Catalogue Raisonne

by Mike Barnes

  When the street stayed bare, I hobbled to the centre of the lawn, unzipped, and let it go all over the wooden stake and then the cardboard of the For Sale sign. Which belonged, I saw when I finally opened my eyes, to Piccone Realtors. Construction, I remembered now, was where he had begun.

  7

  It was a mystery to me why I agreed to so much Monday overtime. Except for all-hands-on-deck occasions like the Gala Preview, it was supposed to be strictly voluntary, though Hans’s grimace when you refused could be hard to take. The twist of disgust that aligned for some nasty moments all the seams in his face implied that your “personal reasons” could only be sheer laziness, if not something even more despicable.

  It wasn’t the extra money. Angela and I were getting by, the takings of two wage slaves combining to make about the salary of a low-level office worker, or just below what a first-year teacher might earn, sans benefits or pension of course. And Sean certainly had a point when he said that “time and a half mainly makes one realize how small time is.” It had a nice cryptic ring; he repeated it quite often. Sean had solved the Monday overtime problem in the neatest way, declaring, the first time he was asked, that he wouldn’t dream of being in the gallery any time it wasn’t mandatory, and especially not when he would be kept too distracted to attend to his real labour of composition. This speech, delivered with requisite pomposity, meant that Sean had to endure possibly the worst reaction I’d seen yet in Hans – a gape and shudder, that passed through various grimaces and twitches as if choosing among them, to reach a frozen sneer of disbelief – but he only had to endure it the once. Whereas the rest of us had to shift and mumble, and then capitulate, each time there was a hanging. Or ventilation ducts that needed reaming. Or a luncheon of Barbara’s ladies for which tables needed to be carried.

  Angela might have minded more if she hadn’t developed such a severe case of gallery devotion. The attendants followed a rotating series of mostly split days off – Monday, Tuesday; Monday, Wednesday; Monday, Thursday . . . and so on – so Monday was our only guaranteed day together. Sometimes she became kittenish when the alarm went off – pitting her rubbery nipples and strong thighs against my loyalty to art, or the local chapter of it anyway. Hardly a fair contest. But today she just groaned and rolled over. I’d got to sleep very late – tossing and turning, and then willing, sort of mentally pitching, myself down into coma – and hadn’t even heard her come in.

  Which left me where I found myself too many Monday mornings. Groggily pulling on my jeans and T-shirt – street clothes and whiskers the day’s main privileges – while wondering whether it was a case of simple masochism or a more insidious addiction, some creeping attachment to the gallery that hid itself behind a mask of loathing. Gallery addiction: even the thought was repulsive. Like a soft and private tumor, spongy and non-fatal and too humiliating to name.

  And then I remembered that today – today – I did have a reason to go in.

  Checkpoint. Checkpoint Charlie. First checkpoint, second checkpoint. Roger that. They were phrases from bad movies . . . until they actually meant something. Each person I passed on my way into the gallery was a checkpoint. Getting by each one another optimistic whisper that last night’s outlandish dream would not take a swerve down into nightmare.

  Ted: buzzing me in without a glance up from his Foundation Trilogy paperback. Foundation: good, solid word. Very safe.

  Hans and Ramon detaching CHOP works from the jumble and loading them onto the freight elevator. Lars and Leo nowhere in sight: another positive sign. Less buffoonery, which I was beginning to see new peril in. Their parents forbade much expansion of their part-time hours, apart from high-visibility events like the Gala Preview. Like a lot of self-made men, Mr. Carlsson was insisting that his sons pay a modest entry fee – a token of sweat equity – before inheriting the family firm. He wanted a university or college degree, though was said to be close to settling for high school graduation, which the twins had been wrapping up for a couple of years.

  I took the passenger elevator upstairs. No police. No yellow crime scene tape securing the MacMahon Gallery. No bullet-headed constable leading suspects up to the lounge, commandeered as a temporary interrogation room by the pock-marked inspector so good at sweating people.

  No, I told myself. Comedy is dangerous. Like nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream of the rising diver, making him goofy before they kill him. Stay alert. Last checkpoint the hardest.

  Crossing the main gallery, approaching the “Secrets of the Surrealists”, I felt my stomach tumble and pitch. My legs wanted to slow and I forced them to hurry, the result a kind of stumbling stroll. It was the classic approach to a binary moment – the cheque that may or may not be in the mailbox, the girl who may or may not have shown up to forgive you – and my reaction was classic fight-and-flight. Telling myself the reasons success was assured. Which had pretty much been covered in the three-way with Robert and Claudia last night. Seeing pictures, more detailed and vivid than the reasons, why disaster was imminent. A blank grey panel displaying two nails and a label – a jeu d’esprit no one had happened to discover yet. Rick shaking off his torpor belatedly, or shedding it at exactly the right moment, sprinting after Robert and knocking him flat. But why bother bruising his own shoulder? One good wrench of a bony wrist would do the trick.

  But in that case Robert would have been bleating and pounding on my door two minutes later. If he still could bleat and pound.

  Why didn’t I follow him all the way to the gallery? Five minutes. Or, hell, walk with him? Nothing but the pure animal instinct of self-preservation. I left at the last moment I could still claim it had nothing to do with me. That was only sensible. So why do I feel ashamed?

  The questions and recriminations, agonizing as they are, are actually what carry you through the silent walk, which would be worse without them. The panel loomed up ahead. With a gulp of fright, I rounded it.

  Back.

  Back intact. Last checkpoint passed. “Wayward Guest” hung in its appointed place. I leaned close to it. No dints or scrapes where Robert had whanged it against a wall. The little figure – heartbeat red and hovering pink – was back home again, after a brief floating excursion.

  Relief drained my head and made my knees wobble, as if the mass of me had rushed downward and settled somewhere near the floor. Now – for the first time since that blazing glimpse on the couch – I could afford to savour, just enjoy with a kind of whirling thrill, the contours of Robert’s mad stunt. The mass at my feet transformed, Einsteined into pure energy that rushed back up my spine to flood my vacant head with wild, hilarious ecstasy. Crazy, crazy fucker! Fucking maniacal demented insane . . . fool! Idiot!

  Paintings littered the floor of the smaller Teale Gallery. Leaning against the walls, many partially overlapping their neighbours. Lying down in rows, again with space-saving overlaps, like toppled dominoes. It looked as if someone trying to get a view of several decks of cards had spread them out as much as possible in a large closet, leaving narrow aisles for pin-step walking. Over two hundred works had been submitted to the CHOP show, with space on the walls for maybe fifty to seventy-five. That was the maximum, even throwing out normal rules of spacing, crowding in more panels than the small room should bear, and “double-hanging” over and under a centre line. Hans and Ramon and Peter and Jason and I stood, by necessity, outside the gallery. Hans and Peter wore their carpenter’s belts for hanging, Hans’s with level shot through on an angle like a short sword, Peter just as obviously unarmed. Jason had his clipboard to begin assembling information for the labels. Ramon turned his head to yawn. “The little girls?” I said. He nodded, yawned again. Bud was there at first, but then seemed to realize that there was nothing for him to do, and left to see if there was perhaps something upstairs.

  Inside the gallery, Walter and Neale stepped carefully along the narrow aisles. Showing good balance, arms only occasionally coming up from their sides in slow teetering flaps. It wasn’t clear to me why Neale was her
e. Walter said – though not often, to his credit, and only in front of certain people – that this was his annual “dirty job”. Or, in better moods, “penance for my sins”. Neale’s presence might have been intended as an oblique reminder of those sins, whatever they were. It could just as easily have been a sign of the new companionship that I’d noticed yesterday. Walter had a habit of murmuring to himself as he considered works, from CHOP contenders up to Frank Stella drawings. “Oh,” he’d say. Or, “Oh!” Or – even more ambiguously – “Yes?” Occasionally, with evident relaxation, “Mm hm..that works.” There was no doubt he enjoyed art, but he did not seem to have intense feelings about it. It was an easygoing passion, if there is such a thing. He confessed to a weakness for what he called “naïve stylings” or “folk art”. You stood a better chance of getting into CHOP with a portrait of your cat, even a fairly good one, or a horribly executed picture of any other subject, than you did with an earnest but unexceptional abstract. Walter himself had worked in the AbEx line – “decently enough,” he admitted, skirting false modesty – back in his student days when he’d still painted.

  Neale said nothing, though he looked and nodded sometimes. Soon Walter began choosing the first rejects, and Walter and Neale began handing them out to us. This went faster after there was enough space cleared for us to get in and help. We started ferrying the rejected pictures back to the space cleared for them in the coat check area behind the reception desk. Lobby duty the Tuesday after CHOP selection was an unpleasant task. Listening to the curses and grumbling, or just the silence surmounted by a stricken face. Directing the boldly outraged few upstairs when they demanded to see the boss. I’d wondered if we really curried enough favour with this show to offset the number of patrons we lost permanently.

  Beyond that, I felt a personal tension as I transported each work. Afraid each time to look down and see Angela’s name, always a little too largely claiming responsibility in the lower right corner. (The Dundas Valley teacher strong on “pride of creation”, less so on means of same. A perverse personal opinion, aired only once.) Afraid, but needing to know, I snuck looks at the paintings the others were carrying and depositing. Each time the name was not hers I felt I’d dodged another bullet. Dodging bullets – large and small – definitely the morning’s theme.

  Finally, Walter was done chucking things out. Except for a few question marks, lying in pairs in the centre of the floor, the shortlist was laid out around the perimeter. I was happy for Angela. Happy and proud. She’d be walking on air tonight. And when I found her painting, and stood with a pretense of nonchalance near it, I felt a double shot of pride to realize that it was more than gallery nepotism – which, again to Walter’s credit, would only have carried her a short way. “Bruce Trail Near Dundas” – the title on the entry form taped to the top, along with contact phone number, our phone number – was her best work yet. Less muddy and cluttered – sharper – with more empty spaces and light-shot ones. She’d seen what she wanted and had mostly got it. To my eyes anyway. I had no idea she’d advanced so far. She’d made a leap of some kind, at least with this painting. I couldn’t wait to see her and tell her that.

  Walter and Neale were standing nearby, disagreeing in their repressed way about a painting leaning in front of them. Two people, nude, probably male and female though the room was dusky and they were both slender, sitting on the edge of a bed with their backs to the viewer. Walter called it “the strongest piece . . . the most painterly” – which from what I’d seen, it might well have been. And Neale, while nodding, called it “skilled but facile” – which might also have been just. I wasn’t critic enough to say. But I could catch the subtext to the discussion: neither of them was entirely happy about a local painting that might not be inferior, or recognized by locals as being inferior, to the famous Europeans in the next room. Naturally the unhappiness came more, though not entirely, from Neale’s direction. Payback time peeped out again, momentarily slivering the comradery. After the failure of the surrealist show, his baby, he needed to cast aspersions – some kind, any kind – on this populist annual, Walter’s baby (even if an unwanted and often abused child), a deal cut between him and the community that had shown itself to be largely indifferent to Max Ernst.

  When they moved off, I took a closer look at “Two Figures”. There was a current running between the forms, with their slumped shoulders but stiffly held necks, something fibrous in the air between them . . . something fraught, told in nervous tangling spidery filaments. You couldn’t tell if it was before or after whatever might take place on the bed. I wasn’t really surprised to see the initials CJ tucked deftly into the corner. Curt, like the title. Diffident, or assured; assured enough to be diffident. And poor Robert had got it dead wrong again. No one undisciplined, not in her art anyway, had done this. She was reaching consciously ahead to develop her own style, and from the evidence it looked like she might find it, even if she hadn’t yet, not quite.

  By two we had the room mostly pulled together and broke for a late lunch. A bit more hanging, Jason’s labels, and some standard lighting were all that remained. On a Code 1 excuse, I took another pass by the Klee. The checkpoints didn’t really stop, I saw, at best they just got spaced farther apart. In the basement there was the usual newspaper knot around the panel. Ted and I usually split the Globe neatly; Ted took the Business section and I took everything else. Ted, with only nickels to invest, pored over the stock market figures, scratching out his findings with a pencil with a worn-down eraser: some Asimov-Burnsian avidity to find the formula that makes the world work, which depressed me if I thought about it for very long. Anyone else wrangled over the Witness. It was such a small, easy-reading paper that all sections could be covered in the lunch hour, but for some reason everyone wanted to read Sports, Entertainment, Local, National and International, in that order. It had to be that order. Sean was there too, unfortunately as it turned out. Later I learned that he had just dropped by to pick up a scrap of his epic that he’d left in his locker. A rare slip of the truth that he couldn’t, Homer-like, keep it all locked in his head. But bad timing regardless, for both of us.

  Strangely, today there was no wrangling over sections. The elevator doors opened and I saw Ted holding the Witness open – yellowish banner of the late edition, which came out in early afternoon. The others standing on my side of the panel, leaning and peering in to read. When I came close, they parted in eerie silence to let me through. I felt like Walter entering a room ready to hang.

  Ted handed me the paper. The Witness used photographs wherever possible, the larger the better, and the first thing I saw was a nice shot of the eastern end of the city. The smoking steel companies, the bridge over the narrow part of the bay, a bit of the big lake beyond. Divided, though, in the deep middle by one of those gruesome dotted white lines, in case you’d forgotten which route gravity took.

  Skyway Death Daredevil Season Opens in Tragedy

  Police have confirmed the death of a young man early this morning, apparently in a fall from the Skyway Bridge. The body of Robert Jongkind, 22, an employee of Burns Security Services, was discovered by harbour police on a patrol at 9 a.m., though the accident is presumed to have occurred some hours earlier. Release of the news to the press was delayed until next of kin had been notified.

  Lieutenant Kevin Scanlon, senior officer at the scene, would neither confirm nor deny reports that drugs or alcohol might have played a role in the mishap. “We’re investigating every possibility,” he said. “But obviously, no one has forgotten last summer. We were lucky then. I just wish we’d been luckier today.”

  No one is likely to forget last August’s rash of leaps by young men from the towering bridge into the bay below, which had the city holding its breath for two weeks. Four young men, over a ten-day period, left parties to take what one jumper called “the ultimate test of bravery.” Miraculously, all four survived, though with extensive bruising and fractures, and, in one case, more serious internal injuries.


  But Lieutenant Scanlon was quick to warn people against drawing hasty connections between last summer’s madness and today’s unfortunate incident.

  “Until we know otherwise, we’re treating this as a case of simple misadventure,” Scanlon said. When asked whether suicide was a possibility, he replied, “We don’t ever rule that out in a Skyway case. Or in any unexplained death, for that matter.”

  He side-stepped a further question about the possibility of foul play, saying, “There are no indications of anything like that at this point in the investigation.”

  So far no witnesses to the death have been found. Police are appealing to early-morning commuters to come forward if they might have seen something, no matter how minor.

  “You hate to see something like this,” said Sergeant Jim Breade, one of the discovering officers. “Especially with someone so young. What can you say? It’s a tragedy.”

  I didn’t want to look at it any more, especially the ghastly diagram, but the only alternative was to look up into the faces I could feel watching mine.

  “Jesus,” someone said. I didn’t even recognize the voice. It could have been anybody’s. But the single toneless word matched the numbness I felt spreading through me.

  The panel intercom burped on. Ted jumped at the sound. So did I; flinches ran round the group in a ripple. Walter’s voice said: “Ted, I’ve talked to Burns. Owen says he can work a double tonight, and they’re sending someone in with him for panel training. Stefan will take Robert’s place, but then of course we’ll still need someone for swing rotation.”

  “Stefan,” Ted said, glancing at the rest of us. “Right.”

  The intercom closed with a softer burp. Now I did meet the other eyes, expecting to find blame of Walter, anger. But the expressions were more chagrined, sheepish, as if embarrassed for the man. Or for themselves, perhaps. It was Walter’s job, after all. And he’d had no way of knowing he was speaking to an audience. The intercom was deceiving that way.