Catalogue Raisonne

by Mike Barnes

  You can let him grab you by the shoulders again, I thought, or – But there was no or.

  So I went down the walk and opened the door and got in.

  No surprise being the only surprise, the only tactic, I had in me at the moment.

  Rick’s choice of a Tim Horton’s for our meeting surprised me, though. Like his choice of car. Not a muscle car, a Corvette or Trans Am, something at least imitating the Porsches and Lamborghinis higher up in the coke chain. Though Rick would’ve had trouble squeezing down behind the wheel of a sports car. The Impala gave him plenty of room. Its interior was filthy with wadded Kleenex, candy wrappers, pop cans, food bags and cartons. A smell of rot and sperm. The warm Brie of blowjobs mingling with the chow mein and pizza bits liquefying in cardboard corners. He straddled the parking line, forcing plenty of space for his doors. Though these were already trimmed with rust, a dark fur like mould. Scratches gleamed around craterish dents.

  “Hey, man,” he said, when he’d brought over our donuts and coffees. “Sorry about the other night. But you know the rule about no touching the girls.”

  Which girls? I wondered.

  “I think I was still a little bummed about Robert,” Rick said. He waited a beat, but I gave my attention to the cruller instead. “Too bad about Claudia. I like her, she’s a cool chick. Spacy” – with the finger twirl – “but cool.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  It’s a strange thing as a man – women must have an equivalent, although of course I don’t know it – to sit peacefully with another man and imagine doing him elaborate harm. I wasn’t smiling at Rick, wasn’t returning his occasional grins, but we were having a coffee together and talking quietly, while I was mentally swinging a hammer against his head, sticking a knife into his stomach or slashing a razor across his face, or – best of all, most disdainful and no props needed – just booting his ass down a long flight of stairs.

  “Robert.” Rick was grinning, shaking his head. Keeping an eye on me. “That crazy fucker. Can you believe that fucking shit?”

  If I finished the cruller too quickly, there would be the question of having another one. Always the dilemma of eating with someone you don’t want to be with: their presence drives you down into the plate, but then the empty porcelain drives you back to them.

  “What’s the matter? You still bummed? Claudia said you guys were tight.”

  Layers, Claudia had said about Rick. The wide handsome face was tightening, the features chiselling like rock, but still I sensed – was I imagining it? – a put-on quality to his truculence. I had no doubt he wouldn’t mind trashing me, completing the job on my face – for venting or just absent-minded exercise – but below that I also had the sense that he was testing for danger, assaying the facts and risks and character of a world unknown to him. Strange sense to have about a biker in a donut shop. And dangerous if I started seeing pawn probes where there weren’t any.

  “He had the right idea, though,” he said to my silence.

  “Actually, it was a bad idea.”

  “Actually, it was a good one.”

  Another bit of male lore that must be hard-wired, or learned right near the start: always that pitch-perfect sense, from geek up to superstud, of when the situation dictates that the other eyes must be met, regardless of how distasteful it is or how badly you let down your side.

  “Just the wrong guy.” Rick winked, and I drove a screw into the socket. Hans’s power drill.

  “Let’s check out another place,” he said, surveying the room with a turned-down lip as if just noticing his surroundings.

  Some Trappist rule of silence seemed to be in effect in the car. Whatever happened inside the Impala must not fall – or rise – to the level of speech. The thought was just another way to distract myself from where we were heading. Rick drove with his two big hairless hands perched on his thighs, directing the car with sideways jogs, one hand rising to wheel it roomily around corners. “Test-drive the product” he’d said last Sunday night, offering us his coke. Now the phrase came back to me along a new tangent of speculation, maybe fear-sparked. Had Robert, knowingly or not, been test-driving the idea of art theft? Demonstrating the possibility? But for whom? A florid face, bulbed with summer vegetables, came into view.

  The idea and the face dissolved, but not with any kind of satisfactory pop. They faded but remained, hovering.

  Our destination turned out to be the Donut Castle up at Duke and James, only a couple of blocks from where we’d started. A donut crawl? Or had Rick just needed time to think, settle on an approach? I was buying this time, apparently. From the counter I watched Rick, at my usual table by the newspaper stand, pick out a Sun and open it to the second page. That gloating, stupefied look as he took in the Sunshine Girl: all eyes, the muscles slack and drooping around them. What my own face had disclosed in a chrome-rimmed sliver at The Tulips.

  Carrying the tray back, I slopped a little over the edge of one cup.

  “Relax, man.” He took the unspilled cup, but tugged a wad of napkins from the dispenser and tossed them on the tray.

  After a bit of parallel sipping, Rick made a sucking sound of impatience – it might have been a sound of disappointment with himself at not finding or remembering a better opening – and said, “Look, we both know the gallery can be done. I just need an inside man.”

  Inside man. More moviespeak. But where did it come from?

  “We know the security is a fucking joke. Sunday afternoon till Tuesday morning, the place is empty. You walk out with it.”

  Rick’s Research, Inc.?

  The trouble with holding your tongue – and maybe the Trappists found this – was that when speech did finally break out, it was apt to be exaggerated. A bit over-the-top from being pent-up.

  “It’s silly,” I said.

  “Silly?”

  “It’s not practical.”

  “We saw it.”

  In your dreams. You were asleep, remember? But then I outlined a bit of what Claudia had explained to me, adding to what I had already told Robert. Getting something out was the easy part.

  Rick blew air through his nostrils, like a bull. I actually felt it on my arm, a warm damp Rick-puff. “I’ve got buyers,” he said. “Buyers are not a problem.”

  He was actually a so-so listener, better than Claudia, and I told him a shortened version of the story she’d told me about the two British guys, the art forger and his dealer, who’d passed off Braques and Giacomettis and even a Picasso. The dealer had had the harder job, and maybe the greater skill: inventing and creating a document trail, fifty-year-old bills of sale, handwritten transfers, phony museum catalogues. Provenance (though I said “history” to Rick). The art forger was just a talented painter without a style of his own. But his partner had been expert craftsman, writer, improviser, master of a hundred signatures and prose styles and habits of mind, fearless bullshit artist having coffees in Sotheby’s . . . creator. Both in jail now. The dealer with the stiffest sentence.

  “But we’re not talking about a fake, are we?” Rick said.

  The alertness of the question startled me. He was right: we weren’t. I didn’t know what I was talking about anymore.

  “I’m not your man,” I said.

  Rick narrowed his eyes, projecting frustration as much as threat, though the difference might prove minuscule to me.

  “It can happen.” He looked at his watch. “Today’s Friday.”

  Outside at the car, I told him I could walk the two blocks. By the slow measured way he came around to my side of the car, head down, fingers grazing the trunk, I knew he wanted to get the ending right. He squeezed my upper arm. The clamp, amazingly tight, like a vise, I’d felt in The Tulips.

  “You work out?” Rick said.

  “No. Not for a while.”

  He winked, grinned. “You should.” He squeezed harder. The pressure was really quite fantastic, just one hand at the end of an outstretched arm, no leverage, and getting right down through my own muscle and
flesh to make the bone ache.

  And then it stopped. He let go.

  After the Impala gunned away, I walked for a while about Little Soho, as Angela and I called our section of the city. It did have more artist types – painters, musicians, writers – than other parts, and now, a few years after we’d found the cheap rents in run-down buildings, the developers were moving in on schedule. You’d see tradesmen’s vans parked around the neighbourhood, belonging to the rent-hike reno guys – the touch-up painters, trim adders, carpeters and carpet-removers.

  I knew where I really wanted to go. I kept seeing Claudia’s face in front of me as I walked – that smirk she had when you weren’t keeping up – but we’d agreed to meet next on Saturday. Why had we thought two days were necessary? Things were moving much faster than that. Rick lumbered through my thoughts. Understanding, as I thought I did – as Angela said I had good reason to – male anger, I couldn’t credit Rick’s with any real focus. It could’ve been jealousy at seeing me with Claudia. It could’ve been a passing mood, it could’ve been a deep-down need for more exercise. The art gallery “job” hovered above these options, though it might make use of them, like a hot-air balloon moored by thick rusty cables.

  With the opulent dark-eyed strippers there, this skinny girl. That was another thing I couldn’t credit him with: being able to see the flame inside her bony shoulders and pebbly skin.

  It’s dangerous to underestimate people. A bad but lucky chess player had told me that once. But it could be dangerous to trust people too. Or even to begin to trust them. I was still stumbling over the basic incongruity I’d stumbled over Sunday night: Rick and Klee? Rick couldn’t imagine it, could he? Wouldn’t have the contacts if he did. (He might even, in some dumb way, consider it beneath him. Filching a square of coloured board not exactly a macho crime.) He’d need, at the least, guidance from someone who knew art and had some contact with its circles. Someone to flick a cape he could charge at. A suggester.

  Exactly.

  And if the suggester was a bit of a maddened asp herself – switching sexes and species for a moment – pissed off at the art world and the gallery, which might have somehow got her brother killed . . . why not turn a beast loose on it? What did she have to lose? Who would believe the beast if it got caught?

  Layers, she’d said. But whose? And how many?

  Finally I just went home.

  Angela was sketching in the armchair in front of the window. It was dark now, but she must have got the basics earlier, from beyond the black pane she still glanced up at. To see herself?

  “Good games?” she said.

  “The last one wasn’t bad.”

  I looked over her shoulder at the drawing. The gravelled parking lot and shed behind our place, a forsythia, trellis and rake. A bit soft-focus for my taste, but accurate and pleasing. She was getting better all the time. I kissed the back of her neck.

  “Mm. Hey, I’m working.”

  I drew back momentarily, then brushed my lips across the nape of her neck and nibbled her earlobe. “Hey!” Where we ended up a few minutes later was still one of my favourite places in the world. A true sanctuary. My head between Angela’s thick clenching thighs, ears blocked to sound, eyes blind or, when I opened them, lost in a tangle of wet dark strands. If I raised my head slightly there were the hypertrophic forms, soft and undulating, Angela’s abundance, with – my addition tonight – some of her colourful hair scrunchies binding her outstretched hands to the bedposts, her feet below me pinned likewise. Dali’s picture, almost exactly. With even, in the gloom, the distant march of Angela’s jewelry on the flat pine headboard, a column of glass and metal bits. Auto-eroticism of the Didact with Hypertrophic Forms. Plus one extra figure, the painter only implied in the painting: me.

  I had one strong urge as I was untying her – the only one so far to go beyond a guilty itch – to confide in her about the gallery. How much it had changed and was changing in my mind, like a Lego building filled with plastic people that could be dumped in a furnace and then poured in brand new moulds, set up again in new configurations. It may have been only the desire to talk, so I could calmly feel it grow and fade, knowing there was no chance I would succumb to it before it passed.

  I yawned protractedly while we were drinking our wine.

  “Tired?”

  “I am.” It had been an eventful day, but now that I was at the end of it I didn’t feel that I had learned anything I hadn’t already known.

  17

  One thing hadn’t changed. Despite some stiff competition, Saturday was still my least favourite day in the gallery. We had more scheduled events, and often more visitors, to tend to than on any other day. These gave the day a make-work feel. People strolling down a lacklustre midway. For all the bitching I did about it – mostly to myself by now – I found the gallery most tolerable at its deadest, when it was approaching Sean’s installation piece fantasy, myself as one of the barely moving parts. I was talking on the phone to Angela, while directing kids with my free hand to the “Power Paint” session up in the lounge. Second-tier volunteers trying to contain the finger-painting chaos, then serving milk and chocolate chip cookies baked by the third tier.

  “I liked last night.” She didn’t sound sleepy, though it was just after nine.

  “Mm. Me too.” A little boy with straw-stalk hair was standing in front of the desk, rubbing his eyes and other parts of his face. “Listen. There’s a policeman here who needs to ask someone about his interviews. Last Tuesday?”

  “On a Saturday?”

  “I guess it’s not exactly nine-to-five. Just a detail, he says.”

  “Well, I barely remember . . . sure, put him on.”

  “Well, actually, he’s just stepped into the washroom.” The boy had wandered off in that direction. “But I know what he wants. He just needs to know the name of the person he talked to in Administration. I guess he forgot to write it down. I told him Walter, but – ”

  “No, Neale. Walter was out at a meeting. Why wouldn’t he just phone?”

  “I don’t know. Good excuse for a donut. Listen, I’ve gotta go.”

  I called for relief and went down to the basement. Luckily, Frankenstein, who didn’t seem to have developed much bowel control yet, was away from the panel again. Otherwise Owen might have felt compelled to make a show of suspicious scrutiny, though he was still deep in Dick. Not even glancing up as I paged back through the LogBook.

  On the page that had been blank on Tuesday, Neale was now signed in at 1:25 and out at 5:25. The slightly smeared ink a nice touch. You didn’t leave a LogBook open and blow on it.

  “Owen?”

  . . . .

  “Owen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does Neale really work this late at night?” I turned the book to show him.

  “Sometimes, yes. Neale and Peter. Neale sometimes comes in on his way back from Toronto.”

  “But this is practically an all-nighter.”

  “Neale practically slept here before the surrealist show.”

  “But this is last Sunday. Or Monday, actually.”

  “I can read.” As he resumed proving.

  Claudia and I met at Rehak’s just after five. I used to go there a lot, but hadn’t been in a while. Rehak’s served bad coffee and delicious cakes and pastries, which made it a natural stop after an especially good or bad rehearsal. It was close to Angela’s old collection agency, too. I used to pick her up and we’d stop for coffee and dessert before walking back to the apartments we had then. It was where we’d started to get to know each other. Rehak’s was a few blocks east of The Tulips, but on the north side of the street. A little place with a striped awning tucked in between Walnut and Ferguson; a German neighbourhood, with The Black Forest restaurant just a few doors down, and, on the other side of the street, Denninger’s deli and a little musty bookstore that sold used German books and fairly recent German newspapers and magazines.

  She was already there, sitting at one of the dim
mer tables near the back, between dark wooden beams and against a white stucco wall like stale cake frosting. She was back in the baggy jeans and dirty T. Looking worse, but looking more herself. It was as if she were having an argument with herself about how much to care about how she looked. Different voices in her head, each with its own opinion on the matter. “We’d better get a move on,” she said.

  Rehak’s was funny about time. Though it was a pastry shop with this sideline of a few tables and chairs, it didn’t adhere to the hours of either a retail store or a restaurant. 11 to 6, six days a week. Closed Sundays. We went up to the glass counter at the front and picked out our desserts. Claudia pointed to a square of plum cake, the server murmuring the German name, and I got one of the marzipan cookies, chocolate around a thin bit of cake around a sweet gooey centre. Really more of a candy than a cookie. One old man I’d shared a coffee with had said that “confections” was the right word for what Rehak’s did. It was, really.

  The waitress brought the plates and coffees over. Shiny blue short skirts, with white blouses with puffed sleeves and embroidered flowers around the collars was the uniform for the Rehak women. The baker came out from the back sometimes, huge and rumpled and dusted with flour, took a grumpy look around for something he never found, returned to his trays and ovens.

  “It could be worse,” Claudia said. “He could have me in that.”

  “You got it then?”

  “Yup. Back in the trenches.”

  “No haggling about the outfit?”

  “It’s early yet. All he said was, ‘A good bartender is hard to find.’ With a handshake and a little kiss on the cheek. I am a good bartender. But it’s also five days after my brother died.”