flights of stairs because what the Americans call the ELEVATOR had jammed with people trapped inside shouting and screaming. I had been happy. Now I was not. I wished I was in the Marsh where there were not one single elevator, not even a LIFT, hardly any stairs more than ten steps I refer to the Presbyterian Church, always trouble with the coffins it was called the WATERSLIDE.
On the fifth floor I passed Vinnie’s apartment the sign on the door reading FILM MUSICIAN CHELSEA DINER. He was what is called a PACK RAT in VIOLATION of the fire regulations with his FANZINES and BIG BUTT MAGAZINE stacked up along the wall.
On the second floor I had time to dress but my head was sparking and my muscles very bad indeed and I kept on going, still pulling on my new CALVIN KLEIN socks as I hopped out onto Tenth Avenue. I started running with the evening traffic then realised that was wrong. I fitted my shoe and then ran back down Tenth Avenue all the way to the West Side Highway where I took a rest. Blumey, do me sideways as my father would have said.
I could have walked to the Bicker Club I wish I were braver but I’m not. I wanted a holiday from Olivier. He was going through a DIFFICULT PATCH grinding up his ADD medicine and sniffing it up a drinking straw and so his snot was red and clotted and the colour of his eyelids was the purple of a bruise, wild orchid to be polite, skin so weary from the effort to refuse admittance to the light of day. He swam in a sea of ghosts, stung by jellyfish, red welts rising on his hands and neck.
There was also the cassette recorder every night the same song. FLIES BLOWING ROUND THE DITCH. BLOOD ON YOUR SADDLE. He had been always so kind to me, had cared for me, paid for my room, had bought me clothes, sat with me, introduced me to so many laundries, and interesting people, Princes and Paupers old chum, but now I was afraid.
My socks were not smooth inside my shoes but I would not stop to fix them and by the time I finally found myself at Mercer Street my feet were bleeding in the dark.
I rang the buzzer.
It replied.
Thank God, thank Jesus, bless us all. I would not have cared if Blue Bones was waiting for me with the flex or razor strop I entered the dark stairs as a wombat returning to the smell of earth and roots.
49
Marlene rescued my five jars of paint from the skip on Leroy Street and when she came back into the loft her legs were shining, her eyes dulled with anger or distress, how was I to know?
My Golem remained in full view, angled to catch her eye as she walked in the door and I do not doubt that she already understood the impossible achievement, not just the 1944 canvas, the veracity of the handwriting, the daring composition, but that this work already existed in the writings of Leo Stein and John Richardson. But she did not say a word. Fuck you, I thought. First time ever.
I was to paint over the Golem, she said, bury it like an archaeological hoax.
Fuck you. Second.
We drank whisky. I explained, often calmly, I could not paint over the Golem which would not only be ruined, but never found.
She disagreed, on the basis of what she did not say. I had never encountered the hard sparkling granite wall of her stubbornness. But neither had she seen Blue Bones with his spinnaker up, flying in the full storm of a rage.
Then the buzzer sounded, always a horrid noise, but this time I thought Thank Christ. I threw a cloth across the painting, laid it against the wall, and sprang the door for my unknown visitor who soon revealed himself, with puffing and farting and a loud “oh dear,” to be my brother Hugh.
He hadn’t taken his first sip of milky tea before Marlene was attempting, none too fucking subtly, to have him return to the Bicker Club.
“It’s such a shame,” she said, “there’s not a bed for you.” At the time I thought she was just being bloody-minded, but of course this was all about the writ—she thought Hugh had become her husband’s spy.
Hugh, by now, was terrified of Olivier and—in desperation I suppose—he produced a wet untidy wad of cash and announced he would buy a mattress and he knew just where to go. This independence was unprecedented. He headed out into the dark and left us alone with our violently clinking Lagavulin on the rocks.
An hour later we had been through War and Peace and back again. Hugh returned, having carried his mattress all the way from Canal Street. He slid his damp burden beneath the kitchen island countertop and this was the territory from which he watched our puzzling activity. Far from being a spy, however, he was an old and needy dog, sleeping, reading comic books, demanding I cook him sausages four times a day.
And of course he finally saw the Leibovitz. “Who did that?” he asked, a question that alarmed Marlene who became suddenly and violently affectionate toward him, luring him out on an expedition to Katz’s Deli, just to take him away from the sight of me burying the Golem.
But of course I wouldn’t bury the Golem as she wished. That is the thing with artists. We are like small shopkeepers, accustomed to ruling our domain. If you don’t like how I do it, get out of my shop, my cab, my life. I was in charge and I had no plans to bury anything.
Marlene was the woman who had climbed the power pole and cut the wires and now she was impatient, angry, anxious, I had no idea to what degree. She managed to endure my resistance for three long days, at the end of which time I returned—an exciting afternoon with Hugh’s tartar problem—and saw she had laid a coat of Dammar varnish on the Golem Électrique.
“Put that brush down,” I said.
She considered me, her eye slitted, her cheeks burning, defiant and afraid at once.
Finally, to my immense relief, she dropped the brush into the varnish pot, like a ladle in a bowl of soup.
“And don’t you ever fucking touch a work of mine again.”
She burst into tears, and of course I held her, and kissed her wet cheeks and hungry lips, and once I had cooked Hugh his sausages she and I went out for a walk, squeezed tight together, lovingly, argumentatively, through the decaying cabbages of Chinatown, down into the shadows of the Manhattan Bridge.
I never suggested that
her idea was not brilliant. Only that science made it impossible to do it as she insisted. I was right. She was as wrong as anyone who would drop a brush into a varnish pot. No-one would trust a layer of Dammar varnish as a safe separation between a valuable work and the crap that must go on top.
Besides if we were to bury it, we would have to plan how it would be discovered, and we required the people with the Yale degrees to unearth the missing Leibovitz themselves. We wanted them—didn’t we?—to feel it was their own genius which had led them to the gold beneath the pile of dung. We would take the Broussard canvas to a top conservator for cleaning—that was Jane Threadwell—and we would, with careful chemistry, let this Threadwell discover the mystery beneath.
She was Milt’s lover, so they said. Meaning: Milt claimed it. Never mind, it’s not the point. Here’s the thing: conservators—even those reckless enough to shtup Milt Hesse—are as cautious as hamsters. Even in a simple cleaning of an undistinguished work by Dominique Broussard, Jane Threadwell would begin by cleaning a tiny spot—1?8 “ diameter—not from the center of the canvas either, not even from the corner, but on that peripheral area normally hidden by the rabbet of the frame.
This very clever trembling animal was the one we had to trap. And much as we might wish her to recklessly scrub away at the Broussard until the gorgeous Golem was revealed, forget it. The merest touch of colour on its swab …she’s out of there.
So how could we lead her to the Golem in spite of all her caution?
“Tear the canvas,” Marlene said. “She’ll see the layers.”
“She’s being asked to fix the canvas of a shitty painting. It’s a drag, a nuisance. She might not even notice. And if she does, why would she think there was a masterpiece beneath?”
“Then how?”
“I don’t know.”
Frankly I thought there must be a simpler way to establish a provenance for the Golem. It was a good painting, for Christ’s sake, not some second-rate pastiche by Van Meegeren. Why take the risk of screwing it up when, surely, she could take it to Japan, for instance, or have it turn up in a deceased estate?