Michael Gruber - The Forgery of Venus

As for Toby, all there is now is a kind of helpless sorrow, although why I should feel sorry for someone who’s doing a lot better than his dad, a pillar of the community and his church, three lovely children he’s never introduced me to-no, I don’t think I want to go there. Although, it was really amazing, as soon as he developed a personality he rejected everything I was, I mean he actually broke crayons deliberately, snap snap snap, and left good drawing paper out in the rain, and ruined the expensive German markers I bought him, and he fixated on my first father-in-law.

And Max just took him over and raised him according to his strict principles, which hadn’t taken all that well with Suzanne but did for her son, and the kid went out for football in high school and was a quarterback and went to Purdue just like granddad and was a star there just like, and became an engineer, ditto. Each year I get a dutiful Christmas card with the beautiful family depicted thereupon, a pleasant-looking group of strangers.

So then back into wonderful singlehood, until I met Lotte and we got married and we had Milo and Rose and then split up. For a while, I thought Lotte would save me, because I could speak to her in a way I could never speak to Suzanne, and I thought I could store the real Chaz kind of in her, like a constant mirror. She has a Memorex-like memory, never forgot a conversation or a dream or one of my many fuck-ups, maddening actually when I think about it, you can’t do that to another person, however much they might love you. No substitute for the true self. Making this recording, together with what remains of my memory after all the dope I sucked into my system while I was with her, and what happened with Zubkoff and later, I have to admit what I did to her. Basically, I walked whistling into my father’s tomb, just like I said I was never going to do, ha ha, and it broke her. The poison leaked into her the way it leaked into my mother. I think it’s why she betrayed me in the end, the most honest and decent person I ever met. And right she was to do it too.

I’d never really understood what she wanted from me. Self-expression? It can’t just be that. I used to do paintings for her all the time, pure self-expression if you like, and the best thing I ever did for her when we were married sent her into a shit fit. It was our fifth anniversary and we’d been fighting on and off for a couple of weeks, and I wanted to make it special for a change. What we’d been fighting about was this goddamn magazine cover I’d done for New York about Giuliani’s wedding, the one to Judith Nathan.

They wanted the obvious pastiche, van Eyck’s Wedding of John Arnolfini , so I did that, in oils on a real oak panel just like the original. I got the arrogant hypocrisy on the face of the man and the Persian-cat self-satisfaction on the face of the woman, and I used the convex mirror behind them to paint in the wedding party, all the pols and celebs, all grinning like skulls, and also I used the ten little lunettes around the edge of the mirror to illustrate scenes from his career and the breakup of his two previous marriages. I mean, it was good. It was a real painting, not a cartoon, and it had some of the authority of the original.

I brought it home after the magazine was finished with it and she went ballistic, her usual business about how could I do this to myself, like my talent was like a god that had to be worshipped in a certain way, and how all the bozos at the magazine had no idea what I was doing, the details wouldn’t even reproduce, and all the time I was wasting on crap like that, my only life. That was one of her phrases-how can you spend your only life this way? But I didn’t see her spending her only life making the kind of money we needed for Milo, I mean it wasn’t like she was maximizing her talent in that little gallery, when any of the big guys would’ve hired her in a heartbeat, she was that good-no, that was down to me, thank you, and around then was when I started in with the amphetamines, to get more work out in my only life and bring in the cash.

Anyway, about mid-May that year, a Sunday, it was, one of the first really nice days we had, maybe a month before our anniversary, I was making coffee or something in the kitchen and I heard this sound of giggling and laughter coming from our bedroom and I went to the door, which was open just a slit, and I looked in. They were on the bed, Lotte and Milo, he must’ve been around four then, and they were playing some kind of tickling game. She was in a white batiste nightgown and he was in Spider-Man pj’s, and it just knocked me out, the sunlight streaming in and lighting them up on the white duvet and the brass of the bed glinting. It was like I was in on some secret, the kind of semierotic play that mothers and sons get into at that age, and for a second I almost remembered-like a sense memory, not like something in my head at all-doing the same kind of thing with my mother.

And that afternoon I went to the loft and stretched and primed a biggish canvas, maybe three feet by five, and I started painting what it was like. I made the boy slightly turned away from his mother, with an expression of delight on his face, and I had the mother sitting up in the center of the bed braced on one arm and with her other arm extended, touching his head, her index finger barely wrapped in a dark curl of his hair. And I got lost in it and for the next few weeks it was like a refuge; I’d grind out my daily bread and then turn back to it, and it was fine, everything was working right, the child’s mouth rendered with three quick strokes, perfect, glistening with the juice of life, and the same with the flesh tones of the mother’s skin I knew like my own, showing through the translucent fabric of her gown in the morning light, pink and pearly, you could almost breathe in the bed-scent of a woman.

And it could’ve been just a genre piece, but it wasn’t; the painted surface was alive and really existent, like it is in serious painting, not mere image at all, and I made the white duvet into what I really have to say was a gorgeous blizzard of the innumerable shades that white can take in morning light. And the vital line of the mother’s arm connecting her to the child, and the set of her haunch on the bed, and the other, supporting arm-perfect, sculptural, vital. I couldn’t believe it.

And I wrapped it up and I was so happy and I thought she’d be too. But when she took the paper off she just stared at it for a long time, as if she was stunned, and then she ran into the bedroom and burst into weeping, just sobbing her heart out, and when I went to her and asked her what was wrong she said something crazy, like, you’re going to kill me, you’re going to kill me. And it turned out that she didn’t get that I could do stuff, I mean in painting, for love that I couldn’t do for money, and she seemed to calm down, and we hung the damned thing in the bedroom, but she wouldn’t talk about it and it was like a bad fairy gift in a fairy tale: instead of bringing us together like it was supposed to, it drove us apart. So after that I didn’t do anything but commercial work.

Which would have been fine, except around then Photoshop came in and art directors who wanted pastiches of famous paintings could just buy the rights from Bill Gates or whomever and pop in new faces, and they even had tools to give that impressionistic effect or craqueleur, and there went half my business. So I had to work twice as hard, especially after we found out that our Milo had those bad lungs, familial pulmonary dystrophy, a disease not attracting much research attention and barely controllable by means of a set of drugs that might have been compounded of powdered diamonds if you looked at the damned bills. And naturally I had to up my own dosage, and one night I lost it and wrecked our house and apparently I slugged Lotte and they had to come and take me away. I say “apparently” because I can’t really recall any of it.