Michael Gruber - The Forgery of Venus

We ordered claras, and when the waiter left he said, “Not really. It’s just I like to stay kind of private.”

“Well, you’ve succeeded,” I said. “So what’ve you been doing all this time? Sidewalk portraits for ten euros?”

“Among other things. What do you think of your portrait?”

I studied it again. “It’s terrific. Full of life. More of me than I like to see revealed, frankly. And incredible that you can work in watercolors instead of pastels like the other sidewalk guys. Do your customers appreciate this kind of work?”

“Some do. Some really do. And a small percentage think they’re crap, not pretty enough.”

“Just like real life,” I said. “But you can’t possibly make a living from this.”

“No. I have other sources of income.” Our drinks came, and Chaz engaged in some rapid-fire repartee in Spanish with the waiter that I didn’t get. The man laughed and went away.

“Then why do it?” I asked.

“I enjoy it. It’s perfectly non-commoditized art, anonymous, and a pure gift of pleasure to those who can see, and even those who can’t see might come to appreciate their portraits after a while. Artists used to live like that in Europe all the time, back in the Middle Ages. Besides that, I have a studio. I paint a lot.”

“What do you paint?”

He grinned a sly grin. “Oh, you know, slick, witty nudes, just like before. It’s amusing. And I do other stuff too.”

The tone here was purposely vague, and I rose to the bait.

“You’re working for Krebs,” I said. “You’re putting together that collection that got burned in Dresden.”

“I might be. Although you can’t really trust anything I say. I mean, I’m a crazy person doing sidewalk portraits for small change.”

“But you’re not crazy. You proved that. The whole thing was a scam.”

“Was it? Maybe I made that up too.”

“Yeah, but come on, Chaz. Hundreds of people knew you, there are records, tax returns…I mean, you may have had some issues with memory, but you also had a verifiable life.”

“No!” he said with some heat. “No one has a verifiable life. A little lump in your brain growing in the wrong place and you’re not you anymore, and all the records in the world won’t change that. If you can’t trust your memory-and I can’t-then the record of your life, the witness of others, is meaningless. If I presented you with a shitload of records and the testimony of dozens of people telling you that you were, I don’t know, a plumber from Arkansas, would you believe it? If your supposed wife Lulubelle and your five kids swore on a stack of Bibles that you were Elmer Gudge of Texarkana, would you say, gosh, well, I had a fantasy that I was an insurance guy from Connecticut, but that’s all over now, hand me my pipe wrench? Of course you wouldn’t, because your memory’s intact. But what if your memory became unreliable, and what if your actual wife, say, looked at you and went, who’s he?”

This line of talk was making me uncomfortable, so I said, “That must’ve been tough, Lotte shafting you like that. I assume you don’t see her anymore.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“Well, she betrayed you, didn’t she? She must have been involved in the scam from the beginning, supplying photos and whatnot, and she betrayed you to your face, just before you went berserk. Unless you’ve forgiven her.”

“There was nothing to forgive, and she didn’t betray me. I betrayed myself. She just made me see it. I’m sort of grateful to her for that. And if I don’t see much of her, it’s not because of what she did-it’s the shame.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how you look through a kaleidoscope and you tap it, and the same little pieces of glass snap into a completely different pattern? That’s what happened. I left Mark’s party that night and took a cab to my loft. And when I went in it was like an alien place, and full of horrible vibes, like an ancient tomb with evil spirits inhabiting it, and even though I’d lived there and worked there for years, it was like I was there for the first time. I couldn’t find stuff, I didn’t recognize the things that were there, as if another me had been there all those years. And I started to freak out bad, and then this revelation-the kaleidoscope clicked, and I saw it. I saw that there was really no difference at all between me and Suzanne.”

He stared at me in a way that seemed to require a response, so I said, “That’s ridiculous. Her problem is she has no talent and wants to be recognized. You have a lot of talent.”

He said, “Yeah, you don’t get it either. It’s the same fucking thing ! Having talent and not putting it on the line is just like not having it and desperately wanting to be recognized. It’s the same kind of pathetic. It’s not noble. It’s not elevated to use the techniques of Velázquez on a perfume ad and laugh secretly at the customer for not catching the nuances. It’s a life made of shit, and I’m positively grateful to Lotte and Krebs for getting me out of it.”

“By making you crazy.”

“No, just crazy in a different way,” he said, and smiled the smile of a contented man.

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I don’t buy it,” I said after a bit. “I can’t understand why you didn’t just call your sister. Surely she would’ve blown the whole plot to pieces.”

“Oh, right, Charlie. Yes, sure, but Charlie was nowhere to be found during the period in question. Some anonymous donor gave her a bunch of money to set up a field hospital in Chad, immediate departure a requirement, and you’ll recall I didn’t have a phone. She was incommunicado for six weeks, and so when I called her the night I went berserk I got a no-such-number message, although there should have been people at her organization. For a while I thought I’d made her up too.”

“You were using Krebs’s phone. Maybe they messed with it somehow.”

“Yes, and they arranged for Charlie to be gone, and everything else that drove me nuts. A secretive international organization with tentacles everywhere. Don’t you realize how crazy that sounds?”

It did sound crazy, so I changed the subject. “So Charlie’s back from there?”

“Oh, yeah. In fact she lives with me in…wherever I live. She’s in and out on missions of mercy, but we have a nice setup.”

“Just like your boyhood dream.”

“Just.” Again, that annoying smile.

“And Milo? I presume he survived.”

“Yeah. He had his transplant, he’s flourishing. A teenager, which we never thought we’d see. The fruits of my wickedness.”

“Speaking of which, did you ever figure out if you did that Velázquez Venus ?”

“Does it matter? You’ve got all the information. What do you think?”

“What I think is that you’re a terrific painter, but you’re not Velázquez.”

This was a little cruel, I admit, but something about how this had all turned out irritated me. It was like when someone accosts you on the street with a problem and you start to respond in a civilized way, to be of service, let’s say, and after a few minutes you pick up that the fellow is crazy and you feel like you’ve wasted your time and your concern.

“You’re right, I’m not,” he said. “But did you ever get a chance to take a close look at it? The real thing, I mean, not the poster.”

“No, but I’ll be in Madrid tomorrow. I intend to see it then. And I assume you haven’t had anymore whatever you call them-visions. Where you think you’re him.”

“No,” he said, with a tone of regret in his voice, “not since I saw him die. I seem to have enough trouble keeping up with me.”