Theft: A Love Story

25

If you come from the Benalla Coffee Palace it will never occur to you, not in your fucking wildest dreams, that you might ever possibly talk to someone who wrote a book, so when, in the New York Public Library, Marlene read the young Milton Hesse's monograph on Leibovitz, she was naturally slow to understand that its author was living down the road. It was her friend the gay librarian who showed her the ad in the Village Voice—DRAWING LESSONS FROM AMERICAN MASTER. MILTON HESSE. There was an address on Allen Street.

"That's him?"

"Indeed."

The F train is just minutes from the Reading Room. Delancey Street is seven stops south. Marlene found Milton Hesse off the Bowery, in charge of twenty filthy windows above a shirt factory. Here he was in the process of becoming that creature we all fear the most—a bitter old painter whose friends are famous, whose own walls are now stacked with twenty-foot-long canvases no-one wants to buy.

Milt was a few years under sixty, a short dark bull with almost black eyes and a rumpled creased forehead.

"Do you have a folio?" he asked the visitor. He had a dripping strainer full of lentils in his broad and chalky hand.

"I'm from Australia," she answered.

He left the lentils to pool water on a table, dragged out a splintered easel, and set up the visitor with some cubes and spheres on the window ledge. He provided a pencil and watched. Who knows what he was thinking? Even at this age, even in this defeated situation, Milt would say almost anything for the sake of cunt.

"Gorgeous, you can't draw worth a damn." He laughed in astonishment, deep in his chest.

"I know."

"Oh, you know." He raised his thick eyebrows and bugged his eyes.

"I'm sorry."

"I can't give you talent, doll-face."

"I need to learn about Jacques Leibovitz. It's personal," she said.

That stopped him. "Ah!" he said.

She coloured.

"Don't tell me it's the useless son?" Again, he was delighted.

Beside himself. "It's the playboy?"

"I'll pay," she said, now very red. She must have been so nicking cute or he would have kicked her out of there.

"Where are you at college?"

"I'm a secretary."

"Well, aren't you something!"

"I don't know."

"Can you afford ten dollars an hour?"

The answer was no, but she said yes.

"Why not," he laughed. "Why not! God bless you!" he cried, and tried to kiss her on the cheek.

Of course this was not how he talked to his fellow painters, parttime scroungers and dealers who he ran into at the auction houses—then every single one of them had sold out, then he alone had not licked ass, and he would tell them, still, after all these years, how to paint—if you wished to see you had to become wood and if you were going to remain flesh you would never see anything, on and on, as if he could still elevate himself, raise himself up to the pantheon by pushing them down into the mud.

Yet even to those who now steered clear of him, it was accepted that his passion for Jacques Leibovitz was the genuine article and whilst almost every other painter in the world was still—in Milt's mind anyway—his competitor, he remained an acolyte of Jacques Leibovitz. In the toilet of his studio he had a shamelessly framed letter from the master: Vous presentez un peintre remarquable. Milton Hesse est un americain, jeune, quipossede une originalite extraordinaire.

Two years later, visiting with Marlene, I was encouraged to go to the toilet, first gently and finally, when I stubbornly refused to understand what I was required to do, with very explicit directions to read the fucking letter on the fucking wall. And of course French is not a language spoken in the Marsh and so Milt had the added pleasure of having me unhook his letter and deliver it to him so he might, sentence by sentence, recite it to me in both French and English. He adored Jacques Leibovitz as if he were still twenty-six years old, in Paris on the GI Bill, at the great man's feet.

When a woman tells you a man is her "friend" you know the description will finally be exposed as so much worse. So I didn't like Milt when I heard about him.

Introducing me at last, Marlene said, "This is Michael Boone, he's a great painter."

Milt looked at me as if I were her pet cockroach. Sixty-two or not, I could have smacked him across the shoulders with his Mahl stick. But I am stuck with imagining the horny little toad, and not because he doubtless fucked my beloved sideways on his drop sheet, but because he changed her life.

Two times a week, he and the secretary went to the Met, the Modern, up and down Madison Avenue, and he never asked again why she would wish to know what he was teaching her.

Interesting—his silence on that point. Did he fear he was a whore working for a whore? There is so much fog around the moral high ground. He could never have seen exactly who she was or what he caused to happen.

He said she should not worry about her ignorance. You should, doll-face, treasure it. He taught her that the only secret in art is that there is no secret. Nor should she imagine that there is a hidden strategy. Forget about it. Real artists don't have strategy.

When you look at a painting never look to see who did it. Keep your mind open. Good art cannot explain itself. Cezanne could not explain himself, nor could Picasso. Kandinsky could explain everything QED. Looking at pictures, he said, is like a prize fight. You should eat well and sleep well before you begin. He quoted Joyce and Pound and Beckett, and bought Pound's ABC of Reading for his protégé. He quoted Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson: "When I feel like the top of my head would come off, I know that's poetry—is there another way?"

It was his fate to have become a part-time dealer. He hated dealers and their clients even more than he hated Marcel Duchamp. ("He played chess because there was no television. If there'd been TV, he would have watched it all day long.") There was nobody, he said, who would lie and cheat like an art dealer.

There was no-one so frightened of being made a fool of as a rich client.

Sometimes he charged only five dollars. Sometimes nothing at all. That's all we need to know.

MoMA had four Leibovitzes, only three of them ever displayed.

The fourth was generally known to have been "fixed up" by Dominique and this was, from Marlene's point of view, more than fortunate. Milton had spent a lifetime sucking up to curators and board members and administrators and although he had not yet had anything more than a lithograph accepted by MoMA he was able to get Marlene downstairs where they could look closely at the doctored canvas and it was through this single work, no more than eighteen inches by twenty, since destroyed, that she became so familiar with Dominique's messy brushwork, so different to Leibovitz's solid grouping of parallel hatching. Of course this was not clear at first but in the end she wondered how she could ever have failed to see the way Olivier's father had so carefully constructed a sense of visual mass with each parcel of brushstrokes.

Of course I am only repeating what she told me. I was not there to check the facts. I was in Sydney, in East Ryde, with a scabbykneed son and apples rotting in the summer grass and— anyway—it doesn't matter why anyone did anything only that, by accident—let's say—the Benalla High School dropout came between the orbits of two men, one beautiful and damaged, the other an egotistical monster and, within the confusion of their gravitational pulls, somehow managed to slide upwards and sideways, so although she remained an assistant to an assistant, and continued to live three houses from the corner of Ninth Avenue, she quietly, triumphantly, entered a completely unmapped ocean, and was gobsmacked, like Cortez, or like Keats himself, to see what the conditions of birth and geography had hidden from her, i. e. the true wonder of bloody everything, no less.