“Except you. You looked like a derelict or an ‘artist’ in quotation marks. I thought, Oh, no, make him not a poseur, he’s too good for that.”
“I noticed your eyes too. Les yeux longés. Wolf eyes. You used to say you fell in love with me through my paintings first.”
“I did used to say that,” she answered, looking straight at me, those beautiful eyes, huge and slanted and gray as clouds, but without the warmth I often used to see there. “What a pity you never did any more like them.”
I pretended I hadn’t heard this, and added, “And then I didn’t see you for years afterward, and Suzanne and I broke up, and then Mark dragged me to the college reunion, the fifteenth, and there you were, dating a friend of mine-”
“Don’t remind me!”
“How did you ever meet up with him? I forget.”
“I forget too.”
“And I stole you away from him right there in the Hilton ballroom. We eloped to that club on Avenue A, one of those black basements, and we danced until three in the morning and I took you back to my loft.”
Saying this, I grabbed her and led her through a few steps, but her body was stiff as a manikin, not like it used to be.
“Chaz, what are you doing?”
“Oh, nothing, just thinking about old times. I’ve been spending a lot of time on memory lane recently, you know, bullshit about my life, how things could have been different, if only…”
“Yes, but that’s something you have to work on yourself. I can’t get into that with you. I tried once, if you recall, and it nearly killed me. So, you know, you can’t come around here and be all sweet and loving and expect me to leap into your arms.” Looking bright darts of flame at me.
A little moment of heartbreak here, and then she pulled away and said, “So let’s see what these look like.”
We stood the paintings up against a wall. Paintings always look so helpless and wan against a white gallery wall, like they’re crying “save me!” but she thought they were terrific and decided right then to combine them in the show she was planning to open that Friday, guy named Cteki, from Bratislava, does Hopperesque alienation scenes from central Europe, empty cafés, rusting factories, people in shabby overcoats waiting for the trolley, not my idea of something for the living room, but he can draw at least, proud to have my crap on the same wall as his crap.
“They should fly off the walls,” I said lightly. “Everyone loves a celebrity.”
She ignored this and stood in front of Kate Winslet, staring for a long minute, and then the same with the others, shaking her head.
“My God!” she said. “Do you know, I can’t think of another contemporary painter who could pull this off, this incredible bravura.”
“You like them?”
“Honestly? Aside from their commercial value, I hate them. This is what’s between us, do you realize that? That you can do this, that you can take something that comes from God almighty to maybe three people on the whole planet and treat it as a big laugh. Kate Winslet! Madonna!”
I said, “I don’t see what the difference is between that and painting princesses in the seventeenth century or plutocrats’ daughters in the nineteenth.”
“That’s not the point, as you know very well. These are pastiches. But the paintings I saw that night at your show, I remembered them all those years later. And when you showed up in that hotel it was the memory of them that made me fall in love with you, leave the very nice businessman I was with, and run off with you like a different kind of woman than I thought I was. Because those paintings were not pastiches. They were you. Not Velázquez, not Goya: Charles Wilmot.”
“Junior,” I said.
“Yes, and in a junior way you’ve let your gift curdle and turn to acid and eat away your heart, just like your father, as you never stop telling me.”
“Except not as rich. Well, dear, I’m sorry I didn’t become a famous, wealthy artist for you-”
“Oh, fuck you!” she shouted. “Fuck you and damn you to hell, you sucked me into this again, you bastard! Get out of here! Go on, scram! I have work to do. And don’t forget you promised to take the kids on Friday.”
With that, I was out on the street, feeling like shit, and then drove back to Bosco’s to drop the keys off and paid for the van use as usual by listening to his political rants and art theories. Most people know his work, life-size, anatomically correct stuffed cloth figures, giant rag dolls, with smooth, white, blank faces upon which he projects video loops. The effect is uncanny; despite the abstraction you read the doll as having a talking face. Some of them are animated by internal motors and pushrods, so that our president, for example, is seen having dog-style intercourse with a large stuffed pig as he gives a speech about Iraq. Given the politics of the art community in New York and L.A., Bosco sells a lot of this work.
Denny bent my ear about Wilhelm Reich, a current hero of his, and showed me an orgone box he built for one of his dolls, a lush beauty in shocking pink, but with the white face, and she’s lying on a cot in the box and there’s a mechanism that makes her writhe and move her hand against her crotch. He paid a couple of dozen girls to make videos of their faces as they masturbated to orgasm, and we had a beer and watched as he ran them in a loop against the face of his boxed odalisque. With the accompanying cries and squishy noises, of course.
An interesting experience. We discussed the faces, whether you can tell acting from feeling, and about what warped desire for exhibitionistic fame would compel obviously middle-class young women to participate in such a project. Bosco said it was because none of them wanted to be president of the United States, which seemed to be the only restriction on behavior nowadays.
Then we talked about his next project, which involved dust from the 9/11 attacks. All of us living in lower Manhattan were showered with the gray cloud on that day, but Bosco had collected a whole barrel of it, consisting of pulverized buildings, computers, firemen, terrorists, bond traders, etc., and wanted to use it in a project that would piss all over the cult of 9/11 in the most offensive way possible. Most artists nowadays have made their peace with the bourgeoisie, the class from whence they arise and the class that pays their bills, in return for which they supply a little frisson of outrage, usually of a sexual nature, but Bosco still believes in the power of art and thinks that anarchy is the only proper politics for a conscious artist. He considers me a neolithic reactionary and accuses me of Republican sympathies. You’re a fucking fascist, Wilmot, he always says, in everything but the lust for gold and power. You’re like sex without orgasm-sweaty, uncomfortable, expensive, with no payoff. You’re a sellout who never collected the check.
We’ve been friends for twenty years, ever since the day of the drywall-nice guy, wouldn’t hurt a cockroach, two grown kids, been married for decades. Lives in a big Dutch Colonial house in Montclair, New Jersey, a perfect phony and a happy man.
And speaking of phony, after I got finished with Bosco I went over to Mark Slade Downtown to see what Slotsky wanted; it was lunchtime and I figured he’d spring for a meal. The girl in black said he’d gone out but she expected him back soon, nice-looking kid, and I thought I recognized her from one of the orgasm clips, although Bosco said that since he collected the vignettes he’s been thinking that every woman between eighteen and forty he sees on the street is one of the ones on the doll’s face.
Slotsky was showing a kid named Emil Mono, big square tricolored abstracts in the loose dramatic style of Motherwell. One ground color, a blob of another color, and some blobs and streak of a third color, perfectly respectable work, suitable for corporate lobbies, hotel meeting rooms, and the Whitney Biennial. I really have no problem at all with work like this, in most cases a kind of wallpaper, anodyne, meaningless, or rather announcing the fact that meaning no longer inheres in painting.