By the spring of 1975, which was when he lost the horse and stable, Marlene was his secretary and had therefore been granted the care of that rat's nest of paper he referred to only as "the French Material".
She asked him, "What shall I do with it?"
He looked into the grey metal cupboard with its bulging files,, its ribbon-bound sheaves, its single orphaned pages, yellowed, browned, creased. He shrugged, a Gallic gesture, so it seemed to Marlene Cook.
"Is it about the art?"
"Yes." He startled, smiling. "Absolutely! About the art."
He could have had no clue that she was already half drunk on her learning curve. She would have been far too shy to tell him that she had read Berenson and Vasari, Mars-den Hartley and Gertrude Stein, but at the time she asked, Is it about the art? she knew the importance of such correspondents as Vuillard and Van Dongen, and she had eaten enough hot dogs during lunch at Phillips and Sotheby's to wonder if this rat's-nest archive might not cover his horse and stable costs entirely. He had no idea how she loved him. She thought herself below him in every way, in grace, in beauty, in sophistication. He hadn't noticed that she was his angel, repairing him, dressing all his bleeding wounds.
So she turned to raging old Milton Hesse who was, for his part, smitten with her. It is easy enough to decide that she was using the poor bugger but I doubt either of them would have seen it quite like that. She knew that Hesse despised Olivier, and knew she could not change his mind, but she shopped for Milt at Gristede's. She made him tuna casserole with a recipe from the Australian Women's Weekly. And she paid him, always, at least five dollars every week.
"Bring me the letters then," said Milton. "Let's see what you got."
"I'll have to ask permission."
"Permission! Bullshit. Just borrow them, doll-face. No sense making a fuss if they're worth nothing."
So she schlepped two heavy boxes down to the F train and sat with the weight cutting into her thighs all the way to Delancey and it was in his freezing studio, while she made lentil soup, that the old man read stuff that made his eyes bulge more than usual.
For at that moment, in 1975—this was what the most recent letters showed—the following paintings were on the market, or would be once Olivier Leibovitz was nice enough to authenticate them: Le Poulet 240V (1913), Le Dejeuner avec les travailleurs (1912), Nature morte (1915). The total value of these works today would be at least ten million US dollars. You will find them in all the books now, but at that time they had no official existence, having been omitted from Dominique's shoddy catalogue raisonne and traded and stored in God knows what shady circumstances.
"The Dauphin never replied to these letters?" asked Milton who, for the first time, had abandoned his waterfront-bull persona and, with his tufts of eyebrows, and his rimless glasses on his forehead, was more like an old Jewish scholar, very foreign, very far away from anything Marlene could even half imagine.
"How could he have?" she asked. "He really knows nothing about art. He doesn't care to."
"It takes no knowledge, toots, just his own birth certificate."
"He can't."
"Baby," said Hesse, "it is not so complicated. If you can recognise Maman's wet and sloppy brushstrokes, which you can, I know, you simply say, ah—this one stinks. No-one likes to think this, but it really does not help to go to Cooper Union.
You could do it now, today. It's not rocket science."
Marlene Cook, hearing her future described, did not understand she was no longer a dunce. "Would you do it, Milton? You could advise him."
"No."
"Please."
He folded his spectacles and snapped them inside a metal case.
"It is not the relationship I have with Jacques."
She liked him too much to think him pompous. She smiled at him and at first this produced no more than his assistance in repacking the cardboard boxes, but then he opened up his spectacle case once more.
"Here, read this," he relented, "from Monsieur L'Huillier in the sixteenth arrondissement."
"You know I can't read French."
"Then I'll translate. If Mr. Olivier Leibovitz can introduce Mr.
L'Huillier to a buyer for a Leibovitz presently owned by Mr.
L'Huillier, then Mr. L'Huillier will split commission with Mr.
Leibovitz."
"But Olivier does not know people who buy art."
"Of course. He's an idiot, forgive me. But he does not need to know anyone. Listen, baby. This is code. L'Huillier already has the buyer. But he needs—listen to me—he needs the painting authenticated. He's saying, just confirm that this is a Leibovitz and I'll give you a pile of cash, in a leather suitcase if you like.
This is what art has been reduced to. These are the most larcenous people on earth. In France this is even recognised in law, that dealers are the lowest of the low, beyond leniency."
"Oh my God," said Marlene Cook. "I've been a perfect dill."
"So do you understand?" asked Milton who, in laying his broad square hand across her own, was putting quite another, much sadder, question.
30
When my brother left to suck up to the Japanese, Jackson was my friend and gave me money OFF THE BOOKS. Jackson was not going nowhere, believe him mate. Jackson was here to stay, no worries. Jackson was wired like a generator, so he said, sparks came from his fingers in the night. Once he had been a RAWLEIGH'S MAN, travelling hundreds of miles a day. White dust on the blackberries beside the roads, purveying tonics FOR MAN OR BEAST. He had seen many women with nothing on beneath their dressing gowns a GREAT BIG BUSH between their legs. As a YOUNG BLADE Jackson had bright red hair and even now it was a GOOD THICK CROP which he combed as often as time permitted.
After years of living in an Austin A40 van and many bad frosts especially in the southern highlands he returned to his trade as a FABRICATOR. In the city of Warrnambool, Victoria, Jackson invented the shopping cart for supermarkets. This was the first in the world, and has been proven. Warrnambool is where the famous Fletcher Jones trousers are made in a huge factory i. e. you can get very rich in Warrnambool. The shopping cart was constructed from a FOLDING CHAIR with two wire baskets Jackson borrowed from the bicycles of TWO SPINSTER TEACHERS at the high school. I was Slow Bones, never understanding the possibility of the folding chair although I was SITTING ON A GOLD MINE all those years. When not in use Jackson's carts could be stored against the supermarket wall and the hand baskets were stacked like dishes in the sink.
At this time there were no supermarkets in the so-called LUCKY COUNTRY otherwise he would have been a rich man rather than be gaoled for larceny of two baskets not his own.
Jackson was married twice and has the photos including plaintiffs, bridesmaids and many stories, also snapshots of five dogs including two of them run over by the same truck in different years. At the nursing home Jackson slept in Room Number One and worked from eight o'clock till breakfast, on the SHIT AND WANDER shift. He brought his best racing pigeons to be stroked by patients out of THE GOODNESS OF HIS HEART but there was a complaint about BIRD LICE by people with eyes so bad they would not be able to read their own death notice.
When there were medical emergencies and lost memories, Jackson took MATTERS IN HAND and was not always thanked as he should be. He also made arrangements with the SAFEWAY MANAGER when the patients took those carts down the hill and left them on the lawn outside Jackson's office.
Many is the evening he pushed the long line of carts up the hill on Edgecliff Road, a cruel punishment, he said so often. Fate had spurned him. All God gave him was a big dick FOURTEEN INCHES LONG you would never guess it to look at his skinny freckled arms.