Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

I had already given the Baroness twenty dollars, enough for all of them to have another 24th Street BLOCK PARTY bless me but I had to walk down twenty flights of stairs-because what the Americans call the ELEVATOR had jammed with people trapped inside shouting and screaming. I had been happy. Now I was not. I wished I was in the Marsh where there were not one single elevator, not even a LIFT, hardly any stairs more than ten steps I refer to the Presbyterian Church, always trouble with the coffins it was called the WATERSLIDE.

On the fifth floor I passed Vinnie's apartment the sign on the door reading FILM MUSICIAN CHELSEA DINER. He was what is called a PACK RAT in VIOLATION of the fire regulations with his FANZINES and BIG BUTT MAGAZINE stacked up along the wall.

On the second floor I had time to dress but my head was sparking and my muscles very bad indeed and I kept on going, still pulling on my new CALVIN KLEIN socks as I hopped out onto Tenth Avenue. I started running with the evening traffic then realised that was wrong. I fitted my shoe and then ran back down Tenth Avenue all the way to the West Side Highway where I took a rest. Blumey, do me sideways as my father would have said.

I could have walked to the Bicker Club I wish I were braver but I'm not. I wanted a holiday from Olivier. He was going through a DIFFICULT PATCH grinding up his ADD medicine and sniffing it up a drinking straw and so his snot was red and clotted and the colour of his eyelids was the purple of a bruise, wild orchid to be polite, skin so weary from the effort to refuse admittance to the light of day. He swam in a sea of ghosts, stung by jellyfish, red welts rising on his hands and neck.

There was also the cassette recorder every night the same song.

FLIES BLOWING ROUND THE DITCH. BLOOD ON

YOUR SADDLE. He had been always so kind to me, had cared for me, paid for my room, had bought me clothes, sat with me, introduced me to so many laundries, and interesting people, Princes and Paupers old chum, but now I was afraid.

My socks were not smooth inside my shoes but I would not stop to fix them and by the time I finally found myself at Mercer Street my feet were bleeding in the dark.

I rang the buzzer.

It replied.

Thank God, thank Jesus, bless us all. I would not have cared if Blue Bones was waiting for me with the flex or razor strop I entered the dark stairs as a wombat returning to the smell of earth and roots.

Marlene rescued my five jars of paint from the skip on Leroy Street and when she came back into the loft her legs were shining, her eyes dulled with anger or distress, how was I to know?

My Golem remained in mil view, angled to catch her eye as she walked in the door and I do not doubt that she already understood the impossible achievement, not just the 1944 canvas, the veracity of the handwriting, the daring composition, but that this work already existed in the writings of Leo Stein and John Richardson. But she did not say a word. Fuck you, I thought. First time ever.

I was to paint over the Golem, she said, bury it like an archaeological hoax.

Fuck you. Second.

We drank whisky. I explained, often calmly, I could not paint over the Golem which would not only be ruined, but never found.

She disagreed, on the basis of what she did not say. I had never encountered the hard sparkling granite wall of her stubbornness.

But neither had she seen Blue Bones with his spinnaker up, flying in the full storm of a rage.

Then the buzzer sounded, always a horrid noise, but this time I thought Thank Christ. I threw a cloth across the painting, laid it against the wall, and sprang the door for my unknown visitor who soon revealed himself, with puffing and farting and a loud "oh dear", to be my brother Hugh.

He hadn't taken his first sip of milky tea before Marlene was attempting, none too fucking subtly, to have him return to the Bicker Club.

"It's such a shame," she said, "there's not a bed for you." At the time I thought she was just being bloody-minded, but of course this was all about the writ—she thought Hugh had become her husband's spy.

Hugh, by now, was terrified of Olivier and—in desperation I suppose—he produced a wet untidy wad of cash and announced he would buy a mattress and he knew just where to go. This independence was unprecedented. He headed out into the dark and left us alone with our violently clinking Lagavulin on the rocks.

An hour later we had been through War and Peace and back again. Hugh returned, having carried his mattress all the way from Canal Street. He slid his damp burden beneath the kitchen island countertop and this was the territory from which he watched our puzzling activity. Far from being a spy, however, he was an old and needy dog, sleeping, reading comic books, demanding I cook him sausages four times a day.

And of course he finally saw the Leibovitz. "Who did that?" he asked, a question that alarmed Marlene who became suddenly and violently affectionate toward him, luring him out on an expedition to Katz's Deli, just to take him away from the sight of me burying the Golem.

But of course I wouldn't bury the Golem as she wished. That is the thing with artists. We are like small shopkeepers, accustomed to ruling our domain. If you don't like how I do it, get out of my shop, my cab, my life. I was in charge and I had no plans to bury anything.

Marlene was the woman who had climbed the power pole and cut the wires and now she was impatient, angry, anxious, I had no idea to what degree. She managed to endure my resistance for three long days, at the end of which time I returned—an exciting afternoon with Hugh's tartar problem—and saw she had laid a coat of Dammar varnish on the Golem electrique.

"Put that brush down," I said.

She considered me, her eye slitted, her cheeks burning, defiant and afraid at once.

Finally, to my immense relief, she dropped the brush into the varnish pot, like a ladle in a bowl of soup.

"And don't you ever fucking touch a work of mine again."

She burst into tears, and of course I held her, and kissed her wet cheeks and hungry lips, and once I had cooked Hugh his sausages she and I went out for a walk, squeezed tight together, lovingly, argumentatively, through the decaying cabbages of Chinatown, down into the shadows of the Manhattan Bridge.

I never suggested that her idea was not brilliant. Only that science made it impossible to do it as she insisted. I was right.

She was as wrong as anyone who would drop a brush into a varnish pot. No-one would trust a layer of Dammar varnish as a safe separation between a valuable work and the crap that must go on top.

Besides if we were to bury it, we would have to plan how it would be discovered, and we required the people with the Yale degrees to unearth the missing Leibovitz themselves. We wanted them:—didn't we?—to feel it was their own genius which had led them to the gold beneath the pile of dung. We would take the Broussard canvas to a top conservator for cleaning—that was Jane Threadwell—and we would, with careful chemistry, let this Threadwell discover the mystery beneath.

She was Milt's lover, so they said. Meaning: Milt claimed it.

Never mind, it's not the point. Here's the thing: conservators— even those reckless enough to shut up Milt Hesse—are as cautious as hamsters. Even in a simple cleaning of an undistinguished work by Dominique Broussard, Jane Threadwell would begin by cleaning a tiny spot—an eighth of an inch in diameter—not from the centre of the canvas either, not even from the corner, but on that peripheral area normally hidden by the rabbet of the frame.

This very clever trembling animal was the one we had to trap.

And much as we might wish her to recklessly scrub away at the Broussard until the gorgeous Golem was revealed, forget it. The merest touch of colour on its swab... she's out of there.