by Mike Barnes
“What did you think of the Führer’s latest tirade?” I heard from behind me, and was glad for once for the new tangent. “Sometimes I honestly do believe the man’s a psychopath.”
It had been a vintage performance, even by Hans’s standards. But say one thing for Robert: he could take a chewing-out, possibly because – as always – he didn’t pay close attention to the details. This time the reaming had been over his laxness in letting CHOP entrants troop down to the basement, and even through the security doors, because of the congestion their numbers were creating upstairs. Setting up this drop-off overflow in the jumble. Robert defended himself feebly with recent examples of security breaches by Administration – Barbara’s multiple flower deliveries for the Spring Fling, for one – but this only incensed Hans more. Robert himself incensed Hans, his dabbling and his pretensions, but it was more that he reminded Hans of all the other negligent, pretentious dabblers he had to deal with and couldn’t shout at. Owen and Ted were almost as careless on the panel, but Robert made a much bigger show of enjoying the byplay with the visiting artists. He was a louder and more naïve, a cartoon, version of the meeters and greeters upstairs. Hans fell to barking curses, Robert to bleated polysyllables. And neither recalled the real source of the chaos. It was Mother’s Day, and asinine scheduling had combined the CHOP drop-off with a screening of “The Sound of Music” in the MacMahon Gallery and a docent-led paint-Mom-a-picture session in the lounge. Kids playing tag on the beige carpets, hide-and-seek behind panels and under stairs. CHOP hopefuls wandering around with their darlings clutched to their chests. The gallery was a circus and a funhouse and a big soft gym. The Tom Thomson could have walked out the door by itself without anyone noticing.
While Hans was taking it out on Robert, Walter and Neale came down in the elevator. They seemed to be sharing a joke, smiling anyway. “We-ell now, gentleman,” Walter said. “What’s all the ruckus about? And who’s minding the store while we’re at it?”
Neale, still smiling faintly, stood behind Walter while he took the depositions and smoothed things out. They seemed to be getting along better these days. Hardly buddies, but something had been ironed out or set aside. Which was odd considering the ever-more-apparent failure of the surrealist show over the last four weeks. After a spurt of initial interest, the citizens were ignoring it. We hadn’t had to open the second box of Neale’s catalogues, and often the last work of the day, as we were checking the galleries before close-up, was to return the discarded ones, those not torn or crumpled, to the sculpture pedestal. And the Comments book was strangely blank. Other shows had garnered abusive feedback, notably “Ordeal”, in which a local performance artist had let hot wax drip onto her bare navel area, until finally one of the horrified onlookers had realized that it was possible to interact and intervene, that that was the point. But the surrealists seemed to generate a nothingness, a void that precluded articulation. Perhaps big names and bafflement had cancelled out in indifference.
When the smoothing was complete and seemed to have taken, Neale said to Walter as they were leaving, “Same population base as Ottawa.”
It was another of the entre nous, or statue, comments, spoken as if the rest of us weren’t there and wouldn’t have understood anyway. But this one wasn’t too hard to decipher. Hamilton was roughly the same size as Ottawa, though the latter, as the nation’s capital, would be entitled to many times more funding. As Neale and Walter would know down to the discrepant, rankling dollar. Which meant, presumably, that the National Gallery could afford a real top-notch integrated security system, rather than our two-tiered one, which funnelled from attendants in cheap suits down to a guy reading I, Robot at the control panel. (Or doodling key signatures, or reading Ubik.) Neale might or might not know about the other gallery’s security arrangements.
Another thing he might know, but could pretend he didn’t, was whether our system had been forced on us financially, or had been chosen by Walter for other reasons entirely.
“I’ll be pleased if it enlarges her dating pool beyond the knuckle-draggers,” Robert said.
I’d just made a move that nudged us toward an endgame. Robert had stared at it, then retreated from the mess on the board back to Claudia’s personal life.
“The patrons?” I said.
“God, no. That might be a step up. The bouncers. A bouncer, lately.” He fondled the top of a pawn, then drew back from it. If I’d insisted on touch play our games would have ended in minutes. “She’s always had a tendency to mate below herself, no pun intended.” With Robert all puns were intended, and probably rehearsed. “You should hear our dear Mother on the subject. Not that Father is a strong case of marrying up.”
“Why, do you think?”
“Father . . . oh, you mean Claudia. Hard to say. Lack of self-esteem, the pop psychs would probably say. And they must be right sometimes. Or maybe she just likes rough trade.”
The last phrase had come from a prized movie or book. You could see it by the way Robert savoured the words, his eyes glinting above the exotic flavor.
“Sis is a little slippery on ethics. Always has been.” He passed his hand over the pieces, like a magician trying to conjure a strategy. The sentence he’d just murmured sounded familiar. Since I tended to tune Robert out, and he forgot what he’d said himself, we often found ourselves in conversations that I couldn’t be sure we hadn’t had before. The same thing happened to us in chess, ten moves into an opening when we realized we’d stumbled into the same morass we’d mucked about in before. But in either case, in words or moves, we felt compelled to play it out.
Tonight, though, for some reason, I felt a greater than usual flicker of interest. Maybe the game was just too bad, an amorphous tangling of troops. Or maybe, like a vampire, I’d become so drained that I needed to let the juices of another life flow into me. In any case, I locked my hands behind my head and leaned back in my chair.
“How so?” I said.
“Well. . . .” And Robert gave me, interrupted by maddeningly languid drags on his cigarette, his portrait of Claudia as a fallen artist. The prize student at OCAD, the favourite of her painting teacher, who gave her straight A+s until she refused to sleep with him, at which point he demoted her to As, which was as low as he could plausibly go. In fourth year she was dating an action painter.
“Like Pollock, you mean?” I’d definitely heard all this before, in outline anyway, and asked questions mainly to claim some minimum of air time.
“‘More muscles, less talent’,” she said, and this was before they broke up.”
Anyway, young Pollock would go dripless at times, and one of these was when his thesis series of paintings was coming due. He went nearly catatonic, seemed to be nearing some kind of breakdown. Claudia did his for him, along with her own of course. She said the challenge wasn’t doing his style but doing them badly enough so no suspicions would be aroused.
“But they were aroused?”
“Suspicions? No. Only André’s, I think, that if Claudia could do a dozen of his ‘Chaos’ series in two nights, then maybe his B- wasn’t a plot by the painting department to destroy an original talent.”
“Then how . . . what happened?”
“Claudia told the truth.”
“She ratted her boyfriend out?”
“No more than she ratted herself out. And he wasn’t her boyfriend by then. She’d caught him with someone else. ‘A Pre-Raphaelite with her mouth full’ – you’d have to see her tell it. Quite obscene, but also quite comical.”
“So they kicked her out?”
“They kicked him out. He made a ‘suicidal gesture’” – Robert stroked himself on one wrist then the other – “but that didn’t change anything. With the college or Claudia. Her they gave the option of repeating fourth year.”
“What’d she say?”
“She says she said, ‘Two times zero would still be zero.’”
“And then she quit?”
“One month before graduation. I told yo
u she had a temper. Mom calls it a talent for self-sabotage.”
“And moved here?”
“Not right away. For a year and a half she was making decent money doing faux finishing.” This part I remembered well – it made me think of the cosy life in our Administration, though on a headier scale – so I resumed looking for a way to terminate the game. Faux finishing was a lucrative decoration business – lucrative to the business owners, not to the young painters they hired – painting scenes and reproductions on Forest Hill or Rosedale bathrooms, kitchens, dining rooms. A repro of a Roman bath painting on the wall next to the jacuzzi – done to simulate fresco but just acrylic over latex primer. A Claude Lorrain-ish landscape in the stockbroker’s oak-panelled study. Often the matrons would pick them out of a Jansen History of Art, pointing with a lacquered nail “That one” or “That one would go.”
“Then one day she just walked off the job. When you can get her to talk about it, which isn’t often, she says Toronto taught her all she needs to know about contemporary painting. OCAD, André, faux finishing” – she’ll rhyme them off on her fingers – “‘Three strikes and I’m out.’”
“Do you think she’s really given up?”
Robert gave no sign of having heard me. He had his head down and was adjusting his cuff links, perhaps in case his Burns supervisor dropped in. “Did I mention André got his own show at a Queen Street gallery?” he said around his cigarette, white smoke rising around his face, veiling it from me.
“So, she’s given up?” I said a few minutes later, then remembered that I’d asked it already. Christ, I was getting as bad as Robert.
“Well, she paints all the time. Obsessively, I’d say. And she is entering CHOP, if that counts.”
“Angela would say it does.”
“Oh, sorry.” With a Peter Lorre glance of remorse.
Leaving us both – or me at least – to wonder at the difference between giving up and giving up painting. Giving up what, then?
“Do you think it was a case of Hammer-itis?”
Robert knew what I meant. He hadn’t grown up here, but you didn’t have to live here long to learn the city’s nickname, Hammer. And to observe the tendency of Hammerites – Hammeroids, we also called ourselves – to imagine we were outclassed by Toronto, and then to make it true. Robert appeared to consider it judiciously. Where his sister was concerned, he seemed to gain a bit in focus and attention.
“No,” he puffed, “not in her case. Not exactly. I mean, it’s true she’s got a nasty temper, and half the time it gets directed at herself. Why, I don’t really know. But not about her art. She honestly believes she’s better than anyone she met at art school – which, entre nous, I think is a very moot point.”
“Well then, entre nous” – Robert grinned yellowly at my imitation – “what’s the problem?”
He was flitting now, fooling with his cigarette package and lighter. “She once said she had to decide how she was superior,” he muttered, not even listening to himself, clicking the Ronson top open and shut, “and then what to do about it.” The edge of his thumb caught the flint wheel, and he started at the spurt of blue flame. “Personally, I think she’s more than a little depressed.”
“En prise,” I said. Finally working in a knight to fork his rook and queen, though at a side risk to myself that I trusted Robert wouldn’t see. I was a terrible player too, it was pathetic how long this was taking me.
Robert leaned over close to the board and stared at it intently for about twenty seconds, giving every impression of actually thinking about it, then said, “Einstein said he owed all of his most important insights to his thought experiments.”
“Did he?” There was a thought experiment awaiting us on the board, but it was an unpleasant one.
“He said relativity occurred to him when he imagined the streetcar he was riding on travelling at the speed of light.”
“There must’ve been a little more to it than that.”
“Indeed.” Robert mashed out his half-smoked cigarette and began the ritual retrieval and lighting of another. Thumbing the old gold Ronson. Settling into it. Settling down. “But one can’t underestimate the genesis of an idea. The seed.”
“Okay. What do you want to sprout?”
“Your go.”
The chess game was over, though officially it might drag on forever.
“I still like the idea of ripping off the gallery,” I said. It was painful, almost physically so, to think how far our brand of thought experiment diverged from Einstein’s.
Robert puffed: Randy Quaid miscast in “Thief”. “And you still think security’s no obstacle?”
“Please. Didn’t you hear Hans?”
He grinned. “My ears are still ringing.”
“Well then. All of these security measures – such as they are – are designed to prevent an outside job. There’s nothing to stop someone inside from walking out with anything they want.”
“Yes, but it would be obvious who had taken it.” Robert tilted his head and then made one of those comments he made from time to time, which, even if it elaborated a point that didn’t need it, reminded you that he had a sharp mind and might yet get down to using it. He was twenty-two; there was time. “Suspicion is like a funnel,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how many possibilities you stuff in the top, only a couple will fit through the hole at the bottom.”
“Exactly. So that’s why you do it on a Sunday. 5:05, right after closing. That gives you until Tuesday morning until anyone notices. If you pick one on the far side of a panel, and depending on who’s on the floor, maybe Tuesday afternoon. Even Wednesday. By then you’re in Buenos Aries. Or Bangkok, under Cleo Carlsson’s younger sister.”
“Christ!”
“Ah. But remember?” He didn’t. Buenos Aries, or the sister, had blotted it out. “Stealing a painting is nothing. Selling it is everything. We don’t know anyone in Buenos Aries. We don’t even know anyone in Toronto.”
“There must be ways to be introduced.”
The difficulties of this, because imponderable, did not distract us long. We got back to where we’d been the other night. Just the raw, red-boned act of walking out. The sheer buzz of that.
“Ernst’s chess set?”
“I’ll do my own whittling, thanks.”
“What, then?”
I thought about it. “The Klee or the Miro. They’re small pictures, big names. Presumably very valuable. Both underlined in Bud’s memo.”
“And you like them? This should be a crime of passion too.”
“Yeah, I do. Very much.”
We went on in this way a bit longer. Bypassing the hassles of getting the money to the various ways of spending it. Drawing it out pleasurably. The old lottery-win fantasy. The Bangkok girls, or their equivalents, figured largely in all versions. Robert did a nice variation where Cleo Carlsson absconded from her husband, ditching him for the bigger catch of Robert on a beach in Maui. Bringing with her a few hundred thousand dollars of hubby’s spare change. Before I left, Robert fished in his trench coat pocket and brought out yesterday’s chess problem from the Toronto Star. In lieu of the checkmate he actually owed me. “Try this. It’s got me stumped,” he said. It might have been his way of resigning.
6
At home I got a beer from the fridge. It was the one constant in the round of Sunday night diversions. Chess, music, reading, walks. Sometimes a spin around the TV offerings, looking for a documentary or an old movie. I sat in our plaid armchair by the window facing the back, the glass grazed and curtained by a shaggy old maple. Spring had been slower, cooler this year. Some of the leaves were still emerging from buds, tight scrolls, the new green glowing even as the long dusk deepened toward black. I imagined Angela painting one of the seasonal still lifes her teacher artfully arranged, perhaps some of these sticky, budding twigs in a cluster of mature leaves, all in the weathered wooden vase he liked, scatterings in front of it. Or perhaps tonight was a night off in celebration of the CHO
P show. Angela wouldn’t have been the only student to enter. Leave the canvas blissfully blank for once. Get an early start on the “sob session” that followed each lesson at a nearby pub. “Misery loves company,” Angela had said, amazed at first by the self-doubt and self-pity and rivalry and envious gossip that were the artist’s lot – though it was exactly as I remembered it. Away from the pick and amp – or brush and easel – the demons started nattering. Still, she always took the last bus home, and arrived seeming buoyant, more optimistic. That too was familiar. The long bitching over jugs of draft ending in hugs and apologies, renewed pledges. Ready for another go. It was a matter of infinite hope. Though time itself exposed how few had even a portion of that.
I dug in the pile of tapes on the floor, searching for the last one Robert had given me. Put his music on while I tackled his chess problem. My fingers found “The Planets” by Gustav Holst. Like the Schoenberg and Monk and Indian ragas, it was part of Robert’s campaign to give me a “more thorough grounding” in music. Thorough, like disciplined, was vintage Robert. Grounding even more so. Sometimes he did make me smile. At fleeting moments I recognized him as one of a fragile coalition of amusements I was distracting myself with, diversions that, taken singly or for long, would have been intolerable, but that taken together, in rapid succession, got me through my days. Slid it in.
