The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber Page A

be the complaisant husband; I might have looked the other way for a long time, like they do in Cheever stories, sophisticated and all that, cool, but she brought the guys into the house, into our bed, and they were universallyscuzzballs, bartenders, drifters, arty fakes, lawn guys with rusted-out pickup trucks. I’d come home on Friday after a week in the city and there’d be some gap-tooth skinny asshole on my deck drinking my booze, her new friend, and one week I just didn’t bother coming back and that was it. I guess my first marriage was based on a secret deal: I would take care of her and she could do what she wanted, and I would always be there when she got tired of it, but in the end I couldn’t; and the reason, I have to say, was I just didn’t care for what she produced. The sad fact is that only the great artists have different rules, and the patzers have to live like everyone else or settle for being pathetic.
    As for Toby, all there is now is a kind of helpless sorrow, although why I should feel sorry for someone who’s doing a lot better than his dad, a pillar of the community and his church, three lovely children he’s never introduced me to—no, I don’t think I want to go there. Although, it was really amazing, as soon as he developed a personality he rejected everything I was, I mean he actually broke crayons deliberately, snap snap snap, and left good drawing paper out in the rain, and ruined the expensive German markers I bought him, and he fixated on my first father-in-law.
    And Max just took him over and raised him according to his strict principles, which hadn’t taken all that well with Suzanne but did for her son, and the kid went out for football in high school and was a quarterback and went to Purdue just like granddad and was a star there just like, and became an engineer, ditto. Each year I get a dutiful Christmas card with the beautiful family depicted thereupon, a pleasant-looking group of strangers.
    So then back into wonderful singlehood, until I met Lotte and we got married and we had Milo and Rose and then split up. For a while, I thought Lotte would save me, because I could speak to her in a way I could never speak to Suzanne, and I thought I could store the real Chaz kind of in her, like a constant mirror. She has a Memorex-likememory, never forgot a conversation or a dream or one of my many fuck-ups, maddening actually when I think about it, you can’t do that to another person, however much they might love you. No substitute for the true self. Making this recording, together with what remains of my memory after all the dope I sucked into my system while I was with her, and what happened with Zubkoff and later, I have to admit what I did to her. Basically, I walked whistling into my father’s tomb, just like I said I was never going to do, ha ha, and it broke her. The poison leaked into her the way it leaked into my mother. I think it’s why she betrayed me in the end, the most honest and decent person I ever met. And right she was to do it too.
     
    I ’d never really understood what she wanted from me. Self-expression? It can’t just be that. I used to do paintings for her all the time, pure self-expression if you like, and the best thing I ever did for her when we were married sent her into a shit fit. It was our fifth anniversary and we’d been fighting on and off for a couple of weeks, and I wanted to make it special for a change. What we’d been fighting about was this goddamn magazine cover I’d done for New York about Giuliani’s wedding, the one to Judith Nathan.
    They wanted the obvious pastiche, van Eyck’s Wedding of John Arnolfini , so I did that, in oils on a real oak panel just like the original. I got the arrogant hypocrisy on the face of the man and the Persian-cat self-satisfaction on the face of the woman, and I used the convex mirror behind them to paint in the wedding party, all the pols and celebs, all grinning like skulls, and also I used the ten