Chaz and I were fairly close up until our senior year, and then I went off to law school in Boston and we lost touch. I saw him for about twenty minutes at our fifteenth college reunion, when he walked off with my date. She was an arty type with a wonderful name-Charlotte Rothschild-and I seem to recall that they eventually got married, or lived together or something. As I say, we lost touch.
Mark kept in touch, being a keep-in-touch kind of guy, active in alumni affairs, always a call for the annual contribution. He tried his hand as a screenwriter in Hollywood for a season, got nowhere, then got his parents to set him up in a downtown gallery when SoHo was just taking off, and he flourished at it, but not before changing Slotsky to Slade. I got invitations to all the Mark Slade gallery openings and we occasionally went to them.
We didn’t discuss Chaz much on those occasions, and I gathered that he was working as an artist with some success. Mark mainly likes to talk about himself, somewhat tediously, if you want to know the truth, and in any case I am not terribly interested in the art scene. I own only one original work of any distinction, curiously a painting by none other than C. P. Wilmot, Senior. It’s one of his wartime paintings-the crew of a gun tub on a carrier at Okinawa, the antiaircraft cannons blazing away, and hanging in the air in front of them like a hideous insect is a kamikaze on fire, so close you can make out the pilot and the white band wrapped around his head, and there’s nothing they can do about it, they’re all going to die in the next few seconds, but the interesting thing about the picture is that one of the crew, a boy really, has turned away from the oncoming doom and is facing the viewer, hands outstretched and empty, with an expression on his face that is right out of Goya, or so I recall from my liberal education.
In fact, the whole painting is Goyesque, a modern take on his famous The Shootings of May Third 1808, with the kamikaze standing in for those faceless Napoleonic dragoons. The navy did not approve, nor did the magazines of the time, and the painting remained unsold. Thereafter, it seems, Wilmot was more careful to please. Chaz had it on the wall of his bedroom all through college, and when we were packing up just before we graduated he gave it to me, casually, as if it were an old Led Zeppelin poster.
As it happened I had just flown into town the weekend Mark threw a party at the Carlyle hotel to celebrate his coup in acquiring the painting that has become known as the Alba Venus. I’d followed the saga of the painting’s discovery with more than my usual interest in things artistic, mainly because of Mark’s involvement, but also because of the value of the object. They were quoting crazy figures for what it was expected to bring at auction, a couple of units at least, a “unit” being a movie mogul term I like to toss around for fun-it’s a hundred million dollars. I find that sort of money very interesting, whatever its source, so I decided to stay at my firm’s suite at the Omni for the evening and attend.
Mark had rented one of the mezzanine ballrooms for the party. I spotted Chaz as soon as I walked through the door, and he seemed to spot me at the same time-more than spot, he seemed to be looking for me. He stepped closer and held out a hand.
“I’m glad you could come,” he said. “Mark said he’d invited you, but your office told me you were out of town, and then I called later and they said you’d be here.”
“Yeah, Mark really knows how to throw a party,” I said, and thought it was strange that he’d taken all that trouble to establish my whereabouts. It’s not like we were best buddies anymore.
I looked him over. Pale, with what seemed to be the remains of a tan, and waxy looking, with his bright eyes circled with grayish, puffy skin. He kept glancing away, over my shoulder, as if looking for someone else, another guest, perhaps one not so welcome as I. It was the first time I’d ever seen him in anything like what he was wearing then, a beautiful gray suit of that subtle shade that only the top Italian designers ever use.
“Nice suit,” I said.
He glanced down at his lapels. “Yes, I got it in Venice.”
“Really?” I said. “You must be doing okay.”
“Yeah, I’m doing fine,” he said in a tone that discouraged inquiry, and he also changed the subject by adding, “Have you seen the masterpiece yet?” He indicated the posters of the painting that hung at intervals on the ballroom walls: the woman lying supine, a secret, satisfied smile on her face, her hand covering her crotch, not palm-down in the traditional gesture of modesty, but palm-up, as if offering it to the man revealed smokily in the mirror at the foot of the couch, the artist, Diego Velázquez.
I said I had not, that I’d been out of town during the brief period it had been on public display.
“It’s a fake,” he said, loud enough to draw stares. Of course, I’d seen Chaz drunk often enough in college, but this was different, a dangerous kind of drunk, I realized, although Chaz was the mildest of men. The taut skin under his left eye was twitching.
“What do you mean it’s a fake?” I asked.
“I mean it’s not a Velázquez. I painted it.”
I believe I laughed. I thought he was joking, until I looked at his face.
“You painted it,” I said, just to be saying something, and then I recalled some of the articles I’d read about the extraordinary scientific vetting of the painting and added, “Well, then you certainly fooled all the experts. As I understand it, they found that the pigments were correct for the era, the digital analysis of the brushstrokes was exactly like the analyses from undoubted works by Velázquez, and there was something about isotopes…”
He shrugged impatiently. “Oh, Christ, anything can be faked. Anything. But as a matter of fact I painted it in 1650, in Rome. It has genuine seventeenth-century Roman grime in the craqueleur. The woman’s name is Leonora Fortunati.” He turned away from the posters and looked at me. “You think I’m crazy.”
“Frankly, yes. You even look crazy. But maybe you’re just drunk.”
“I’m not that drunk. You think I’m crazy because I said I painted that thing in 1650, and that’s impossible. Tell me, what is the time?”
I looked at my watch and said, “It’s five to ten,” and he laughed in a peculiar way and said, “Yes, later than you think. But, you know, what if it’s the case that our existence-sorry, our consciousness of our existence at any particular now-is quite arbitrary? I don’t mean memory, that faded flower. I mean that maybe consciousness, the actual sense of being there, can travel, can be made to travel, and not just through time. Maybe there’s a big consciousness mall in the sky, where they all kind of float around, there for the taking, so that we can experience the consciousnesses of other people.”
He must have observed my expression, because he grinned and said, “Mad as a hatter. Maybe. Look, we need to talk. You’re staying in town?”
“Yes, just for the night, at the Omni.”
“I’ll come by in the morning, before you check out. It won’t take long. Meanwhile, you can listen to this.”
He took a CD jewel box out of his inside pocket and handed it to me.
“What’s this?”
“My life. That painting. You remember Krapp?”
I said I did.
“Krapp was crazy, right? Or am I wrong?”
“It’s left ambiguous, I think. What does Krapp have to do with your problem?”
“Ambiguous.” At this he barked a harsh sound that might have been a laugh in another circumstance and ran his hands back through his hair, still an abundant head of it even in middle age. I recalled that his father had such a crop, although I couldn’t imagine Mr. Wilmot wrenching his tresses in the way Chaz was now doing, as if he wanted to yank them out. I had thought it merely a figure of speech, but apparently not.