Pas d'avant les domestiques

Well, have you sold my picture?

Here it is, said Magus. I am putting a frame on it so that I can offer it to someone who thinks he knows something about Art.

Mouse didn't dare to go back to the shop again. He set to work on a series, variations of his Rockwell. He spent two weeks at it, eating like a mouse and working like a galley-slave. He took long walks in down Market and then Oak to relax the kinks from sitting at his computer. When he got to Golden Gate Park, he sometimes went for a run. Sometimes he just sat and dreamed his day of fame and wealth.

One evening he continued down Market past Sanchez Street. His feet took him inevitably right up to Magus's shop. He could not see his picture anywhere.

I have sold your picture, the dealer said to the artist.

For how much ?

I have got back what I spent on it with a little interest. Make interiors for me, augment the canvas surface with some clear acrylic brushstrokes. Still lifes, landscapes, a nude study: I'd pay for them, said Ulysses.

Mouse could have hugged Magus; he looked on him as a father. He went home delighted. So the great artist Schinner was wrong! In the huge sprawl of Fran-Angeles, there were hearts that beat in time with Keene's; his talent was understood and appreciated. The poor fellow at the age of twenty-three was as innocent as the boy of eighteen. Another man, one of those suspicious, aggressive enfants, would have noticed Ulysses Magus's devilish expression; he would have observed the twitching of his eyelid, the ironic curve of his mustache, the movement of his shoulders that revealed the satisfaction of a carny huckster taking a mark. Mouse went for a walk on the thoroughfares bathed in a happiness that gave a proud expression to his face. He looked like a schoolboy who is going with a girl. He met Josef Bridau, one of his fellow artists, one of those eccentric talents destined for fame and misfortune. Josef Bridau, who, as he put it, had a few cents in his pocket, took Mouse for half-price night at SFMOMA to relax amidst Picasso, Matisse, and O'Keeffe. Mouse didn't notice the attempts at cool flirtation among the art set, the ars for arse sake. He didn't taste his espresso. He was having ideas for pictures. He was creating. He left Josef in the middle of the evening, ran home to make notes until dawn. He thought up thirty pictures based on memories of paintings; he believed he was a genius. The very next day, he bought some new filters and printing stock in various sizes and grains. He cleaned the entire apartment; he put bread and cheese on his table, he poured a glass of water from the purifier. Then, as they say in class, he cranked away at his pictures. He had a few reproductions of pre-millennium Old Masters and Magus lent him others. After five months of seclusion, the Californian had completed twenty-two pictures. He again asked Schinner's advice and Josef Bridau's as well. The two painters saw in these canvases servile imitation of Chagall and Mondrian landscapes, of Hockney interiors, of Twombly and Haring, Warhol, Nagel, Klein's IKB 79 in red, a still life by de Staël and other bottles by Braque. In the final piece, they saw a knock-off Erté nymph bathing, with a greenish yellow fill where the golds should be.

Still imitations, said Schinner. Mouse finds it difficult to be original.

You ought to do something other than painting, said Bridau.

What? asked Mouse.

Throw yourself into literature.

Mouse bent his head like dogs do when it rains. Then he asked for and received useful advice and touched up his pictures before taking them to Magus. Imitations they may have been, but, with the additional work, fair ones. Ulysses paid three-hundred dollars for each canvas. At this price, Mouse made little profit, but he lost nothing, since he lived so abstemiously.

He went for a few walks to see what had become of his pictures and had a strange hallucination. His canvases, which had been inked so brightly on shiny polymer paper, had the gleam of paintings on porcelain before. Now, so it seemed, a wan dingy mist covered them; they looked like old pictures. Ulysses had just gone out. Mouse could get no information about this phenomenon. He thought that he hadn't seen properly. The painter went back to his studio to make some more canvases into garbage by smearing them with Art. In this way, Mouse was an anti-Dadist.

After eleven years of steady work Mouse succeeded in composing and painting tolerable pictures. Other artists referred clients who wanted work cheaply. These clients sent others of their kind. He repeated his mockingbird originality many times over for them and made reprints to sell by the inch at bargain shows. His creativity was so familiar that, though no one remembered his name, his fees gradually grew. He did as well as most second-rate artists. For Ulysses his specialty was to mimic the style of a single artist in each piece. For these, he sometimes dabbed a bit of actual paint onto the print. Magus bought and sold exclusive rights to these works, which were not available as reprints from the poor Californian, who earned laboriously about thirty-thousand a year and didn't spend more than fifteen.

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