Michael Gruber - The Forgery of Venus

Jackie’s a painter too, but unlike me he yearns for gallery success. Unfortunately, while he has all the technique in the world he has no creativity at all. Ever since I’ve known him he’s been pursuing the fashions, always a little too late. He started out doing big splashy abstracts and then, in turn, op art, color fields, pop art, and now he’s into conceptual. One winter a few years ago I walked into his loft on Crosby Street and found him feeding big Warholian-wannabe canvases into the Ashley stove he used to heat the place. No loss, that, but he seemed curiously cheerful about it, and I recall being a little envious that he honestly didn’t give a shit about his work. He thought the whole art scene was a scam and that sooner or later he’d hit it right and cash in.

Anyway, when I came in he waved me over, and I ordered a martini and unloaded about the Vanity Fair fiasco. He commiserated and, unlike Lotte, didn’t ask me why I didn’t do the gallery thing, which was restful at least, and then he said he was leaving New York for Europe. Yeah, some rich guy wanted some paintings done, a variety of styles, money up front.

“This is hotels?” I asked him, but he got a sly look on his face and said, “For private customers, yes, you know, yachts and beach houses, and this man I am working for, he says he’ll represent me on the European market, all these Russian billionaires now, they want paintings, so it will be very big.”

I asked him what Mark had to say about that, because Mark’s his gallery and I happen to know that Mark had been carrying him for a while, but he said, “No, it was Mark who turned me on to this. It is partly his idea.”

So fine, I was happy for him and I figured that if I wanted to bitch I could use the bartender. Or the back-bar mirror.

I walked out of there with a couple of martinis in me easing the pain and strode up to Prince Street and Lotte’s gallery to pick up the kids, it being my night for them, and to tell her that there wouldn’t be quite as much money as expected this month. I received a lot less sympathy than I’d just had from Jackie, but when I showed her photographs of the rejected paintings, she thought they were terrific and she said she was sure they’d sell, if I wanted, and I did want, I couldn’t stand the sight of them. She let out one of her famous sighs, the meaning of which I perfectly understood-the insoluble, neurotic business about why I mind selling this stuff to people for their walls, as opposed to a magazine. It’s totally irrational, selling is selling, but still…I think it’s because the buyers won’t see what’s there either, they’ll say, oh, I love Kate Winslet, and they’ll buy it as a kind of kitschy joke, like it was the same as Andy Asshole’s silk screens of Marilyn, a pure pop object, and that brought up the thought that maybe it is, maybe I’m just kidding myself. I’m a joke too, after all, like I said, but a poor one.

The kids are fine with self-entertainment in my loft, all kinds of stuff for them to play with, cut themselves with, poisons galore, and nothing’s ever happened, not a scratch; is it luck or just growing up around a non-childproof environment? While the two of them messed around with paints on the floor I went to my old Dell and Googled some of the weird stuff I’d experienced in that second drug session. I drew a blank on “Gito de Silva,” but I had a hit on “Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop,” which it turns out is a street in the old quarter of Seville, in Spain. I brought it up on Google Earth and zoomed down as far as it would let me. A tiny little street, and I could see the route he (or I) took from his (or my) house to the plaza. I told myself that I was in fact a tourist in the old city of Seville once, age nine, with my father, and therefore it was some kind of dredged-up residual memory.

Had a good time with the kids, our usual drawing contest, we all sat around and drew each other and Rose won by popular acclaim like always. She’s pretty good for four years old; maybe she’ll be a famous artist like her daddy, God forbid. Milo can draw too, but I think he’s mainly a word guy. Walking down the street behind them, I almost had to cry. Milo is so frail and Rose is such a sturdy little truck, and she worships him, it’s just going to tear her apart, when…Another thing I have to talk to Shelly about; he’s a research guy, maybe there’s some program I can get Milo into, or move to a country where you don’t have to be rich to live. But what he needs is a new set of lungs.

After they were asleep I went out on the fire escape and smoked some dope and had a funny little reverie about my first and only gallery show, and it was interesting because of the contrast between it and what I’d experienced on the salvinorin. Or maybe the salvinorin was somehow enriching the experience in some neurophysiological way. Anyway, I recalled being late because I’d decided I had to drop some stuff off at an ad agency in midtown, and then I had to have an after-work drink with a couple of people from the agency. A couple three drinks or so, and then I called Suzanne from a phone booth and told her to go on without me, I’d be there soon. The show was in Mark Slotsky’s gallery on West Broadway off Worth Street, and she got all steamed at that, was I nuts, this was my big break and I was screwing around with some crappy ad, and didn’t I know who’d be there, Mark had called in all these chips to get a good crowd and had spent a fortune on the spread, not shitty wine and cheese but catered from Odeon and so on and so on. What it was, she wanted to make an entrance with the star, and now she’d have to just walk in like everyone else.

I remember walking down West Broadway and feeling like I was going to my execution. I was still wearing my work clothes, paint-smeared, not that clean, a hoodie and jeans and really awful raggedy-ass sneakers, and I felt embarrassed, like I had wanted to look like this to impress all the art lovers that I don’t give a shit about.

And I arrived, the place all lit up and people spilling out on the sidewalk, chattering and holding flutes of champagne. They looked at me, and I felt like the skeleton at the feast, but then I was recognized: Mark shouted out my name and he and Suzanne came running over to me, my wife dressed in a black spaghetti-strap outfit that would have been racy underwear in my mother’s day, and I collected slaps on the back and kisses, and they were all beaming and happy, because the show looked to be a hit, there were little stick-on red dots on many of the paintings, they were sold, I was selling, this is success. And then I had to meet the buyers, the art hags, women in black with ethnic jewelry hanging from neck and ears, and chunky gold and diamonds like fetters on their wrists, and I was trying to be happy like them, and I heard how wonderful it was for them to have paintings that look like something, and Mark was talking a mile a minute about appreciation, he means appreciation in value, a good investment, they were getting in on the ground floor with Charles Wilmot, Jr.

And while this was going on I was chugging champagne as fast as I could grab the flutes off the silvery trays; the bubbles brought up a froth of bile from my stomach and I wanted to vomit. The paintings on the white walls were unbearable to look at, the paint looked like shit, muddy and dull, and all the avid faces around me looked like birds of prey, carrion beasts. Yes, neurotic, self-destructive, I know it, and I was wondering why I thought about that show just then. It’s a memory I don’t treasure, except that was the night I first saw Lotte Rothschild, although I was able to turn that into shit as well.

The next day I took the kids off to their school and I came back to my place and borrowed Bosco’s van to take my rejected paintings from the magazine offices in the Condé Nast Building over to Lotte’s gallery. The place was empty and we had a nice talk, almost like old times, so much so it made my heart hurt. And then I recalled that fire escape reverie and I said, “Do you remember my first show?”