“Eric?”
I don’t reply. The door opens with a hum.
Someone touches my arm. Behind me there’s a thin man with a long nose and a narrow chin. In one hand he’s holding the handlebars of a bicycle, and in the other he has a well-worn plastic shopping bag.
“You shouldn’t have gotten involved,” he says. “You should have left the three of them alone. It was none of your business.”
I slam the door behind me and run up the stairs. If she has a man with her, if there’s a man, if she, if … her floor. She’s standing in the doorway.
“So what’s wrong?” she asks.
“The thing with the car should never have happened. Just left standing like that. What will people think!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I must report it stolen.”
I walk past her into the apartment. There’s no one here. She’s alone. I sink down onto the nearest chair and switch on my cell phone. Nine calls, three from my office, six from home, three text messages. I switch it off again.
“What’s happened, Eric?”
I want to answer that absolutely nothing has happened, that everything has simply become too much for me. I want to answer that I’m just stuck. But all I say is “It’s been a hard day.” And as I’m looking at her, I realize I don’t even want to be here with her. I want to go home.
“I wanted to be with you,” I say.
She comes closer, I stand up and manage to do everything necessary. My hands go where they’re supposed to, my movements are the right ones, and I even succeed in enjoying the fact that this is what she wants so much, and that she’s soft and smells good and maybe even loves me a little.
“Me too,” she whispers, and I ask myself what I’ve gone and said again now.
Afterward I lie there awake, listening to her breathing and looking up at the dark expanse of ceiling. I mustn’t go to sleep, I have to be home before dawn comes and Laura wants to tell me her dream.
I get up silently and put on my clothes. Sibylle doesn’t wake up. I slide out of the room on tiptoe.
BEAUTY
“Have you seen Carrière’s new exhibition?”
“Yes, and I’m a bit stumped.”
“Oh?”
“People say he challenges our usual ways of seeing. He says it too. In every art magazine right now. But basically what it boils down to is him admitting that pictures are only pictures, not reality. He’s as proud of this as a child who’s just discovered there is no Easter Bunny.”
“That’s mean.”
“But I really admire him.”
“Quite right, too.”
We both smile. The situation is complicated. In my profession it’s not just a matter of selling paintings — you also have to sell them to the right people. Naturally I have to convince Eliza that her collection needs another Eulenboeck, but at the same time Eliza has to convince me that her collection is the right home for Eulenboeck. There won’t be many more Eulenboecks coming onto the market, and meanwhile the museums have become interested in him, and granted, they pay less, but they can raise the reputation of an artist enormously, which in turn causes auction prices in the secondary market to soar. You have to be carefuclass="underline" if prices rise too precipitously, they soon collapse again, and the result is all the art magazines pronouncing that the market has delivered its verdict, and the name of the artist never recovers. So Eliza has to convince me that she won’t dispose of the painting I’m going to sell her as soon as she can turn a profit on it; she has to convince me that she’s a serious collector, just as I have to convince her that Eulenboeck’s value will not decline in the long run.
But we don’t talk about any of this. We each sit in front of a plate of salad, sip our mineral water, smile a lot, and talk about anything and everything except what it’s actually all about. I’m a good artist’s executor, she’s a good collector, and we both know the game.
So we talk about the terraces in Venice. Eliza has an apartment in Venice with a view of the Grand Canal. I went to visit once and it never stopped raining; mist crawled over the water and the city seemed lethargic, dark, and stagnant. We laugh about the parties at the Biennale, we both think that they’re exhausting and loud and a big effort, but you still have to go, you have no choice. We agree that great beauty makes too many demands: you are helpless in front of it, it’s as if you have to react in some way, do something, respond to it, but it remains mute, and rejects you with sovereign equanimity. This of course leads to Rilke. We talk about his time with Rodin, we talk briefly about Rodin himself, then, it’s unavoidable, we talk about Nietzsche. We order coffee, neither of us has touched our salad, who has an appetite on a day as hot as this? And now, because time is running out, we get around to talking briefly about Eulenboeck.
Difficult, I say. There’s a lot of interest.
She can well imagine, says Eliza, but if you’re going to give a painting a home, it comes down to what neighborhood it will find itself in, and what company it will be keeping. She already has a number of Eulenboecks. Back home in Ghent she has works by Richter, Demand, and Dean, she has a few things by Kentridge and Wallinger, she has a Borremans, whose style is somewhat similar to Eulenboeck’s, and she has a John Currin. In addition to which she was lucky enough to know the master personally — not as well as I did, of course, but well enough all the same to know that he was no friend of the museum world. His work, she feels, belongs at the heart of the here-and-now, not in the storage rooms of galleries.
I nod vaguely.
Oh this heat, she says.
She fans air toward her, and although the restaurant has soundless ventilators, the gesture doesn’t look silly, coming from her. She has an effortless elegance. If women were my thing, I’d be in love with her.
Weather like this, she says, gives you a whole new respect for Moorish culture. How is it possible to build an Alhambra while exposed to such deadly heat?
In previous eras, I tell her, our species was more robust. Man’s constitution is not fixed, it develops over time. The road marches of the Roman legions achieved distances our world could only attribute to Olympic athletes.
A thought, she observes, that would have pleased Nietzsche.
But one, I reply, that only a healthy person should even formulate. The moment a tooth hurts, you are infinitely grateful for modernity and its alienations.
We stand up and embrace quickly with air kisses on both cheeks. She leaves, I stay and pay the bill. We’ll meet again, first at a dinner party, then perhaps a breakfast, then she’ll visit me in Heinrich’s studio, and then maybe the moment will come to actually talk about money.
I don’t have far to go to get home, I live next to the restaurant. In the hallway of my apartment, as always, I pause in front of the little Tiepolo drawing, happy to be able to call such a piece of perfection mine. Then I listen to the messages on my answering machine.
There’s only one. Weselbach, the auction house, informing me that a dealer from Paris has put up an Eulenboeck for auction the week after next. Old Death in Flanders, luckily a more or less minor work. No inquiries from potential buyers yet, but the dealer doesn’t want to withdraw the painting.
Not good! No inquiries up-front means that the interest driving the auction will be limited, and I’ll probably have to buy the picture myself to support Eulenboeck’s value. The opening bid is set at four hundred and twenty thousand — a lot of money, and all I’ll get for it is a painting I myself sold six years ago for two hundred and fifty. I’ve already had to buy three Eulenboecks this year, and it’s only August. I have to do something.
I call Wexler, the new chief curator of the Clayland Museum in Montreal. Actually all I want to do is leave a message, but in spite of the time difference he answers right away. He says he’s switched his office line over onto his cell phone and no, he’s not asleep, he’s broken the habit.