On the last Friday of that disappointing March, Herbert called from work to invite me for dinner at the Hotel Grand. He’d made some great discovery about the Steins and wanted to share it over a meal with me and our friend Henry Richard. Henry always stayed at the Grand (a squat brick and glass monstrosity that rose from the edge of our “historic district” like a staging area for some kind of theme-park ride). Henry was in town just now, buying art.
Herbert, who really is extremely good at what he does, had discovered three “missing” drawings by Picasso—studies, he believed, for the 1906 painting called Boy Leading a Horse. (An utterly enchanting boy, standing nude beside a horse, which he seems to command without reins; the earth is tawny and burnished like the boy, while the sky is a festering storm of silver and gray, like the horse.) Herbert believed this boy might be Allan Stein. He’d uncovered a bill of lading sent by Allan to Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore in 1951, listing a portrait Picasso had painted of Allan, age eleven, during the same months that he painted Boy Leading a Horse—included with it were “three preliminary drawings.” The portrait arrived in America, but the drawings did not. Herbert thought these drawings might have been for Boy Leading a Horse. If Allan had posed one afternoon, during his sittings at Picasso’s studio, standing nude in the posture of the boy, he might, in some small way, be the Boy Leading a Horse. Finding the drawings could provide the link.
“Obviously nothing can be proven per se.” Herbert rambled on as we sat waiting for Henry at the Grand. “Given Picasso’s use of—well, virtually anything he could get his hands on to make his paintings, no one could prove Allan was the model in any conventional sense. But it’s just so tantalizing to think of finding ‘the boy,’ I mean, a real boy stuck somewhere in that painting. It’s a monumental piece.” Herbert showed me a once-tipped-in color plate he’d cut from a book at the museum. The painting was very erotic. The contours of the boy’s belly and chest were supple and inviting. “Any evidence linking it to Allan Stein would be, you know, more than delightful. No one ever mentions him in this regard.” Henry arrived now, but that didn’t keep Herbert from going on. “Everyone’s so ga-ga about Cézanne’s Bathers, Greek kouroi, or this weird grown-up Parisian delinquent who I’m sure was very important and blah-blah-blah, but why never a real boy?” I smiled hello to Henry, who looked very smart in his linen jacket. “Why wouldn’t Picasso look at an actual boy?”
Henry Richard, first name English last name French (Herbert simply called him “the Day-Glo king” [Henry made a fortune with a 1961 patent on psychedelic poster paints {the patent was his even if the idea wasn’t—his brilliant, druggy college roommate stumbled across it fooling around in chem lab, Henry saw the $$$ and offered the friend pot (to his credit a lot of pot) for the rights—and he licensed it out to manufacturers} without ever owning or running anything more than a postage meter at home] though Herbert only ever said this to me, not Henry), had spent the day with Herbert buying art. He liked to be called “Hank.”
Hank bought art with Herbert’s advice, while also buying Herbert’s advice with art. The payoff for these friendly consultations was paintings, given to Herbert by the artists he pitched to the Day-Glo king (at that time building a fantastically high-profile collection)—a little thank-you for making their rent and maybe their careers. It all gets very complicated when Herbert later curates shows featuring these same artists, borrowing from the collections of the dozen industrialists he has advised in the past and writing lavish essays that create great reputations and markets for everyone involved: the artists, the collectors who own them, and not coincidentally Herbert, who just happens to have pieces by every last one of them, tossed his way free like a bone to a good dog who, in the last reel, turns out to have been the star of the movie all along.
Hank snagged the waiter, and we ordered more drinks. Herbert handed me a photograph of the Steins, winter 1905. It was enchanting. The family is standing in the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus. Allan is ten, the only child in a group of six. The adults form a dark wall and Allan stands in front of them, chest high to Gertrude, dressed in a white sailor shirt and knickers; he is wielding a stick. His eyes are dark flowers, barely opened. Gertrude has her hands on his shoulders, like the claws of a bird, though it’s unclear if she means to protect or devour him. The Steins’ faces are hard and flat, like the cut ends of tree stumps; they’re all staring in different directions. Only Allan and Gertrude regard us directly, and this fact enchanted me—the directness of the boy’s regard. Hank took the photocopied bill of lading from Herbert.
“Mmm, I see it right there. ‘Three preliminary drawings.’ ” A good empiricist, Hank.
“I think Allan never sent them,” Herbert went on. “He was never very good with details in the first place, plus being sick and all. The drawings probably stayed in Paris and ended up in the hands of his family when he died.” The Grand management had scattered white narcissus willy-nilly throughout the dining room, so the air was pungent and cloying. Herbert performed a miracle with the encyclopedic wine list (thirty pages, possibly copied direct from the distributor’s warehouse inventory), finding an Oregon pinot to complement the ubiquitous floral perfume. This acrobatic wine also had the virtue of going well with the lamb we ordered. We dined in a sea of odors: garlic, sage, rosemary, more garlic, someone else’s cheese cut by my knife (an earlier dinner), lingering cleanser used to scrub grit from the tiles, plus the overpowering blooms.
“Do you know them?”
“Allan’s family? I certainly know of them—”
I interrupted. “That’s a very nice tie, Hank, very fine.” Hank’s tie interlocked salmon with clams in a kind-of Escheresque puzzle, a regional knickknack, I supposed, that he probably only wore on his trips north. It looked like a local bouillabaisse.
“Thanks very much.” He tipped his fork to me, chewing. Herbert grimaced and poked at the pink lamb on his plate.
“It’s a Jeffries,” Herbert put in. “We bought it right off the artist’s rack at his studio this morning. Hank is very lucky to have gotten the last one.”
“Mmm, I thought it looked like a Jeffries,” I improvised.
“Jeffries didn’t make it, he simply owned it. Don’t you read anything I clip for you? He’s selling a bunch of his old clothes, you know, with all the grime left in, signing them and selling them. Each one is dated so you can tell when he owned it, kind of a record of his own evolving bad taste.” Herbert cackled at this joke and then blushed when neither of us joined him. “This one’s from very early, before he had any kind of name, you see, so it’s especially sought after. Apparently it’s got blood and cum stains, Jeffries says so, anyway.”
Hank’s tie, with its generous swirl of fish and bivalves, slipped neatly into a collar that was immaculate. Despite the pleasure of good company, the tasty lamb, the odors, the talk (a pungent, literate conversation)—all the epicurean delights, that is to say, of good company in a well-serviced cosmopolitan setting—I couldn’t keep my mind from swimming into that beguiling collar, with its perfect single crease, which Hank kept lightly touching. The dry circumspection of this knife’s-edge crease, tie snug as if folded within a thin and expert crepe, transported me to the moment of its creation—the firm hand of the laundress pressing her flat, hot iron to the cloth, the burst of steam, twined cotton fibers minutely loosened (breathing like Turks in a cave of heated rocks), then turned and pushed flat against the board into their traditional, more orderly arrangement. Handed to shirtless master in a flash,