Theft: A Love Story

  We are the nation of Henry Lawson and the campfire yarn, but just the same we are very bloody wary of people doing what Marlene was doing now. We are inclined to wonder, Is she a name-dropper? Does she have tickets on herself? At the same time, no-one in this paddock has ever spoken like this, not ever, and I was literally on the edge of my chair, watching with the most particular attention as she blew on her Marlboro so its tip burnt evenly.

  “By the time all this was over, Olivier could not so much as touch one of his father’s paintings. He hated them. He hates them now. These great works of art make him ill, really, physically ill.”

  This was interesting, I didn’t say it wasn’t. “But why, for Christ’s sake, did Dozy hide the painting from me?”

  She shrugged. “Rich people!”

  “He was frightened anyone would know he had something so valuable?”

  “It’s an asset,” she said derisively. “That’s how it is with them. It’s there to own, not to see. But if the market believed Honoré’s story—that this precious painting was somehow doctored—my husband would have been ruined. We would have been exposed for the loss, a million U.S. dollars, probably more.”

  “You and your husband?”

  “Yes.” She almost smiled.

  “And of course Honoré is just a malicious little shit,” she said, “but he must be answered, so I sent up two forensic chemists to do an independent pigment analysis. Indeed, I think one of them met your brother in the pub. He thought he was amazing.”

  “Sometimes he is.”

  “In any case,” she said quickly, “my independent chemists also echoed Honoré, fretting about the presence of titanium dioxide in the white. This was not in common use in 1913, so for them this was what they call”—she made a mocking face—“a red flag. Fortunately, Dominique lived in a pig sty hoarding every tram ticket, every restaurant bill, so we had a great archive, thank God. And there at last I found, not only the letter from Leibovitz to his supplier requesting titanium white, but also a receipt, dated January 1913. That’s enough. It doesn’t matter it was not in common use. Honoré can go fuck himself. Your friend has a real Leibovitz. I brought him the documentation personally so it can be with the painting forever now. I actually attached it for him, in an envelope on the back of the stretcher.”

  She held out her glass and I filled it. “Hence the celebration.”

  “Very good wine too.” And I was now, having waited so long, all set to give her a big lecture on what she had been gulping down—the work of Tom Lazar and his vineyard at Kyneton, about this treasure growing in the shitty dun-coloured landscape of my childhood—but just as I was about to establish my sophistication, she let it slip that Dozy’s painting was Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois, the same work I had first seen in reproduction at Bacchus Marsh High School. This seemed, that night, such a sweet and magical connection, and what my childhood self would have seen as showing off or name-dropping became transmuted into something you could call noble, and we sat there until the early morning, finishing up Lazar’s third vintage, the rain drumming on the roof, and I relaxed, finally, while this strange and lovely woman described the entire canvas for me, speaking in a low soft throaty voice, beginning, not at the top left-hand corner, but with the cadmium yellow stroke which marks the edge of the young wife’s blouse, a slice of light.

  5

  The morning sun produced a layer of grey fog which was just high enough to reveal the black roof of the Avis car as it moved slowly along the road to Bellingen. As I watched this pleasantly dreamlike departure, my mind was almost completely occupied with that puzzling creature, the driver. She was an extraordinarily attractive woman and she had shown me, without a question, that she was blessed with the Eye, but she was alien, American, working for the other team, the market, the rich guys, the ones who decided what was art and what was not. They were in charge of history, and so fuck them all, always, forever.

  It was this—not her marriage—that had me folding and refolding her business card until it fell in half. She was, she must always be, my enemy.

  Her late father-in-law’s painting was also in my thoughts and I intended to phone Dozy Boylan—indeed my hand was on the instrument—to invite myself to a private viewing. But then Hugh leapt on me and in the struggle we busted through the flyscreen, and then—you wouldn’t want to know—days went by without me contacting Dozy.

  Also, I had my canvas waiting. I know I said I could not afford decent materials, and that is true. I didn’t use a penny. Instead I called Fish-oh, my old canvas supplier in Sydney, and finally he confessed, very fucking reluctantly, that he had an unopened crate, just arrived from Holland, and this—it was so bloody hard for him to own up—contained a roll of #10 cotton duck fifty bloody yards long. Why Fish-oh would act like a mingy withholding bastard does not matter here only that I persuaded him to ship the whole fifty yards C.O.D. to Kev at the Bellingen Dairyman’s Co-op. This would go straight on Jean-Paul’s account. It’s no good getting old if you don’t get cunning.

  The Dutch canvas arrived in Bellingen just before Marlene. All the time I talked to her it was in my mind. I could see it lying quietly in the co-op loading dock, amongst the bags of fertiliser, and as soon as my visitor had gone I rushed—not to Dozy Boylan as you might expect—but to the co-op and then we brought it home and I rolled my canvas out across the studio floor, but not a cut, nowhere a cut, so all this, all this possibility, was crowding in on me.

  And then—thirty minutes later—the lovely adenoidal little Kevin telephoned again, this time to inform me that my custom-made pigments had just arrived, and then not even a bloody Leibovitz could seem important. This paint was from Raphaelson’s, a small Sydney outfit who are amongst the best pigment makers in the world. In the five years I had been really famous I would use nothing else and now they had some new, very serious acrylic greens: permanent green, earth green, Jenkins green, titanium green, Prussian green, a phthalo green so fucking intense that just a teardrop of this stuff could colonise a blob of white. Of course art supplies was not the co-op’s normal line of merchandise but Kev and I had already done a lot of business together and gifts had been exchanged—a tiny landscape, a charcoal drawing—so the paint went on Jean-Paul’s account.

  Minutes after Kevin’s call, the Bones boys were back in the Holden ute, creeping along the road, a submarine gliding through the milky sea of fog. My house-paint period was over. No longer would I be reduced to adding sand or sawdust to build impasto or using scratchy short-haired brushes on a Dulux Hi Gloss that dried too fast.

  “Bloody hot,” said Hugh.

  “Clammy, mate.”

  “Bloody scorcher you wait.”

  Neither of us liked this wet season, but for Hugh, whose main activity was to every day walk into Bellingen and back, the heat was of never-ending concern and, being a fearsome mouth-breather, he needed vast quantities of water in order not to perish on the journey. Even now he was drinking from the billycan he carried with him everywhere. Later, when he set out to walk, he would dive down into the bush to this creek or that dam—he knew them all.

  Back at the co-op, I picked up my beautiful wooden box of one-pound tubes—that was Raphaelson’s, everything so perfectly presented—and I was happy as a boy on Christmas morning. Every one of these new greens I ordered straight, but also mixed down with pumice and flakes of stainless steel, this recipe designed to give the green a secret mirrored light that would—I knew this before I opened anything—curl my fucking toes.

  It’s hard to make a civilian understand what this new palette and an uncut roll of canvas might mean to me but I planned to get into some very serious shit and in this I was not deluded. Later, of course, Jean-Paul claimed I had obtained my materials illegally. But did he have the heart to be a patron, or did he want me to continue to spend Hugh’s pension on bloody house paints? What had he expected when he started?

  Hugh arm-wrestled Kev and won four bucks for his victories, so he was happy too. I added a coup
le of bags of fertiliser to the bill. It was eighteen bucks a bag at the co-op and Mrs. Dyson, my next-door neighbour, was happy to take it off my hands for fifteen. Later Jean-Paul would decide that this was stealing too, but for God’s sake, I was not a Sunday painter. I could reasonably expect to pay back any debts. It was a cash-flow issue only and if I had not been interfered with so unconscionably I would have been able to sell the canvases privately—the court never need have known.

  The road back to Jean-Paul’s place winds through the bush until it commences its descent into the long green valley at Gleniffer. At this point you can normally see the Dorrigo escarpment and, three thousand feet below in the valley the Never Never, which was today lying beneath a blanket of fog so dense it was, from some three hundred feet of elevation, a streaky oyster grey. I was driving very very slowly indeed when I saw another pair of headlights coming towards us.

  “Dozy,” said Hugh, “bloody old Dozy.”

  He had an eye, Hugh, although it required no special talent to recognise our neighbour’s headlights for he had, perhaps because of the unpredictable nature of his creek, converted a long-wheel-base Land Rover into a somewhat eccentric monster truck, the lights of which sat close together and high up off the road. Seeing their yellow orc-eyed glow, I slowed, pulling up just below the brow of the hill where, with my window down, I could hear Dozy’s horrible old diesel grinding down into first gear. According to the custom in those parts he should have stopped to talk, but he passed by me, very close, and so very slowly that there could be no mistaking his look of implacable hostility

  I had only known Dozy Boylan six weeks but we had quickly become friends, often spending two or three nights a week drinking from his cellar, discussing, not art, not literature, but the plants and insects which were his great passion. It was he, my neighbour, who had discovered both the rare Wombat Fly (tr. Borboroidini) and the Stalk-eyed Signal Fly (Achia sp). He was smart, so enthusiastic, so filled with life and information. Nothing in my experience prepared me for his rich man’s secretiveness and—even worse—this really rather hateful look which he now bestowed on me.

  Well, I liked my neighbour and if I had offended him somehow, then I would apologise. I thought, I’ll call him in an hour or two. And then I began to think about those lovely heavy tubes from Raphaelson’s and that flat, stapled section of the canvas which I had already prepared. As soon as we were back home I was into it, and Hugh had filled his billy with water and set off back along the road, drinking and spilling as he proceeded.

  I should have phoned Dozy that night, and indeed I intended to, for I had still not seen the Leibovitz or talked to him about the general bloody wonder of its existence, but I was filing away the beautiful colour charts from Raphaelson’s when I came across some papers he had given me when I first arrived. Dozy had a rich and interesting history and apart from running a very profitable Brahmin stud in Bellingen, he had, years before in Sydney, established a now-famous business in what was then called Scandinavian Design. Amongst the old catalogues he had provided, by way of introduction, was a glossy company report in which was contained, along with black-and-white reproductions of 1950s modern furniture, his portrait. It made me smile at first, for he had clearly modeled himself on the actor Clark Gable, although there was, behind that trim moustache and the movie-star good looks, something not quite right, a little crooked, a little heavy in the chin and although these were not in any usual sense defects, they became so simply through his failure to actually be Clark Gable, and what was left was something rather vain and silly. I would never have dwelled on this if it had not so brilliantly explained the half-wild anger I had seen in his eyes this morning on the road. The old man was vain. It had never occurred to me. But he had claimed Marlene had hit on him and I had mocked his bullshit. So fucking sorry to have caused offense.

  So I did not call him. I would do it later. I would get over it. He would get over it, or so I thought. I was wrong, wrong about almost everything, and I would wander on blindly for the next few weeks before I finally discovered the real source of Dozy’s upset and in the meantime there developed one of those strange silences between friends that, like a torn shoulder muscle left unattended, grows hard and lumpy and finally locks into a compacted knot of injury that no amount of manipulation can undo.

  He spoke to Hugh, I know, and sometimes gave him lifts in his Land Rover but although I saw Dozy many times upon the road, and although he quietly returned my slasher after dark one night, I never actually spoke to him again. I would see that Leibovitz within the year, but by then Dozy would be dead.

  6

  The undiluted greens I did not even bother with, but the others I was into like a snouty pig—huge luscious jars, greens so fucking dark, satanic, black holes that could suck your heart out of your chest. Green would not be my only colour, but rather my theorem, my argument, my family tree and soon I had all ten bloody power drills committed in one way or another, mixing my demon dark, with gesso, with saf-flower oil, kerosene, with cadmium yellow, with red madder; the names are pretty but beside the point—there is no name for either God or light, only mathematics, the angstrom scale, red madder = 65,000 A.U.

  Hugh was up and away, all over the place like a madwoman’s shit, gallumping along the bitumen, swearing at the flies in made-up languages but he, Dozy, Marlene, my little boy—everyone was dead to me. R.I.P., so very bloody sorry.

  I painted.

  Years later when he laid his pale bored eyes upon this canvas in the loft on Mercer Street, the dealer Howard Levi was nice enough to explain what I had done that steaming day in Bellingen: “You are like Kenneth Noland” and “Your words are not the point, your words are an armature, something you hang the colour from.”

  This was not only dumb, it was not even what he thought. He said—How refreshing. But he thought—Who is this cunt who hasn’t heard of Clement fucking Greenberg?

  Levi is dead so I can name him. The others I intend to keep quiet about a little longer. These New York dealers had their own particular type of ignorance, quite different from Jean-Paul’s, although they did share one astonishing assumption, that I needed to accept what was already agreed upon by Dickberg and others. Jean-Paul would say this almost outright. Levi, on the other hand, found me refreshing.

  But it was all the same everywhere: everyone who loved me was trying to get me up to date. Sometimes it seemed there was not a place on Earth, no little town with flies crawling inside the baker shop window, where there was not also some graduate student in a Corbusier bow tie who was now, this instant, reading the party line in Studio International and ART news and all of them were in a great sweat to get me up to date, to free me not only from the old-fashioned brushstroke but from any reference to the world itself.

  These were weighty issues, but the first question the Manhattan dealers asked me was of a different order: “What are the names and phone numbers of your collectors?”

  And the next question would be: “When was your most recent auction sale?”

  And then, when they actually looked at the canvas, they would silently ask themselves, What the fuck is this?

  All dark and comfortless. They had no eye, only a nose for the market and I smelled to them like some demented Jesus fool living in a cotton town in Bentdick, Mississippi.

  But I am Butcher Bones, a thieving cunning man and I made this beautiful seven-foot-high monster with my greens and my Dutch canvas and when it was done, and I had cropped it, the result was twenty-one feet long and its bones, its ribs, vertebrae, wretched broken fingers, were made from light and mathematics.

  I, THE SPEAKER, RULED AS KING OVER ISRAEL IN JERUSALEM; AND IN WISDOM I APPLIED MY MIND TO STUDY AND EXPLORE ALL THAT IS DONE UNDER HEAVEN. IT IS A SORRY BUSINESS THAT GOD HAS GIVEN TO MEN TO BUSY THEMSELVES WITH. I HAVE SEEN ALL THE DEEDS THAT ARE DONE HERE UNDER THE SUN; THEY ARE ALL EMPTINESS AND CHASING THE WIND. WHAT IS CROOKED CANNOT BECOME STRAIGHT; WHAT IS NOT THERE CANNOT BE COUNTED. SO I APPLIED MY MIND TO UNDERSTAND WISDOM
AND KNOWLEDGE, MADNESS AND FOLLY, AND I CAME TO SEE THAT THIS TOO IS CHASING THE WIND. FOR IN SUCH WISDOM IS MUCH VEXATION, AND THE MORE A MAN KNOWS THE MORE HE HAS TO SUFFER.

  And a Mars black pushed itself into that first “I” which stood as tall as my brother in his football socks, and a field of alien gooseturd grey, its surface buffed flat as glass, flowed like an invading army from the “HEAVEN.” Forget it. This stuff can’t be talked, or walked, or garnered from the auction record. These are my mother’s bones, my father’s dick, the boiled-down carcass of Butcher Bones, bubbling like a cauldron of tripe, and for the ten days and nights I wrenched and slapped and sanded until, with the flood still running through my head, the canvas put the holy fear of God in me, made the bloody hair on my bloody neck stand up on end, and if it scared me, who was its maker, assassin, congregant, it was going to terrify Jean-Paul who was a form of life more generous, but ultimately even lower than Howard Levi and the Fifty-Seventh Street Gang.

  He had not told me this when he came to fetch me from my prison cell, but I already knew that he and the dealer and the lawyer were concerned that I was going out of style.

  Oh dearie me. Gracious, what a disaster. What might I do?

  They did not know that I was born out of style, and was still out of style when I came down on the train from Bacchus Marsh. My trousers were too short, my socks were white and I will commit similar sins of style when I am in my coffin, my ligaments all gone, bone by bone, my flesh mixed down with dirt.

  Anyway, the problem was not style. It was my falling prices at the auctions and the value of Jean-Paul’s collection. The market is a nervous easily panicked beast. And so it should be. After all, how can you know how much to pay when you have no bloody idea of what it’s worth? If you pay five million dollars for a Jeff Koons what do you say when you get it home? What do you think?