The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  She’d looked at him as if he were a new, only slightly interesting piece of furniture someone had moved in front of her.

  “There are people who refuse to believe in death,” he said. “But they have their reasons and I don’t pretend to understand them. There are even people who have cured people of hopeless diseases and brought them back from the edge of the grave through the power of prayer. I’ve read of them. But they have their reasons, they know what they’re doing, they claim to understand what God is all about.”

  She crossed one leg over the other and closed her eyes while she pressed two fingers into the furrows of her forehead. She always looked, wherever she was sitting, like a person who was installed permanently in the chair. Or waiting for it to take her wherever it was she wanted to go.

  “They don’t just hope,” he said. “They don’t just have faith. They have reasons.”

  But she too had her reasons, she told him at last. The mirror, the voice, the promise.

  As she had always had reasons, for everything she did. For marrying him in the first place: she was an interior decorator and it was just as easy to fall in love with an architect as with anyone else, she said, and much more practical. For insisting on living in rented suites all the twelve years of their marriage while every one of their friends had bought at least one house: she couldn’t see any point in settling into anything of their own until they could afford the dream house they were capable of creating together. For refusing even to consider a second child once they’d discovered what was wrong with Anna: “Can you imagine what it would be like for her to have a perfect sister, a perfect brother?” she said, and shuddered at the thought as if only a monster would consider it. For heading off at least once a year with the girl to some different part of the continent seeking out every hint of a possible cure; she believed that any doctor who practised on this island couldn’t possibly know all the latest discoveries and inventions, and any parent who didn’t at least investigate all the possibilities, no matter how remote, was cheating his own child out of a normal life and ignoring his first duty.

  He drove along the harbour where tourists in their yachts stood talking across the floats to one another, over the still, oily water. Then up through town and on up the hill. He would like to press his foot right to the floor, keep right on going up the hill, off up the mountain, into nowhere, into somewhere else. But he drove — carefully, because here, suddenly, cars full of young people were racing from light to light — on up through town and onto the short street to the mortuary. For blocks ahead the street was lined on either side with cars, a surprise at first until he remembered that this was Eli Wainamoinen’s night, his show. “In another country this would have happened forty years ago,” Sylvi Wainamoinen had told him. “But here, we must wait until a life is almost over before we dare to celebrate it.” David Payne couldn’t see how a gathering of a few hundred people on Vancouver Island could be called celebrating a life, but then he had never pretended to understand what the business of art and artists was all about.

  As he pulled up in front of the Blessed Sleep Funeral Home and parked his car in the reserved area, someone opened the door to go into the ballroom of the hotel across the street. Light slid out across the blacktop parking lot like a sudden thrust finger when the door opened, then pulled back in again and died suddenly. “It would be polite to at least put in an appearance,” he said, though he would rather walk naked into fire than step in front of all those eyes.

  And she did not disappoint him. She breathed in, heavily. “No,” she said, and exhaled. “Nobody would expect.”

  You could’ve stolen the show, he thought. Who’d want to look at a lot of old-man paintings when there’s an honest-to-goodness fanatic in your midst? Wainamoinen would gnash his teeth in jealousy, and Sylvi — poor Sylvi — would have our furniture out on the street by the time we got home again.

  Oh how nice to see you, Mrs. Payne, and isn’t this the day your little girl . . .?

  Yes, yes, but not a flicker yet.

  Well never mind, the night’s still young. I love your suit.

  Dear God, he thought, and suddenly yanked on the hand brake. A police car moved slowly down the street and until it had gone out of sight the weight of pain on his chest nearly broke him.

  He cracked all the finger joints of his left hand, one after the other. Then he did the same thing with the right.

  “This is it,” he said.

  But she didn’t move. “It’s not as if I actually did something,” she said. “It’s not as if I hurt her.”

  “Or anybody else,” he said. And hung his head. “Poor Carrie, you never hurt anybody in your life.”

  She did not move.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “in a particularly rainy spring the parent birds will let their children starve to death while they hover over them trying to keep them dry.”

  She looked at him. “Because they’re afraid,” she said. Then she said, “Let’s go. Charlie will be wondering what happened to us.”

  Lost her, damn it. He’d gone and lost her. You couldn’t take ten steps in this bastard crowd without your wife disappearing. People buzzed around as if somebody was stirring them with a stick, at the bottom of a paint can.

  He would rather have been at home, where there was no one who pushed and shoved. He would rather have been back in the water again, cold as it would be by now, just lying out on his back and floating. You could trust the water, it would hold you up if you let go and allowed it. You could lie on your back and feel all of it below holding you up while you kept your eyes on the sky or closed them to watch your own dreams. You couldn’t trust a crowd like that, it would even swallow your own wife.

  He would have left her entirely, gone right out the door and waited for her somewhere in the foyer or downstairs in the beer parlour if it hadn’t been for Kit O’Donnell.

  “Carl!” she said, and broke loose from the crowd. “You look like somebody’s lost little boy. Ready to cry!”

  “Arrrgh,” he said, and started to stomp out.

  But she stood in front of him, head swivelling on that skinny neck. “Where’s Gladdy? You always seem to have just misplaced her.”

  “Lost her,” he said. “She was with me, and all of a sudden she wasn’t. We was headed for the picture.”

  She put her finger to her lip, considered. “The place is full of booby-traps,” she said, and spilled a small chain of laughter. “She could have bought a $1000 painting by the time you see her again.”

  “Not Gladdy,” he said. “Not her.” She wouldn’t dare, not without asking him. She knew they couldn’t afford it, even if she did see something she liked.

  Though he wouldn’t be surprised to hear Kit O’Donnell paid a fortune for something to hang in that boathouse shack she lived in. She’d done sillier things.

  And wore clothes that no one but a husband should see. Carl didn’t know where to look; the front was split open right down to her damn belly button, while her slit skirt let all the world see leg right to the hip.

  He rooted around in his pocket and brought out his handkerchief, already damp, and passed it over his forehead, around his neck. The heat in this place, the heat could be over a hundred. And all these people were breathing up the air.

  “What do you think?” he said, and nodded his head at all of it. She was a teacher and perhaps she could tell him what it was all about.

  “Think?” she said, and raised an eyebrow as if it had never occurred to her.

  “Of this, of him, of his stuff.”

  “Oh,” she said, “that.” And looked blank as if already she’d forgotten the question, or him, or both. Then, suddenly, when he’d nearly walked away, she came to life again, sucked in air.

  “He puts on a good show,” she said. Dismissing it, perhaps. She wasn’t impressed.

  “He got a crowd.”

  “He got a crowd. But the paintings disappear in a place like this. Side by side, hanging, you suddenly realize what th
ey are — products. In his studio, one at a time, they can suck you in. When I sat for him he let me see just one painting a day, no more. Each was like a fist in the stomach.”

  “You sat? He painted you?”

  She chewed on her bottom lip and studied him. One finger slid down her naked front. “A whole series,” she said. “Nearly every evening for two or three months.”

  “I didn’t know, I never seen any of them. What part of the hall are they in?”

  She put fingers, hot as electric bars, on his hand. “I’ve got to teach in this town,” she said, and slid her eyes to one side. “I asked him not to display, not this time, not here.”

  The old goat. Had this little girl up there in his studio every night for three months. Didn’t do nudies, eh? Didn’t show nudies, maybe, but he did them all right. Like every other damn one of them so-called artists.

  “No. 97,” he said. “I think that’s the number they said.”

  “For?”

  “For the painting of this here mug. I may as well take a quick look at it before I get out of here.”

  She turned and led him through the crowd. They threaded their way past moving couples, between talking clusters, around knots of gawkers. She led him right down to the far end of the hall where the crowd was thinner, all the way down to the corner. Then she stood back for him to see, as if she were the painter.

  What he saw first was Gladdy, standing alone, staring at the picture, her head cocked to one side, her long dress stretched tight across her rear end, and her tight shoes apart for balance.

  Then the painting.

  “Well shoot,” he said. Because there must be a mistake. They were at the wrong one.

  No. 97, though. And he couldn’t deny the tuft of hair at his throat. Or the white stretch of forehead high into his thinning hair.

  “Well shoot,” he said.

  Because it wasn’t him at all. Not his face. Not any face he’d ever seen in a mirror. It was as if his face had been wiped partially off, then painted back on again just slightly altered so that it was someone else’s, a stranger’s. If he met this fellow on the street he’d pass him by without even thinking there was a resemblance.

  “That looks more like old Wainamoinen himself than me.”

  Gladdy turned and just barely smiled and said, “Oh, it’s you all right.”

  And Kit said, “It’s not bad at all. Though a bit unusual for him.”

  The face which was not quite his face filled up most of the left half of the canvas. Looking out, as if the frame was actually a window through which he could watch with cold marble eyes all these people watching him. On the right, behind him, was the new foundation of a house being built on a rise of stones and weeds, and on the foundation, a few perfect pink studs stood up as if they had grown there, or been nailed down at random, though at the top of one there was a small branch of leaves still alive, curving upward: an impossibility. The sky behind was the worst; it came right down to the foundation, right down to the man’s shoulders; and it was white, nearly white. As if it were both nothing at all and a terrible threat. Because there were faint shadows in it, like pale grey smoke, that might have been anything, as if you were meant to peel it away to reveal what was hidden within.

  A man with that sky at his back would be cold all the time.

  “Son of a bitch,” Carl Roote muttered. And hoped no one else had seen him there. To guess.

  “Eight hundred dollars,” Gladdy cried, consulting the price list taped to the wall. Her finger moved across the paper. “No. 97. The Builder. Eight hundred dollars. That’s what she told me.”

  Kit O’Donnell smiled. “He promised you immortality,” she said. “Maybe what he meant was you’ll be paying for it forever.”

  “I ain’t buying it,” Carl growled.

  “But who?” Gladdy said, and sidled up to the picture as if she owned it already and he was threatening to give it away.

  “Let some other stupid bastard pay to hang it on his wall,” he said. “Right now I’m getting out of here.”

  In the basement suite of the artist’s house Sparkle danced. Her body twisted and shook, jolted, twisted and shook, in the middle of the living-room floor. Hands flashed. Her hair whip-cracked in light.

  The radio was turned up full volume, the house was solid sound. There wasn’t another soul here but her — all the old creeps had gone. She was alone.

  Twisted and shook, jolted, twisted and shook. Outside, the bay faded, the town translated itself into a band of yellow lights.

  Hear it, hear it, she cried. Hear it, hear it.

  Gladdy Roote could’ve bawled. Right into her pink lady. Men! She gritted her teeth to keep from speaking her thoughts.

  They expected at least a clap of thunder. Or slashes of light. They thought that scales should fall.

  Though she felt warm at the gaining of friendship. Kit O’Donnell had come in here with them, and argued with her against Carl’s preference for the beer parlour, had ordered a pink lady too.

  A corner table. Gladdy sat so that she could see, through the glass and across the foyer, the edges of movement in the wide doorway to the ballroom. And just by turning her head she could see the white stucco front of the Blessed Sleep Funeral Home through a window on the outside wall. It was a place you could sit all evening and never feel left out.

  “I heard the brother agreed not to do anything to it until the three days were over,” she said. “To the body.”

  Kit ran a finger around a stain on the Arborite table. “Is that legal?”

  “I don’t know, but I guess for a relative you can bend things a little.”

  Gladdy looked across the table at her own closest relative. But Carl, scowling, hunched over his glass of beer as if he wanted to wrap his own shoulders around it, the only thing he intended to acknowledge in this world.

  “You can’t deny he’s attracted attention,” Kit said. “For a painter.”

  “I suppose the papers are here.”

  “The locals,” she said. “I don’t imagine the Vancouver papers would send across a real art critic.”

  “It’s possible,” Gladdy said, and sipped. “Anything is possible.”

  The girl’s great dark eyes travelled all around the inside of the lounge. “Yes, I imagine,” she said. And laced her long hands together on the table, scarlet nails like petals of blood on the white. What Gladdy would give for nails again!

  Others had come in from the art show, talking excitedly at their tables. The jangle of bracelets, the baritone laughter. Gladdy could not want to be anywhere else, she was alive here. If only they wouldn’t notice the misery implied by Carl’s posture.

  “I should’ve come alone,” she said. “To spare Carl.”

  Who grunted.

  “Oh no!” the girl cried. “I’m always surprised to see one of you without the other. It never seems right. You two are one of those couples it seems impossible to imagine apart.”

  Carl lifted his face to look at her out of one eye. As if Kit had just now landed there, from Mars. Then he looked down and drank the beer, his third. Gladdy felt cold breezes at her neck.

  “Oh, we know what it’s like to be apart,” she said. “We haven’t always been together.”

  “It still wouldn’t seem right.”

  “The operation,” Gladdy said. And rejoiced at the sudden rigidity of Carl’s shoulders, of his huge arms.

  “The operation?”

  “All that time, while I was laid out flat in the hospital he cooked like a woman, looked after Sparkle, kept house as clean as if I’d been there. All that time, we were apart.”

  She cocked her head.

  “Mind you, he used to come up to the hospital every evening and just sit there, staring at me. And cry when he had to go.”

  Carl put his big hands around her wrist. “All right, Gladdy.”

  “But I told him it was good practice for him. I told him ‘What if?’ you know, ‘What if?’ but he said he’d never get used to it in a
hundred years. He said he’d rather they cut off his privates than take me from him.”

  The hand jerked away. She’d gone too far. Even the little teacher was blushing.

  “Well excuse me,” Gladdy said, and stood up. “While I visit the powder-room.”

  And Kit, too, was standing. “I’ll go with you.” And followed. You might have thought the two of them were running away from that brooding hulk. She saw the bloodshot eyes slide up at her from under his brows. He was sulking; he would sulk for a good while yet.

  Kit went for a mirror, to fuss with her hair, and Gladdy slipped into a cubicle, shut the door. “Did you ever imagine,” she said, “the network of pipes there has to be under this town just to keep places like this ready for these little emergencies?”

  Kit admitted that the thought had never occurred to her. She said if you started to think about all the complicated workings behind every simple part of your life you’d never be able to move.

  “Ha!” said Gladdy Roote, and lowered her behind onto the black cold horseshoe seat.

  Then added, “Did you see old Carl’s face when he took a look at that picture? I thought he was going to drop dead out of shock, right there.”

  Kit’s voice was high, more English than she’d thought. “He must have expected a photograph. He must have thought Eli’s brushes were meant to do what a camera does.”

  “Eight hundred bucks for that!”

  “Well, he’d probably lower the price a little if you were the ones to buy it.”

  “He could drop it all the way down to a dime and I know Carl wouldn’t have that thing hanging in the house. Though he may be willing to pay for the right to chop it up in pieces.”

  And then she noticed.

  A seam in her dress had opened up for a foot or so down the front. The stitching was right out, a long white thread. If she’d pulled it the gash would lengthen all the way up to her waist.

  Jesus. She rummaged in her purse. For pins. For anything. You couldn’t count on anything going right, it seemed. She turned over everything, all the combs and peppermints and bits of paper. She began taking everything out, one piece at a time, and laying it on the floor, but soon there was nothing left but fluff and grit at the bottom.