Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

This was where my art had always been headed for, how depressing. We entered the lift and ascended to the eighteenth floor where young Mr. Mauri ran something called the Dai Ichi Corporation, dai ichi meaning "number one".

The receptionist was a very dour long-chinned lady with a helmet cut and dull grey suit, but she did not punish us for long and soon we were brought, through an anteroom, to my new collector's office which was as dull as ply and aluminum can be made to be. Nothing suggested taste or sensitivity at all, and I was taken aback to find myself treated with such veneration by Mr. Mauri who appeared to be an earnest, even studious man of thirty.

Our interview was conducted on either side of his big empty desk on which there was a folder containing not only my press file, but a considerable number of transparencies and these my new patron or owner occasionally held up to his desk lamp, speaking about each at some length. I could understand almost everything he said, and often recognised the sources of his sentences, some praise for me from Herbert Read (1973), a little from Elwyn Lynn (1973) and Robert Hughes (1971). I sat, thinking about the Japanese education system, the benefits of learning things by rote. I looked to Marlene but she would not catch my eye. She sat on the edge of her chintz-covered chair, her hands upon her lap, nodding from time to time.

Once more I was in a room watching the dark come down in Tokyo, the sky outside the uncurtained window filled with pink and green neon advertising bars and go-go and Bangkok Massage. Mr. Mauri finished with his dissertation and led us into another room, much more comfortable, with overstuffed armchairs and a number of early twentieth-century paintings— there was a very plausible Matisse.

One of these, reflecting so much quartz halogen from its shrieking gold perimeter, was Tour en bois, quatre. If I experienced a lurch of disappointment, it was not because this was the study, but because, at this momentous meeting, Leibovitz appeared to be a smaller talent than the one I knew when I was a jerk-off teenager with no more data than a black-and-white sixty-five-screen reproduction. I had imagined something ethereal, transporting, mythic, colours glowing with layers of obsessive underpainting.

"My goodness," said Marlene and she was straight at the canvas without any Japanese preliminaries. Mauri was beside her too, a pig at trough, I thought, his gold-rimmed spectacles twirling like a spastic top in the hand behind his back.

"Oh my God," she said.

Is that all there is? I thought. The canvas was almost homely, a chip missing from the blouse, a slight grubbiness on the surface of the cadmium yellow. All this—little things, easily repaired in restoration—was exaggerated by the gaudy criminal frame, and it took a real act of will to escape the pin-up of my youth, to actually see what was in front of me, the lovely witty squirrelly brushwork of the lathe, and, more generally, the brave decisions the old goat had made at a time when no-one, certainly not Picasso, had entered this particular arena of no synthetic cubism.

Here, in the products of the lathe, in cylinders and cones, there was a clear straight line from Cezanne to Leibovitz.

"May I?" Marlene asked.

She lifted the work off the wall and turned it over. "Look," she said to me. Mr. Mauri bowed me forward so I could see the shadowy secret discoloured canvas, the tracks of staples from its loans and travels, the Japanese characters stamped upon the stretcher which, I guessed, marked its appearance at Mitsukoshi in 1913. There was also a desiccated Stalk-eyed Signal Fly I might not have noticed if I had not spent so many nights drawing the enemies of art. This little bugger had freshly hatched, and found itself behind a Leibovitz, and here it had been caught and died but somehow never eaten. This sad little death would continue in my mind for days.

"Perhaps a problem," said Mr. Mauri, "I do not wish to sell it in Japan." He smiled painfully. "Japanese people don't like so much."

"Of course."

"St. Louis perhaps?"

I was slow to realise what was happening in front of me. Mauri was asking her to sell this work. I looked to her but she would not catch my eye.

"The first thing," she told him, cool as ice, "would be to get it to New York."

"Not Freeport?"

"No need."

Mr. Mauri paused and looked at the painting. "Good," he said.

He bowed. Marlene bowed. I bowed.

And that, I realised, was it. It was done. Presumably there would be paperwork, a signature from the owner of the droit moral, but the painting was now all but authenticated. That much I got completely.

I had expected Mr. Mauri would wish to discuss his clever strategies for driving up the price of my nine paintings, but nothing like that occurred and a few minutes later we had passed through the famous Blue Bar and were on the streets of High Touch Town amongst the jostling crowds. Marlene took my hand and swung it high, literally skipping down the steep stairs to the Oedo line.

"What happened?" I asked as we fed our coins into the ticket dispenser.

"Oh baby, baby," she said, "I am so happy. I love you so."

She turned to me and lifted her chin and her eyes were glowing, clear as water on the subway stairs.

"I'm onto you."

"Sure you are," she said and we kissed there, before the turnstiles, in front of the white-gloved ticket collector, beside the flood of High Touch girls and gaijin hopefuls who pushed around us, buffeting us, not knowing what worlds they were connecting to, threads of history joining us to New York, Bellingen and Hugh, always Hugh, sitting on the footpath with his dripping pram.

Jean-Paul came to visit in shirt cuffs and perfume. He was very cross because Marlene Leibovitz had wired him fifteen thousand dollars. What had offended him? He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at me.

He had spent the MORNING WITH LAWYERS. Christ Almighty, Marlene Leibovitz had tricked him into signing over the right to sell If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die in Japan. This painting was his PROPERTY. It had been NOT FOR SALE AT ANY PRICE so Marlene was an EMBEZZLER and a CON ARTIST. He said he would report her to INTERPOL as soon as he could find out how.

I thanked him for being so kind—suck up suck up. Immediately he asked to see my room and I was sorry I had spoken but my FEW POSSESSIONS were in their proper place including the wreath and radio given me by the police. Jean-Paul turned very thoughtful. He put his cigarette under the running tap and said he was worried for my safety. I said Butcher would soon return to fetch me and he gave me a look so full of pity it made my stomach turn.

MINUTES LATER I was informed by Jackson that my bed was needed for a new CLIENT and I must remove my pram and second trolley to the utility room where I would live until my position was made clear. My brother was IN ARREARS. What would happen to me now? My brother had once forced me to live in the back of his FC Holden. I had been LEGALLY IN HIS CARE in the streets of St. Kilda, Mordiallac, East Caulfield and other places he was drawn to by his pursuit of women who would hold his ugly head between their breasts. Yellow streetlights, redbrick flats, designated parking, oil stains on the concrete, no soul alive except, every now and then a single REFFO or a WOG or B ALT each man driven from his place of birth condemned to roam the earth at night.

The FC Holden stank of wet cigarette butts, potatoes sprouting in the damp rusting floor, piles of newspapers mouldering and all this FLOTSAM meant the LAYBACK SEAT could not be lowered, all sleep denied.

At East Ryde, even Bellingen and Bathurst Street I had thought those bad days over but the utility room had been always waiting at the end of the L-shaped hallway, down five steps, beside the laundry, the sour smell of cleaning rags worse than the smell of AUSTRALIA'S OWN CAR. I asked Jackson was there a nicer room. He said no, and then he tried to give me money off the books but I dare not take it.