“That famous!” Mr. Glescu assured him. “Who is the man with whom modern painting, in its full glory, is said to have definitely begun? Who is the man whose designs and special manipulations of color have dominated architecture for the past five centuries, who is responsible for the arrangement of our cities, the shape of our every artifact, the very texture of our clothing.”
“Me?” Morniel inquired weakly.
“You!” No other man in the history of art has exerted such a massive influence over design or over so wide an area of art for so long a period of time. To whom can I compare you, sir? To what other artist in history can I compare you?”
“Rembrandt?” Morniel suggested. He seemed to be trying to be helpful. “Da Vinci?”
Mr. Glescu sneered. “Rembrandt and Da Vinci in the same breath as you? Ridiculous! They lacked your universality, your taste for the cosmic, your sense of the all-encompassing. No, to relate you properly to an equal, one must go outside painting, to literature, possibly. Shakespeare, with his vast breadth of understanding, with the resounding organ notes of his poetry and with his tremendous influence on the later English language—but even Shakespeare, I’m afraid, even Shakespeare—” He shook his head sadly.
“Wow!” breathed Morniel Mathaway.
“Speaking of Shakespeare,” I broke in, “do you happen to know of a poet named David Dantziger? Did much of his work survive?”
“Is that you?”
“Yes,” I told the man from 2487 A.D. eagerly. “That’s me, Dave Dantziger.”
He wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t seem to remember any—What school of poetry do you belong to?”
“Well, they call it by various names. Anti-imagist is the most usual one. Anti-imagist or post-imagist.”
“No,” said Mr. Glescu after thinking for a while. “The only poet I can remember for this time and this part of the world is Peter Tedd.”
“Who is Peter Tedd? Never heard of him.”
“Then this must he before he was discovered. But please remember, I am an art scholar, not a literary one. It is entirely possible,” he went on soothingly, “that were you to mention your name to a specialist in the field of minor twentieth-century versifiers, he could place you with a minimum of difficulty. Entirely possible.”
I glanced at Morniel, and he was grinning at me from the bed. He had entirely recovered by now and was beginning to soak the situation in through his pores. The whole situation. His standing. Mine.
I decided I hated every single one of his guts.
Why did it have to be someone like Morniel Mathaway that got that kind of nod from fate? There were so many painters who were decent human beings, and yet this bragging slug …
And all the time, a big part of my mind was wandering around in circles. It just proved, I kept saying to myself, that you need the perspective of history to properly evaluate anything in art. You think of all the men who were big guns in their time and today are forgotten, that contemporary of Beethoven’s, for example, who, while he was alive, was considered much the greater man, and whose name is known today only to musicologists. But still—
Mr. Glescu glanced at the forefinger of his right hand where a little black dot constantly expanded and contracted. “My time is getting short,” he said. “And while it is an ineffable, overwhelming delight for me to be standing in your studio, Mr. Mathaway, and looking at you at last in the flesh, I wonder if you would mind obliging me with a small favor?”
“Sure,” Morniel nodded, getting up. “You name it. Nothing’s too good for you. What do you want?”
Mr. Glescu swallowed as if he were about to bring himself to knock on the gates of Paradise. “I wonder—I’m sure you don’t mind—could you possibly let me look at the painting you’re working on at the moment? The idea of seeing a Mathaway in an unfinished state, with the paint still wet upon it—” He shut his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe that all this was really happening to him.
Morniel gestured urbanely and strode to his easel. He pulled the tarp off. “I intend to call this—” and his voice had grown as oily as the subsoil of Texas—“Figured Figurines No. 29.”
Slowly, tastingly, Mr. Glescu opened his eyes and leaned forward. “But—” he said, after a long silence. “Surely this isn’t your work, Mr. Mathaway?”
Morniel turned around in surprise and considered the painting. “It’s my work, all right. Figured Figurines No. 29. Recognize it?”
“No,” said Mr. Glescu. “I do not recognize it. And that is a fact for which I am extremely grateful. Could I see something else, please? Something a little later?”
“That’s the latest,” Morniel told him a little uncertainly. “Everything else is earlier. Here, you might like this.” He pulled a painting out of the rack. “I call this Figured Figurines No. 22. I think it’s the best of my early period.”
Mr. Glescu shuddered. “It looks like smears of paint on top of other smears of paint.”
“Right! Only I call it smudge-on-smudge. But you probably know all that, being such an authority on me. And here’s Figured Figurines No.—”
“Do you mind leaving these—these figurines, Mr. Mathaway?” Glescu begged. “I’d like to see something of yours with color. With color and with form!”
Morniel scratched his head. “I haven’t done any real color work for a long time. Oh, wait!” he brightened and began to search in the back of the rack. He came out with an old canvas. “This is one of the few examples of my mauve-and-mottled period that I’ve kept.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Mr. Glescu murmured, mostly to himself. “It’s positively—” He brought his shoulders up to his ears in the kind of shrug that anyone who’s ever seen an art critic in action can immediately recognize. You don’t need words after that shrug; if you’re a painter whose work he’s looking at, you don’t want words.
About this time, Morniel began pulling paintings out frantically. He’d show them to Glescu, who would gurgle as if he were forcing down a retch, and pull out some more paintings.
“I don’t understand it,” Mr. Glescu said, staring at the floor, which was strewn with canvases tacked to their wooden stretchers. “This was obviously before you discovered yourself and your true technique. But I’m looking for a sign, a hint, of the genius that is to come. And I find—” He shook his head dazedly.
“How about this one?” Morniel asked, breathing hard.
Mr. Glescu shoved at it with both hands. “Please take it away!” He looked at his forefinger again. I noticed the black dot was expanding and contracting much more slowly. “I’ll have to leave soon,” he said. “And I don’t understand at all. Let me show you something, gentlemen.”
He walked into the purple box and came out with a book. He beckoned to us. Morniel and I moved around behind him and stared over his shoulder. The pages tinkled peculiarly as they were turned; one thing I knew for sure—they weren’t made out of paper. And the title-page…
The Complete Paintings of Morniel Mathaway, 1928–1996.
“Were you born in 1928?” I demanded.
Morniel nodded. “May 23, 1928.” And he was silent. I knew what he was thinking about and did a little quick figuring. Sixty-eight years. It’s not given to many men to know exactly how much time they have. Sixty-eight years—that wasn’t so bad.
Mr. Glescu turned to the first of the paintings.
Even now, when I remember my initial sight of it, my knees get weak and bend inward. It was an abstraction in full color, but such an abstraction as I’d never imagined before. As if all the work of all the abstractionists up to this point had been an apprenticeship on the kindergarten level.