‘If you start smelling mostly like a horse, give me a ring,’ said Hennessy.
‘I will,’ said Joe. He thanked us and drifted away.
‘You guys probably have things to talk about,’ said Kitty. ‘I’m going to look at the paintings and maybe find some champagne.’
The crowd was thinning out.
‘I used to have an impulse to climb into your lap and tell you my troubles,’ I said to Hennessy.
‘Looks as if you might have found a better lap,’ he replied, grinning at Jim.
‘Do my best,’ said Jim.
We left together and he did.
Chapter 59. Jim on the Brim
The painting I fished out of the water. I haven’t really looked at it since I brought it home. Angelica said it was a lot of tiny, tiny dancing bad luck and we’d both be sorry if I picked it up. Did it try to drown me? The boom knocked me overboard when she let go of the tiller. Had I told her what happens when you do that? Now I can’t be sure. Anyhow, this seems like a good time to see what’s what with this thing.
Chapter 60. Paradise Lost
I wanted to know how (and if) things were with Volatore Three, the hairstylist and inventor of TurboScalp. I still had his card so I invited him round to the gallery for drinks. In view of the fact that the hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar painting had turned up in San Francisco Bay I thought he might be in a delicate state and would be glad to avoid the hurly-burly of a more public watering place. We were in the process of taking down Ossie Przewalski’s show but I doubted that the hairstylist would be disturbed by a roomful of nudes on Harley Davidsons.
Remembering Volatore Three’s grandiosity, I was surprised and saddened by his present appearance. He had always been a small man but this afternoon he seemed so diminished that I could have sworn he’d lost a couple of inches. His wig looked dispirited; his Armani hung loosely on him; his Rolex, I guessed, had no good times to offer and apparently his Mont Blanc and fat chequebook could buy him no joy.
We sat him down at a little table with a bottle of Sancerre and a plate of sandwiches. Olivia and I raised our glasses to him.
‘Here’s luck,’ I said.
He responded with a weary nod.
‘How are you?’ I said.
He shrugged and made the universal so-so gesture with the flat of his hand.
‘So-so,’ he said. ‘Cosi-cosi.’
‘Did you,’ I tried to say very gently, ‘drop the painting off the Golden Gate Bridge?’
He nodded.
‘It was either it or me. I was poised to make the jump myself but a large policeman convinced me that the wind conditions were not right and I might fatally injure one of the yachtsmen below us. He gave me his card and invited me to have coffee with him to talk the matter over. I began to think about how foolish I should look falling through the air with my toupee flying off, so I decided to go on living a while longer.’
‘You mean that isn’t your own hair?’ said Olivia.
He shook his head and smiled modestly.
‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Tell me, was the policeman’s name Hennessy?’
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘I know him, and it’s the kind of thing he would do.’
‘Can you tell us what happened?’ said Olivia. ‘The last time we saw you, you liked that painting well enough to pay a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it.’
‘The tiny, tiny dancing giants in the dim red caverns of sleep,’ he murmured, and held out his empty glass which I quickly refilled. ‘There was with me when I bought the painting a feeling’ — he spread his arms as if to embrace the world — ‘of an immensity of comprehension, of containing in myself the whole dream of reality which is the world.’
Olivia and I had nothing to say; we were both eating the little sandwiches to fill the emptiness we suddenly felt.
Silence. I offered the plate of sandwiches to Volatore Three. He shook his head and took more wine.
‘Please go on,’ I said. ‘What happened then?’
He put down his glass and covered his face with his hands.
‘It left me, the immensity of comprehension suddenly was gone from me like a dream I couldn’t remember. The painting closed up and went flat.’ He took his hands away and I got another bottle of wine. ‘You can’t imagine my loss,’ he said, ‘unless you’ve contained that immensity and experienced the same loss.’
More silence.
‘TurboScalp?’ I said hesitantly. ‘Does that help at all?’
‘It works only if you think it will. And I don’t think it will.’
‘How’s your translation of Orlando Furioso going?’ said Olivia.
‘I seem to have lost my flair for rhyming. Thank you for your hospitality. I shall leave you now.’
‘Come see us again,’ I said.
Volatore Three bowed, kissed our hands, and headed for the door. We watched him get smaller and smaller and then he was gone.
Chapter 61. Mental Jimnastics
The painting of the tiny, tiny dancing giants in the dim red caverns of sleep: the words alone make you want to lean against a wall. This painting affects different people in different ways: Joe Fontana, who had never painted before, created it in an altered state, calling himself Volatore and smelling like Volatore. He later reverted to his normal state with no recollection of doing the painting nor of selling it to Lenore Goldfarb. When Hennessy and Angelica took him to the gallery and made him look at it he fainted.
Volatore Three dreamed about the tiny tinies and followed their metaphysical scent to the gallery. Looking at the painting seemed to have no physical effect on him while he was in the altered and smelly state. When he reverted to his normal state he threw the painting off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Lenore Goldfarb paid Joe Fontana fifty thousand dollars for the painting but then developed an aversion to it without going strange or smelly and wanted it out of the house.
Alexander Zhabotinsky had never seen the painting but spoke of ‘winey, winey trancing clients in the dim red taverns of sheep’ and took on the famous smell very briefly. As his normal state, however, is already altered from what most people would call normal it is not possible to assess the effect, if any, on him.
Hennessy, Angelica and Olivia all felt woozy looking at it but no more than that. I had to sit down quickly when I first looked directly at it.
So, reviewing these data, what do I think? I think the painting puts into an altered state only those who come more than halfway to meet it, those who want something from it, perhaps access to that dream of reality made real in it. Joe Fontana and Volatore Three went more than halfway to meet it and what happened? It took them in and then it spat them out. So the painting has opinions, it decides whom to accept and whom to reject. What is it looking for, what does it want?
What is the genius of the painting, its familiar spirit or whatever that made Joe Fontana, not an artist, visualise the tiny, tiny dancing giants in the dim red caverns of sleep? Whatever it is, it’s something that wants to, needs to? make itself known to some but not to others.
Lenore Goldfarb, Hennessy, Angelica and Olivia were not invited in; they didn’t need what it had to offer. They were already based on the reality necessary to them.
Well, we’ll see what happens when Dr Jim steps up to the plate.
Chapter 62. Between Jim and It
The painting was in the bedroom, with its face to the wall it was leaning against. I hadn’t looked at it since bringing it home. When I fished it out of the water and laid it on the cabin roof it was just a big canvas on stretchers, nothing more than that. But now it seemed to be waiting for me. Well, I had done that to myself, hadn’t I, by leaning it against the wall and making it wait. But now the evening seemed favourable; I’d seen my last client for the day, a woman who constantly used the word ‘relationship’ and the phrase ‘more importantly’. She also liked using singular verbs with plural subjects and she thought the nominative case classier than the objective case. ‘Between you and I,’ she said in a burst of emotion, ‘there’s many, many guys out there who will simply not commit to a relationship. More importantly, I have issues of my own with commitment in a relationship. You know what I’m saying?’