“How are the kids?” I said, hoping to change the subject to the safer one of our mutual parenthood, a ploy that had often worked in the past.
“Oh, yes, the kids! Their father has disappeared without a word of good-bye, after they saw him with a bloody face in the Post being taken by the police-how do you think they are?”
And more in this line, and I listened without fighting back or interrupting, and at last she wore it out and I smoothed things over with the lie that I would seek psychiatric help in Europe. We eased back into our usual conversational mode and I asked about the children again, and this time she said, “Oh, well, we had a small crisis the other day. Rudolf is no more.”
“Finally. He was old for a hamster. What did he die of?”
“Of death, as Rose says with great solemnity. She took it very well, I must say. We all dressed in black and had a funeral in the back garden. Milo played the march from Saul on his flutophone and Rose did a eulogy that would have made a cat laugh. It was amazing that Milo could keep playing. She described hamster heaven in some detail. Apparently Baby Jesus visits it every day, before his bedtime. She’s constructed a shrine, with one of her shredder collages-Rudolf escorted into said heaven by St. Peter and the angels, with an altar cloth made of shredder waste. It’s killingly funny, and Milo is under strict orders not to mock.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Fine, except the new drug makes him itch and he says he has no energy. I wish I trusted them more, but what can we do? At the end of the day our boy is a guinea pig, and that’s what we must put up with to keep him alive.”
I said, “You don’t have to worry about money for a while anyway, because I just told Slotsky to send you the proceeds from my restoration job. It should come to a little under two hundred grand.”
A small silence while she absorbed this, and then she said, “But, Chaz, what will you live on if you give us all of it?”
“Oh, that’s what I’m calling about, really. It sounds funny when you actually say it, but I have a patron.”
“A patron?”
“Yeah, like in the old days. A rich guy, a pal of the man I did the restoration for, he saw it and we got to talking and I sort of told him my sad story, and he said something like there’s no reason for an artist of your ability to have to grub in the marketplace, and he had a studio I could use rent-free and he’s promised to pay me a regular stipend and take everything I paint.”
“Who is this man?” she asked me, suspicion in her voice, warranted obviously; can she really tell a porker over the telephone? But not really a lie when you think about it; Krebs really is a patron and possibly less of a gangster than the old kings of Europe, considering the kind of shit they pulled as a matter of course-Krebs never sent his boys to burn a city and rape its women and burn people at the stake.
“His name’s Krebs,” I said. “He’s a German art dealer and collector. Mark set it up, but I’m not working through Mark. This is all directly for the collector.”
“That’s ridiculous. No one sells paintings like that. What will happen when your work is sold? Will you share in the proceeds?”
“Not clear, and I don’t care. I’m getting paid top dollar to please a single connoisseur who loves my work. Every artist in Europe had that arrangement before the modern period. Lotte, I’ve been looking for this all my life. And you’ve been yelling at me for years to do the best work I can, not jokes, Lotte, no more jokes. And the money…the money is fantastic. It means a completely new life for us.”
“As for example…”
“He’s going to give me a million for the painting I’m doing now.”
A longer pause here and a long, sad sigh. “Oh, Chaz,” she said,
“why do I even talk to you? I don’t know what to do.”
“What?”
“You are out of your mind, you are still in some kind of fantasy world. I’m sorry, I cannot do this-”
“Listen, it’s not a fantasy, Krebs is real. Ask Mark.”
“I don’t trust Mark. He’s perfectly capable of encouraging your insanity for his own purposes, and in any case, what you describe is impossible! No one could realize that much on your work in the market-”
“Lotte, there’s no market. That’s the point. He’s an eccentric zillionaire. He’s got private jets, private yachts, he can afford to have a private artist, just like Lorenzo the Magnificent and Ludovico Sforza and the rest of those guys.”
A long silence, and at last she said, “Well. Then I congratulate you. Honestly…I’m sorry if I sound doubtful, but it all seems like…I don’t know, some impossible and grandiose fantasy. You used to have them all the time when you were taking drugs, if you recall, so perhaps you’ll forgive me if I am not just now breaking out the champagne. By the way, my father rang and said he’d seen you and that you looked well.”
“So you know I’m not doping,” I said, maybe a little acerbic tone there, because she said, “I didn’t mean to imply any such thing. But, you know, it is my business-everyone is suspicious, the artists think they’re being cheated, the customers think the same, haggling, always haggling. No one comes in the door and says, I love this work and here is a check for what it says on the card. It’s always, if I buy two can I have twenty percent off? And I sell a work and then the artist sees it at auction and it sells for twice what he got, and he yells at me for undervaluing his work.”
“So quit. We don’t need the money for the gallery anymore.”
“Yes, your new fortune. I tell you, Chaz, I would like to meet this man and see with my own eyes what you have gotten into. Then maybe I’ll believe it.”
“Blessed are those who have not seen and believed.”
That got a laugh. “Well, if you quote the Bible I suppose I must become a little excited.” She sighed. “Ah, if only it were true! There are clinics in Switzerland that have had wonderful successes with children like Milo, where a month costs what I take in, gross, in my best year.”
“It’s covered. I’m telling you, Lotte, it’s a new world. Look, the other reason I called-I want you to come over here.”
“What, to Venice?”
“No, I’m in Rome. That’s where the studio is. I’ll send you first-class tickets, you’ll come, we’ll stay in a swanky hotel. When was the last time we did something like that? Never is when.”
“But the gallery. And the children-”
“The girl can handle the gallery for a few days and the kids’ll be fine with Ewa. Come on, Lotte, you can spare four, five days.”
And she agreed right away, which I thought was a little odd. Lotte’s response to poverty is the classic French one of bitterness, self-denial, and also resenting the pleasure others get in expending money. We used to fight about that a lot: we couldn’t ever go out for a nice meal, and when I did drag her out she always ordered the least expensive thing on the menu and drank a single glass of wine and sat like the chief mourner at a provincial funeral. She wasn’t like that when I met her; no, she knew how to let the good times roll. It was the kid getting sick. Or me. Maybe I have a special charism for making women bitter.
Two days later Franco and I picked her up at the airport and drove to the San Francesco, which is not quite the Danieli in Venice but is the best hotel in Trastevere. She was quiet, a little withdrawn, which I guess I had to expect, and when we got out of the Merc at the hotel, she gave me a look. Lotte, being a diplomatic brat, is used to the top end of things-or was before she married me-and the look said, can you really afford a place like this? And so I whipped out my magic black card and handed it to the desk clerk.