I loved it, of course, nasty little boy that I was, and I swiped the sketchbooks and took them back to my room, my little “studio” with my kid-sized easel and my first-class paints, and I started to copy. Being Goya to Velázquez, I wanted to learn how to do that, stroke, lick, smear, and there was a skinned traumatic amputation, a jawless face, solid, brilliant, puke making. I went through sheet after sheet of expensive Arches paper-never any lack of art supplies, he used to buy it all by the ton-and after a while, it took weeks, I had it down, I could do the glisten of naked bone against riven flesh, and one evening he found me at it, with the sketchbooks strewn around my room and the painting there on the block, and he bit my head off.
It wasn’t just the usual keep your hands off my things; he was enraged, insane, way more than he would’ve been if I’d tried to copy one of his Post covers or a corporate portrait; no, he’d buried this and I’d dug it up, and not only that, I’d seen it. And I wanted it, not the slick shit, I’d instinctively wanted the real thing, the entombed Goya he was, and not only that, I could do it too, at eight years old.
He just beat the shit out of me, practically the only time he ever did. I remember the beating and I stuck it away in the slot of don’t touch Daddy’s stuff, but not the rest; the underpainting was wiped away, leaving only the slick and meaningless surface.
I have a photo from around that time, Charlie must’ve snapped it: I’m on the floor of our sunroom with my sketchbook, drawing, and he’s in a wicker easy chair with a drink in his hand, and he’s looking at me, and he’s got the strangest expression on his face, not paternal pride at all, but doubt and fear, and I just figured that out, there in the Prado. I always thought, Hey, he was a son of a bitch in a lot of ways, and a shit to my mother, but at least he encouraged me as an artist, he was proud of my talent, but now I saw that wasn’t true, the opposite was true, all those drawing lessons, painting lessons-now I can really recall them, because I was ten-year-old me just a few minutes ago, and I know what he did, the subtle warping, the criticism. He wanted me to be just like him, a locked box, a successful mediocrity. And I thought again of that gorgeous loft on Hudson Street and the painting in it, and I felt like I’d been socked in the belly; I literally could not breathe for a long minute.
“Are you okay?”
Franco was looking into my face and he was all blurred. I’m going blind now, hysterical blindness, I was thinking, maybe a mercy, and I said, “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?” and he said, “You’re crying.” And I laughed (hysterically) and said, “I’m not crying, it’s the pollen. I have hay fever”-a lie, just like my life. And what the fuck am I supposed to do with it now, this revelation, this understanding? Someone once said understanding was the booby prize, and oh, it’s true.
At that point I couldn’t stand to look at any more pictures, and we exited out to the Paseo, the wide boulevard that runs in front of the museum, and waited in a crowd of tourists at the crosswalk for the light to change-they wait in Madrid, unlike Rome, where no one waits for traffic. I was right by the curb, under a putrid cloud of self-pity, when something slammed me hard in the back and threw me right into the path of a city bus.
I was down on my knees and the bus was almost on top of me-I saw a band of red paint and above it the reflecting windshield of the monster-and then I was heaved into the air with a force that nearly yanked my arm from its socket, and the edge of the bus’s bumper smacked into my heel, ripping my sneaker from my foot as the air brakes screeched.
I found myself lying face-up on top of Franco, who also lay face-up on the sidewalk, the pair of us like a couple of lounge chairs stacked poolside. He’d pulled me so hard he’d fallen down on his back. He scooted out from under me and stood scanning the crowd, but whoever had done it had vanished. He helped me to my feet, or foot, because the left one was out of action. According to Franco, the guy had snaked in through the crowd and hit me from the right. Neither of us thought it’d been an accident or a maniac.
We hobbled back to the hotel, which fortunately was only about a hundred yards distant. I thanked him for saving my life, and he shrugged and said, “No problem.”
When we got back to the suite he tended me like a mommy, fetching ice for my wounded heel, ordering new sneakers from the concierge, pouring me a scotch. Yeah, he was just doing his job, but it was nice anyway, a sere form of human contact, but better than the howling waste of isolation into which I had fallen. Somebody just tried to kill me, but I was more terrified of life than of imminent death; it left me strangely, unnaturally calm. I have a feeling that’s what my dad was like on Okinawa, or he wouldn’t have been able to see what he saw and make it into art.
Krebs had been out somewhere with Kellermann, but when he came back and got the story of the attempted murder he immediately turned our lazy and louche little ménage into the Afrika Korps: orders snapped out, scurrying of the foot soldiers. Within an hour of his return, we were en route to the airport.
“Where are we going?” I asked him when we were in the car. I’d asked before but no one had bothered to answer me.
“We’ll fly to Munich,” he said. “I’ve arranged a jet.”
“What’s in Munich?”
“Many cultural wonders, but we’re not going to stay in Munich. It’s the nearest major airport to my home.”
“You’re taking me home?”
“Yes. I believe it’s the only place I can guarantee your safety until this thing is finished and the picture has been sold and my associates are paid off.”
“Your associates just tried to kill me,” I said. I guess I was a little irritated that he hadn’t made more of a fuss, oh, my dear Chaz, can you forgive me, I’m sorry, are you all right? And like that, but nothing: he listened to Franco’s report of the incident and barely looked at me while we were getting ready to leave.
He patted my leg and said, “Cheer up, Wilmot. Imagine that you are Caravaggio, fleeing a charge of murder, or Michelangelo defying the Pope, or Veronese under the thumb of the Inquisition.”
“I never wanted to be any of those guys.”
“No, you wanted to be Velázquez, with an honorable sinecure in the royal household, a liveried coat, and a bag of golden reales every quarter.”
“Yeah, and I thought that’s what I was getting.”
“So you shall, but you know even Velázquez had to go to dangerous Italy twice in his life, and not only to look at pictures. And didn’t he plunge into a risky affair with that woman, as you yourself have recounted, and didn’t he paint those wonderful nudes?”
I stared at him. “That was a fantasy. That was the drug screwing with my head.”
And now he turned and looked at me, and it was uncanny, like he’d turned into a different person or like I was seeing him properly for the first time. The slightly manic air he usually had was gone, and he looked tired, and older, and somehow more caring. I have no idea how he did it. He looked at me this way for what seemed like a long time. Then he said, “Was it really? You spend a good deal of time in a fantasy world, don’t you? Perhaps this idea that you forged a Velázquez accepted by the whole world as genuine was also a fantasy. Perhaps it really is genuine after all. How could you tell?”