“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Yes, I know, but I have some work to do and I haven’t time to explain it all just now-not that you’d listen, not that you listened the last fifty times I tried…”
“Work? It’s nighttime.”
“Not in Uganda it isn’t.”
“As usual, blowing me off for the distant poor.”
A long sigh. “Oh, Chaz, you know I love you and you take terrible advantage of it. If I’m sharp it’s a form of self-protection. And also, when you spend time with desperate, starving, brutalized people who pass their short, shitty lives wailing over dying children, you tend to lose patience with brilliant neurotics who can’t seem to find a way to be happy. Good night, baby brother.”
“What is this, you stop being a nun and that gives you a ticket to be extra mean? You used to be nice.”
“The nice got all burnt up in Africa. God bless, kid.”
She hung up. I’m always strangely invigorated when Charlie gives me a spanking. Probably part of our sick quasi-incestuous relationship. But that was the last time I talked to her for a real long time.
On Saturday afternoon I took the kids to MoMA; Milo asked for an audio guide and wandered off, and I took Rose and was her audio guide myself. She wanted to know what the pictures were really about, and I had to make up a representational story for each one. I think that shows something about what we want in art. She didn’t whine once, a patient kid, an art lover maybe, but I think mostly it was having a monopoly on Dad for a couple of hours, looking at art. Oldenburg was of course a favorite-who doesn’t like gigantic silly everyday objects-but also Matisse and Pollock. She tells me Pollock’s big Number 31 is really about a little mouse, and a story went with this appreciation, pointing out the various places where the mousie had adventures in the tangled grass; I wish I could have got it down, it would have revolutionized Pollock scholarship.
After that, lunch and went to watch Buster Keaton movies. Rose announced afterward she is going to be an artist like me, but better, watching my face for signs of dismay, which I provided, then she held her thumb and fingers up barely separate and said just a little better. Milo did his Steven Wright jokes on the street and subway, he has the timing and the deadpan down cold. Terrible to love your kids this much, and this mixed with guilt because of the mess I made of Toby-maybe if I’d spent more time with him, but I had to work like a demon in the city to keep up the damn house and all that, which we bought in the first place so he could have a happy childhood among the birds and bunnies.
Around eleven that night Lotte called from the gallery and said three of the five actress paintings had been sold, for five grand apiece.
“Mark bought the Kate Winslet Velázquez three minutes after he walked in the door,” she said. “He insisted on taking it off the wall right then and paid us extra for the trouble. I had to wrap it in brown paper and he walked out with it clasped to his chest like a girl with a new dolly.”
“That’s strange,” I said. “Mark usually plays it fairly cool. He must’ve had a customer in mind. Or we’ll see it in his gallery marked up two thousand percent. Who bought the others?”
“Some media mogul and his girlfriend. This is wonderful, Chaz, you know? Everyone loved them!”
I tried to be enthusiastic for Lotte’s sake. The money’s nice, but not so nice the thought that I could paint these things forever, maybe add a male line, Cruise and Travolta by suitable masters, and wouldn’t that solve all my money problems? I could go back on dope too, really crank the fucking things out, and I looked at Milo and listened to him drag each breath in while he slept and thought, How can I be such a selfish piece of shit, not to fucking burn myself to a crisp to buy him absolutely top-of-the-line medical care. I don’t understand anything.
Except that in between my little domestic and parental tasks, and despite my obsessional shit about making money, I was boiling with ideas, filling page after page of my sketchbook. I was practically nauseous with the flow of creative juice; it started with those silly paintings, images of fame. I mean really, what is the world now? I mean visually. Image after image on the screen, but the kicker is we aren’t allowed to see them, I mean actually study them long enough to derive meaning, it’s all quick cut and on to the next one, which essentially destroys all judgment, all reflection.
By design, I think. I mean, what does the president actually look like, what does anything actually look like? You can’t get it in a photograph, or only a hint, and so there was opened up to me a whole potential universe of realistic, penetrating, analytic painting, picking it up where Eakins left it, but adding all the stuff painting’s done since. You’d have to push it, but not like Bacon did, or Rivers, or that new kid, Cecily Brown, not so obvious, not the screaming Pope, not so on the nose-what if you pushed it from inside, up from the hidden structure of the painting? So that it worked subliminally almost, like Velázquez, it would be devastating, yeah, if you could bring it off, you could light up this whole blighted era. Neue Neue Sachlichkeit. If anyone can still see.
On Sunday morning I took the kids over to Chinatown for dim sum, and in the restaurant Milo started coughing. I thought he had something caught in his throat, and I got up and he threw his head back with his tubes all shut down and started to go blue around the lips, and I dropped him down and did CPR until the paramedics came. His face was gray by then, and matte, like a bag of lint. Then at the NYU Medical Center when they heard I didn’t have health insurance they were going to ship him over to Bellevue after they got him stabilized and I said he had familial progressive pulmonary dystrophy and he’d been treated here before, and I made the stupid woman call Dr. Ehrlichman and she took my credit card grudgingly-she’d have been even more grudging if she knew it was blown. I called Lotte from the hospital and before I could say anything she told me I’d sold out, little red dots on all five actresses, and this time I didn’t even pretend I gave a shit and told her about our boy. So she came to the ward and we waited until we knew he was going to survive this one, and she stayed and I took Rose back to my loft.
After Rose was asleep I sat out on the fire escape in my parka chain-smoking and thought about being the kid Velázquez-funny what the mind constructs, another thing to talk with Shelly about. After smoking my throat raw, I went back through the window into the loft and sat at my desk and calculated my riches: twenty-five grand for the actresses plus the kill fee Condé Nast promised makes 30K, enough to pay off the really embarrassing debts, and Slotsky’s job in Italy will fix everything for the indefinite future; I’d have to stick Lotte with the whole child-care load for a while, but what else can I do? She won’t mind if there’s serious money involved, she’s got the nanny. I thought I could finally get even with the fucking medical bills and have a chance to take a breath.
Two days after that the magazine sent the kill fee: amazingly fast pay, they must feel guilty as hell. Lotte deposited the checks for the paintings, so I was flush for about twenty minutes before I started writing my own checks. The IRS ought to get nearly half of it, both for back taxes and this year’s estimated, but I couldn’t bear to pay it. Let them come and get me. Instead I got up to date with Suzanne-my more present parasite-then the rent, phone, and paying down the four credit cards, laden with medical bills, Milo’s plastic lifeline, and then around town with a stack of cash for all the people who let me have a flying hundred never expecting to see it again.