Becky studied E.J. Gordon’s column in her four-poster bed the next morning, reclining against satin pillows, picking at a bran muffin. She was in a sour mood. Problems with the children. Bernard, into coke and God knows what else, was falling behind with his studies at Harvard. Libby, at Bennington, wouldn’t come home until Harvey divested his shares in any company with holdings in South Africa. And Becky, her outsize donations to the art museum and symphony orchestra notwithstanding, had still failed to crack the right dinner-party lists. She insisted that Harvey take her to dinner at the Ritz.
“The Moffats are watching our table. Order caviar.”
“But I don’t like it.”
“And don’t you dare mash chopped onions into it.” Then she told him what she had decided. “We’re going to redecorate the house and then hold a masked ball and invite le tout Montreal.”
Becky went after the best that money could buy, the much soughtafter Giorgio Embroli of Toronto and Milan. Giorgio, a master of rectilinear circuitry, did not undertake commissions just like that. He had first to explore the physic boundaries of the three-dimensional space involved and to test the stream of kinetic energy bound to flow between him and his clients. Harvey flew him into town in a Gursky Challenger jet. He and Becky welcomed him to their house by cracking open a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé that came out of a Napa Valley vineyard only recently acquired by McTavish. Giorgio raised his glass to the light, took a sip, swished it around in his mouth and grimaced. “Sadly,” he said, “most Californian wines are completely incapable of producing a sensory shock. They never surprise you. They tell you how they were made, but not how they came into existence.” Then, patting his ruby lips with a handkerchief, he said, “Show me, please, where I can rinse out the palate.”
Harvey didn’t blink at Giorgio’s fees. He stood by as the interior decorator floated out of the house, pausing at the front door, offering a pale scented cheek to Becky to be kissed. But once he was gone, Harvey threw out the Baccarat wine glass that had touched his lips and the Pratesi towel that he had used in the hall toilet. “I know they say that you can only get it from an exchange of bodily fluids,” he said, “but until they know for sure we’re not taking any chances.”
Giorgio’s live-in companion, Dov HaGibor, was a talented painter out of Ramat Aviv. He had started out as an abstract impressionist, determined to create work that celebrated a collision of ur-references as well as trapping infinity and assigning a linguistic function to colour. Recently, however, HaGibor had confounded his admirers by converting to high-voltage realism, his pictures interpreting fractured rather than unified space. He found his subjects by seeking out junk shops wherever he travelled, never knowing what he was looking for but recognizing it immediately he found it. An old photograph, discovered in a Salvation Army sale in Montreal, was the causa causans, as Walter Osgood, curator of the Gursky Art Foundation put it in his essay in Canadian Art, of the famous 14 × 8-foot canvas that was to dominate the redecorated Schwartz living room, its value escalating once HaGibor had died of AIDS.
There had been a barely legible inscription on the back of the original photograph that HaGibor had burnt once his painting was done: “Gloriana, October 10, 1903”. And “Gloriana” is what HaGibor called what came to be recognized as his masterpiece, the title an enigma, a matter of contention. Some critics argued that it made the artist’s satirical intent clear, but others insisted just as forcibly that HaGibor had meant his work to stand as a complaint against la condition humaine, as witness the Hebrew words flying off to the right. The words, translated, read: My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope.
In any event, the undeniably striking canvas showed a bewildered couple, the husband dour, the wife looking stricken, standing before a sod hut, the landscape bleak as it was bare. Though the couple in the original photograph had hardly ever seen each other nude in thirty-two years of marriage, they were naked to the world in the painting, the woman’s breasts desiccated and her genitals bald; the man pigeon-chested with a penis like a withered worm.
Harvey was determined to dump the canvas as soon as that hysterical Italian faggot was out of their house for good, but he relented once Walter Osgood came to inspect “Gloriana” and clearly coveted it. Then “Gloriana” was photographed for the cover of Canadian Art. Westmount matrons who had cut Becky at the annual museum ball now vied for invitations to view HaGibor’s last statement. The curator of the National Gallery in Ottawa requested permission to exhibit the painting, assuring Becky that a notice mounted alongside would read, “From the private collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Schwartz.” Dealers began to make unsolicited offers that would have enabled Harvey to quadruple his original investment, but he was not prepared to sell. Instead he increased the insurance on “Gloriana” five-fold. A risky move, as far as he was concerned, because if the picture were stolen anti-Semites would whisper that he had arranged it to collect the money. Harvey Schwartz would be blamed. Count on it.
Eight
One
“According to the Haidas, of the unfortunately named Queen Charlotte Islands, more properly Haida Gwai, the Islands of the People,” Sir Hyman once said to Moses, “according to them, before there was anything, before the great flood had covered the earth and receded, before the animals walked the earth or the trees covered the land or the birds flew between the trees, there was the raven. Because the raven had always existed and always would. But he was dissatisfied as, at the time, the whole world was still dark. Inky black. The reason for this was an old man living in a house by the river. The old man had a box which contained a box which contained an infinite number of boxes, each nestled in a box slightly larger than itself until finally there was a box so small all it could contain was all the light in the universe. The raven was understandably resentful. Because of the darkness on the earth he kept bumping into things. He was slowed down in his pursuit of food and other fleshly pleasures and in his constant and notorious need to meddle and change things. And so, inevitably, he took it upon himself to steal the light of the universe from the old man.”
Moses and Sir Hyman were strolling through Regent’s Park, en route to Prunier’s.
“But I think I’ll save the rest of the story for lunch, dear boy. A pity Lucy couldn’t join us.”
“An audition.”
“In the end she will have to settle for being a producer, putting her inheritance and business acumen to some use. But don’t you dare repeat I suggested as much.”
From the time Moses first met Sir Hyman in Blackwell’s bookshop, through his turbulent affair with Lucy and after, he had listened to the old necromancer pronounce on many things, but mostly politics. Mind you, they first began to see a lot of each other in an especially febrile year. A watershed year. 1956. Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, hinting that Stalin had been responsible for the murder of Kirov, his licence for the show trials that led to the execution of two more rivals, Zinoviev and Kamenev. After Khrushchev snitched, Nasser grabbed the Suez Canal. Then, in the autumn, Russian tanks rolled into Budapest. The British and the French, in collusion with the Israelis, attacked Suez.