The Forgery of Venus (11 page)

The friar reads on and from a distance sounds the plashing of a fountain; I’m in a room in the Alcázar. To one side is a lectern at which stands the Dominican reading, in front of me His Majesty and a tall canvas I have primed with glue and black-lime mixture, and over that a priming of red earth,
tierra de Esquivias,
as they do here in Madrid. I am painting his face. His Majesty wears a suit of black, as is customary at court, with a narrow white ruff.

The friar comes to the end of his chapter and looks up to see the king’s pleasure. His Majesty tells him to retire, for he wishes to converse with this painter.

So we speak. I am speaking with the king of Spain! I find I must grip the brush hard and my stick is trembling against the canvas. His left hand at hip, weight on left leg, an easy pose, a paper of state in his right hand. He graciously asks me of my home and family, of Don
Pacheco, of Don Juan Fonseca, and how things pass in Seville. Then we speak of paintings: the king wishes to have the finest collection in Europe, surpassing that of the king of France, and we speak of which painters are best for which subjects. I believe I do not make a complete fool of myself, nor yet vaunt myself about my station. He is younger than I by three years; I think he is not eighteen.

A courtier enters, whispers to the king. He says he must leave me and says further he has enjoyed our conversation and looks forward to the next time he sits for me. And smiles. Then, coming around to view my work, he studies the painted face, which of course I have spent the most time upon, and he says, “Don Diego, I know what I look like. See you paint me as I am.” And touches me lightly upon the shoulder. The king has touched me! I am all in a sweat as he leaves. The Dominican gives me a baleful look and sweeps out too. My shoulder tingles still, and I realized I had slumped down in my chair and the edge of the computer desk was cutting into my shoulder.

I checked the clock on the machine. I’d been gone eight minutes, although I’d experienced at least an hour in subjective time. So then I thought, Okay, I was drawing as Velázquez but my canvas is still blank, could I maybe make myself actually
do
a painting in the here and now while I was having a Velázquez hallucination? Maybe if I stood in front of the canvas with my brush in my hand and took some more salvinorin? And maybe the stuff was cumulative, maybe I’d get deeper into it.

Into the mouth with my other dose, ten minutes of staring at the blankness, and then I started to draw. It’d be a group scene, I decided, eight guys just sitting around a saloon, no, at an outdoor party, like a wedding, just a bunch of regular guys who liked a belt or two after work, and the drawing went very fast, no detail, just blocking in the relative positions of the figures. After I’d got that down I mixed up a
big batch of flake white and added a little ochre and azurite to it to make a neutral gray, and then I blocked in the outlines of the figures.

They say I can do only heads, and this is my answer to them. Carducho and the other royal painters, they mock me as an upstart who knows how to imitate nature but has no conception of how to make a true painting with ideas, in the Florentine style. All of them, Carducho, Caxés, and Nardi, will never forgive me for having won the competition His Majesty ordered for a painting of the expulsion of the Moors, and I have heard they were joking that I only won because I am a Moor myself, being from Seville, where there is so much impure blood.

Yet I am painter to the king and I am usher of the chamber, and will rise higher still. If these calumnies on my blood reach the king, he will not hear them; besides, I am well in with his grace the count-duke of Olivares, and his word should sustain me against all slanderers.

I finish the outlining and return to my apartment. I am short with Juana, as I always am when I am on a new painting and I go to bed early. Again these strange dreams of hell, monsters of noise and light that’s neither from sun nor candle, infernal light that warps all colors into impossible shades. I go to mass early and pray that these dreams may cease, and then back to work, this time with models.

I have Antonio Rojas today, a mason, and I give him as much wine as he wants. He grins like an ape at me and I take his likeness quickly and then dismiss him with a clap on the back and fifty maravedí. Then comes in a butcher from the royal kitchen who I paint as my Bacchus.

When he has left me I look at the unfinished painting. There is something wrong with it, but I don’t know what it is—perhaps the figures are too crowded together in the foreground, as if they were all sitting on a rail. I have tried to correct the composition, but it is still unsatisfying. The faces and figures are from nature and full enough of life, but the space they’re in is not real space. There is a secret here
I don’t know, and none of the fools who paint in this kingdom can advise me. Not that I would ask. Yet, God willing, His Majesty will like it, I think, and it’s still better than anything Carducho ever did.

A boy comes in with a message from His Majesty and I must leave this and change my clothes to be fit for his presence. I believe he must have decided on the portrait of his late father that he mentioned on Friday last. That arm is not right either.

I
came out of it walking down Canal Street in a cold rain, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and no shoes. When I got back to my loft I was not surprised to see my canvas was full of
Los Borrachos,
or
The Feast of Bacchus,
by Velázquez, not the completed painting, but the underpainting and two almost completed faces, the Bacchus and the guy in the middle with the sombrero and the drunken grin. The paint was still a little wet and you could see where he, or I, had repainted the peasant on the extreme right, giving him a new head, and where the figure in the back had just been painted in, in a failed attempt to give the whole thing more depth. I could see what he meant about Bacchus’s arm—it was set into the shoulder a little wrong and the foreshortening was off a hair. The face was terrific, though.

I took a shower, changed my clothes, and carefully made myself a Gibson with my dad’s silver shaker. Pearl onions are among the only foodstuffs in my refrigerator, those and olives, because sometimes I prefer a martini.

Thinking back, it occurred to me that I must’ve spent a couple of days at least in Velázquez’s life this time, given the work on the painting, and so I was curious to see how much time I had actually spent in…can I still call it real time? The little screen on my answering machine told me that approximately thirty-four hours had passed since I had set up the canvas, something my belly was starting to confirm,
and the Gibson was having an unusually powerful effect on my brain and balance. There were fifteen messages on my machine, said the little lights, and I ran through them and answered the one from Mark Slotsky.

T
here were a lot of drinks, and we closed the place and poured Jackie into a cab after he’d given us more than one Gallic embrace, with kisses. Then Mark hailed a cab of his own and told me he’d have some people come by for the painting in a week or so, when it’d be dry enough to move. I went back home and when I got there I took it off the easel and turned it to the wall. It was starting to freak me out a little.

The next day I was awakened from the sleep of the sot by a pounding on my loft door, and it was Bosco; he wanted to show me something, his latest. Nice to see a guy still excited about art, so I went down to take a look. He’s been talking about doing this for a while, using the barrel of 9/11 dust he collected back then, a major critique of what he called the fascist hysteria that enabled the Iraq war.

In his loft the masturbating girls were gone (sold to some rich creep in Miami, he said), replaced by a huge Plexiglas case that must have measured ten by ten by twenty feet. It was equipped with lights and TV projectors and peopled with his trademark rag dolls. He made me sit down in front of it and switched it on.

A great show, I have to say. He had video loops of Bush and Giuliani playing on the faces of dolls dressed in clown suits, and video loops of the planes striking the twin towers projected on the background. He’d made pneumatic models of the twin towers that expanded upward and collapsed in spastic jerks. At the foot of one tower he’d built a little trackway on which tiny figures made up as
Orthodox Jews escaped from the building before each collapse and vanished down a miniature subway entrance. The air compressor that operated the towers also shot gusts of air to blow little Styrofoam dolls dressed as cops and firemen and civilians up into the air to fall down again, these figures suitably charred and blood spattered, complemented with tiny amputated heads and limbs. And he’d filled the whole box with the actual gray 9/11 dust, which made interesting clouds in the space above the yapping dummies as well as ever-shifting drifts on everything in the box. The sound track was a densely layered mix of politicians speaking, newscasters casting, explosions, and screams of anguish; from a separate speaker came hysterical laughter. This speaker was embedded in one of those amusement-park chortling torsos that used to grace penny arcades back in the forties. He’d re-dressed it as a Saudi Arab.

“What do you think?” he asked after I had stared some minutes.

“I think you’ve outdone yourself with respect to sheer offensiveness. It’s as if Duchamp had presented his urinal filled with piss.”

“You think so? Well, thanks, but I really wanted to rig it with gas—you know, for real flames? But I was worried about the dust igniting and also the gallery was freaked about the fire insurance. Maybe I could use colored foils or plastic film—it would flap pretty good in the breeze in there, you know, for a fiery effect.”

“I think it’s perfect as it is, and besides, you have the video projection of the actual flames. Are you really going to show this in a gallery?”

“Yeah, Cameron-Etzler’s giving me the whole of their SoHo space next month. It’s going to be big.”

I told him that I thought it would be and left for my place, trying without much success to keep the envy out of my heart. I looked through my recent sketchbooks and thought about what Chaz would paint if he were going to get big, recalling my recent subway thoughts, that notion of deep analysis of modern faces using tradi
tional techniques. How to generate dignity and keep from descending into kitsch?
Man Ordering Pizza. Woman Looking for Metrocard.
Is it still possible? Not anything like photorealism, no, everything steel but the breastplates, the bumpers on the cars all phony, a copy of a Kodachrome slide flashed onto the canvas. Structure, weight, authority, the authority of the paint applied on a living surface:
sprezzatura
. Velázquez’s dwarfs and grotesques, revive the
bodegones
but with what we’ve experienced in the past centuries added—it has to show on the faces. I smoked half a pack and filled my paper shredder with sketches, but nothing came, and after a while I gave up and went out.

The next three weeks passed in the same state of suspended animation. I did a little job for the
Observer,
Bush as Pinocchio with the long nose in the manner of Disney, with the other characters as current pols, and passed up a couple of other similarly distinguished jobs, living on the ten grand I’d gotten from Mark, hoping I’d have a breakthrough before I had to leave for Italy to do the fresco. But no dice; everything I did looked like shit, and someone else’s shit at that.

To increase the torment, one Sunday I took the kids to the Metropolitan’s American figurative painting show. Milo waltzed off with his electronic art critic pressed to his ear, trailing his little oxygen tank on wheels, and Rosie breathed God’s own air but had only me to tell her about art. The place was jammed; everyone loves figurative painting in their secret heart, even mediocre pieces, although practically everyone makes the mistake of confusing the mere image with painting as art.

They had big posters up with remarks from the famous artists. Richard Diebenkorn had this to say: “As soon as I started using the figure my whole idea of my painting changed. Maybe not in the most obvious structural sense, but these figures distorted my sense of interior or environment, or the painting itself—in a way that I welcomed.
Because you don’t have this in abstract painting…. In abstract painting one can’t deal with…an object or person, a concentration of psychology which a person is as opposed to where the figure
isn’t
in the painting…And that’s the one thing that’s always missing for me in abstract painting, that I don’t have this kind of dialogue between elements that can be…wildly different and can be at war, or in extreme conflict.”

I feel the same way, Dick. And Tom Eakins weighed in with: “The big artist does not sit down monkeylike and copy…but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature and steals her tools. He learns what she does with light, the big tool, and then color, then form, and appropriates them to his own use…. But if he ever thinks he can sail another fashion from Nature or make a better-shaped boat, he’ll capsize.”

We small artists capsize anyway. It would be so much easier for me if figurative painting was well and truly dead, dead as epic poetry or verse drama, but it’s not, because it speaks to something deep in the human heart. What I would like is a drug that informs me why I can’t just have a normal career as a modern figurative painter.

Again, I mention all this to show that my life was progressing as it has for years, whiny, discontented, blocked, occasionally suicidal, except the kids kept me from that. This was the life I had, these were all the memories I had, except for the memories of being Diego Velázquez, which, of course, I
knew
were being induced by a drug.

Anyway, we stared at the wonderful paintings along with the mob, and dear Rose asked me where
my
paintings were hanging, and I said they weren’t, and she asked why, and I said that museums only hang the very best paintings and that mine weren’t good enough, and she said that you should just try a little harder, Daddy.

Good advice, really, and then we went back to my place, and Milo played with the computer and I tried harder and Rose invented a new art form using shredder waste and a glue stick to make fantastical col
lages, multilayered weavings of colored strips, just the thing, if they were twenty-five feet long, for the Whitney Biennial. And watching her I thought about Shelly’s theory that creativity sprang from the child self and that returning to that self under salvinorin might jumpstart the process on a higher level, and I found myself looking forward to my next dose. I suppressed the thought that even in the drug state I was a pasticheur, that I wasn’t mining my own past but that of someone else.

T
hen it was time for my next appointment at the lab, but when I arrived the receptionist, instead of handing me a clipboard, told me again that Dr. Zubkoff wanted to see me in his office.

I went in and he gestured me to a seat and gave me a grave look like there was a bad shadow on my CAT scan, which he probably practiced in med school and hadn’t had much of a chance to use in his career. He said, “Well, Chaz, I have a little bone to pick with you.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. You didn’t tell us you had a history of drug abuse.”

“I wouldn’t call it a
history
—”

“No? Two commitments to rehab, one court ordered. I’d call that a drug problem.”

“I sold some pills in a saloon, Shelly. It was a horseshit bust. I was doing a favor for a friend of a friend and he turned out to be a narc. That’s why the involuntary—”

“Yeah, whatever, but in any case you can’t stay in the study. It’s a confounding variable.”

“But I’ve been clean for years.”

“So you say, but I can’t be testing you for drugs every time you participate. The other thing is, my staff reports you’re uncooperative and aggressive.”

“Oh, please! Because I didn’t describe a painting in a fantasy?”

“Right, you’re supposed to tell us what you’re experiencing on the drug. The accounts are part of the study.”

And then he talked about the Velázquez stuff, which still disturbed him; that wasn’t supposed to happen on salvinorin.

“So what is it?” I asked.

“Something else. Something confounding.” He seemed to search for a delicate way of saying what he wanted to say. “An underlying psychological issue.”

“Like psychosis?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but clearly something odd is going on with you that is unlikely to be related to salvinorin, and unfortunately we’re not set up to give you the help you need. My advice is to check into the hospital here, run a full battery of tests, complete blood panels, EEG, PET scans, fMRI, the works, and make sure there’s no underlying pathology. I mean, for all we know you could have some kind of endocrine imbalance or an allergic reaction to salvinorin, or, God forbid, a brain tumor.”

I said I’d think about it. Shelly shrugged and we shook hands and that was it, out on my ear.

Then they asked me to sign some releases and I was officially expelled from the study, and I have to say I felt bereft. On the ride downtown I started thinking about where I could get some more of the drug. I recalled that it was one of the few psychoactive drugs that had not yet been made illegal and I figured I could get hold of it somewhere in town. Then I thought to myself, Don’t be crazy, Chaz, that’s all you need; if Lotte found out about it you’d never see the kids again. Thus my subway thoughts.

When I climbed out into daylight my cell phone said I had two messages: one from my sister, and the other from Mark, and he was all about his Italian gangster businessman wanting to get the palazzo ceiling done
this fall, before the next rainy season in Venice, he was having the roof fixed and he wanted the work on the fresco to go on simultaneously, and could I possibly see my way clear to going early, he’d negotiated a bonus, 25K if I started the first of the month and another twenty-five if I finished before Christmas, and I called him right away and said fine, since I wasn’t going to be in the drug study anymore.

My sister had left a voice mail saying she’d be out of touch for a period, she’d had an opportunity to go off to Africa to save babies or something, she had to leave instantly and she couldn’t give me any details because she didn’t know them, and also because she suspected that covert entry into an unnamed but nasty African nation was going to be part of the picture.

Then I went over to Lotte’s gallery and told her I had to be out of town for maybe three months and why, and she bitched a little about it, but the money dangling there, maybe two hundred thousand, was an argument she couldn’t really get past. I was real formal, not like last time, just a business relationship now, and she said, “Hey, did you see you got a review?”

In the main room of the gallery my actresses (except Kate) were still up there with the sacred red dots that said they’d sold, and there was a review from the
Village Voice,
framed and hanging nearby. It was not bad. The guy had actually got it that it wasn’t just a postmodernist appropriation but a genuine effort to use the traditional means of painting to penetrate character, to pry up under the mask of celebrity. And he hoped I’d continue to do work in that vein. Unfortunately he closed with a little riff about how Andy Warhol had started as a commercial artist and look where he’d gone. Yeah, look.

I said, “Very nice. It’s always a treat to be lumped with Warhol.”

Lotte said, “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a great review. I’ve had calls from some very big collectors; do you have any more work to show? This could be a very good thing for you.”

I looked at her and I was about to say something cynical and nasty, which is what I usually did in these situations, but I saw she was really pleased—her face was positively shining with happiness and admiration—so I just nodded and, after an awkward moment of suspension, hugged her, and she hugged me back.

Then I said, “Well, good, but they’re going to have to wait,” meaning I had to do the Italian job first, and she was fine with that and was glad I was at least out of the magazine business for a while. I told her about some ideas I’d had for paintings, and my God, it was nice to talk with Lotte again about painting and real work, just like we were back at the start, and I left her with the hope that my work had turned a corner.

I went home, dreading the solitude that might require me to actually paint something. But as it happened, as I climbed the stairs to my loft I saw that the door to Bosco’s loft was open, and when I looked in I found my neighbor examining himself in the dusty mirror that hangs next to the door. He was wearing an antique tuxedo jacket over jeans and a black Nine Inch Nails tour T-shirt, and I remembered his show and that I had promised to walk over to it with him.

Although Bosco has a perfectly serviceable wife and children, plus an agent, plus a gallery, he likes to have me or some other artist hang out with him when he goes to one of his openings. It’s a tradition I’d always supported with my usual masochism, so we went out and made the short walk up Broadway to Broome. The gallery is west of Broadway and by the time we got to the corner we could see something was up. There were two police cars parked with their lights flashing at the junction of the two streets, blocking traffic, and when we turned the corner we saw that Broome Street was jammed with people, I guessed at least five hundred of them, and maybe twenty cops. A couple of TV vans rumbled and hummed near the gallery entrance and lit it with their glare.