I know what I like. And most of what I like isn’t art at all. I like pictures and I like ornaments. Once I even owned a French Spelter banjo-lady. It wasn’t a sculpture, just a piece of junk that sat on my mantelpiece next to a photograph of Gath, my hometown in the land of the Philistines. If I want a picture to speak to me, I’ll go watch Maureen O’Sullivan in a Tarzan movie.

While I shambled around the gallery I was closely tracked by the periscope eye of a woman in a wool black tailor-made, which, thanks to the Föhn, she was probably regretting having worn. She was thin, a little too thin, and the long, ivory cigarette-holder she was carrying might just as easily have been one of her bony, ivory-colored fingers. Her hair was long and brown and bushy, and it was gathered up at the back of her fine head in what looked like a twenty-five-pfennig loaf. She came up to me, her arms folded defensively in front of her, in case she needed to run me through with one of her pointy elbows, and nodded at the painting I was appraising with careful discrimination and good taste, like some queeny connoisseur.

“What do you think?” she asked, waving her cigarette holder at the wall.

I tilted my head to one side in the vague hope that a slightly different perspective on the picture might let me ante up like Bernard Berenson. I tried to picture the crazy sonofabitch painting it but kept on thinking of a drunken chimpanzee. I opened my mouth to say something. Then closed it again. There was a red line going one way, a blue line going the other, and a black line trying to pretend it had nothing much to do with either of them. It was a work of modern art all right. That much I could see. What’s more, it had obviously been executed with the craft and skill of one who had studied licorice-making carefully. Putting it on the wall probably gave the flies escaping the Föhn through the open window something to think about. I looked again and found that it really spoke to me. It said, “Don’t laugh, but some idiot will pay good money for this.” I pointed at the wall and said, “I think you should get that patch of damp seen to, before it spreads.”

“It’s by Kandinsky,” she said, without batting a garden rake of an eyelash. “He was one of the most influential artists of his generation.”

“And who were his influences? Johnnie Walker? Or Jack Daniel’s?”

She smiled.

“There,” I said. “I knew you could do it if you tried. Which is more than I can say for Kandinsky.”

“Some people like it,” she said.

“Well, why didn’t you say so? I’ll take two.”