Mark waved his hand dismissively. “No, that was something completely different. I mean, Jackie’s okay, but he’s no you. So what do you say? Are you in?”
“No, sorry.”
“No? Why the fuck not?”
“I just don’t think I’d like the work. And…I’ve got some big projects I want to work on now and I might not have the time.”
He swallowed this lie, or seemed to, and shrugged. “Okay, man, but if you ever want to make some serious cash, give me a call. Meanwhile, I’ll set up this Castelli thing. Who knows, it could turn into something for you.”
“Who knows, indeed,” I said, and then the waiter bustled up and we had to have a conversation about dessert. Over this, Mark wanted to know more about salvinorin, so I gave him the short version of what Shelly had given me, and then he asked me why I thought I’d stopped visiting my own past and started visiting what seemed to be the past of someone else, and I said I didn’t know, but the sense of it was like being inside a baroque painting, maybe late cinquecento, and then I mentioned that the place I was in was a real place and that I’d looked the address up on Google, Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop, in Seville, and his eyes bulged out when I said that. Slotsky’s a fucking encyclopedia of art history, and he asked me whether I knew what the kid’s name was, and I said yeah, he said it was Gito de Silva, and Mark said, “Holy shit!”
So I go, “Oh, you heard of this guy Gito de Silva? I mean, he’s a painter?”
And he goes, “You could say that. ‘Gito’ is a short form of ‘Diegito,’ ‘little Diego.’ He was born in Seville at number one Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop in 1599,” and when he said that I swear there were sparks coming out of his eyes. And he goes on, “His father was Juan de Silva, just like you said, but because it was the custom in Seville to use your mother’s name professionally, when he started painting he called himself Diego Velázquez.”
So, okay, I’d been painting like Velázquez recently and I must have had him on my mind and that’s where that came from. I explained that to Slotsky and he said, “Yeah, but you didn’t know all that stuff until I told you about it; where did that come from?”
I said, “I must have read it somewhere, what other explanation is there?”
He shook his head. “No, you’re really going back in time, you said yourself that it was real, not like a vision or a fantasy, your dad’s funeral and all that; maybe you’re in some psychic contact with Diego Velázquez.”
And I said, “I didn’t know you believed in that shit,” and he said, “I don’t, but it makes you think, maybe your mind is preparing you to paint like Velázquez.”
I said, “My mind would do something like that, one more thing to fuck up my life and get me to produce even more unsalable paintings.” So we had a laugh about that and he bugged me a little more about selling my stuff through him until he saw I wasn’t paying attention.
Well, that was an interesting day, followed by a restless night. I couldn’t fall asleep. I had a strange sort of vibrational energy, like my life was going to change radically, and I’m resisting the urge to fight it, to take a pill, for example, a couple of pinks out of the trove of Xanax I had from my rehab days. I’d made a damned fool of myself at Lotte’s, and afterward I was thinking maybe it would be different if I had some real money, because the plain fact is that for all her business about the purity of art, Lotte hates being poor, especially because of Milo and the medical expenses. So it was kind of strange that just then up steps Slotsky with this offer.
So I thought then that this thing with Slotsky could be the solution-if I could just get a little ahead, get free of this crazy rat race, maybe then I could, I don’t know, get back to that place again, when I was painting for love; maybe that’s the place to start.
That Friday-I remember it was October first-I had the kids for the weekend again so Lotte could do her show. No smoking around the kids, so I was covered with nicotine patches, and it wasn’t the same; they made me slightly sick all the time, and there was none of the good stuff about smoking, the taste and the look of the smoke curling upward that mysteriously unlocks the creative process.
After dinner, I called my sister Charlie at her place in Washington. She always likes to talk to the kids, and after they’d had their chatter, I got on with her. She asked me how I was doing and I said fine, and she said, you don’t sound fine, she’s using her “sisdar,” as we used to call it, and I kind of gave a nervous laugh and said yeah, something’s happening. And I told her about the drug trial and seeing her again at our father’s funeral and Mom again when she was young, and I asked her what she thought was going on, Charlie always my gateway into the strange, and she asked me what she’d said when we talked back then (or just the other day, depending on how you looked at it). I told her we’d talked about her life and how she was thinking about leaving her order and doing something else, and she said, yeah, I remember that conversation, it was an important conversation, I was really confused about my vocation and talking it out with you really helped, and I said, I didn’t recall it at all until it happened again.
Then I asked her what she made of the Velázquez stuff and she asked me what Velázquez meant to me, and I said, he was a great painter, you know, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez…and she said, “No, what he means to you, what he represents.”
I said, “What, you think it’s some kind of Freudian thing, I’m fantasizing being Velázquez because I want a substitute father, my father didn’t love me enough?”
“I don’t know what I think yet, although I’m a little concerned you’re playing around with your brain, given your history with drugs.”
“It’s not the same thing at all-this is a perfectly safe experimental drug under medical supervision.”
“Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Anyway, you had plenty of love. You were everyone’s golden child.”
“You always say that, but I never felt it. I always felt like the prize in a grab bag or the ball in soccer. I think they spent a lot of time competing for me. I thought you were the one they loved.”
“Oh, please! Plain, gawky Charlotte, who could barely finger paint, in a house where beauty and talent were the be-all and end-all? And Mother actively disliked me, if you recall.”
“I must have missed that. Why did she?”
“Because I was the thing that trapped her into her marriage. She didn’t have the guts to face the social death that would follow ditching a kid, and besides, I worshipped Dad. Hopelessly, of course. Why I fled into the Church, or so I tell myself. I think I probably warped you more than they did, the way I doted on you. Your total slavey. Spoiled you rotten for a normal woman, may God forgive me.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” I said. “I used to think we would grow up and get married. You remember that time when you explained to me that it didn’t work that way? I must’ve been six or so, and I went wailing away. We were on the beach out at the point and I got lost.”
“Oh, yes, I couldn’t forget that. You got cosseted and I got a whipping for losing you. As I say, spoiled rotten.”
“Of course, now that there are no more rules, maybe we should try it. The kids love you, anyway…”
Raucous laughter, she’s got a big booming laugh like a man, like our father, in fact, and it went on for a while, and then she said, breathless, “I’m sorry, I was just imagining myself in the archepiscopal palace: ‘Um, Archbishop, I know we just got through the process of releasing me from my formal vows, but there is one other little thing…’”
“So it’s a possibility?”
Another hoot. “If it were, my lad, I wouldn’t have you on a plate. You’re far too hard on the girls.”