Free The Way of the Dog by Sam Savage Page B

contrivances , a thick layer of dust and hanging nets of cobweb on them all, the divan practically eaten up by mice. Meininger would paint the same woman over and over, in a manner that was completely obsessive, the paintings differing mainly in the various fixtures he would paint her with. On the rocking horse, in the bath chair, and so forth.
    The appraiser sat in the kitchen, computer open on the table in front of him. Moll served him lunch, and he ate while staring at the screen. I sat in the wing chair. I fell asleep. I woke up. She brought us sandwiches. Alfie jiggled in the rocker, and speculated about the paintings, repeating the appraiser’s art gossip as if it were his own.
    We assembled in the dining room, Moll having announced that we should assemble there, telling us the appraiser was now ready. We took seats at the table and waited to hear his assessment of my collection, his so-called expert opinion on what I could already sense he considered my amateurish agglomeration. We didn’t talk. Even Alfie stopped chattering. There was a feeling, a subtle message, it seemed to me, emanating from the appraiser, who was staring into his computer, that we were not permitted to talk. Faced with this professional expert, we had become submissive, childlike, and now he was making us wait. He tapped at his computer, deliberately dallying, I thought, to force us into a state of complete dependence. Finally, looking up at Alfie, he said that pending more research he could give us only a rough, preliminary estimate. It was, he said, his educated guess that the preponderance of the collection was of modest art-market value, by which, of course, he meant utterly worthless. But that said , he added, looking around at us all, the Lesko watercolors might fetch a price if auctioned locally, and the Meininger was an outstanding piece. After years of controversy and crazy price fluctuations there is now an art-market consensus on Meininger, he told us. The painter’s numerous late works, while often dismissed as formulaic and repetitive, are maintaining value , he said, due to their wide popularity, their use in advertising, and so forth, while his earlier paintings have stood up under scrutiny , are now recognized as groundbreaking works. The Nude in Deck Chair is a museum-quality painting , he said, and its considerable value has only been enhanced by the artist’s sensational end, which has sent prices through the roof , he told us, pointing at the ceiling. He was, he said, reluctant to assign an exact dollar value to the painting, given the notorious unpredictability of art auctions, but when Alfie pressed him for a ballpark figure, just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, he named an astronomical sum. This astronomically obscene price knocked Alfie over. He hated the painting, from childhood on he had always hated it, and now it had suddenly become a valuable art object , an art object he naturally assumed I would be eager to sell. I told them I intended to take it into the yard and smash it, that I was going to smash it and then burn it. I told them, actually pounding on the table, cutting at the table with the sides of my palms in illustration of my words, that I intended to chop it into little pieces, that I had always intended to do that, that I was going to sell the other two paintings and with the money hire a wrecking crew to obliterate the Meininger by chopping it to bits with an ax.
    I was overwrought, I was talking in a voice that they all could hear was laden with feelings that no one, myself included, had expected from me. The three of them stared wide-eyed, as if listening to a crazy person.
    I am going to stop. I draw up a statement of principles and then I stop.
    I will write Statement at the top of the page. Or maybe Statement of Principles. Or maybe just Principles.
    It will be Euclidean. It will have theorems, corollaries, and definitions.
    Begin with a definition of stopping. Ceasing to move, to think, to