When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,48

names with a certain authority I can almost always provoke a response. (“Did you say Van der Pol? Oh, right, I think I saw something of his at the Louvre.”)

People hush up when they stand before my paintings. They clasp their hands behind their backs and lean forward, wondering, most likely, how much I paid. I want to tell them that each cost less than the average person spends on car insurance, that and general upkeep — oil changes and break pads and such. I, myself, don’t have a car, so why not take that money and put it toward something I like? Then, too, the paintings will appreciate, maybe not a lot, but given time I can surely get my money back, so in a way I’m just guarding them. Explaining, though, would ruin the illusion that I am wealthy and tasteful. A connoisseur. A collector.

The sham falls apart only when I’m visited by a real collector, or, even worse, by my father, who came in the winter of 2006 and spent a week questioning my judgment. One of my paintings shows a group of cats playing musical instruments. It sounds hokey on paper — cute, even — but in real life it’s pleasantly revolting, the musicians looking more like monsters than anything you’d keep as a pet. I have it in my living room, and, after asking the price, my father shook his head the way you might when witnessing an accident. “Boy,” he said. “They sure saw you coming.”

Whether I’m buying a painting or a bedspread, his premise is always the same — namely, that I am retarded, and people take advantage of me.

“Why would something that’s survived three hundred years not cost that much?” I asked, but he’d moved to another evident eyesore, this one Dutch, showing a man undergoing a painful and primitive foot surgery. “I wouldn’t spend two minutes looking at this one,” he told me.

“That’s OK,” I said.

“Even if I were in prison, and this was the only thing on my wall, I wouldn’t waste my time with it. I’d look at my feet or at my mattress or whatever, but not this, no way.”

I tried my best not to sound too hopeful. “Is someone sending you to prison?”

“No,” he said. “But whoever sold this to you should be there. I don’t know what you paid, but if it was more than ten dollars I think you could probably sue the guy for fraud.” He looked it over one last time and then rubbed his eyes as if they’d been gassed. “God Almighty. What were you thinking?”

“If art is a matter of personal taste, why are you being so aggressive?” I asked.

“Because your taste stinks,” he told me. This led him to reflect upon Cracked Man, which still hangs in the foyer beside his living room. “It’s three slabs of clay cemented to a board, and not a day goes by when I don’t sit down and look at that thing,” he said. “I don’t mean glancing, but full-fledged staring. Contemplating, if you catch my drift.”

“I do,” I said.

He then described the piece to Hugh, who had just returned from the grocery store. “It was done by a gal named Proctor. I’m sure you’ve heard of her.”

“Actually, no,” Hugh said.

My father repeated the name in his normal tone of voice. Then he began yelling it, and Hugh interrupted, saying, “Oh, right. I think I’ve read something about her.”

“You’re damn right you have,” my father said.

Before they started collecting art, my parents bought some pretty great things, the best being a concrete lawn ornament they picked up in the early 1960s. It’s a toadstool, maybe three feet tall, with a red spotted cap and a benevolent little troll relaxing at its base. My father placed it just beyond the patio in our backyard, and what struck my sisters and me then, and still does, is the troll’s expression of complete acceptance. Others might cry or get bent out of shape when their personal tastes are denounced and ridiculed, but not him. Icicles hang off his beard, slugs cleave to the tops of his pointed shoes: “Oh, well,” he seems to say. “These things happen.”

Even when we reached our teens and developed a sense of irony, it never occurred to us to think of the troll as tacky. No one ever stuck a lit cigarette in his mouth, or disgraced him with sexual organs, the way we did with Mr. Balloon Man or my mother’s