‘Well, not the de Kooning woman,’ he said, smiling.
‘Well, I’m grateful for that,’ Maria said, also smiling.
‘Oh,’ he said, pushing his lick of hair away, ‘you’re not fond of them?’
‘He’s such an extraordinary painter,’ she said. She was pleased to be here. Tax Department people never talked about painting. Alistair was an educated man, but he would barely have known who de Kooning was. ‘I love his work, but the women always frighten me.’
This made the man smile at the edges of his mouth. His eyes became thoughtful.
‘Seen the butter?’ he asked.
Maria looked for the butter, but could see none. ‘He’s so lyrical and beautiful,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s like I’m giving my heart to him and then I walk into the next room and feel I’m in the power of a serial killer. I mean, is he Ted Bundy?’
The man turned towards a puffy-faced dark-haired woman on the other side of the table. Maria imagined he was going to ask for butter. Instead he said: ‘Janice, I was very impressed by your piece on our mutual friend, although I really do think you could have taken the matter even further.’
Maria saw she had been cut. She thought: how could you be so unkind to someone who was a stranger and not at home?
She looked across the table towards a man and woman engaged in conversation. The table was very wide. The conversation seemed too far away to enter. The woman was in her early fifties with large eyes and a way of listening that must have been most flattering to the man, who was short and smooth and shaved so close his red cheeks shone like soup bones.
‘The thing I object to,’ the man said, ‘is to pay my taxes, fine, but not to subsidize some bored housewife so she can be pleasured by a doctor.’
It was a moment before she understood his use of ‘pleasured’. He meant a vaginal examination. Maria looked at his listener who was studiously brushing toast crumbs off the table cloth. You hate him surely. You are nodding your head while you despise him.
‘I agree, I agree,’ she said. ‘I like the American system.’
‘No one ever goes to the doctor in the States just because they’re bored.’
‘My God, no.’
‘But these women are bored,’ the man with glistening cheeks said. ‘Probably hubby is ignoring them. So they go along to good old Doctor-of-your-choice with their little green and yellow Medicare card.’
When Alistair was running the department it had been flexible enough to accommodate the passions Maria Takis now felt. (You wrote down a Rolls-Royce number plate and checked it out. You saw a lot of marble on a building site, it was enough.) She would have taken pleasure wringing the tax out of the complacent little gynophobe. Indeed, she might yet do it, or have someone do it for her. She looked across the table trying to read his place card upside down.
‘I think you’re absolutely correct about the de Kooning women,’ the man on her right said. ‘I never knew how to take them either.’
He introduced himself, but she already knew who he was. She knew his paintings and admired them. She responded to their spareness, their austerity, their refusal ever to be pretty. They did not mesh with the face, which was rather pudgy, and pasty, but rather with the flinty light in his small grey eyes. The colour clung to the canvas like crushed gravel, and it was through them that Maria had learned to love the Australian landscape which she still saw, everywhere, in their terms. It was exhilarating to be in agreement with Phillip Passos about de Kooning.
‘Did he buy a “Woman”?’ she whispered. ‘I feel such a fool. I’ve insulted him.’
‘Him? He’s not Digby.’ Passos was breaking his bread roll with his shockingly small white hands.
‘Then who is it?’
‘No one to worry about. Digby’s in there, at the Big Table. He bought a rather nice abstract piece from the early fifties. Not “pivotal”,’ he smiled, ‘but “major”. He paid $23 million for it.’
‘I heard.’
‘Well, he thought he had a bargain, because the market is so soft, but now he’s in a panic because maybe the market is still falling and he’s got to decide whether he has to bid for the next de Kooning. And that’s a “pivotal” one. Sotheby’s auction it in New York next week. He’ll have to be over there to prop up his own investment.’
‘I wonder what de Kooning thinks of all this.’
‘Not much. He has Alzheimer’s, I believe.’
‘Well he should be benefiting somehow.’
‘Mmmm,’ said Passos, looking a little vague.
‘Doesn’t France have something like this? A Droit de Suite? Don’t French artists now get a cut on all future sales of their work?’
Passos cut his smoked salmon carefully. ‘What do you do?’ he asked.
‘Oh, just a public servant,’ she said, and was disappointed and relieved to see she had satisfied his curiosity.
‘You know what this dinner party is about, do you?’
‘The de Kooning man.’
‘Nah,’ said Passos. ‘He’s just a bowl of fruit on the table. He’s a nature morte. He’s a thing you arrange other things around. The hidden agenda is Droit de Suite.’
‘Oh, you’re lobbying? Now?’
‘The Attorney General wants artists to love him, and so he introduced this Droit de Suite legislation. Now he’s hurt because we don’t want it.’
‘I would have thought it was great for artists.’
‘So did he. So did I. But if it’s going to work the art galleries have to keep honest records on how much people paid for paintings.’
Maria was already acting like a spy. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘so is that a problem?’
‘Not if you pay tax. But they don’t. They pay cash. Over half of it is funny money. So what the commercial galleries are saying to the government is Droit de Suite is too complicated to administer, and what they’re saying to their artists is that over half our collectors will just stop collecting once the Tax Department can check on what is really going on. I can see I’ve disappointed you.’
‘No, really. It’s fascinating. Really.’
‘Well, you know, we took dirty money from the Medicis, so I guess we’ll take it from Jack Catchprice too.’
The smoked salmon on Maria’s plate was subtle and flavoursome, and it became, as she separated it from itself on her plate, not like a fish, but something at once alive and abstract, which had been bred for the pleasure of the connoisseur and about whose death she would be wise not to enquire too closely.
54
Frieda’s son was now a big man with whorls of tight hair across his chest like a black man. He had soft, teary eyes and his father’s lips. ‘What did he do to you?’ she asked him.
Mort had his big male hand around her arm, above the elbow. He had found her walking up the street towards the highway. He was propelling her back across a gravel car lot in Franklin. She lost one shoe. She kicked off the other. It fell between the treads down on to the gravel.
The annexe smelled like her father’s bedroom in Dorrigo.
In her living-room, he pulled out her chair for her and she sat in it. Her stockinged feet were wet. She looked at the room, surprised by its disrepair. He pulled out a dining chair and did not seem to know what to do with it.
‘Don’t panic, Mort,’ she said.
He said: ‘I’m really sorry you had to hear this smut.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He was a good man,’ Mort said, holding the back of the chair and lowering his big square stubborn head, his father’s head. ‘You can rely on that.’
‘She says he touched her bosom.’
He sat on the chair. He leaned across and took her hand. ‘He was widely liked. I could draw a map for you Mum, and show you where he was liked, all the way over to Warrakup, right over as far as Kiama even,’ he smiled. ‘I find old codgers who remember him. They hear my name and they say, “You Cacka’s son?” I met one old man last week in the Railway Hotel at Warrakup, a Mr Gross.’