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thing in the bedroom, but she wouldn’t talk about it and it was like a bad fairy gift in a fairy tale: instead of bringing us together like it was supposed to, it drove us apart. So after that I didn’t do anything but commercial work.
    Which would have been fine, except around then Photoshop came in and art directors who wanted pastiches of famous paintings couldjust buy the rights from Bill Gates or whomever and pop in new faces, and they even had tools to give that impressionistic effect or craqueleur, and there went half my business. So I had to work twice as hard, especially after we found out that our Milo had those bad lungs, familial pulmonary dystrophy, a disease not attracting much research attention and barely controllable by means of a set of drugs that might have been compounded of powdered diamonds if you looked at the damned bills. And naturally I had to up my own dosage, and one night I lost it and wrecked our house and apparently I slugged Lotte and they had to come and take me away. I say “apparently” because I can’t really recall any of it.
    I went into rehab like a good boy and did my program, but when I got out she said she couldn’t live with me anymore, she couldn’t carry the weight of the demons. I moved back into my loft then, and since then I’ve been living from check to check, magazine work mainly, newspapers, a few ads, never enough, sinking ever deeper into plastic hell, IRS hell…
    Maybe.
    That brings us up to last summer, a day in June; I was at Vanity Fair that day talking to Gerstein, the art editor, about a project they wanted to do, a series of pieces on the great beauties of the day illustrated with oil portraits in the manner of the great masters. They got the idea, of course, from the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer and Scarlett Johansson, that was the hook: Madonna by Leonardo (ho ho!), Cate Blanchett by Gainsborough, Jennifer Lopez by Goya, Gwyneth Paltrow by Ingres, Kate Winslet by they hadn’t decided yet. And he thought of me, naturally, and he went on and on about how he had to fight management to get to do them as real paintings rather than Photoshopped photos, and I asked him had they agreed to pose, and he looked at me funny and said of course they’re not going to pose, you’ll work from existing photographs. I argued with him fora while but it’s impossible to get anyone, especially a magazine fart director, to understand the difference between a posed portrait and one cocked up from photographs, and he knew I needed the money, so we shook on it, $2,500 per, a bargain. I suggested Velázquez for Kate Winslet and he said great idea. I called Lotte and told her about the sale, just to hear her happy with me for once, and she was. I could practically hear her mental calculator clicking over the phone.
     
    T here was a fairly short deadline on the project, and by the time I got back to the loft I was thinking about painting and trying not to think about where in the bottomless money pit I was going to stuff that twelve and a half grand. Since I turned whore I have all the art books, and it’s kind of cool to look through them and summon up the originals I’ve seen. The funny thing is I know that when I actually have the palette set up and brush in hand I won’t give a shit what the finished product is, I’ll be stoned off the process of painting.
    Lotte, in her art gallery head, used to calculate that I made about eight bucks an hour with the kind of work I put into a project, and I could never explain to her why I do it, why I have to work like that in order to get out of bed every morning, because I knew what she would say. She would say, why don’t you paint then for yourself, Chaz, and give up this connerie ? Then I’d get mad and say, how the fuck are we going to pay for Milo’s goddamn pills, five grand a month at least, and are you going to pull that out of your little gallery? And then she’d say, but I can sell your work, your work is