A Paradise for Fools Read online

  “I love the Botticelli,” Fred said.

  “No, no, no,” Eva said. “Nobody’s wearing shoes. I’m ready, Arthur. Let’s pick this up again before I start to feel it, OK?”

  Arthur said, “The lining’s about done. If you’re good for another hour—you OK with that? Feeling all right?—I’ll get some color on, start shading in the reds and pinks of the robe she’s reaching with. I want to start with the heavy color so we can judge how to fill in the girl’s dress. Then there has to be some color, or shading, on the girl’s skin, but, like I say, her skin should be your skin, Eva. That’s how I see it. Like her hair is going to be the same color as yours. Fred, I don’t know why you’re here. I can talk while I work. We’ll start with your back, Eva, then get to the left side and front, so be ready to roll or—we’ll work it out. Figure on three more sessions, to be safe.”

  The group adjourned to the work area. Eva lay down again, under the lights. Arthur pulled on a fresh pair of gloves and busied himself with the equipment, saying, “For the color and shading we use a broader spread of needle. Feels the same, goes faster.” He tore off paper towel from a roll and wiped down Eva’s back with a squirt of green soap, “You’ve been wandering around since we worked. And there’s Beth’s smoke. Doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

  “Who’s Kim?” Beth challenged. “You never mentioned Kim.”

  “Kim changed her name,” Eva said, into the couch. “She was Ruthie in the old days. I’ve told you about Ruthie. We were all in the same school, same class.” Beth had dragged her chair to the side of the couch opposite Arthur, in the direction Eva’s head was turned. “You can imagine. Ruthie Hardin, she was. The fun the guys had with her last name. Came down to Massachusetts, I happened to run into her, she’s changed the whole name, now she’s Kim Weatherall.”

  Arthur said, “Ready?” He dipped the needle end of his tattooing machine into the ink he’d selected, stepped on the foot pedal, and the machine’s mild chatter started as he began to apply color, beginning smoothly from the left hip.

  “Ruthie Hardin. I don’t remember that name either,” Beth said.

  Eva continued, over the mechanical buzz, “It doesn’t matter. Like Arthur improved his name. I couldn’t believe it, but I love it. Arthur Pendragon.” Her giggle mixed well with the sound of Arthur’s machine.

  “Don’t move,” Arthur warned.

  Fred said, standing back far enough not to interfere either with the work or Arthur’s light, “I’m like you, Arthur. I love pictures. I love to see them out in the world. In a museum…”

  “A museum is a fucking bank,” Arthur said. “Museum’s a fucking hospital. A fucking morgue, is what a museum is. Some pictures, you see them everywhere. Like the one I drew for you. Advertisements, chocolate box tops, calendars. I figure, on a person, I set it free. It’s walking. On the move. You’re going to tell me that’s another old one? Another one frozen back under glass in a museum? That naked chick standing on the shell? The one I’m doing now, part of it, on Eva?”

  “‘Fraid so,” Fred said. “I’ve seen that one, too. It’s Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Venus in the middle, obviously. The character you’re working on, on Eva, is a servant or friend, at the ready with clothes, since Venus is born naked. Those flying boys on Beth are winds. You did them beautifully. And the flowers.”

  “Arthur’s the best there is,” Beth confirmed. Arthur kept adding color, the needle passing smoothly, allowing a three-dimensionality to develop in the turbulent drapery. “It’ll move when Eva moves,” Beth said. “You move nice, honey, when you move. But not now. While Arthur’s…”

  “You’re gonna tell me this one’s in England too,” Arthur complained. “But go ahead. How big is the real—see, when Mr. Z passes the sheets around, you don’t think about much except, well, hell, it’s high school…”

  “Except getting Tippy Artoonian to take her top off,” Eva said. “Picture like that goes around the room, that naked girl made out of white chocolate, you can almost see the desk tops rising up, the guys’ dicks getting into it. Guys look wildly around the room wondering, which one of these girls will show us how much she appreciates art and take off her clothes like the big-foot girl in the picture. Mr. Z. He’s in the corridor, lipping his Parliament, that filter tip. Ready to open up like an umbrella and offer secret culture to some lucky girl, he’s been all around the world, thinking who’ll it be next? Tippy? Ruthie?’”

  “Which some of us figured, the way he talked, he must be gay,” Arthur said.

  “The painting’s in Florence,” Fred said. “The figures are almost life size. Venus stands about Eva’s height. Five something. Florence, Italy.”

  “You don’t think of a painting as anything real, solid and heavy,” Arthur said. “Mr. Z didn’t say anything about that. His whole deal was pieces of paper, and what the stories seemed to be. You see a real painting, it’s like the difference between a picture of a storm of rain, and standing in one.”

  “Kim mentioned a painting you had here,” Fred said. “You were working from. A dirty old wooden painting?”

  The soft chattering of the machine stopped short.

  Chapter Fourteen

  And started again as Arthur depressed the pedal. Arthur shook his head, keeping the needle moving smoothly. “I work from memory. One of the reasons I hate flash. That, and the designs of flash are old and crappy and yesterday and dead and everyone already has them and you could put them on in your sleep. One problem, the client sees something, immediately that’s the size the client starts thinking. Me, I have the girl you call Venus in my head, I can project it any size I want. I know she can fit on your shoulder, your back, I can wrap her around your leg, hell, upside down if you want. But you’re not gonna know that unless you come in, you say ‘I want something this big on my shoulder, or this big on my back,’ the rest of it, I draw out my sketch and then you are already imagining how big the lines are going to be, since you know the dimensions. I see those three characters on your back, Fred. The ones from Piero’s picture. I honestly do.”

  “And he’ll sell them to you,” Beth said. “Don’t think he won’t. I came in, I wanted, what I had in mind, a picture from a kid’s book I loved, the old woman who lived in a shoe, all over my back. I even went home for the book. Connecticut. Eva was with me, she’s Arthur’s friend, she never was gonna get ink at all. Hated the idea. But Arthur sold us. Because Eva knew Arthur from before. The whole thing, including the concept of the stranger, who would have to be a man, carrying the middle around we might never meet.”

  Arthur dipped his complex of needles and applied it again, like a brush. The color, a deep salmon pink, continued rippling up Eva’s back. He said, “Turn onto your right side and hold still. Prop her with cushions, Beth, if that helps. I still like the idea you never meet him. Unless by accident. You’re at the beach, maybe a convention in Nevada, somebody says, and that somebody’s someone you don’t already know, ‘Hey, wait, you should meet…’ and runs into the crowd, comes back with whoever it is.”

  Fred said, “I like paintings. The real thing. You ladies, the way you collect, the art’s on your skin. Arthur has, it looks like, a phenomenal collection in his head. From the class with Mr. Z. But more than that, Kim happened to mention, when she was showing her work, an actual painting she had looked at with you here, Arthur. On wood, she said.”

  Arthur shook his head. He’d had too much time to think himself into a closed box of denial. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “Thanks for the coffee.” He talked smoothly enough, but Fred’s questioning, and his denials, had disturbed his concentration. “I can’t stop now. I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I have to work.”

  Fred was dismissed. “I’ll think about that back piece,” he said. “The Piero. A thing like that, what would it cost me?”

  “We can talk about it,” Arthur said. “Some other tim
e.”

  This was going no farther. “I’ll be off then,” Fred said. “It’s great to meet you all. Arthur, you do beautiful work.”

  Arthur continued his shading. He said, “Whatever Kim said, I don’t know anything about a painting. Beth, lock the door behind Fred. I can’t be interrupted. It’s tricky, the next part.”

  ***

  Arthur’s denial was absolute. High school had given him good training. A lie is easy to disregard unless it happens to block an avenue of inquiry. “Doesn’t ring a bell” was the easiest kind of lie. Its identity as a lie was immediately exposed by Fred’s being given the bum’s rush.

  “Arthur Pendragon,” Fred said, reaching the foot of the stairs. “The guy’s a romantic. And, by the way, something like a genius, not only to reproduce Botticelli’s Venus like that, from memory—but freehand, with ink. To execute that reaching female figure accurately, again from memory, on Eva’s back—that guy is a genius for sure and true. Sandy Botticelli himself couldn’t have done it. It requires genius little short of autism.”

  He tucked his car next to Clayton’s in the designated parking area and was horizontal again by four, the birds of Beacon Hill having greeted his return with their moderated dawn chorus.

  “Something to ask Molly Riley,” he mused, recognizing the lacuna in his education. “Was Arthur—King Arthur to be—the natural son of Uther Pendragon, so that his patronymic would have been the same—Pendragon? Or what loins did young King Arthur spring from? Was he another miraculous hero birth? There’s so much the tattooer Arthur doesn’t know, how did he get the name Pendragon? Not from books.

  “These kids don’t need books. They get all the education they want from electronic games and fantasy. For all I know, Pendragon is the name of a galactic superstar.

  “I should not have told him that Piero della Francesca was dead, and that his painting was on the other side of the Atlantic. Should have kept Arthur on the hook. But he had me fooled. I could not accept that a person who could draw like such an angel could at the same time be so dirt pure ignorant. He doesn’t know the name of the painter who composed The Birth of Venus? Doesn’t know where or, give or take a century, when? And yet he can paint the thing from memory on a girl’s back. A pretty back, at that, which might in itself distract some artist craftsmen.

  “Why does he deny the existence of the gremlin painting? What’s the point?

  “What was he afraid of when he called me?

  “Was he afraid?

  “He thinks about scale the way I was thinking about it myself earlier, down by the river. Again, or still, with reference to the relationship between an image on a sheet of paper—and the relative size it is obliged to take on as soon as it becomes part of the human body. The screaming skull with candles in its eyes, if it takes up the whole of a fellow’s front—the way it did in one of those magazine photos—that leaves us no recourse but to fantasize the skull as missing the skeleton of an eighteen-foot giant. With that head as the central focus, as a head always will be, the remaining parts of the figure—legs, arms, and vestigial teeny hands or feet—become the appendages of a kind of odd crab whose head is also its body, like Odillon Redon’s spider.

  “What happens to this guy if he’s arrested for defying the Commonwealth’s laws? Who cares? Is there a Department of Sanitation that gets offended, or who is it? Do they fine him? Jail him? Ride him out of Cambridge on a rail? They can’t take his license away if he doesn’t have one.

  “What’s my next step? I’m hooked. They’ve got me interested.

  “Everyone in this has an alias. That’s refreshing. Everyone but Mr. Z. Maybe Eva and Beth. Flash for sure. I don’t see anyone his age coming into the world and being baptized by the happy parents as Sammy Flash.

  “Who happens to be in my bed. What am I thinking? Keeping him close.

  “What is the painting? Unless I want to get arrested, I can’t go back to Cut - Rate - Cuts and ask Kim to show me the work in progress so I can figure out what I’m looking for. A Victorian fairy painting—if that’s it, I’ve already wasted too much time.

  “If I only had Arthur’s skill at total visual recall.

  “What did I see? It was too fast, and I was inhibited by being a gentleman, or in loco parentis or whatever slows me down. Impression of interwoven figures, birds, animals—but not in arabesques. So, not Victorian, maybe. Nothing pre-Raphaelite or art nouveau. And it wasn’t the imitated Celtic knot work that, from a brief perusal of Sammy Flash’s magazines, a lot of young people today find evocative. If anything, I’d say it was medieval. A gremlin, Kim said, like an egg with two heads and chicken feet.”

  The description rang a bell, to use Arthur’s term of art.

  The chorus of birds grew less as they settled into their work day. Vehicular and foot traffic was providing a rhythm that was leading in the direction of a fitful doze when Fred sat upright with a gaping jerk. “I’ve seen that gremlin egg. Or something close enough to be its brother. Pieter Breughel? Could be. The elder. No. It’s smack in the middle of hell. Hieronymus Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights, so called.”

  That would jolt Clayton Reed when he came home.

  Fred shook with the possibilities—unless it was the room shaking.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sleep had become unlikely. After a couple of hours and a trip into the world for coffee, Fred’s desk became the mess-in-progress that gave him as much comfort as it gave Clayton cat-fits. Books, periodicals, and sales catalogues from Clay’s extensive collection were laid out in a rude semicircular heap, like a squirrel’s nest the raccoons have gotten at, leaving only a ragged entrance for Fred. Clay wouldn’t have a Post-it note in the place, claiming the mild gum damaged paper. Therefore the books and catalogues were porcupined with slips of paper.

  “Of course I haven’t seen the damned thing,” Fred kept reminding himself. “If I set out to discover America or the lost city of Atlantis on the strength of this much evidence—to wit—a hostess in a barber shop told her friend in my presence that there was a dirty old wooden painting, and that the same painting was the source for an emblem that was the basis of her tattoo of an egg with two heads and chicken feet, which she characterized as a gremlin. That is what I know. Also, the tattooist denies the existence of the item in question. I know that too.”

  Meanwhile—here it was. That egg, or a version of it, everywhere. Specifically, as an evocatively surrealistic image, it was all over the work of that elusive painter who had bobbed like an inflated egg to the surface of Fred’s liquid mind: Hieronymus Bosch, famous in song and story—if not well known at all.

  Jeroen van Aken—his Christian name would be Jerome in English. The Latin form, Hieronymus, attached to him once he became significant. He was born in around 1450 and was recorded as buried (one hopes already deceased), on August 9, 1516. His town was ’s-Hertogenbosch, a slightly inland port city that was at the time the capital of the Duchy of Brabant, a neck of the woods that has since become the southernmost province of the Netherlands. No record exists that Jeroen van Aken ever set foot outside the town. On the seven paintings that he signed, and that are known to be from his hand, the signature he chose was Hieronymus Bosch, an alias partially, and legitimately, derived from the last syllable of his native place. Hieronymus Bosch was as made-up a name as Sammy Flash, Kenzo Petersen, Arthur Pendragon, or Kim Weatherall. Jeroen’s friends in town, and in his club, the Brotherhood of Our Lady, presumably called him the equivalent of “Jerry.”

  His paintings may be part of the Western world’s general iconography, but they are very few, and tend to be found off the beaten track, and are often so large that reproductions leave us helpless to follow what is happening. Of the twenty-five paintings that are generally accepted as being his work, The Temptation of Saint Anthony is in Lisbon, The Garden of Earthly Delights, a monster triptych seven feet high and thirteen feet long
when its wings are extended, is, with several others, in the Prado in Spain. An enterprising child might count as many as eleven dozen figures—human, bird, animal, God and angels—and still fall short of the total, baffled, as the work went on, to find no children anywhere in the mix that, whatever it represents, purports to stand for the world.

  “But of course I haven’t seen the damned thing,” Fred repeated.

  However, he’d confirmed the image that lurked in his memory, from the Garden of Earthly Delights, and drawn out by Kim’s vestigial description. The right-hand inner panel of the triptych—a hinged contraption whose doors, when closed, displayed a black, grey, and white vision of the earth in process of its formation, on around the third day of creation when dry land is coalescing out of the chaotic planetary soup—that right panel exhibited a surreal mixture of events as grim as it was lively. At the top of the seven-foot panel a city seen at night, beleaguered by war, is burning. Beneath that a grisly juggernaut, seemingly a weapon of war, advances across naked victims, despite the fact that the machine consists in no more than a pair of ears clasping a vicious tilted knife blade. Its stamped hallmark proves it to be from a maker in ’s-Hertogenbosch.

  Beneath that stands the dreadful egg Fred was remembering—a hollow monster doubling as an inn for the hopeless and condemned. It stands on its own legs, bleached trunks from which long thorns pierce through its shell. The egg’s shell serves as body to the being because the egg has a human head, as death-pale as the shell. This head is by far the largest human visage in the triptych and seems cruelly alive, given its circumstances. It is a portrait—male, humane, perhaps even with a sense of humor that adds poignancy to his despair. Portrait or, perhaps, self-portrait.

  Then you proceed downwards. The legs of the monstrous being rest tentatively in small boats that tilt in the surface of a river whose thin ice gives illusory support to naked persons speeding toward their doom on skates and sleds. Down further to persons impaled on their musical instruments; bird-headed Satan devouring a sinner from whose frightened anus crows escape; and things deteriorate from there.