Catalogue Raisonne

by Mike Barnes

3

  And on a personal note,” Walter concluded his short speech, “I’d like to thank Neale on behalf of all of us for bringing this milestone exhibition to grace our gallery.”

  The burst of applause was heartier than it needed to be, perhaps signifying a group effort to dispel the torpor induced by the mayor’s long, droning, often ignorant and at times nonsensical, introduction. His Worship actually wore his chain of office in public, especially to functions like this, like a portly ham actor at an audition for the part of Cardinal Wolsey. Laughter was not always kept in check until he had moved a decent few steps away. His “addressed remarks” had included a congratulatory telegram from the Lieutenant-Governor, sadly unable to attend, but wishing “every success and a long run,” perhaps confusing the show with a play.

  “Throughout the long months of its careful preparation,” Walter went on, somewhat confusingly since he seemed to have finished already, “he has shown nothing but the most scrupulous dedication to his project, meticulous attention to the smallest details, the diligence of a true scholar, and, er, unwavering persistence in the face of, er, philistinism. Neale?”

  The laughter, still mayorally enhanced, at Walter’s philistine jibe and the artful “er”s that framed it, subsided slowly as Neale rose. He was frowning faintly. He walked lopingly to the lectern and stood for a few moments in silence, towering and swaying slightly, blinking from behind round wire-framed glasses, as if trying to bring the people below him into focus. They, seventy-five of them or so, held their plastic wine glasses and peered back at him, trying to do the same.

  Start with the clothes. Whereas Walter had worn another well-calibrated black suit, cut sharply enough to distinguish him from the businessmen without quite alienating them, Neale was dressed, not badly, but confusingly. A scuffed but expensive-looking brown leather jacket over a fawn turtleneck sweater; dark brown cords; blond shiny cowboy boots, also leather, that elevated him up near the six and a half foot mark. It might have been a Toronto look, though it didn’t really seem to be. Yet Toronto was assumed to come into it somehow. Of all the “statements” Neale made, or was suspected of making, the one clear and agreed-on one was that, although he’d only been an assistant curator at the AGO, still he was somehow slumming here. Address had something to do with this. Preferring to avoid rush hour traffic, he rented a top suite (rumoured to be mostly unfurnished) in the Bay 200 tower, but late every Friday night, at the end of his five-day exile, he returned to the Big Smoke. Bud lived in Toronto too, but he took the Go bus in each morning, which was somehow more excusable. Walter, on the other hand, lived in one of the posh nestled lanes below the escarpment, an old house sprucely landscaped, with the artistic license of “ground cover” instead of lawn. Barbara, just as impeccably, lived with her professor husband in a Tudor-style home in Westdale near the university.

  Neale also gave the impression that he’d never lifted anything heavier than a martini glass. Never a winning impression in a steeltown. Not even in its art gallery. Even Walter managed to avoid it, dropping occasional mentions of his “mining days” in the summer while at university.

  Before the mutual inspection got too far into the prickly stage, Neale gripped both sides of the lectern, and raising his eyes to a spot near the top of the closed curtains in the lounge, said, “Surrealism is not a new means of expression, or an easier one. It is a means of total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it.” After a pause to let this sink in, he added, darting a piercing look downwards, “Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes, Declaration of January 27, 1925.”

  This bad beginning did not lead, as it should have been bound to, to a better middle. It got, rather incredibly, worse. Other quotations followed the first, but even more esoteric and disjointed, without segues or explanatory stitching. The ending, after some perfunctory thanks to the gallery and its sponsors, marked the nadir:

  “But now” – eyes swooping down above a chilly smile that might have been a parody, or only an awkward simulation, of friendliness – “Now, I wouldn’t dream of detaining you for one instant longer from enjoying the splendid show that awaits you.”

  The pattering of scattered clapping was very similar to, just a little louder than, the pattering of the gentle April rain that had awakened me that morning.

  Luckily, Barbara was up last. As imperious as she could be, as imperious as she was, she was also very popular. As someone whose “hobby job” (officially three-quarters time, summers off, but she had more reasons than anybody to be out of the gallery) was recruiting volunteers and donors, she had to be. Also, it was hard to resent, or keep resenting anyway, someone so beautiful. Honey blonde hair, not obviously tinted, contrasted well with an Aruba-Muskoka all-year tan; like the contrast between her semi-sheer white blouse, unbuttoned halfway, and her tight black skirt slit teasingly at the knees. Or – when the light or her movements brought them out – the brown-white-brown globes swinging loose within the blouse. All these contrasts, especially the latter one, had immobilized the six attendants, ranged around the perimeter of the lounge, to statues fitting Sean’s fantasy of us as installation pieces. Sean, stationed at the door for his getaway after the speeches, was no exception. Neither was I.

  “Whoa, some party! Some night!” Barbara began breathlessly, with a shivery toss of her hair. A ragged cheer went up, like the recovery after the mayor’s bomb. Barbara took this little material and worked with it, smiling and swaying with enthusiasm about the show and the turn-out and the expected crowds, and . . . . After just enough of this, she switched keys and began thanking “all the people, too many to name so I apologize to whoever I’m leaving out, who made the show possible.” But then she actually did manage to name them all, at least all that I could think of. “Walter, of course, first and foremost; Bud, for being everybody’s right – and left – hand man; Peter and Jason, for their usual meticulous work; dear Angela, for putting up with all of us – ”

  That embarrassed feeling again, the one twinned with guilt, when I caught Angela’s naked look of gratitude. No one but me could guess the number of times “that woman” had driven her to tears with insatiable and often petty demands, all last-minute and top-priority.

  “ – and of course, my God, our dear demented, utterly inspired author of this enchanted evening. Let’s hear it for him.”

  And Neale, looking more glum than demented, actually brightened, grinning crookedly into the applause, real and sustained this time, and into the jouncing activity within the white blouse.

  It was impressive, really, to watch Barbara turn dewy eyes on each person she thanked, finding them in the crowd with a smile. Watching her, I realized there was no way to distinguish the genuine from the artificial in a true “people person”. That was what being a people person meant. Statements to the contrary, by cynics such as Sean, by myself sometimes, amounted to a kind of bitter faith, the adolescent’s creed that sincerity cannot be faked.

  That would have been a good place to end. From a dramatic, if not a human, point of view. But Barbara did not neglect, though she kept it short, to pay tribute to “Hans and Ramon and the other attendants, who keep us safe and help in a thousand ways. And to my volunteers, true ‘angels of the arts’ – a phrase you hear bandied about, but absolutely and precisely true in this instance — I don’t know how you . . . I just have to marvel every day . . . at your devotion, your energy. . . .” Looking about the room as she seemed about to lose it, seeking the faces of various well-dressed women, she seemed to transfer her desperate feeling from her eyes into theirs, which filled and in some cases overflowed. “Thank you for your love of art,” she said softly.

  The tumult of noise that followed this was like the chaotic expression of primal energies that have been called forth, heightened but also artfully contained. Like one of those science diagrams where the molecules have been whipped up like a stirred hive of bees, dotted trails showing where they try to zip out of their canister, bounce off walls and collide with each other, energy direc
ted outward but really feeding on itself.

  The opening went back to what it had been before the speeches. A sort of cocktail party, with the guests drifting between the lounge and the lobby, occasionally wandering out into the gallery itself. The attendants were all on duty and in uniform, the public face of gallery security, but at invitation-only openings like this we were encouraged to mingle. Walter didn’t even mind us with a glass of wine in our hands, as long as it wasn’t overdone. Only one guard was actually stationed in the surrealist show, the only gallery some guests were visiting. Sean, of course, had volunteered. Neale, looking sour again, led a few small groups back on very short tours; then Walter took over, managing to stretch the visits a bit, perhaps with side excursions. But nobody stayed back there very long, and it didn’t detract seriously from the party. After an hour or so, all who wanted to had made their pilgrimage.

  One thing that did detract from the party, and quite seriously after a bit, was Robert’s piano playing. Robert was another of the Burns guards in the basement, an aspiring musician and my regular chess partner, who had offered to play “cocktail piano” before his night shift began at 11. Walter, for some reason, had agreed. A lapse, perhaps. Robert’s playing could be good; I’d heard him let it be in stretches. But tonight it was the more usual mix, a melee of lounge and jazz and pseudo-classical styles. A drunken Dudley Moore imitating Thelonius Monk playing “The Lady is a Tramp”. Dizzyingly bad. Luckily, the conversation was too loud to catch more than selected trills and chord stomps. The artfully placed single notes, the pianist bending low, hanks of hair grazing the keys Glenn Gouldishly, went unnoticed. Drowned by other sounds.

  The trouble was plain already when Robert made his windy entrace, black bow tie worn askew over his usual white shirt and shapeless black pants, the unruly hair swept back with water, wild curls escaping. He had to have been thinking of the young Gould, as he’d appeared on the cover of “The Goldberg Variations”. Robert always tried to make a splash, but after people got used to his eccentricities, they went largely unnoticed. The long black trench coat (in season now, but also worn in January and July), its belt ends dangling, flapping at his gangly, big-boned frame; the cavernous scuffed brown briefcase with brass clasps and lock, from which he was never separated and which he claimed contained the symphony he was working on – it definitely contained hundreds of scraps of paper, some of which had staff lines and musical notes on them.

  The beautiful and the bright, the businessmen and professors and media journalists whom Barbara had squeezed funds or cachet or coverage out of, parted to let the artist take his seat.

  And then the playing began. First, a violently syncopated jazz that sounded a bit like the Thelonius Monk tape he’d lent me, but a Thelonius Monk mixing steroids and uppers . . . then lush chords, all chords – again, he’d spoken approvingly of Brahms’s “impossibly lush orchestrations,” and perhaps was trying to convey that impossibility by means of a piano.

  The first people moved upstairs.

  Others, less musical or more curious, moved closer. Could he play this tune? they asked. Robert inclined his head soberly at the request, oblivious to the possibility that they meant could in its ruder sense. And for five minutes or so he played pieces of show tunes and pop songs, the melodies not entirely disappearing under his embellishments.

  The lobby was about half empty now. Trousers and toned legs in stiletto heels disappearing up the staircase to the lounge.

  Over a murderously striding bass, Robert crooked a finger and beckoned me over. “Why don’t you sit in?”

  “I don’t know the chords,” I said. Or the piano, I was ready to add, but Robert was grinning hugely, imputing irony where there was none. Full lips in a wide mouth, big discolored teeth. One of the reasons I could be honest with Robert was that he was incapable of accepting the simple truth at face value. The more straightforward a remark was, the more outlandish he assumed it to be. It was part of his absolute – though temporary I hoped, for his sake – disconnection from common sense. And, I’ll admit, it’s what allowed Robert to look up to me as something of a mentor. In music as well as chess, though my days with The Chile Dogs were four years behind me, and on some days felt like forty years away. Five years hacking out covers of The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Kinks, The Who, The Stones – calling ourselves, and getting called, a punk band, but really just three guys needing songs that were fast and short, with four chords or less and no guitar solos. The Thursday we finally played Duffy’s Rockpile, one of three local bands replacing the headliners who were snowed in in Buffalo, I had the sense of my fingers just grazing the bottom rung of an immense vertical ladder. I don’t have it, I thought – a weird, perverse spark in the smoke haze of exhilaration. But a spark that grew as the smoke dispersed, enlarging and steadying into an overhead spot that gave a bright, even glare.

  And then there was the way Robert mistook for intellect my magpie memory and habit of figuring things from the sidelines. Which tickled me, when it didn’t make me feel like a fatally flawed fake.

  Angela was watching me from across the now mostly vacated lobby. Smiling and frowning, both faintly. I went over to her.

  “Have you seen the show?” she said. “It’s incredible.”

  “I’ll get plenty of chances.”

  The frown gained, the smile weakened. And I felt shitty again. Why do it? It probably was a good show. It was just that sense again of Angela slipping, traces of the girl I’d first met, with her vial of good hash oil at a Chile Dogs gig, dissolving. Disappearing. Eaten into, eaten away, by the subtle acids of the gallery’s self-importance.

  She kissed me on the cheek. Glancing around first: public kissing a little past wine in Walter’s book. “I love you,” she said. “Ditch that guy and come up where the action is.”

  I looked down into her face. Clear brown eyes, freckled cheeks. Her new hairstyle – bangs and a bob with a saucy flip – was a big improvement over the old yanked-back ponytail. “I love you too.”

  I looked back at Robert: head down, banging away. He probably didn’t need an audience; he certainly didn’t deserve one. I followed Angela up the stairs. It had been one of the pleasantest surprises of my life to discover how much better her plump short body looked out of clothes than in them.

  Ramon was charming a group of the younger society ladies. Hans was telling a story to an older couple. The Carlssons were standing by with fond smiles while a trio of middle-aged women tried to tell their sons apart. “Leo? No, Lars? No!” The disputed objects grinning vacuously. Looking at Mrs. Carlsson, the former Miss Bangkok, and her tall blond, almost white-haired husband, you could trace the origins of the twins’ striking looks: the genes that had combined, softening each other, into neat small bodies, cat-like lifting eyes, and the long noses and square chins offsetting the delicate, faintly amber skin. “Lars has a mole.” “So does Leo!”

  Angela had been absorbed, laughing with her head thrown back, into a group including Barbara and Jason, the gallery registrar. I moved up another short flight of steps, from the rotunda where the speeches had been made, to the upper lounge with the small servery. Volunteers were picking up the trays of canapés, fruits and cheeses, and vegetables and dips, and circulating through the crowd with them. The oldest volunteer, Mrs. Soames, covered with a long yellow smock splotched with wine and water, was feverishly washing dishes at the small sink, her beringed fingers scarlet.

  “Hello, dear!” she called. “Wine’s on the counter.”

  Barbara spoke often of “my volunteers” as if they were one treasured group. But it was a group that had at least three tiers. The oldest, Mrs. Soames and a few others, did most of the cleaning and lugging; they also ran the gift shop and art rental. The youngest and prettiest, who were usually the best-married too, were the stalwarts of the docent program, the most public face of the volunteers, guiding groups through the galleries on educational scripts prepared by Barbara. Mrs. Carlsson was a regular docent. The middle tier was a
bit fuzzier; there were some sliding criteria and functions, and one could move in or out of it, though usually only in a downward direction. Some of this group, for instance, who had catered or served at other functions, were well-dressed guests at this one. Served by colleagues who were slightly more dowdy or older or whose husbands were less successful. Some of the servers wore the shapeless yellow smocks, and some didn’t; though the unsmocked ones had good but not their best dresses on, the ones it wouldn’t be a crime to spill food on. There were gradations.

  “Who’s he?” I asked Ramon when he came up for more wine for the ladies, after watching Walter smoothly engage and then disengage from a heavyset man in a blue pinstriped suit.

  “That guy? That’s Piccone.”

  “Piccone?”

  “Yeah, you know, man. The Tulips.” Ramon winked.

  It was the wink more than the name that made me remember. About a month ago, after another opening, we’d all trooped over after close-up to check out the new strip club. A lot of winking that night. A good night, fun, but at six bucks a beer not one a wage slave could indulge in often.

  “Did that stuff die down?”

  “Stuff, man?”

  “Those hassles, I mean.” I remembered a photo of some picketing, editorials in the Witness. The city had its share of peeler palaces, of course, run-down places on run-down streets, but not a fancy one shouldered into King Street, two blocks from Eaton’s.

  Ramon made a motion, one hand sliding up and over the other, that was a good combination of greased palms and greased wheels.

  “What’s his actual business?” I’d read it, but I couldn’t remember.

  “Buncha different things.”

  “Legitimate?”

  Ramon shrugged, palms up. It was one of those times when he seemed to be working the barrio street mojo a little too hard. I wished I could tell him he didn’t need it.

  “What’s he doing here?” I said.