The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber

didn’t actually tape my life like old Krapp did. The present effort is not an adequate substitutebecause—how should I put this—I’m not entirely sure who I am anymore. Maybe that was Beckett’s point in his play, that none of us are anyone anymore, we’re all hollow men, heads filled with straw, as Eliot says in the poem, colonized by the media, cut off from the sources of real life. Why art with any soul in it is grinding to a halt.
    So let’s run through my life from then, quickly, because it’s not much fun for me, and also, I have to say, because it may or may not be my life. But stay with me here.
    Okay, the girlfriend’s pregnant, we go to visit the parents in Wilmington. Max, the dad, is a big, jovial slab of beef; Nadine, the mom, is a slightly withered Southern ex-belle. They are not pleased with the catch, I detect, but they’re resigned, whatever the little girl wants. Max takes me aside, asks how I’m going to support Suzanne in the manner to which she’s become accustomed, and I say I intend to work as an artist, and he goes, lots of luck, sonny, I hope you intend to be a commercial artist, because you’re buying into a high-maintenance package, don’t be fooled by the bohemian styling.
    We got married anyway and lived in the loft and had the baby, which was Toby. The fact is me and Suzanne should have been three hot weeks in a Spanish hotel room, not a ten-year marriage, although you can build a lot of plans on guilt. It was going to be great, I thought, the opposite of my parents’ marriage, or her parents’ marriage, and we were going to be artists together, that was the basis, really, a life together in art. Then it turned out that for whatever reason I wasn’t going to be the hot young painter of the season and she was not going to be one of the defining singer-songwriters of that decade, and the funny thing is, despite our mutual mediocrity we both made a shitload of money for a while, which muffled the pain, as it often does. I could barely keep up with the ad work, and she had one of her songs covered by the thrush of the moment and itwas a Top 40 hit for a while. Terrible song, I still hear it now and then if there’s a radio tuned to an oldies station, all her songs anodyne and slightly sappy, tinkly, no real juice, easily distinguished from Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, etc.—like my painting, unfortunately.
    Then, because she said you can’t raise a kid out of a loft in SoHo, we bought a house in the country, a four-bedroom in Nyack on three and a half acres, with a barn; God alone knows what it’s worth now, but way back then those big houses were going for a hundred and a half, two hundred, which seemed like a lot of money, and I started to work all week in the city, and I should have been the one to have affairs, I mean come on, I was rich in New York and that was the era for it, but I never did, not once, guilt again, probably—no, yet another example of schmuckhood. Mark was burning up the bedsheets during that time, and he used to invite me along to the meat markets downtown, but no, I was the opposite of Dad in that respect. I was just like Mom. It actually took me years to catch on about what Suzanne was doing; I thought I had an okay marriage until one evening she got drunker than usual and set me right with the list of guys.
    Somewhere in those years she gave up music, decided clay was more her thing, then printmaking, then book design, then video, then back to clay, but at a higher level, she wrote a play too, and film scripts, an all-around artistic type, Suze, no focus in any of them, just a desperate desire to be in a scene, be noticed.
    Or so I think, but I have no idea who she is. “Late for the Sky,” that Jackson Browne song, from the days when we thought rock lyrics held the key to all mysteries, I still think about her when they play it on the oldies. I have to say, I can’t carry the freight for the breakup of my first marriage. I don’t have it in me to