Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

I have never minded working in public view, but I would not let Marlene see me walk the wire until I was safely on the other side.

She had the eye, the intelligence, I've said that all before, but at this moment these qualities would not help the task at hand.

This is why I went ahead and baked my masterpiece before submitting it for her approval. The canvas fitted perfectly inside the GE oven and I gave it sixty very bloody nervous minutes at a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit. If I had used linseed oil this would not have been enough but because the medium was Ambertol it set like bakelite. Its skin was dry and hard as if it had stood in air for sixty years.

I left Le Golem electrique, 1944 to cool like an apple pie on an American sill, and then I took the paints and threw them into a skip, not the one nearby on the Prince Street corner, but right over on Leroy Street, almost on the West Side Highway where the marauding relentless Amberstreet would not bring his pointy red-tipped nose. It was here that I also discovered, along with broken plaster and bricks from a demolished garage, a gorgeous prissy frame, a smoky grey with grapes and garlands in low relief, Too big, but that was better than too small. This I carried home in triumph, down streets which were slowly becoming familiar, Leroy, Bedford, Houston, Mercer. I let myself in, finally comfortable in the darkness of the stairs.

Marlene was still not home. I turned the easel, set the painting on it, angled to catch what little light there was. It was a lovely, lovely thing, believe me, and I was about to celebrate, was searching for a corkscrew on the worktable, when I heard the scream. Or not a scream, a screech. Marlene!

I ran to the door, no weapon but the corkscrew, leaped into the dark, entered the confusion of trash and carpet, fell, tumbled, broke nothing, and arrived finally on the street level to find her, sitting in the open door. The worm was in the apple but I did not know. I pulled her to her feet but she shrugged me violently away. She dropped a Kodak envelope. I picked it up. She said: "He said, Are you Marlene Leibovitz?"

Just as I had once thought we were being evicted because of Evan Guthrie's metacarpal, I now imagined this crisis was something to do with the Kodak envelope. Opening it, I discovered photographs of Dominique's painting, the one I had sanded to make the Golem. I was thinking, We've been caught.

She's been caught.

"No, no, not that." She snatched the photographs away from me and thrust a quite different sheaf of papers at my chest, but I could not concentrate on this because I had a whole different story running like a train, steel rails all the way from here to gaol.

"How did he get it?"

"Who?"

"Amberstreet."

"No! No!" she cried, and she was in a fury, with me, with the world. "Read it!"

We were still at the open doorway, half in Mercer Street, and it was here I finally understood the sheaf of papers. A writ. Some bastard in a London Fog had served a writ on her, an action for divorce issued by Olivier Leibovitz (plaintiff) against Marlene Leibovitz (defendant).

"This is what upset you?"

"Well, what do you think?"

But why would she be upset? She didn't love him. He had no money. Her reaction was a complete surprise to me. Also: we did not talk to each other like this, were never abrasive, sarcastic, hostile. Suddenly I was an enemy? A fool? These were not roles I liked to play. They turned me nasty.

"Then what about the photographs?"

"The photographs don't matter. They're not the point." Her voice was trembling and I embraced her, trying to wring out all the anger from us both, but she would not be held and I felt a great wave of annoyance as she rejected me.

"I am the authenticator," she said. "It is me."

Oh fuck, I thought. Who gives a fuck?

As I ascended the stairs, two steps behind, I could actually feel her heat. When we arrived in the loft where my painting stood waiting, her cheeks were pink, her eyes narrowed. She glanced at the painting briefly, and nodded.

"Now listen," she said. "This is what we're going to do."

So what about my bloody painting? No doubt she saw the Golem but there was no—Well done, Butcher, who else could have ever made such a thing?

Rather she was busy hurling the writ across the room then laying out the Kodak prints like a hand of patience. There was the original Broussard in all its glutinous vanity. The photographs were extremely unsettling in other ways, suggesting an interest Marlene had managed to hide from me completely.

"You took these?"

"You didn't understand I knew what you were doing?"

"But why?"

She was completely without humour, all hot and closed down.

"You said I had to establish the provenance. Well this is how we're going to do it. You're going to paint the Broussard back on top."

I laughed. "Perhaps you'd like to look at it before I cover it!"

"Of course I've looked at it. What do you think I've been thinking about, baby?"

"You peeked."

"Of course I peeked. What did you expect?"

"You like it?"

"It's brilliant, OK? Now you're going to paint this back over your Golem." She slid the photographs around like a pea-andthimble man on lower Broadway. "Not exactly as it was, but close. Trust me. You're going to use the same pigments, exactly."

"I threw them out."

"You what?"

"Hey, calm down baby."

"You what? Where did you throw them?"

"In a skip."

"Skip where?"

"Leroy."

"Leroy and what?" But she already had one foot in a running shoe.

"Leroy and Greenwich."

She tied up the second shoe and she was gone. I watched her from the fire escape. Although I had often seen her set off for exercise, I had never actually seen her run. On another occasion it would have made my fond heart beat faster, for she ran over those cold grey cobbles as across the surface of a hamburger grill, so straight that she might have had a string attached to that little springy tuft of hair on her straw-coloured head. Seeing her then, my lover, my supporter, my tender funny angel, I was frightened by my own complacency.

Re: sexual intercourse. They say you DO NOT LOOK AT THE MANTELPIECE when you are poking the fire so I poked her, bless me, what blazing logs, she squealed and HOLLERED as if consumed by BUSHFIRE, crimson edges on the floating leaves, by crikey it was a long time between drinks.

It is true the BARONESS was not TOP HOLE. No kids at Sydney Grammar, etc., if Olivier did not have a job I would not have visited the Rousseau Houses at all. Olivier went to work, taking his bottles of LORAZEPAM and ADDERALL, but no SUBSTANCE could make him happy and he was continually saying bad things about Marlene. When he began to cry at breakfast I knew I had chosen the losing side, forgive me, bless me, I wish I was a nicer man.

I tried to return to Butcher but he would not answer the bell.

I had made UNSUITABLE friends, whose fault was that? They were often artists from the movies and the stage i. e. Vinnie and the Baron. I went to see them with my chair and they encouraged me to put my sausage in the baroness. Too many dead pigs cooked in that apartment. No LILAC and ROSEMARY as in A TOUCH OF CLASS when Butcher would sit out in the car reading ARTnews wishing he could find his long-lost name.

The Baron said he respect me man but he took the money from my back pocket and also Olivier's VALIUM. But I was ON THE JOB, just on the foothills as they say, the tide just turning, seaweed floating, little fishes, bless me. Then Vinnie and the Baron took RABBIT EARS off the TV and used them to jab my bum. Then they went too far. The room was dark and small with six lava lamps and I knocked Vinnie on his bright red little SNOUT so he left a SNAIL TRAIL of black boot polish across the wallpaper as he descended. I should have done the Baron with a BELAYING PIN but not being a character in The Magic Pudding I was forced to use my chair instead. The Baroness, socalled, was screaming like a STUCK PIG in the backyard of a house in STARKVILLE MISSISSIPPI from where she came hoping to be a dancer although only five foot tall. I never hit a woman. I picked up my clothes and it was WALTZING MATILDA TA-TA BYE-BYE.