Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

I felt better. I felt worse. Then I could not stand the map. Heft.

Across to Third Avenue and up. That was my plan. Twentysecond Street, 23 rd Street, and so on. There was no doubt I could reach 55th. Heart closer to two hundred, great red lump of muscle in an uproar, never mind. Reaching 55th Street I was denied access to the building by a man in a brown suit.

I walked back Downtown. Followed the map of the Marsh and arrived at the butcher shop next door to Duane Reade where I bought a pack of Band-Aids it was HIGHWAY ROBBERY.

Olivier finally arrived back at the club BETTER LATE THAN NEVER I gave him the Band-Aids and instructed him to stick one on his window so I could see his office from the street.

Old Chum, he said, I will put up the Band-Aid at exactly ten past one.

When we set up in the bar, Olivier told me he was getting his life back.

Here, he said, have one of these.

He would now divorce Marlene.

He downed a big gin and tonic and crunched up the ice. This will totally fuck the bitch, he said. Once she was divorced she would never authenticate another painting or try to make him sign a form.

Here, he said, have one of these as well.

I pointed out the second pill was a different colour from the first pill. He replied that we were desperados not decorators.

He was on his HOBBY HORSE and galloping. She could go back to the typing pool, old mate, the pond from which she rose and then he listed the names of different SCUM that grew on top of ponds for instance SPIROGYRA.

Jeavons came to have a word.

BLOOD ON HER SADDLE he said the words from a song who knows which one. Jeavons made a sign to the bartender and I understood Olivier was going mad.

Next morning I knew I must take a holiday with my brother. It was his job to care for me. On arrival I requested sausages and eggs. He knew his obligation.

Marlene was asleep in the mattress on the floor. She had a bare leg sticking out beneath her quilt and I could see her batty, bless me, it was so pretty I had to look away. For REASONS KNOWN ONLY TO HIMSELF my brother had purchased a sheet of glass and was grinding pigments, gathering and scraping the pigment with a spatula.

I asked him why he did not buy some nice one-pound tubes.

He said I could go and rack myself.

Very nice. I sat and watched him until he asked me would I like a try. So I was needed to be the DOGSBODY.

He had no linseed oil but something else called AMBER-TOL. I was pleased to show how well I produced the buttery texture he required. The colour very soothing before he made it into something angry. Oceans of yellow, colour of God, light without end.

So, said he, how is your mate Dr. Goebbels?

Who?

Olivier.

I told him Olivier was going to divorce Marlene. I intended to make him happy. Perhaps I did. In any case I heard Marlene shift in the bed but she might as well have been asleep because she did not say a word.

The face of Dominique Broussard's dusty canvas was now turned permanently towards the wall, and if there was still a certain tension between the pair of us, it was entirely pleasant.

That is, my baby had a secret—how had she shrunk the painting? And I also had a secret of my own—jars of paint in colours I refused to explain to her. I left these five enigmas in full view on the blistered kitchen countertop, and I made sketches twenty feet away from them, in a corner by the windows, sitting on a wooden box with my back turned to the dirty street. What was I up to? I would not tell her and she would not ask. We smiled a lot, and made love more than ever.

Then she bought a bench press, assembling it in pretty much the same spirit that I worked on my paints and pencil studies.

Sometimes I stepped away from my secret project to draw her lovely slender arms, the stretched tendons in her neck. She sweated readily when exercising but in these drawings, which I still have, it is my own desire that glistens on her skin.

It was 1981 and the only rule was DON'T BUZZ IN PEOPLE YOU DO NOT KNOW. But when, late one snowy morning, the street bell rang, I buzzed in the stranger and threw our apartment open to the fates. It was either that or walk down five flights to find no-one more interesting than the UPS guy.

On this occasion I accidentally let in Detective bloody Amberstreet.

Marlene lowered her weights.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"What are you doing here, Marlene?" said Amberstreet, his white creased-up face protruding from a long black quilted coat.

"That would be more pertinent."

"Nice shoes," I said, but he had always been impervious to insult and now he complacently considered the snow-encrusted Converse sneakers protruding from the skirt of his black coat.

"Thanks," he said. "They were only sixty dollars." He blinked.

"The thing is Marlene, this loft is the property of the Government of New South Wales. I hope for your sake that you have permission to be here."

But then his eye was taken by I, the Speaker, and here his snarky manner unexpectedly melted and that strange adoring look crept into his eyes. Without altering this new focus of attention he removed his ridiculous coat, revealing a sweatshirt reading "UCK NEW YOR," the "F" and "K" being hidden underneath his arms.

"So," he said, hugging the coat against him like a comforter, "so, Michael, were you a friend of Helen Gold?"

Marlene cast a quick look at me. What the fuck did that mean?

"She's a bloody awful painter," I said. "Why would I know someone like that?"

"She was artist-in-residence here."

"Actually, she was a friend of mine," said Marlene.

"So, Mrs. Leibovitz, you knew Helen killed herself."

"Of course."

"So you understand that you have been contaminating a crime scene?"

"Sorry," she said to me. "I did not want you getting spooked."

"It has bad light," Amberstreet announced, taking in his twentyeight- inch belt another notch. "I don't know who would buy a space like this for an artist. Are you working here, Michael? Are you producing?" He peered around, his bristly head darting towards the jars of paint I had lined up on the kitchen countertop.

"A change of palette!"

He squeaked across the floor towards the kitchen. Marlene shot me a warning look, but why?

The detective was like a dog, sniffing here, pissing there, running from one smell to the next. He laid his coat down on the countertop and picked up two jars, one red, one yellow. "How exciting." Pant, pant, pant. Then he was pushing his pointy nose towards I, the Speaker, squizzing up his eyes, clasping my bottles to his chest. If he had opened one and got a whiff of Ambertol...

He didn't.

"God," he said, "even if the lighting was a little bit too perfect. I mean at Mitsukoshi. A complete sellout, I mean in the good sense, Michael, of everything being sold. I hope you got some press back home."

"I don't know."

"Of course you've not been home either. It was Mauri, right?

Hiroshi Mauri who bought the whole damn show. That's a class above your mate Jean-Paul."

"Yes."

"An associate of yours, Marlene, would that be correct?"

Marlene had been sitting on the bench, but now she stood, wrapping a towel around her shoulders. "Oh please," she said.

"This is so boring."

"Yes, you know what I thought, Michael?" He immediately gave me my jars of paint to hold. "You know what I thought when I heard about your show? I thought, This is how Marlene is going to get Mr. Boylan's Leibovitz out of Australia."

It was hard not to laugh at the little fuck. "Yeah, well you were wrong about that one."

"No, I don't think so, Michael. I wasn't wrong at all. My, this painting was beautifully restored." The V-shaped creases around his eyes were deepening like wire cuts in a sandstone block. He cocked his head, and, in what seemed a sort of frenzy of curiosity, twisted his wire arms fiercely around his chest. "Really, it's no excuse for what we did to it, but it's actually improved, don't you think?"