by Mike Barnes
Below this the little coda of CP, a title, and “Returned”. All in tiny pencil that had appeared spottily elsewhere. Bud’s, I thought. Still trying. Switching to photographs, perhaps.
“Did you find what you were looking for, Paul?” Jason asked.
His expression didn’t contain a trace of the smugness most people would have shown at catching a sneak. I remembered him telling me at a Christmas party that his 4:36 time in the mile would be “good for a high school runner.” Coming from a thirty-year-old, it should have been an ironic boast. But Jason’s face over his eggnog was just too earnest to tell what exactly he meant by it. He might simply have been stating a fact, in case you weren’t up on running times.
I slid the drawer shut.
“It’s an open secret,” Jason said.
That much I believed. The passed-around cards, the various pens. Though obviously not open below this floor – Jason’s placid face might even be reminding me of that. I wondered how many other open secrets the people up here shared. In two days of casual digging I’d learned new facts about their coke and sex lives, and now, their sweetheart deals with corporate chums. I’d worked here four years, thought I knew the place to the point of phone book boredom. Now I had to ask myself if I knew it at all.
“The tax credits on donations aren’t exactly generous. And they do nothing to generate any goodwill towards the gallery.” My silence, which was only because I hadn’t thought of anything to say yet, seemed to be pulling more answers out of Jason than questions could have.
“I understand,” I said. And I did, perfectly I thought. The gallery was repaying large donations with loans from the permanent collection. It would certainly loosen the Carlssons’ cheque book if, in return for their donation they got, not just a boring tax break, but a neat little Lawren Harris to grace a dinner party for friends. Lars and Leo had never mentioned it, but perhaps they hadn’t seen anything worth mentioning. Maybe, as sons of privilege, they saw nothing strange in a public art gallery doing some interior decorating to hustle funds.
“It’s a, um . . . it’s quite a smart idea, actually,” Jason said.
I didn’t necessarily disagree. At least more of the paintings got looked at.
“Don’t worry. It won’t travel downstairs through me.”
He smiled his wan smile. Tired-looking, despite all his running. When I passed Angela she gave me a helpless grimace, hands V’d out over her desk. No way to warn me of Jason’s sudden return. The library was four steps from the elevator. I nodded. Then she remembered that she was pissed at me and, frowning, started tapping at her keyboard.
Walking up and down the streets with a buzzing head. Rehearsing the new facts. Playing the new chord in different ways: fast strums, slow pick patterns, feathery arpeggios. Combining it with the others. Just savouring it after the wait.
Though savouring didn’t quite capture it this time. Away from Jason’s blandness, I was getting a bad taste in my mouth about the Gallery Rentals scam. Perhaps from a taxpayer’s viewpoint I couldn’t see much to complain about. It was slippery, irregular, but presumably as a result of it more paintings got bought and put on the walls. Or at least in the vaults. No, what bothered me more was the sense of arrogance, the smug immunity I sensed behind it all. It was just too cute, too smooth. It reminded me of a photo I’d seen of a chess park in Germany, with the players perched on towers at either end of a huge dyed-grass board. They pointed out their moves, and others below carried the milk-can-sized men for them. To another square or right off the board. The chess photo had the same sunny, fuck-proof feel as the Gallery Rentals game. Intellect from on high.
So what would I prefer? Rick’s fat ass and fists?
Rule – art rule – by Joe Mass? “King Dumb” had been one of The Dogs’ best covers, and I still liked listening to it. “Watch TV, livin large / I don’t want you in charge. / Burger King, a fight with Marge / You don’t want me in charge.”
What, then? A middle. A decent middle.
Christ, that sounded dull. And anyway, wasn’t a decent middle exactly what I’d been talking to in Jason? He was in on it.
Walk on.
I could imagine the satisfaction Walter got from matching renter with painting, pushing the envelope of someone’s taste, chipping away at ignorance and bias. A kind of missionary work. In his mind maybe. And though I toyed with the idea that Jason was naïve about Walter’s motives, in the end I believed that there was no personal cash skim, it really was about attracting donations to the gallery. Walter had lived in the daisy-chain of the art world so long that it was like a private club to him, complete with dues and privileges and smoking rooms. He didn’t see anything wrong with using public funds to decorate a businessman’s dining room if the transaction allowed him to buy a new piece for the public gallery. It came from the public but it came back to it too. Besides, over ninety percent of the collection never left the vaults. Walter was canny about rotating the works on display, but there were just too many of them. They piled up. But these things had to be “done delicately”, as the Oz witch put it. Walter might have objected to the value of the Krieghoff rental. Or just to the recipient. Piccone the strip club owner, chewing his carrot sticks and jingling his pocket change. In his own quiet way, Walter was certainly a snob. He was cautious too. More cautious than Jason, who had a record-keeper’s necessary lack of subtlety. Though, by his “tax credits” line, he seemed to have picked up more snobbery than was natural to him. All of these people were snobs. They couldn’t all have begun that way. At bottom, Jason seemed like a scrub-faced democrat. Maybe the place bred it. The rarefied atmosphere you breathed. The talk you heard, the clothes you saw. But it was interesting hearing the spin he put on something he assumed I didn’t really understand. I was pretty sure he didn’t understand all of the implications of Piccone’s record card, which perhaps he hadn’t even seen, and which was creating new spaces in my head. Wheels within wheels.
I walked the streets and had a series of coffees. But there’s only so much playing of the new chord you can do by yourself. After a while you’ve got to try it out on someone else. And there was only one person I had in mind as an audience.
13
O oh, fisticuffs,” Claudia said, reminding me of my face. The face I saw over the chain was changed too. Still pale, and bumpy on the cheeks, but the black around her eyes was carefully applied, and offset nicely by a pale silver lip gloss. She’d washed her hair – the Johnny Rotten tufts and flattened places meeting, more or less, in a fluffy brown cap with tawny streaks.
I was prepared to say as much as I could through the crack in the door, but after a few moments of looking at my face, she seemed to decide something and said, “Come on in.” Closing and unchaining and opening the door again.
She was changed and the room was changed. When I saw how she was dressed I remembered Robert’s funeral had been that afternoon. I’d forgotten it for long intervals while I was snooping, and hadn’t thought of it at all since leaving the gallery. “A private affair” Ramon had said when he’d got back from the funeral parlor. That meant no gallery, and I thought would have come from Claudia. She was wearing a man’s white shirt – too large, the cuffs rolled up: one of Robert’s, I assumed. Many thin silver bracelets jumbled jangling on one wrist. A black choker, and, below two-buttons-worth of white skin, the top of a black bra. An ankle-length black skirt with Madonna studded belts, several of them, angling down one hip. Black ankle socks, black pumps. It looked to be an artful compromise between her own fashion sense and what might pass muster at a funeral. But I was only guessing.
“The place looks good,” I said. “Different.” The room, too, had been given a partial makeover. Things put away or stacked, the carpet vacuumed.
“Not for long,” she said. “Robert’s the total slob. But I’m not far behind. My parents just left a while ago. They’re driving back to the county with my aunt.”
“The county?”
“Near Picton.”
; “You’re alone then tonight?”
She drew back at that, turtling into her shoulders with a sharp glance. “Meaning what?”
“I mean, Rick’s not coming over?”
“Please. Give me a little credit.” Her eyes at my cheek and temple again. “Did he do that?”
“With a little help.” Reflex machismo. One two-hundred-and-sixty pound bouncer not quite sufficient to lay me low.
She smiled faintly and shook her head. And then seemed, in an instant, to go all wobbly, her body seeming to shiver and sway like a Jell-O tower before flopping down on the couch. She pushed off her shoes and put her head back, eyes at the ceiling. “Have a seat,” she said.
But she was in the middle of the couch, too little room left on either side. I brought over one of the kitchen chairs. She turned her head on the couch and said in a tired voice, “Please. I’ve done the cop interview. Take the rug. It’s vaccumed at least. Finally.”
I sat down cross-legged on the floor, then, reminding myself a little too much of a student at the feet of a guru, I stretched out my legs to one side. Leaning on the bad hand first, which I corrected fast. I didn’t know how to start.
“Er, how did it go today?” I said finally.
“Oh, great.” She ducked her head away, but then turned back quickly. Perhaps not so much from a willingness to let me see her eyes as from an unwillingness to let mine out of her sight. “Great. They put my brother in a hole and then they threw dirt on him.”
“I’m sorry.”
Which softened the glare in her eyes a bit, not much. Grey, almost colourless eyes. Painter’s eyes, I found myself thinking. Nothing to warp the outside colour. Collide with and change it.
“Look,” she said. “I’m really not up to the hostess thing right now. To tell the truth, I’m hardly ever. Grab a beer if you want.”
“Do you want one?”
“Me? Yeah, sure. Why not?”
Sipping on the beers – no toast – we talked a bit more comfortably. I asked about the guitar leaning in the corner.
“Robert’s,” she said. “Everything musical is. Even all the tapes. I’m sort of non-musical. It’s funny. I mean, I listen to it a lot – especially when I’m working – but I don’t care that much what’s playing. Apart from country, I mean. And even then sometimes. It’s just background for my eyes. Hands.”
She nibbled at an edge of her forefinger, working off a ragged bit. Something very mouse or rat-like in her face as she did this. The thin sharp nose, small quick teeth – wide, somewhat glassy eyes. She stopped after a bit.
“I don’t really miss him yet. You know? I’m afraid I won’t. Growing up, I just remember being embarrassed by him mostly. I’d be talking to some hot guy, and there’d always be this moment when he’d smirk, like he had something on me, and he’d say, “You’re Robert’s sister, right? I used to dread that moment.” She looked out the window. Street lights by the insurance/school yard, fuzzy blooms in the black square. “And wait for it too, sometimes. It meant that particular episode was over. Stop trying, Claudia. Your turn.”
She leaned her head back on the couch and I realized she meant it. It really was my turn.
“I’ve been finding out some things at the gallery,” I said.
“Bzzt. Wrong answer. I don’t want to hear another fucking word about that place. And how’s your beer? Mine’s dry.”
Out at the fridge, I felt the pressure building in my chest, behind my eyes. Familiar. But what to do with it this time? Just leave? She’d just buried her brother, but you couldn’t have a conversation where one person was doing all the shoving. Not with this girl, especially. I went back to the living room with the beers, determined to give it one last try.
“Listen,” I said in a tone that brought her head up, the glare out again. “I don’t know what you think of me and it doesn’t really matter. But I have been finding out some things. Doing some digging. Since . . . Monday night. Remember, you’re the one who told me about someone calling from the gallery.”
“Calling Robert.”
“Right. And that started something. Maybe it would have started anyway, I don’t know.”
She puffed out her lips and blew air through them. An exaggerated sigh, strangely spoiled-sounding. It didn’t seem to fit her.
“Okay. We’ll do the job thing. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. Me first! Mine’s easy.” She jumped up. Had she done a line? “Piccone fired me. I have no ass.”
She turned to show me. She was exaggerating again. The forms may not have been hypertrophic, but they were definitely there. Clearer in the dress than in the baggy black.
“You’re underselling yourself.”
“I’m not selling anything.”
She flopped down on the couch again, sagging like a punctured balloon. Death seemed to be working like Ramon’s stepped-on coke: short peaks, followed by long flat spells.
“Well, at least I’m getting a better reception than I got the other night. I’m glad of that anyway.”
“I’m glad you’re glad. Look at it from my side,” she said, without a hint of pleading. “Robert and I don’t talk much. Or I don’t listen well anyway. But I do catch enough about this wizard chess player he works with, a ‘fascinating colleague’” – she did a painfully good Robert, though it didn’t seem to pain her. “Exactly the kind of geek I’ll steer clear of, I’m thinking. And that’s about the end of it. A few bits more about a ‘fiendishly good’ plan to steal some art. Geek talk. Harmless. And then my idiot brother shows up with Paul Klee in his briefcase, you right behind. Hnh?”
“And you thought what?”
“I thought, wizard, right.”
Which was all pretty much what I’d seen in our first meeting. Suspicion of the guy who might be piggybacking on a wanker’s jeu d’esprit, spotting in hare-brained fantasy the possibility of a mule.
“You say you’re a lousy listener?” I said.
“I am.”
“Well get better. Fast.” Armin talk. And looking to one side, avoiding the voodoo glare I could feel even in profile, I started in before she could interrupt. Sketching in what I’d learned. The Klee safely back on the walls, as she’d seen herself. No sign-in in security – nothing strange there. But when asked by the cop, the director fine with Robert waltzing in at midnight with his sister’s painting. Leaving it in a back gallery? Little things, some adding up, some not. Art rental and Piccone in a huff. I didn’t mention her own “Adjusted” series, the sales record I hadn’t found yet. Suspicion definitely a two-way street, always. Spaces in the vaults. Ending with my discovery of the Gallery Rentals scam. My masterpiece.
“Tiddlywinks at the culture club,” she said.
“More than that,” I said. “Even if you buy their reasoning – and in certain moods I might – it’s still more.”
She smiled wearily. No boost left in the lines. “Listen. I was a pretty good listener, wasn’t I?”
“You did fine.”
“I don’t mind talking about this shit. It takes my mind off . . . a bit anyway. Just as long as you don’t start drawing lines between this fiddling in the gallery and what happened to Robert.”
“What if there is a line?”
“You think there is?”
“I don’t know.” There’s a space, but I can’t really feel it yet.
“Do you have any reason to think so?”
“No. Not really.”
“Then don’t.”
I nodded. I’d accept this for now, since it was obviously non-negotiable.
“The cops are calling it death by misadventure. That’s my brother in a nutshell. Missed adventure.”
“He was young.”
“Oh yeah, and like we’re old. Mr. and Mrs. Maturity.” Again that flat smile, weary, which did make her look old. If there was something adolescent about Claudia’s thin body, a spidery girl whose gangly limbs seemed to move in jerks, there was something older, worn-down about her face. “I don’t think he ever believ
ed he had any power over anything. It was always something hare-brained. Taking a famous painting as a ‘jeu d’esprit’. Getting drunk and doing a stuntman’s leap off the Skyway. Pretending he was an international art thief. Pretending he was a summer jock. I think it was exactly what the cops said it was. Death by missed adventure. Yup, that’s my brother.”
I could feel our meeting winding down. The beers were empty and wouldn’t be replaced. Claudia would sleep soon, and should. I didn’t know what I would do. Somewhere out there was Angela, returning home from her Thursday class to find the apartment empty. Was lunch a cover then? I drew shapes on the vacuumed carpet, pulling my finger dark against the nap to make circles, squares. Smooth-rub them out again. Claudia was watching me. Frowning. Lines gathering in her face, as if her weariness was forming itself into a question.
Even before she spoke, I heard the chord – unsought this time, truly out of the blue – and knew that she was beginning to trust me. Or getting tired of not trusting. I knew that touch-down feeling too. But I would wonder later if everything that was about to happen could really be traced back to someone – not for long, but for long enough – getting too tired to doubt.
She sighed deeply. Not the pampered sigh, but the long emptying exhalation of someone taking the plunge.
“I painted the fucking thing, okay?”
“What?”
“The Klee Robert took. It wasn’t Klee. It was mine.”
14
“Do you paint?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t really mean how.”
I did mean exactly that. Even now, my thoughts reeling at the edge of a sudden drop, I was aware of the need to push back against the constant shoving, stand firm against the bullying. If it’s this hard when she’s tired. . . .
