Pretty colors, though. I recall once when I was in Europe a dozen or so years ago, in the Prado as a matter of fact, and I got caught in one of the endless corridors they’ve got stuffed with barely distinguishable academic painting, all brownish remakes of Rubens and Murillo, and I felt like I was drowning in sepia. I practically ran out of the place and walked down the Paseo to the Reina Sofía modern art museum and into a cool white room, and there was a Sonia Delaunay that was like a little girl singing on some bright terrace, lovely and fresh, just some watery stripes and numerals and letters, and it cleaned my eye, the way the art needed to have its eye cleaned around the tail end of the nineteenth century. And God bless them all, the nonfiguratives, but I can’t do it myself, I am chained to the world as it is; but, yeah, it’s a way to paint, and Cézanne is as good a daddy as anyone. Art is a universe in parallel with nature and in harmony with it, as he famously said; true enough as long as you keep a grip on the harmony-with-nature part. I just find 95 percent of it as exhausting to look at as those miles of brown, slick academic pap.
I hung around for forty minutes or so, drank some free coffee, and was just going to leave or strike up a conversation with the girl, maybe about art, when Slotsky came in. He was dressed for uptown, double-breasted suit, handmade shoes, he’s always reminded me of my father in his good clothes-maybe an actual model there, his own father did not dress like that. He seemed glad to see me, a hug, not a shake, that’s a newish affectation, Mark always trendy that way, and ran me back to his office behind the gallery.
He looked reasonably well, I thought, or as well as a short, pudgy fellow with floppy lips and white eyelashes ever looks. He still has his Harpo mop of yellow curls, now a little tarnished with age, but still his logo, as it was at school. Mark no longer wears all black. Since he started selling old masters some years ago he has adopted the English squire look, which suits him rather better, since combined with his features and general carriage his former all-black costume inevitably recalled the Hasidim rather than urban sophistication, although he doesn’t look much like an English squire either. For example, he’d left the last button on the sleeve of his suit jacket partially open, so that knowledgeable people could tell that he had real buttonholes, and therefore that the suit had been custom-made. I don’t know any actual English squires, but I kind of doubt they do this.
We took a cab to Chez Guerlin, the place du jour, I guess, not the kind of joint I would ever go to but sort of interesting in a natural history way. They seated us at a banquette table, right side front, which is the supreme place to be in this particular beanery, a fact he related to me shortly after we sat down. He then told me which famous people were dining with us, cautioning me not to stare, which I was in any case not inclined to do, except I stared at Meryl Streep. Mark’s shamelessness is a legend and is part of his charm.
There followed a good deal of tedious business with the captain, who came by to pay his compliments, and a discussion with the waiter about what we should eat and what wine was drinking well this week, to which the two of them gave not quite as much discussion as Eisenhower held with his aides on the subject of D-day. I let them order for me. This done, Mark gave me a rundown on his business and dropped a dozen or so boldfaced names, which were largely lost on me, although when he observed this he helpfully provided the identifying surnames for the various Bobs and Donnas and Brads so dropped. Business was apparently booming. The art market was going nuts again: the sixteen-thousand-square-foot houses that people of a certain standing now require have lots of wall space that cannot be left blank, and since the rich are no longer paying taxes, money was squirting through New York like a firehose and a lot of it was going into high-end art.
Then we talked about his current artist, young Mono; he asked me what I thought. I told him wallpaper of a superior grade; he laughed. It’s his pretense that I’m opposed to nonrepresentational art on principle, like Tom Wolfe-I’ve never been able to explain to him why that’s not the case-and he spent a while bending my ear about the dynamic values and hidden wit of his kid’s wallpaper. Asked me how I was doing, I told him about the Vanity Fair fiasco but left out the part about the show at Lotte’s-he’s always trying to get me in with him in a business way and I won’t do it, don’t ask me why.
I admitted I was in deep shit, no shame in that, maybe fifty grand in the hole, and he said he’d just gotten back from Europe, buying pictures, talked about hotels, the luxe life, a completely insensitive guy, yeah, but I know him a long time now. I asked him what he’d bought and he said he’d gotten a nice small Cerezo and a couple of Caravaggisti I’d never heard of, and some Tiepolo drawings almost good enough to be genuine-laughed here, just kidding, but you have to be a shark over there, everyone wants to sell you a missing Rubens, and I said it sounded like a perilous life.
Then he asked me if I could work fresco and I said I hadn’t in a while, not since I’d done the St. Anthony seminary out on the Island with my father when I was a kid, and why was he asking, and he said he had a nice little project for me if I could get away to Europe, an Italian zillionaire he’d met in Venice had bought a palazzo with a Tiepolo ceiling in bad shape, ruined really, and he might be able to get me in there, and I said I wasn’t interested, and he said, you didn’t ask how much.
So I asked, and he said a hundred and fifty grand. He had a “gotcha” look in his eye that I hated, and I said I might be interested but it couldn’t be for a while, after Christmas really, because I was committed to participating in a drug study being run by Shelly Zubkoff. When he heard the name he laughed and we did the whole “small world” thing that people do in New York, and he asked about it and I told him the story of what had gone down while I was on the drug. He pumped me pretty dry on the subject, which I thought was a little funny because Mark mainly likes to talk about himself and his experiences. He said it sounded a little scary and I agreed that it did, but I still wanted to go on with it because of the effect it was having on my painting.
So we ate minuscule portions of pretentious food, the sort of stuff that Lotte calls gourmet cat food, and drank a lot of expensive Chambertin, and he filled me in on the gossip of the art world, who was up, rising, falling, or down, and while he talked I could not (as he’d obviously intended) get out of my mind the prospect of earning a hundred and fifty grand for a month or so of work.
I said, “Okay, you got me, tell me more about this palazzo job.”
And he did, and it turned out that the palazzo had been vacant for a while and the roof leaked and the ceiling had essentially collapsed, so it wasn’t a restoration job exactly but more like a reproducing job. Which kind of pissed me off, because it was getting into the forgery zone, but he said, “Not at all, no way, not only do we have a photo of the ceiling, but we even have Tiepolo’s original cartoons for the thing, you’ll be one with the masters, except with electricity.”
“You know this Italian guy personally?” I asked.
“Castelli,” he said, “Giuseppe. He’s big in cement and construction, builds airports, bridges, like that.”
“But do you know him?”
“Not as such. I met him at a dinner Werner Krebs organized in Rome. That name mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
“Probably not. He’s an art dealer. Old masters. Very big in Europe, private sales, multimillion-dollar level.”
“Well, that lets me out of his circle, being a young master myself.”
“Yeah, you could say that. You know, Wilmot, you’re a fucking piece of work. You’re always broke, you do shit magazine work for peanuts, and all the time you’re sitting on a million-dollar talent. Christ, you could be another Hockney.”