Her hair was very particular, corn yellow, never dyed, so she had no need to spend a KING’S RANSOM every month to maintain a lie. Her eyes very blue and liquid. I thought she might be Dutch or even German like the bachelor. She soon found herself a chair and together we had a picnic and waiters in ponytails and black suits leaned down to serve us while we talked about The Magic Pudding and I told her how Butcher had built his former son a tree house in the jacaranda, almost exactly identical to the PUDDING YARD on page sixty-three, she knew it well.
This led to me confiding in her the loss of both boy and pudding yard and all the other misfortunes that had fallen upon the brothers Bones. I told her very frankly what a LOW EBB we were at, how the police had not returned the masterpiece and the galleries would not spare my brother the time of day.
He is a great painter, she said. As no one had expressed this opinion since 1976, I was surprised. She added, He should not suffer that.
Just then I caught sight of Butcher Bones who had borne false witness against her. He was busy sucking up to someone new and he had an awful glaze to him, nodding his big head and listing at 45 DEGREES, so his victim would think himself the most interesting man alive. Who could guess that the round red stickers on the wall were like hot spikes driven beneath my brother’s broken fingernails. I stood to move my chair out of his line of sight but of course my movement caught his eye and he turned, a great gleaming drunk, holding out his arms, bellowing.
My God! he cried. The missing Mrs. Leibovitz.
I could have shat myself.
15
I had been an almost decent man the night Marlene and I had talked in Bellingen. But at the disgusting Stewart Masters show I was shickered, three sheets to the wind, and everything I cast my eyes on seemed false, meretricious, nasty as sequins on a dunny door, but then, there she was—narrowed eyes, swollen lips, and those twin honey-coloured wells made by her clavicle. She smiled and her eyes slitted as she offered me her hand and I thought, You stole that fucking Leibovitz.
And Hugh—Goddamn—he bloody winked at me.
Oh, I thought, fuck you. You think it is all hubba-hubba?
But he was folding up his chair for travel, sending his glass sliding, slamming, shattering against the gallery wall.
Marlene Leibovitz stood to dodge the flying shards.
“Let’s go!” My brother kicked the glass beneath a desk. “The Buchanan,” he said. “Bo-bo-lula.” I abbreviate to spare you, don’t be sorry, there is no translation except that when he said “the Buchanan” he meant “the Balkan,” a restaurant on Oxford Street where he intended that I entertain Mrs. Leibovitz while he, the great fat carnivore, filled his face with grilled Croatian meats. And you know what? Five minutes later the three of us were in the ute, thundering along Oxford Street, Hugh’s chair crashing around the tray behind and the art thief—for that is how I knew her then—light and silky as a wish beside me. My passengers were both talking, Hugh about the need to pound the flesh of unborn calves with a wooden hammer, over which brutality I clearly heard Marlene Leibovitz tell him she was having trouble with the police. This interesting news cut straight through the pinot noir but then I had to run a red light beside Ormond Street, and by the time we were nosing up to Taylor Square I was beginning to wonder—my fellow drunks will understand—if I had imagined it.
I would have asked her about the police but then I had to park and, as I wound down the windows to permit the junkies easy access, she told me anyway. The Art Police, she claimed, had burgled her apartment. “But you know all this,” she said.
“I don’t think so. No.”
She frowned. “They put out an Interpol alert for him.”
“For who?”
“For Olivier, my husband. He ran away. Don’t you read the papers?”
My brother was now stomping off through the crowds with his chair swinging so dangerously there was no time to answer.
“You do remember,” she insisted, hurrying behind.
I remained distracted by my brother and she insisted, “We talked about my husband.”
“In a sort of way.”
“No.” She took my sleeve. “In a very specific way. His father’s work makes him ill. You do remember that?”
I did not know what to say or where to look and I certainly did not enquire how someone might be made ill by a great painting.
“The police are persecuting the only man on Earth who can’t have done it.”
Why did she want to tell me quite so much?
“He is physically incapable of touching a Leibovitz.”
I shrugged.
She folded her arms and surveyed the traffic and we maintained a stiff silence until our table was ready and Hugh had been permitted to unfold his chair. Watching him, Marlene Leibovitz’s eyes were surprisingly soft, and when she smiled—not much, a tiny stiffening of the muscle in her upper lip—I thought for a mistaken moment that she was going to cry.
“You think I did it don’t you?” she demanded, breaking a bread roll and pushing it, rather indelicately, into her mouth. “You said to me, ‘the missing Leibovitz.’ That was really rude, Michael.”
“Your name is Marlene Leibovitz. You’ve been missing.”
“Sure,” she said.
A peach-pink dress lay like a silk sheet across her lovely brown body, and I could not hold her watery gaze. “I’m sorry if I was rude,” I said. “The whole thing really fucked my work. I lost my studio for one thing.”
“All right,” she said calmly. “If you want to know the truth, it was Honoré Le Noël who stole Mr. Boylan’s painting.”
But then the waiter was there and Hugh had particular demands and I saw Marlene quietly blow her nose.
“Now listen,” she said as the wine was poured.
And she told me again about Honoré Le Noël being found in bed with Roger Martin. Dominique had thrown him out of 157 rue de Rennes, which he accepted readily enough, not least because he had a far nicer place in Neuilly But when she demanded he resign from the Comité, he would not budge. Until that moment Dominique thought the Comité was hers. She had assembled it after all. Yet when she demanded the Comité dismiss him she was told that M. Le Noël was the great Leibovitz expert and it would damage everyone to do so preposterous a thing. In the end she stacked the Comité with her own allies, but that took years of scheming and Honoré had all the time in the world to completely fuck her over.
In 1966 Dominique, being short of cash as usual, brought a late-period masterwork into the light. Ampère was its title. She put it up for auction in New York, but Sotheby’s, knowing a little of her reputation, wanted the Comité to endorse it and so the painting was crated up and shipped back to Paris. This must have been what Honoré was waiting for—and who knows, maybe he had been whispering to Sotheby’s—and he now convinced enough members of the Comité that this was a canvas that Dominique had tampered with. This happened to be completely untrue, but he was the expert, and he was obviously a bad man to have as your enemy for he now managed to make the Comité doubt its own good sense. This didn’t happen in a single night, but over weeks or months. At the height of the dispute Dominique walked into La Coupole and threw a jug of water over Honoré, but that weakened her cause still further and the Comité refused to endorse Ampère. Once that had happened, droit moral or no, Sotheby’s would not take it for its show.
“Having declared the work a fake,” Marlene told me, “the Comité had Ampère destroyed.”
“What?”
“They burnt it.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“This is France. You’ve got to believe me. It’s the law. That’s why you never want to let a painting near these Comités. They did it with police supervision. Later, of course, it all came out. They’d incinerated a masterpiece. And it was a huge scandal.”
“They burnt a Leibovitz!”
“I could cry,” she said.
“So why would he steal Dozy’s painting?”
She che
wed more bread and nodded vigorously. “It will turn up in France. You watch.”
“How? Why?”
“He is rich and he has nothing else to do. He’s like some insane deposed king who imagines he can get his throne back. He’s obsessed with ‘the Leibovitz Case.’ He sat next to Boylan on an airplane, both in first class, they got to chatting. Boylan has a Leibovitz. Honoré is a leech that has found a vein. Next thing you know he has traveled to Australia. He removed paint samples, and he is not someone famous for his manual skills. He returned to Paris and wrote a condition report on the painting. It’s an insane document. He claims it’s a middle-period painting dressed up to look like a valuable early period. How does he know? What right does he have? Because he feels he owns Leibovitz. Because he’s an expert. He claims to have X-rays to prove his case, but no-one has ever seen them. Believe me, Michael, I’ve got nothing to gain from this. I could never bear to hurt a work of art. Please don’t think badly of me. I really cannot bear it.”
At this moment, to my surprise, Hugh placed his greasy hand on Marlene’s naked arm and, as I noticed the fat spill of tears caught briefly in the lower lashes of her left eye, I too took her hand. What then are we to do with my emotions? Should they be burnt or nailed up on the wall?
16
Marlene would be my brother’s girl, that ripped my sausage casings when I saw it, but it was not new that I should understand this before the man himself. Sometimes I have wanted to smash and bash him smite him for his cruelty and he never knows I was in love with the so called Alimony Whore even worse than he was. In that way we were twins, the best part of us identical. In the Buchanan, I laid my hand on Marlene’s tiny arm and I watched all her sad water seeping from her lovely eyes you never saw such blue—hair threads of ultramarine, the blues of an opal, bless us, arranged in the pattern of a human eye.
Butcher always said there was no God, no miracles, he had sat in judgment and found Marlene guilty as a thief but then I saw that ugly smirking look on his face and it made me sick to picture what he would do, his fat dick being in no way deterred by having condemned her without a trial. The artist is always for himself alone, allegedly a MONK, a PRIEST or KING, in spite of which assertion he was always seeking a woman who would let him lie with his BUG IRISH face between her breasts. Who could not fall asleep with the scent of lavender rising from a woman’s skin?
When previously resident in Sydney my brother would drive me to A TOUCH OF CLASS in Surry Hills, although not before he had scared the living Christ out of me with condoms and instructions on where my mouth could go. I knew more than him and always had. The girls were very nice NO BATTERIES NEEDED, YOU’RE MY LOVE TOY BABY at least three of them saving to put their children through Sydney Grammar, but Butcher was always waiting outside for me to finish. He said he didn’t mind the time, was just thinking, but there were many thoughts that never crossed his mind and when I touched Marlene’s arm my feelings occupied a country closed to him, denied entry, UP SHIT CREEK without a paddle.
In Bacchus Marsh we knew many girls with names we pronounced Mah and Wah and Lah. That was a joke. Doo-Wah! That’s another.
MAH-LEEN and not MAH-LANE—they included Marlene Warriner, and Marlene Boatwright and Marlene O’Brien and Marlene Repetti so I was not surprised to learn Marlene Leibovitz was really Marlene Cook and she had been born in Benalla, a very nice town in North Eastern Victoria, not much bigger than Bacchus Marsh.
This surprised my brother greatly as he had her pegged as a NEW YORKER. But she was Marlene Cook, whose mother had the COFFEE PALACE. She was the girl who always WROTE AWAY for information about THE STORY OF SUGAR or the history of AUSTRALIA’S OWN CAR. When I learned this I sadly knew she would be well suited to my brother for he had always caused trouble at our post-office box number 46, causing it to get clogged up with BROCHURES and FREE SAMPLES to the detriment of more important business.
All this writing away was what led them apart from their own people, in her case to become an IMAGINARY AMERICAN, an expert on the work of Leibovitz when her only education had been getting thrown out of Benalla High School for insubordination—she admitted so herself, so who would doubt her? Never did I forget I also was cast out from fourth grade. I hid inside my bed for a whole week drawing on the sheets. They never knew what pictures I saw, how close they came to violent death, God save me. Blood pouring through their eyes and noses.
And here you are too, Hugh, she said, eating pork cevapi in Taylor Square. Who could have imagined this in Bacchus Marsh?
I did not share her opinions but I did not care because it was very nice to be with her. She made Butcher quiet, soothing that MAD RAGE which had been brought about by the work of the pretty-boy painter and the general problem of being OUT OF STYLE. She went for the plum pancakes and THREE FORKS and when I was completely STONKERED we all drove back to Bathurst Street, although not before the Butcher bought two bottles of d’ARENBERG DEAD ARM SHIRAZ @ $53 per, the unit price being an indication that he planned to make her like him more than me. Such is life. Who knows what he remembers about the night where his entire life began to change? All he ever mentions is that we left my chair behind in the restaurant and we had to go back and explain to the waiter it was legally our property. It is not my fault that there are so many aggressive drunks and criminals in Darlinghurst at that hour of night.
Finally we came up the stairs at Bathurst Street, not even pausing on the first floor but heading on up to the second. The lights of the dancing school were better than we might have hoped and Butcher had previously banked and aimed them at the longest wall and now, in spite of the injury suffered when retrieving my chair, he was able to assist me when tacking the canvases in place. One for the money, two for the show. He was a bloody bower bird displaying snail shells and dead spiders to the female, puffing up his feathers to make himself look larger, running back and forwards, bless me chook-chook-chook
Until now Mrs. Leibovitz had been VULNERABLE, but now her eyes lost all sign of feeling and she revealed what is known as a professional character standing in the EXACT SAME way as Detective Amberstreet on a later date, supporting her left elbow with her right hand while the left cupped her chin and covered the evidence of her pretty mouth. Surely this was not the result my brother wanted?
She did not say a word, preferring to nod when she had seen enough, and at her bidding we two large men rolled up one canvas and tacked up the next one. Bless me, I was not sure what was happening. No-one touched the Dead Arm Shiraz, although it had been offered with the shells and spiders.
Then she said, I can get you a show in Tokyo.
Bless me.
This was not what I had expected. Had he? I cannot guess. If I had been him I would have set off hollering and running around the room, THE BUTCHER’S DANCE by Arthur Murray. But his Boone-eyes stayed dark and tiny like my father when considering the possibility a well-priced beast might be hiding a NOTIFIABLE DISEASE.
Where?
The male’s mouth was just a slit, a contrast to the female’s which was parted in surprise. The windows were open to the street and we could hear shouting, perhaps the WESTIES had come to beat up the SOFT FACES as they were called. The woman scratched her bare brown upper arm and asked him did he know Tokyo. He treated her as if she was trying to pick his pocket.
How can I get a show in Tokyo? His face was an egg or river stone, no place to crack it open.
At Mitsukoshi, she said, smiling and frowning to a very large degree, her forehead corrugated like low tide—sand worm in secret panic beneath the feet.
Mitsukoshi?
The department store.
A department store, says he, as if it might be disgusting to buy a pair of socks or that he had never lived fifteen years behind a bloody shop which had been his heritage and obligation.
Marlene could not have known we were in danger of a sermon based on ideas put up his batty by the German Bachelor. Just the same she CUT HIM OFF AT THE PASS, firstly uncorking the fifty-dollar Shiraz
and pouring it into a coffee cup, then explaining to my brother, as he walked up and down like a horse on a lunging rope, that all the most important shows in Japan were in department stores. I could not see why she would tolerate him but of course this is the LIBERTY given those of so-called genius that they are permitted to act like TOTAL MORONS. Marlene Leibovitz persisted, finally producing from her purse a notebook inside which she had stuffed papers big and small amongst them a card with silver on its edge. On this card were three important things. The first was the name of the Mitsukoshi department store and the second was the angry Ducodripper Jackson Pollock but it was not until a CROWN PRINCESS was revealed that my brother finally WHOA UP.
Well fuck me dead, said Butcher.
It is a big bloody mystery to me that a man so dead set against QUEEN ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND could get himself so rigid about the crown princess of Japan, but soon he had a great STIFFY, THROBBING LIKE A SOCK FULL OF GRASSHOPPERS. And who am I to understand his secret squirming brain? All I know is that Butcher saw the silver Japanese characters on the back and was therefore so completely converted to Mitsukoshi that he could never change his mind, not even when he discovered the Jackson Pollock exhibition had been opened by a TELEVISION PERSONALITY.
From that night began his enthusiasm for uncooked fish of every kind and as a result of eating TUNA RIGHT OFF THE BOAT he was infested with a parasite producing bloating, cramping, diarrhea and unusual bowel movements. This was not the least of the excitements in the months ahead.
17
There is always Hugh, and his chair and his chicken-and-lettuce sandwich, and you cannot take a slash or park the truck without considering him, and it has been like that since—to be extremely fucking precise—his twentieth birthday which he celebrated by trying to drown his father in the bath. Blue Bones was a shocking bastard, as strong and slippery as an old goanna, and he flipped Slow Bones on his back and, aided no doubt by all the dreadful bawling, half-filled his lungs with soapy water before Mum broke the door down with the kindling axe. If you relied on Hugh for family history you would never hear this incident, for he loved his daddy to the point of giddiness, and we all four acted a loud and violent melodrama on the day I arrived to take him down to Melbourne. Our poor mother. She had been a pretty girl.