The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber Page B

little lunettes around the edge of the mirror to illustrate scenes from his career and the breakup of his two previous marriages. I mean, it was good. It was a real painting, not a cartoon, and it had some of the authority of the original.
    I brought it home after the magazine was finished with it and she went ballistic, her usual business about how could I do this to myself, like my talent was like a god that had to be worshipped in a certain way, and how all the bozos at the magazine had no idea what I was doing, the details wouldn’t even reproduce, and all the time I was wasting on crap like that, my only life. That was one of her phrases—how can you spend your only life this way? But I didn’t see her spending her only life making the kind of money we needed for Milo, I mean it wasn’t like she was maximizing her talent in that little gallery, when any of the big guys would’ve hired her in a heartbeat, she was that good—no, that was down to me, thank you, and around then was when I started in with the amphetamines, to get more work out in my only life and bring in the cash.
    Anyway, about mid-May that year, a Sunday, it was, one of the first really nice days we had, maybe a month before our anniversary, I was making coffee or something in the kitchen and I heard this sound of giggling and laughter coming from our bedroom and I went to the door, which was open just a slit, and I looked in. They were on the bed, Lotte and Milo, he must’ve been around four then, and they were playing some kind of tickling game. She was in a white batiste nightgown and he was in Spider-Man pj’s, and it just knocked me out, the sunlight streaming in and lighting them up on the white duvet and the brass of the bed glinting. It was like I was in on some secret, the kind of semierotic play that mothers and sons get into at that age, and for a second I almost remembered—like a sense memory, not like something in my head at all—doing the same kind of thing with my mother.
    And that afternoon I went to the loft and stretched and primed a biggish canvas, maybe three feet by five, and I started painting what it was like. I made the boy slightly turned away from his mother, with an expression of delight on his face, and I had the mother sitting upin the center of the bed braced on one arm and with her other arm extended, touching his head, her index finger barely wrapped in a dark curl of his hair. And I got lost in it and for the next few weeks it was like a refuge; I’d grind out my daily bread and then turn back to it, and it was fine, everything was working right, the child’s mouth rendered with three quick strokes, perfect, glistening with the juice of life, and the same with the flesh tones of the mother’s skin I knew like my own, showing through the translucent fabric of her gown in the morning light, pink and pearly, you could almost breathe in the bed-scent of a woman.
    And it could’ve been just a genre piece, but it wasn’t; the painted surface was alive and really existent, like it is in serious painting, not mere image at all, and I made the white duvet into what I really have to say was a gorgeous blizzard of the innumerable shades that white can take in morning light. And the vital line of the mother’s arm connecting her to the child, and the set of her haunch on the bed, and the other, supporting arm—perfect, sculptural, vital. I couldn’t believe it.
    And I wrapped it up and I was so happy and I thought she’d be too. But when she took the paper off she just stared at it for a long time, as if she was stunned, and then she ran into the bedroom and burst into weeping, just sobbing her heart out, and when I went to her and asked her what was wrong she said something crazy, like, you’re going to kill me, you’re going to kill me. And it turned out that she didn’t get that I could do stuff, I mean in painting, for love that I couldn’t do for money, and she seemed to calm down, and we hung the damned