Patron of the Arts

high a percentage of precious grains. She didn’t mention it until after our visit to the ecology preserve off the Great Barrier Reef and we were walking on the beach at Bora Bora at sunset.

Madelon looked at me after a long silence. “Sometimes you are very hard on people, you know. You demand much.”

“No. Just the best. You become mediocre when you are satisfied with mediocrity.”

She kicked some sand and grinned as she said, “Modern civilization has placed mediocrity on a level with excellence . . . and then looks down on excellence for having lowered itself.”

“My, my,” I said. “And I’m supposed to be hard on people.”

“Well, you’re famous, and people expect it, I suppose.”

“I have a reputation,” I said. “That means they’ve heard of you, but know nothing about you. If you are famous, they know all about you. If you are notorious, they know all about you whether they want to or not.”

“It sounds as though you’ve made a study,” she said, the setting sun reddening her face.

“Defense mechanism. A public figure is one who has been on the vidstats more than once. A celebrity is someone whose face you know and whose name you can’t remember. Or vice versa. A famous figure is an old celebrity. A noted figure is an old famous figure, while an actress is a young and famous figure.”

She stopped and put her arms around my neck. “I knew you would get around to sex.”

“I thought we had pontificated enough for one evening,” I said, and kissed her.

“Pontificate me right here,” she said, slipping out of the shimmercloth sarong.

“Suppose I dogmatized you.”

“Oh, marvelous!” she said, pulling me down to dark sands under purple clouds edged with rose.

At Ankara we visited the tomb complex carved from a rocky cliff, where three generations of a family had carved a marble fantasy and leased tomb space to the affluent. Madelon commented on all the years of cutting and sanding. “Time has nothing to do with the creation of art,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it took ten years or ten minutes or ten generations. The art must stand by itself. The artist can’t stand next to it saying, ‘Look, this part took me three years and that part was a whole winter.’ Hemingway wrote two of his best short stories before lunch, then went back to work. The Sistine Chapel took years. It only matters to the artist how long something takes. If he works slowly it might be difficult to hold the vision together for the time needed. It also limits his total output, and he might be frustrated in not being able to say everything he wants. But working slowly might give more chance to interact with the work. It all depends on the artist.”

“Don’t you like this?” she asked, gesturing toward the cliffline of facades and loggia and columned fronts.

“Yes, but the important fact is that it exists, not the time it took to do it. It’s like saying something is better because it took a long time to do, and that is certainly not true.”

“Then what is important is the artist’s vision, and his ability to communicate that vision?”

“To the viewer, yes. To the artist it might be that he had done it, and how close he was to satisfying the ethereal vision with the reality.”

“Then the closer the reality is to the vision the better it is?”

“Well, the more successful, yes. We still have to deal with the worth of the vision.”

“Oh, god, this is endless! How many visions dance on the head of a paintbrush?”

“One at a time.”

The world was a playground, a beautiful toy. We could deplore the harsh, but necessary, methods they were using to reduce the population in India, even as we flew high overhead to Paris, for Andre’s fete, where the most beautiful women in Europe appeared in sculptured body jewelry and little else.

I took her to the digs at Ur in the hot, dusty Euphrates Valley, but stayed in an air-conditioned mobile-villa. We sailed the Indian Ocean with Karpolis even as the Bombay riots were killing hundreds of thousands. The rest of the world seemed far away, and I really didn’t care much, for I was gorging at a love-feast. My man Huo handled the routine matters, and I put almost everything else off for awhile. We went up to Station One and “danced” in the null-gravity of the so-called “Star Ballroom” in the big can of the central hub. We took the shuttle to the moon, for Madelon’s first visit. I saw Tycho Base with fresh eyes and a sense of adventure