Catalogue Raisonne

by Mike Barnes

  Of course, on the rare songs we tried with four or five or even six chords, the possibilities grew in number and my Zen trick suffered accordingly. Often I was reduced to mere random searching, hacking bar chords up and down the neck in mounting frustration. Flailing.

  Maybe every tactic, every strategy, was a pawn probe. Some just more successful than others. Or maybe with practice you upped your success rate. Pawn probes on better odds – was that strategy?

  Robert. Mrs. Soames and Claudia’s painting. Piccone in art rental. Peter in the vaults. My office tour.

  Rehearsing the known chords until they became automatic, nothing you had to think about or remember, just markers in the deep background pointing to the shape in the fog that would complete them – that had been crucial to the method. But now, trying out my gallery chords, I saw there was a problem. The events and people I was seeing in my mind were just glimpses of things, isolated facts, not known parts of any song. They were single notes, not chords. And I’d never tried to build a chord from a handful of scattered notes. We would have picked another song.

  And then there was the question of which note even belonged in the chord. Robert, for instance. The loudest note, the starting fact, but that didn’t mean he belonged with the others. He might just be one trumpet blast.

  My faith in the method collapsed. This was the point at which a joint should be rolled, but there wasn’t any pot in the apartment. There hadn’t been for a while, I realized.

  What was left – and it was as reliable and maddening as ever – was the sensation of central space. The hole that the notes, some of them at least, were clustering around. Blobs of block-out liquid the hippy silk-screener had dabbed on . . . but what was the letter he was trying to ink? The one they helped form, but could not belong to?

  Changing the metaphor, with or without the aid of pot, had never done more than postpone the search.

  I dialled the gallery and invited Angela to lunch. She sounded happy if a bit flustered. Maybe just surprised.

  “Paul, are you sure? I mean, that would be great. But . . . .”

  “I know. But I can’t keep treating the place like a toxic waste dump forever.”

  Another small lie, I realized after I hung up. Because the truth was – and it surprised me even more than it would have surprised Angela – I was actually anxious to get back to the gallery. Strange. Apart from Monday duty, I’d never been in, or even close to, the building on a day off before. Back to the fretboard.

  It took me longer than usual to walk downtown. Three-quarter-speed about the best I could manage, thanks to Rick’s boot work, which had evolved overnight to a black smudge surrounded by dark blue-brown, throbbing muscle. The fingers of my left hand were curled in a claw-like shape, avoiding instinctively the pain of taut skin. Passing the tulip gardens at city hall, behind which hung a banner advertising the surrealist show, I recalled a story Hans had told me about one of Walter’s first decisions at the gallery. In the days of Josh MacMahon, the name Hamilton Art Gallery had led naturally to the acronym HAG. People had fun with it. “What’s on at HAG?” “Let’s drop in to the HAG.” When someone, a previous Bud-type probably, voiced the PR dangers of this, MacMahon just said – you could imagine this as a pipe-puffing moment – “Well, as long as they call it something.” On with the meeting. But one of Walter’s first moves as director had been to change, at considerable cost, the signs, the banners, the stationery, the brochures. Art Gallery of Hamilton. (You couldn’t do much with AGH or even AGOH.) “A detail man,” Hans said blandly, in that way he had with bosses of inviting criticism without endorsing it.

  Angela was waiting on the concrete-tiled sculpture plaza above Main Street, where she could see me crossing the city hall plaza. She came down the steps and crossed at the light to meet me. Now she seemed to be the one in a hurry to leave the gallery. She was wearing one of her usual gallery outfits, a grey pleated skirt and a simple white blouse, snug over her breasts. I wished I’d worn better clothes to our lunch. Shaved, at least.

  “Bad day at the office?” I said as she reached me.

  “Oh, fuck them. Where’re we going?”

  “I thought Le Papillon maybe.”

  She smiled, put her hand in mine.

  Mild May. Breeze from the west, blowing the bad smells east. Still that perfect window of early summer, before the lid of airless heat and stink slammed down. We walked along chatting about small things, laughing at the geometric forms, circles and squares, of the Board of Education – “like kids’ blocks . . . boring ones,” Angela said – west a few blocks into the shops and restaurants of Hess Village.

  Le Papillon was the crêpe place where we’d agreed to move in together. Casually, easily. Again – though Ramon still might not get it – not like marriage. Nothing that momentous. We’d come on special occasions ever since. Our low-income tax rebates, our “government dinner”, was an annual event – though we’d skipped it this year, both busy with something.

  We ordered our usuals: Angela the broccoli and ham, mine the mushroom with béchamel sauce. For dessert we generally split the apple crêpe, dolloped with whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate sauce. When the wine came and we’d toasted – “To Thursday in May” – Angela angled her glass, peering into the pale yellow liquid.

  “You know, you could have told me the truth about last night. Boys’ night out, especially for Robert’s sake, isn’t exactly beyond my comprehension.”

  “Who – ” I started to say, then realized it didn’t matter. No one else had been told the event was hush-hush. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She looked at my face, frowning at the shiner that was darkening. “Sore?”

  “A little.”

  “You know, I have to admit it’s a little sexy-looking.”

  “Every woman loves a fighter.”

  “Could be.” She bit her lip.

  “A bruised apple over a waxed one?”

  “Oh, stop! I said a little. A little sexy.”

  We were about halfway through our crêpes – mine a little cool in the centre, the strongest proof yet that they re-heated them – when I said, “So really, were they giving you a hard time up there today?”

  “Up there? Christ, that sounds like we’re still at work.” She took a forkful from her crêpe’s centre, which was steaming properly enough. “Well, no, in terms of jobs it was just the usual. Do these twelve things and do them yesterday. It’s more just the general people shit. This chilly shit between Barbara and Neale. Which comes out in the most petty ways. Her work done in priority before his. Or his before hers. Give me a break.”

  “What chill?”

  She looked surprised. “You mean the ice vibes haven’t reached downstairs?”

  “They don’t always. Or get garbled between floors on the way. What happened?”

  “They broke up. Or stopped sleeping together anyway.”

  “They seemed hot enough at the Gala Preview.”

  “Neale’s Tin Man dance?” We both chuckled, seeing the same picture: stiff-limbed robot and hip-rocking mama. “I guess they were, then.”

  “Until when?”

  “Oh God, dates? You want dates? Usually you’re the one holding your head when I start into the gallery gossip.” She didn’t hold her head, or even completely stop chewing, but she did peer at me intently. “I don’t know. Two, three weeks ago.”

  Angela might have mistaken my look of disappointment for disapproval. But why had I expected her to say Sunday, the night Robert walked home with “Wayward Guest”? Or Monday, after he fell? Could it be that neat? And what would it prove anyway?

  “It’s recreational sex,” she said, veering into a lecture mode that could get strident quickly and that was unpleasant at any volume. “It goes on and then it stops. They’re both adults. Or so I thought. It’s not as if Barbara hasn’t had enough practice. Look, really, could we forget about all of them for an hour? This is our lunch.”

  It was, and we did. But the gallery couldn�
�t lend us quite an hour. Just fifty minutes, allowing for the walk back. “Mustn’t cut into his hour. Not for a minute,” Angela muttered. Jason not happy about spelling Angela off for her lunch – not a registrar’s career ambition, but written into his job description in a smaller gallery – and holding the line at exactly sixty minutes, no more. Another good reason for the grudge Angela seemed to bear him. Besides the many fiddly and exacting typing jobs he threw her way: labels, condition reports, insurance forms. Lots of numbers, foreign words, check boxes.

  Back at the front entrance to the gallery, Angela seemed surprised when I started up the steps to the plaza with her. “This has been nice, Paul.” She kissed my cheek and we hugged briefly. “But if you see me to the door I’m going to really worry about that knock on your head.”

  I let her go on alone. Then, wanting to give Jason time to get well on his way to lunch – he usually went to Eaton’s salad bar, I recalled – but not wanting to hang about the lobby and have my face become a topic, I remembered what I wanted to check with Owen. I walked up the alley between the gallery and Hamilton Place and rang the security buzzer on King Street.

  No click open. Just a voice – Stefan’s – in the intercom. “Yes, Paul?” Too late, I remembered Owen still had another day off.

  “I was wondering if I could have Owen’s home phone number.”

  “Certainly. You can ask him when he’s in on days tomorrow.”

  I didn’t stare at the camera and didn’t ask to be let in. Deny him the satisfaction of considering it, at least. Instead, I went back and in the regular way, and did encounter a bit of commentary about my face, though not much really. I went up to the third floor.

  “Paul?” Angela said. And from the mix of worry and annoyance in her face, I realized our meeting had peaked right at the start and had been taking a spiral course downhill ever since.

  “There’s something I want to look up in the library.”

  “Paul?” Crooking her finger at me while casting a glance at the door to the office corridor. I went to the desk and leaned over so she could whisper.

  “This sudden gallery interest. You’re not doing anything dangerous, are you?”

  “Not to anyone who hasn’t done it themselves,” I said. And regretted, not the pomposity of the statement, but just its carelessness. Guilt had squeezed it out. Guilt at leaving Angela out of the loop, which wouldn’t change now, would only become more frequent and more deliberate, less excusable on grounds of negligence.

  “Okay, then.” The brown eyes above her freckles sharp with some kind of question, but I couldn’t read it. When I was at the library door, she said, not lowering her voice, “Was lunch a cover then?” Her head bent to her work when I turned without an answer.

  Jason was such a tidy person, it would be no trouble finding what I had in mind. If it existed, that is. If I could locate the chord that fit the space, or the notes that made up the chord, Jason would be too meticulous, too above-board and gallery-pious, to clutter or hide the way to it. With his cropped thick hair, wan smile and lean physique, he reminded me of the Mormons that got short shrift at my door. God’s Marines. Though Jason never insisted. Never got pushy.

  Art rental was my start. I’d decided that much. I opened the drawer labelled “Gift Shop” in one of the filing cabinets behind the registrar’s desk. The art rental files were in there, fourteen of them, one for each year since the new gallery had opened and the program had begun. The first few files were thin – the local artists shy at first, or wary, or just scarce. Or maybe it was the local customers who’d been those things, since the folders only recorded the works that actually rented out. But the last few years business had been brisk. The file for the first four and a half months of 1984 was already thick. Standard contract with the artist on the first page, stapled to the record sheet behind: boxes for Artist/Work/Price/Date Out/Date In/ Renter’s Signature. No box for Condition of Work, but maybe there was an inspection before the volunteer entered the Date In. Or maybe a painter of watercolours of Coote’s Paradise didn’t get to be fussy about the occasional nick or scrape. The records were embarrassing in other ways too. Prices went as low as $5 a month, and the highest I saw was $25. $60 in a year if someone kept it that long, or if twelve different people traded it around. “Forsythia #14” – out of how many in total? – had gone out for just one month, obviously not suiting that particular kitchen.

  But you could hit a minor jackpot and sell a painting, too. “Summer Lane, Ancaster” had found a permanent home after just four months, the $100 rental fees coming off the purchase price, leaving a balance of $50 before the red PAID stamp and the new owner’s signature.

  Fingers drifting along up the neck. I looked for a sheet under Jongkind. Nothing. The sheets were arranged alphabetically, by artist’s last name, but even Jason might make a mistake. So I looked under Claudia and then in the A’s for “Adjusted”. Still nothing.

  I was about to start on the previous year – Mrs. Soames hadn’t said when the painting had been sold – when I noticed a grey file card box sitting in the drawer behind the manila folders. Helping to keep them upright actually, wedged in behind them like a bookend.

  I pulled the drawer out a little farther into the light and flipped up the top of the box. A label saying Gallery Rentals faced me from the inside of the lid. Yet the outside had been anonymous office grey, one of those functional plastic objects that seem designed to repel curiosity. In a short time they become invisible, disappearing even as they sit in front of you.

  Like the box, the record cards were obvious at first, then less so. Crisper, more concise, than the regular rental sheets – but with some confusing touches.

  Each card had a name printed in pen on the top. ALDERSON, BAGSHOTT, CARLSSON, FOURNIER – names familiar from the slotted silver boards in the lobby, donors to the gallery. Along with other names not on the boards but in the same social bracket, or close to it: names I’d heard at openings, some of the upper-tier docents. Down the left margin were initials in blue pen: CC, CH, GR. I might have puzzled over these longer – they looked like people’s initials, but that didn’t seem right – except that I caught AbEx in one list. That clarified things on a couple of counts. Walter couldn’t bring himself to further reduce the beloved shorthand to AE, and maybe saw no reason to. The word came off his lips like the nickname of an old friend. The initials were genres of art, then. Suggested genres, since they switched about, trying to suit or steer the renter’s taste. The titles of works scrawled beside the genre codes seemed to bear this out. “Old Que.” beside CH: Canadian Historical, presumably. If a suitable genre was found and stuck with, the abbreviated painting names just ran down without the coded initials. Two or three hands entered the names of paintings, though the blue ink coder predominated. Walter was a careful delegater. And the abbreviated titles suggested people who knew the permanent collection much better than I did. Knew its dusty corners, especially. Expanding, even elaborating, the abbreviations as best I could, there wasn’t a title I recognized.

  Well there wouldn’t be. Fingers just touching down on the strings. Pre-strum.

  And then I flipped to the Carlssons’ card. Halfway down it I saw G7; beside it, “College St. Houses?” Which seemed to peep up into something recognizable. There’d been a show of Lawren Harris’s early works, small vigorous oils of Toronto streets, which I’d found pleasant, but which had disappointed the people who came in expecting to be walloped by the cool northern geometries of his later phase. “College St. Houses?” was entered in a red pen. Beside it, near the right margin, was a blue check mark, dark, pressed hard. A concession? No mention of money, of cost, on the card. There wasn’t on any of them.

  Piccone’s card told a small story in itself. A story of conflict and frustration – on both sides. They were having a hard time drawing a number on the man. First, it seemed, they had given him some old Quebec paintings. At least that was what I assumed CH, coupled with “Mme. Lacuisse”, meant. I’d seen those pain
tings in corners in the vaults: dark, sooty-coloured portraits of old women in bonnets, some of them nuns. Piccone, separated by a thin wall from naked twenty-year-olds from Trois-Rivières and Chicoutimi, had returned those fast. Then they’d sent him some modern abstracts. Those had come back even faster. I remembered him saying “Noise” to me, about the electro-pop at the Gala Preview. Probably he’d soundproofed his office at The Tulips against the rock that boomed over the dancers, a din he’d accepted only as the price of trade. Then they’d gone out on a limb – another red question mark, blue check – to rent him a Milne, not one I recognized. A serious compromise, but that hadn’t washed either.

  Right at the end, the little narrative reached its climax. There were no more marginal initials, they’d given up on genre-guessing. But there was a clear name – “Krieghoff” – in red ink, no question mark. Beside it a blue NO, underlined with an exasperated slash, as if to someone who needed to be told things twice. Then a red RETURNED! So there.