“So are you paying me a compliment with this comparison?” I asked. “Or is it a put-down?”

“I don’t know,” he said slyly. “However you want to take it. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with a guy who could make literally millions off his talent and he’s pissing it away with hack work, and when he finally does a show, hallelujah, he does it at his ex-wife’s low-end gallery. It offends my professional dignity, is what it is, like if I was a theatrical agent and I went to a coffee shop every day and there was Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow slinging hash. What is this gorgeous woman doing here, I’d ask myself, and I’d want to do something about it. Not to mention you’re an old pal.”

“How did you know I was having a show at Lotte’s?”

He shrugged. “I have my ways. Very little goes on in the art world in the city that I don’t get to hear about. Anyway, I don’t want to be a bore about it, but if you ever want to get your hands on some serious money…for example, did I tell you my idea about almost-old masters?”

I said he hadn’t and he told me.

“Let’s say you’re a guy who’s clearing, say, ten million a year in, I don’t know, real estate or Wall Street, whatever. There’re fifty thousand guys like that in the city, right? This guy’s got everything, the apartment, the house on the Island, the car, his kids are going to the top schools, he’s got a small collection of important pieces, modern stuff, but appreciating pretty well-”

“Which he bought on your recommendation, of course.”

He laughed. “Of course. We stipulate the guy’s sharp. So what this guy can’t buy yet is major art: Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, they’re all out of range, not to mention Rembrandt, Breughel, the old masters. It’s a gap in his self-image. Also, let’s say his wife likes traditional furnishings. He can’t hang a Butzer or a Miyake up there, it’d look like shit. But what if I can sell him a nice little Cézanne fake, a nice almost-Reni madonna, the gilt frame, the little brass light above it. No one but an expert can tell it from the real thing. Obviously, we’re not going to do Girl with the Red Hat or the Mona Lisa, not at all. We’re going to do obscure stuff, small but beautiful. The guests come in and they say, ‘Hey, is that a Cézanne?’ And our guy says, ‘It may be. I picked it up for a song.’”

“These will be signed?”

He wrinkled his face disapprovingly. “Of course not signed! Jesus, that’s all I need! No, it’d be exactly like, you know, fake gems, cubic zirconiums. A woman has a forty-carat ring, she doesn’t wear it to the grocery store or the country club. It’s in a vault and she wears a custom-made fake, which all her friends accept because one, they all do the same thing, and two, because they know she’s got the real jewels. So our guy is demonstrating he’s got taste, and also-and this is the big selling point-maybe he’s got a lot more money than his pals thought, because look what’s on the walls-Cézanne, Corot. What do you think?”

“I think it’s a terrific idea, Mark. It’s pretentious and false, yet at the same time completely legal. I can’t think of another gallery owner who could have come up with it.”

Mark sells a lot of irony but he has a little trouble actually getting it in real life. He gave me a big smile.

“You really think so? That’s great. So, are you interested? I mean, in doing some pieces.”

“Let me ask you something first: I ran into Jackie Moreau the other day and he said you’d set him up with a hot deal in Europe doing paintings in many styles, as he put it. Was that what you’re talking about now?”

Mark waved his hand dismissively. “No, that was something completely different. I mean, Jackie’s okay, but he’s no you. So what do you say? Are you in?”

“No, sorry.”

“No? Why the fuck not?”

“I just don’t think I’d like the work. And…I’ve got some big projects I want to work on now and I might not have the time.”

He swallowed this lie, or seemed to, and shrugged. “Okay, man, but if you ever want to make some serious cash, give me a call. Meanwhile, I’ll set up this Castelli thing. Who knows, it could turn into something for you.”

“Who knows, indeed,” I said, and then the waiter bustled up and we had to have a conversation about dessert. Over this, Mark wanted to know more about salvinorin, so I gave him the short version of what Shelly had given me, and then he asked me why I thought I’d stopped visiting my own past and started visiting what seemed to be the past of someone else, and I said I didn’t know, but the sense of it was like being inside a baroque painting, maybe late cinquecento, and then I mentioned that the place I was in was a real place and that I’d looked the address up on Google, Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop, in Seville, and his eyes bulged out when I said that. Slotsky’s a fucking encyclopedia of art history, and he asked me whether I knew what the kid’s name was, and I said yeah, he said it was Gito de Silva, and Mark said, “Holy shit!”

So I go, “Oh, you heard of this guy Gito de Silva? I mean, he’s a painter?”

And he goes, “You could say that. ‘Gito’ is a short form of ‘Diegito,’ ‘little Diego.’ He was born in Seville at number one Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop in 1599,” and when he said that I swear there were sparks coming out of his eyes. And he goes on, “His father was Juan de Silva, just like you said, but because it was the custom in Seville to use your mother’s name professionally, when he started painting he called himself Diego Velázquez.”

So, okay, I’d been painting like Velázquez recently and I must have had him on my mind and that’s where that came from. I explained that to Slotsky and he said, “Yeah, but you didn’t know all that stuff until I told you about it; where did that come from?”

I said, “I must have read it somewhere, what other explanation is there?”

He shook his head. “No, you’re really going back in time, you said yourself that it was real, not like a vision or a fantasy, your dad’s funeral and all that; maybe you’re in some psychic contact with Diego Velázquez.”

And I said, “I didn’t know you believed in that shit,” and he said, “I don’t, but it makes you think, maybe your mind is preparing you to paint like Velázquez.”

I said, “My mind would do something like that, one more thing to fuck up my life and get me to produce even more unsalable paintings.” So we had a laugh about that and he bugged me a little more about selling my stuff through him until he saw I wasn’t paying attention.

Well, that was an interesting day, followed by a restless night. I couldn’t fall asleep. I had a strange sort of vibrational energy, like my life was going to change radically, and I’m resisting the urge to fight it, to take a pill, for example, a couple of pinks out of the trove of Xanax I had from my rehab days. I’d made a damned fool of myself at Lotte’s, and afterward I was thinking maybe it would be different if I had some real money, because the plain fact is that for all her business about the purity of art, Lotte hates being poor, especially because of Milo and the medical expenses. So it was kind of strange that just then up steps Slotsky with this offer.

So I thought then that this thing with Slotsky could be the solution-if I could just get a little ahead, get free of this crazy rat race, maybe then I could, I don’t know, get back to that place again, when I was painting for love; maybe that’s the place to start.

That Friday-I remember it was October first-I had the kids for the weekend again so Lotte could do her show. No smoking around the kids, so I was covered with nicotine patches, and it wasn’t the same; they made me slightly sick all the time, and there was none of the good stuff about smoking, the taste and the look of the smoke curling upward that mysteriously unlocks the creative process.

After dinner, I called my sister Charlie at her place in Washington. She always likes to talk to the kids, and after they’d had their chatter, I got on with her. She asked me how I was doing and I said fine, and she said, you don’t sound fine, she’s using her “sisdar,” as we used to call it, and I kind of gave a nervous laugh and said yeah, something’s happening. And I told her about the drug trial and seeing her again at our father’s funeral and Mom again when she was young, and I asked her what she thought was going on, Charlie always my gateway into the strange, and she asked me what she’d said when we talked back then (or just the other day, depending on how you looked at it). I told her we’d talked about her life and how she was thinking about leaving her order and doing something else, and she said, yeah, I remember that conversation, it was an important conversation, I was really confused about my vocation and talking it out with you really helped, and I said, I didn’t recall it at all until it happened again.