The Forgery of Venus

“I’ll lay a bet,” said Sancho, “that before long there won’t be a tavern, roadside inn, hostelry, or barber’s shop where the story of our doings won’t be painted up; but I’d like it painted by the hand of a better painter than painted these.” “Thou art right, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “for this painter is like Orbaneja, a painter there was at Ubeda, who when they asked him what he was painting, used to say, ‘Whatever it may turn out’; and if he chanced to paint a cock he would write under it, ‘This is a cock,’ for fear they might think it was a fox.” -Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Wilmot showed me that one, back in college; he’d written it out in his casually elegant calligraphy and had it up on the wall of his room. He said it was the best commentary he knew about the kind of art they were showing in New York in the eighties, and he used to drag me to galleries back then and wander through the bright chattering crowds muttering in a loud voice, “This is a cock.” A bitter fellow, Wilmot, even back then, and it should not have surprised me that he came to a bad end. Whether the story he tells is merely remarkable or literally fantastic I still cannot quite decide. I would have said that Wilmot was the least fantastic of men: sober, solid, grounded in the real. Painters have a rep, of course-we think of van Gogh and Modigliani flaming out in madness-but there’s also stodgy old Matisse and, of course, Velázquez himself, the government employee and social climber, and Wilmot was always, even back in college, on that zone of the spectrum.

Did this all begin in college, I wonder? Were the lines of relationship, envy, ambition, and betrayal set that early? Yes, I believe so, or even earlier. Someone once said life is just high school, on and on, and it does seem that the great of the world are only familiar schoolyard figures-the obnoxious little shit we recall from ninth grade becomes the obnoxious little shit in the White House, or wherever. There were four of us then, thrown together by chance and by our mutual dislike of dorm life at Columbia. Columbia is technically an Ivy League school, but it is also neither Harvard, Yale, nor Princeton, and has the additional misfortune of being located in New York City. This tends to make its undergraduates even more cynical than undergraduates tend elsewhere to be: they’re paying all this money and yet they might as well be attending a suburban community college. And so we were cynical, and affected also a paint-thin coat of sophistication, for were we not New Yorkers too, at the center of the universe?

We lived on the fifth floor of a building on 113th Street off Amsterdam Avenue, across the street from the great futile mass of the unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I roomed with a fellow named Mark Slotsky, and in the other apartment on the floor were Wilmot and his roommate, a reclusive, pasty pre-med whose name I had forgotten until reminded of it somewhat later in this tale. Aside from the pre-med, the three of us became pals in the manner of students, deeply, but provisionally: we all understood that school was not real life. This was perhaps unusual at the time, the waning days of the great patriarchy, and there was still floating around in the air the notion that this experience would mark one forever, that one would always be “a Columbia man.” This none of us bought, which is what pulled us together as a group, because it would have been hard to find three young louts with less in common.

Slotsky’s parents only appeared at graduation, and I sensed that he might have excluded them then had he been able. They were actual refugees from Hitler, with dense accents, almost parodically overdressed, noisy and vulgar. Mr. S. had made a modest pile as a soft-drink distributor and loudly wondered what items of the college’s property his money had paid for. They seemed, to my eye, oblivious to their beloved college boy’s desire to stay as far away from them as possible, indeed to be mistaken, by reason of dress, speech, and comportment, for another scion of Charles P. Wilmot, Senior.

The name of C. P. Wilmot (as he always signed himself in a thick black scrawl) is not as famous now as it was then, but he was at one time considered the natural heir to the throne occupied by Norman Rockwell. He’d made a rep as a combat artist during the war and had flourished as a delineator of American life in the mass-circulation magazines of the fifties, and at the time of our graduation it was not at all obvious that his profession and livelihood would utterly vanish in the succeeding decades. He was rich, and famous, and happy with his lot.

I should add that upon this graduation day I was an orphan, parents killed on the road when I was eight, only child, raised by a responsible but distant aunt and uncle, and so forth, and therefore I always had my eye out for appropriate father figures. During the various graduation ceremonials I found myself staring at the elder Wilmot with filial lust. He wore on that occasion a soft cream-colored double-breasted suit, with a foulard bow tie and a Panama hat, and I wished I could stick him in a shopping bag and take him home. I recall that the dean came by and shook his hand, and Wilmot told an amusing anecdote about painting the portrait of both the president of the university and the president of the United States. He was much in demand as a fellow who could paint into the faces of world leaders a nobility of spirit not always apparent in their words and deeds.

After the graduation was over, the great man took us three friends and our families to Tavern on the Green, a place I had never been to before and which I then regarded as the pinnacle of elegance rather than what it is, a sort of higher Denny’s with a terrific location. Wilmot sat at the head of the table, flanked by his son, and I was down by the foot, with the Slotskys.

During lunch I therefore learned a good deal about the distribution of carbonated beverages and what little Mark had liked to eat as a child, but what I chiefly recall about the afternoon (and it’s amazing I can recall anything, so generously flowed the champagne) was the senior Wilmot’s voice, rising witty and mellow above the restaurantish murmur and clink; the laughter of the company; and once, the sight of Chaz’s face, illumined by a chance bar of sunlight from the park outside, and its expression as he regarded his father, a look that combined worship and loathing in equal measure.

Or perhaps I am interpolating this based on what I later learned, as we so often do. Or I do. But there can be no doubt about what I am now to relate, and this bears more directly on the veracity of Chaz Wilmot’s remarkable, horrible tale. He was one of those sons who, looking upon their father’s profession and finding it good, set out to match or surpass the old guy’s achievement. He was therefore an artist, and a surpassingly good one.

I first met him in our sophomore year as I was moving in. He happened to be going out while I was struggling up the filthy marble stairs with an enormous suitcase and an over-full grocery carton, and with hardly a word, he pitched right in and helped me with my things and afterward invited me into his place for a drink, which was not beer, as I had expected, but a Gibson, made in a chrome shaker and served in a chilled stemmed glass. My first ever, and it went to my head, as did the appearance somewhat later that afternoon of a lovely girl who removed all her clothes so that Chaz could paint her. I was reasonably experienced in that area for an undergraduate, but this was for me a new and expansive level of the louche-Gibsons and naked girls in the broad light of day.

After she was gone, Chaz showed me his work. His room had the street-side windows and for a few hours a day the light was fairly good and to obtain this light he had agreed to occupy the smaller of the two bedrooms, even though he was the lessee. There was an immense professional easel in it, a ratty pine table smeared with paint, a junky student desk, a brick-and-board bookcase, a plywood wardrobe, and a beautifully made antique brass bed, this last brought from home. One wall was covered with pegboard, from the hooks of which depended an astounding variety of objects: a stuffed pheasant, a German lancer’s helmet, a variety of necklaces, bracelets, tiaras, a stuffed beaver, an articulated human skeleton, swords, daggers, odd bits of armor, a large flintlock pistol, and an array of costumes representing the last half millennium of European dress, with a few tastes of the Orient thrown in. This collection, I soon gathered, was a mere overflow from his dad’s, who had a virtual museum of paintable objects installed in his studio at Oyster Bay.

The place stank of paint, gin, and cigarettes; Chaz was a heavy smoker-always Craven A’s in the red cardboard box-and you could see the yellow nicotine stains on his long fingers even through the omnipresent blots of paint. I still have a little self-portrait he did that year. I watched him do it, in fact, entranced: a few minutes staring at himself in a dusty mirror of a Broadway saloon and there he was-the pall of coarse black hair falling heavily over the broad forehead, the elegant straight nose, the long jaw, those remarkable large pale eyes. When I expressed appreciation he ripped it out of his sketchbook and handed it to me.

On that first afternoon, however, I woozily stood in front of his easel and caught my first sight of his work, which was a smallish painting of that naked girl done against an ochre ground. Without thinking I gasped and said it was terrific.

“It’s shit,” he replied. “Oh, it’s alive and all that, but overworked. Anyone can do a figure in oils. If you screw up, you just paint over it, and who cares if the paint is half an inch thick. The thing is to catch the life without trying, without any obvious working. Sprezzatura.”

He said the word lovingly, with a roll; I nodded sagely, since we were both being formed into little Renaissance manikins by the Columbia great books program and had both read Castiglione’s Courtier, with its admonition to achieve excellent results without showing obvious effort. One was languid, therefore, one whipped out brilliant papers at the last minute, one despised the sweaty grinds in the pre-med program. I should mention here that Chaz rather set the tone of our little community, which was as aesthetic as all get-out. The three of us were in the arts: Chaz painted, of course, and I was acting seriously at the time-I had some off-Broadway credits, in fact-and Mark had a Super 8 camera and was making short films of intense existential dreariness. In memory it was a lovely era: bad wine, worse marijuana, Monk on the record player and an endless stream of lanky girls in black tights and heavy eye makeup with straight hair down to their butts.

Strangely enough it was something Chaz did that knocked me out of acting for good. This was at the start of junior year, and they had brought in a visiting professor, a real Broadway director who was mad for Beckett. We did a series of his plays and I was Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape. Chaz went to all three performances, not, I think, to support me, for we sold out the Minor Latham Playhouse straight through, but because he was genuinely fascinated with the idea of taping one’s whole life-of which more later. At the cast party I got into a drunken argument with some frat boy gate-crashers and there was a modest spasm of violence. The police were called, but Chaz hustled me out through the restaurant kitchen and back to our building.

We sat in his room and we drank some more, vodka out of the bottle, I recall, and I talked and talked until I noticed that he was looking at me peculiarly and I asked him what was wrong. He asked me whether I realized I was still in character, that I was using the querulous, middle-aged voice I had devised for Krapp. I tried to laugh it off, but the realization generated a deadly chill that penetrated through the booze. In fact, this happened to me a lot. I would get into a character and not be able to get out, and now someone else knew about it too. I changed the subject, however, and drank even more sincerely until I passed out in Chaz’s armchair.

And awoke to dawn and the sharp stink of turps. Chaz had set up a large canvas, maybe five feet by three, on his easel. He said, “Sit up, I want to paint you.” I did so; he adjusted the pose and began to paint. He was at it all day, until the light was gone, pausing only for the necessary toilet breaks and a Chinese meal delivered to the door.

I should say that although I had scrubbed the theatrical makeup off my face, I was still wearing powder in my hair and my Krapp costume of collarless white shirt, baggy dark trousers, and waistcoat with watch chain; and I’d grown a three-day beard to add to the seedy effect. I believe I said “Holy shit!” when at last he allowed me to see what he’d done. I’d taken the obligatory history of art survey course, and the apposite name popped into my head.

“Jesus, Chaz, you’re painting like Velázquez,” I exclaimed, with a peculiar combination of feelings: astonishment and admiration at the feat of art, and an absolute horror of the image itself. There was Krapp, with the impotent lust and malice playing on his face and the little lights of incipient madness around the eyes; and beneath this mask there was me with all the stuff I thought I had successfully hidden from the world staring out, naked. It was like the picture of Dorian Gray in reverse; I had to make myself look, and smile.

Chaz regarded it over my shoulder and said, “Yeah, it’s not bad. A little sprezzatura working in there, finally. And you’re right; I can paint like Velázquez. I can paint like anybody except me.” With that he snatched up a brush and signed it with the black colophon he would use through-out his career, the “CW” with a downward pothook drooping from the “W,” to indicate that it was Wilmot Junior who’d done it. I have the thing still, rolled up in a cardboard tube on the top shelf of a storage closet in our house, never shown to anyone. A couple of days after he made the painting I went to my advisor, dumped all my theater courses, and switched to pre-law.

I should say here a little something more about myself, if only to frame, as it were, the story of Chaz Wilmot. My firm is one of those anonymous outfits denoted by three capital letters, and we specialize in insuring the entertainment industry, broadly speaking, everything from rock concerts to film locations, theme parks, and so on. Still in showbiz after all, I like to say. We have offices in L.A. and London, and for about twenty years I was based out of town in those places. Currently, my domestic arrangements are ordinary in the extreme and related to my business life, in a way, for I married my travel agent. Someone in my position necessarily spends a good deal of time on the phone with the person who arranges flights and hotels and so forth, and I developed an attachment to the voice on the phone, so helpful and accommodating at all hours, so unflappable in the many emergencies, blizzards and so forth, that afflict the traveling man. And I liked her voice: Diana is a Canadian, and I grew accustomed to those long vowels and the perky little “eh?” she appended to her sentences; I found myself calling her number late at night with pretended routing changes, and then we dropped the pretense. We have been, I suppose, happily married, although we see little of one another, except on vacations. We have the canonical two children, both now in college, and a comfortable house in Stamford. I am not rich, as wealth is calculated in these imperial times, but my company is both successful and generous.

Chaz and I were fairly close up until our senior year, and then I went off to law school in Boston and we lost touch. I saw him for about twenty minutes at our fifteenth college reunion, when he walked off with my date. She was an arty type with a wonderful name-Charlotte Rothschild-and I seem to recall that they eventually got married, or lived together or something. As I say, we lost touch.

Mark kept in touch, being a keep-in-touch kind of guy, active in alumni affairs, always a call for the annual contribution. He tried his hand as a screenwriter in Hollywood for a season, got nowhere, then got his parents to set him up in a downtown gallery when SoHo was just taking off, and he flourished at it, but not before changing Slotsky to Slade. I got invitations to all the Mark Slade gallery openings and we occasionally went to them.

We didn’t discuss Chaz much on those occasions, and I gathered that he was working as an artist with some success. Mark mainly likes to talk about himself, somewhat tediously, if you want to know the truth, and in any case I am not terribly interested in the art scene. I own only one original work of any distinction, curiously a painting by none other than C. P. Wilmot, Senior. It’s one of his wartime paintings-the crew of a gun tub on a carrier at Okinawa, the antiaircraft cannons blazing away, and hanging in the air in front of them like a hideous insect is a kamikaze on fire, so close you can make out the pilot and the white band wrapped around his head, and there’s nothing they can do about it, they’re all going to die in the next few seconds, but the interesting thing about the picture is that one of the crew, a boy really, has turned away from the oncoming doom and is facing the viewer, hands outstretched and empty, with an expression on his face that is right out of Goya, or so I recall from my liberal education.

In fact, the whole painting is Goyesque, a modern take on his famous The Shootings of May Third 1808, with the kamikaze standing in for those faceless Napoleonic dragoons. The navy did not approve, nor did the magazines of the time, and the painting remained unsold. Thereafter, it seems, Wilmot was more careful to please. Chaz had it on the wall of his bedroom all through college, and when we were packing up just before we graduated he gave it to me, casually, as if it were an old Led Zeppelin poster.

As it happened I had just flown into town the weekend Mark threw a party at the Carlyle hotel to celebrate his coup in acquiring the painting that has become known as the Alba Venus. I’d followed the saga of the painting’s discovery with more than my usual interest in things artistic, mainly because of Mark’s involvement, but also because of the value of the object. They were quoting crazy figures for what it was expected to bring at auction, a couple of units at least, a “unit” being a movie mogul term I like to toss around for fun-it’s a hundred million dollars. I find that sort of money very interesting, whatever its source, so I decided to stay at my firm’s suite at the Omni for the evening and attend.

Mark had rented one of the mezzanine ballrooms for the party. I spotted Chaz as soon as I walked through the door, and he seemed to spot me at the same time-more than spot, he seemed to be looking for me. He stepped closer and held out a hand.

“I’m glad you could come,” he said. “Mark said he’d invited you, but your office told me you were out of town, and then I called later and they said you’d be here.”

“Yeah, Mark really knows how to throw a party,” I said, and thought it was strange that he’d taken all that trouble to establish my whereabouts. It’s not like we were best buddies anymore.

I looked him over. Pale, with what seemed to be the remains of a tan, and waxy looking, with his bright eyes circled with grayish, puffy skin. He kept glancing away, over my shoulder, as if looking for someone else, another guest, perhaps one not so welcome as I. It was the first time I’d ever seen him in anything like what he was wearing then, a beautiful gray suit of that subtle shade that only the top Italian designers ever use.

“Nice suit,” I said.

He glanced down at his lapels. “Yes, I got it in Venice.”

“Really?” I said. “You must be doing okay.”

“Yeah, I’m doing fine,” he said in a tone that discouraged inquiry, and he also changed the subject by adding, “Have you seen the masterpiece yet?” He indicated the posters of the painting that hung at intervals on the ballroom walls: the woman lying supine, a secret, satisfied smile on her face, her hand covering her crotch, not palm-down in the traditional gesture of modesty, but palm-up, as if offering it to the man revealed smokily in the mirror at the foot of the couch, the artist, Diego Velázquez.

I said I had not, that I’d been out of town during the brief period it had been on public display.

“It’s a fake,” he said, loud enough to draw stares. Of course, I’d seen Chaz drunk often enough in college, but this was different, a dangerous kind of drunk, I realized, although Chaz was the mildest of men. The taut skin under his left eye was twitching.

“What do you mean it’s a fake?” I asked.

“I mean it’s not a Velázquez. I painted it.”

I believe I laughed. I thought he was joking, until I looked at his face.

“You painted it,” I said, just to be saying something, and then I recalled some of the articles I’d read about the extraordinary scientific vetting of the painting and added, “Well, then you certainly fooled all the experts. As I understand it, they found that the pigments were correct for the era, the digital analysis of the brushstrokes was exactly like the analyses from undoubted works by Velázquez, and there was something about isotopes…”

He shrugged impatiently. “Oh, Christ, anything can be faked. Anything. But as a matter of fact I painted it in 1650, in Rome. It has genuine seventeenth-century Roman grime in the craqueleur. The woman’s name is Leonora Fortunati.” He turned away from the posters and looked at me. “You think I’m crazy.”

“Frankly, yes. You even look crazy. But maybe you’re just drunk.”

“I’m not that drunk. You think I’m crazy because I said I painted that thing in 1650, and that’s impossible. Tell me, what is the time?”

I looked at my watch and said, “It’s five to ten,” and he laughed in a peculiar way and said, “Yes, later than you think. But, you know, what if it’s the case that our existence-sorry, our consciousness of our existence at any particular now-is quite arbitrary? I don’t mean memory, that faded flower. I mean that maybe consciousness, the actual sense of being there, can travel, can be made to travel, and not just through time. Maybe there’s a big consciousness mall in the sky, where they all kind of float around, there for the taking, so that we can experience the consciousnesses of other people.”

He must have observed my expression, because he grinned and said, “Mad as a hatter. Maybe. Look, we need to talk. You’re staying in town?”

“Yes, just for the night, at the Omni.”

“I’ll come by in the morning, before you check out. It won’t take long. Meanwhile, you can listen to this.”

He took a CD jewel box out of his inside pocket and handed it to me.

“What’s this?”

“My life. That painting. You remember Krapp?”

I said I did.

“Krapp was crazy, right? Or am I wrong?”

“It’s left ambiguous, I think. What does Krapp have to do with your problem?”

“Ambiguous.” At this he barked a harsh sound that might have been a laugh in another circumstance and ran his hands back through his hair, still an abundant head of it even in middle age. I recalled that his father had such a crop, although I couldn’t imagine Mr. Wilmot wrenching his tresses in the way Chaz was now doing, as if he wanted to yank them out. I had thought it merely a figure of speech, but apparently not.

“Great,” I said, “but if you don’t mind me asking, why are you handing this to me?”

I can’t describe the look in his eyes. You hear about lost souls.

He said, “I made it for you. I couldn’t think of anyone else. You’re my oldest friend.”

“Chaz, what about Mark? Shouldn’t you share this with-”

“No, not Mark,” he said with as bleak an expression as I’d ever seen on a human face. I thought he was going to cry.

“Then I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” I said. But I sort of did, as a queasy feeling cranked up in my gut. I have little experience with insanity. My family has been blessed with mental health, my kids went through adolescence with barely a blip, and the raving mad, if you except the people who make movies, are not often found in the fields where I have chosen to work. Thus I found myself tongue-tied in the presence of what I now saw was a paranoid breakdown of some kind.

Perhaps he sensed my feelings, because he patted my arm and smiled, a ghost of the old Chaz showing there.

“No, I may be crazy, but I’m not crazy in that way. There really are people after me. Look, I have to go someplace now. Listen to that and we’ll talk in the morning.” He held out his hand like a normal person, we shook, and he vanished into the crowd.

I went back to the Omni then, poured myself a scotch from the minibar, and slipped Chaz’s CD into the slot in my laptop, thinking, Okay, at worst it’s eighty minutes, and if it’s just raving, I don’t have to listen, but it wasn’t just a recording. It was a dozen or so compressed sound files, representing hours and hours of recorded speech. Well, what to do? I was tired, I wanted my bed, but I also wanted to find out if Chaz Wilmot was really around the bend.

And another thing. I have sketched my life here, a singularly bland existence strung around the cusp of the century, and I suppose I wanted a taste of, I don’t know, extravaganza, which is what the life of an artist, which I had declined in terror long ago, had always represented to me. Perhaps that’s why the Americans worship celebrities, although I deplore this and refuse to participate, or only to a slight degree. But here I had my own private peep show, and it was irresistible. I selected the first file and clicked the appropriate buttons, whereupon the voice of Chaz Wilmot, Jr., came floating from the speakers.

Thanks for listening. I realize this is an imposition, but when I heard Mark was throwing this party and he said he’d invited you, I thought it was perfect timing. There’s other stuff I want to talk about, but that can wait until I see you again. It’s a shame you haven’t seen the actual painting-those posters are shit, like all reproductions-but I guess you’ve read the stories about how it was found and all that. These are lies, or may be lies. Reality seems to be more flexible than I’d imagined. Anyway, let me set the stage for this.

Did you ever do any acid, back in the day? Yeah, now that I think about it, I believe I gave you your first hit, blotter acid, purple in color, and we spent the day in Riverside Park walking, and we had that conversation about seagulls, what it was like to be one, and I seem to recall you transmitted your consciousness to one of them and kited along the Hudson, and then later we spent the bad part of the trip in your room in the apartment. It was just before spring break our senior year. When I asked you how you liked it after, you said you couldn’t wait for it to be over. Oh, yes.

And that’s my point-it implied that you knew you were doping, knew you were hallucinating, even though the hallucinations might have seemed totally real. One time-did I ever tell you about this?-I was tripped out on acid and I happened to have this triangular tortoiseshell guitar pick on me, and I spent half the night staring at it, and all those little brown swirls came alive and showed me the entire history of Western art, from Lascaux cave painting, through Cycladic sculpture and the Greeks and Giotto, Raphael, Caravaggio, right up to Cézanne, and not only that-it revealed to me the future of art, shapes and images that would break through the sterile wastelands of postmodernism and generate a new era in the great pageant of human creativity.

And of course after that I couldn’t wait to trip again, so the next weekend I got all my art supplies lined up and the guitar pick in hand and I dropped a huge fucking dose, and nothing. Worse than nothing, because the guitar pick was just what it was, a cheap piece of plastic, but there was a malign presence in the room, like a giant black Pillsbury Doughboy, and I was being squashed and smothered under it and it was laughing at me, because the whole guitar pick event was a scam designed to get me to trip again so this thing could eat me.

You remember Zubkoff, don’t you, my old roommate? Pre-med? The guy who stayed in his room studying all the time. We called him the Magic Mushroom? I heard from him again, out of the blue. He’s a research scientist now. I joined a study he was doing on a drug to enhance creativity.

Did you ever wonder how your brain worked? Like, say, where do ideas come from? I mean, where do they come from? A completely new idea, like relativity or using perspective in painting. Or, why are some people terrifically creative and others are patzers? Okay, being you, maybe the whole issue never came up.

But it’s always fascinated me, the question of questions, and even beyond that I desperately wanted to get back to the guitar pick, I wanted to see what’s next. I mean, in Western art. I still can’t quite believe that it’s all gurgled down to the nothing that it looks like now, big kitsch statues of cartoon characters, and wallpaper and jukeboxes, and pickled corpses, and piles of dry-cleaning bags in the corner of a white room, and “This is a cock.” Of course you might say, well, things pass. Europeans stopped doing representational art for a thousand years and then they started up again. Verse epics used to be the heart of literature all over the world and then they stopped getting written. So maybe the same thing has happened to easel painting. And we have the movies now. But then you have to ask, why is the art market so huge? People want paintings, and all that’s available is this terrible crap. There has to be some way of not being swamped in the ruthless torrent of innovation, as Kenneth Clark called it. As my father was always saying.

I mean, you really have to ask, do we love the old masters because they’re old and rare, just portable chunks of capital, or do we love them because they give us something precious and eternally valuable? If the latter, why aren’t we still doing it? Okay, everybody’s forgotten how to draw, but still…

Drifting here. Back to Zubkoff. He called me up. He said he was running a study out of the Columbia med school, lots of funding from the government, National Institutes of Mental Health, or whatever, to explore whether human creativity could be enhanced by taking a drug. They were using art students, music students, and he also wanted to get some older artists in on it, so they could check if age was a variable. And he thought of me. Well, free dope. That was never a hard sell.

Anyway, I volunteered, and here we all are. And I’m sure you’re wondering now why, after however long it is, old Wilmot is dropping all this on me. Because you’re the only one left, the only person who knows me and who doesn’t care enough about me to humor me if I’m nuts. I’m being blunt, I know, but it’s true. And while I’m being blunt, of all the people I’ve known, you’re the one with the solidest grasp of what the world calls reality. You have no imagination at all. Again, sorry to drop this on you. I’m dying to know what you think.

Setting the stage, interesting phrase, that, like our life is a drama, act one, act two, act three, curtains. So let’s start with me at twenty-one, just out of college. Did you ever wonder how I graduated? How could I be an art major and flunk three art courses? This my advisor asked me. Well, sir, the reproductions make me sick, I can’t look at them and I can’t write about painting, the words seem like jokes. It took me three years to learn how to fake it, and if it wasn’t for Slotsky I would’ve failed the other courses too. A genius at doing art papers, Slotsky; if they hung twelve-hundred-word art papers in museums, Slotsky would be one of the great artists of our generation.

I was home in Oyster Bay, home sweet home, and all I could think of was how to get out of there before I killed myself or him. My dad. I don’t think I ever mentioned this to you, but Dad had a little problem.

He was chasing Kendra the maid again, although she’s practically deformed. How could he? Maybe he stopped seeing them as they are. It was worse before Mother started hiring the maids, not that she cares anymore, but we kept losing maids, and of course she needed a maid by then, she could hardly function by herself.

I remember you invited me out to your aunt’s place one summer, and you might have wondered why I never reciprocated. Well, Dad’s problem is one reason; maybe he would’ve behaved himself with guests-always a sense of decorum in public-but I didn’t want to risk it. Another reason: there are nude portraits of my mother on every fucking wall in the house. Interesting progression though, from Pre-Raphaelite sylph (my favorite, if that’s the word, she’s maybe a couple years older than I am now: naked, hair shoulder-length, leaning against a wall, looking out at all of us-am I not beautiful?), to classical Venus, to the Titian version, finally to Rubens, and then he stopped painting her, or maybe she stopped posing. I wonder what she tipped the scales at that summer, four or even five hundred, I couldn’t look anymore, but she got even with him in a sort of Dorian Gray self-destructo way.

Anyway, you have to imagine me skulking around that huge, echoing house, wishing I had the balls to join a cult, the kind where you get a tattoo on your forehead, and other stupid thoughts, and decided I was never going to play into his hands, I was never going to wreck myself to get even like she did. Why didn’t she leave him? I never figured that out. It’s not like she didn’t have any money.

Her dad had plenty, made it in switching equipment for the railroads. All that complicated electromechanical machinery that relayed current to the right switches in railyards and out along the line. There used to be something called a Petrie junction that got some use in telephone exchanges too. Westinghouse bought him out right after the war for something like thirty million, which was serious money in those days. He died when I was seven or so, but I knew my grandmother pretty well.

Grandma Petrie was a character, a beautiful, stupid woman, always concerned about whether her hair was right. She lived with us for twelve years after the old man died, becoming dimmer by the year and increasingly concerned with the Church and her place in the next world. A little Dickensian drama here on the shore of the Sound, or one of those other guys, a lavender-scented breath from the previous century. Dad, of course, smarming around, phony as hell about all the religious horseshit, entertaining fat monsignors right and left, making sure we were all raised in the Church, Catholic schools and all, Charlotte to Sacred Heart, of course, and me to Columbia only because the old man went there, instead of the decent art school I should’ve gone to. Grandma didn’t much like me. Charlotte was her favorite. They used to sit for hours, saying the rosary or looking at her thick, leather-bound photograph albums. I would ask Charlie how she could stand it and she’d say it was charity, a lonely old woman needing companionship, and after a while I learned not to tease her about it, and I took it as natural that my sister could be two completely different people, the quiet little nun-in-training and the tomboy in shorts and a T-shirt, palling around with me down on the beach, in our boats, always covered in sand, tracking it through the house.

When she died, I mean Grandma, it turned out that all the smarm was for naught. She left the bulk of the estate to the Church, with life grants to me (small), Charlotte (larger), and Mother. Mother got the house. In the will she said she expected Charlotte to pursue her vocation and enter religious life.

That’s a scene etched into my brain, the bunch of us sitting around listening to the lawyer read it out, all of us in black, like it was 1880, and when that part got read I rolled my eyes and nudged Charlotte, who was sitting next to me, expecting her to give me the elbow back, but she didn’t, she just turned and looked at me, and there was someone else looking out from behind her eyes and it fucking froze my blood.

Why he never left her, I guess, why he never had a real French-type mistress in a Manhattan apartment like he must’ve wanted. I remember looking at him when he realized he wasn’t going to get a dime, that he was stuck with us more or less forever; he went white, like he’d been punched in the gut. Funny, because his income was pretty high then; he was at the peak of his fame as a second-rate Rockwell, he could’ve split then, but he didn’t, he just kept grabbing the maids and the locals, waitresses and cashiers.

But he loved her once; you couldn’t paint a woman that way unless you did, or I couldn’t anyway, and there are photographs, God, are there photographs! They met in the last summer before the war, they were both at the Art Students’ League, he was an instructor, she was a student for her bohemian summer before she got serious and started settling down with a good Catholic boy, and I think he just blew her away with sheer talent. The Petries must’ve loved it when she dragged him home that summer, a heathen with no money, no family. But Mother was a hardhead when she wanted to be, and she was Daddy’s girl, the only child, a bit of a disgrace there in a fine Catholic family, only one kid, what’s wrong with them? And he converted, naturally, more Catholic than the Pope after a while; he could be charming too, charmed the old guy, but never Grandma, as it turned out. I bet she was praying that a Jap bomb would solve her problem, but he came back and they got married and he got famous, and then came Charlotte and then a set of miscarriages and a little girl who died of polio at age two, and then me, and that was it.

There it is, the sad story, for the record, this record, or at least what I’ve been able to gather. Not that anyone actually ever sat down and told me the truth. I get versions. Who to believe? More to the point, how to avoid it?

I finally settled on a plan to go to Europe -the geographic cure, always attractive at that age. I didn’t have enough money of my own and I thought he’d never give me any of his, although he spent enough of it on himself. I guess he assumed that I’d stay here, he had the stupid idea that we were going to be a father-and-son thing like the Wyeths or the Bassanos, a little atelier here in the cultural desert of Long Island. He was talking about how I could do the lesser portrait commissions, or maybe the liquor ads. But as it turned out he sprang for the whole thing. That’s what was so maddening about the bastard, you thought he never considered another human being besides himself, and then he goes and does something like that; he said, take as long as you want, you’re only young once, and remember to use condoms.

Of course I’d asked my mother for it first, and she’d said, ask your father. I couldn’t believe it, standing there in her room, trying not to gag from the smell of the disinfectant and her rotting feet. Her mouth drawn down from the stroke, her eyes almost invisible in the pads of flesh: ask your father.

Which I didn’t, no, I got drunk instead, a half bottle of bourbon, and passed out in the downstairs bathroom in a pool of puke, charming, and he found me there and cleaned me up. What was he trying to prove? That in the end he loves me more than she does, that he won the war of the Wilmots? Anyway, he wrote me out a check for five grand the next morning, and we talked about what I had to see and we sat there in his studio and talked about it, about the museums, London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Florence, the same trip we did together when I was nine, when I got to look at the European collections for the first time.

That first time with Dad we stayed at the Ritz-God, he could throw money around in his flush years-everyone was real nice to me there, and I thought it was because I was such a terrific kid before Charlotte set me straight, incredible embarrassment, though I never admitted it to her. She hated that part, and now that I think about it I guess it was then she started visiting churches and convents, insisted on going up to Ávila to see St. Teresa.

When I made the European trip by myself in my twenty-first year, I skipped the Ritz and stayed at a one-star albergo three flights up on Calle de Amor de Dios at the corner of Santa Maria, an address Charlie would no doubt approve of and about a ten-minute walk to the Prado. I hadn’t been to the place since I was nine, but it seemed like I just stepped out for a minute, the pictures all in the same place. But my eye had been polluted with art history courses, and I knew that I’d never recapture that fucking explosion when I first saw it, because it was one of Dad’s ploys never to have art reproductions in the house, no coffee-table books spoiling the golden eye of young Chaz. My father took me into the big room through the back way, through the dreary mediocrities of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fussy brown paintings, and then Room Sixteen and there’s the Surrender of Breda, the first big Velázquez I ever saw. I wanted to spend my life looking at it, that Dutch soldier glancing casually out of the picture plane-how did he even think of doing that-and the lances the way they were, just perfect, but he wouldn’t let me stay, he grabbed my arm and pushed me past the famous portraits and the prophets in the desert with that wonderful black bird suspended in real air and through the grand room, the center of the cult, Room Twelve, and we hung a sharp right and there was Las Meninas.

The school of painting, Manet called it, and my father’s opinion was that taken all in all, it really was the best thing anyone had ever done in oils. He told me, and I can believe it, that when I first stood in front of it my mouth dropped open and I held my hands up to my cheeks, like a version of Munch’s The Scream. It was so wonderful at first sight, like the Grand Canyon or the Statue of Liberty, but more so, because I had been hearing about it for my whole life and I’d never even seen a postcard of it. And so I stood there trying not to disgrace myself by crying while he talked.

Nine-year-olds are not supposed to have that kind of reaction to paintings, but I suppose I was a kind of twisted prodigy. Can I even remember what he said? Maybe it’s been layered over in my mind by all the formal art criticism I got in college. There wasn’t much historical material, just a working painter’s admiration for a genius. He made me look at the light coming in through the window on the right, the way that light shines on the painted wood of the window frame. Vermeer made a whole career out of light shining on painted surfaces, he said, and never did anything better than that, and Velázquez just tossed it in as something extra.

And the playing with visual reality in a way that wouldn’t appear again in Western art until the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, he said, Manet got all that business of flat tonality and bold clean outlines from this painting, and there wouldn’t be anything like the blurred treatment of the lady dwarf until the twentieth, it was like something out of de Kooning or Francis Bacon.

And the perfect, doomed little girl at the center, the most important little girl in the whole world, the heartbreaking look of pride and terror on her face, and the two attendant meninas, one superbly painted like her mistress, the other blocked in angular planes like a wooden doll, a little Cézanne avant le lettre (why? He didn’t know, a mystery) and the whispering nun and the waiting figure in a glory of yellow in the far doorway (terrifying! Who knew why?) and the unimportant king and queen in the dusty mirror, and every movement and gesture in the whole vast thing directing the eye to the guy with the mustache and the black tunic with the cross of a knightly order on it, standing calmly in the midst of it with his palette and brushes. He’s saying I made this all, my father told me, he’s saying I have stolen this moment from time, this is how God sees the world, each instant an eternity, and when the dwarfs and the dog and the nun and the courtiers and the royal family and their maids are forgotten dust, this will live and live forever, and I, Velázquez, have done this.

I recall the expression on his face as he said it, and I guess I thought he was talking about himself, because at nine I thought my father was in the same class as Velázquez, the greatest painter in the world. No, not really true; I think after that trip to Europe, after really seeing the masters, even at nine I could tell the difference, and I think he could see that I could. Over the next year it made him increasingly cranky, more demanding, more authoritarian. He was the master; I was the student and always would be. But the fact is I’m better than he was, maybe not as far above him as Velázquez was above his own master, Pacheco, but a discernible gap. Not that I could actually say that or claim that, even to myself, and I wonder how Velázquez handled it. Of course Pacheco wasn’t his father, just his father-in-law, but still.

All that crap came flooding back when I stood in front of Las Meninas for the second time and I realized that’s what I’ve always wanted from art, the ability to stand apart from the domestic whatever, the whispers, the favorites, the little cruelties.

And, my friend, you’ll see that, in a strange and unexpected way, I have succeeded. But also you may be thinking, hey, isn’t this supposed to be about the painting? Why is he giving me all this crap about his sad life? Because it’s not just about the painting. It’s about whether my memory has anything whatever to do with what really happened. Figure that out and the painting is explained one way or the other. Therefore I spread my memories before you as with a trowel. Are there inconsistencies? Impossibilities?

Pay attention, please.

The following day I met Suzanne Nore in the Prado.

I never pick up girls in museums, I can’t see them when I’m in my art head, but there she was, looking at Velázquez’s equestrian Baltasar Carlos, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her, that mass of red-gold hair down to her butt. I waited until we were alone in the room and then I just started talking like a maniac about the painting, the unbelievable mastery of technique, the paint so thin that it runs, the weave of the canvas showing through, all done in one go with practically no corrections, look at the damn background, it’s like a sumi-e painting or an aquarelle, and the texture of the costume, he taps the brush here and there and your eye reads it like gold embroidery, and look at the face, it’s practically a sketch but the whole psychology of the kid is stripped bare, and so on and so on, I couldn’t stop, and she started to laugh and said, you really know a lot about painting, and I said, yeah, I do, I’m a painter and I want to paint you. I almost said I wanted to paint you naked, but I didn’t.

She was a singer, or wanted to be; she went to Skidmore, she was on a junior year abroad taking lessons at the Paris Conservatory, and she’d hopped the train down here for a long weekend. I took her through the museum, talking nonstop like some kind of nutcase; I thought she would disappear if I shut up. We were there until it closed, and afterward we went to a little bar I like on Calle de Cervantes and drank wine and talked until it got dark and it was time for tapas, and we ate and drank some more. We closed the place and I walked her back to her hotel by the Plaza Santa Ana, very respectable, and I kissed her there in the doorway, getting dirty looks from a couple of Guardia Civils-no public kissing allowed, Franco didn’t like it-and I thought, This wasn’t supposed to happen, I wasn’t set up for this, love or whatever it is. Crazy.

I spent the next couple of days with her, every minute. She talked a blue streak, funny as hell, jokes about everything, wandering around the city. She made up a fantasy about us being in a war movie because of the soldiers in the Nazi helmets marching around everywhere-we’re hiding from the Nazis!-and it started to get real, it’s hard to explain. But the next night after we closed the tapas place again, and back at her hotel, I kissed her like before, but longer, and when I said good night like a dope, she grabbed my belt buckle and dragged me inside and up the stairs.

So, that was it, all the stuff the movies teach us about passion, all those scenes where the actors tear their clothes off standing up and the actress jumps up and impales herself on his dick, we’re supposed to believe, and they fall on the narrow bed. I always thought I was a cool guy, in control, but this was a whole different kind of thing. I lasted about two minutes, and I was opening my mouth to apologize but she wouldn’t stop, she told me what to do, she worked on me with her hands and her mouth, and all the time she kept talking, telling me just what she was feeling; I never heard a girl say stuff like that, I couldn’t believe it was happening. “Insatiable” is probably not the right word, I don’t know what the right word is, but we did it until we were raw, we would’ve started hemorrhaging if we hadn’t fallen asleep. And laughing, giggling. I remember thinking, This is too good, there’s got to be something wrong with this, some punishment to come.

We stayed in bed almost all the next day. I staggered out for food and beer once, and then when night fell we got up and cleaned ourselves off, sneaking down the hall to the bathroom together and doing it again under the weak stream of the shower in the tin stall. We went out late like the Spaniards do and she knew clubs-this was all underground stuff, she had addresses from musician friends of hers-and there were kids there playing music. They had no records; rock and roll was banned by the government, so all they knew was what they could pick up on shortwave from the U.S. Armed Forces Radio, and they’d invented their own version, a weird combination of flamenco and Hendrix, incredible music. And I had my drawing stuff and I just drew like crazy, making portraits of the musicians, and her, of course, blazing away on a homemade electric guitar, drawing in ink and putting the gray tones in with spit and wine, ripping the sheets off and handing them out to anyone who wanted them. I thought, Okay, it doesn’t get any better than this, this is life.

When she had to go back to Paris, I went with her. She said we’ll always have Madrid, like in that movie, and so now we have Paris too. I have to say a huge relief leaving fascism behind, it was getting old, that sense of people taking down what you were doing, and the Guardias in their shiny hats on every corner giving you the eye like you’re thinking about bringing down the state.

We stayed in her place off the Rue Saint-Jacques near the Schola Cantorum, third-floor walk-up, filthy bath down the hall. Her room was incredibly messy; I was the fascist in the relationship. She took voice classes at the Cantorum every morning, not the Conservatory, or maybe I got it wrong. La vie bohème, left bank, student demos, everyone in black, pretentious, smoking and drinking and doping like mad. While she was out I hit the museums and the galleries. Paris was dead as far as painting went at the time, all political shit and wannabe New York School.

But I went to an exhibition at the Orangerie, it was Weimar art: Dix, Grosz, and some people I never heard of before, like Christian Schad, Karl Hubbuch. Some terrific stuff, the style was called Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity. So these guys were in the ruins of Germany after the first war and everywhere abstract modernism was the thing to be doing-Picasso, Braque-and there was Dada and Futurism cranking up, and these guys tried to rescue representational art from kitsch and they did it, especially Schad, a technique like Cranach’s, wonderful depth and structure, and shocking penetration. Look at the world you made, you bastards, this is what it looks like. I recall thinking, Can we do that now? Would anyone be able to see it? Probably not, and the world hasn’t changed that much, except we stick the war-wounded behind the walls of hospitals so we don’t have to look at them, and the rich are now thin instead of fat. But even if you did it, the rich shits would buy them up: oh, you have a Wilmot, appreciating very nicely, thank you, not as much as de Kooning but a good return on investment. Everyone is blind now, except if it’s on TV.

I was going to stay in Europe for at least a year, but I came home that fall, to find some interesting developments. Mother had been moved to a care facility because of her worsening diabetes and the effects of the new stroke, which is probably a good thing considering more parts of her were turning black and falling off, and no one wants that around the house. They had to take the door off her room, and the frame too, and move her out through the French windows and the garden. My prayer is she had no brains left at the time. She loved that garden.

The wreckage from this demolition was still apparent when I returned, but Dad seemed disinclined to do much about it. Charlie left the day after Mother did, off to her novitiate somewhere in Missouri. She was going to be a missionary sister and help the far-off poor. She didn’t write or leave a note for me; I mean, I knew she was talking about, it but I didn’t think she was just going to leave, like sneaking off while I was gone. I used to tell her when she first started to get serious about it, I told her, you don’t have to do this, Charlie, we can run away together, we can make a life, but she just looked at me in a kind of holy blank way she’s developed and said, it’s not that, Christ was calling her and so on, and I didn’t believe her. She was never that religious when we were growing up; I always thought it was a girl thing, like being crazy about horses. For a while I thought it was because he did something to her-you hear about shit like that all the time, even families around here in Oyster Bay, Daddy and Daddy’s little girl-I should have asked her, but I couldn’t, the one time I went to see her, not in a convent parlor, and I have to say, I never really believed it. He’s a monster, but not that kind of monster.

I missed her. I never thought, I mean I always thought we would be together, or close, anyway, my big sister, Chaz and Charlie together forever. I thought charity began at home, but I guess not. Dad was by that time boffing the lawn guy’s daughter, Melanie, a conventionally cute brunette with a face unlined by suffering or complex thought. She was about four years older than me, just a little younger than Charlie, and I actually went out with her a couple of times myself, which is really weird, even for chez Wilmot. He wasn’t painting much then, although he was anticipating a big commission to do a fresco in a seminary dining hall out on Long Island. He wanted me to help, part of his fantasy that I was his student and artistic heir.

You’ll want to know why the fuck I came home.

Yeah, a long pause there; but basically, it was Suzanne. When I said good-bye to her at the station in Paris before she got on the airport bus, and right, it was rainy and gray, and we were hugging and kissing there and she was crying, she said I was the love of her life and she’d never forget me and she just knew she’d never see me again, it was too good for her. What I was thinking, I’m ashamed to say, was, Whew, I’m glad to have a break from this consuming girl, and so long, darlin’, see you around.

So she left, and there I was with plenty of time on my hands, and it turned out all the movies and the popular song lyrics were true. Whatever sensible-Chaz thought-that she was too much to take on at this stage of my life, that I didn’t need the aggravation and grand opera that were part of the Suzanne package, that I had work to do, you know, defining myself as a painter and all that crap-whatever, there was a part of me that just ached for her. I would pass a street corner where she used to sing sometimes with a group of scruffy French kids, American folk songs and standards, for tossed coins, and I’d see them singing with some other girl and I’d feel my heart clench up.

I kept her room, which was probably a mistake; I should’ve packed up and gone to Berlin or something, but I stayed on there, not doing much, while her smell gradually faded from the room. I found a miniature bottle of shampoo she’d left behind, with only a little smear of it left, and I kept it and opened it every night and sniffed it and remembered what her hair smelled like. Did I try other girls? Oh, yeah. It’s not hard to get laid on the Left Bank when you’re twenty-one and you can draw. Everyone wants to be immortal, and maybe I’ll be famous someday, I could practically hear them thinking.

But, God, you know? I couldn’t figure it out, why none of that was any good. I mean, I’m out with my pad, doing tourist sketches on the boul, just for something to do, and then the girl sits down and you make her look a little prettier than she is, and she’s blown away by it-these are not French girls, oh, no, they’re Americans, Brits, Danes-we’re speaking English here, and then some smooth talk, a date for a drink, and yeah, you have a terrific body, I can tell, and then up to the apartment where they take off their clothes and there you have it, a fling with a genuine Paris artist, and as far as I’m concerned I might as well be using someone else’s dick.

And then my work started to go downhill, I mean it was like there was a scrim over everything, my eye had no penetration, and the paint wouldn’t behave itself, it wanted to go to mud; it’s hard to describe, but there was no doubt about it. I’d rented a piece of a studio after Suzanne left, going to do some serious work now that I had more time, and I thought I’d try to work on the kind of psychological portraits that I’d seen in the Orangerie, with a little Eakins precision thrown in, but even though I worked like fury, everything I did was garbage. I got frenzied, I broke brushes, I threw fucking canvases against the wall, but nothing came. And after a couple of weeks of this, the word “muse” started to float up through my mind, something I always thought was complete bullshit, but now I thought, Well, there was Rembrandt and Saskia, and van Gogh and his whore with the earlobe, and Picasso always had a short stack of girls on hand, and I thought, Okay, I found Suzanne and she’s mine, however that works, I needed her. And as soon as I started thinking that way, I saw that the stuff I’d done while she was there was the best stuff I’d ever done, it was vital and passionate, and I remembered what I was like with her, my base temperature was ten degrees higher, and you could see that in the lines of the drawings, especially the drawings of her.

And there was the sex, too: boy oh boy, screwing tourist girls-thin wine after that hundred-proof brandy. I mean, there’s a kind of sex you have when you’re floating off somewhere, kind of watching yourself have it, and the girl is too, who knows what they’re thinking, and you know that you’ll have nothing to say to them after, and even if the girl is cool and pretty there’s a moment when you can’t wait to see the last of her and you have a sense that she feels that way too. But Suzanne demanded the full presence, she held on like it was the end of the world, like this was the last fuck before the bomb went off, the last fuck in history, talking through the whole thing, narrating it, and her body never stopping, clenching, and totally there.

So I came back and we met and it was the same in New York as it was in Paris, couldn’t get enough, and the first thing I did was rent a loft on Walker Street, a hundred bucks a month, five flights up, an old wire factory, full of scrap and filth, and that was where we stayed, on a big slab of foam I bought on Canal Street. We’d turn the lights off and light dozens of thick plumber’s candles and afterward wash up in the tiny workman’s toilet. I decided to turn it into a living loft; I would dump the scrap out the window into the air shaft or carry it down. I would paint it white and put in a sleeping platform and lighting and partitions and a kitchen, and we would live there and be happy.

In the meantime I stayed in Oyster Bay with Dad, keeping out of his way as much as I could. He had some idea that we were going to be a family again-were we ever that kind of family?-the pair of us and Melanie, the girlfriend. The stepgirlfriend? And he kept going on about this church fresco, how it’s going to be a gigantic revival of that great art, with Wilmot père and fils as the ringleaders.

When I happened to run into him I could barely stand it, those affectations, that straw sombrero he wore, and the walking stick, and the cape, strolling through the increasingly ragged garden. Maybe the gardener was not that delighted his daughter’d shacked up with a client thirty years older than her, or maybe it was just the lack of money. Mother’s entire income went to the luxurious madhouse she was in, and he was living on whatever commissions he could wrangle. Collier’s was long gone by then, and the Saturday Evening Post and the others. His main business had become fat cat portraits and selling originals of his old work, but this fresco was going to make everything okay again.

Just before I moved out I had a conversation with his girlfriend. I was sitting on the living room sofa watching a fire I’d just made and thinking about my sister and how that was one of our favorite things to do in the winter, make a big fire and watch it burn and throw in stuff we hated-bad photographs of us or toys we’d outgrown, anything that wouldn’t make an actual stink or explode, but occasionally that stuff too-and Melanie came in and plopped down in the leather armchair where my father usually sat. After a while I realized that she was staring at me. I stared back a little and then I said, “What?” and she started in on why was I being so cold and cruel to my father, who loved me so much and was so proud of me and all that. And I said, “You know, for someone who just walked in the door you have a lot of opinions about the nature of this family. For example, they just dragged my mother out of here with a crane. That might have something to do with how I feel about my father.”

“You think that was his fault?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s been screwing nearly every woman and girl around this place since practically day one. That might have an effect on a woman’s self-esteem, might make her inclined to excessive eating and the use of drugs. Who knows, if you stay here long enough you might get to see what it’s like.”

This produced a shrug that made me want to reach for the poker. She said, “He’s a great artist. Great artists play by different rules. If she couldn’t handle that…I mean, I’m sorry for her and all, but…”

I said, “He’s not a great artist. He had a great talent. It’s not the same thing.”

“That’s crazy-what’s the difference?”

“Oh, you want an art lesson? Okay, Melanie, just wait here. I’ll be right back.”

With that, I went to the racks in the lumber room where he kept all his old stuff, the salable and the unsalable carefully divided, and from the latter section I removed a portfolio and went back to the living room. I threw the portfolio open on the coffee table and fanned out the contents.

I said, “When I was a little kid, starting from about age six through about age eleven, my father would take me out to our dock or down the beach, nearly every day when it wasn’t raining or freezing, with watercolor sets and portable easels and canvas chairs, and we would paint together. I had a set just like Dad’s, with Winsor and Newton colors and sable brushes, and we used expensive cold-pressed D’Arches watercolor blocks, twenty-four by eighteen. My father doesn’t believe in cheap materials, even for little kids. And we painted together, for an hour, two hours, depending on the light. We went down at different times of the day, so we could catch all the varieties of light and what the light did to the water and the sand and the rocks and the sky. In the warm weather we painted figures, people on the beach, and boats out on the Sound, and in the winter, we just painted the beach, the sea, and the sky, the same view, over and over again. It was our Mount St. Victoire, our Rouen Cathedral. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Not really,” she said.

“No. But anyway, what do you think of the paintings? These are his, by the way. I used to tear mine up afterward because it made me so mad that I couldn’t do what he did with a brush.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“Yes, they are. This one, for example, a fleshy woman and a child sitting on the beach, early in the morning. Look at the heft and presence of the figures, all done freehand with a loaded brush, ten strokes and there they are. And look at the sweep of the wet sand! That perfect color, and the white of the paper showing through just enough to make it shine. And this one: winter on the Sound, and three seagulls made out of the white of the paper, just chopped in against the gray sky, and they’re perfect and alive. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get those effects in aquarelle? This is not the kind of kitsch you buy in resort souvenir shops, it’s nearly as good as anything Winslow Homer or Edward Hopper ever did in the medium. You get that word, ‘nearly’? I use it because that’s the story of his life as an artist-‘nearly.’ He didn’t ever take it that extra foot into greatness. He checked at the fence. And it wasn’t just that he was an illustrator. Homer did illustration, Durer, for Christ’s sake, did illustration. No, there was something missing, or maybe, yeah, something stifled in him. That’s why he put these away, he doesn’t want to be reminded of how close he came. You need more than talent to be a painter. You have to take risks. You have to not give a shit. You have to be open to…I don’t know what it is-to life, God, truth, some kind of other stuff. It’s a business, art, but not just a business.

“And you know what the really horrible thing is? He knows it. He knows it. He knows what kind of gift he threw away, and that knowledge made a poison in this house, a curse, and that sad, ruined woman they just dragged away knew it too and she took it all in, she tried to absorb the poison, she fucking carried it, so that he could still be jaunty C. P. Wilmot, with his little straw hat and his romantic cape, traipsing about her house and chasing cunt. He’s a vampire: perfect manners, charming, beautiful clothes-come innnn, I only vant to suck your bluuuuhd. I can see he’s got his fangs into you too, darling. He’s given you the line about how he needs a woman who understands genius, about how the rules that regular people have to follow don’t apply in his case, how he’ll make you immortal with his brush…”

And so on and on. She looked at me like I was a traffic accident, one of those mashed-beer-can ones with blood on the glass, where you can imagine what happened to the people inside, but you can’t take your eyes away. She jumped to her feet while I was still yapping away and walked out of the room without another word.

The strange thing about this little encounter was that while I was talking it came into my mind why I was so reluctant to leave Oyster Bay. Looking at those pictures-it was like a concentrated elixir of my childhood, the beach, the flats, the water, the boats, my mother wrapping me in a sweater on the beach on a cool evening, and Charlie’s hand over mine on the warm tiller of her little sailboat the summer she taught me how to sail. And the smell of low tide, and always the sparkle and play of light on the water; I used to lie facedown on the dock and stare at it like a mystic stares at a mandala, the door to a higher existence. I was born there, I never really lived anywhere else but there and in the city during school, and even then I’d come home every summer.

After Melanie walked out I went up the back stairs to the widow’s walk, and stood out in the breeze, and looked at the lights on Lloyd Point and Centre Island, and the channel markers, red and green, and beyond the black Sound the glow of Stamford on the Connecticut shore. Charlie and I used to sneak up here at night when we were kids, we’d stand by the railings wrapped in blankets and be pirates and explorers until Mother came up and yelled us back to bed, but not much of a yell because she used to do the same thing when she was a girl, and now Charlie’s entombed and Mother’s entombed, rotting alive, and he’s still trotting around like nothing’s wrong, with his new honey, although he’s probably in a deeper tomb than either of them, when you think about it, but not me, I said to myself, I’m not going to be buried alive, not here, not anywhere. It fucking broke my heart, but that day I performed a homectomy on myself, without anesthesia, and left and never lived there again.

I seem to recall you had a car and helped me move out, or maybe it was someone else, and I started living in the ruined factory on Walker Street. I worked like a bastard for five weeks, throwing out a ton of trash, tangles of wires, rusted machinery, then putting down tile on the splintered floors, wiring the place, hauling cabinets up five flights of stairs, plus a stove, a kitchen sink, and the hot-water heater. If I’d known what it would be like, I probably wouldn’t have started. A hot-water heater up five flights of stairs by myself!

The only thing I had help on was the drywall. The guy on the second floor took pity on me, Denny Bosco, another painter, he saw the ton of drywall stacked on the sidewalk and told me I should hire some guys from the labor exchange on the Bowery to haul it up, and I did: who knew? And he helped me with the drywall too, one thing it’s real hard to do by yourself, you can’t hold a panel up over the baseboard and nail it in unless you have three hands. He was the Oldest Inhabitant around there, been living in the building since SoHo was a decaying industrial neighborhood; you had to have an AIR sign outside the building, “artist in residence,” so that if there was a fire the firemen would know to look for a charred corpse. He said he used to sit up on the roof at night-this was back in the late sixties-and look out toward Canal, and except for the neon glow from Chinatown, which was a quarter the size it is now, you could see nothing but blackness and a few little lights from the lofts of the pioneers. He told me that it was going to get worse, that the parasites were moving in, like they do anytime the artists generate a little life in a neighborhood-the rich come to suck at it and make it dead again. A prescient guy, Denny, as it turned out.

A week later I rented a paint sprayer and masked the windows and my face and sprayed the whole interior white. The paint was barely dry when, as we’d arranged, Suzanne showed up with a U-Haul full of furniture. I was glad to see her and I carried the stuff up in a pretty good mood, although it was mainly really heavy pieces from her parents’ house, and I thought it would be a nice day, moving into a place we were going to live together in, but I noticed she was in one of her dark phases; she sat on a chair smoking, and didn’t really respond when I started joking and playing around about where we were going to put the different chairs and dressers and all, like I was an interior decorator. Really the place looked kind of grungy still, despite all my work, and I thought that was what was bringing her down, she was disappointed.

But no. She said, “I’m pregnant.” And the usual, are you sure, yeah, almost two months late, and she’s had the tests and all, and how did it happen, I thought you were on the pill, and she sort of lost it then, like, oh, I knew you’d say it was my fault and my life is over, and my career is just taking off. Which was mainly that she sang on open mike nights in a couple of clubs in the East Village and there was a guy who said he was from a record company and gave her a card, but I didn’t mention that. And I said, well, what do you want to do? She was crying by then, and I hugged her and said I loved her and whatever she wanted was okay with me, abortion or have the baby, we’d manage.

The girl gets pregnant and either you get rid of it or you have it and your life flows into a different channel than you thought it would. We went back and forth about it quite a few times; first she wanted to abort and I didn’t, and then she didn’t and I did, and I guess the Catholic thing is still there, but not only that, it’s something about the flow of life, it makes me crazy to think of the hole you’d have to live with for the rest of your life, and that can’t be good for a relationship. But what did I know? Charlie always said go with life, love your fate. Amor fati is the expression. I’d have given anything to be able to talk this through with her, but when I called the number of her society they said she was en route to Uganda.

And so was my life set on a false course, which is another reason why I’m telling you all this ancient matter. For lust will languish and its heat decay, says Petronius Arbiter, you’ll recall that from the class we had on Renaissance translations from the Latin masters-one of my rare B grades, I think-and it’s so true. By the time I marched up the aisle with Suzanne my attachment was more than half guilt, but I thought I could fix that somehow, through fidelity, through affection, and somehow lay the curse my father had passed on. Unfortunately, it turns out the habit of self-betrayal tends to spread. It pollutes the other parts of life, in my case my painting, and it acts as a marker for others, like those cruel experiments where they paint a monkey green and the other monkeys tear it to pieces. If you’re false to yourself, I think, other people find it easier to be false to you. I mean, there’s no one there to begin with, so what’s the big deal?

It’s a shame, in a way, that I didn’t actually tape my life like old Krapp did. The present effort is not an adequate substitute because-how should I put this-I’m not entirely sure who I am anymore. Maybe that was Beckett’s point in his play, that none of us are anyone anymore, we’re all hollow men, heads filled with straw, as Eliot says in the poem, colonized by the media, cut off from the sources of real life. Why art with any soul in it is grinding to a halt.

So let’s run through my life from then, quickly, because it’s not much fun for me, and also, I have to say, because it may or may not be my life. But stay with me here.

Okay, the girlfriend’s pregnant, we go to visit the parents in Wilmington. Max, the dad, is a big, jovial slab of beef; Nadine, the mom, is a slightly withered Southern ex-belle. They are not pleased with the catch, I detect, but they’re resigned, whatever the little girl wants. Max takes me aside, asks how I’m going to support Suzanne in the manner to which she’s become accustomed, and I say I intend to work as an artist, and he goes, lots of luck, sonny, I hope you intend to be a commercial artist, because you’re buying into a high-maintenance package, don’t be fooled by the bohemian styling.

We got married anyway and lived in the loft and had the baby, which was Toby. The fact is me and Suzanne should have been three hot weeks in a Spanish hotel room, not a ten-year marriage, although you can build a lot of plans on guilt. It was going to be great, I thought, the opposite of my parents’ marriage, or her parents’ marriage, and we were going to be artists together, that was the basis, really, a life together in art. Then it turned out that for whatever reason I wasn’t going to be the hot young painter of the season and she was not going to be one of the defining singer-songwriters of that decade, and the funny thing is, despite our mutual mediocrity we both made a shitload of money for a while, which muffled the pain, as it often does. I could barely keep up with the ad work, and she had one of her songs covered by the thrush of the moment and it was a Top 40 hit for a while. Terrible song, I still hear it now and then if there’s a radio tuned to an oldies station, all her songs anodyne and slightly sappy, tinkly, no real juice, easily distinguished from Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, etc.-like my painting, unfortunately.

Then, because she said you can’t raise a kid out of a loft in SoHo, we bought a house in the country, a four-bedroom in Nyack on three and a half acres, with a barn; God alone knows what it’s worth now, but way back then those big houses were going for a hundred and a half, two hundred, which seemed like a lot of money, and I started to work all week in the city, and I should have been the one to have affairs, I mean come on, I was rich in New York and that was the era for it, but I never did, not once, guilt again, probably-no, yet another example of schmuckhood. Mark was burning up the bedsheets during that time, and he used to invite me along to the meat markets downtown, but no, I was the opposite of Dad in that respect. I was just like Mom. It actually took me years to catch on about what Suzanne was doing; I thought I had an okay marriage until one evening she got drunker than usual and set me right with the list of guys.

Somewhere in those years she gave up music, decided clay was more her thing, then printmaking, then book design, then video, then back to clay, but at a higher level, she wrote a play too, and film scripts, an all-around artistic type, Suze, no focus in any of them, just a desperate desire to be in a scene, be noticed.

Or so I think, but I have no idea who she is. “Late for the Sky,” that Jackson Browne song, from the days when we thought rock lyrics held the key to all mysteries, I still think about her when they play it on the oldies. I have to say, I can’t carry the freight for the breakup of my first marriage. I don’t have it in me to be the complaisant husband; I might have looked the other way for a long time, like they do in Cheever stories, sophisticated and all that, cool, but she brought the guys into the house, into our bed, and they were universally scuzzballs, bartenders, drifters, arty fakes, lawn guys with rusted-out pickup trucks. I’d come home on Friday after a week in the city and there’d be some gap-tooth skinny asshole on my deck drinking my booze, her new friend, and one week I just didn’t bother coming back and that was it. I guess my first marriage was based on a secret deal: I would take care of her and she could do what she wanted, and I would always be there when she got tired of it, but in the end I couldn’t; and the reason, I have to say, was I just didn’t care for what she produced. The sad fact is that only the great artists have different rules, and the patzers have to live like everyone else or settle for being pathetic.

As for Toby, all there is now is a kind of helpless sorrow, although why I should feel sorry for someone who’s doing a lot better than his dad, a pillar of the community and his church, three lovely children he’s never introduced me to-no, I don’t think I want to go there. Although, it was really amazing, as soon as he developed a personality he rejected everything I was, I mean he actually broke crayons deliberately, snap snap snap, and left good drawing paper out in the rain, and ruined the expensive German markers I bought him, and he fixated on my first father-in-law.

And Max just took him over and raised him according to his strict principles, which hadn’t taken all that well with Suzanne but did for her son, and the kid went out for football in high school and was a quarterback and went to Purdue just like granddad and was a star there just like, and became an engineer, ditto. Each year I get a dutiful Christmas card with the beautiful family depicted thereupon, a pleasant-looking group of strangers.

So then back into wonderful singlehood, until I met Lotte and we got married and we had Milo and Rose and then split up. For a while, I thought Lotte would save me, because I could speak to her in a way I could never speak to Suzanne, and I thought I could store the real Chaz kind of in her, like a constant mirror. She has a Memorex-like memory, never forgot a conversation or a dream or one of my many fuck-ups, maddening actually when I think about it, you can’t do that to another person, however much they might love you. No substitute for the true self. Making this recording, together with what remains of my memory after all the dope I sucked into my system while I was with her, and what happened with Zubkoff and later, I have to admit what I did to her. Basically, I walked whistling into my father’s tomb, just like I said I was never going to do, ha ha, and it broke her. The poison leaked into her the way it leaked into my mother. I think it’s why she betrayed me in the end, the most honest and decent person I ever met. And right she was to do it too.

I’d never really understood what she wanted from me. Self-expression? It can’t just be that. I used to do paintings for her all the time, pure self-expression if you like, and the best thing I ever did for her when we were married sent her into a shit fit. It was our fifth anniversary and we’d been fighting on and off for a couple of weeks, and I wanted to make it special for a change. What we’d been fighting about was this goddamn magazine cover I’d done for New York about Giuliani’s wedding, the one to Judith Nathan.

They wanted the obvious pastiche, van Eyck’s Wedding of John Arnolfini, so I did that, in oils on a real oak panel just like the original. I got the arrogant hypocrisy on the face of the man and the Persian-cat self-satisfaction on the face of the woman, and I used the convex mirror behind them to paint in the wedding party, all the pols and celebs, all grinning like skulls, and also I used the ten little lunettes around the edge of the mirror to illustrate scenes from his career and the breakup of his two previous marriages. I mean, it was good. It was a real painting, not a cartoon, and it had some of the authority of the original.

I brought it home after the magazine was finished with it and she went ballistic, her usual business about how could I do this to myself, like my talent was like a god that had to be worshipped in a certain way, and how all the bozos at the magazine had no idea what I was doing, the details wouldn’t even reproduce, and all the time I was wasting on crap like that, my only life. That was one of her phrases-how can you spend your only life this way? But I didn’t see her spending her only life making the kind of money we needed for Milo, I mean it wasn’t like she was maximizing her talent in that little gallery, when any of the big guys would’ve hired her in a heartbeat, she was that good-no, that was down to me, thank you, and around then was when I started in with the amphetamines, to get more work out in my only life and bring in the cash.

Anyway, about mid-May that year, a Sunday, it was, one of the first really nice days we had, maybe a month before our anniversary, I was making coffee or something in the kitchen and I heard this sound of giggling and laughter coming from our bedroom and I went to the door, which was open just a slit, and I looked in. They were on the bed, Lotte and Milo, he must’ve been around four then, and they were playing some kind of tickling game. She was in a white batiste nightgown and he was in Spider-Man pj’s, and it just knocked me out, the sunlight streaming in and lighting them up on the white duvet and the brass of the bed glinting. It was like I was in on some secret, the kind of semierotic play that mothers and sons get into at that age, and for a second I almost remembered-like a sense memory, not like something in my head at all-doing the same kind of thing with my mother.

And that afternoon I went to the loft and stretched and primed a biggish canvas, maybe three feet by five, and I started painting what it was like. I made the boy slightly turned away from his mother, with an expression of delight on his face, and I had the mother sitting up in the center of the bed braced on one arm and with her other arm extended, touching his head, her index finger barely wrapped in a dark curl of his hair. And I got lost in it and for the next few weeks it was like a refuge; I’d grind out my daily bread and then turn back to it, and it was fine, everything was working right, the child’s mouth rendered with three quick strokes, perfect, glistening with the juice of life, and the same with the flesh tones of the mother’s skin I knew like my own, showing through the translucent fabric of her gown in the morning light, pink and pearly, you could almost breathe in the bed-scent of a woman.

And it could’ve been just a genre piece, but it wasn’t; the painted surface was alive and really existent, like it is in serious painting, not mere image at all, and I made the white duvet into what I really have to say was a gorgeous blizzard of the innumerable shades that white can take in morning light. And the vital line of the mother’s arm connecting her to the child, and the set of her haunch on the bed, and the other, supporting arm-perfect, sculptural, vital. I couldn’t believe it.

And I wrapped it up and I was so happy and I thought she’d be too. But when she took the paper off she just stared at it for a long time, as if she was stunned, and then she ran into the bedroom and burst into weeping, just sobbing her heart out, and when I went to her and asked her what was wrong she said something crazy, like, you’re going to kill me, you’re going to kill me. And it turned out that she didn’t get that I could do stuff, I mean in painting, for love that I couldn’t do for money, and she seemed to calm down, and we hung the damned thing in the bedroom, but she wouldn’t talk about it and it was like a bad fairy gift in a fairy tale: instead of bringing us together like it was supposed to, it drove us apart. So after that I didn’t do anything but commercial work.

Which would have been fine, except around then Photoshop came in and art directors who wanted pastiches of famous paintings could just buy the rights from Bill Gates or whomever and pop in new faces, and they even had tools to give that impressionistic effect or craqueleur, and there went half my business. So I had to work twice as hard, especially after we found out that our Milo had those bad lungs, familial pulmonary dystrophy, a disease not attracting much research attention and barely controllable by means of a set of drugs that might have been compounded of powdered diamonds if you looked at the damned bills. And naturally I had to up my own dosage, and one night I lost it and wrecked our house and apparently I slugged Lotte and they had to come and take me away. I say “apparently” because I can’t really recall any of it.

I went into rehab like a good boy and did my program, but when I got out she said she couldn’t live with me anymore, she couldn’t carry the weight of the demons. I moved back into my loft then, and since then I’ve been living from check to check, magazine work mainly, newspapers, a few ads, never enough, sinking ever deeper into plastic hell, IRS hell…

Maybe.

That brings us up to last summer, a day in June; I was at Vanity Fair that day talking to Gerstein, the art editor, about a project they wanted to do, a series of pieces on the great beauties of the day illustrated with oil portraits in the manner of the great masters. They got the idea, of course, from the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer and Scarlett Johansson, that was the hook: Madonna by Leonardo (ho ho!), Cate Blanchett by Gainsborough, Jennifer Lopez by Goya, Gwyneth Paltrow by Ingres, Kate Winslet by they hadn’t decided yet. And he thought of me, naturally, and he went on and on about how he had to fight management to get to do them as real paintings rather than Photoshopped photos, and I asked him had they agreed to pose, and he looked at me funny and said of course they’re not going to pose, you’ll work from existing photographs. I argued with him for a while but it’s impossible to get anyone, especially a magazine fart director, to understand the difference between a posed portrait and one cocked up from photographs, and he knew I needed the money, so we shook on it, $2,500 per, a bargain. I suggested Velázquez for Kate Winslet and he said great idea. I called Lotte and told her about the sale, just to hear her happy with me for once, and she was. I could practically hear her mental calculator clicking over the phone.

There was a fairly short deadline on the project, and by the time I got back to the loft I was thinking about painting and trying not to think about where in the bottomless money pit I was going to stuff that twelve and a half grand. Since I turned whore I have all the art books, and it’s kind of cool to look through them and summon up the originals I’ve seen. The funny thing is I know that when I actually have the palette set up and brush in hand I won’t give a shit what the finished product is, I’ll be stoned off the process of painting.

Lotte, in her art gallery head, used to calculate that I made about eight bucks an hour with the kind of work I put into a project, and I could never explain to her why I do it, why I have to work like that in order to get out of bed every morning, because I knew what she would say. She would say, why don’t you paint then for yourself, Chaz, and give up this connerie? Then I’d get mad and say, how the fuck are we going to pay for Milo’s goddamn pills, five grand a month at least, and are you going to pull that out of your little gallery? And then she’d say, but I can sell your work, your work is wonderful, people would love to have your work. And there it would sit, like a fresh turd on the table, the thing that busted us up, Chaz Wilmot’s principled refusal to paint real work for the commodity market. So I would storm out to the studio and work on a magazine cover or a record album and smoke dope until everything seemed just peachy.

I was just sitting down with a book of Ingres portraits when the phone rang and it was a secretary asking me if I would hold for Dr. Zubkoff, and my belly dropped because I thought it was one of Milo’s docs with more bad news. So when he came on and I figured out who it was and found out what he wanted, I was so relieved that I would have agreed to practically anything.

The next day I took the subway up to the Columbia medical school campus and walked to the building I’d been told to find, a four-story brick-and-glass structure on St. Nicholas Avenue at 168th Street. Inside, the usual medical smell, the over-cooled reception room with the tattered magazines, the white-coated receptionist behind her little window. They were expecting me. I filled out a medical form, lied about my drug use and my smoking like everyone else, and was turned over to a nurse in pale blue scrubs who took me into a little room and told me to get into a gown. They said they wanted to make sure I was totally disease-free before they let me into a major drug study, so if I had a prior condition I couldn’t come back at them with an accusation that their drug messed me up.

A couple of hours later, I found I was healthy, despite my lifestyle, still sound as a bell, apparently, just like Krapp. It was an impressive medical workup, bloods, scans, the whole nine yards, and after it I had an even greater sympathy for my poor kid.

After all the tests were done and I was dressed again, they led me to a small conference room with the other guinea pigs and I saw Shelly himself, now a far cry from the pale slug he was in college, a man with a tan and longer hair, with the flossy rich-guy cut they all have and that aura of authority they must bolt on when they give out the med school diplomas. A dozen or so people in the room, all arty types, about evenly divided between the sexes, mostly younger than me. It looked like Sunday brunch at any hip place in Williamsburg.

Dr. Z took us through a PowerPoint show about salvinorin A, the drug we were about to pollute our bodies with. On the screen a picture of some dusty Indians sitting around in a circle, Mazotecs from the deserts of Oaxaca, who used a plant called Salvia divinorum, the diviner’s sage; their shamans used it to break loose from time and see the future and the past. Silly them, because according to Shelly it was all happening in the damp meat of their brains, like everything else we perceived. Over the last few decades, researchers had extracted the active principle of the Indian herb-salvinorin-and discovered that it was not an alkaloid like most of the psychoactive drugs, but a much smaller molecule, a diterpene, and unique in that respect. It was a kappa opioid agonist, I recall that, something to do with the control of perception. The drug had a variety of different effects, we learned, and these varied considerably between users. Of particular interest, though, was its ability to create the illusion that you were reliving a portion of your earlier life. Dr. Z said he thought that since the retention of childlike wonder and freshness of perception was widely considered to be a central element in the creative process, maybe salvinorin might enhance it, which was why he’d selected his subjects from artists and musicians. Then there was some technical stuff about how if they got psychological effects they would use tracers and so forth to try to pinpoint the areas of the brain that did creative stuff, and then he closed with assurances that while the drug was extremely potent, it appeared to be quite safe and nonaddictive.

Then the usual questions from the floor, which Shelly handled, I thought, with a smoothness that had not been apparent in him as an undergrad, and the meeting broke up. I went up to him afterward and we shook and did the whole small world thing, and he invited me for a private chat in his office. Which was very nice, golf clubs in the corner, all kinds of awards, blond wood desk and chairs, flat-screen monitor, framed kids’ drawings on the walls and a small amateur oil of flowers in a vase, maybe by the wife, a happy family man it seems, good for Shelly. No talk about old times; he boasted and I listened. His great career, his beautiful family, his house in Short Hills. He said he saw my stuff in the magazines all the time, he thought it was great. He thought I was a success, just like him.

He said he particularly wanted me in this study because it was really going to penetrate to the roots of creativity and even lead to ways of augmenting it. I thought that if he wanted to do that he better bring his lunch, but I didn’t say anything; why rain on the guy’s parade? I was happy for him, the poor schmuck, and it was a hundred bucks a session to me.

After that he turned me over to Ms. Blue Scrubs and I had my first dose of salvinorin. They’ve discovered that the best way to ingest it is via the oral mucosa. They can heat the drug and shoot you the fumes, or they can give you a surgical sponge soaked with a solution of the drug and you have to keep that in your mouth for ten minutes. The first way brings on an intense reaction in a few seconds but it fades in half an hour. The sponge works best; the reaction lasts for a full hour, more or less, and then drops off over the next hour. It’s a way to provide a controlled dose but still imitate chewing the leaves, which is what the Indians down in Mexico do.

She took me to a little room, like an examination room, with a low-slung recliner and left me with an observer in a white coat, nameplate HARRIS, young woman, all business, notebook, tape recorder, and a comfortable chair to sit in, like psychotherapy. I made a joke to that effect, minimal response. Message: this is serious research. She opened a plastic tub marked with a numbered label and extracted a damp surgical sponge with plastic tongs. She stuck it in my mouth and told me to chew on it for ten minutes starting now-clicked her watch-try not to swallow, and then she dimmed the lights.

I chewed on the cloth and kept the liquid it yielded in a cheek pocket, like a country-boy pitcher on the mound. Faintly herbal, a little like turkey stuffing, not unpleasant. After ten minutes I was allowed to expel the wad. Then nothing for a while. I thought about the Vanity Fair project, about money, the usual sad, self-pitying thoughts about how essentially and irreparably screwed up my life was, floating mind-crap. After a while I felt a certain relaxation, like I was looking at Chaz thinking this shit and finding it amusing; I guess I actually laughed a little then. Next a feeling of vague physical discomfort, like my muscles were starting to cramp, that claustro coach-class airliner feeling, and I got up and went for the door.

Harris said I couldn’t leave, so I sat down, got up, sat down, paced back and forth, energy flowing through my body, electric, vibrational and crunching over gravel and dead leaves, the air chill and damp and I’m just drifting, not really sad, but somehow feeling a déjà vu as we’re walking toward the grave site at the head of a column of mourners, quite a few of them, more than I had expected really, my sister in her nun’s head-scarf, they’d dumped the black clothes by then, holding on to my arm. I stopped and stumbled a little from the force of the disorientation and she asked me what was wrong. I told her and said I’d never had a déjà vu that strong, and she said no wonder, it’s not every day you bury your father, and we walked along and the rest of the funeral played out.

Charlie and I got a little drunk later and she told me she was thinking about leaving the religious life. She liked helping the starving millions in the world’s nasty places, but the good they could do seemed so paltry compared to the extent of the evil. Yes, it was good to give twenty girls a year a convent education and keep them from being raped by older guys, but there were hundreds and hundreds they couldn’t help, the mothers would bring them to the school in Kitgum, crowds of women and girls begging for admission, knowing it was hopeless, but what else could they do? And somehow now that our father was gone a lot of the reason for it (as she now admitted) was gone too, and she felt she wanted to move into the world, not to leave religion exactly, but to be of some greater service. We talked about that for a while, what different orders of sisters did, and she asked me how my painting was going and did I think I would start painting for myself now and not just to piss the old man off, and I laughed at that.

We stayed up late talking, just like we’d done in the old days when we were kids, and she kissed me good night and then I went up to my old room. It hadn’t changed at all, the Indian blanket on the bed, my old hockey stick on the wall next to the painting of my mother, and that damp wicker smell from the old furniture. I got out of my clothes and was going to go to bed but remembered I hadn’t closed the French doors leading to the terrace and if the wind shifted in the night the rain would ruin the carpets, so I put my old blue plaid robe on and tried to open the door. The door wouldn’t open, and I rattled the knob and pounded and kicked at it, and there was a hand on my shoulder, which scared the shit out of me because I was alone in the room, and I turned around and this woman was there in a white coat with HARRIS on the tag and I was back in the drug study.

Now, you absolutely have to understand that this was not a reverie or a dream, nothing like that at all. I was there. I was back in time twenty-two years, inhabiting my younger body, talking to my sister in the living room of my father’s house, full color, stereo sound, the works. I said, holy shit! And my knees gave way and I had to lie down on the couch, and Harris was all over me about what had happened. It was hard to reply at first. It wasn’t that I felt drugged, or dull, or extra sharp like on coke or speed, but more detached, a very subtle variation in consciousness, and there was a beating in my head, a pulse like a kitten licking my brain four or five times a second, thnick thnick thnick, in just that delicate way.

At the same time I felt both extremely focused and detached, as if experiencing my life for the first time without the blurring of worry and regret. Not in the least like hash and the furthest thing from acid. She asked me a bunch of questions she read off a printed sheet, and I answered them as best I could, yes, I attended my father’s funeral; no, I can’t guarantee that what I experienced was a memory and not a fantasy. It seemed perfectly real, just like talking right then to the silly woman seemed real, although if you informed me that I was still in my room on the night of the funeral and that this interview was a fantasy I would have said sure, right.

She kept me for another hour. The kitten licking faded after a while and I returned more or less to normal, although at that point I was no longer sure what normal was. On the way out I lifted from the reception room table a tattered old People magazine with a story about Madonna in it. Back at the loft, I set up a small gessoed wood panel and dug through the chests until I found an old theatrical costume that would do, plum colored, with gilt threads and a straight, high bodice-some Juliet must have worn it in the Edwardian age, stank of mothballs, but in good shape. I hung it on my manikin, propped her in an armchair, arranged the lighting, pinned Madonna’s face up on the wall nearby, and got to work.

I drew it out in charcoal, a figure from the waist up with her arms demurely folded, pale hair in ringlets falling to the neck, showing against a cloudy background and a little city with walls and towers back there. Underpainting in warm gray-ochre, mixed a little Japan dryer in because I’m a commercial artist, can’t wait for the paint to dry, and who cares if it cracks and blackens in fifty years? So when the imprimatura was touch-dry, I built up the masses, laid on glazes, and then the fall of the drapery, and it went terrific, I painted for hours, it got dark outside, I got hungry, I ignored the phone ringing. Was it different? I guess. I can often get lost in the act of painting and forget for a while that what I’m doing is essentially commercial crap, but this session was even more so, I was totally into it, with my body, just letting the paint flow out onto the fresh white surface, magic.

My stomach was growling by then and I wanted to give the underpaint a chance to dry, so I took a break and walked over to Chinatown for some noodles and took the People with me to read and study Madonna some more. Her face in the cheap printing showed the mere mask of the celebrity, and the job was to find the interior behind it, and of course you can’t do that from a photo, that’s the point, the handlers want to control the star’s image, revelation not wanted, so I knew I’d have to imagine it. And naturally I thought about Suzanne, a singer at a vastly lower level of celebrity but a face I knew well, and I worked with that. The People photo was a typical lowering Madonna shot, the overbit mouth pouting and a little downturned, the eyelids at half mast in a way meant to be read as sexual according to the conventions of beauty shots.

When I got back to my place I opened her mouth into a little gape of astonishment and put into her eyes the deep loneliness and insecurity of the famous performer. And the not-so-famous, as I knew from experience.

And the bambino. They hadn’t asked for one but I thought it added the right touch. So I pulled out an old baby picture of Milo and painted it in freehand. Milo had a kind of sly expression, you know the kind, the secret and unknowable joy of the pre-articulate child.

I glazed the underpainting all night, and when I looked at it by daylight it was certainly a credible Leonardo, no sharp outlines, everything smoky-sfumato, they called it-and the background is pretty good. I threw in some of those flat-looking quattrocento trees, which I always thought were an artistic convention until I went to Italy and saw they had taken them from life-I never learned what kind of trees they were, I always call them quattrocento trees. Amazing really; I would have futzed around with something like this for weeks, and so if Shelly thought the drug enhances creativity, I have to say yeah, it does.

And it got better. I did five paintings in five days, by far the most productive period of my life, I mean without coke and speed. And it was nothing like the frenzy I used to have when I was drugged out, it was just like…shit, I can’t say what it’s like. Being supernormal, maybe, not getting distracted, total focus, total pleasure in the work. When I was four or around there I could sit forever in my father’s studio while he worked, with big sheets of newsprint on the floor, drawing with my crayons or painting with watercolors. Time stopped, or flowed at a different pace, and there was nothing but the moment before I made a mark; and the making the mark; and looking at the mark afterward. And again. That week was just like that; for some reason all the shit that usually runs through my brain-worries about money, about the wives and kids, about what I’m doing-all seemed to take a little vacation, leaving a stripped-down Chaz who just painted. Wonderful!

A couple of days later I went back to the med school for another session. They took a blood sample, and I got a quick physical; I told them I felt fine, great in fact, even if I did lose almost ten pounds, and I had to fill out a form about how I fared the past week. Interesting the stuff they were checking on-paranoid ideation, sleepwalking, violence, convulsions, catatonia, hallucinations, uncontrollable laughter, excessive urination, no urination at all, reverse ejaculation, eating unfamiliar foods, priapism, impotence, paralysis, dyskinesia, and there’s a section for changes in creative process, where you can rate your creative functioning on scales of one to ten, and I gave myself all tens. Unless that was a hallucination. How could you tell?

Then the same little room with Harris, she said, we’re going to try a slightly lower dose, and she hooked me up to various meters, including a brain-wave device. Chewed my wad. Same as before, one second I’m in the little room, the next I smell the cologne my mother always used back when she was alive, lily of the valley, and I’m in her lap on our deck looking over the Sound, a gray day, it must be early autumn, and she has me wrapped in a brown velvet throw; Charlie is away somewhere and Mother’s lovely and I am perfectly happy.

She’s telling me a story, always the same story, about the brave little boy whose mother is kidnapped by an ogre and taken to his castle, but the brave little boy fights through many dangers and drives the ogre out of the castle, and the brave little boy and his mother live happily ever after in the ogre’s castle.

Okay, the same as before, I’m there, it’s real, and now something happened that was even more weird. I’m sitting in her lap, and then the scene darkens and the smell of the water and of her perfume fade, and they’re replaced by heavier smells, meat cooking and scorched feathers, and a sweet/sour smell like sewage and lavender fighting it out, and I’m still on a woman’s lap, but it’s not my mother, and I’m not me.

But I also know she’s my mother, and I’m also me in a strange way, as if the two little boys are the same boy, both the same age, one on a deck overlooking Long Island Sound and the other in this room. A familiar room, familiar comforting sounds and smells. My mother is wearing a black velvet dress that smells of lavender, and there are other women in the room moving about and my mother is talking to them, discussing domestic affairs, how to cook a chicken, the need for more beans. I am wearing a dress too, of some stiff fabric, bloodred, with a lace collar. The room is small, with a low beamed ceiling, and dim-the light comes through a narrow casement window made of round lenslike panes.

My mother puts me off her lap and stands, and another woman grabs me by the hand and leads me out of the room into a courtyard flooded with strong light; overhead is the hot sky of some southern region. This too is all familiar, a fountain lined with blue tiles playing in the center of the courtyard, and I am fascinated by this blue and how the water changes the color of it. I splash my hand in the water and the sensation is real, actual; I look at the blue of the tiles and the blue of the sky and I think that this has some importance but I don’t know what it is. From outside I hear the noises of the street, vendors’ cries and the snort of horses and creak of cart wheels. A dark-skinned woman comes in through the gate with baskets of flowers, red carnations. I stare at the flowers and I conceive a desire for them, I want to hold the perfect red of them.

But someone shouts, and the flower woman darts away and does not latch the gate, and I slip out into the street, although I have been warned not to, warned the Jews will steal me. I follow the flower lady through narrow streets; she knocks at doors, enters or is shouted away. While I wait I play with a stick; I poke a dead cat into the sewer that runs down the center of the street. I am careful with my shoes, I am not to get them wet with the filth.

The flower seller leaves the narrow lanes of the neighborhood and enters a broader street. She walks faster and I have to trot to keep up with her. She no longer knocks at doors. Now we are in a plaza full of carts and animals, and many people; most of them are shouting out the names of foods and other things. The flower seller has disappeared.

Some men are looking at me, talking, but I don’t understand what they are saying. They are dark men, wearing unfamiliar clothing. One reaches out to grab me, but I am suddenly afraid, and I dart away. I am lost, I run through the crowd crying. Maybe the Jews are following me, they will steal me and drink my blood, as Pilar the nurse has often assured me that they love to do.

I run blindly, tripping and bumping into people, I knock over a hen coop, and then I am swept up off my feet and held, a man in black, a broad hat and a cassock, a priest. I beg him not to let the Jews get me, and he laughs and says there are no Jews anymore, little man, and who are you, and why are you crying, and I say my name, Gito de Silva, and my father is Juan Rodríguez de Silva, of the street of Padre Luis Maria Llop, and he says he will take me home, and I am glad to be saved but also terrified that I will be beaten and so I struggle in his arms. The priest says, hey, take it easy, buddy! And I find myself struggling with a UPS man in a brown uniform.

I still had the EEG leads trailing from my head and I’d lost a sneaker. I managed to croak out the lie that I was all right, that I was fine, and the man said I had dashed out the door of Shelly’s building and run into him full tilt. Like I was blind, he said. We were at Haven Avenue and 168th Street and he’d been en route to making a delivery at the Neurological Institute. In a minute or so, Harris came running up and apologized to the guy and led me back into the building.

She had me down on the recliner and was taking the leads off my head when Shelly Zubkoff popped in, looking a little ruffled. Apparently, without warning, I had jumped off the bed, knocked Harris away when she tried to stop me, and somehow got out of the building, where I’d bounced off the delivery man. Shelly apologized and observed that I was lucky that the man hadn’t been driving his truck. I had no memory at all about this. One second I was a kid in some other age struggling with a priest, and the next I was out on the street with the UPS guy. Disorienting is barely the word.

He made me stay for an hour, for observation he said, although I felt perfectly okay, really good, calm and kind of blank, and again without the usual internal dialogue going on, the crap that constantly fills up our heads, and it turns out, you know, that without that script running, you can really focus down on the world around you, and if you do that everything is really interesting. Everything.

There’s a feeling you get on crank or cocaine where you think you have super powers: anything seems possible, and worse, sensible, which is why you get people painting six-room apartments with a one-inch brush or doing mass murders. But what I felt when I left Zubkoff’s office wasn’t like that at all. I felt perfectly myself, but more so, like there were forces behind me, encouraging me, stroking me. Again that kitten-licking sensation in my head. It was exactly like being a well-beloved child, it was that kind of omnipotence, at home in the universe (a book title I’ve always liked), and everything was just as it should be and everything was interesting.

Right, I keep saying that, “interesting” is the word, because as I rode downtown on the subway, the car crowded with the end of rush hour, ordinary people going home to supper and their lives, I couldn’t help staring at the faces and the patterns of the people in random juxtaposition, but it wasn’t random at all-everything was loaded with meaning, and you could point that out with art, I saw, you could make sense of it. I cursed the hours I’d spent being bored and pissed off and getting high because real life wasn’t quite perfect enough for me, and I was nearly crying with the desire to paint these faces and this choir of people arranged for me and paint everything so that people would look at it and say oh, yeah, that’s true, it all makes sense. This vibrating moment.

I won’t say it was an epiphany, because God wasn’t involved, but I knew there was something else going on, that time itself is the real hallucination, that the material world isn’t all there is of existence. I could see divine stuff peeking through the cracks, I felt supported by Creation and it was flowing through me stronger than ever, and I thought, Okay, this was what Fra Angelico must’ve felt like all the time.

I was home and in bed before it occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about that other thing that had sent me running through the streets, the little boy in the red dress and the house with the strange smells and the girl with the carnations, and when I started thinking about it I realized that the people were all speaking a language I didn’t know, like Spanish but not quite, but I could understand it just like English. And who the hell was Gito de Silva? What was he doing in my head?

The next week was fairly rotten, even for my life, because I got a call from Vanity Fair. Gerstein was real apologetic, but his editor didn’t like the paintings, and they weren’t going to use them. They thought they were too spooky and weird, he said, and they didn’t look enough like the stars, he said, and I controlled my temper and I said they looked exactly like the stars, as those stars would be seen by the five old masters concerned, which I thought had been the fucking point of the exercise, and we went around the barn for a while on this, and what it turned out to be was they really had no idea that anyone had ever seen things differently from the way they do now. They thought that the current view of everything was the stone reality, that this week stood for all time.

And I guess if you’re running a style magazine with cultural pretensions, that’s the way you have to see the world. Such an enterprise can’t really handle much penetration. If people looked and thought deeply they wouldn’t read magazines, or at least not magazines like Vanity Fair. I have to say they were generous; they paid me a kill fee of a grand per painting and said I was free to sell them elsewhere.

I was pretty calm, compared to what I would have been at another time, and I couldn’t help wondering whether that was a side effect of the salvinorin, a kind of tranquilizer thing, although I didn’t feel in any way dulled out, really the opposite in fact. A kind of acceptance, maybe, of what I’ve been fighting my whole life, that I can do something extremely well that has absolutely no exchange value as artwork. People can see that quality in the old masters, or at least they write about seeing it, but not in something made yesterday.

So my work’s a complete fucking waste of time, at least where money is concerned. I used to think I’d been born out of my proper era. I mean, it’d be like a major league pitcher being born in 1500. His ability to throw a small ball at a hundred miles an hour through any sector of an arbitrary rectangle is totally unsalable, so the guy would spend his life shoveling shit on some estate, and the only time he does his thing is at the fair, hey, guys, look what Giles can do! But basically it’s not all that interesting, not even to Giles.

Meanwhile, there was over seven thousand bucks I would not be seeing, and I dreaded going around to the creditors I’d promised it to and having to eat shit, again. Mark Slotsky had left a message on my cell phone, which I hoped was about money, and I called him back, but his phone said I had to leave a message.

Later that day, I went into Gorman’s on Prince Street, the only place in SoHo where I still have credit. Clyde the bartender has a soft spot for artists. Behind the bar is a painting of mine, the original of a cover I’d done for New York magazine a couple of years back, Mrs. Senator Clinton as Liberty leading the people in the Delacroix painting with her breast hanging out. Clyde had loved it, and I gave him the painting in exchange for my bar tab and a year of free drinks. Gorman’s used to be a cop saloon when the police headquarters was still in that palace on Centre Street, and then it was artists for a while, until most of the painters moved out when the rents went up, and now it is all retail people from the boutiques and the galleries. This is fine with me. I don’t have much to say to painters nowadays; I can’t stand the hacks and the serious ones make me ashamed of myself. I’m a little isolated, actually, all alone in the big city, a cliché, but there it is. From week to week the only people I see are Lotte, Mark, and a guy named Jacques-Louis Moreau, who, as it happened, was sitting at the bar in Gorman’s when I walked in. He usually is, with a glass of wine and the French papers and a cell phone.

I wouldn’t exactly call Jackie a pal of mine, he’s actually more Lotte’s friend, a fellow diplo-brat, been to the same schools in various capitals and here in the city. Whether they’d ever been an item I don’t know, she would never tell me. Although after we broke up she’d been seeing a lot of him, and I had the mixed feelings you have about a guy who’s sniffing around your beloved even when she’s not exactly yours anymore. He’s a big guy, a soccer player, with that roundheaded neat French look, close-cropped dark hair and a ready smile. Our relationship consists mainly of drinking at Gorman’s in the afternoons and bitching about our hard lives. Maybe that’s why I went into the bar that day.

Jackie’s a painter too, but unlike me he yearns for gallery success. Unfortunately, while he has all the technique in the world he has no creativity at all. Ever since I’ve known him he’s been pursuing the fashions, always a little too late. He started out doing big splashy abstracts and then, in turn, op art, color fields, pop art, and now he’s into conceptual. One winter a few years ago I walked into his loft on Crosby Street and found him feeding big Warholian-wannabe canvases into the Ashley stove he used to heat the place. No loss, that, but he seemed curiously cheerful about it, and I recall being a little envious that he honestly didn’t give a shit about his work. He thought the whole art scene was a scam and that sooner or later he’d hit it right and cash in.

Anyway, when I came in he waved me over, and I ordered a martini and unloaded about the Vanity Fair fiasco. He commiserated and, unlike Lotte, didn’t ask me why I didn’t do the gallery thing, which was restful at least, and then he said he was leaving New York for Europe. Yeah, some rich guy wanted some paintings done, a variety of styles, money up front.

“This is hotels?” I asked him, but he got a sly look on his face and said, “For private customers, yes, you know, yachts and beach houses, and this man I am working for, he says he’ll represent me on the European market, all these Russian billionaires now, they want paintings, so it will be very big.”

I asked him what Mark had to say about that, because Mark’s his gallery and I happen to know that Mark had been carrying him for a while, but he said, “No, it was Mark who turned me on to this. It is partly his idea.”

So fine, I was happy for him and I figured that if I wanted to bitch I could use the bartender. Or the back-bar mirror.

I walked out of there with a couple of martinis in me easing the pain and strode up to Prince Street and Lotte’s gallery to pick up the kids, it being my night for them, and to tell her that there wouldn’t be quite as much money as expected this month. I received a lot less sympathy than I’d just had from Jackie, but when I showed her photographs of the rejected paintings, she thought they were terrific and she said she was sure they’d sell, if I wanted, and I did want, I couldn’t stand the sight of them. She let out one of her famous sighs, the meaning of which I perfectly understood-the insoluble, neurotic business about why I mind selling this stuff to people for their walls, as opposed to a magazine. It’s totally irrational, selling is selling, but still…I think it’s because the buyers won’t see what’s there either, they’ll say, oh, I love Kate Winslet, and they’ll buy it as a kind of kitschy joke, like it was the same as Andy Asshole’s silk screens of Marilyn, a pure pop object, and that brought up the thought that maybe it is, maybe I’m just kidding myself. I’m a joke too, after all, like I said, but a poor one.

The kids are fine with self-entertainment in my loft, all kinds of stuff for them to play with, cut themselves with, poisons galore, and nothing’s ever happened, not a scratch; is it luck or just growing up around a non-childproof environment? While the two of them messed around with paints on the floor I went to my old Dell and Googled some of the weird stuff I’d experienced in that second drug session. I drew a blank on “Gito de Silva,” but I had a hit on “Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop,” which it turns out is a street in the old quarter of Seville, in Spain. I brought it up on Google Earth and zoomed down as far as it would let me. A tiny little street, and I could see the route he (or I) took from his (or my) house to the plaza. I told myself that I was in fact a tourist in the old city of Seville once, age nine, with my father, and therefore it was some kind of dredged-up residual memory.

Had a good time with the kids, our usual drawing contest, we all sat around and drew each other and Rose won by popular acclaim like always. She’s pretty good for four years old; maybe she’ll be a famous artist like her daddy, God forbid. Milo can draw too, but I think he’s mainly a word guy. Walking down the street behind them, I almost had to cry. Milo is so frail and Rose is such a sturdy little truck, and she worships him, it’s just going to tear her apart, when…Another thing I have to talk to Shelly about; he’s a research guy, maybe there’s some program I can get Milo into, or move to a country where you don’t have to be rich to live. But what he needs is a new set of lungs.

After they were asleep I went out on the fire escape and smoked some dope and had a funny little reverie about my first and only gallery show, and it was interesting because of the contrast between it and what I’d experienced on the salvinorin. Or maybe the salvinorin was somehow enriching the experience in some neurophysiological way. Anyway, I recalled being late because I’d decided I had to drop some stuff off at an ad agency in midtown, and then I had to have an after-work drink with a couple of people from the agency. A couple three drinks or so, and then I called Suzanne from a phone booth and told her to go on without me, I’d be there soon. The show was in Mark Slotsky’s gallery on West Broadway off Worth Street, and she got all steamed at that, was I nuts, this was my big break and I was screwing around with some crappy ad, and didn’t I know who’d be there, Mark had called in all these chips to get a good crowd and had spent a fortune on the spread, not shitty wine and cheese but catered from Odeon and so on and so on. What it was, she wanted to make an entrance with the star, and now she’d have to just walk in like everyone else.

I remember walking down West Broadway and feeling like I was going to my execution. I was still wearing my work clothes, paint-smeared, not that clean, a hoodie and jeans and really awful raggedy-ass sneakers, and I felt embarrassed, like I had wanted to look like this to impress all the art lovers that I don’t give a shit about.

And I arrived, the place all lit up and people spilling out on the sidewalk, chattering and holding flutes of champagne. They looked at me, and I felt like the skeleton at the feast, but then I was recognized: Mark shouted out my name and he and Suzanne came running over to me, my wife dressed in a black spaghetti-strap outfit that would have been racy underwear in my mother’s day, and I collected slaps on the back and kisses, and they were all beaming and happy, because the show looked to be a hit, there were little stick-on red dots on many of the paintings, they were sold, I was selling, this is success. And then I had to meet the buyers, the art hags, women in black with ethnic jewelry hanging from neck and ears, and chunky gold and diamonds like fetters on their wrists, and I was trying to be happy like them, and I heard how wonderful it was for them to have paintings that look like something, and Mark was talking a mile a minute about appreciation, he means appreciation in value, a good investment, they were getting in on the ground floor with Charles Wilmot, Jr.

And while this was going on I was chugging champagne as fast as I could grab the flutes off the silvery trays; the bubbles brought up a froth of bile from my stomach and I wanted to vomit. The paintings on the white walls were unbearable to look at, the paint looked like shit, muddy and dull, and all the avid faces around me looked like birds of prey, carrion beasts. Yes, neurotic, self-destructive, I know it, and I was wondering why I thought about that show just then. It’s a memory I don’t treasure, except that was the night I first saw Lotte Rothschild, although I was able to turn that into shit as well.

The next day I took the kids off to their school and I came back to my place and borrowed Bosco’s van to take my rejected paintings from the magazine offices in the Condé Nast Building over to Lotte’s gallery. The place was empty and we had a nice talk, almost like old times, so much so it made my heart hurt. And then I recalled that fire escape reverie and I said, “Do you remember my first show?”

“When we met,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

And naturally I was not going to tell her about sitting out on the fire escape doing dope while the kids were with me, so I said, “No reason, really, but I was just thinking about it last night and I remembered how I felt, the sensation of…I don’t know what you’d call it, terror, revulsion.”

“Yes, you seemed miserable. And I couldn’t understand why; you were selling out the show and the paintings were wonderful.” Here her face fell a little. “Our old tape. Do we have to run through it again?”

“No. But I remembered how I noticed you in the crowd. You were wearing a green velvet jacket with glass buttons, a lace blouse, sort of very pale ochre, like parchment, and an ankle-length skirt, in some rustling material. And red boots. Everyone else was all in black.”

“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.

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.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be another Hockney.”

“Why not, for crying out loud? Look, you want to do representational? You think I can’t sell representational? There are people dying for representational work. They only buy the conceptual and abstract shit because they think they should, because people like me tell them to buy it. But they hate it, if you really want to know the truth; what they’d really like is an old master, or a Matisse, or a Gauguin, something where they don’t have to read the artist’s statement to know what’s going on. I’m talking people who have a million, a million and a half to spend on art. It’s a huge fucking market. Why aren’t you getting rich off it?”

I finished my glass of wine and filled the glass again. “I don’t know,” I said lamely. “Whenever I think about doing another gallery show it makes me sick. I want to get drunk, dope myself into oblivion.”

“You ever think about seeing someone about that little problem?”

“A shrink. Yeah, oh, Doctor, save me, I can’t participate in the corruption of the art market! Vermeer had the same problem, you’ll recall. He did about one painting a year, and when he could bring himself to sell one, sometimes he used to go and try to buy it back. Then his wife would take the painting back to the buyer and beg him for the money again.”

“So he was a nut. So was van Gogh. What does that prove? We’re talking about you, the Luca Giordano of our age.”

“The who?”

“Luca Giordano, the painter, Neapolitan, late seventeenth century. Hey, you’re an art major. You took Italian painting in the seventeenth.”

“I must’ve been out that day. What about him?”

“Fastest brush in the west, and he could imitate any style. They called him the Thunderbolt, or Luca Fá Presto, Luca Go Faster. Interesting guy, a major influence on Tiepolo, as a matter of fact. Never developed a real style of his own, but that didn’t matter, because if you wanted a sort of Rubens, or a sort of Ribera, Luca was the man to see. He once did a Durer that was sold as a genuine Durer, and then he told the guy who bought it that he’d done it.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he wasn’t a forger. The client took him to court for fraud, but Luca got off when he showed the judge that he signed the painting with his own name and covered it with a layer of paint, and also that he never personally stated it was a Durer. He left that to the so-called experts. The judge threw the case out of court. After that it was balls to the wall for Luca; he imitated just about every famous artist of his time, and the previous generation too: Veronese, the Caraccis, Rembrandt, Rubens, Tintoretto, Caravaggio-especially Caravaggio. And always with the hidden signature, so he could skate on any forgery charges. When he was court painter to Carlos the Second in Spain, he forged a Bassano from a private collection, a picture he knew that the king wanted, and after it got bought he told the king it was a fake and showed him the hidden signature. The king cracked up, he thought it was terrific and complimented him on his talent. I mean, the guy was a rogue, but a genius with a brush.”

“So are you paying me a compliment with this comparison?” I asked. “Or is it a put-down?”

“I don’t know,” he said slyly. “However you want to take it. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with a guy who could make literally millions off his talent and he’s pissing it away with hack work, and when he finally does a show, hallelujah, he does it at his ex-wife’s low-end gallery. It offends my professional dignity, is what it is, like if I was a theatrical agent and I went to a coffee shop every day and there was Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow slinging hash. What is this gorgeous woman doing here, I’d ask myself, and I’d want to do something about it. Not to mention you’re an old pal.”

“How did you know I was having a show at Lotte’s?”

He shrugged. “I have my ways. Very little goes on in the art world in the city that I don’t get to hear about. Anyway, I don’t want to be a bore about it, but if you ever want to get your hands on some serious money…for example, did I tell you my idea about almost-old masters?”

I said he hadn’t and he told me.

“Let’s say you’re a guy who’s clearing, say, ten million a year in, I don’t know, real estate or Wall Street, whatever. There’re fifty thousand guys like that in the city, right? This guy’s got everything, the apartment, the house on the Island, the car, his kids are going to the top schools, he’s got a small collection of important pieces, modern stuff, but appreciating pretty well-”

“Which he bought on your recommendation, of course.”

He laughed. “Of course. We stipulate the guy’s sharp. So what this guy can’t buy yet is major art: Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, they’re all out of range, not to mention Rembrandt, Breughel, the old masters. It’s a gap in his self-image. Also, let’s say his wife likes traditional furnishings. He can’t hang a Butzer or a Miyake up there, it’d look like shit. But what if I can sell him a nice little Cézanne fake, a nice almost-Reni madonna, the gilt frame, the little brass light above it. No one but an expert can tell it from the real thing. Obviously, we’re not going to do Girl with the Red Hat or the Mona Lisa, not at all. We’re going to do obscure stuff, small but beautiful. The guests come in and they say, ‘Hey, is that a Cézanne?’ And our guy says, ‘It may be. I picked it up for a song.’”

“These will be signed?”

He wrinkled his face disapprovingly. “Of course not signed! Jesus, that’s all I need! No, it’d be exactly like, you know, fake gems, cubic zirconiums. A woman has a forty-carat ring, she doesn’t wear it to the grocery store or the country club. It’s in a vault and she wears a custom-made fake, which all her friends accept because one, they all do the same thing, and two, because they know she’s got the real jewels. So our guy is demonstrating he’s got taste, and also-and this is the big selling point-maybe he’s got a lot more money than his pals thought, because look what’s on the walls-Cézanne, Corot. What do you think?”

“I think it’s a terrific idea, Mark. It’s pretentious and false, yet at the same time completely legal. I can’t think of another gallery owner who could have come up with it.”

Mark sells a lot of irony but he has a little trouble actually getting it in real life. He gave me a big smile.

“You really think so? That’s great. So, are you interested? I mean, in doing some pieces.”

“Let me ask you something first: I ran into Jackie Moreau the other day and he said you’d set him up with a hot deal in Europe doing paintings in many styles, as he put it. Was that what you’re talking about now?”

Mark waved his hand dismissively. “No, that was something completely different. I mean, Jackie’s okay, but he’s no you. So what do you say? Are you in?”

“No, sorry.”

“No? Why the fuck not?”

“I just don’t think I’d like the work. And…I’ve got some big projects I want to work on now and I might not have the time.”

He swallowed this lie, or seemed to, and shrugged. “Okay, man, but if you ever want to make some serious cash, give me a call. Meanwhile, I’ll set up this Castelli thing. Who knows, it could turn into something for you.”

“Who knows, indeed,” I said, and then the waiter bustled up and we had to have a conversation about dessert. Over this, Mark wanted to know more about salvinorin, so I gave him the short version of what Shelly had given me, and then he asked me why I thought I’d stopped visiting my own past and started visiting what seemed to be the past of someone else, and I said I didn’t know, but the sense of it was like being inside a baroque painting, maybe late cinquecento, and then I mentioned that the place I was in was a real place and that I’d looked the address up on Google, Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop, in Seville, and his eyes bulged out when I said that. Slotsky’s a fucking encyclopedia of art history, and he asked me whether I knew what the kid’s name was, and I said yeah, he said it was Gito de Silva, and Mark said, “Holy shit!”

So I go, “Oh, you heard of this guy Gito de Silva? I mean, he’s a painter?”

And he goes, “You could say that. ‘Gito’ is a short form of ‘Diegito,’ ‘little Diego.’ He was born in Seville at number one Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop in 1599,” and when he said that I swear there were sparks coming out of his eyes. And he goes on, “His father was Juan de Silva, just like you said, but because it was the custom in Seville to use your mother’s name professionally, when he started painting he called himself Diego Velázquez.”

So, okay, I’d been painting like Velázquez recently and I must have had him on my mind and that’s where that came from. I explained that to Slotsky and he said, “Yeah, but you didn’t know all that stuff until I told you about it; where did that come from?”

I said, “I must have read it somewhere, what other explanation is there?”

He shook his head. “No, you’re really going back in time, you said yourself that it was real, not like a vision or a fantasy, your dad’s funeral and all that; maybe you’re in some psychic contact with Diego Velázquez.”

And I said, “I didn’t know you believed in that shit,” and he said, “I don’t, but it makes you think, maybe your mind is preparing you to paint like Velázquez.”

I said, “My mind would do something like that, one more thing to fuck up my life and get me to produce even more unsalable paintings.” So we had a laugh about that and he bugged me a little more about selling my stuff through him until he saw I wasn’t paying attention.

Well, that was an interesting day, followed by a restless night. I couldn’t fall asleep. I had a strange sort of vibrational energy, like my life was going to change radically, and I’m resisting the urge to fight it, to take a pill, for example, a couple of pinks out of the trove of Xanax I had from my rehab days. I’d made a damned fool of myself at Lotte’s, and afterward I was thinking maybe it would be different if I had some real money, because the plain fact is that for all her business about the purity of art, Lotte hates being poor, especially because of Milo and the medical expenses. So it was kind of strange that just then up steps Slotsky with this offer.

So I thought then that this thing with Slotsky could be the solution-if I could just get a little ahead, get free of this crazy rat race, maybe then I could, I don’t know, get back to that place again, when I was painting for love; maybe that’s the place to start.

That Friday-I remember it was October first-I had the kids for the weekend again so Lotte could do her show. No smoking around the kids, so I was covered with nicotine patches, and it wasn’t the same; they made me slightly sick all the time, and there was none of the good stuff about smoking, the taste and the look of the smoke curling upward that mysteriously unlocks the creative process.

After dinner, I called my sister Charlie at her place in Washington. She always likes to talk to the kids, and after they’d had their chatter, I got on with her. She asked me how I was doing and I said fine, and she said, you don’t sound fine, she’s using her “sisdar,” as we used to call it, and I kind of gave a nervous laugh and said yeah, something’s happening. And I told her about the drug trial and seeing her again at our father’s funeral and Mom again when she was young, and I asked her what she thought was going on, Charlie always my gateway into the strange, and she asked me what she’d said when we talked back then (or just the other day, depending on how you looked at it). I told her we’d talked about her life and how she was thinking about leaving her order and doing something else, and she said, yeah, I remember that conversation, it was an important conversation, I was really confused about my vocation and talking it out with you really helped, and I said, I didn’t recall it at all until it happened again.

Then I asked her what she made of the Velázquez stuff and she asked me what Velázquez meant to me, and I said, he was a great painter, you know, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez…and she said, “No, what he means to you, what he represents.”

I said, “What, you think it’s some kind of Freudian thing, I’m fantasizing being Velázquez because I want a substitute father, my father didn’t love me enough?”

“I don’t know what I think yet, although I’m a little concerned you’re playing around with your brain, given your history with drugs.”

“It’s not the same thing at all-this is a perfectly safe experimental drug under medical supervision.”

“Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Anyway, you had plenty of love. You were everyone’s golden child.”

“You always say that, but I never felt it. I always felt like the prize in a grab bag or the ball in soccer. I think they spent a lot of time competing for me. I thought you were the one they loved.”

“Oh, please! Plain, gawky Charlotte, who could barely finger paint, in a house where beauty and talent were the be-all and end-all? And Mother actively disliked me, if you recall.”

“I must have missed that. Why did she?”

“Because I was the thing that trapped her into her marriage. She didn’t have the guts to face the social death that would follow ditching a kid, and besides, I worshipped Dad. Hopelessly, of course. Why I fled into the Church, or so I tell myself. I think I probably warped you more than they did, the way I doted on you. Your total slavey. Spoiled you rotten for a normal woman, may God forgive me.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” I said. “I used to think we would grow up and get married. You remember that time when you explained to me that it didn’t work that way? I must’ve been six or so, and I went wailing away. We were on the beach out at the point and I got lost.”

“Oh, yes, I couldn’t forget that. You got cosseted and I got a whipping for losing you. As I say, spoiled rotten.”

“Of course, now that there are no more rules, maybe we should try it. The kids love you, anyway…”

Raucous laughter, she’s got a big booming laugh like a man, like our father, in fact, and it went on for a while, and then she said, breathless, “I’m sorry, I was just imagining myself in the archepiscopal palace: ‘Um, Archbishop, I know we just got through the process of releasing me from my formal vows, but there is one other little thing…’”

“So it’s a possibility?”

Another hoot. “If it were, my lad, I wouldn’t have you on a plate. You’re far too hard on the girls.”

“I beg your pardon-I happen to be nice as pie.”

“In your dreams, bozo. You’re exactly the kind of wonderfully decent guy who somehow manages to totally destroy any woman he gets involved with. How do you do it? It’s beyond me, unfamiliar as I am with the ways of men, but you know, I always thought you and Lotte were going to last.”

“Oh, Lotte! I thought we were sort of making up, but now she hates me again.”

And I told her about our fight in the gallery in some detail and she went, “You said what?”

I said, “Well, you know, she was going on about how I never got to be the rich and famous artist that my so-called talent warranted, like she always does-”

“That’s not what you just said at all. You said she was talking about you ruining your gift, so it curdled, not about being a success and famous.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Oh, Christ Jesus, give me strength! What’s the difference? The difference is the heart of life, you dunce! Don’t you understand, that woman would scrub floors, she’d do anything short of whoring on the street so you could paint what you wanted to? Don’t you understand anything about love at all? I’m surprised she didn’t brain you with a hammer.”

“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.

And Milo was out of the hospital, looking like old oatmeal. I spent some time with him, trying to cheer him up, and of course, he cheered me up, which is the usual case with us. He cheered up Ewa the nanny too, who has a tendency to Slavic depression at the best of times, but thank God for her anyway. Ewa from Kraków, one of the rare Polish maidens who, applying for a job as a child-care worker in America, actually obtained such a job rather than a slot in one of the slave brothels that seem to be one of the more common features of globalization.

I don’t know what it is about a sick kid that’s so hard for us moderns to deal with; it’s that core of irony that makes real grief almost impossible, you think, oh, how banal, like your life was a novel and this was a cheap literary trick, and of course we don’t really have religion anymore, or I don’t. I recall reading something that Hemingway wrote, to the effect that if your son dies you can’t read the New Yorker anymore. It’s grinding, grinding, I have these demonic thoughts like wishing he was a little piece of shit instead of the most perfect kid in the world, beautiful and talented and good, just stone decent all the way to the center of him, so it wouldn’t rip me up like it does, but maybe the parents of awful kids don’t feel that way, you see moms of serial killers weeping for their babies in the courtrooms. Where does he get it from, that cheerful grace? What is it, the booby prize from God almighty? You only get to live for twelve years, sucker, so here’s an extra helping of the Holy Spirit? Another topic I planned to discuss with Charlotte.

After I dropped the kids off in Brooklyn I took the subway up to the med school. When I checked in the secretary said Dr. Zubkoff would like to see you before you go in for your session, and pointed the way. Shelly was in his office; he motioned me to a seat and brought out a file. The usual small talk, and then he said, “Let’s talk about these past-life hallucinations you’re having.”

I said, “Yeah, if you want to call them that.”

He said, “What would you call them?” in that patient doc tone of voice.

“I relive the past,” I said. “It’s not me, as I am now, having hallucinations. I’m really in my former self, reliving a moment, whether I can recall the incident now or not. It’s a real experience.”

“I see. How is that different from a vivid dream, or a waking hallucination?”

I said, “You tell me, you’re the doctor. How do I know you’re not a hallucination? How do I know I’m not locked in a rubber room somewhere, fantasizing all this? You remember what Hume said about the limits of empirical observation.”

The doctor was not amused. He said, “Let’s just take it as given that the world is real, and external to us, and that we’re both sitting here. And I understand the vividness of the salvinorin experience. It’s been reported extensively in the literature. What I’m a little concerned about is this most recent run, where according to your report you experienced what seemed to be someone else’s past.”

It turned out this was not a normal reaction to the drug and he was hot to pump me about it. I told him what I went through last time and what Slotsky had said about the probable identity of Gito de Silva, and added that I was in the middle of the lushest creative run of my entire life.

This got him all excited and he gave me a lot of neurological information that I couldn’t follow, but the main point was that he thought that it was all a matter of various brain regions responding to the chemical stimulus and that I was constructing the past experiences as a result. It was like dreams, he said, the actual stimulus for dreaming is just random brain noise, and we interpret this noise as imagery and events.

“Yeah, that might explain me reliving my own past,” I said, “but it doesn’t deal with me reliving the past of Diego Velázquez.”

He gave me what I thought was a strange look and said, “We don’t know a lot about the subjective effects of the drug. That’s the point of the study.”

“Not much of an answer,” I said, and he sort of withdrew a little behind the professional Kevlar and said, “Well, you’re a painter, and you’re having a kind of fantasy about being a famous painter. It’s merely an enhancement of what we see every week on American Idol.”

“You think it’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy?”

“What else could it be?” he said, and he had me there. “But let’s lower the dosage, shall we? You seem to be particularly sensitive to the drug.”

Then he had to go do something and he handed me over to Harris, who ushered me into one of the little rooms.

I lay down on the couch. She arranged her tray of little beakers, selected one, and said, “Would you mind if we put you in some light restraints? It’s for your own safety.”

I said I didn’t mind at all, and after I had chewed my wad, she placed Velcro bands around my wrists and across my chest. Then the usual floating sensation, and then I’m standing at a table grinding massicot into a fine powder using a stone mortar and pestle. The four casement windows of the room were lately barred with shutters, but now the fighting in the city has died away and there is light again to do this work. I feel the grit of the bright yellow powder with my fingers. It isn’t fine enough, so I keep grinding. The old man will not beat me if I don’t do it right, but that doesn’t matter. I must do it right, I must please him, because it’s my duty, and the honor of my family demands it. Honor is like a constant pressure, sometimes between my eyes, sometimes in my gut, like a live thing, like life itself.

The fighting was about the Immaculate Conception, which means the Blessed Virgin was born without original sin. I believe this, and it gives me an almost physical comfort even though I don’t really understand the theology. I know that some in the city deny the Immaculate Conception, and that’s why there was a small war here. I saw beaten and dead people on the street, and I wished that I was a man so that I could fight for the Blessed Virgin too and kill the bad people who deny her glory in this way. Mary’s honor and my family’s honor and my own honor are all tied together into that solid feeling in my center.

I am a hidalgo, a son of someone, I am noble on both sides of my family, of pure Christian blood, and this thought is a constant undercurrent of all my thoughts, like my name, or my family’s history, or the positions of my limbs.

I finish the grinding and place the pigment carefully in a stoppered jar. I go into another room, where there is an elderly man staring at an uncompleted painting: my master, Old Herrera. I tell him I have finished grinding and say that if he has nothing else for me to do I would beg his leave to go out drawing in the plaza. He waves me away. He is no longer interested in me, because he knows I can already draw and paint better than he can himself and that I will not ever work for him so that he can profit from my skill.

I put on my hat and cloak and call out for my servant, Pablo. In a minute or so he comes out from the kitchen, smelling of smoke and grease. He is a boy a little older than me, dark skin, greasy black hair, wearing my cast-off clothes, which are too small for him. I feel a kind of affection for him, but also I feel that he is not really a person like I am, more like a superior kind of dog, or a donkey. I understand also that there are those, the grandees, who feel the same way about me, and this thought is like an intolerable itch. I wish to rise in the world.

I order Pablo to pick up the box and portfolio I use for drawing, and we go out, him following behind me at a suitable distance. We go to the plaza. It’s a market day and the stalls are full of tradesmen and women selling vegetables, fish, meat, leather, and household goods. I sit down on a keg of salted fish in the shade of a fishmonger’s awning. I open my box, set up my inkhorn, and point a reed pen with my pen-knife. I draw piles of fish, cockles, oysters, an octopus, the fishwife. Later I tell Pablo to adopt different postures and make faces, and I draw these too. The local people are used to me doing this, but often a stranger will pass and look at what I have drawn, and sometimes there will sound a soft oath from behind me. Sometimes a woman will cross herself. Many people find what I can do disturbing, it is too much like God, they think, to make things that look like life itself. But it is from God and the Virgin that I have this gift.

And I am painting the Virgin now, the first large painting I have been allowed to do, and I stop, my brush stutters, and I am struck with a memory from my days with Herrera, of grinding paint and then going out to draw in the market. It is very strange; I have not thought of him for two minutes since I became Don Pacheco’s student, and suddenly this burst of fresh memory. It has been nearly five years I’ve been with him, and this painting will be my masterpiece for entry into the painter’s guild of Seville. Of course it has to be a religious painting for that. The memory vanishes in a flash, like a street magician making a bowl of fruit disappear with a flourish of his cloth, and I shiver as if someone has walked on my grave.

I resume painting. The thing is not bad, better than anyone else in Seville can do, but not entirely satisfying. There is a stiffness in the figure that I don’t care for, but this is how it is done with Virgins, and she stands on a globe, which is unnatural to begin with, so perhaps the stiffness is part of what the good sisters at the Shod Carmelites expect. I’ve made her hair like that of Don Pacheco’s daughter. There have been hints this year that she would not be adverse to a proposal. I think it will happen. It’s important to have friends, and my master knows everyone who paints in Seville and even in Madrid, and he has connections with powerful people. A man he knows, Don Juan de Fonseca, has been chaplain to His Majesty. What could be more wonderful and full of honor than to wait upon the king himself!

I step back from the painting to examine the balance of the masses. More clouds on the left, I think. The face does not look too much like Juana de Miranda de Pacheco, that would be impious, but it is the same kind of face, and a real woman’s face too, not the doll face you see painted by the religious artists of Seville.

I load my brush with lead and lay in more clouds, blending the white into the ochre of the background. Already I am thinking of my next piece, a John the Evangelist for the same convent. Don Pacheco has written that John should be an old man, but I am going to paint him as a young fellow. I will use as a model a market porter of my own age, a man I’ve used before in my bodegones. I think the nuns will like to look at a young man. In any case in a short time I will be my own master and can paint what I like.

And now I have a strange feeling, the room is somehow too small, there is a tightness across my chest, I have to escape from my clothes, and a woman’s voice is calling out, “Relax, relax, it’s all right!” and I was struggling against my restraints as the room and the couch I was on seemed to toss around like a boat in a gale.

“It’s all right,” said Harris repeatedly, and after a while, “Are you okay now?”

“Drink,” I croaked. My throat was clawky with the taste of the drug and an intolerable dryness. I asked for water and she unwrapped my hand and gave me a plastic pint bottle, which I drank dry.

“How long was I out?”

She checked an electronic stopwatch. “Eighteen minutes. What happened?”

“Nothing. I was painting something.”

She untied me, gave me the usual clipboarded form, and asked,

“What were you painting?”

But now I found myself unwilling to share the details of my experience with these people. I mean really, they were trying to determine the effects of the drug on creativity, and I was perfectly willing to go on about that and fill out their tests and forms, but this stuff was really none of their business.

“It was just a painting, Harris,” I snapped. “What the fuck does it matter what it was? You can’t buy and sell it-it’s all in my head.”

“You’re feeling aggressive,” she said in that clinical tone.

“No, aggressive would be if I broke this goddamn clipboard over your head. And yeah, I’m being a pain in the ass because we artists are often a pain in the ass. If you wanted docile you should’ve brought in a bunch of kindergarten teachers. Now get out of here and let me finish this shit so I can go home!”

She flushed bright pink, started to say something, but turned and left the room. I finished the form and then I noticed that she’d left the tray full of little beakers with the gauze sponges in them, and there was a large covered jar on the tray with some code numbers on it. I opened it, and for some reason I pulled out a couple of the damp sponges and stripped out a latex glove from a dispenser and shoved them inside it. I don’t know why I did this; maybe it was Shelly saying he was going to cut my dosage. I didn’t like that. Something about being Velázquez was-I won’t say addictive, but compelling. I wanted more of it, not less.

I left the lab with the kitten-licking feeling under my skull more intense than before-maddening not to be able to scratch it-also hyped, energetic, like speed coming on, but without that jaw-grinding thing; I felt fine, spring in my step and all that. For a while after I got off the subway I wandered through Chinatown, drawing the markets, the piles of fish and fruits. I was trying to recapture the feeling I’d just had as the boy Velázquez and it was great, and when I got back to my loft I stretched a big canvas, over five by seven feet. I sized it with glue mixed with carbon black, and when it was dry I put on a thin layer of iron oxide, red lake, and carbon black, mixed with powdered limestone. Paint like Velázquez, prep like Velázquez. This took all day and into the evening. I was hungry, so I went out and got something in Chinatown and then came back and put on my lamps and stared at the vast thing for a while. I looked through my recent sketchbooks, but the ideas I thought I’d had seemed to have vanished. I kept feeling Lotte peering over my shoulder, expectant, ready to offer love again if I would just be true to the real Chaz. That or make a lot of money, I thought, hiding behind the cynicism.

I paced, I filled an ashtray with butts, a couple of times I picked up a charcoal and stood in front of the thing, waiting for the power to kick in, and after a while I got impatient and took one of the sponges from my rubber glove.

I lay down on my daybed and chewed it, and no out-of-body experience this time, nothing freaky, except the colors seemed to get a little sharper and brighter, the edges between patches of color sort of glowing, and that kitten-licking thing in my head, and I was sitting in psych class, late spring in my sophomore year in a classroom in Schermerhorn Hall, warm breezes in through the windows and the professor gabbing on about how human existence was just a lot of operant conditioning, the mind was an illusion, and the rest of that tedious and fallacious story, and I was ignoring him and concentrating on drawing a girl sitting across the aisle from me, terrific neck, like Nefertiti, and her hair piled up on her head, streaky blond, with bright little pennants from it tossing in the breeze from the open windows, a slight overbite to the mouth, very nice, pale eyes, she knows I’m drawing her and she’s holding the pose. I’m working with a soft pencil on cartridge paper, using my thumb to blend it in; the chin’s a bit weak, but I’m correcting that, the magic of drawing, it’s what she wishes she looked like, but still a fair likeness, as the professor drones on, though now his voice slips into a lower register and he’s reading from the lives of the saints, St. Cecilia, whose day it is, and I’m drawing the king of Spain.

The friar reads on and from a distance sounds the plashing of a fountain; I’m in a room in the Alcázar. To one side is a lectern at which stands the Dominican reading, in front of me His Majesty and a tall canvas I have primed with glue and black-lime mixture, and over that a priming of red earth, tierra de Esquivias, as they do here in Madrid. I am painting his face. His Majesty wears a suit of black, as is customary at court, with a narrow white ruff.

The friar comes to the end of his chapter and looks up to see the king’s pleasure. His Majesty tells him to retire, for he wishes to converse with this painter.

So we speak. I am speaking with the king of Spain! I find I must grip the brush hard and my stick is trembling against the canvas. His left hand at hip, weight on left leg, an easy pose, a paper of state in his right hand. He graciously asks me of my home and family, of Don Pacheco, of Don Juan Fonseca, and how things pass in Seville. Then we speak of paintings: the king wishes to have the finest collection in Europe, surpassing that of the king of France, and we speak of which painters are best for which subjects. I believe I do not make a complete fool of myself, nor yet vaunt myself about my station. He is younger than I by three years; I think he is not eighteen.

A courtier enters, whispers to the king. He says he must leave me and says further he has enjoyed our conversation and looks forward to the next time he sits for me. And smiles. Then, coming around to view my work, he studies the painted face, which of course I have spent the most time upon, and he says, “Don Diego, I know what I look like. See you paint me as I am.” And touches me lightly upon the shoulder. The king has touched me! I am all in a sweat as he leaves. The Dominican gives me a baleful look and sweeps out too. My shoulder tingles still, and I realized I had slumped down in my chair and the edge of the computer desk was cutting into my shoulder.

I checked the clock on the machine. I’d been gone eight minutes, although I’d experienced at least an hour in subjective time. So then I thought, Okay, I was drawing as Velázquez but my canvas is still blank, could I maybe make myself actually do a painting in the here and now while I was having a Velázquez hallucination? Maybe if I stood in front of the canvas with my brush in my hand and took some more salvinorin? And maybe the stuff was cumulative, maybe I’d get deeper into it.

Into the mouth with my other dose, ten minutes of staring at the blankness, and then I started to draw. It’d be a group scene, I decided, eight guys just sitting around a saloon, no, at an outdoor party, like a wedding, just a bunch of regular guys who liked a belt or two after work, and the drawing went very fast, no detail, just blocking in the relative positions of the figures. After I’d got that down I mixed up a big batch of flake white and added a little ochre and azurite to it to make a neutral gray, and then I blocked in the outlines of the figures.

They say I can do only heads, and this is my answer to them. Carducho and the other royal painters, they mock me as an upstart who knows how to imitate nature but has no conception of how to make a true painting with ideas, in the Florentine style. All of them, Carducho, Caxés, and Nardi, will never forgive me for having won the competition His Majesty ordered for a painting of the expulsion of the Moors, and I have heard they were joking that I only won because I am a Moor myself, being from Seville, where there is so much impure blood.

Yet I am painter to the king and I am usher of the chamber, and will rise higher still. If these calumnies on my blood reach the king, he will not hear them; besides, I am well in with his grace the count-duke of Olivares, and his word should sustain me against all slanderers.

I finish the outlining and return to my apartment. I am short with Juana, as I always am when I am on a new painting and I go to bed early. Again these strange dreams of hell, monsters of noise and light that’s neither from sun nor candle, infernal light that warps all colors into impossible shades. I go to mass early and pray that these dreams may cease, and then back to work, this time with models.

I have Antonio Rojas today, a mason, and I give him as much wine as he wants. He grins like an ape at me and I take his likeness quickly and then dismiss him with a clap on the back and fifty maravedí. Then comes in a butcher from the royal kitchen who I paint as my Bacchus.

When he has left me I look at the unfinished painting. There is something wrong with it, but I don’t know what it is-perhaps the figures are too crowded together in the foreground, as if they were all sitting on a rail. I have tried to correct the composition, but it is still unsatisfying. The faces and figures are from nature and full enough of life, but the space they’re in is not real space. There is a secret here I don’t know, and none of the fools who paint in this kingdom can advise me. Not that I would ask. Yet, God willing, His Majesty will like it, I think, and it’s still better than anything Carducho ever did.

A boy comes in with a message from His Majesty and I must leave this and change my clothes to be fit for his presence. I believe he must have decided on the portrait of his late father that he mentioned on Friday last. That arm is not right either.

I came out of it walking down Canal Street in a cold rain, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and no shoes. When I got back to my loft I was not surprised to see my canvas was full of Los Borrachos, or The Feast of Bacchus, by Velázquez, not the completed painting, but the underpainting and two almost completed faces, the Bacchus and the guy in the middle with the sombrero and the drunken grin. The paint was still a little wet and you could see where he, or I, had repainted the peasant on the extreme right, giving him a new head, and where the figure in the back had just been painted in, in a failed attempt to give the whole thing more depth. I could see what he meant about Bacchus’s arm-it was set into the shoulder a little wrong and the foreshortening was off a hair. The face was terrific, though.

I took a shower, changed my clothes, and carefully made myself a Gibson with my dad’s silver shaker. Pearl onions are among the only foodstuffs in my refrigerator, those and olives, because sometimes I prefer a martini.

Thinking back, it occurred to me that I must’ve spent a couple of days at least in Velázquez’s life this time, given the work on the painting, and so I was curious to see how much time I had actually spent in…can I still call it real time? The little screen on my answering machine told me that approximately thirty-four hours had passed since I had set up the canvas, something my belly was starting to confirm, and the Gibson was having an unusually powerful effect on my brain and balance. There were fifteen messages on my machine, said the little lights, and I ran through them and answered the one from Mark Slotsky.

“Where’ve you been, man?” he demanded when he answered his cell phone, before I could say my name. This still annoys me, that technology tells us who’s on the phone, another little erosion of the social. There were saloon noises in the background. “I’ve been leaving messages,” he added. “You heard I bought Kate?”

“Yeah, thanks. I presume you have a Winslet fan you’re going to shop it to.”

“A Velázquez fan, actually. Terrific piece of work.”

“Yeah, right. Listen, can you come over now? I have something you ought to see.”

“Now? I got Jackie Moreau here. We’re at the Blue Orange. What’ve you got?”

“More Velázquez. Really, you need to see this.”

He agreed and twenty minutes later the two of them came in, both antic with drink, but they quieted down when they saw what was on the easel.

“Jesus, Wilmot, what the fuck is this?” Mark said.

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like Velázquez’s Feast of Bacchus, about a third finished.” He looked around for a pinned-up reproduction, and when he didn’t find one, he said, “You’re copying it from memory?”