Caveat Emptor by Ken Perenyi

at the front that looked down upon the street. The furnishings consisted of a table and two old chairs, a stepladder for guests to sit on, and a neurotic refrigerator that never stopped rattling and shaking. Tony was basically living in the bedroom, the only room with heat. The door to it had always been conspicuously closed on my previous visits.
    When I got the chance to peek in, I nearly gagged. A bed was inexplicably mounted on a crazy-looking platform that Tony had built himself. It was about five feet above the floor. On it was a pile of clothes, pillows, and blankets that swept up into a corner reaching halfway to the ceiling. Tony’s old poster of Mussolini that went everywhere with him hung crookedly on the grimy wall above the bed like a picture of a saint. A wretched three-legged table supported a lamp with a broken shade. The rest of his wardrobe was stuffed in a heap beneath the bed. A path through piles of bottles, books, and boxes containing God-knows-what led to the bed, where Tony had to leap up and burrow in to sleep.
    I threw the mattress I’d brought from my studio against a wall in the main room of my new home, but I experienced a sinking feeling when I was faced with the prospect of spending my first night in Tony’s dungeon. During the time I had planned this move, Tony mentioned in passing that there might be another lodger, who I assumed would be a girl, staying with us, but the excitement of embarking on my first serious artistic effort caused me to forget this detail.
    I was sitting at the table having a glass of wine with Tony, who was doing his best to cheer me up. I looked at him in surprise when I heard the door lock being turned. Tony was smiling, and I wondered who this could be. I was speechless when a gorgeous African-American girl with the most beautiful smile poked her head around the door. She flung a modeling portfolio onto a chair and lighted on my lap!
    â€œYou must be Ken,” she said, laughing. I was smitten on the spot and instinctively wrapped my arms around her tiny waist. When Andrea Sutton introduced herself, I was staring at a hundred blindingly white teeth framed in the biggest lips I’d ever seen.
    With the formalities out of the way, Andrea told us about her day spent auditioning for a part in a movie, all the while getting more comfortable in my lap. For the first time all day, I was smiling, and Tony was delighted.
    Andrea was a model and actress who Tony had found at Max’s. In need of a place to stay, she’d been keeping irregular hours at the loft for the past month. She had an exuberant personality, a devastating smile, and a body so slinky it looked like she’d been squeezed out of a tube. Tony was preparing to leave for his afternoon routine of a sauna and rubdown at the Russian Baths on East Seventh Street, before reading the paper at his favorite espresso bar.
    I got up and poured a glass of wine for Andrea while she turned on some music. As we sat at the table sipping our wine, we began staring into each other’s eyes and smiling. The door hardly closed behind Tony before we:
    A) raided Tony’s stash of joints,
    B) undressed each other,
    C) went straight to bed.
    Andrea definitely helped buffer the shock of moving into that place. One day she came home with a beautiful Irish setter that had been abandoned by a recently evicted friend. We walked the dog around the Village, enjoying beautiful carefree days together while I gathered materials and arranged to have my steel and Plexiglas containers made at a fabricator in TriBeCa.
    Unfortunately, Andrea finally had to split. She landed a part in a movie and flew out to L.A. I immersed myself in my work, and it wasn’t long before I was in a routine of eating, sleeping, and painting. The exciting prospect of creating my first collection of art put all thoughts of forgery out of my mind. In fact, I was convinced that my days of faking paintings were in the past.
    Tony and I