by Sam Wiebe
“When they divorced she remarried, had another kid, moved back to the prairies. He lives in a shack on Gambier Island.”
“When’d you last talk to them?” Shay asked.
“Probably when they were wiping my ass in that picture.”
“You don’t miss them?”
“No.”
She expected more of an answer. I added, “What I miss is not having a big sister. That would’ve been cool. Someone to drag me to concerts, borrow cigarettes from, help me cheat my way through school. I would’ve liked that. I hate that I don’t have that.”
“But your parents,” Shay said. “You never tried to get in touch?”
I took the book from her and closed it and set it down.
“The other day I talked to this guy, Wayne Loam,” I said. “Chelsea’s biological uncle. He said family is who’s there for you. I’d never articulated it that well. My birth mother’s older sister and her husband are my parents. The other two made their choice.”
“Maybe I’ll phone them up,” she said impishly. “How would that make you feel?”
“It wouldn’t make me feel anything,” I said. I looked at the Sears clock over the dresser. “At night that thing ticks like John Bonham. You might want to pop out the battery. I’ve got to go.”
“When will you be back?”
“Saturday, hopefully. Anything I can bring you from lovely Winnipeg?”
She did her best to think of something.
23
I WAS LATE FOR THE LECTURE, but lectures never start on time. Grad students were selling wine at a tableclothed desk in the hall. Copies of Alex Knowlson’s art books were for sale and perusal at the next table.
The theatre was packed with academics, art patrons, students and other members of the city’s cultural vanguard. Once the rounds of cool applause for the event sponsors and coordinators were out of the way, the place roared—roared—as Alex Knowlson took the podium.
Even at a distance I recognized that he possessed the gravitational pull of celebrity. The unease in his movements broadcast as unease with fame. But it was a practised discomfort. Success sat easier with him than he perhaps realized. Like a punk rock front man turned actuary. At some point the thing you pretend to be becomes the thing you are.
Knowlson’s lecture lasted fifty minutes and began with a solemn acknowledgement that we were conducting this meeting on unceded territory belonging to the Coast Salish peoples. He took his time excoriating, in turn, the feds in Ottawa for slashing arts finding, the city council for giving themselves raises at the expense of social programs, the art community for resting on its haunches during a time of undeclared class warfare, and the international community for putting economic interests ahead of humanitarian ones.
The gist of his speech was that, as money poured into the city, corporate interests would continue to overtake communities. The result would be the speedy demise of the city’s arts scene. “You can’t outsource poetry,” Knowlson said at one point. The crackdown on graffiti—“the last vestige of true democracy”—coupled with real estate prices forcing out local studios, meant that important voices were being silenced. Something had to be done, and it fell to us, right now, right this minute.
Question time. A devout-looking student approached the audience mic and asked if Knowlson had any advice for an aspiring artist like herself, and those like her in the crowd.
“Care,” he said. “Just care. I don’t care what about.”
Raucous, rousing, wall-to-wall applause.
“Art is misunderstood,” he said. “A painting isn’t art because it’s a painting, or because it fetches two hundred million at Christie’s. And it’s not worthless because the quote-unquote art community deems it so. Some of my favourite paintings are forgeries.”
Laughter and profound murmurs.
“What art’s function is—apologies to Oscar Wilde—is to smack us upside the head. Sometimes delicately, sometimes severely. If you do that well, and follow that principle regardless of where it leads you—well, you’ll probably make a few dollars somewhere down the road, and someone important will probably call you subversive pinko scum. But there are worse things to be. Just so long as you care.”
Afterwards Knowlson hung around to press the flesh, sign a few programs, accept a plaque from the dean of arts. A few students and rich people wanted their moment with him, and he did his best to indulge them. He was an hour and a half late in leaving, but finally he did, heading up over the Granville Street Bridge to his darkened gallery.
I gave him five minutes to settle in before I knocked on the glass door.
“You were at the talk,” he said, inviting me in. “How did you find it?”
“I’m not ready to march on the Bastille,” I said, “but I liked it.”
“Out of curiosity, what would it take for you to march on the Bastille, to use your phrase?”
I didn’t have an answer.
“How corrupt does a system have to get before anarchy is preferable for a working-class professional like yourself?”
“I don’t believe in anarchy,” I said.
“Which tenet do you find hardest to swallow?”
“That it exists,” I said. “Sooner or later someone always takes control.”
“So better them than the people?”
I put my hand over my heart and leaned back as if shot. “You got me. I don’t know anything about politics. I came to ask you about Chelsea Loam.”
“That’s a subject that deserves a drink,” he said.
I followed him through the unlit gallery to an aluminum spiral staircase that led up to a loft, half office, half salon. The workspace was neat and spartan, with framed pieces on the wall, one that looked like the Declaration of Independence copied out in brown Crayola. The salon side of the room was a jumble of papers, ashtrays, books with Post-its peeking out from between pages, envelopes and camera paraphernalia and empty glasses. Knowlson took two tumblers from the sideboard and poured a dram into each one.
“Friend of mine in Scottish parliament brought this over,” he said. “Only MPs and their staff can purchase it. I don’t have distilled water, then you could really appreciate the subtlety.”
We clinked glasses. Alex Knowlson saluted the pictures on his wall. I appreciated the subtlety just fine.
He sat and crossed his legs and swept a few locks back from his eyes. “Where to begin with Chelsea Loam,” he said. “She helped make me and in return I did…far too little. At the time, of course, it seemed the other way around. If I’d known then what I do now about the political implications of appropriating the stories of those in the sex trade.”
“Mind translating that for those of us without master’s degrees?”
He grinned. “You’re more intelligent than you let on,” he said. “A lot of my earlier work attempted to capture what it was like to live in Vancouver’s poorer areas. I was practically living out of the Carnegie Centre, taking my meals with addicts and prostitutes. The year before I’d been absolutely destroyed by a painting of Degas’s that hangs in the Musée d’Orsay. L’Absinthe, or Girl in a Café. Do you know it?”
“Sort of,” I said.
His hands flew to a volume by his feet and he found a photo of it. A woman neither beautiful nor homely, sitting at a small table, staring at a goblet of green liquid as if it were the only thing sustaining her.
“There’s beauty but no sentimentality,” Knowlson said. “People initially thought it was a warning against the overindulgence of spirits. I’d pass people on Cordova, different means of escape but that same finality of expression, that acceptance of despair. And I sought to capture that.”
He paused and drank, then seemed to realize he’d paused to give his story effect, and laughed to himself at his own theatricality.
“What I figured out in later years,” he said, “was that while my intentions were good, I was reinforcing certain stereotypes about the people that live here, especially the women. Society sees th
em as valueless, drug addicts and prostitutes and the mentally ill and all the other reductive stereotypes. When you factor in that many of these women are aboriginal, or Métis, or mixed race, you have a perfect storm of racism, sexism and colonialism. And my intentions aside, people were misreading my work. ‘Oh, another junkie prostitute, another drunk native.’ They were missing the humanity with which I was trying to imbue my subjects—but then perhaps so was I. Perhaps I was so eager to become the Great White Protector, Champion of the Downtrodden, that I had done the exact opposite of what I’d intended.”
“So that’s why: ‘No faces, no races, no spaces,’ ” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Departicularize. It’s the only way to avoid all possible chance of misrepresentation.”
“I like your early stuff better,” I said.
He laughed hard and leaned back in his chair. “So do I,” he said.
“How ’bout this?” I handed him the sketch of Chelsea’s face. He took it and laid it on the sideboard and smoothed it, then returned to his seat, holding the picture and scrutinizing it for a long time.
He let out a moan. It didn’t seem theatrical. It seemed as if someone who’d once been important to him had reappeared, bringing with her a rush of memories that had overwhelmed his heart.
Alex Knowlson stared at the picture sadly. I was in no hurry.
And then of a sudden he was jolted to awareness of where he was and who was with him. He apologized. “I was remembering when she and I did this.”
He held up the picture.
“I started it from memory one day while waiting for her outside Performance Works. It was between Christmas and New Year’s. She showed up late, not really dressed for the snow. Addicts don’t always dress weather-appropriate. Once she’d arrived I made her sit there while I sketched in the fine details. It took two hours. She was just about blue by the end of it. But she didn’t move once. She insisted on getting the picture right.”
“If she’d run away on her own,” I said, “would she have taken it with her? Because I found this with a diary, and I don’t see her leaving both behind.”
“Her diary,” he said. “Does it mention me?”
“Very favourably.”
He stood up and paced to the desk. “What right did you have to read that?” he asked. He seemed upset, but not at me.
“Would you rather she called you a shit?”
He stopped pacing. “Perhaps,” he said. “You have to understand, things changed all of a sudden for me. I met my second wife. I’d just started reading Hegel. I was invited to go back to Europe as part of a rolling exhibition of post-colonial talent. And when I came back I had a young son and things were different. Chelsea was different, too. More desperate. She wouldn’t stop with the phone calls. She’d write me notes and drop them through the doggy door. I was so fucking sick of her, sick of the way she desperately wanted to be around me. I’d tell her to do something as a joke and she’d take it literally and do it. Like, ‘Go offer a blowjob to that fat old man sitting over there with his wife.’ And she would. As if she enjoyed having me degrade her.”
Knowlson gestured to me. “Come over here.”
He turned on the bank of lights over the desk. He pointed up at the strange scrawled parchment framed on his wall.
“She did that,” he said.
I looked closer, caught the brush strokes and the uneven smears of paint. It read:
I know you’ve been busy but I’ve
been reading that book you gave me
and it’s really wonderful and I kind
of understand what he’s saying but if you’d
help me with this one part I just can’t
The frame cut the last line off.
“ ‘Get it,’ ” Knowlson said. “ ‘I just can’t get it.’ I never gave her my copy of Camera Lucida. She stole it from out of my wife’s car.”
“Was there something wrong with her hands?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “The original letter is framed in behind that. I told her if she wanted an answer she had to get a big piece of parchment, mix together some of her menstrual blood, stick a brush in her ass and rewrite it.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because I didn’t think she would do it. And she did.”
“But why in hell would you frame something like that?”
“It’s a perfect mixture of obscenity and passion,” he said. “It’s the most powerful piece in this entire gallery.”
He refilled his glass, offered me some. I didn’t respond. I stared from him to the note and back.
“You think I’m a son of a bitch,” he said.
“Yep. I think you betrayed her as much as it’s possible to betray another person.”
“She gave it to me willingly,” he said. “Wanted me to hang it up. The line between pornography and art is entirely a social construction.”
“You know who Kevin’s father was?”
“Kazz, I assumed. She’d given Kevin up before she met me.”
“Hear her talk about someone with the initials G.O.?”
“No,” he said. “She did mention someone named George, I think, but I don’t know much about him. One of her clients, maybe.”
“How about C.P.?”
He started to disavow, then caught himself.
“Cal Palfreyman,” he said. “His wife used to be a benefactor for our studio. I think Cal and Chelsea might have met at one of the showings. Cal’s a prosecutor. Was he one of her clients?”
“Just a set of initials,” I said. “She ever talk about bikers?”
“Not to me.”
It was past midnight. I was tired again. I owed Shay a phone call but decided to put that off until morning.
“I might have more questions,” I said. “I’ll leave them with your secretary.”
“I hope Chelsea turns up,” he said.
“With friends like you looking out for her, how could she not?”
I spun my way down the staircase and crossed the dark gallery and let myself out.
—
Jeff Chen drove me to YVR early. The sun wasn’t up. We took his convertible, the top down. The cold air swooped and shrieked over our heads as the car picked up speed, sounding like so much white noise.
“Any case-related business I should be aware of?” Jeff asked.
“I’ll do what I can from Manitoba,” I said. “Don’t let anyone touch that diary for any reason.”
“How could I? It’s in Blaine.”
“And don’t tell anyone that, either.”
“Anything else?”
“Check in on my mother. Make sure Shay has what she needs. Don’t give her money unless I okay it.”
At the terminal I called her. “So early,” Shay drawled.
“Everything’s okay?”
“I guess.”
“See you Saturday.”
“Safe flight, or whatever.”
I checked my messages. Gail Kirby’s daughter had texted me. MOM NOT WELL WANTS TO KNOW ANY NEWS?
NONE, I wrote. BACK SAT.
The final boarding call went over the PA. I bought a couple of newsstand paperbacks and a Dr. Pepper. Then I jogged for the gate, then ran, and made it in time. And everything worked out perfectly.
INTERLUDE: FUCKING WINNIPEG
TOMMY ROSS knew how to have fun, and knew how to make all the girls wet and begging for it. He told me this several times over the course of our trip.
I wasn’t sure if I was in town as Ross’s guest, his bodyguard, or his pet. What he wanted from me was, first, to enjoy myself, and tell him if I needed him to buy anything for me, anything at all; and second, to help him out, get the drinks, open the limousine door. But that was only with the ladies, so they’d know who was funding this venture.
Ross had rented an Escalade limousine, a sleek white monster that would dwarf and humble anyone who dared question who was The Shit. That was not up for debate: The Shit was Tommy Ross and the world w
ould accept it and start taking dictation.
The Roving Party Headquarters—The Shit Central—picked me up at nine from the parking lot of the Comfort Inn. Ross was already in the bag. He emerged through the sunroof like a strange new deity, pointing at me as if bestowing some terrible, life-threatening honour: Come with me, Mr. Wakeland. Together we will drink up the night and fuck the entire city, and when we’re done you can take your place at the foot of my sarcophagus as the other peons seal tight the pyramid doors.
“Buddy,” he said to me as I climbed in. He was sitting next to a thin Asian woman in a silver lamé wrap. Ross had half of a tuxedo still on. They were drinking Goldschlager. Ross would point and gesticulate using the bottle.
“This is Tammy. Tam, Dave. How you feeling, buddy? Ready to tear this town a new one?” He pressed an intercom button. “Terence, man, take us to the best club in town.”
Restaurants and gas stations flew by on the other side of the tinted window. Winnipeg was sweltering, even with the sun melting into streaks of gold.
“So what kind of things you want to do?” Ross said. “You like strippers? Want to get some food? ’Cause it’s whatever you want, buddy.”
“How about a coffee shop? I started a pretty good Sue Grafton on the plane.” G is for Get Me the Fuck out of Winnipeg.
Ross snorted. “Maybe later. Right now we need some hot bitches and some more tunes and a hell of a lot more Goldschlager.”
He splashed some into a water glass, handed it to me. No ice. I watched the flecks of gold dance in it. Like drinking a snow globe.
On one armrest was a stack of CDs that slid across the seats as Terence negotiated the stretch through the maze of downtown Winnipeg. The music ranged in variety from Nickelback to Night Ranger. “Pick your poison,” Ross said, sweeping an arm at the selection.
One drug-themed compilation had an Iggy Pop track. I put it on. Ross air-drummed along to “The Passenger.”
The neon letters of the club came in view, with a line of well-dressed people in silhouette below. Ross struggled into his jacket. Tammy helped him fix his tie. He finished his drink and told Terence to stop right in front and be back in an hour.
