Then I asked her what she made of the Velázquez stuff and she asked me what Velázquez meant to me, and I said, he was a great painter, you know, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez…and she said, “No, what he means to you, what he represents.”
I said, “What, you think it’s some kind of Freudian thing, I’m fantasizing being Velázquez because I want a substitute father, my father didn’t love me enough?”
“I don’t know what I think yet, although I’m a little concerned you’re playing around with your brain, given your history with drugs.”
“It’s not the same thing at all-this is a perfectly safe experimental drug under medical supervision.”
“Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Anyway, you had plenty of love. You were everyone’s golden child.”
“You always say that, but I never felt it. I always felt like the prize in a grab bag or the ball in soccer. I think they spent a lot of time competing for me. I thought you were the one they loved.”
“Oh, please! Plain, gawky Charlotte, who could barely finger paint, in a house where beauty and talent were the be-all and end-all? And Mother actively disliked me, if you recall.”
“I must have missed that. Why did she?”
“Because I was the thing that trapped her into her marriage. She didn’t have the guts to face the social death that would follow ditching a kid, and besides, I worshipped Dad. Hopelessly, of course. Why I fled into the Church, or so I tell myself. I think I probably warped you more than they did, the way I doted on you. Your total slavey. Spoiled you rotten for a normal woman, may God forgive me.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” I said. “I used to think we would grow up and get married. You remember that time when you explained to me that it didn’t work that way? I must’ve been six or so, and I went wailing away. We were on the beach out at the point and I got lost.”
“Oh, yes, I couldn’t forget that. You got cosseted and I got a whipping for losing you. As I say, spoiled rotten.”
“Of course, now that there are no more rules, maybe we should try it. The kids love you, anyway…”
Raucous laughter, she’s got a big booming laugh like a man, like our father, in fact, and it went on for a while, and then she said, breathless, “I’m sorry, I was just imagining myself in the archepiscopal palace: ‘Um, Archbishop, I know we just got through the process of releasing me from my formal vows, but there is one other little thing…’”
“So it’s a possibility?”
Another hoot. “If it were, my lad, I wouldn’t have you on a plate. You’re far too hard on the girls.”
“I beg your pardon-I happen to be nice as pie.”
“In your dreams, bozo. You’re exactly the kind of wonderfully decent guy who somehow manages to totally destroy any woman he gets involved with. How do you do it? It’s beyond me, unfamiliar as I am with the ways of men, but you know, I always thought you and Lotte were going to last.”
“Oh, Lotte! I thought we were sort of making up, but now she hates me again.”
And I told her about our fight in the gallery in some detail and she went, “You said what?”
I said, “Well, you know, she was going on about how I never got to be the rich and famous artist that my so-called talent warranted, like she always does-”
“That’s not what you just said at all. You said she was talking about you ruining your gift, so it curdled, not about being a success and famous.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Oh, Christ Jesus, give me strength! What’s the difference? The difference is the heart of life, you dunce! Don’t you understand, that woman would scrub floors, she’d do anything short of whoring on the street so you could paint what you wanted to? Don’t you understand anything about love at all? I’m surprised she didn’t brain you with a hammer.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Yes, I know, but I have some work to do and I haven’t time to explain it all just now-not that you’d listen, not that you listened the last fifty times I tried…”
“Work? It’s nighttime.”
“Not in Uganda it isn’t.”
“As usual, blowing me off for the distant poor.”
A long sigh. “Oh, Chaz, you know I love you and you take terrible advantage of it. If I’m sharp it’s a form of self-protection. And also, when you spend time with desperate, starving, brutalized people who pass their short, shitty lives wailing over dying children, you tend to lose patience with brilliant neurotics who can’t seem to find a way to be happy. Good night, baby brother.”
“What is this, you stop being a nun and that gives you a ticket to be extra mean? You used to be nice.”
“The nice got all burnt up in Africa. God bless, kid.”
She hung up. I’m always strangely invigorated when Charlie gives me a spanking. Probably part of our sick quasi-incestuous relationship. But that was the last time I talked to her for a real long time.
On Saturday afternoon I took the kids to MoMA; Milo asked for an audio guide and wandered off, and I took Rose and was her audio guide myself. She wanted to know what the pictures were really about, and I had to make up a representational story for each one. I think that shows something about what we want in art. She didn’t whine once, a patient kid, an art lover maybe, but I think mostly it was having a monopoly on Dad for a couple of hours, looking at art. Oldenburg was of course a favorite-who doesn’t like gigantic silly everyday objects-but also Matisse and Pollock. She tells me Pollock’s big Number 31 is really about a little mouse, and a story went with this appreciation, pointing out the various places where the mousie had adventures in the tangled grass; I wish I could have got it down, it would have revolutionized Pollock scholarship.
After that, lunch and went to watch Buster Keaton movies. Rose announced afterward she is going to be an artist like me, but better, watching my face for signs of dismay, which I provided, then she held her thumb and fingers up barely separate and said just a little better. Milo did his Steven Wright jokes on the street and subway, he has the timing and the deadpan down cold. Terrible to love your kids this much, and this mixed with guilt because of the mess I made of Toby-maybe if I’d spent more time with him, but I had to work like a demon in the city to keep up the damn house and all that, which we bought in the first place so he could have a happy childhood among the birds and bunnies.
Around eleven that night Lotte called from the gallery and said three of the five actress paintings had been sold, for five grand apiece.
“Mark bought the Kate Winslet Velázquez three minutes after he walked in the door,” she said. “He insisted on taking it off the wall right then and paid us extra for the trouble. I had to wrap it in brown paper and he walked out with it clasped to his chest like a girl with a new dolly.”
“That’s strange,” I said. “Mark usually plays it fairly cool. He must’ve had a customer in mind. Or we’ll see it in his gallery marked up two thousand percent. Who bought the others?”
“Some media mogul and his girlfriend. This is wonderful, Chaz, you know? Everyone loved them!”
I tried to be enthusiastic for Lotte’s sake. The money’s nice, but not so nice the thought that I could paint these things forever, maybe add a male line, Cruise and Travolta by suitable masters, and wouldn’t that solve all my money problems? I could go back on dope too, really crank the fucking things out, and I looked at Milo and listened to him drag each breath in while he slept and thought, How can I be such a selfish piece of shit, not to fucking burn myself to a crisp to buy him absolutely top-of-the-line medical care. I don’t understand anything.
Except that in between my little domestic and parental tasks, and despite my obsessional shit about making money, I was boiling with ideas, filling page after page of my sketchbook. I was practically nauseous with the flow of creative juice; it started with those silly paintings, images of fame. I mean really, what is the world now? I mean visually. Image after image on the screen, but the kicker is we aren’t allowed to see them, I mean actually study them long enough to derive meaning, it’s all quick cut and on to the next one, which essentially destroys all judgment, all reflection.