by Mike Barnes
It felt good to be sitting, just watching. Last night I’d walked halfway from the gallery to the Skyway Bridge. I didn’t know exactly why I was doing it, or even that I was doing it at first. It wasn’t a tribute or a penance. It felt more like some fumbling gesture towards clarity, a pawn probe when you have no better move. Did he walk there? I wondered after a few blocks, the question finally catching up to my feet.
The Skyway was far away, the other end of the city, past the steel companies, closing off the inner harbour like a steel-and-concrete cord at the top of a bag. He walked? On a head roaring with coke and alcohol, when Robert, for all his show of being a dissolute and a libertine, began to giggle three sips into a beer. I’d got to Ottawa Street, maybe three miles and half the way, and was just beginning to counter the ache in my legs with a little mounting thrill of excavating a mystery, when I recalled – the fact like a tarpaulin pulled over the hole I was scrabbling at – 4:45 a.m. The time the east-bound buses started running. Early in a city where morning shifts could start any time between 5:30 and 7. “Time of death has not been established precisely, but is estimated to have been no earlier than 5 a.m. Police are again urging drivers who may have. . . .” The bus: no need to walk at all.
I dragged home away from the gritty, rotten egg smell feeling that I was behind the play. The king-side assault, or whatever it was, was going on along a flank or via combinations I couldn’t even dream of, Armin not even bothering to scoop up my offered pawn in the centre. Leave it till later, when he had a spare move.
Besides being a good place to take a breather – and Peter didn’t mind supplying a plausible motive for your being there, some delivery or pick-up, if an Admin person knocked – Conservation was probably the best place in the gallery to watch someone actually doing something. Anywhere near Hans was good too – though rarely as serene.
Peter had removed the hanging wire and the screw-eyes at the sides. Now he was bracing the frame against his thighs and gently but firmly – the tendons rising in his slender arms – teasing a sticky retaining nail out with pliers. Each part of the frame he removed he set in a plastic tray beside him. Nothing lost, everything ready to be reassembled in reverse order.
“What’s the job with that?” I asked.
“A patch maybe. There’s a small tear in the canvas.”
“Why maybe?”
“I have to decide if my painting chops are up to the retouching.”
“Are they, do you think?”
“No. Not this time.”
That job would be more interesting to watch than the unframing. But it was likely hours away. I’d come away from sessions with Peter with nice oddments of knowledge, and the strange, often pleasing, words for them. The bloom on varnish, a little moisture cloud that Peter would remove with circular motions of a soft cloth dabbed with machine oil. The danger of skinning a painting by stripping off all of its varnish.
Though pointedly contemporary in dress and musical tastes and dance style, in other areas Peter had a preference for old, or old-fashioned, things. Below his rows of brushes hung from nails was an old shaving brush with a tortoise-shell base that Peter saved for his most delicate dusting work. Beside it, a jar with old toothbrushes for less finicky jobs. He had his jar of Durofix, “the Conservator’s best friend”, but when he had time he preferred to mix his own cements to fit the job, dissolving celluloid in proportions of amyl acetate and acetone, mixing them to the consistency of syrup. These ingredients stood among many others on his neat shelves. Watching him mix up a personal recipe I’d had the impression of a contented male witch, happily accepting the disguise of an electro-geek if it let him stir his little cauldrons.
“Whose is that?” I said, pointing at an old wooden clock standing in the corner opposite me. I hadn’t noticed it at first because of its size. It seemed more a part of the room than one of Peter’s small, ordered objects.
“Oh, Barbara’s,” he said, seeming to know what I was referring to without turning.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Probably just dusty. Somebody took the mesh out from behind the frets. Though it might need a new escapement, too.”
“When will you do that?”
“It needs to be done immediately,” he said, quoting if not exactly doing Barbara. “It will get done when I run out of other things to do.”
That, if it was more than a hollow boast, would be some time. Watches and smaller clocks, which were another of Peter’s antique hobbies, sat on a shelf above Barbara’s clock. Pride of place went to the perpetual calendar Peter had recently restored, cleaning and buffing the tarnished silver beautifully. A shining wonder with tiny scrolled roses, that could also tell you what day May 16 had fallen on forty or fifty or sixty years ago.
Peter was bending a little lower over his work. Which, despite whatever gripes Hans had against the man – which were probably mostly just youth and different approaches to similar tasks – seemed an inoffensive, and even almost amiable, way of telling someone to fuck off.
An hour or so later, I’d completed a long slow stroll of the upstairs U – down the painting corridor, through the Pettit Gallery, and up the Soames Sculpture Hall on the other side of the courtyard – Sean off somewhere, on a Code 2 or his coffee break or just vanished (AWOL personnel being our most common security breach) – when I came to the door to the main vault. It was open. Peter must have intended that, since he had his own entrance through Conservation. Still, I felt my stomach area tingle as I peered around the door jamb into the dark.
“Could you give me a hand moving something?” Peter said.
Relieved – the stairwell thud back into normalcy – I followed his voice inside.
It wasn’t really dark, just dusky compared to the rest of the gallery. A dimmer switch allowed one to work at the lowest light levels possible, and by now Peter could probably have tapped his way to whatever he needed. I helped him move a large Paul Peel from its hooks on one screen to hooks on another a few feet away across the centre aisle. The vault screens were floor-to-ceiling panels of metal mesh, heavy metal links like a giant’s chain mail, except for solid gripping ends. They didn’t swing, like their smaller counterparts in art rental, but rolled in tracks. The paintings faced each other at close range, like soldiers across a no-man’s-land of inches, but the screens were staggered, so one could be rolled out into the centre aisle to get at a particular work. The Peel wasn’t so big that Peter couldn’t have transferred it the short distance himself, but he preferred to do things by the book. And to be seen doing them by the book, possibly.
My eyes adjusted slowly. Peter went about his business: walking in and out between the screens, pulling some of them out a bit to see, making notes or putting check marks with his pen on a clipboard. Peering around from the centre aisle, like someone planning a new arrangement of the furniture in a crowded room. I wandered around the vault. It was always a pleasant space to be in, though it had a creepy undertone that got stronger the longer you stayed. This was the fate of most of the best art in the world. It if wasn’t in a Japanese bank or a celebrity’s bedroom or on a few feet of public wall, it was here, in a dark temperature-and-humidity-controlled vault. In a closet, basically. And, as with a closet on occasion, I’d closed the door – or watched Peter close it – with an eerie impression of the things left behind carrying on a whispered half-life, facing each other in the near-silence of fans that dealt them air of the prescribed dryness and temperature.
“Where’s the Goodridge Roberts?” I said.
“Which Goodridge Roberts?”
I described the painting I liked, which was missing from the place I’d always known it to hang. It was a very simple square interior, a chair and a table with a few things on it. But something about the frankness of it, the cosy corner zapped with a vibrancy, always came as a pleasant shock.
“Oh. Walter’s got that now, I think.”
“What about all these other spaces?” Which I could see better now when I scanne
d through the screens, many small clearings in a forest that I’d thought was dense as jungle. Its density, in fact, came up sometimes at general staff meetings, and presumably more often at meetings upstairs. How to get more vault space? Where? With what funding? Space that, at the moment, didn’t seem to be urgently needed.
“My shop. The offices. Hanging downstairs. On loan to other galleries. Touring exhibitions. . . .” Peter, whose voice didn’t often develop this exasperated edge, gave the impression that he could go on if forced to. He was trying to concentrate on his clipboard, appearing now to be sketching in boxes and rectangles.
“Do you need me for anything else?” I said.
“No. Thanks.”
I took the elevator upstairs. Absconding from my watch as easily as Sean had. On Ramon’s day off, not even gallery groupies disturbed the peace, except for the odd new one who didn’t have his schedule down yet. I wasn’t even sure, as the elevator rose one floor to Administration, just how I was going to follow up the hunch that had snuck up on me in the vaults. But when the doors opened, Angela’s surprised smile brought me the luck I needed.
“They’re all gone,” she said. “Over at city hall for the budget meeting.”
“Oh well,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just have a coffee in the lounge.”
Her smile broadened. It’d been months – no, years – since I’d taken my break in the upstairs lounge, preferring the dash across to the Second Cup and the leisurely lean against the lobby counter. It wasn’t something you could prove, but despite the “one big family” sorts of formulations, voiced aspirations about a gallery esprit de corps, the third-floor people always seemed more surprised than glad to see you sitting there in your brown and beige (or navy and maroon, now). Just that little look, fleeting across a preoccupied face: oh, you.
Angela’s pleasure was genuine. And so easy to bring about. Generally it was. But there was that guilt again, a fleeting shadow, at bringing it out with a lie. Even a small lie, an improvised fiction that smoothed her away from puzzlement.
Little lies. More forgivable, less dangerous, but also more habit-forming than the larger kind.
I still didn’t know what I was doing, no more than I had on last night’s walk toward the Skyway. Something niggled, was all. Didn’t quite fit. Something about the empty spaces in the vault had put an idea – the vague outline of one – in my head. Later I would wonder where it came from, but for now I was just following it. It was as much a wayward guest in my skull as any notion that might have visited Paul Klee. And like his visitor, mine needed tangible form to complete it. Without knowing what that form might be, I had to look everywhere.
Start with Angela’s wall: a large David Milne hanging behind her. On the walls in the waiting area, bright floral watercolours by the woman whose name I could never remember. From Saskatchewan. I poked my head in the library door. Another place I used to come on breaks, taking down art books and flipping through them. Paid for this a common thought then, right after the recession. Jason was working at his desk.
“Hi, Paul,” he said. Which, with only a smile added, was a world away from Yes, Paul? or the other variations. For some reason I recalled that Jason’s best time for the mile was 4:36. In the narrow spaces between bookcases and file cabinets were smaller pictures, dark and wood-framed, which for simplicity’s sake I filed in my head under Old Canadian, Nobody Famous.
Walter’s office, when I poked my head in, had the Goodridge Roberts hanging behind his desk. On another wall was one of Walter’s favourites, a square of white with a thick swipe of red in the centre, globbed at the top and trailing to threads where the brush had run dry. A gesture. Which went curiously well with the Roberts painting. As a contrast – vacant and filled – but also something about the looseness, the freedom of attack that gave gooey texture, brightness.
Bud seemed to be trying – trying too hard – to do more things with his walls. He had a couple of hand-tinted photographs, blurred black and white street scenes with mauve and pink and lime streaked into certain faces. He had a tryptich of cream swirls, but he’d unhinged – or had someone unhinge – the third panel so the series continued onto a second wall. I wondered about the ethics of that – aesthetic rules, if not legal ones. There was also an A.Y. Jackson, one of his orangey-brown hills that had provoked L, foolishly and unforgettably, to dub him “Pizza Man”. The overall effect was of Bud expressing admiration for, interest in, and understanding of the entire permanent collection. I wondered if he really thought anyone else, especially Walter, would see it that way.
Barbara’s office was certainly the most attractive. Our Picasso drawing, “Hand Holding Flowers”, the child-like large fist and petals touching in their seeming awkwardness. It went with the real flowers in the vase on her desk. “Flowers for Barbara”, from the volunteers or from other friends in the community, was a common errand that came over the squawk box. Two hinged photographs beside the vase. A small one of her husband, the psychology professor rumpled and smiling tolerantly, and a larger one of her daughter, said to be away at university somewhere. After checking both ways down the hall, I took a step into the room to get a closer look at the daughter. Twenty maybe. With the same blonde hair and fine features, the same sexy tan. But also the glowing, unlined skin – raw peeled youth – that Barbara had to simulate a bit now with creams and makeup. It struck me that of all the people on the Administration level, only Barbara had a child. One child. She was the only one married too, though Jason had been once, a few years ago. It seemed odd. In a crowd of educated people aged twenty-five to fifty-five, with good jobs and better connections. Walter usually brought a date to the openings, always a good-looking woman younger than himself, though seldom the same one twice. Sniffy comments got made, often by rejected artists, about sexual orientation. But that didn’t seem to be it either. Despite their many rumoured, and some blatant, affairs, there was something monastic, or at least hieratic, about their world. Something singular, under glass, about each of them.
By now the Yes, Paul? voices I’d kept at bay were back, and loud enough that I barely had time to duck my head into the lounge across from Barbara’s office. More paintings, though I was no longer filing them under any headings. It was another pawn probe, I’d realized, like the halfway-to-Skyway tramp last night. I had no way of matching these paintings to the spaces in the vaults, which could be there for the reasons Peter had given or, probably, for many others. I was flailing, introducing complications when there was no Robert to be undone by them.
No, I corrected myself: You’re feeling for the complications that might have undone him. What did that mean? Now I was confusing myself. My head was buzzy with an itching blankness, a staticky space.
There was just Neale’s office in the corner left to peek into. Finish the gambit, for what it was worth.
But what I saw there made me stop for a longer look.
He had no paintings, no artwork of any kind on his walls. His desk was cluttered with papers, notes and newspapers and magazines and clippings, and some of the papers had made their way up onto his walls. Despite myself, I went into the room to take a closer look. The papers taped to walls – with Scotch tape, which he had to know was hell on paint jobs – were reviews from art shows, clipped from newspapers and magazines. Photographs included. A couple from the Globe, one from the New York Times . . . others written in French and what looked like Spanish. A German one on glossy paper. By Neale’s standards this statement didn’t seem hard to read. In fact it seemed obvious, crude and petulant. Import the grade of art I can’t find around here. Something like that. It was faintly disappointing, as well as faintly exhilarating, to be finally reading the mystery man so easily.
Not everything came clear. Two poems, mounted like the ones in the surrealist show – black type on laminated white boards – were stuck on one wall. The gesture seemed clear enough, according to the new language I was understanding: he’d lost the argument about including them in the show. But the poems themselves
were more elusive. I read them as Sean would have, trying to commit them to memory.
The Yes, Paul? voices chased me out long before I could be sure I’d got them. Halfway down the hall, attacked by just as strong but less distinct voices, I hurried back and, snatching a pencil and paper from the jumble on Neale’s desk, scribbled the poems down quickly, glancing every line or two over my shoulder.
Opus 15
Emanuel Morgan
DESPAIR comes when all comedy is tame
And there is left no tragedy In any name.
When the round and wounded breathing Of love upon the breast
Is not so glad a sheathing As an old brown vest.
Asparagus is feathery and tall,
And the hose lies rotting by the garden-wall.
Opus 182
Anne Knish
HE’S the remnant of a suit that has been drowned:
“That’s what decided me,” said Clarice.
“And so I married him.
I really wanted a merman;
And this slimy quality in him
Won me.
No one forbade the banns.
Ergo – will you love me?”
“That was a short coffee,” Angela said.
“A good one, though,” I said chirpily. But the smile on her face had dimmed.
11
Ramon showed up at a quarter to five and announced that we were all going to The Tulips to do a wake for Robert. Lars and Leo had already been contacted and would meet us over at the Food Court for a bite beforehand. It was like Mrs. Soames’s idea with the flowers: so good, so right, you felt a bit embarrassed not to have thought of it yourself.
The Tulips, two blocks east of James on the south side of King, had a discreetly elegant entrance. Two tall, polished wooden doors with brass handles, a brass plaque affixed to the sandblasted brick at eye level: Gentlemen’s Club. A greeter – serviceably large but stretching a nice blue suit – standing beside the doors to say again, “Gentlemen.” It might have been this veneer of elegance, combined with the uptown location, that had got up some citizens’ noses. The other strip clubs, down on Sherman North or Barton Street, were shabby dives where a forty-year-old took it off with slow, tired grinds, and the only greeter was a homeless drunk panhandling for sherry money.
