Michael Gruber - The Forgery of Venus

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 collages, 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.

Then 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?”