by Mike Barnes
His truest likeness, he claimed, was to the death mask of William Blake. And when he showed you the faded Xerox in his wallet, it was true: except for Sean’s weaker chin there was a resemblance. Mostly in the small, close-set eyes and the huge smooth brow.
“Tell them I’ll be down shortly. I’ve got two more lines,” he said now as he moved off down the hall, fingers flicking out from his thigh to help him with the metre.
2
4:30. Half an hour till close-up. Three and a half hours before the Gala Preview. And the gallery seemed dead. I was alone in the lobby. Even the gift shop was empty, though I could hear a faint bustle and clatter from the upstairs lounge. I leaned against the semicircular front desk, which had been abandoned again.
The uniform did itch. Dark brown pants, white Arrow shirt, brown tie, beige jacket – all 60% cotton, but after a few hours of walking and standing in it, it began to chafe. Sweat trickled from your armpits, and it began to feel like Hercules’ burning shirt – the poisoned one his wife gave him, mistaking it for a love charm. (Allusion courtesy of Sean, of course.) All the guards complained about it. You’d see guys taking off their jackets, examining the lining. Even Hans, who’d been wearing it and its predecessors almost thirty years. Looking for the source of the itching, whatever was trapped there. But I think it was just all the standing around. The sheer inactivity.
In terms of energy, the gallery was a black hole. Despite a lot of intermittent frenzy, nothing much happened there. Events got pumped up, haggled over, and then barely occurred. Despite that, or because of it, Bud regularly sent us down Memos on alertness and security, especially regarding the surrealist show. “. . . the gallery’s most valuable and thus VULNERABLE exhibition thus far.” Yet years of false alarms had rendered us all panic-proof, almost action-proof. An alarm was an aggravation – more itching – more than a crisis. After a thoughtless period roaming the beige, you’d jump at a squawk from the walkie-talkie on your belt. “Attention all guards. I have an alarm on the southeast exit, Teale Gallery.” The Burns guard on the panel downstairs enunciating crisply, yanked from his sci-fi novel or Penthouse for just this moment. And you’d shake the rubber out of your legs and run to the exit, your heart thudding in spite of yourself, the excited chatter of “backup” and “converging” and “sealed” at your belt . . . and you’d come to the door in question. And, with a deep breath, go through it. Expecting, trying to expect, trouble. Discounting the past, the odds. Only to find a confused old person bumbling in the stairwell, whose eyes had missed DO NOT ENTER ALARM WILL SOUND below the glowing red EXIT sign. Or a surly adolescent prankster, who hadn’t missed the signs, but hadn’t known the street door would lock ahead of him, along with the door behind him, sealing him in a deeply uncool stairwell. Or a toddler, who’d been strong enough to push open the door, but not strong enough to avoid wailing at the sight of the red-faced, panting man in beige. Hans said there’d been a couple of attempted grabs soon after they’d moved to the new building, in 1970, but he couldn’t recall when the last one had been.
Of course, as assistant to the director, Bud tried to make us forget the past. In addition to the Memos, we had security meetings once a month, and several recently. During these, Bud made sure to avoid Sean’s eyes, which were joined by a short fuse to Sean’s mouth. At one early briefing, Bud, almost as green as Sean and I, had stressed the need to treat each alarm seriously, enter each situation decisively and aggressively. He might have been dictating a memo to himself re his new job. Sean said: “You want me to take a bullet for $4.45 an hour?” “We want you to use all reasonable restraint,” Bud managed to reply, though the dyes in his magenta shirt appeared to trickle upwards into his throat. Sean’s retort had evoked exciting images – the grapple and thud of bodies, the flash of a blade, even a barrel calmly faced – that had gone entirely unrealized. Expectation had evaporated. And quoting the value of the surrealist works, how they had stressed the gallery’s insurance budget to the max, could hardly reactivate it.
Gallery law, tattooed on fallen arches: One cannot wait forever and be ready.
There had only been one stairwell case where the guy was actually clutching a painting. And case was the exact word. A psychiatric patient out on a day pass, who meekly handed over the painting with a trembling hand and glassy eyes. Then was fed tea and a scone by the volunteer in the lounge while waiting for the cops to arrive, mumbling a story of how roughly he’d been grabbed by the wrist. Look, I have red marks. The volunteer actually glared at me.
When the attendants reconvened from wherever they’d scattered to, we trooped across King Street to Jackson Square. One L – the losing one – brightened when two of the gallery groupies followed us out onto the street, then drooped again when Ramon shooed them back toward the gallery. “No, girls. Work. Work now. Play later.” With pink moues of disappointment, the girls ran ahead of us into the mall. Perhaps hoping to waylay Ramon on his return, or else just scout for sub-Ramon replacements. Ramon winked at me. “You’re lucky to be married.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “I was just thinking it might be nice not to be.” I’d tried, early on, to explain to Ramon the distinction between my living with Angela and marriage. But then, watching his parade of partners, which went far beyond these girls to hot women at the clubs he DJ’d at on weekends, I’d wondered if there was a distinction.
“Trollops,” Sean muttered.
“No, man,” Ramon patted my back. “The little girls, they make you cra-zy.” He spun a hand languidly beside his face.
Our losing L drooped further when Ramon steered him past Big Steel, Benetton and The Gap – places his mother took him for clothes, he was young enough to admit – and into the Sears by the Food Court. “Sears sucks,” he moaned. He loitered by some tolerable suits in the high-end section, ready to chat up the tailor for a bespoke model, but Ramon took him by the shoulders and marched him to an off-the-rack special, most of the jackets and pants lying tangled in a heap on a big square table. Fitting wasn’t even an issue, since alterations came at an extra charge. Sean’s spine was stiffened at a perceived outrage, L was pouting, and even I was obscurely aware of some affront. Only Ramon, signing for the total, seemed relaxed and unsurprised.
Navy pants, a new white Arrow shirt, navy tie, maroon blazer. We put them on in the fitting rooms. The new material felt cheap but cool, no itching at least. We wore them out, carrying our frayed sweaty browns in Sears bags. At the first garbage can we came to, Sean pushed his bag through the opening.
“That’s gallery property,” I said.
“That’s why it’s in the vault,” Sean said.
L and I followed suit, so to speak. Even Ramon did, after a pause.
The gallery closed now, we buzzed at the blank grey security door on King Street. L mugged up at the camera, which swivelled away in annoyance, tilting to get a view of April clouds reflected in the glass of Sunlife Assurance. The door clicked open. Inside, if he’d been conned by a silly face, the panel guard still had the option of not opening either of the doors that would admit us to the basement. Leaving us to shoot our way out of the garage, back onto the street or through the wide corrugated door that lifted to take in art shipments and other large deliveries; or else, more comically, to blast ourselves out of the little vestibule between the doors, with its small, supposedly bulletproof windows for “the last visual inspection”. It reminded me of the airlock in a sci-fi spaceship: the click behind, the click ahead, when it was operating properly.
But now the double clicks came like fingersnaps before we could buzz again. Inside, Ted was hunched over the panel, reading a book that probably featured just such an airlock and spaceship. Probably with a buxom blonde in a shrink-wrapped spacesuit on the other side of it. Sean fled upstairs. He claimed that to spend time with any Asimov afficionado was debilitating, “let alone such a fecund one.” But I liked Ted: gawky, grinning, with thick glasses and chaotic brown teeth and hair. And how else exactly – if you couldn’t compose ep
ics in your head – did you escape from raising four kids on near-minimum wage? Let alone a bank of monitors that showed you slowly revolving, black and white pictures of rooms and corridors where nothing happened.
Without lifting his eyes from the page, Ted handed me a folded slip of paper. “From your wife.” He, too, had married us in his mind. Ramon and L headed toward the basement washroom to primp for the opening. I read what Angela had left me:Gone home for a bite. Good luck with the prep!
I’ll see you at 8! ♥A.
I looked up from the note, vaguely depressed by it. The middle of the basement, most of it really except for a walking strip, was filled with a head-high jumble. Shipping crates – big, important-looking and shockingly heavy wooden boxes stamped with black stencilled letters DALI, MIRO, KLEE, PICABIA, etc., with stern latches and locks on their outsides, and cunning felt-lined compartments within, sized to fit each work snugly. Divider panels, sculpture pedestals, dollies, ladders, stanchions, paint cans, tool boxes, plastic drop sheets, boxes of assorted lights – all the paraphernalia it took to run the gallery. After five years together, a short note could be as revealing as an X-ray. I could feel Angela’s excitement and thrill in the short gaspy sentences, the two exclamation marks. I could feel her pride, in the gallery and in me, in the important word “prep”. Which I didn’t need luck for, only ingrained habit and tolerance. I could feel us in the shorthand heart. And, somehow, it embarrassed me – with guilt attached naturally – to witness the bubbling energy she poured into the gallery. And when the staff upstairs, Barbara especially, gushed that she was their “godsend”, that they couldn’t remember what they’d done before she arrived – things I’d said, and still said, about Angela too, but was irritated to hear in their mouths – my first thought was that she was a receptionist. Did that make me a snob? It was a creeping affliction. And then there was the fact that I’d got her the gallery job. Given her an inside line on it anyway. It all swirled together muddily.
So muddily that I was relieved when Ramon summoned me to start pulling things we’d need out of the jumble. L, when he finished primping, helped too. As the freight elevator hauled us slowly upward, Ramon pulled his shirt collar away from his neck. I caught his eye.
“I know.” It was just the newness, or being outside the gallery, that had made the new clothes feel different. Now that we were back inside, moving and lifting, the itching was back too.
“Sixty percent cotton again. So important this show, you’d think they coulda gone all the way. Give us one hundred percent.”
“Our job is to look good, Ramon. Not be comfortable.”
“S’pose to be alert, man. ‘Security is Job 1,’ remember? How I’m gonna catch someone, I’m always scratching and sweating?”
For a guy who’d grown up in Stoney Creek, sometimes Ramon laid on the Spanish speech rhythms of his parents a little too thickly. It seemed, just faintly, like a bid for street credibility, and beneath him somehow. A lack of vanity was central to his cool.
Upstairs in the MacMahon Gallery, the hippy silk-screener was still doing what appeared to be the same thing, to the same part of the panel. Either he’d made a mistake and was doing it over, or else the process took longer than I realized. I’d stood by many times while he worked without really bothering to take it in.
The last two hours before any show were sheer madness. It didn’t matter how carefully you planned, how many hands were helping, or how early a start you got. Angela had done some amateur theatre before we’d met, and she said backstage opening night was the same. Last-minute frenzy was the law.
Pictures still to be hung – assisting Hans and Peter with that. Paint touch-ups on walls, Polyfilla and paint on missed nail holes and hollows. People walking as quickly as possible on criss-crossing paths, carrying sculpture pedestals, catalogue boxes, sculptures, paintings, a coffee urn. The walkie-talkie squawking another delivery downstairs, another volunteer who needed help up with the freight elevator. Lights to be mounted, adjusted, fine-tuned . . . then done again when a spot of glare was noticed from a certain angle. Flowers. More flowers. A new pen – “One that works!” – for the Comments book. Certain labours where groups of men moved or raised or toppled heavy objects, making one think of jungle peons erecting stone gods, or Egyptian slaves hoisting their blocks. Three of us wheeling the grand piano from a storage room to the lobby. Easing down one of the dividers onto a dolly, pushing it into the freight elevator. Raising another panel – “On three: one, two, heave!” – then six or eight arms sliding it a few inches across the carpet to the indicated spot. Shouldering it back, then forward, then back, into alignment. A volunteer with a tablecloth she needed help folding – Hans cutting in: “Ve’re too bissy now!”
Everyone showing his temper in his own fashion. Hans barking more, his shed German accent returning. Peter working even more precisely, and faster. Walter’s voice getting a bit quieter and steadier. Neale pointing.
Finally though, as always, there came a point – a series of points, each one slightly more optimistic than the one before – where having the gallery ready for eight o’clock seemed conceivable, then possible, then probable, then certain. When the third stage had been reached, Hans sent us down in shifts for a ten-minute nosh of pop and pizzas that had been ordered in. It was at this stage too that Neale and Walter left to go home, presumably to have dinner and get dressed. Hans stared glumly after them. Serving the two midwives had worn him out. In the year since his arrival from Toronto, “Secrets of the Surrealists” was certainly the most important show Neale had curated. Maybe the most important show the gallery had had. You could understand Walter wanting to hang the best of the permanent collection in the other galleries, but not his leaving half the work till the last hours. To someone’s innocent-sounding query, Walter had answered cheerily, “Big show . . . gallery’s got to look its best. Ab-so-lutely super.” And it could be defended that way. But it seemed to have as much to do with each man needing to proclaim his fiefdom of expertise. With Walter it was all things actually owned by the gallery, accent on contemporary, accent on Canadian. Neale considered himself an internationalist. In practice this meant European, since you didn’t see much art from Asia or Africa making it into the gallery. When his show was hung except for finishing touches, Neale walked briskly through the showcase of the permanent collection Walter had arranged, eyes fixed on the elevator in the lobby ahead. Much as Walter had power-strolled through Neale’s galleries a few hours earlier, murmuring approval without breaking his stride. It seemed a childish rivalry, something from a world of games and gold stars.
At 7:45 I joined Hans, who was smoking his pipe under the self-portrait of J. E. (“Josh”) MacMahon, 1903-1977. MacMahon had been Hans’s first boss and the first director of the gallery, going back to the days when the gallery was a one-room out-building loaned by the university on a corner of the campus.
“Look at those young fools,” Hans said, gesturing with his pipe at Lars and Leo, who were taking turns running a Hoover over random strips of carpet, while nearby Ramon was actually vacuuming. Sean was already pacing upstairs, self-exiled in anticipation of “the rabble”.
Finally, after a gruelling day, Hans was getting a breather. Relaxed enough to let the luxury of tolerance creep back in. I felt it too. This was a calm you could actually savour, since it came between bouts of activity. Each opening, I waited for it.
I looked above Hans at the picture, its focus softened by the floating veils of smoke. A bald, kind-faced man, dressed in a suit and sitting in an armchair, hands folded quietly in his lap. I liked the picture, though as with most of the pictures I passed every day, I hadn’t looked at it in a while. It might have been MacMahon’s sentimental, or just accurate, view of himself, but it was done in robust, unafraid oils and framed in plain varnished oak. With, I noticed now – and couldn’t recall noticing before – a pipe perched high on the edge of the bookcase behind him. A reformed smoker, the habit placed in view but out of easy reach? There was a
hint of humour in the eyes, a jawline that could firm up if it needed to.
“He looks like an interesting man,” I said.
“Mr. MacMahon?” Hans looked up with unabashed reverence. “He was a grand old gentleman. Not like this crew,” he added, but with a sharp glance that pre-empted any elaboration of this by me. Though bound to the past, Hans actually thought quite highly of Walter, and anyway, wouldn’t brook any very expanded criticism of an employer. There were times when I drew a line from Hans’s habit of servility straight through to Nuremberg, before I remembered to allow for an immigrant’s gratitude. He’d come here a few years after the war, a teenager from a bombed-flat country. Josh MacMahon had given him his first, and still his only, job in Canada.
“Is it true he and Casson used to ski down Main Street to sketch?” I asked.
I knew it was, but it was a story Hans loved to tell.
