At the Bureau of Divine Music

Tahiti

6 Tahiti When you and your Jack Russell were moving in, I knew the time had come to begin my life as the neighborhood Gauguin. So I covered ten prestretched 20 16 canvases with blobs of phthalo and alizarin. I wanted a whole roll next, to stretch myself on leftover tomato stakes. Better yet, I would go down to the wharf where the cargo ships docked every month with goods in gunnysacks to be unsewn, resewn, and stretched for an authentic surface on which to beguile the afterlife with women clad in nothing. I had the little dog sketched in my head for the lower right-hand corner where Seurat put the monkey on the string, except Jacqueline would be sniffing the foot of a man just leaving. Burlap was easier to find eventually, for $1.99/yd at the fabric store, to be tacked to an old pallet and painted on, stiffened with ordinary paint-shop primer. I considered whether anyone would get the Gauguinesque homage—which had to do with why Gauguin wanted to leave his flat with its walls affecting a slick palm-forest green, around the corner from St-Germain-des-Prés, to sail to Tahiti the second time, on the way to the Marquesas. Gauguin had something different to do in the South Seas when he went back than what he went there for after the wife ran home to Copenhagen. 7 He needed a place to die, and tried to, with arsenic that he neglected to ask the chemist how to make it give him more than a queasy stomach and a sleepless night on the mountain by himself. ...