Pierre, Lucien, and Me

PIERRE, LUCIEN, AND ME

I survived my first heart attack. But as soon as I was well enough to sit up in bed, the doctor came back and told me I was sure to have a second. Only a matter of time, he said. The first episode had been indicative of a serious underlying weakness. Which it had just made worse. Could be days. Or weeks. Months at most. He said from now on I should consider myself an invalid.

I said, “This is 1928, for fuck’s sake. They got people talking on the radio from far away. Don’t you have a pill for it?”

No pill, he said. Nothing to be done. Maybe see a show. And maybe write some letters. He told me what people regretted most were the things they didn’t say. Then he left. Then I left. Now I have been home four days. Doing nothing. Just waiting for the second episode. Days away, or weeks, or months. I have no way of knowing.

I haven’t been to see a show. Not yet. I have to admit it’s tempting. Sometimes I wonder if the doctor had more in mind than entertainment. I can imagine choosing a brand new musical, full of color and spectacle and riotous excitement, with a huge finale, whereupon all of us in the audience would jump to our feet for a standing ovation, and I would feel the clamp in my chest, and fall to the floor like an empty raincoat slipping off an upturned seat. I would die there while the oblivious crowd stamped and cheered all around me. My last hours would be full of singing and dancing. Not a bad way to go. But knowing my luck it would happen too soon. Some earlier stimulus would trigger it. Maybe coming up out of the subway. On the steep iron-bound stairs to the 42nd Street sidewalk. I would fall and slip back a yard, in the wet and the dirt and the grit, and people would look away and step around me, like I was a regular bum. Or I might make it to the theater and die on the stairs to the balcony. I no longer have the money for an orchestra seat. Or I might make it to the gods, clinging to the stair rail, out of breath, my heart thumping, and then keel over while the band was still tuning up. The last thing I would hear would be the keening of violin strings all aiming for concert pitch. Not good. And it might spoil things for everyone else. The performance might be canceled.

So in words I have always used, but which are now increasingly meaningless, a show is something I might do later.

I haven’t written any letters, either. I know what the doctor was getting at. Maybe the last word you had with someone was a hard word. Maybe you never took the time to say, hey, you’re a real good friend, you know that? But I would plead innocent to those charges. I’m a straightforward guy. Usually I talk a lot. People know what I think. We all had good times together. I don’t want to spoil them by sending out some kind of a morbid goodbye message.

So why would anyone write letters?

Maybe they feel guilty about something.

Which I don’t. Mostly. Hardly at all. I would never claim a blameless life, but I played by the rules. The field was level. They were crooks too. So I never laid awake at night. Still don’t. I have no big thing to put right. No small thing, either. Nothing on my mind.

Except maybe, just possibly, if you pushed me really hard, I might say the Porterfield kid. He’s on my mind a little bit. Even though it was purely business as usual. A fool and his money. Young Porterfield was plenty of one and had plenty of the other. He was the son of what the scandal sheets used to call a Pittsburgh titan. The old guy turned his steel fortune into an even bigger oil fortune and made all his children millionaires. They all built mansions up and down Fifth Avenue. They all wanted stuff on their walls. Dumb fucks, all of them. Except mine, who was a sweet dumb fuck.

I first met him nine years ago, late in 1919. Renoir had just died in France. It came over the telegraph. I was working at the Metropolitan Museum at the time, but only on the loading dock. Nothing glamorous, but I was hoping to work my way up. I knew some stuff, even back then. I was rooming with an Italian guy named Angelo, who wanted to be a nightclub performer. Meantime he was waiting tables at a chophouse near the Stock Exchange. One lunchtime a quartet of rich guys showed up. Fur collars, leather boots. Millions and millions of dollars, right there on the hoof. All young, like princes. Angelo overhead one of them say it was better to buy art while the artist was still alive, because the price would rise sharply when he was dead. It always did. Market forces. Supply and demand. Plus enhanced mystique and status. In response a second guy said in that case they’d all missed the boat on Renoir. The guy had seen the news ticker. But a third guy, who turned out to be Porterfield, said maybe there was still time. Maybe the market wouldn’t react overnight. Maybe there would be a grace period, before prices went up.

Then for some dumb reason Angelo buttonholed Porterfield on his way out and said he roomed with a guy who worked for the Metropolitan Museum, and knew a lot about Renoir, and was an expert at finding paintings in unlikely places.

When Angelo told me that night I asked him, “Why the fuck did you say that?”

“Because we’re friends,” he said. “Because we’re going places. You’d do the same for me. If you overheard a guy looking for a singer, you’d tell him about me, right? You help me, I help you. Up the ladder we go. Because of our talents. And luck. Like today. The rich man was talking about art, and you work at the Metropolitan Museum. Which part of that was not true?”

“I unload wagons,” I said. “Crates are all I see.”

“You’re starting at the bottom. You’re working your way up. Which ain’t easy. We all know that. So you should skip the stairs and take the elevator whenever you can. The chance doesn’t come often. This guy is the perfect mark.”

“I’m not ready.”

“You know about Renoir.”

“Not enough.”

“Yes enough,” Angelo said. “You know the movement. You have a good eye.”

Which was generous. But also slightly true, I supposed. I had seen reproductions in the newspaper. Mostly I liked older stuff, but I always tried to keep up. I could tell a Manet from a Monet.

Angelo said, “What’s the worst fucking thing could happen?”

And sure enough, the next morning a messenger from the museum’s mail room came out into the cold to find me and give me a note. It was a nice-looking item, on heavy stock, in a thick envelope. It was from Porterfield. He was inviting me to come over at my earliest convenience, to discuss an important proposition.

His place was ten blocks south, on Fifth, accessed through bronze gates that probably came from some ancient palace in Florence, Italy. Shipped over in a big-bellied boat, maybe along with the right kind of workers. I was shown to a library. Porterfield came in five minutes later. He was twenty-two at the time, full of pep and energy, with a big dumb smile on his big pink face. He reminded me of a puppy my cousin once had. Big feet, slipping and sliding, always eager. We waited for a man to bring us coffee, and then Porterfield told me about his grace-period theory. He said he had always liked Renoir, and he wanted one. Or two, or three. It would mean a lot to him. He wanted me to go to France and see what I could find. His budget was generous. He would give me letters of introduction for the local banks. I would be his purchasing agent. He would send me second class on the first steamship out. He would meet all my legitimate expenses. He talked and talked. I listened and listened. I figured he was about eighty percent the same as any other rich jerk in town, with too much bare wallpaper in his dining room. But I got the feeling some small part of him really liked Renoir. Maybe as more than an investment.

Eventually he stopped talking, and for some dumb reason I said, “OK, I’ll do it. I’ll leave right away.”

Six days later I was in Paris.

It was hopeless. I knew nothing and no one. I went to galleries like a regular customer, but Renoir prices were already sky high. There was no grace period. The first guy in the chophouse had been right. Not Porterfield. But I felt duty bound, so I kept at it. I picked up gossip. Some dealers were worried Renoir’s kids would flood the market with canvases found in his studio. Apparently they were stacked six deep against the walls. The studio was in a place called Cagnes-sur-Mer, which was in the hills behind Cannes, which was a small fishing port way in the south. On the Mediterranean Sea. A person could get to Cannes by train, and then probably a donkey cart could take him onward.

I went. Why not? The alternative was passage home, to a job I was sure was already gone. I was absent without leave. So I took the sleeper train, to a hot and tawny landscape. A pony and trap took me into the hills. Renoir’s place was a pleasant spread. A bunch of manicured acres, and a low stone house. He had been successful for many years. No kind of a starving artist. Not anymore.

There was no one home, except a young man who said he was a good friend of Renoir’s. He said his name was Lucien Mignon. He said he lived there. He said he was a fellow artist. He said Renoir’s kids had been and gone, and Renoir’s wife was in Nice, staying with a friend.

He spoke English, so I made sure he would pass on all kinds of sincere condolences to the appropriate parties. From Renoir’s admirers in New York. Of which there were many. Who would all like to know, for reasons I made sound purely academic and even sentimental, exactly how many more paintings were left in the studio?

I figured Mignon would answer, being an artist, and therefore having a keen eye for a buck, but he didn’t answer. Not directly. Instead he told me about his own life. He was a painter, at first an admirer of Renoir, then a friend, then a constant companion. Like a younger brother. He had lived in the house for ten years. He felt despite the difference in their ages, he and Renoir had formed a very deep bond. A true connection.

It sounded weird to me. Like why people get sent to Bellevue. Then it got worse. He showed me his work. It was just like Renoir’s. Almost exactly copied, in style and manner and subject. All of it was unsigned, too, as if to preserve the illusion it might be the master’s own product. It was a very odd and slavish homage.

The studio was a big, tall, square room. It was cool and light. Some of Renoir’s work was hung on the wall, and some of Mignon’s was hung beside it. It was hard to tell the difference. Below the pieces on display, there were indeed canvases stacked six deep against the walls. Mignon said Renoir’s kids had set them aside. As their inheritance. They were not to be looked at and not to be touched. Because they were all very good.

He said it in a way that suggested somehow he had helped make them all very good.

I asked him if he knew of any other canvases as yet unspoken for. Anywhere in France. In answer he pointed across the room. Against another wall was a very small number of items the kids had rejected. Easy to see why. They were all sketches or experiments or otherwise unfinished. One was nothing more than a wavy green stripe running left to right across a bare canvas. Maybe a landscape, started and immediately abandoned. Mignon told me Renoir didn’t really like working out of doors. He liked being inside, with his models. Pink and round. Village girls, mostly. Apparently one of them had become Mrs. Renoir.

One of the rejected canvases had the lower half of a landscape on it. A couple dozen green brushstrokes, nicely done, suggestive, but a little tentative and half-hearted. There was no sky. Another abandoned start. A canvas laid aside. But a canvas later grabbed up for another purpose. Where the sky should have been was a still life of pink flowers in a green glass vase. It was in the top left of the frame, painted sideways onto the unfinished landscape, not more than about eight inches by ten. The flowers were roses and anemones. The pink colors were Renoir’s trademark. Mignon and I agreed no one did pink better than Renoir. The vase was a cheap thing, bought for a few sous at the market, or made at home by pouring six inches of boiling water into an empty wine bottle, and then tapping it with a hammer.

It was a beautiful little fragment. It looked done with joy. Mignon told me there was a nice story behind it. One summer day Mrs. Renoir had gone out in the garden to pick a bouquet. She had filled the vase with water from the pump, and arranged the stems artfully, and carried it into the house through the studio door, which was the easiest way. Her husband had seen it and was seized with desire to paint it. Literally seized, Mignon said. Such was the artistic temperament. Renoir had stopped what he was doing, and grabbed the nearest available canvas, which happened to be the unfinished landscape, and he had stood it vertically on his easel, and painted the flowers in the blank space where the sky should have been. He said he couldn’t resist their wild disarray. His wife, who had spent more than ten minutes on the arrangement, smiled and said nothing.

Naturally I proposed a deal.

I said if I could take the tiny still life for myself, purely as a personal token and souvenir, then I would buy twenty of Mignon’s works to sell in New York. I offered him a hundred thousand dollars of Porterfield’s money.

Naturally Mignon said yes.

One more thing, I said. He had to help me cut the flowers out of the larger canvas and tack the fragment to stretchers of its own. Like a miniature original.

He said he would.

One more thing, I said. He had to paint Renoir’s signature on it. Purely for my own satisfaction.

He hesitated.

I said he knew Renoir had painted it. He knew that for sure. He had watched it happen. So where was the deception?

He agreed fast enough to make me optimistic about my future.

We took the half-landscape, half-flowers canvas off its stretchers, and we cut the relevant eight-by-ten rectangle out of it, plus enough wraparound margin to fix it to a frame of its own, which Mignon assembled from wood and nails lying around. We put it all together, and then he squeezed a dot of paint from a tube, dark brown not black, and he took a fine camel hair brush and painted Renoir’s name in the bottom right corner. Just Renoir , with a stylized first capital, and then flowing lower-case letters after it, very French, and very identical to the dozens of examples of the real thing I could see all around.

Then I chose twenty of his own canvases. Naturally I picked the most impressive and Renoir-like. I wrote him a check— one hundred thousand and 00/100 —and we wrapped the twenty-one packages in paper, and we loaded them into the pony cart, which had waited for me, per my instructions and Porterfield’s generous tip. I drove off with a wave.

I never saw Mignon again. But we stayed in business together, in a manner of speaking, for three more years.

I took a room in Cannes, in a fine seafront hotel. Bell boys brought up my packages. I went out and found an art store and bought a tube of dark brown oil, and a fine camel hair brush. I propped my little still life on the dresser and copied Renoir’s signature, twenty separate times, in the bottom right corners of Mignon’s work. Then I went down to the lobby and cabled Porterfield: Bought three superb Renoirs for a hundred thousand. Returning directly .

I was home seven days later. First stop was a framers for my still life, which I then propped on my mantelpiece, and second stop was Porterfield’s mansion on Fifth, with three of Mignon’s finest.

Which was where the seed of guilt was planted. Porterfield was so fucking happy. So fucking delighted. He had his Renoirs. He beamed and smiled like a kid on Christmas morning. They were fabulous, he said. They were a steal. Thirty-three grand apiece. He even gave me a bonus.

I got over it pretty fast. I had to. I had seventeen more Renoirs to sell, which I did, leaking them out slowly over a three-year span, to preserve their value. I was like the dealers I had met in Paris. I didn’t want a glut. With the money I got I moved uptown. I never lived with Angelo again. I met a guy who said RCA stock was the thing to buy, so I did, but I got taken for a ride. I lost most everything. Not that I could complain. The biter bit, and so on. Sauce for the fucking goose. My world shrunk down to a solitary life in the uncaring city, buoyed up by the glow of my roses and anemones above the fireplace. I imagined the same feeling inside Porterfield’s place, like two pins in a map. Twin centers of happiness and delight. He with his Renoirs, and me with mine.

Then the heart attack, and the guilt. The sweet dumb fuck. The big smile on his face. I didn’t write a letter. How could I explain? Instead I took my Renoir off the wall, and wrapped it in paper, and walked it up Fifth, and through the bronze Italian gates, to the door. Porterfield wasn’t home. Which was OK. I gave the package to his flunky, and said I wanted his boss to have it, because I knew he liked Renoir. Then I walked away, back to my place, where I continue to sit, just waiting for the second episode. My wall looks bare, but maybe better for it.