The One Thing She Would Not Do

The imperfect is our paradise . . .

- Wallace Stevens

"So she says to me, all right, we're on - I'm game for anything - but there's one thing I absolutely will not do."

Don't forget, this is Jay Florenz talking to me. Jay whose life with women - and money - has been the mystery, the irritation, and occasionally, the envy, of his friends for decades. For some reason he is telling me, openly, naming names, about the strangest sexual encounter of his life. And this is some life we're dealing with here! Rushing to Tangiers, on the tail of a stolen Veronese, being escorted to the airport at Madrid by the Guardia Civil because he had sold a Goya to a movie producer, all the while knowing that the Spanish government took the dimmest view of allowing the great Spanish masterpieces to leave the country.

You may say, well, this was a commercial, a political encounter, but with Jay the female element is always lurking around the edges of his experiences. As it turned out, he had bought the Goya from a Spanish beauty whose grandfather worked for both Franco and the Republicans and was said to still be an excellent shot. A married Spanish beauty, as if I had to add that - there had to be something dangerous, something complicated, something difficult in all Jay's sexual and romantic liaisons. Oh, he's a Distinguished Professor of Art History now, covered with honors instead of kisses and money. But at the time we're talking about, Jay's was mainly a moment of stolen kisses and borrowed money. He was a hot-shot critic, making and breaking reputations in Art News and ArtForum, occasionally the New York Times on Sunday. But that had not yet translated into cash.

When the eighties arrived and gave birth to a storm of art buying, Jay's expertise was much in demand. People who were pushing Jenny Holzer and Julian Schnabel needed a lot of academic backup to help hold up those heavy-duty prices that made the art market of the eighties such a scandal - at least, now, from the vantage point of later years. You know, the way you can point out the similarity between Cy Twombly's graffiti and Tiepolo's scribbles around the periphery of the big altar pieces. That kind of thing makes a big buyer feel a lot more secure when he's writing out a check with more zeros than he'd planned on. Which is how Jay first met Shirley Schoenberg, the sister of the woman who would do anything except one thing.

Have I mentioned Jay's integrity? The man would slip an Old Master out of a country that wanted to keep it - that was just business. But when it came to artistic judgments, I mean he was infected with integrity like a virus. He would make a comparison between a great master and a current artist only if he believed it in his soul and his art historian's intellect. Otherwise, he would shake his head and decline.

He first met Shirley Schoenberg at an opening - where else? Shirley ran the seedy little gallery which bore her name, Shoenberg, not Shirley, almost far enough downtown to be called SoHo and not far enough uptown to be within scratching distance of Fifty-seventh Street. The opening, though, was at the Marlborough Gallery: Maurice Lowenfeld, Jay's buddy from his Paris adventure days was showing those giant canvases, almost empty, just brushed lightly with a woman's shape, or an automobile fender, but drawn and painted with the lyricism of an Ingres.

"I would have loved it if this guy had walked through the doors of my gallery with one of these."

This, to Jay who stood next to her gazing with that sad straight look of his at the painting. Whether or not she knew who Jay was at that moment is not clear.

"Maybe she knew," Jay told me, "Or maybe not. It was the kind of impulsive thing Shirley was given to." And in Jay's ever alert...