I loved her. What do you think I said?

"No matter what I tell you?" Her smile had a gorgeous rosy lack of definition you might more normally explain with paint, a thumb, a short and stabby brush.

"No matter what," I said.

Her eyes were bright and deep, dancing with reflections.

"How big is Dozy's painting?"

"This one's smaller."

She shrugged. "Maybe I shrank it?"

"It can't be Dozy's," I said.

"Come, Butcher, please. It's just a few more days. We'll stay at the Plaza. Hugh will be fine."

About Leibovitz, Milton Hesse's high-school dropout had become completely, improbably, expert. In the case of Hugh, however, she had not the faintest fucking clue. I could not have the same excuse.

35

It was in the reign of Ronald Reagan, at three o'clock on a September afternoon, that we arrived in the heart of the imperium. For a moment it was more or less OK, but then, at the limo counter, everything began to come undone. Marlene's Australian bank card was rejected by a tall black woman with rhinestone spectacles and a thin wry mouth. "OK," she said, "let's try another flavour."

It had been an eighteen-hour flight. Marlene's hair looked like a paddock of hail-damaged wheat.

"Any card at all, Miss."

"I've only got one card."

The dispatcher examined my travel-soiled beauty, slowly, from top to bottom. "Uh-huh," she said. She waited just a moment before holding out her hand to me.

"Oh, I don't have cards."

"You don't have cards." She smiled. You don't have cards.

I was not going to explain the terms of my divorce to her.

"You don't neither of you have no credit card?" Then, shaking her head she turned to the man behind us.

"Next," she said.

Of course I had two hundred thousand dollars coming to me, but I didn't have them on me. As for Marlene's credit, something had fucked up at Mauri's office or his bank, but it was three in the morning in Tokyo and we could not find out.

Well, fuck that, I phoned Jean-Paul from Concourse C, and I did reverse the charges but we had just wired the little bugger fifteen thousand bloody dollars—my entire gallery advance—for If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die, so he had made a profit on the painting he had lost. It was five in the morning in Sydney, early, yes, but no reason to scream into my ear about all the litigation he had planned for me. It was his phone bill so I let him rant.

He calmed after a while, but then he started in on Hugh who he claimed was smashing up his "facility".

"He pulled the washstand off the wall."

"What do you want me to do? I'm in New York."

"Fuck you, you thief. I'll have him locked up for his own protection."

After the nice patron slammed the phone down in my ear we found a bar and I drank my first Budweiser. What a jar of cat's piss that turned out to be. "Don't worry," Marlene said, "it'll be all right tomorrow."

But it was Hugh I was thinking of. And although I held Marlene's hand, I was alone, rank with shame and weariness as I was led onto the bus to Newark Station where we caught New Jersey Transit to Perm Station and then changed to an art-encrusted loony bin to Prince Street. It was SoHo but not the SoHo where you bought your Comme des Garcons. I had no idea where I had surfaced, only that I had destroyed my brother's life and that the sirens were hysterical and cabs would not shut the fuck up and that, somewhere, near here, there was a place to stay. I wanted a gin and tonic with a great fat fistful of anaesthetic ice.

At dusk we finally arrived on Broome and Mercer, that is at an hour when the sheet-metal factories were dark, the power was off, the aging pioneers of Colour Field and High Camp Anaesthesia were presumably crawling into their fucking sleeping bags while the web of fire escapes was weaving a last lovely filigree of light across the factories' faces.

On the corner of Mercer Street, Marlene said, "I'm going to stand on your shoulders."

I obediently held out my hands, and Marlene Cook climbed up me like a full forward in the goal square in the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This was the first time I glimpsed the size of what might be still hidden from me. With her big handbag still across her shoulder my intimate companion leaped from my hands to my shoulders. Only one hundred and five pounds but she departed with such force that my knees bent like tired old poppy stems and by the time I steadied myself she was pulling herself up on the rusty ladder, then zigzagging through the filigree to the fifth floor. I heard a resistant window break free, a kind of pop, like a locked-up vertebra achieving independence.

Who was this fucking woman? There was a police car approaching, lumbering slowly along the broken street, headlights up, headlights down. And who the fuck was I? My money was all Japanese. My passport was with my bags in a locker in Penn Station. A silver key fell from the night and bounced across the cobbles. The police car braked and waited. I entered the spotlight, picked up the key, retreated. Then the car lumbered onwards, dragging its muffler like a broken anchor chain.

This was not Sydney. Let me list the ways.

"Come on up," my lover called. "Fifth floor."

On the other side of the door it was pitch bloody dark and I made my way slowly up the stairs, feeling my way past a landing filled with disgusting smoke-damaged carpet and another with cardboard boxes and then on the fourth floor I saw the flickering light of candles spilling from behind a battered open metal door. "How's this?"

It was a loft, almost empty, almost white. Marlene stood in the centre. Her big black handbag was on the floor behind her, beneath the big deep-silled window, amidst the mess of wooden splinters which announced her entry. Abandoned on the sill was a fucking Stanley Super Wonder Bar, a heavy-duty piece of steel with a ninety-degree-angle claw for pulling nails and, at the other extremity, a deadly point.

"Honey, is this yours?"

She took it from me without a word.

I observed how familiarly she hefted it. "Whose place is this we're in?"

She was studying me closely, frowning. "New South Wales Government Department of the Arts," she said. "They have it for artists-in-residence."

"Where is the artist?"

"You?" She approached, a supplicant, her shoulders bending to fit against my chest.

I snatched the pry bar from her. "Who lives here?"

I had hurt her hand, but she smiled, soft and bruised as peaches in the grass. "Baby, we'll have money from Tokyo tomorrow."

"Tomorrow I have to fly home."

"Michael," she said. And then she broke apart and she was weeping, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, fractured, her beauty divided against itself by cracks and fissures, a pit, eyes like animals, God have mercy I threw the bar away and held her, so shockingly tiny against my chest, her little head within my hands. I wanted to wrap her tight inside a blanket.

"Don't go," she said.

"He's my brother."

She turned her big wet eyes up to me.

"I'll bring him here," she said suddenly. "No, no," she said, jumping away from my nasty laugh. "No, really." She joined her palms and did a weird sort of Buddhist thing. "I can do this,"

Marlene said. "He can come with Olivier."

Oh no, I thought, oh no. "Olivier is coming here?"

"Of course. What did you imagine?"

"You never said a thing."

"But he's the one with the droit moral. I can't sign."

"He's coming here? To New York?"

"How else could I do it? Really? What did you think?"

"I thought this was some little romantic tryst."

"It is," she said. "It is, it is."

For this I had betrayed my mother and my brother? So fucking Olivier could be witness to adultery?

"Don't you fuck with me, Marlene." I was Blue Bones' son and don't know what else I said. I certainly kicked the nasty wonder bar against the wall. "What's that?" I roared. "What the fuck is that?"