Read The Forgery of Venus for Free Online

doing, and the Guardias in their shiny hats on every corner giving you the eye like you’re thinking about bringing down the state.
    We stayed in her place off the Rue Saint-Jacques near the Schola Cantorum, third-floor walk-up, filthy bath down the hall. Her room was incredibly messy; I was the fascist in the relationship. She took voice classes at the Cantorum every morning, not the Conservatory, or maybe I got it wrong. La vie bohème, left bank, student demos, everyone in black, pretentious, smoking and drinking and doping like mad. While she was out I hit the museums and the galleries. Paris was dead as far as painting went at the time, all political shit and wannabe New York School.
    But I went to an exhibition at the Orangerie, it was Weimar art: Dix, Grosz, and some people I never heard of before, like Christian Schad, Karl Hubbuch. Some terrific stuff, the style was called Neue Sachlichkeit , New Objectivity. So these guys were in the ruins of Germany after the first war and everywhere abstract modernism was the thing to be doing—Picasso, Braque—and there was Dada and Futurism cranking up, and these guys tried to rescue representational art from kitsch and they did it, especially Schad, a technique like Cranach’s, wonderful depth and structure, and shocking penetration. Look at the world you made, you bastards, this is what it looks like. I recall thinking, Can we do that now? Would anyone be able to see it? Probably not, and the world hasn’t changed that much, except we stick the war-wounded behind the walls of hospitals so we don’t have to look at them, and the rich are now thin instead of fat. But even if you did it, the rich shits would buy them up: oh, you have a Wilmot, appreciating very nicely, thank you, not as much as de Kooning but a good return on investment. Everyone is blind now, except if it’s on TV.
     
    I was going to stay in Europe for at least a year, but I came home that fall, to find some interesting developments. Mother had been moved to a care facility because of her worsening diabetes and the effects of the new stroke, which is probably a good thing considering more parts of her were turning black and falling off, and no one wants that around the house. They had to take the door off her room, and the frame too, and move her out through the French windows and the garden. My prayer is she had no brains left at the time. She loved that garden.
    The wreckage from this demolition was still apparent when I returned, but Dad seemed disinclined to do much about it. Charlie left the day after Mother did, off to her novitiate somewhere in Missouri. She was going to be a missionary sister and help the far-off poor. She didn’t write or leave a note for me; I mean, I knew she was talking about, it but I didn’t think she was just going to leave, like sneaking off while I was gone. I used to tell her when she first started to get serious about it, I told her, you don’t have to do this, Charlie, we can run away together, we can make a life, but she just looked at me in a kind of holy blank way she’s developed and said, it’s not that, Christ was calling her and so on, and I didn’t believe her. She was never that religious when we were growing up; I always thought it was a girl thing, like being crazy about horses. For a while I thought it was because he did something to her—you hear about shit like that all the time, even families around here in Oyster Bay, Daddy and Daddy’s little girl—I should have asked her, but I couldn’t, the one time I went to see her, not in a convent parlor, and I have to say, I never really believed it. He’s a monster, but not that kind of monster.
    I missed her. I never thought, I mean I always thought we would be together, or close, anyway, my big sister, Chaz and Charlie together forever. I thought charity began at home, but I guess not. Dad was by that time boffing the lawn guy’s daughter, Melanie, a conventionally cute brunette with a face