When he has left me I look at the unfinished painting. There is something wrong with it, but I don’t know what it is-perhaps the figures are too crowded together in the foreground, as if they were all sitting on a rail. I have tried to correct the composition, but it is still unsatisfying. The faces and figures are from nature and full enough of life, but the space they’re in is not real space. There is a secret here I don’t know, and none of the fools who paint in this kingdom can advise me. Not that I would ask. Yet, God willing, His Majesty will like it, I think, and it’s still better than anything Carducho ever did.
A boy comes in with a message from His Majesty and I must leave this and change my clothes to be fit for his presence. I believe he must have decided on the portrait of his late father that he mentioned on Friday last. That arm is not right either.
I came out of it walking down Canal Street in a cold rain, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and no shoes. When I got back to my loft I was not surprised to see my canvas was full of Los Borrachos, or The Feast of Bacchus, by Velázquez, not the completed painting, but the underpainting and two almost completed faces, the Bacchus and the guy in the middle with the sombrero and the drunken grin. The paint was still a little wet and you could see where he, or I, had repainted the peasant on the extreme right, giving him a new head, and where the figure in the back had just been painted in, in a failed attempt to give the whole thing more depth. I could see what he meant about Bacchus’s arm-it was set into the shoulder a little wrong and the foreshortening was off a hair. The face was terrific, though.
I took a shower, changed my clothes, and carefully made myself a Gibson with my dad’s silver shaker. Pearl onions are among the only foodstuffs in my refrigerator, those and olives, because sometimes I prefer a martini.
Thinking back, it occurred to me that I must’ve spent a couple of days at least in Velázquez’s life this time, given the work on the painting, and so I was curious to see how much time I had actually spent in…can I still call it real time? The little screen on my answering machine told me that approximately thirty-four hours had passed since I had set up the canvas, something my belly was starting to confirm, and the Gibson was having an unusually powerful effect on my brain and balance. There were fifteen messages on my machine, said the little lights, and I ran through them and answered the one from Mark Slotsky.
“Where’ve you been, man?” he demanded when he answered his cell phone, before I could say my name. This still annoys me, that technology tells us who’s on the phone, another little erosion of the social. There were saloon noises in the background. “I’ve been leaving messages,” he added. “You heard I bought Kate?”
“Yeah, thanks. I presume you have a Winslet fan you’re going to shop it to.”
“A Velázquez fan, actually. Terrific piece of work.”
“Yeah, right. Listen, can you come over now? I have something you ought to see.”
“Now? I got Jackie Moreau here. We’re at the Blue Orange. What’ve you got?”
“More Velázquez. Really, you need to see this.”
He agreed and twenty minutes later the two of them came in, both antic with drink, but they quieted down when they saw what was on the easel.
“Jesus, Wilmot, what the fuck is this?” Mark said.
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like Velázquez’s Feast of Bacchus, about a third finished.” He looked around for a pinned-up reproduction, and when he didn’t find one, he said, “You’re copying it from memory?”
“I’m not copying it at all. I took some salvinorin and I was back in 1628 and I was him. Painting it, I mean, and when I came to this was on the easel. Pretty neat, huh?”
“It’s incredible,” Mark said, and leaned close to the painting, touching it tentatively with a fingertip. “Have you ever seen the radiographs of this thing? I mean the ones published in the literature.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not a scholar like you. Why do you ask?”
“Because what you got here is an early version, without the pentimenti. You know, if it wasn’t fucking insane and impossible, I’d almost believe you were telling me the truth.”
Jackie said, “Can you be other people too? Because if you were Corot or Monet you could have yourself a nice little business with this.”
And we laughed, and then Mark stopped laughing and said, “What’ll you take for it?”
“It’s not finished,” I said, “and it’s not for sale.”
“No, really. What’ll you take for it?”
“Ten grand,” I said, meaning it as a joke, but he whipped a checkbook out of his jacket and wrote a check with a gold Montblanc the size of an antitank round.
I stared at the yellow slip of paper, stunned. “You think there’s a market in unfinished old master copies?”
“There’s a market for everything. All you have to do is create it.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I turned to Jackie, who, like the sweet guy he is, was grinning like a monkey, enjoying my good fortune.
“I thought you were going to Europe,” I said.
“Tomorrow. We were having a bon voyage at L’Orange Bleu when you called. You were invited, but you did not return all these calls.”
I said, “Well, let’s continue the party.”
“Agreed,” said Jackie. “And the drinks are on you.”
There were a lot of drinks, and we closed the place and poured Jackie into a cab after he’d given us more than one Gallic embrace, with kisses. Then Mark hailed a cab of his own and told me he’d have some people come by for the painting in a week or so, when it’d be dry enough to move. I went back home and when I got there I took it off the easel and turned it to the wall. It was starting to freak me out a little.
The next day I was awakened from the sleep of the sot by a pounding on my loft door, and it was Bosco; he wanted to show me something, his latest. Nice to see a guy still excited about art, so I went down to take a look. He’s been talking about doing this for a while, using the barrel of 9/11 dust he collected back then, a major critique of what he called the fascist hysteria that enabled the Iraq war.
In his loft the masturbating girls were gone (sold to some rich creep in Miami, he said), replaced by a huge Plexiglas case that must have measured ten by ten by twenty feet. It was equipped with lights and TV projectors and peopled with his trademark rag dolls. He made me sit down in front of it and switched it on.
A great show, I have to say. He had video loops of Bush and Giuliani playing on the faces of dolls dressed in clown suits, and video loops of the planes striking the twin towers projected on the background. He’d made pneumatic models of the twin towers that expanded upward and collapsed in spastic jerks. At the foot of one tower he’d built a little trackway on which tiny figures made up as Orthodox Jews escaped from the building before each collapse and vanished down a miniature subway entrance. The air compressor that operated the towers also shot gusts of air to blow little Styrofoam dolls dressed as cops and firemen and civilians up into the air to fall down again, these figures suitably charred and blood spattered, complemented with tiny amputated heads and limbs. And he’d filled the whole box with the actual gray 9/11 dust, which made interesting clouds in the space above the yapping dummies as well as ever-shifting drifts on everything in the box. The sound track was a densely layered mix of politicians speaking, newscasters casting, explosions, and screams of anguish; from a separate speaker came hysterical laughter. This speaker was embedded in one of those amusement-park chortling torsos that used to grace penny arcades back in the forties. He’d re-dressed it as a Saudi Arab.