Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

“Over the couch.”

“Right.”

“You know, it might look kind of nice in your place,” she said. “Once all this mess is cleared away, you know what you’ll have to do?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Something like one-to-ten.”

“One-to-ten?”

“Years.”

“Oh,” she said, and dismissed the entire penal system with an airy wave of her hand. “I’m serious, Bern. Once everything’s cleared up, you can sit down and paint yourself a Mondrian and hang it over the couch.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I mean it. Face it, Bern. What old Piet did back there doesn’t look all that hard to do. Okay, he was a genius because he thought of it first, and his proportions and colors were brilliant and perfect and fit into some philosophical system, whatever it was, but so what? If all you’re looking to do is make a copy for your own place, how hard could it be to follow his measurements and copy his colors and just paint it? I mean there’s no drawing involved, there’s no shading, there’s no changes in texture. It’s just a white canvas with black lines and patches of color. You wouldn’t have to spend ten years at the Art Students League to do that, would you?”

“What a thought,” I said. “It’s probably harder than it looks.”

“Everything’s harder than it looks. Grooming a Shih Tzu’s harder than it looks, but you don’t have to be a genius. Where’s that sketch you made? Couldn’t you follow the dimensions and paint it on canvas?”

“I can paint a wall with a roller. That’s about it.”

“Why’d you make the sketch?”

“Because there’s too many paintings,” I said, “and unless they’re side by side I couldn’t tell them apart, Mondrian being Mondrian, and I thought a sketch might be useful for identification purposes. If I ever see any picture besides the one in the Hewlett. I couldn’t do it.”

“Couldn’t do what?”

“Paint a fake Mondrian. I wouldn’t know what to do. All the black bands are straight like a knife edge. How would you manage that?”

“I suppose you’d need a steady hand.”

“There must be more to it than that. And I wouldn’t know how to buy paints, let alone mix colors.”

“You could learn.”

“An artist could do it,” I said.

“Sure. If you knew the technique, and-”

“It’s a shame we didn’t get to Turnquist before he died. He was an artist and he admired Mondrian.”

“Well, he’s not the only artist in New York City. If you want a Mondrian for over the couch and you don’t want to try painting it yourself, I’m sure you could find someone to-”

“I’m not talking about a Mondrian for my apartment.”

“You’re not? Oh.”

“Right.”

“You mean-”

“Right.”

“Where’s the waitress, dammit? A person could die of thirst around here.”

“She’s coming.”

“Good. I don’t think it’ll work, Bern. I was talking about making something that’d look good over your couch, not something that would fool experts. Besides, where would we find an artist we could trust?”

“Good point.”

The waitress arrived, setting a fresh martini in front of Carolyn and having a look at my Coke, which was still half full. Or half empty, if you’re a pessimist.

“That’s perfect,” Carolyn told her. “I bet you used to be a nurse, didn’t you?”

“That’s nothing,” she said. “It’s supposed to be a secret, but I just know you won’t tell anyone. The bartender used to be a brain surgeon.”

“He hasn’t lost his touch. It’s a good thing I’ve got Blue Cross.”

The waitress did her exit-laughing number, taking Carolyn’s eyes with her. “She’s cute,” said my partner in crime.

“A shame she’s not an artist.”

“Clever repartee, a great personality, and a nifty set of wheels. You figure she’s gay?”

“Hope does spring eternal, doesn’t it?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Gay or straight,” I said, “what we really need is an artist.”

The whole room seemed to go silent, as if someone had just mentioned E. F. Hutton. Except that other conversations were still going on. It’s just that we stopped hearing them. Carolyn and I both froze, then turned our eyes slowly to meet one another’s exophthalmic gazes. After a long moment we spoke as if in a single voice.

“Denise,” we said.

“Hold this,” Denise Raphaelson said. “You know, I can’t remember the last time I stretched a canvas. Who bothers nowadays? You buy a stretched canvas and save yourself the aggravation. Of course I don’t usually get customers who specify the size they want in centimeters.”

“It’s becoming a metric universe.”

“Well, you know what I always say. Give ’em a gram and they’ll take a kilo. This should be close, Bernie, and anybody who takes a yardstick to this beauty will already have six other ways to tell it’s not the real thing. But the measurements’ll be very close. Maybe it’ll be a couple millimeters off. Remember that cigarette that advertised it was a silly millimeter longer?”

“I remember.”

“I wonder whatever happened to it.”

“Somebody probably smoked it.”

Denise was smoking one of her own, or letting it burn unattended in a scallop shell she used as an ashtray. We were at her place and we were stretching a canvas. We meant Denise and me. Carolyn had not accompanied me.

Denise is long limbed and slender, with dark brown curly hair and fair skin lightly dusted with freckles. She is a painter, and she does well enough at it to support herself and her son Jared, with the occasional assistance of a child-support check from Jared’s father. Her work is abstract, very vivid, very intense, very energetic. You might not like her canvases but you’d be hard put to ignore them.

And, come to think of it, you could say much the same of their creator. Denise and I had kept occasional company over a couple of years, sharing a fondness for ethnic food and thoughtful jazz and snappy repartee. Our one area of disagreement was Carolyn, whom she affected to despise. Then one day Denise and Carolyn commenced to have an affair. That didn’t take too long to run its course, and once it was over Carolyn didn’t see Denise anymore, and neither did I.

I could say I don’t understand women, but what’s so remarkable about that? Nobody does.

“This is gesso,” Denise explained. “We want a smooth canvas so we put this on. Here, take the brush. That’s right. A nice even coat. It’s all in the wrist, Bernie.”

“What does this do?”

“It dries. It’s acrylic gesso so it’ll dry in a hurry. Then you sand it.”

“I sand it?”

“With sandpaper. Lightly. Then you do another coat of the gesso and sand it again, and a third coat and sand it again.”

“And you on the opposite shore will be?”

“That’s it. Ready to ride and spread the alarm through every something village and farm.”

“Every Middlesex village and farm,” I said, which was the way Longfellow had put it. Middlesex sort of hung in the air between us. “It comes from Middle Saxons,” I said. “According to where they settled in England. Essex was the East Saxons, Sussex was the South Saxons, and-”

“Leave it alone.”

“All right.”

“‘Every bisexual village and farm.’ I suppose No Sex was the North Saxons, huh?”

“I thought we were going to leave it alone.”

“It’s like a scab, it’s irresistible. I’m going to see if I can’t find a book with the painting reproduced. Composition with Color, 1942. God knows how many paintings he did with that title. There’s a minimalist I know on Harrison Street who calls everything he paints Composition #104. It’s his favorite number. If he ever amounts to anything, the art historians are going to go batshit trying to straighten it all out.”