“Not right now,” he said. “Perhaps later. I have several commissions that I want to do.”
“Keep me in mind when you have time. She’s a very unusual woman.”
He glanced at me and tossed a pebble down the hill. “I’m sure she is,” he said.
“You like to do women, don’t you?” I asked.
He smiled in the moonlight and said, “You figured that out from one cube?”
“No. I bought the three small ones you did before.”
He looked at me sharply. “How did you know they even existed? I hadn’t told anyone.”
“Something as good as the Snowdragon cube couldn’t come out of nowhere. There had to be something earlier. I hunted down the owners and bought them.”
“The old lady is my grandmother,” he said. “I’m a little sorry I sold it, but I needed money.” I made a mental note to have it sent back to him.
“Yes, I like doing women,” he said softly, leaning back against the pale column. “Artists have always liked doing women. To . . . to capture that elusive shadow of a flicker of a glimpse of a moment . . . in paint, in stone, in clay, or in wood, or on film . . . or with molecular constructs.”
“Rubens saw them plump and gay,” I said. “Lautrec saw them depraved and real.”
“To Da Vinci they were mysterious,” he said. “Matisse saw them idle and voluptuous. Michelangelo hardly saw them at all. Picasso saw them in endless mad variety.”
“Gauguin . . . sensuality,” I commented. “Henry Moore saw them as abstracts, a starting point for form. Van Gogh’s women reflected his own mad genius brain.”
“Cezanne saw them as placid cows,” Mike laughed. “Fellini saw them as multifaceted creatures that were part angel, part beast. In the photographs of Andre de Dienes the women are realistic fantasies, erotic and strange.”
“Tennessee Williams saw them as insane cannibals, fascinatingly repulsive. Steinberg’s women were unreal, harsh, dramatic,” I said.
“Clayton’s females were predatory fiends.”
“Jason sees them as angels, slightly confused,” Mike said, delighted with the little game. “Coogan saw them as motherly monsters.”
“And you?” I asked.
He stopped and the smile faded. After a long moment he answered. “As illusions, I suppose.”
He rolled a fragment of stone from the time of Caesar in his fingers and spoke softly, almost to himself.
“They . . . aren’t quite real, somehow. The critics say I created a masterpiece of erotic realism, a milestone in figurative art. But . . . they’re
. . . wisps. They’re incredibly real for only an instant . . . fantastically shadowy another. Women are never the same from moment to moment. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate me.”
I didn’t see Mike for some time after that, though we kept in touch. He did a portrait of Princess Helga of the Netherlands, quite modestly clad, the cube filled with its famous dozen golden sculptures and the vibrations of love and peace.
For the monks at Wells, on Mars, Mike did a large cube of Buddha, and it quickly became a tourist attraction. Repro cubes made a small fortune for the monastery.
Anything Mike chose to do was quickly bought and commissions flowed in from individuals, companies and foundations, even from movements. What he did was a simple nude of his mistress of the moment. It was erotic enough in pose, but powerfully pornographic in vibrations, and after Mike left her she received a Universal-Metro contract. The young Shah of Iran bought the cube to install in his long-abuilding Gardens of Babylon.
For his use of alpha, beta, and gamma wave projectors, as well as advances in differentiated sonics, Mike was the subject of an entire issue of
