Michael Gruber - The Forgery of Venus

Aweek later I rented a paint sprayer and masked the windows and my face and sprayed the whole interior white. The paint was barely dry when, as we’d arranged, Suzanne showed up with a U-Haul full of furniture. I was glad to see her and I carried the stuff up in a pretty good mood, although it was mainly really heavy pieces from her parents’ house, and I thought it would be a nice day, moving into a place we were going to live together in, but I noticed she was in one of her dark phases; she sat on a chair smoking, and didn’t really respond when I started joking and playing around about where we were going to put the different chairs and dressers and all, like I was an interior decorator. Really the place looked kind of grungy still, despite all my work, and I thought that was what was bringing her down, she was disappointed.

But no. She said, “I’m pregnant.” And the usual, are you sure, yeah, almost two months late, and she’s had the tests and all, and how did it happen, I thought you were on the pill, and she sort of lost it then, like, oh, I knew you’d say it was my fault and my life is over, and my career is just taking off. Which was mainly that she sang on open mike nights in a couple of clubs in the East Village and there was a guy who said he was from a record company and gave her a card, but I didn’t mention that. And I said, well, what do you want to do? She was crying by then, and I hugged her and said I loved her and whatever she wanted was okay with me, abortion or have the baby, we’d manage.

The girl gets pregnant and either you get rid of it or you have it and your life flows into a different channel than you thought it would. We went back and forth about it quite a few times; first she wanted to abort and I didn’t, and then she didn’t and I did, and I guess the Catholic thing is still there, but not only that, it’s something about the flow of life, it makes me crazy to think of the hole you’d have to live with for the rest of your life, and that can’t be good for a relationship. But what did I know? Charlie always said go with life, love your fate. Amor fati is the expression. I’d have given anything to be able to talk this through with her, but when I called the number of her society they said she was en route to Uganda.

And so was my life set on a false course, which is another reason why I’m telling you all this ancient matter. For lust will languish and its heat decay, says Petronius Arbiter, you’ll recall that from the class we had on Renaissance translations from the Latin masters-one of my rare B grades, I think-and it’s so true. By the time I marched up the aisle with Suzanne my attachment was more than half guilt, but I thought I could fix that somehow, through fidelity, through affection, and somehow lay the curse my father had passed on. Unfortunately, it turns out the habit of self-betrayal tends to spread. It pollutes the other parts of life, in my case my painting, and it acts as a marker for others, like those cruel experiments where they paint a monkey green and the other monkeys tear it to pieces. If you’re false to yourself, I think, other people find it easier to be false to you. I mean, there’s no one there to begin with, so what’s the big deal?

It’s a shame, in a way, that I didn’t actually tape my life like old Krapp did. The present effort is not an adequate substitute because-how should I put this-I’m not entirely sure who I am anymore. Maybe that was Beckett’s point in his play, that none of us are anyone anymore, we’re all hollow men, heads filled with straw, as Eliot says in the poem, colonized by the media, cut off from the sources of real life. Why art with any soul in it is grinding to a halt.

So let’s run through my life from then, quickly, because it’s not much fun for me, and also, I have to say, because it may or may not be my life. But stay with me here.

Okay, the girlfriend’s pregnant, we go to visit the parents in Wilmington. Max, the dad, is a big, jovial slab of beef; Nadine, the mom, is a slightly withered Southern ex-belle. They are not pleased with the catch, I detect, but they’re resigned, whatever the little girl wants. Max takes me aside, asks how I’m going to support Suzanne in the manner to which she’s become accustomed, and I say I intend to work as an artist, and he goes, lots of luck, sonny, I hope you intend to be a commercial artist, because you’re buying into a high-maintenance package, don’t be fooled by the bohemian styling.

We got married anyway and lived in the loft and had the baby, which was Toby. The fact is me and Suzanne should have been three hot weeks in a Spanish hotel room, not a ten-year marriage, although you can build a lot of plans on guilt. It was going to be great, I thought, the opposite of my parents’ marriage, or her parents’ marriage, and we were going to be artists together, that was the basis, really, a life together in art. Then it turned out that for whatever reason I wasn’t going to be the hot young painter of the season and she was not going to be one of the defining singer-songwriters of that decade, and the funny thing is, despite our mutual mediocrity we both made a shitload of money for a while, which muffled the pain, as it often does. I could barely keep up with the ad work, and she had one of her songs covered by the thrush of the moment and it was a Top 40 hit for a while. Terrible song, I still hear it now and then if there’s a radio tuned to an oldies station, all her songs anodyne and slightly sappy, tinkly, no real juice, easily distinguished from Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, etc.-like my painting, unfortunately.

Then, because she said you can’t raise a kid out of a loft in SoHo, we bought a house in the country, a four-bedroom in Nyack on three and a half acres, with a barn; God alone knows what it’s worth now, but way back then those big houses were going for a hundred and a half, two hundred, which seemed like a lot of money, and I started to work all week in the city, and I should have been the one to have affairs, I mean come on, I was rich in New York and that was the era for it, but I never did, not once, guilt again, probably-no, yet another example of schmuckhood. Mark was burning up the bedsheets during that time, and he used to invite me along to the meat markets downtown, but no, I was the opposite of Dad in that respect. I was just like Mom. It actually took me years to catch on about what Suzanne was doing; I thought I had an okay marriage until one evening she got drunker than usual and set me right with the list of guys.

Somewhere in those years she gave up music, decided clay was more her thing, then printmaking, then book design, then video, then back to clay, but at a higher level, she wrote a play too, and film scripts, an all-around artistic type, Suze, no focus in any of them, just a desperate desire to be in a scene, be noticed.

Or so I think, but I have no idea who she is. “Late for the Sky,” that Jackson Browne song, from the days when we thought rock lyrics held the key to all mysteries, I still think about her when they play it on the oldies. I have to say, I can’t carry the freight for the breakup of my first marriage. I don’t have it in me to be the complaisant husband; I might have looked the other way for a long time, like they do in Cheever stories, sophisticated and all that, cool, but she brought the guys into the house, into our bed, and they were universally scuzzballs, bartenders, drifters, arty fakes, lawn guys with rusted-out pickup trucks. I’d come home on Friday after a week in the city and there’d be some gap-tooth skinny asshole on my deck drinking my booze, her new friend, and one week I just didn’t bother coming back and that was it. I guess my first marriage was based on a secret deal: I would take care of her and she could do what she wanted, and I would always be there when she got tired of it, but in the end I couldn’t; and the reason, I have to say, was I just didn’t care for what she produced. The sad fact is that only the great artists have different rules, and the patzers have to live like everyone else or settle for being pathetic.