“Where’ve you been, man?” he demanded when he answered his cell phone, before I could say my name. This still annoys me, that technology tells us who’s on the phone, another little erosion of the social. There were saloon noises in the background. “I’ve been leaving messages,” he added. “You heard I bought Kate?”
“Yeah, thanks. I presume you have a Winslet fan you’re going to shop it to.”
“A Velázquez fan, actually. Terrific piece of work.”
“Yeah, right. Listen, can you come over now? I have something you ought to see.”
“Now? I got Jackie Moreau here. We’re at the Blue Orange. What’ve you got?”
“More Velázquez. Really, you need to see this.”
He agreed and twenty minutes later the two of them came in, both antic with drink, but they quieted down when they saw what was on the easel.
“Jesus, Wilmot, what the fuck is this?” Mark said.
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like Velázquez’s Feast of Bacchus, about a third finished.” He looked around for a pinned-up reproduction, and when he didn’t find one, he said, “You’re copying it from memory?”
“I’m not copying it at all. I took some salvinorin and I was back in 1628 and I was him. Painting it, I mean, and when I came to this was on the easel. Pretty neat, huh?”
“It’s incredible,” Mark said, and leaned close to the painting, touching it tentatively with a fingertip. “Have you ever seen the radiographs of this thing? I mean the ones published in the literature.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not a scholar like you. Why do you ask?”
“Because what you got here is an early version, without the pentimenti. You know, if it wasn’t fucking insane and impossible, I’d almost believe you were telling me the truth.”
Jackie said, “Can you be other people too? Because if you were Corot or Monet you could have yourself a nice little business with this.”
And we laughed, and then Mark stopped laughing and said, “What’ll you take for it?”
“It’s not finished,” I said, “and it’s not for sale.”
“No, really. What’ll you take for it?”
“Ten grand,” I said, meaning it as a joke, but he whipped a checkbook out of his jacket and wrote a check with a gold Montblanc the size of an antitank round.
I stared at the yellow slip of paper, stunned. “You think there’s a market in unfinished old master copies?”
“There’s a market for everything. All you have to do is create it.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I turned to Jackie, who, like the sweet guy he is, was grinning like a monkey, enjoying my good fortune.
“I thought you were going to Europe,” I said.
“Tomorrow. We were having a bon voyage at L’Orange Bleu when you called. You were invited, but you did not return all these calls.”
I said, “Well, let’s continue the party.”
“Agreed,” said Jackie. “And the drinks are on you.”
There were a lot of drinks, and we closed the place and poured Jackie into a cab after he’d given us more than one Gallic embrace, with kisses. Then Mark hailed a cab of his own and told me he’d have some people come by for the painting in a week or so, when it’d be dry enough to move. I went back home and when I got there I took it off the easel and turned it to the wall. It was starting to freak me out a little.
The next day I was awakened from the sleep of the sot by a pounding on my loft door, and it was Bosco; he wanted to show me something, his latest. Nice to see a guy still excited about art, so I went down to take a look. He’s been talking about doing this for a while, using the barrel of 9/11 dust he collected back then, a major critique of what he called the fascist hysteria that enabled the Iraq war.
In his loft the masturbating girls were gone (sold to some rich creep in Miami, he said), replaced by a huge Plexiglas case that must have measured ten by ten by twenty feet. It was equipped with lights and TV projectors and peopled with his trademark rag dolls. He made me sit down in front of it and switched it on.
A great show, I have to say. He had video loops of Bush and Giuliani playing on the faces of dolls dressed in clown suits, and video loops of the planes striking the twin towers projected on the background. He’d made pneumatic models of the twin towers that expanded upward and collapsed in spastic jerks. At the foot of one tower he’d built a little trackway on which tiny figures made up as Orthodox Jews escaped from the building before each collapse and vanished down a miniature subway entrance. The air compressor that operated the towers also shot gusts of air to blow little Styrofoam dolls dressed as cops and firemen and civilians up into the air to fall down again, these figures suitably charred and blood spattered, complemented with tiny amputated heads and limbs. And he’d filled the whole box with the actual gray 9/11 dust, which made interesting clouds in the space above the yapping dummies as well as ever-shifting drifts on everything in the box. The sound track was a densely layered mix of politicians speaking, newscasters casting, explosions, and screams of anguish; from a separate speaker came hysterical laughter. This speaker was embedded in one of those amusement-park chortling torsos that used to grace penny arcades back in the forties. He’d re-dressed it as a Saudi Arab.
“What do you think?” he asked after I had stared some minutes.
“I think you’ve outdone yourself with respect to sheer offensiveness. It’s as if Duchamp had presented his urinal filled with piss.”
“You think so? Well, thanks, but I really wanted to rig it with gas-you know, for real flames? But I was worried about the dust igniting and also the gallery was freaked about the fire insurance. Maybe I could use colored foils or plastic film-it would flap pretty good in the breeze in there, you know, for a fiery effect.”
“I think it’s perfect as it is, and besides, you have the video projection of the actual flames. Are you really going to show this in a gallery?”
“Yeah, Cameron-Etzler’s giving me the whole of their SoHo space next month. It’s going to be big.”
I told him that I thought it would be and left for my place, trying without much success to keep the envy out of my heart. I looked through my recent sketchbooks and thought about what Chaz would paint if he were going to get big, recalling my recent subway thoughts, that notion of deep analysis of modern faces using traditional techniques. How to generate dignity and keep from descending into kitsch? Man Ordering Pizza. Woman Looking for Metrocard. Is it still possible? Not anything like photorealism, no, everything steel but the breastplates, the bumpers on the cars all phony, a copy of a Kodachrome slide flashed onto the canvas. Structure, weight, authority, the authority of the paint applied on a living surface: sprezzatura. Velázquez’s dwarfs and grotesques, revive the bodegones but with what we’ve experienced in the past centuries added-it has to show on the faces. I smoked half a pack and filled my paper shredder with sketches, but nothing came, and after a while I gave up and went out.
The next three weeks passed in the same state of suspended animation. I did a little job for the Observer, Bush as Pinocchio with the long nose in the manner of Disney, with the other characters as current pols, and passed up a couple of other similarly distinguished jobs, living on the ten grand I’d gotten from Mark, hoping I’d have a breakthrough before I had to leave for Italy to do the fresco. But no dice; everything I did looked like shit, and someone else’s shit at that.