So I asked, “Who’s Sophia?” and he looked surprised and said, “She served you your risotto this afternoon.”
“Oh, the waitress,” I said, and I honestly couldn’t recall what she looked like.
“Yes, she helps her mother, but she’s an artist. Like you.”
I said, “You mean a forger.”
A nod, a smile, an Italian gesture of the hand. “A forger is an artist. She does antiquities and drawings, small things, very good quality. The boy will pose too, you know, with the mirror. The Cupid. Naturally, in the faces you will use your imagination, we don’t want someone to say, you know, I saw that woman with that little boy on the Number Fourteen bus.”
I agreed that would be embarrassing, and then for the rest of the afternoon I watched him rub out the crappy Flight into Egypt.
He used flame and turpentine-and not just any turps, he used the kind I’d be using for the painting, real Strasbourg turpentine made from the resin of the Tyrolian silver fir. Terrific smell, a little Pavlov in there; when it hit my nose I couldn’t wait to get back to work. Fresco is neat but there’s nothing like oil, just the feel of it down the brush to your hand and the way it shines, rich and sweaty, and of course that smell. Baldassare was talking about varnish, how we’d use real mastic from Pistaccia trees, the finest Chios grade, prepared with that same turpentine.
“How are we going to age it?” I asked him, and he stopped cleaning and made that gesture of the finger to the side of the nose, indicating a secret.
“You will see, but first we do the painting, okay?”
The cleaning and the drying of the canvas took a couple of days, during which I wandered around the city, on foot and by public transportation. Franco offered to drive me anyplace I wanted to go, but I preferred to mooch around the city myself. I hadn’t been in Rome since I came with Dad at age ten. Obviously, it’s changed, becoming more like everywhere else.
I looked at a lot of pictures but I kept coming back to the Doria Pamphili and Velázquez’s Pope. Joshua Reynolds thought it was one of the best portraits in the world. Second that. The first time I ever saw it I was terrified and had nightmares about it for weeks afterward. “Innocent, my ass!” is what my father said, before giving me his usual close reading of the work. He was always going on about the inherent superiority of an oil portrait to a photograph, especially when the image was literally as large as life, as here. You don’t see many life-size photographs, and even when you see actors on the screen, larger than life, as the saying goes, it’s still not the same. There’s something about the human scale that finds a trigger in our brains, and this painting has the usual legends attached to it, of servants coming into a room where it was hanging and mistaking it for the actual man, bowing and so forth.
But its power comes from a lot more than scale, because a life-size Kodachrome print would be a joke. It’s not mere illusion, has nothing to do with those fussy little nature mort or trompe l’oeil paintings you see in the side rooms of museums, it’s its own thing, the life of two men, artist and subject interpenetrated, coming alive, the vital loom of a life in a moment of time-no wonder the servants bowed. And technically, the handling of the satin of the camauro and the manteletta and the dense fall of the rochetta, white but made of every color but white, and the rendering of the damp flesh of a living man-you can look at it for hours and digitize the fucking brushstrokes and penetrate it with X-rays, yet still at its heart there’s a mystery. All the balls he had to keep in the air at once, every brushstroke in balance with every other-and what strokes, exactly right, each one, and all perfectly free, loose, and graceful. I must be insane to pretend I can do this, is what I was thinking, to be absolutely honest, raving mad. And for gangsters too! I was starting to feel like the queen in Rumpelstiltskin: oh, sure, king, honey, I can spin straw into gold…
And at that point it struck me that the obscure names for his ecclesiastic garments had popped into my head as I studied them, and I was sure I had no idea what a rochetta was when I walked into the museum. I felt the hair stand up on my neck, and I left in a hurry, with a funny sense that something was on my heels.
I needed a drink after that and I found a café in the Corso and had a grappa. As I was drinking a beer to wash away the taste, I called Mark in New York and asked him to send the money from Castelli, minus commission and expenses, to Lotte. He said he would and he wanted to talk about what I was doing and how the you-know-what was turning out, but I didn’t want to talk to Mark and I got off the phone as soon as I could.
Then I made the call I’d been putting off, my guilt call to Lotte at home. It was nine or so in the evening there and she sounded sleepy and irritable.
“So you finally decided to call us,” she said. “Honestly, Chaz, what are you thinking?”
“I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “I’ve been working really hard.”
“Yes, that’s always been your excuse. You think you can treat people any way you like and it will be all fine because you are being productive.”
“I said I was sorry, Lotte.”
“That’s not enough. I have been worried sick about you. You have some kind of psychotic break, you are arrested and sent to Bellevue, and then, instead of getting help, you run away to Europe-”
“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.”