by Mike Barnes
Those blue suits looked anonymous to me – more upscale versions of the Sears job I was wearing – but I’d got a lesson in their power one day. It was during my six-month tour of the city during the recession of 1980. Over 200 applications to factories and offices and stores, taking me from the industrial zones in the east to the struggling downtown core and out to McMaster in the west end. Applying at first to jobs that looked decent, then to anything that advertised, and finally to many that didn’t, just hopeless walk-ins off the street. No bites. About five interviews. For the first of these – already about a month in – I wore the grey suit I’d had since high school graduation. For luck, I splurged on a big breakfast in the Sunshine Restaurant. The Chile Dogs used to drink coffees in a corner booth there, arguing over the slurred or screamed lyrics we had transcribed from tapes, debating whether a G chord was really a G7 and if so could we still get away with the G which was easier. And on this morning a waitress I knew brought me a menu and said, “Good morning, sir.” Sir? I thought she was joking and rode with it, chatting her up, mistaking the flirtatious twinkle in her eye for a prank, a send-up. But “There you go, sir,” she said when she brought the food, making extra trips to fetch ketchup and jam, fussily clearing other tables nearby. It was no joke, or not the kind I’d thought. The suit had sold her. Finally I got into a mass hiring for a new mall at the ass-end of the mountain, acres of parking lot around a giant concrete box, right on the southern outskirts, nothing but fields with signs announcing future subdivisions surrounding it. Clerks were needed for every store; the one I drew was a clock outlet. Whenever time in the gallery became an IV-drip about to stop, and I thought that no seconds could be more excruciating, I remembered my month in the Clock Gallery. Trying to look busy without a customer in sight, while clocks on the wall told you how that minute stood in Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, Vancouver, Honolulu. Bud had found my application floating in the files he inherited. His first question, when he phoned me at work, was, “Can you talk?” I was interested that it would occur to him that I couldn’t. It seemed a mark of sophistication. An art gallery.
But I didn’t remember that time as all bad. Far from it. I’d lost The Chile Dogs, we’d given up, but I’d found Angela. Watching “Thief” at The Broadway, James Caan drilling slowly into vaults to steal jewels over a brooding Tangerine Dream soundtrack, then strolling back to the apartment to get stoned and have sex until four a.m. – that wasn’t a bad life, no matter what the papers told me.
And in fact, comparing it with our present routine, it seemed idyllic. We still tried to keep a kernel of the old days alive. Saturday night was still our night (when it wasn’t the gallery’s, every six weeks or so) – and watching Elwy Yost over takeout Chinese could be fun, certainly comfortable, though it did feel a little settled for 29. Sex flared up sometimes like a fanned ember, but more often it was dwindling into cuddles and snuggling – which sometimes felt just fine, and sometimes like we were turning each other into small furry animals at a petting zoo. Sometimes these long hugs necessitated a short trip to the bathroom after Angela had fallen asleep, but increasingly not. Angela wasn’t the wild-eyed groupie who had dogged me at my gigs, proffering her pot like she didn’t know what else to give – but then I wasn’t the guy who had croaked out “I Wanna Be Sedated”, either. Be careful what you wish for. Unless you really are Joey Ramone.
Apart from Saturday, Angela and I spent most evenings of the week in different places, doing different things. Recently I’d been directing my energies into chess, learning some openings and endgames, visiting the chess club at the YWCA on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Angela was taking a painting course on Sunday at the Dundas Valley School of Art. Tuesdays and Thursdays she studied Art History at McMaster. She was moving deeper into art just as I was quitting it for good. She was clawing her way towards something from the inside, like a chick trying to peck free of its shell . . . while I was drifting, untethered, away from it all.
The positive spin Angela put on our diverging lives was that we were branching out, finding ourselves in different directions. Though she wished I would study something at a school; that was necessary somehow. At times I was persuaded by the notion of “parallel play” that she’d brought home from one of her courses. A sociology intro, before the program became all-art. “It’s what toddlers do at a certain stage. Playing alongside each other at different games.” And – ignoring the advisability of using toddlers as our model – I thought we could stay together – which was all I wanted to do, deep down – as long as we kept doing that. I’d even worked up a theory to go along with it, that most couples fell apart because they were too much in each other’s faces. Trying to make one person where two should exist. Whereas we were keeping it sane.
At the corner of Herkimer I turned left. We lived at the eastern, still-shabby end of a row of four attached Edwardian-era buildings. All three-storied and narrow, all containing four apartments including the basement. Recently the landlord had slid our eviction notice under the door. He regretted, etc., but with the “extensive renovations” he had planned, no one would be able to occupy the building until he was finished. He had city permits if we needed to see them. It wasn’t a surprise. For the past two years he’d been working his way along the line of buildings and now he’d got to us. We still had two more months – June 30 was our exit. He said we’d be welcomed back as “preferred tenants”, but there was no question of us paying the extra $200/month he would be asking for his baseboard trim and carpeting on the stairs. We hadn’t even bothered to discuss it. Nor had we started looking for another place.
Coming up the worn stairs to our rooms at the top, I heard the faint sounds of music coming from behind our door. “Avalon” again. I imagined Angela asleep already, and thought that tonight that might mean a stop-off at the bathroom before bed. She had a maddeningly sexy habit of smoking up and falling asleep with her music on – naked, her arms and legs splayed. Like Dali’s staked-out nude, though usually face-down.
When I opened the door, though, I saw candles flickering from the bedroom down the short hall. She was sitting up in bed in her housecoat, her back against the wall, feet tucked under her. A bottle of wine was opened on the bedside table, two glasses.
“How’d you know I’d be back so early?”
“I was willing to wait.” Her shyly wicked smile.
I loved it when she surprised me. I craved it. She’d been working at a collection agency when we met, and one day, picking her up unexpectedly, I’d come up the stairs to a torrent of screamed abuse, someone’s vocal cords ripped raw by the threats she was shrieking at the deadbeat on the line. The screamer was no one I knew or wanted to know, but it turned out to be Angela. She’d gone scarlet in embarrassment, then later had downplayed it as a “persona”, an ugliness the job forced her to put on like a fright mask. But I’d found it weirdly exciting, as well as a bit appalling – this rage she could find or pretend to find. The job made her miserable, she said – it wasn’t who she was – and she cried with relief when she got the receptionist’s job at the gallery.
I stepped out of the Sears rags and joined her on the bed. She poured the wine and we kissed.
“To the Gala Preview,” I said.
“No, fuck that,” she said harshly. “To us.” By her slightly muddied voice, I gathered she’d started ahead on something. We clinked glasses.
“Do you want to do a line?” she said.
“We have some?”
“Just a bit. Ramon gave me some extra.”
“Tonight?”
“What’d you think all those people were going upstairs for?”
“I didn’t notice them. I mean I saw people get on the elevator. But.”
“Seriously.”
“I am. I didn’t notice.”
She smiled and shook her head. It was a quietly intense pleasure – another calm before the storm – to watch her prepare the coke on her makeup mirror, emptying it carefully from Ramon’s foil packet and dicing it with
her razor blade. Back and forth, finer and finer. My features when I bent over the mirror appeared terribly enlarged, flickering in the candlelight like Zeus looming from a cloud. Soon after the soft explosions happened in my head, we were naked and fucking wildly. A brief interruption to replace Roxy Music with “Exile on Main Street”, cranked up a notch. Angela and I liked things noisy and semi-rough: tastes better suited to a detached home than to apartment living. Then back to hypertrophic forms in my hands, on my chest and lap, bobbling and shimmering over my face, pillowing up at me like giant white mushrooms off the sheets.
For a while we lay without speaking. Touching each other gently as the buzz dissipated. “You looked good out on the dance floor tonight,” I said.
She turned toward me. “Once you rescued me from old tightass. My hero. Christ, what a nerd.”
She had to be talking about Jason. Robert might well qualify as a nerd, but there was nothing tight about him. He was more like a spill of loose parts. But why were we talking about the gallery again? And then I remembered that I’d brought it up.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure he’s absorbed a certain amount of gallery snobbery. It runs through the air in that place. But under it he’s a decent guy. There are worse crimes than dullness.”
“Name one.”
For a moment before I thought of an answer, it struck me as curious that our talks had taken a sudden turn south just when we’d started working at the same place. On almost everything concerned with the gallery we had opposite viewpoints. On the paintings, the running of the place, especially the people. Like this little matter of Jason, who wasn’t worth talking about, but since we were, whose annoying habits were far outweighed by the fact that he was probably the best, certainly the most solid and reliable, person in Administration. Stuck in a lower echelon, naturally.
“Your ass,” I said. “It’s a crime against my sanity.”
“Even when it sits on your face?”
“Especially then.”
That started, and partly scripted, a better interlude. After Angela fell asleep, I looked around the room in the dark. Not really dark. Just city dark. Deep dusk, lit by pale fuzzy blooms from the street lights below. The rays looked like milkweed filaments, fraying as they drifted into the room. Angela’s pictures on the wall: landscapes and still lifes she was labouring to make less muddy. Now, in the dusk, mostly bunched dark masses. Composed with careful balance, forms set off against one another. No guitar in the corner. Sold on the clean break theory after the last spasm of The Dogs’ dissolution. The right move.
The hole I’d punched recently in the closet door had pale ragged edges around a black centre, blond wood fibres tearing through coats of varnish. The causes of the argument already obscure as it was happening, it had escalated so quickly into something all-inclusive and consuming. When Angela used to say I had a bad temper, she smiled sometimes, not seeming to think it was an entirely bad thing. “It helped you to play a mean guitar,” she’d pointed out, during the endless post mortem of The Chile Dogs’ failure. And of course she had her own inner screamer, though it hadn’t come out in a while. But now anger seemed to be more of a problem. Sometime during the sociology course, bad temper had been filed under “anger management problems”, which had recently been upgraded – or downgraded – to “rage issues”. She referred to the hole in the closet door, often by inclining her head at it, as a symptom. Which I thought was naïve. The splintery crater fell well within, or just within, the normal parameters of male expression. Even considered as a mistake, a blurted aberration, it belonged in the total vocabulary. It was a hiccup, really.
II
CHOP
5
Your move,” Robert said. It was a Sunday, and we were sitting over a chessboard in the basement a couple of hours after everyone else had gone home. Little screens set in the panel beside us showed black and white, slowly changing views of the gallery, inside and out. Neither of us paid any attention to them, except for when the motion detector alarm in one gallery started blinking green, for reasons no one had been able to discover yet. Someone was supposed to be looking into it. Robert glared at the red Reset button, then pushed it.
“Whose move is it exactly?” he said. And then: “Did Angela get her picture in?”
“Mine,” I said. “And yes, I think so. I was on the floor.”
I pushed a pawn into a congested area, and Robert lit another cigarette. He stared at the menace, or more confusion, I had created, looking worried and then pleased. Pleased to be worried, perhaps. “Well, wish her luck for me. If the judges develop a sudden attack of integrity, she won’t need it.” Absolved from the difficulty on the board by this courtly sentiment, he raised his head and blew a pretty good smoke ring. We watched it wobble, a raggedly dissolving O.
Because of Robert’s sloppy play, the result of incurable inattention, I had developed a lazy general strategy against him: after the opening, introduce a lot of complications in the middle game, knowing that he couldn’t or wouldn’t bother to untangle them. My own game suffered – according to the YWCA’s resident master, a distempered Karl Marx look-a-like from Croatia – from being “too quiet. Just react. Some good moves, sure. Little fork, pin. Never BOOM BOOM!” Which was an odd handicap considering the rage issues Angela said I had. But it was true that Robert’s and my games usually followed the same pattern: sharp beginnings, followed by increasingly muddy and blundering middles, then long dawdling endgames, in which he didn’t know enough to resign and I didn’t know enough to checkmate him. The games we bothered to finish, I invariably won. But winning palled after a while when the contest wasn’t hard-fought.
“Did you see Claudia’s entry?” he said.
“No. Not yet. Like I say, I was on the floor.”
“It’s quite interesting actually. Undisciplined, still. But definitely an advance. Something more than the usual – what should I call it? Sterile facility? Something approaching a style of her own. A pin-step in that direction, at least.”
Undisciplined. What did that mean coming from Robert? But his critique was not as harsh as it sounded. When he spoke of his older sister, as he often did, you heard real fondness and concern for her in his voice. If you knew what to listen for, at least. She got the exasperated criticism Robert reserved for those he considered fellow artists. Colleagues and rivals, whose delays in development he was duty-bound to deplore. Whereas other women, like Angela, got the courtly best wishes, even a slight forward inclination from the waist when he met them.
“She got fired, you know.”
“No, you didn’t say. From The Tulips?”
“Yes. Apparently she has no ass.”
“Hello?”
“That’s her version anyway. Well, as a brother I wouldn’t want to comment extensively, but it’s true we’re a family of ectomorphs. Even the females, I’m afraid. Apparently Mr. Piccone kept insisting on skimpier and skimpier costumes, even for the bartenders. I guess the naked flesh on stage isn’t enough; sometimes you have to turn away to get your drink.” Robert grinned, then stubbed out his cigarette and began the elegant business of lighting another with his old gold Ronson. He smoked with elaborate ease, puffing and blowing sensuously, but not quite seeming to inhale and seldom finishing a cigarette.
“It’s still your move. So she drew the line?”
“Well, yes and no. It wasn’t a question of principle. She made that point rather aggressively to me. She had no feminist scruples, or even a moral objection. ‘I have no ass.’ The lady’s own words. Followed by ocular proof – clothed, at least. To her brother.”
I had no mental picture of her. Robert had said she came into the gallery sometimes to sketch, but if we’d met I didn’t remember it. “So, is she looking?”
“At her canvases. She seems to be suffering from the delusion that we will find our rent there. Until she recovers, I’m afraid we’re subsisting on the largesse of Burns. Ah!”
With a quick pounce down at the board.
&
nbsp; During the convoluted mid-game, it frequently became necessary for Robert to leave the board in a physical sense. He was over by the rows of CHOP paintings that were leaned against the centre jumble. Head down, puffing importantly, he pulled each work toward him and briefly considered the next, like someone riffling through a card catalogue, glancing for a masterpiece that would not be found. Every year the city’s main radio station – C.H.O.P. – hosted a juried exhibition for local artists, for which the gallery donated the smaller Teale Gallery for three weeks and awarded prizes at the end. It was poignant to see “Smokestacks by Sunrise”, in its neatly tacked pine frame, leaning against a huge yellow crate stencilled in black KLEE, with a red-stamped packing slip in a plastic sleeve from the gallery in Lucerne. Or “Bruce Trail Splendour” tucked in under PICABIA, like the mushroom at the bottom of the tree in the awkward watercolour. MASSON managing with one word to shout down the busily-painted “Main Street West”.
The poignancy wasn’t helped – was just made worse – when I looked back at the ash-stained confusion on the board. Robert’s voluminous briefcase beside it, left gaping in the hope of tempting someone to pry among its paper scraps: fragments of symphonies, poems, novels, “aperçus” – unless his minuscule chicken scratches clarified into musical notes and rests, it was hard to identify the genre or even the art form he was working in. How was it, even allowing for all the weird arcs and tricks of art, that there were still people who you knew at a glance could never accomplish anything serious, not even if they were glued to a chair for a hundred years? Robert was a moth flitting along a string of patio lights. And there was another reason he got to me. Some difference between us. A crucial difference, but also one that united, and which led straight down that road to poignancy . . . or was it just self-pity? It was the difference between a wannabe and a has-been. They can look the same – at times, in certain lights – but the differences between them are unbridgeable. Like the differences between two women talking about babies: one a girl who assumes she’ll have many (though she may in fact be sterile), the other a woman who after a series of miscarriages and stillbirths has had her uterus removed. The obsession they share can obscure the fact that they are staring at it from opposite sides of a canyon.
