Page 46 of Safe Enough

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.

NEW BLANK DOCUMENT

This all was about ten years ago, back when I didn’t get many cold calls at all. Maybe I would get two in a month. Sometimes three. Random assignments, because I was cheap, and I was always available. I was a new freelancer making his name, fully aware that for a long time pickings would be slim, so I was also always willing. I was happy to go anywhere and do anything. A couple thousand words here or there would pay my rent. Another couple thousand would put food on my table.

My phone rang and I answered it and heard faint whistling and scratching. Not a local number. Turned out to be a magazine editor in Paris, France. A transatlantic call. The first I ever got. The guy’s English was accented but fluent. He said he had gotten my name from a bureau. The place he mentioned was one we all signed up for, in the hopes of getting a little local legwork for a foreign publication. Turned out my hopes had come true that day. The guy in Paris said he wanted to send me on just such an assignment. He said his magazine was the biggest this and the biggest that, but in the end what it boiled down to for me was he wanted sidebar coverage about some guy’s brother.

“Cuthbert Jackson’s brother,” he said, reverently, like he was awarding me the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I didn’t answer. I pecked out Cuthbert Jackson one-handed on my keyboard, and the search engine came back with an obscure American jazz pianist, an old black guy, born in Florida but for a long time permanently resident in France.

I said, “Cuthbert Jackson the piano player?”

“And so much more,” the Paris guy said. “You know him, of course. My magazine is attempting a full-scale biography. We plan to serialize it over thirteen weeks. Recently, for the first time ever, Monsieur Jackson revealed he has a living relative. A brother, still in Florida. Naturally we need to include his point of view in our story. You must go see him at once. Am I correct you live near Florida?”

As a matter of fact he was correct, which I guess explained how he picked me out of the bureau’s list. Simple geography. Less mileage.

I said, “Florida is a big state, but yes, I live right next to it.”

“Ideally you should obtain biographical detail about their family situation. That would be excellent. But don’t worry. Worst case, we can use anything you get, as purely sidebar coverage if necessary, as if to say, by the way, Monsieur Jackson has a brother, and this is where he’s living, and this is what he’s doing.”

“I understand,” I said.

“This is very important.”

“I understand,” I said again.

---