Page 45 of Safe Enough

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.

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