“That’s the impression people always have of others, that they are full and complete, but that you are uncertain, fragmented, incomplete. But it isn’t true. We are all in the process of growth. Even a rock becomes gravel, and gravel sand, and sand becomes sandstone, and sandstone becomes rock.” Then I laughed in the dark and grumbled that I slipped off the edge and got my foot wet in philosophy.
“What were you like as a little girl?” I asked. I knew the photographs from her dossier, but not her.
“I was plain and I had no breasts and I wanted breasts and hips so that I could be a real woman. Then, when I got breasts and hips and all the rest, I found out there was more than that to being a woman. I learned. I survived. What were you like as a boy?”
I thought a moment and said, “Small. Isolated. Full of dreams. Ignorant. Pig-headed. Inquisitive.”
“Did you want to be an artist?”
“Yes. But some connections were missing.”
“But you are famous as an art lover—”
“That’s a long way from being an artist,” I said. “A long way.”
Madelon said with a smile, “I love going to museums with you, to galleries and studios and things. You say what’s in your mind and you don’t try to phony it up.”
I took a sip of wine and swirled the glass. “I’ve never been a man who thought you should be especially quiet in a museum. As long as I don’t really bother anyone else, or intrude on their privacy, I’ve always felt free to talk, laugh, discuss, or be silent. Art isn’t holy to me, not in that way.
“Something in a frame or on a pedestal does not require either my silence or my speech. Something in a frame is not automatically art, it is just something someone framed.”
“Sturgeon’s Law?” suggested Madelon. “Ninety percent of everything is crud. Including this statement.”
“Yes, and I’m afraid that’s even more so with art. All my adult life people have kept close to me in galleries, because if I am with someone, I talk of what I see and feel, and some people, strangers even, seem to find that interesting. Or maybe it’s just unusual. I try not to talk of what I think the artist meant or felt, but of what I felt, of what the artist communicated to me.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Madelon, “how I dislike those who explain it to you!”
I laughed, too. “You will never hear me say ‘A unique synthesis of the purely somatic and the archly conceptualized with an almost verbal communication in his aesthetic cognitions.’ I will never attribute motives and intellectualizations to men I don’t know personally, and well.”
“But there are obvious influences,” Madelon said.
“Remember that Peruvian exhibit we saw? In the jungle world that those potters and craftsmen lived in, which was their only reality—their only concept of reality—they created those jaguar pots that are as fierce and as deadly a manifestation of fear and respect as I’ve ever seen. I might talk of the impact of the Church on some artist, who painted what he felt, then added haloes and touched in the symbols of the saint he had selected.”
“But all artists are influenced by their times,” Madelon insisted.
“And the times by the artists.”
“Of course. But I always speak for me, not the artist. If he or she is any good at all the work speaks louder, clearer, and more concisely than anything I might say, and for a hellava lot longer.”
“What about those new ones, the Fragmentalists? They work with computers and cloud chambers, and never see their work; only knowing that it happened.”
“Yes, it existed, for a nanosecond or two, and then was gone. Since no one can see their art, I suppose that’s why they prattle so much about it. It can’t speak, so they will.”
Madelon smiled at me in the dusk. “Brian, I’ve never known anyone who wasn’t an active, working artist to be as involved with art as you are.”
I shrugged. “It is simply part of my life. I dislike it when people buy art for investment. Art futures is a phrase I’ve heard far too often. It might be like buying future orgasms, I don’t know.” I looked again at the fading firetrails. “I have always tried to be myself. But the best possible me. My greatest failures are when I fail myself.”
I turned and smiled at the most beautiful woman I knew. “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Me,” she said. “Only the best possible me.”
“Would you be interested in investing in a future orgasm?” I asked.
She unwound gracefully from the chair, smiling and silken. “Are you asking me to forsake Hilary’s many pleasures, my dear sir?”
“I am. I had something more intimate in mind.”
“I was hoping you had been taking your ESP pills, darling. I was thinking along those lines myself.”
We flew to San Salvador and rode through the tall grasses on my cattle ranch there and made love by a stream. Madelon was witness to me disciplining a sloppy supervisor, who had permitted the cattle to consume too high a percentage of precious grains. She didn’t mention it until after our visit to the ecology preserve off the Great Barrier Reef and we were walking on the beach at Bora Bora at sunset.
Madelon looked at me after a long silence. “Sometimes you are very hard on people, you know. You demand much.”
“No. Just the best. You become mediocre when you are satisfied with mediocrity.”
She kicked some sand and grinned as she said, “Modern civilization has placed mediocrity on a level with excellence . . . and then looks down on excellence for having lowered itself.”
“My, my,” I said. “And I’m supposed to be hard on people.”
“Well, you’re famous, and people expect it, I suppose.”
“I have a reputation,” I said. “That means they’ve heard of you, but know nothing about you. If you are famous, they know all about you. If you are notorious, they know all about you whether they want to or not.”
“It sounds as though you’ve made a study,” she said, the setting sun reddening her face.
“Defense mechanism. A public figure is one who has been on the vidstats more than once. A celebrity is someone whose face you know and whose name you can’t remember. Or vice versa. A famous figure is an old celebrity. A noted figure is an old famous figure, while an actress is a young and famous figure.”
She stopped and put her arms around my neck. “I knew you would get around to sex.”
“I thought we had pontificated enough for one evening,” I said, and kissed her.
“Pontificate me right here,” she said, slipping out of the shimmercloth sarong.
“Suppose I dogmatized you.”
“Oh, marvelous!” she said, pulling me down to dark sands under purple clouds edged with rose.
At Ankara we visited the tomb complex carved from a rocky cliff, where three generations of a family had carved a marble fantasy and leased tomb space to the affluent. Madelon commented on all the years of cutting and sanding. “Time has nothing to do with the creation of art,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it took ten years or ten minutes or ten generations. The art must stand by itself. The artist can’t stand next to it saying, ‘Look, this part took me three years and that part was a whole winter.’ Hemingway wrote two of his best short stories before lunch, then went back to work. The Sistine Chapel took years. It only matters to the artist how long something takes. If he works slowly it might be difficult to hold the vision together for the time needed. It also limits his total output, and he might be frustrated in not being able to say everything he wants. But working slowly might give more chance to interact with the work. It all depends on the artist.”