Michael Gruber - The Forgery of Venus

“What, to Venice?”

“No, I’m in Rome. That’s where the studio is. I’ll send you first-class tickets, you’ll come, we’ll stay in a swanky hotel. When was the last time we did something like that? Never is when.”

“But the gallery. And the children-”

“The girl can handle the gallery for a few days and the kids’ll be fine with Ewa. Come on, Lotte, you can spare four, five days.”

And she agreed right away, which I thought was a little odd. Lotte’s response to poverty is the classic French one of bitterness, self-denial, and also resenting the pleasure others get in expending money. We used to fight about that a lot: we couldn’t ever go out for a nice meal, and when I did drag her out she always ordered the least expensive thing on the menu and drank a single glass of wine and sat like the chief mourner at a provincial funeral. She wasn’t like that when I met her; no, she knew how to let the good times roll. It was the kid getting sick. Or me. Maybe I have a special charism for making women bitter.

Two days later Franco and I picked her up at the airport and drove to the San Francesco, which is not quite the Danieli in Venice but is the best hotel in Trastevere. She was quiet, a little withdrawn, which I guess I had to expect, and when we got out of the Merc at the hotel, she gave me a look. Lotte, being a diplomatic brat, is used to the top end of things-or was before she married me-and the look said, can you really afford a place like this? And so I whipped out my magic black card and handed it to the desk clerk.

Who took it with both hands and made a little bow and was all smiles. He was about to check us into the room I’d reserved when Lotte put a hand on my arm and drew me aside.

“I want my own room,” she said.

“Why, you think I’m going to attack you in a frenzy of lust?”

“No, but I’m not here for a cozy holiday. A few months ago you were a raving maniac who pulled a knife on a gallery owner, and I would like to have at least one door between us if this maniac should happen to return.”

“Fine. So what is this, a tour of inspection, like a sanitary commission?”

Now she was standing in combat position, with her arms folded across her breasts and her jaw thrust out, and at that moment more than anything I wanted to tell her the whole thing. But I did not. I was terrified that if I spilled it her face would take on a certain look, one I was more than familiar with from the terminal stages of our marriage, in which shock, pain, and bone-deep disappointment each played a part. The suspicious and canny face she was now showing was not a natural part of her expressive repertoire, I knew. It was me that put it there, as surely as if I’d painted it on with oils. My mom used to wear it often, as a matter of fact, and now I’d given it to my beloved forever. Life is just so wonderful.

“If you like,” she said. “You say you have all this money, and I’ve seen some of it, but I want to be sure you are not in some insane delusion about the rest of it. It’s about our child, Chaz, and about his future. You see why it’s hard for me to trust you-”

“Sure. Okay, no problem. Two rooms. Can they be adjoining or do you have to be heavily isolated from the maniac?”

“Adjoining is fine,” she said coolly, and I turned again to the desk.

An elderly porter with the manners of an ambassador ushered us up to our rooms and got a tip commensurate with his mien. When he’d gone, we agreed to meet in an hour and go out to dinner. I tossed my bag onto what would be my lonely bed and left for the bar on the roof of the hotel, where I drank a couple of Camparis and watched the sky go dark and the shadows creep up the ochre walls of the little convent across the street until they vanished into blackness.

When I returned and knocked on the door of Lotte’s room, I found her ready to go, wearing a dress of just the rose pink that Fra Angelico used to clothe his angels in and a worn velvet jacket colored a sort of verdigris, very quattrocento. It suited her coloring, the dark blond hair, the dark eyes, an unusual combo, but one you see often in paintings from that period. From her Italian mother. And it’s a habit of Lotte’s to dress in colors, when everyone in her circles in New York wears black, as a sign, she says, of mourning for the death of art.

We walked down to the river and north and went to a restaurant I liked off the Piazza di Sta. Cecilia in Trastevere. Both of us had decided to forget about the big issues and the tension of the afternoon, and we had our usual out-of-marriage good time. After dinner we walked back slowly, arm in arm, and talked about light matters or were companionably silent for long stretches on the dark streets. In the hotel, we both went to our separate rooms, after a set of Euro-style cheek kisses, very civilized.

I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep; I paced and watched Italian TV with the sound off for a while, and then found myself waggling the knob of the door to the next room. It was unlocked. Meaning what? She’d neglected to lock her side? Or maybe this is how they did it in Italian hotels when a couple opted for adjoining rooms.

I walked in and sat at the little desk and watched her sleep, and after a while I took a couple of sheets of hotel stationery and the short pencil they supplied for taking phone messages and made a drawing of Lotte as she slept, the rich spill of hair, her ear, the lovely strong lines of neck, jaw, cheekbone. Then I went and retrieved one of the boxes of Staedtler pens I’d bought as presents for the kids and added color, and I was soon caught up in the technical problem of how to get interesting effects with the unsubtle chemical tones they put in these things, and I found myself cruising down the old expressionist highway, pushing the color with lots of overlayering, and it got to be kind of fun.

After that I went back to my room and did a portrait from memory of the two of us sitting up in bed, kind of Kirchneresque, but with the anatomy correct and more detailed, stronger drawing, a Wilmot, in fact, and this made me feel good, although I kept slipping into those strange dreamlike states you fall into at such times and then jerking awake.

And thinking, I have not been sleeping well; I wake from unpleasant dreams in which there are roaring monsters on the canals and half-naked women riding on their backs. And almost every night, even when I do manage to sleep, I am awakened by shouts and gunfire. During my time here there have been outbursts throughout the city, day and night, some affray between the great families of Venice, and the ambassador gives me to understand that it is ever thus. Yet also, Venice plays a dangerous game between the Pope and the power of Spain and the Empire; it was explained to me, but I cannot understand it, something to do with the principality of Montferrat. Assassins prowl the streets; yesterday I saw them fish a body from the canal. My copy of the Crucifixion of Our Lord by Tintoretto is almost done, and after that I will copy his Christ Giving Communion to the Disciples. Now that I have seen the paintings that are here, I am ashamed of how I have composed my own, but I count it ignorance rather than lack of skill. Once you have seen it done scores of times, you say, of course, this is how to arrange figures.

I think the best thing I have seen is the altarpiece that Titian did for the Pesaro family; there is nothing like it in Spain. He commands your eye with masses of color, so that you see the different parts of the work in the order he prescribes. It is like a Mass in itself, one thing following another, and each wonderful-St. Peter and the Virgin and Child, and the banner and the captive Turk and St. Francis and the family of Pesaro, with that remarkable boy staring at an onlooker from out of the picture-that face alone would make a masterpiece, and the audacity of it! But I can do this as well.