This Dog for Hire by Carol Lea Benjamin Page B

Then again, lurid sex crimes also sold. It was just a matter of time before the rest of the story came out, which would drive the prices even higher than the schmaltz had already done. Louis Lane was going to end up a rich man.
    Dennis was in the back, with Magritte.
    “Honey, you look sen-sa-tional!! ,!
    “Yeah. Yeah.” I leaned in as if to kiss his check. “What have you learned?” I whispered.
    He leaned closer. “Well, apparently blue eye shadow is back!”
    “Dog people,” I explained.
    He rolled his eyes. “And Lois is here.” He indicated the location with a tilt of his head, and I turned to get a look at the new owner of the collection, prepared to loathe him on sight.
    “She’s doing an interview,” he sang. “Does anyone ask me—” he began, but I cut him off.
    “I’ll see you in a bit,” I said, leaving quickly and pushing through the crowd with Dashiell at my side.
    Leonard Polski was a few feet away from where I had been standing with Dennis, talking to someone who was taking notes. I squeezed in close enough to hear some of the bull he was tossing around, sure I’d be hearing about his always having had faith in Cliff’s ability, about how he encouraged him to try his last series of grayish, oversize paintings where images took several canvases to be completed, and richest of all, how pleased he was that Magritte was found and how much he loved the little dog.
    What I heard surprised me. Even allowing for the distortion of the tape recording, this was clearly the same voice that left the warm and funny messages for Clifford that I had heard last night. That was as I had guessed. The rest was not.
    Louis Lane was speaking softly about the rise of bate crimes, the resurgence of Nazism in the new/old unified Germany, the racial cleansing in Bosnia, and the rise in gay bashing here at home. Then he began to talk about Clifford, his painting as a kind of journal writing on canvas, the curiosity that drove him into his own psyche to troll for powerful material, his feeling that if he touched upon the things he felt deeply about, his paintings would touch others in some powerful way even though each person’s history was unique and even though Clifford’s own story was not fully expressed, just alluded to mysteriously. That, he said, the mysterious quality of Clifford’s work, was what he, Louis, loved best.
    “It was his way of expressing not only his own alienation and the alienation all gay men feel, but a far larger issue, the alienation of the nineties, the understanding that we never really know each other, and the question of whether or not many of us care for each other.”
    Of course, this made me wonder how well Louis Lane knew Clifford Cole, or why he thought this was a nineties concept. From the beginning of time, no one has ever known anyone. I mean, did Adam know Eve? I mean, really know her, beyond the biblical sense?
    “He was very emotional,” he continued, “yet in the translation to canvas, a kind of artistic flatness took over. I think without that, he couldn’t have gone where he needed to go. The pain would have
    been too great. And in that, he was a strong for what is going on in the post-Bush era, the disappointment people feel resonating with the pain of childhood, as if Bush the father betrayed us just as our own fathers did.”
    In action, how like an angel! To coin a phrase.
    The reporter nodded and kept writing. Behind him, there was a triptych I hadn’t seen at the loft. In fact, looking around, I hadn’t seen much of what was on display. I guess these were the paintings from the closet. Looking at the one behind Louis, this one really was from the closet; it was a middle-aged man in drag, but in each of the three pictures he had his back to the viewer. What was weird is that it looked like early TV, like Milton Berle in drag. It was even pained without color, in black and white and shades of gray. This was neither genderfuck, where there is a devil-may-care