Theft: A Love Story

49

Marlene rescued my five jars of paint from the skip on Leroy Street and when she came back into the loft her legs were shining, her eyes dulled with anger or distress, how was I to know?

My Golem remained in mil view, angled to catch her eye as she walked in the door and I do not doubt that she already understood the impossible achievement, not just the 1944 canvas, the veracity of the handwriting, the daring composition, but that this work already existed in the writings of Leo Stein and John Richardson. But she did not say a word. Fuck you, I thought. First time ever.

I was to paint over the Golem, she said, bury it like an archaeological hoax.

Fuck you. Second.

We drank whisky. I explained, often calmly, I could not paint over the Golem which would not only be ruined, but never found.

She disagreed, on the basis of what she did not say. I had never encountered the hard sparkling granite wall of her stubbornness.

But neither had she seen Blue Bones with his spinnaker up, flying in the full storm of a rage.

Then the buzzer sounded, always a horrid noise, but this time I thought Thank Christ. I threw a cloth across the painting, laid it against the wall, and sprang the door for my unknown visitor who soon revealed himself, with puffing and farting and a loud "oh dear", to be my brother Hugh.

He hadn't taken his first sip of milky tea before Marlene was attempting, none too fucking subtly, to have him return to the Bicker Club.

"It's such a shame," she said, "there's not a bed for you." At the time I thought she was just being bloody-minded, but of course this was all about the writ—she thought Hugh had become her husband's spy.

Hugh, by now, was terrified of Olivier and—in desperation I suppose—he produced a wet untidy wad of cash and announced he would buy a mattress and he knew just where to go. This independence was unprecedented. He headed out into the dark and left us alone with our violently clinking Lagavulin on the rocks.

An hour later we had been through War and Peace and back again. Hugh returned, having carried his mattress all the way from Canal Street. He slid his damp burden beneath the kitchen island countertop and this was the territory from which he watched our puzzling activity. Far from being a spy, however, he was an old and needy dog, sleeping, reading comic books, demanding I cook him sausages four times a day.

And of course he finally saw the Leibovitz. "Who did that?" he asked, a question that alarmed Marlene who became suddenly and violently affectionate toward him, luring him out on an expedition to Katz's Deli, just to take him away from the sight of me burying the Golem.

But of course I wouldn't bury the Golem as she wished. That is the thing with artists. We are like small shopkeepers, accustomed to ruling our domain. If you don't like how I do it, get out of my shop, my cab, my life. I was in charge and I had no plans to bury anything.

Marlene was the woman who had climbed the power pole and cut the wires and now she was impatient, angry, anxious, I had no idea to what degree. She managed to endure my resistance for three long days, at the end of which time I returned—an exciting afternoon with Hugh's tartar problem—and saw she had laid a coat of Dammar varnish on the Golem electrique.

"Put that brush down," I said.

She considered me, her eye slitted, her cheeks burning, defiant and afraid at once.

Finally, to my immense relief, she dropped the brush into the varnish pot, like a ladle in a bowl of soup.

"And don't you ever fucking touch a work of mine again."

She burst into tears, and of course I held her, and kissed her wet cheeks and hungry lips, and once I had cooked Hugh his sausages she and I went out for a walk, squeezed tight together, lovingly, argumentatively, through the decaying cabbages of Chinatown, down into the shadows of the Manhattan Bridge.

I never suggested that her idea was not brilliant. Only that science made it impossible to do it as she insisted. I was right.

She was as wrong as anyone who would drop a brush into a varnish pot. No-one would trust a layer of Dammar varnish as a safe separation between a valuable work and the crap that must go on top.

Besides if we were to bury it, we would have to plan how it would be discovered, and we required the people with the Yale degrees to unearth the missing Leibovitz themselves. We wanted them:—didn't we?—to feel it was their own genius which had led them to the gold beneath the pile of dung. We would take the Broussard canvas to a top conservator for cleaning—that was Jane Threadwell—and we would, with careful chemistry, let this Threadwell discover the mystery beneath.

She was Milt's lover, so they said. Meaning: Milt claimed it.

Never mind, it's not the point. Here's the thing: conservators— even those reckless enough to shut up Milt Hesse—are as cautious as hamsters. Even in a simple cleaning of an undistinguished work by Dominique Broussard, Jane Threadwell would begin by cleaning a tiny spot—an eighth of an inch in diameter—not from the centre of the canvas either, not even from the corner, but on that peripheral area normally hidden by the rabbet of the frame.

This very clever trembling animal was the one we had to trap.

And much as we might wish her to recklessly scrub away at the Broussard until the gorgeous Golem was revealed, forget it. The merest touch of colour on its swab... she's out of there.

So how could we lead her to the Golem in spite of all her caution?

"Tear the canvas," Marlene said. "She'll see the layers."

"She's being asked to fix the canvas of a shitty painting. It's a drag, a nuisance. She might not even notice. And if she does, why would she think there was a masterpiece beneath?"

"Then how?"

"I don't know."

Frankly I thought there must be a simpler way to establish a provenance for the Golem. It was a good painting, for Christ's sake, not some second-rate pastiche by Van Meegeren. Why take the risk of screwing it up when, surely, she could take it to Japan, for instance, or have it turn up in a deceased estate?

Oh no no, she couldn't.

For Chrissakes, why?

It was complicated, but no.

Why?

Not now.

She was distracted, irritated and sometimes I was irritated too.

Just the same I tried to please her—who wouldn't? I really believed that if we could bring this off, we could get the hell out away from Olivier and—thank God—the fucked-up drama of his mother. Sometimes I began to imagine buying Jean-Paul's place in Bellingen—a ridiculous idea, please don't point it out.

Money had not been part of it at first but as I began to imagine our escape from the droit moral, a million dollars was clearly no small thing. I bought a copy of Mayer's Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques in whose eight hundred pages I attempted to find the answer to a crossword puzzle built on chemistry and chronology, believable paints, a likely solvent which would safely dissolve the veil. I slept badly in a merry-goround of chemicals, ripolin, gouache, white spirits, turpentine, everything ending in disaster, myself in a foreign prison, the Golem washed away. I became the victim of sudden starts, cries, violent awakenings. Marlene was not much better.

"Are you awake?"

Of course. She was, on her back, her eyes glistening in the dark.

"Look," she said. "Listen to me. He was licensing his father's work for bloody coffee mugs. Can't you understand? He was a complete philistine ignoramus."

"Shoosh. Go to sleep. It doesn't matter."

"He was lazy and disorganised. The only reason he kept the advertising job was that he would fly to Texas to see his client who would take him to dinner and fuck him up the arse."

"No! Really?"

"No, not really, but I saved the weasel from his night mare. I looked after him. I really, really took care of him. I made sure he could ride his horses and drive in car rallies. And I would have kept on doing that, fuck him."

"Let him be. He can't hurt us."

"He has already, the prick."

And yet she snuggled into me, my sweet baby, fitting her lovely head in against my neck and shoulder and her warm little pussy against my thigh and I could feel her as she sniffed my clavicle, inhaling my skin, and her whole lithe body fitted my lumpen Butcher mass.

"Don't stop loving me," she said.

I blew out the altar candles and stroked her neck until she went to sleep. Her breath smelt of toothpaste and the air was smoky, waxy, like after Evensong, once upon a summertime.