Theft: A Love Story

31

I have said some dreadful things about Business Class, some in print, but I am an artist and I had often need to make myself at home amongst the purchasing class. I let the lackey fill my glass with, as it happened, Tasmanian bloody pinot noir and after the last chocolate and second armagnac Marlene lay her head upon my chest and we slept damn near all the way to Narita. Even with a bursting bladder, I was as weightless as an astronaut.

Of course I would be punished for this trip, but that would be later and this was now and not since the bawling screaming murderous year I ran away to study life drawing at Footscray Tech had it ever once occurred to me that it might be possible to ever be free of my brother's bony elbow, his stinky breath, his sweaty sudden arrivals in the middle of my sleep. During the Boeing's descent, and then through all the wait at Immigration, on the train, through the following days, I continued to feel so high and happy. Forgive me, I did not worry about Hugh. Not for a second did I try to imagine how he felt.

In Tokyo they are intent on concreting themselves to death, but I found the city beautiful, a three-dimensional representation of my neon leaping heart.

As Marlene had predicted, my paintings had been delayed in Sydney while Amberstreet and his fellow geniuses ripped the crates apart. Why else send my paintings to Japan if not to hide a stolen Leibovitz? Go suck my dick!

Of course they failed to find the Tourenbois so they spent a few hundred taxpayers' dollars to crate them up again. By some miracle they didn't hurt my canvases, which I saw unpacked at Mitsukoshi only two days late.

I would normally have driven the gallery nuts with hanging and rehanging, but I found myself agreeing to leave matters in their hands, and for the next three days we did the honeymooner special, and I will spare you the cute postcards of Asakusa, and the cries of the caged birds who staffed the front desk at our hotel. I was happy in Japan, happy with Marlene, happy to wake and look at those clear bright inquisitive, mischievous eyes. lb do the simplest thing with her was a pleasure, to look at anything, to drift, light as gossamer down a lane, to be confused by the labyrinth of Lego-coloured subway symbols, to discuss the gauze of August light falling across the billowing curtains of construction sites. We finally arrived at Mitsukoshi just as the white-gloved greeters began their morning work, and on the thirteenth floor we found my paintings and even if my name was spelled BONE I did not care, even if they had lit each canvas so fastidiously there was no spill of light onto the wall and there was, let us say, a slightly precious decorated element which was a very fucking long way from Bellingen, I did not care. The work could still bite your leg off and spit the crunchy pieces on the floor.

Marlene was so close, a shadow, a touch of sleeve, a whisper of hand, a living breath of kindness on my cheek.

"Do you see that?" she asked me.

"See what?"

"That."

She indicated, I thought, the general way the gallery was arranged—five rooms, nine big canvases, impossible to see more than one work at any time. The numbers and titles were placed away from the work, on the adjoining wall where it was both clearly attached but also separate.

"The titles?"

"You moron, Butcher. Look." Beside each of the titles was a small Japanese character, black on white. "Here," she whispered.

"This is the Japanese version of a red sticker. It means no longer available. Sold, yes. You've sold out, my love."

And there, in the middle of the empty gallery she leaped on me, pinned her legs around my waist.

"Shit."

"Yes, shit. Congratulations."

This was what Amberstreet could not get his provincial little head around. The show was not even open, and I had sold it without a suck-up dinner or dangerous conversation with a critic. This was so much better than Australia. Even in my good years I had never had a sell-out before the drinks were poured and while I kissed her soft, wide mouth, I was—forgive me— doing calculations, multiplying, subtracting. I had two hundred bloody thousand dollars after commission and freight. Just like that.

Later there would be the opening celebration about which there is nothing much to say. Certainly, in the country of Hokusai and Hiroshige I did not expect an introduction by lesbian trick riders, but by then much stranger things had happened.

It was to a printer's shop we went a few days later, carrying a professionally wrapped bottle of Lagavulin. We were to pay our respects to Mr. Utamaro who had printed the catalogue for my show. That was all I knew about him, and that he had his offices at the end of a blank-faced lane in Ikekuburo. God knows what the other buildings were, warehouses or something else—-I have no idea. Mr. Utamaro met us at the lift in a canvas printer's apron and led us into one of those very simple rooms you might normally expect to find at a framer's. His steel windows were so close to the expressway you could see no more than five speeding Hondas at any time.

Below the windows and around the room were deep wooden studio drawers, each one neatly labelled, not in English naturally With infinite courtesy, he removed a poster for Pollock, a catalogue for Matisse, and with the freeway rumbling in our ears, set them carefully upon the pale scrubbed table which occupied the centre of the room.

The old codger was handsome, strangely freckled, with a high forehead from which he swept his mane of silver hair. There was a delicacy in his mouth and a softness to his hands that soon made it clear that he was a great deal more than a common printer. I never, for a second, underestimated him, but he was very hard to understand and—also, by the way—I had not expected an extended visit. It was not until my face was aching from politeness that I helped myself to the second glass of scotch. Well, fuck it, I was Australian. What else was I meant to do?

When the cars on the expressway turned on their lights, we were still stuck with Mr. Utamaro and then the glow of the passing faces, all separated in their own cocoons of life, reminded me of the melancholy parade that cut the Marsh in half on Sunday nights. I topped up my glass again, why not?

Mr. Utamaro rolled down a soft grey cloth on the wooden table and on top of this he placed a glassine bag. Then, having looked up expectantly at Marlene, he slid out a very ordinary brochure, maybe eight inches by six inches, black-and-white, glossy but discoloured with age.

"Michael!" she cried, but although she reached for my hand, what she was looking at was the brochure, on the cover of which was, so I thought, the painting Dozy Boylan had bought years later.

Marlene made a dove noise. "Oh."

Mr. Utamaro bowed.

"Christ," I said. "It's Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois"

Mr. Utamaro smiled.

"No, no, shoosh." Marlene's colour was very high, a sort of aspen pink. She pointed at the title and dimensions which were, in the midst of all the Japanese, in English. "It's a different work," she said.

Well I already knew she had an eye but I have one as well, and I had grown up with a black-and-white reproduction of Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois.

"No, it's the same."

"Yes, darling," and she stroked my hand as if to soften the contradiction. "Except it's smaller. It's twenty-eight by eighteen inches. A study."

Having had my own painting ripped apart by morons because a piece of collage was allegedly thirty by twenty-one and a half inches, I was not likely to forget the number.

"See," she said, "the title of this one is Tour en bois, quatre (Woodlathe, number four)."

If I was somehow irritated by this coincidence, I had no good reason to be—artists can do twenty studies for a major work. In fact it was not even a coincidence, but somehow this thing pissed me off.

'Tour en bois," I said. "I know what it means."

"Shoosh, baby. I know you know. But look anyway." Watching her slip on a pair of white cotton gloves you would swear she had spent twenty years working at the Tate. She held the old catalogue in her open palms and sniffed it like a rose. Then, softly, deftly, she brought it back to the grey cloth and Mr.

Utamaro, having gravely bowed, returned this ridiculously ordinary item to its glassine bag.

By now dark had fallen and the cars ran past the window in such a way that the whole wall became like a canvas by the great Jim Doolin who had been driven out of Melbourne in 1966. Now, surely, we could go, but no, we moved to a small alcove where Mr. Utamaro formally refilled my glass and I learned the story of Tour en bois, quatre which had come to Japan as part of an exhibition of works by Dumont, Leger, Leibovitz, Metzinger and Duchamp organised by Mitsukoshi to introduce the Japanese public to cubism. This was in 1913. Mr. Utamaro's father had photographed the paintings and met with M.

Leibovitz himself. And bless me, if there was not one more exhibit—a very solid-looking Japanese gentleman side by side with the old goat in a fancy restaurant with heavy black Empire chairs.

"Do you know who this is, Michael?"

"Of course l don't."

"This is Mr. Utamaro's friend, Mr. Mauri, who bought Tour en bois, quatre in 1913."

I nodded.

"Michael, you know his son."

I don't think so.

"Michael! His son is the gentleman who bought your entire show. I told you," she said, colouring intensely enough for me to realise she was not excited but upset.

"I'm sure you didn't say the name."

"Oh, never mind," she said, and was suddenly fond, stretching out her hand across the table to hold my arm. "So when we do meet him, baby, perhaps he will show us Tour en bois, quatre.'

I looked to Mr. Utamaro and bowed from my chair. I hoped that would be polite enough for a hairy barbarian.

Marlene stood. Mr. Utamaro stood.

Thank Christ, I thought, that's over.

I was, as they say, mistaken.