The Forgery of Venus Read Online Free PDF Page A

believe it, standing there in her room, trying not to gag from the smell of the disinfectant and her rotting feet. Her mouth drawn down from the stroke, her eyes almost invisible in the pads of flesh: ask your father.
    Which I didn’t, no, I got drunk instead, a half bottle of bourbon, and passed out in the downstairs bathroom in a pool of puke, charming, and he found me there and cleaned me up. What was he trying to prove? That in the end he loves me more than she does, that he won the war of the Wilmots? Anyway, he wrote me out a check for five grand the next morning, and we talked about what I had to see and we sat there in his studio and talked about it, about the museums, London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Florence, the same trip we did together when I was nine, when I got to look at the European collections for the first time.
    That first time with Dad we stayed at the Ritz—God, he could throw money around in his flush years—everyone was real nice to me there, and I thought it was because I was such a terrific kid before Charlotte set me straight, incredible embarrassment, though I never admitted it to her. She hated that part, and now that I think about it I guess it was then she started visiting churches and convents, insisted on going up to Ávila to see St. Teresa.
     
    W hen I made the European trip by myself in my twenty-first year, I skipped the Ritz and stayed at a one-star albergo three flights up on Calle de Amor de Dios at the corner of Santa Maria, an address Charlie would no doubt approve of and about a ten-minute walk to the Prado. I hadn’t been to the place since I was nine, but it seemed like I just stepped out for a minute, the pictures all in the same place. But my eye had been polluted with art history courses, and I knew that I’d never recapture that fucking explosion when I first saw it, because it was one of Dad’s ploys never to have art reproductions in the house, no coffee-table books spoiling the golden eye of young Chaz. My father took me into the big room through the back way, through the dreary mediocrities of the later seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, fussy brown paintings, and then Room Sixteen and there’s the Surrender of Breda, the first big Velázquez I ever saw. I wanted to spend my life looking at it, that Dutch soldier glancing casually out of the picture plane—how did he even think of doing that—and the lances the way they were, just perfect, but he wouldn’t let me stay, he grabbed my arm and pushed me past the famous portraits and the prophets in the desert with that wonderful black bird suspended in real air and through the grand room, the center of the cult, Room Twelve, and we hung a sharp right and there was Las Meninas .
    The school of painting, Manet called it, and my father’s opinion was that taken all in all, it really was the best thing anyone had ever done in oils. He told me, and I can believe it, that when I first stood in front of it my mouth dropped open and I held my hands up to my cheeks, like a version of Munch’s The Scream. It was so wonderful at first sight, like the Grand Canyon or the Statue of Liberty, but more so, because I had been hearing about it for my whole life and I’d never even seen a postcard of it. And so I stood there trying not to disgrace myself by crying while he talked.
    Nine-year-olds are not supposed to have that kind of reaction to paintings, but I suppose I was a kind of twisted prodigy. Can I even remember what he said? Maybe it’s been layered over in my mind by all the formal art criticism I got in college. There wasn’t much historical material, just a working painter’s admiration for a genius. He made me look at the light coming in through the window on the right, the way that light shines on the painted wood of the window frame. Vermeer made a whole career out of light shining on painted surfaces, he said, and never did anything better than that, and Velázquez just tossed it in as something extra.
    And the