The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber Page A

chained to the world as it is; but, yeah, it’s a way to paint, and Cézanne is as good a daddy as anyone. Art is a universe in parallel with nature and in harmony with it, as he famously said; true enough as long as you keep a grip on the harmony-with-nature part. I just find 95 percent of it as exhausting to look at as those miles of brown, slick academic pap.
    I hung around for forty minutes or so, drank some free coffee, and was just going to leave or strike up a conversation with the girl, maybe about art, when Slotsky came in. He was dressed for uptown, double-breasted suit, handmade shoes, he’s always reminded me of my father in his good clothes—maybe an actual model there, his own father did not dress like that. He seemed glad to see me, a hug, not a shake, that’s a newish affectation, Mark always trendy that way, and ran me back to his office behind the gallery.
    He looked reasonably well, I thought, or as well as a short, pudgy fellow with floppy lips and white eyelashes ever looks. He still has his Harpo mop of yellow curls, now a little tarnished with age, but still his logo, as it was at school. Mark no longer wears all black. Since he started selling old masters some years ago he has adopted the English squire look, which suits him rather better, since combined with his features and general carriage his former all-black costume inevitably recalled the Hasidim rather than urban sophistication, although he doesn’t look much like an English squire either. For example, he’d left the last button on the sleeve of his suit jacket partially open, so that knowledgeable people could tell that he had real buttonholes, and therefore that the suit had been custom-made. I don’t know any actual English squires, but I kind of doubt they do this.
    We took a cab to Chez Guerlin, the place du jour, I guess, not the kind of joint I would ever go to but sort of interesting in a natural history way. They seated us at a banquette table, right side front, which is the supreme place to be in this particular beanery, a fact he related to me shortly after we sat down. He then told me which famous people were dining with us, cautioning me not to stare, which I was in any case not inclined to do, except I stared at Meryl Streep. Mark’s shamelessness is a legend and is part of his charm.
    There followed a good deal of tedious business with the captain, who came by to pay his compliments, and a discussion with the waiter about what we should eat and what wine was drinking well this week, to which the two of them gave not quite as much discussion as Eisenhower held with his aides on the subject of D-day. I let them order for me. This done, Mark gave me a rundown on his business and dropped a dozen or so boldfaced names, which were largely lost on me, although when he observed this he helpfully provided the identifying surnames for the various Bobs and Donnas and Brads so dropped. Business was apparently booming. The art market was going nuts again: the sixteen-thousand-square-foot houses that people of a certain standing now require have lots of wall space that cannot be left blank, and since the rich are no longer paying taxes, money was squirting through New York like a firehose and a lot of it was going into high-end art.
    Then we talked about his current artist, young Mono; he asked me what I thought. I told him wallpaper of a superior grade; he laughed. It’s his pretense that I’m opposed to nonrepresentational art on principle, like Tom Wolfe—I’ve never been able to explain to him why that’s not the case—and he spent a while bending my ear about the dynamic values and hidden wit of his kid’s wallpaper. Asked me how I was doing, I told him about the Vanity Fair fiasco but left out the part about the show at Lotte’s—he’s always trying to get me in with him in a business way and I won’t do it, don’t ask me why.
    I admitted I was in deep shit, no shame in that, maybe fifty grand in the hole, and he said