The Eye of the Beholder

by Janice Macdonald

  I packed my own tiny tin of tuna, crackers, celery sticks, and an apple, and was soon out the door myself, on my way to the little-university-that-could across the river. MacEwan University had expanded its downtown campus, but divested itself of its satellite campuses in the west end and out in Mill Woods. I was impressed with its growth, and more than happy to teach there. I had finally realized that I was never going to be offered a fulltime job at any of the universities or colleges in town, and had acclimatized myself to being grateful for work at all. Sessional friends I knew were having courses dropped at the last minute here and there, while the institutions scrambled to fill classrooms to the max and focused only on profit.

  Everything was a business. Once you got your mind wrapped around that concept, living in the western world became easier to navigate. Not easier to bear, but at least you understood the game.

  Thinking about business made me think about money, which brought me back to thinking about my plan. I almost forgot to change trains at Churchill station, but popped off just in time not to be driven all the way to the northeast end of town when I wanted to swerve west of downtown to MacEwan station.

  As I waited at the station, I noticed signs pointing to the Art Gallery of Alberta, situated just above the station, across from City Hall. I hadn’t been there in ages, which was a shame since I had fallen hard for the new building, which seemed to be made out of one long ribbon of chrome, all swirled about. Now it seemed you could enter the building at the basement level from the LRT station.

  Edmonton really was thinking like a bigtime winter city should. Major attractions were all connected by pedways or underpasses and now there were LRT links to three of the institutions of higher learning as well as two hospitals, three malls, a library, the art gallery, and the new museum.

  Making a vow to come back and tour the art gallery soon, I popped onto my train for the short but ponderously slow ride to MacEwan Station. I wondered when they were going to finally get the bugs out of that route.

  Diego Rivers was nowhere to be seen at the MacEwan Station, but he might as well have been there. His mural was finished, and full of eyes looking at those of us looking back from the platform. Tourists, old time Edmontonians in gaudy Klondike gear, including a darkhaired Klondike Kate, a blond Shumka dancing couple, a trapper, the old town crier who used to wander Jasper Avenue, former alderman Michael Phair in his cool glasses and pink hat, our very tall mayor wearing the beaver-pelted chain of office, and various people I didn’t recognize were all part of the crowd at the centre of the mural, gazing in all directions at the sites posted along the edges of the painting. Some of them seemed to be looking at us, too, implying that we regular Edmontonians were tourist attractions, as well?

  I stood with people streaming around me, impressed as all get out by Rivers’ vision and talent. This huge mural was as intimate a work of art as my Sunflowers photo print by John Wright, and yet it was more than a dozen feet high and even wider. No wonder Kristin had been taken with this man. It was one thing to talk a good line, but to be able to deliver this sort of a punch made me think the man was a visionary.

  Briar Nettles had been dismissive of Rivers’ talent and hold on the younger students. I wonder if she’d been jealous? Or maybe she too had been attracted to the artist-in-residence, and found that attraction annoying in spite of herself? Or perhaps she’d been rebuffed? The man Steve and I had met on the food tour had seemed nice enough, and completely devoted to his wife, almost to the exclusion of the rest of us on the tour. In fact, the face of the Klondike Kate—the most glamorous woman in the mural—resembled his wife, Alessandra, now that I thought of it. Had he been like that at his first meeting with Briar, and made her feel rejected? That could certainly account for her sneering attitude.

  Or maybe it was just that my appreciation for art wasn’t as high-toned as hers. The way I saw it, this mural was everything public art should be: bright and engaging, provocative, well articulated, and beautifully crafted. If I were on the Works board, I’d be looking for a way to make this a permanent installation somewhere.

  I took a couple of pictures of the mural for Steve’s collection, thinking it would make a good short stop motion film if I strung them all together for him. I could give that Cole Vandermeer a run for his money with his stop action art.

  My second class of Much Ado was more successful than I could have hoped. There was some real pushback against the Prince’s idea of tricking Beatrice and Benedick into falling in love from a couple of students, and they made the leap of comparing it to Don John’s tricking of Claudio into thinking he wasn’t in love with Hero.

  “So royalty plays with the peons for their amusement, and you just have to hope you have a good Prince and not a bad one. Is that what Shakespeare was saying?”

  “If that is what he was saying, why didn’t he just come right out and say it?” asked another student, who was obviously firmly in the camp of not enjoying anything written in metre.

  “What do you think would have happened to Shakespeare if he were to come right out and say such a thing?”

  “He’d have his head chopped off!” one of them called out, a little too joyously for my taste.

  “They weren’t still chopping peoples’ heads off by then.”

  “Actually, they were,” announced a fellow proffering his smartphone as proof. “The last person was beheaded in England in 1747.”

  “And Much Ado was written when?” I asked, trying to regain control of the discussion.

  “1600!” chorused out several of those students far more comfortable with the recitation of facts and figures from other classes. I tried to give them a few of these dates and formulae in the way of important quotations to hang on to and make them comfortable in this world of symbols, and motifs, and unreliable narrators.

  “Right. So we have a play that purports to be a comedy along the lines of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where unlikely lovers meet, overhear things and change their determinations as a result, overlaid with the makings of a tragedy, where a malicious prince decides to ruin a woman’s life on the grounds that he feels slighted by the man she agreed to marry.”

  “No one seems to take her situation very seriously, do they?” asked one of the quieter young women who sat along the back row of the class. “They just want her name cleared for her father’s sake and for her to be married off, to the same fellow who blew hot and cold the week before.”

  “And there would be the kernel of a great term paper, on whether or not you can claim Shakespeare as a feminist.” There were groans, but their trigger word seemed to be term paper, not feminist, so I still had hopes for these kids.

  “Next week, we have your late mid-term exam. Remember, you are being examined on whether you have read and understood the materials assigned, what you have taken from the class lectures and discussions, and what you might extrapolate from what you’ve learned. It’s only worth ten per cent, the same as your first essay, but in a way, the midterm is a dress rehearsal for the final exam, so you’ll be prepared for the sort of exam I set. Read over your notes and pay attention to what we focused on in class from the words we read. You may see a poem you’ve never seen before, but you’ll be asked to discuss it in the way we dealt with other poems in class.”

  Some of the class looked stricken, though most of them had been attending every lecture. Spring session classes were like that; you made the commitment to screw up your summer, so you took it seriously. I tried to lighten the mood a little. I usually slated the midterm later into the session, in the same way I tried to fit it into mid-January in regular full term courses, so they’d have a chance to write two papers prior to sitting an exam. I truly only used the midterm as a test-run for the final, so they could rehearse for the exam that would make up 30 per cent of their mark.

  “I have no doubt you’ll do fine. The class discussions have been really on point in this class, and I can
tell you’ve been keeping up with the reading. My advice is just to review what we’ve covered, because we’ve covered a lot already.”

  A few students stuck around to ask questions about the exam, and another few continued the Much Ado conversation, mostly to vent about how much they detested Claudio. I shook them all off after about twenty minutes and made my way up to the English office to see if there was any physical mail for me. Most things came electronically these days, but I liked to check mostly because it made me look like less of a slacker to have an empty mailbox than one stuffed full of junkmail from publishers’ reps and college-wide flyers.

  I ran into Valerie, who wasn’t teaching this spring, but was training for a marathon and had decided to include the campus in her practice run. She had popped in for water and to find out if the bookstore had ordered her novels for the summer course she was teaching.

  We walked down the wide stairs together, me feeling slightly overdressed in comparison to her singlet and shorts, under which she was wearing tighter bike shorts.

  “How is married life treating you?” she grinned.

  “So far, so great. We’ve settled into a routine of sorts and we’ve bought enough things together to make his place feel like ours now.” I told her about my parents’ gift of art money, and she nodded approvingly.

  “That’s so clever. Those joint decisions are the building blocks of a good marriage.”

  “Maybe that’s what I should have told my students earlier, when we were discussing the marriages in Much Ado About Nothing.”

  “I don’t think I would ever trust marriage advice from someone who willed his wife his ‘second-best bed’,” laughed Valerie. “And now, I’m off. I have to make the last ten kilometers in less than fifty minutes. See you next term!”

  Val jogged past some students blocking the sidewalk, stretched out, and began to run as she crossed 104th Avenue with the lights. She would probably make it to the southside before I did.

  That was okay. I couldn’t afford to work up a sweat. I was about to become a patron of the arts, and I needed to look both rich and arty. And the rich don’t sweat.

  33

  I had done a check of all the A. McManuses in the directory, and finally found the one that corresponded with K. Perry’s address. My sense was that a call ahead would net me nothing; Kristin’s roommate had probably learned how to say ‘no’ on the phone after dealing with reporters for the last four months. But if I were to show up, and spin enough of a good story to see some of Kristin’s art, maybe I could find out who was holding on to most of her work, and whether or not it had all gone home to her family.

  The girls hadn’t lived in the block of attached townhouses Briar Nettles had claimed were full of art students. Instead, they were a few blocks east, in a small walk-up apartment in Old Strathcona. I rang the bell at the front door, and when a metallic “Yes?” sounded, I asked for Andrea McManus.

  “Who is it?”

  “My name is Randy Craig, and I’m an art collector,” I said, which wasn’t entirely untrue, given that we’d just bought four pieces of art in the last three months.

  There was a long pause, and then the voice said, “It’s 402.” The buzzer rang, and the door lock clicked. I pulled the door quickly and stepped inside the apartment building. There was no air-conditioning in this building, like most of the three-storey walk-ups in the neighbourhood. The air smelled of various cooking odors, none of them unpleasant.

  I walked up the rubber-covered stairs in a front stairwell that was open glass on one side, and a series of fire doors at each level on the other. The basement level must have been the 100s, because 402 was on the top floor. I stood at the top of the stairs to catch my breath, hoping my art collector persona was still intact.

  I pressed a button in the middle of the door of 402, creating an immediate buzz. Andrea must have been waiting for me, because the door was opened almost before I could pull my finger away.

  “Are you thinking that Kristin’s art is going to be worth something because she was murdered? Because I think that’s ghoulish.”

  I held up my hand to ward off what seemed to be a preplanned diatribe.

  “No, Ms. McManus, my interest in Kristin’s works is to see what sort of influences were at play in her most recent paintings. I’m working from a hypothesis that all artists are swayed in some way by what is important to them at the moment they are painting, and I would like to understand that in terms of her work.”

  She wasn’t buying my line. Frankly, I was not sure I was, either.

  “Are you some sort of reporter, doing a true crime piece?” I shook my head forcefully, both because I was telling the truth and because I could see that an affirmative answer was going to have her pushing me back through the portal. Andrea McManus had some strong opinions.

  “Okay, then, are you working for the police?”

  “I did some research for them in terms of this case, which is mainly how I heard about her, and saw some of her work. But I’m not here on behalf of the police, I promise you. I am here to purchase art if it is yours to sell, nothing more.”

  This somehow seemed to calm her down.

  “Kristin’s parents did leave some of her work here. I don’t think they liked her more recent stuff, and it’s not like they have that much room to hang all her student work. Her mom told me to let her classmates use whatever canvases they could salvage, and to deal with the rest for them.” Andrea shook her head, sadly. “As if anyone would touch her stuff, but I’m not sure where we can keep all of it.”

  “May I have a look?”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s still in her room. We’ve cleaned a bit up, since we have to rent out the room soon to make this place feasible for us, but we haven’t put up an ad yet. Kristin had paid up till the end of June, anyhow, and her parents didn’t seem to care about that.”

  Andrea walked me down a long dark hall. One door was open, leading into a cheerful room full of bookcases, a daybed with drawers and colourful pillows, and a hanging skeleton with a feather boa around its neck. On one wall hung a cheery portrait of a smiling girl with dark, straight hair.

  “That’s Jeannie’s room. She’s in med school,” Andrea said, obviously contextualizing the skeleton for the visitor in a practised manner. “She is actually in class all through the summer, so I almost never see her except around dinner time.

  “And here’s Kristin’s room,” she said, opening the one closed door in the hallway. There was a slight mustiness that was mixed with linseed oil. I didn’t think that door had been opened all that much since they’d got back from Mexico.

  Kristin had also lived with her work surrounding her. She had a double-sized mattress and box spring on the floor in the corner of the room. There was an Indian cotton spread over the mattresses, but it looked as if the bed had been stripped beneath. The louvred doors to the closet were opened, and there were only hangers where there should have been Kristin’s wardrobe.

  A dresser sat inside one side of the closet, leaving the rest of the room clear to contain a standing easel and a worktable, on which once must have sat all of her paints and brushes. There were splotches of colour all over the top of the worktable, but it was clean otherwise. Likewise, there was nothing on the easel.

  Along one wall, though, canvases were stacked, about four rows of them and some of them at least six or seven canvases deep.

  “We’ve cleaned up the rest, after her mom came and packed up her clothes and paints, and I was asked to sell the easel on Kijiji for them,” Andrea said from the doorway. “But we’re still not sure what to do with the paintings. Would you like a chair to sit on while you go through them?”

  I accepted her offer gratefully, and Andrea rolled in a desk chair from her room that was further down the hallway. I thought, half-curious, that it would be interesting to see the personality described by her room, but mostly I was taken with th
e task at hand. I set my satchel onto the workstation and rolled myself up to the left stack of canvases.

  The first one was a study of a hand against a blue background. The veins on top of the hand were beginning to pop, and one of the knuckles was much bigger than the others. This had to be a hand portrait of someone much older than Kristin herself.

  There were a couple more body parts on solid background colours: a foot, pointed and arched on a red silky sheet; and a shoulder with a small tattoo of Saturn in front of a green curtain.

  The next row of canvases seemed like more exercises. I counted two still lifes, and an interesting collection of poses on one canvas of the same model in what had to be a life class.

  The third row had the canvases turned back to front, so I had to pull each one out and turn it, instead of flipping through them like vinyl records in a store bin. I immediately recognized the model for the first one I turned.

  It was a portrait of Diego Rivers, looking more like the man I had briefly met in Mexico than the strutting artist I’d been watching at the mural site. I also realized he was the dark-haired man in the other painting of Kristin’s I had seen in the gallery. Talk about personal and public personas; this version seemed far more civilized, private, and pleasant. Did he think that made him vulnerable? Or was painting something that required him to amp up his personality to eleven?

  Whatever the case, Kristin had been privy to the man he showed to his wife on their vacation. I wondered if that was the teacher they had all seen, or whether that was especially for outside the art world? I took a shot of the painting with my phone.