by Mike Barnes
What do you say in the face of wisdom and class? Nothing but yes, if you can help it.
Ramon, our specialist in things fresh and lovely, volunteered to take down Mrs. Soames’s suggestions of flowers and go over to the market to purchase them. When he returned, you could actually smell the blooms before he got up the stairs, a draft of May blowing in the door.
Ramon went back to what he’d been working on with Hans, some repair or maintenance somewhere. L was on the desk. Hans, with a glance into the vacant galleries, motioned me to follow Mrs. Soames, now tottering back into the gift shop under her load of flowers.
Helping Mrs. Soames on a non-addled day mainly meant standing by and listening as she went about her business. I watched as she laid down the plastic bags Ramon had brought back and spread the flowers out on them, trying some preliminary arrangements, bunches grouped and altered and set aside for the moment, as she used the gift shop scissors to snip the stems and leaves. Quick, deft, practiced movements. Almost automatic. You had to wonder how many weddings, funerals, graduation days had gone into them. Mrs. Soames was tiny now. Bent with age, but she must always have been petite. The scent of her perfume mingled well with the flower scents; tasteful mists, probably expensive. The brown age spots on her cheeks and forehead were blurred by skilfully applied makeup, but she could do nothing about the ones appearing on her scalp beneath her thinning hair. It was hard not to see her as a diminished person. And – to judge by the dish detail she’d been given at the Gala Preview, a typical Mrs. Soames assignment – very few even tried. Still, the gems behind her swollen knuckles proclaimed that she had once been, and perhaps still was, precious to someone.
“It’s hard to lose a brother,” she was saying. “Hard to lose anybody. But especially when you’re young.” As she murmured her arthritic fingers never stopped moving. Still nimble, dextrous. Muscle memory. Guessing her age to be near eighty, I mentally placed her back in time: a child before the First World War. Already middle-aged in the Second. Someone had said that the first sign of aging was an interest in family history. That hadn’t hit me yet. But I was starting to position people in relation to world events, adjusting them like a makeup artist and fitting them alongside, or inside, the pictures in history books.
Mrs. Soames chose a tall fluted vase with a solid bottom, hand blown by a local glassworker, its colour a shy spring green. The perfect complement, and one Mrs. Soames would be subsidizing herself, as I saw before she picked the price tag off. When she’d wrapped it in tissue paper, and tucked it beside the stems of the flowers lying on tissue in the box, she found an equally tasteful card.
“Should we try to collect signatures?” she asked, her clouded eyes flicking up at me. Whatever she saw in my face must have been answer enough. She made a clucking sound in her cheek. “You’re right, darn it.”
And signed it herself, “With deepest sympathy from the gallery staff,” in beautiful flowing script.
Ramon was dispatched to deliver the box to the funeral home named in the Witness. I stood beside Mrs. Soames in the gift shop doorway. She was looking across the lobby at the top of the stairs down which Ramon had just disappeared with the long white box, rocking back and forth slightly, like a thin yellow stalk swaying in a breeze.
“Do you know Claudia, then?” I said.
“Who, dear? Oh, well, no, I wouldn’t say know, exactly. But yes, we meet all of the artists.” She made the clucking sound, just faintly, again. “That poor girl.”
Then, peering fiercely up at me: “Come with me.”
I followed her to the art rental area at the back of the shop. When I’d first started the rental paintings had been in big bins, like items at a discount sale, awkward to flip through and sometimes damaging to the works. Then Hans and Peter, collaborating well for once, had devised the present system, a modification of the one in use in the gallery vaults. They’d constructed large rectangular metal frames spanned by metal mesh, the links thick enough to support even large works, and then hung these on heavy hinges so that they swung freely back and forth. You could leaf through the row of them like the pages of a huge book. But they were heavy, especially when hung with paintings on both sides. Mrs. Soames – and even some of the younger volunteers – often had to get our help to move them. It had been years since I’d paid much attention to the pictures inside the pages I was swinging.
Now I did. “Stop,” Mrs. Soames said when I was about six screens in, but I’d already seen them.
“Some of the other volunteers don’t even show them any more. They say if they haven’t rented out in six months, not even once, why bother? But I think if we’re going to accept an artist’s work, then we owe it to him – or her in this case – to show it. Walter thinks she’s quite good actually. He says if people knew what they were looking at they’d be flying out of here.” She squinted and her tongue went into her cheek, but no sound came out this time.
I remembered Walter’s praise, over Neale’s demurral, of the “Two Figures” painting in the CHOP show. These, though very different, were clearly by the same artist. You couldn’t be sure if she was slumming or just confused. But there was a signature of style, and of raw skill. And an attitude. They reminded me of Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with a moustache. But seventy years after Duchamp, wasn’t the gesture trivial? “Adjusted Vermeer” showed a centre square of the famous jug and hand, a bit of blue-purple dress, close-painted, highly finished – not as good as Vermeer, of course, but you had to lean in a bit to be sure of that – but then the woman above this careful square became sickly – sketchily painted, with ugly cross-hatching, some actual gouges in the paint, like Munch’s dying sister. We’d had a show of “Northern Images”, meaning some prints from Oslo, and the highlight had been a woodcut version of “The Sick Child”. “Adjusted Manet” was more ambitious, and maybe a little more successful. The nude woman in the centre was pretty much as Manet had had her, but the flanking men at the picnic were smeary and globby-sombre, heading toward Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud territory as they leaned in with gaping, wound-like mouths.
“I think she’s mixed up,” Mrs. Soames said.
Apart from lacking detail, it wasn’t a bad summary of what I was thinking.
“There’s a space at the bottom. Was there another one before?” Something told me they wouldn’t hang another artist’s painting next to hers. It wouldn’t be fair – from their point of view or mine.
“Yes. Yes there was. Believe it or not, we did sell one.”
“Who to?”
“Oh, I don’t remember. Anyway, I wouldn’t tell you if I did.” Her sly glance up at me came from the Manet girl more than from the Vermeer. She’d been young, I should remember, and not shy. “It’s gallery policy to keep some distance between the buyer and the seller. Walter calls it a ‘discreet distance’. How long do you think we’d be in business if they didn’t have to go through us? Of course, some of them find out. And then that’s the last we see of them. We’ve lost some of our best renters that way. You can’t really blame them.”
“But you must keep the receipts. Some records.”
“Oh, well. We’re swimming in paper here most of the time. But it all goes upstairs eventually. Whoosh. Good riddance, I say. I can’t stand clutter.”
Art rental was a busy place that afternoon. The only part of the gallery that was. Shortly before closing, John Piccone came up the stairs in a huff. I heard hoarse wheezing breaths, and when I saw him, his bulbous face flushed with blasts of colour, sweat fringing his curly grizzled hair, the similarity with Arcimboldi’s vegetable man was sealed. It might have been the title even more than the picture. “Summer”. Growth in a hurry.
He was carrying one of the large canvas bags, felt-lined and with sturdy wooden handles, that art rental packed its pictures in. Another of Hans’s good ideas, drawn up by him and sewn by a local fabric artist who wanted a show. Without it the Release Form, with its forced purchase clause in the event of damage, wouldn’t have made much sense.
“Where is picture rental?” Piccone called loudly, before he was very near the desk. But when I extended my hand, he brought his own up to return the courtesy. Big gold ring with blue stone, worn on the pinky. A wide plain copper bracelet on the hairy wrist that came out of his suit sleeve, and a chain one with a flat band falling over it. Arthritis? Medic Alert? I wondered. Stacking the ailments on the same wrist – but the hand you shook with? It was one of those curious handshakes that I’ve got mainly from Italian men: just the ends of the fingers lightly gripped for a moment. Brief, curiously delicate. Two courtiers in a hurry, crossing paths in the street. He didn’t seem to remember me from the Gala Preview.
“Where is the lady who rents pictures?” he repeated.
I took him across to Mrs. Soames, then lingered near the sliding glass door. Pretending to fuss with its rubber-stoppered metal feet, which generally needed a good kick to dislodge at closing time.
Piccone was loudly, though still politely, complaining about the picture he’d rented, which apparently hadn’t been his first choice, or perhaps had been picked out by someone else. “I liked the last one, that was good. All those little people. I liked that. I asked for another one the same. Maybe not exactly . . . but this! Not even close. I don’t like it.” I was reminded of a difficult customer in a restaurant: all those “I”s and “like”s.
Meanwhile Mrs. Soames, flustered now, her sharpness gone, was opening and closing small drawers, the cash register, flipping through some of the papers she’d described as “clutter”. She may just have been trying to stay plausibly occupied in the face of the male discontent that was leaning over her Windexed counter, raising its voice, giving off its smells.
“You want to see? I’ll show you,” Piccone said, lifting the bag to unzip it.
I did, but Mrs. Soames said, “Um, no. No.” Getting the proper firmness into the second “no”, blinking rapidly at Piccone.
Piccone sighed, and said, “Where is head office, please?” The question, or its tone, nicely powdered with the courtesy owed to a lady, like a talcum covering the basic content: Show me someone who matters.
I was about to oblige him, since Mrs. Soames was lifting the corners of papers on a spike, when Bud said from behind me, “That’s fine, Paul. I can help Mr. Piccone.”
He led Piccone into the yellow elevator. The complaints resumed before the doors closed, and continued, growing fainter, up the shaft. It occurred to me as I began the closing routine that I was suddenly getting a lot of the Paul treatment. Or just noticing it more. Bud, yesterday: That’s enough, Paul. Stefan of course: Yes, Paul. Yes, Paul. Even Hans: Just the required, Paul. And now Bud again: That’s fine, Paul. You could work someone over well with the first-name finish. Paul. An end-stop that felt more like a dangling icicle. It got added to my list of gallery grievances, a round-the-block queue by now, like the pictures of the line-up snaking through Madrid to see Franco’s body, soon after I’d dropped out of first-year university and bought my first guitar.
10
Still, I’d learned quite a lot in my time at the gallery. I had to remind myself of that sometimes, whenever I came too close to thinking of the four years as flushed down a toilet or dropped, day by day, into the temporal equivalent of a paper shredder. Working at a cultural institution, even a mostly empty one, you couldn’t help but gain some knowledge. Picked it up effortlessly, by osmosis as it were. Literary lore from Sean, musical bits from Robert. Fix-it rudiments from Hans and
Peter and a stream of various repairmen I’d stood behind. Glimpses of the local scene, its cliques and power shifts, from Barbara and her circle. Art history and styles, from Walter mostly, but also from a variety of culture apparatchiks and mavens and patrons and wannabes. They all had opinions about the water they swam in, some of them worth listening to. And I learned from the artists, though they tended to be preoccupied and to talk least. And the ones that did talk were often strangely inarticulate, swept up by something and able to relay the sensations and the passing blur, but not really able to report on anything like a conscious, deliberate process. None of this knowledge needed to be actively sought. It pervaded the gallery air like pollen in May, a little of it inevitably settling on your hair and clothes and on your exposed skin.
These were natural thoughts to be having on my way to visit Peter, the person from whom I’d probably picked up the most interesting tidbits of knowledge.
On my way I looked up Sean. He was in one of his favourite lairs, tucked in between the potted ficus and the window at the end of the Pettit Gallery, looking out onto a tiny gravelled courtyard that couldn’t have been entered except by mini-helicopter. His lips went still at my approach. He really did look afraid as well as startled.
“I’m sorry about Monday,” I said. “I played chess with him sometimes.”
“No apology required,” he murmured, but looked relieved. He closed his eyes a moment, and then intoned: “Passion is never disallowed, particularly in the place where passion is spent.” From the shy glance he darted at me I knew it was his own.
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s good to know.”
We wandered down the sculpture corridor and took up our usual position leaning on the wooden railing, overlooking the MacMahon Gallery. Barbara was conducting one of her docent training sessions, a refresher course or perhaps a recruiting drive this late in the school year, standing in front of a painting with fifteen or twenty women in a semi-circle around her. Her voice rang out confidently, clear and dominating, but also warm. “Notice the little flip of red he gives the end of this brush stroke. It looks like an afterthought, at most a grace note near the edge of the composition, but if you take note of your own eye movements as you view the work, you’ll find that it might actually be the centre of the painting.” She had no script in hand.
“Harpies,” Sean muttered. For no good reason I could see. Barbara yielded centre space to a middle-aged woman, a new one, who began stammering some of her own reactions to the painting. Barbara smiled encouragement from the side. Today she wore a short brown leather skirt, brown heels, and a soft beige – taupe, Angela might call it – sleeveless sweater. Top two buttons undone, a thin gold chain hanging above the tanned cleavage. Tanned bare legs. A Study in Brown. Or Neil Young: “Cinnamon Girl”. Once when we were drinking tequila, soon after she’d started at the gallery, Angela said, “Barbara might drive me crazy, I think she probably will, but she’s probably the most fuckable woman I’ve ever met.” She didn’t clarify whether she meant fuckable from her point of view or a man’s, or both. Tequila gave us both an exploratory stone: horny and reckless and curious and a bit brutal. I did one of those mental disclosure dances – tell the truth? lie? hopping from one foot to the other while my partner waited – before I just said “Yes.” Which seemed to go down fine. Angela frowned, but suggested we lick the salt from each other’s wrist on our next shot.
Sean moved off one way down the corridor and I moved the other. I paused at my usual stopping-place, by another ficus and in front of a little bronze “Iris” by Rodin. The naked headless – and armless, and legless below the knee – girl leapt up, a leaping torso, one thigh cocked outward like a dancer from the glistening slit and ridges of her vulva. “Goddess of the rainbow, and by extension presumably, messenger of the gods” ran part of Jason’s larger, more-explanatory-than-usual label. Even a minor Rodin, one of many versions, mattered. Above it, black letters spelled: Soames Sculpture Hall. Mrs. Soames had asked me, soon after we’d met, about my “people”. I doubt if she remembered what I told her, since it seemed to satisfy but not impress her. Now I wondered about her people, the legacy I was looking at. A husband? Perhaps a much older, long-dead one. The husband’s father? Brother? No one had said. Only that Mrs. Soames was likely to be offended by Iris’s ebullient splits, the hard little breasts polished by patrons’ fingers, the yelping crotch. But I thought that was selling Mrs. Soames short, if not from the standpoint of taste then just from the standpoint of long experience, o
f lived life. The young were naturally intolerant, the old had to work harder at it. Mrs. Soames seemed too busy working at everything else.
I knocked on the door of Conservation. After a pause, Peter opened it. No Yes, Paul treatment this time. There never was from Peter. He never gave any sign of how welcome your presence was, beyond the obvious not very. But he had no objection to being watched as he worked, as long as the conversation was limited to occasional questions. It wasn’t the aloofness of Neale, which might or might not be making some kind of statement, and it wasn’t Walter’s cultivated inattention, which caught everything and filed it appropriately. This was just the concentration of a craftsman. Not even Hans denied Peter that title. “He does fine work,” Hans said, nodding glumly at a truth he wouldn’t evade.
I sat on my usual perch, the swivel stool in the corner. Peter returned to his work at the long white table, cleared except for the picture he was unframing, face down on a rubber mat, and the tools he would need at coming stages. A Spandau Ballet tape case, always just the one he was currently listening to, placed beside the small ghetto blaster in the corner. Soft sounds, a non-urgent beat. Sometimes he had “Morningside” on the radio. Peter was wearing a lemon yellow T-shirt, tight black jeans, desert boots. His feet close together, as they nearly always were, even as he bent forward from the waist. Craftsman crossed with monk, say. Thin. The blond curls on his wiry arms lighter than the ones on his head. Blandly handsome in profile. He reminded me of a yellow-blond pencil, sharpened and set upright in a box.
