by Mike Barnes
Claudia raised her eyebrows, let them fall slowly. This wasn’t like playing a chord. When you found a chord, or thought you had, you could tell right away whether it was the right one. So could anyone else listening, even those with bad ears, like ours. But what I was doing now felt less sure and more precise, the method less mysterious but the goal perhaps more so. I had left music behind, something I’d often wondered if I could ever completely do. The Chile Dogs’ brand of music, anyway. This did have more to do with people, people and pictures. Chess, with its black and white patterns and calculable (at least in restrospect) sequences, might have been the precursor. People moved in shifting colours, and their past was no less ambiguous than their present or future. But there was still a sense of trying to understand what they were capable of, working singly, sometimes in combination. It was very tricky – a constantly tricky thing – to decide whether an effect, the picture you were seeing, was due more to someone, or some people, working in concert toward an intention, or whether it was a composite of many individual efforts, criss-crossing and combining and cancelling each other. Tangents. And which ones grazed the circle you could feel containing the picture? And which ones just bypassed it closely? Or cut right through it on their way somewhere else – not tangents at all? Limitless.
Taking another deep breath, I said, “Remember how you said the idea of doing a bunch of forgeries was silly?”
“Mm hm.”
“Well, you’re right, it is. But only if you understand the art world. Not if you don’t really. And especially not if you think you do when you don’t.”
“You’ve lost me there.”
I could see I had. Her eyes drifting back to the hall, the easel I’d yanked her from at the end of it. This kind of chord seemed to fall apart when you tried to play it for someone else – in which case, chord was definitely the wrong word. Completely. Finally. And yet – and yet – another person still had to give it a listen and nod, even if vaguely or indulgently. I backtracked a bit to lay out the “Phantom Gallery” idea that had popped into my head (chords not needing their own titles either, just a grunted G or C or F for the bass player). Claudia leaned back at her end of the couch, giving a fair impression of listening patiently. She must have sensed I needed that.
And the story caught her a bit, finally. She was a visual person after all. With the pattern recognition that involved. Concern for composition, balance. Form.
“I still don’t get,” she interrupted with a frown, “whether it’s to rent out the real things or the fakes. You said the fakes could fill up the empty spaces in the vaults. In which case they might not even have to be very good. But then you also talked about people hanging them on their walls.”
“Did I?” I shook my head briskly, like someone emerging from water, or trying to clear it after a blow. “It might depend on who she’s more contemptuous of, Walter or her customers. Or maybe she plans a tier system, like her docents and her dish ladies. The upper tier would get the occasional treat of a real Milne, Leduc, Roberts, Peel – whatever she thought Walter, and so Peter, wouldn’t be bothering with for a while – and the lower tier would get a Claudia. So to speak,” I added when her frown deepened.
“The point is,” I went on, “I don’t think she’s got it all worked out yet. I think she knows her basic direction, but the details she’s doing on the fly. Improvising. She’s got a lot of energy.”
I was suddenly struck by a horrible spinning image – like a vortex of paper scraps – generated by the thought of everyone simultaneously working out their own chords, pictures, sequences, people. The infinite possibilities and confusion of that. The sheer chaos.
“Wouldn’t she be worried about me?” she said. “Telling. Or blackmailing her, or something?”
“She doesn’t know you.”
Claudia’s face went blank a moment, as if just remembering that. Trust her? a voice reminded me. Then she looked pissed again, her default mood.
“I mean the ‘Claudia’ she gets,” she said. “Whoever she finds.”
I chewed my lip, considering it. “I think you have to be a certain size – in her terms – before she even sees you. She wouldn’t be able to imagine you as less than ecstatic with your $500 per painting. She might even tell herself she was doing you a favour.”
“She might be.”
“Exactly.”
“But why take the risk, I mean. Extra cash?”
“Yeah, that. More because you can, I think. There’s a ceiling above you – maybe far above, lots of headroom, but you still don’t like it . . . so smash it.” I was guessing now. “And yes, money. Her husband is a psychology professor. She can’t run with the people she wants to run with. Not really.”
“Her salary and his. They must make a decent buck.”
“Our decent buck is their minimum wage. And coke. . . .” But this trailed off into inconsequence. I stared into space.
“Do you want some tea?” When she reached over and touched my arm, I noticed my hands were shaking.
As she clinked and clanked in the kitchen, I thought of the picture that had guided me on the way here, driven me here really. A moving picture, like a little film. A wasp, long and yellow and black, with its wings removed, crawling around the bottom and the sides of a white cardboard box. A shoe box maybe. The wingless insect walking without pause, reaching a corner, trying another direction. And then a child’s slim fingers going into the box. Curious? Sympathetic? Or just wanting to touch the glowing yellow cylinder, a pet now that it was maimed. But forgetting about the stinger. The fingers smarting back in pain, tipping the box, freeing the wasp to die on the ground. But the picture cropped at the intruding wrists. No way, when I tried to raise my gaze, to see the face – howling, likely – above them.
A neighbour? A relative? Me?
“Here.” The tea was herbal, chamomile probably though it had been steeped too briefly to be sure. The main effect was of hot water sweetened with honey. After we’d sipped a bit in silence, she said, “It still sounds preposterous to me.”
Where did the strange comfort in that thought come from?
“Well,” she said, “we’ve got plenty of time anyway. To figure it all out.”
The comfort there was no mystery. We. Time.
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess we do.”
20
But we didn’t.
I woke up after a few hours sleep, feeling like the wasp in the box had found a number of friends, some with wings and all with stingers, and they were all active inside my head, crawling and buzzing and stinging to get out.
Angela rolled over sleepily. “What time is it?” Her breath laden with alcohol from last night’s post-mortem.
“It’s Monday.”
“Oh. Hans needs you, I guess.” She went under again as if hit with a mallet.
Halfway down Park Street I realized I needed to kill some time at the Donut Castle. Not even Hans got to the gallery by 7:45. The streets seemed dead for the start of the work week. When I asked the counter girl, she said, “Um . . . Victoria Day?” making it sound like a hopefully-not-too-wild conjecture. And then as I was approaching the gallery, still well before nine, I stopped at a thought that should have stopped me at home: the Führer never changed a decision once he’d made it. After this had been pointed out to him heatedly a few times, it seemed to ignite a perverse pride, and firmed up from a pretty reliable tendency to an absolute rule. There’d be no work for me today at the gallery. He’d said so.
Turning back toward city hall, I thought of the signs of Galleria I was showing. First, going in when I wasn’t scheduled. Then, using going in as an excuse when I didn’t have to. Now, wanting to get in when I couldn’t. They seemed like an alcoholic’s mounting lies and pin-steps downward. The symptoms unmistakable – I’d seen their counterparts in Angela.
Five minutes later – a parking lot and half a block not far to stretch by dawdling – I was at Claudia’s door. I hesitated. Even though we’d ended well last night
, she wouldn’t be pleased by another unscheduled visit so soon. Away from the canvas her goodwill had a short half-life. And on it too, I thought, remembering the scratches and gouges in the adjusted faces. I knocked.
No answer.
I gave it a good hammering to be sure, and was mystified – as well as relieved of course – when the door didn’t fly open in a hail of curses.
I looked at my watch. 9:10. Clearly it was one of those days that you know will last forever because nothing takes long enough.
Thinking that she might have just stepped out for coffee or groceries, I killed time on a bench in the yard across the street. I sat under a big old maple, dense with new leaves, the shade cool, watching the squirrels and pigeons. Nothing doing in the stone building that was shared by the schoolchildren and the insurance adjusters. Vacated by both of them in honour of a foreign queen who had been dead for eighty-three years.
“Really? A picnic?” Angela seemed pleased, but a bit flustered, as she had been by the lunch surprise last Thursday. She seemed to be getting a little stuck in routine, even small deviations knocking her back. Or maybe she was just hungover.
“More of a long walk, really. It’s a nice day.”
We made some tuna and egg salad sandwiches, packed them with a thermos of coffee in a backpack, and set out toward the Royal Botanical Gardens. It was a long walk. Not for someone in shape, Jason for example, but quite a stretch for two people who circulated between the TV and the gallery, Angela taking side trips on the bus to paint or study. Maybe four miles in total. As long as my Skyway trek would have been if I’d completed it. But this time curving around the other end of the bay, like tracing the left side of an open lobster claw. The nicest stretch along York Boulevard, the oldest city cemetery on one side, the bay with distant smoking factories on the other. Pre-summer sailboats whitely dotting the blue.
We hadn’t been to the gardens in years. The RBG was more of a courtship or retirement destination, most of the faces in their early twenties or late sixties. For most people in between the grounds were pleasant but a bit dull. Shade and sun, plants. I asked Angela some of the names. Forsythia. Freesia. Labels, like the gallery’s but in all-weather plastic, named more exotic varieties. Tulips predominated, huge lush beds of them; the upturned bells in urgent colours, aligned on long thick stalks. Beautiful, certainly, but hard to appreciate in such numbers. It occurred to me that I’d only ever seen tulips en masse; they seemed to get planted that way. I wasn’t sure in nearly thirty years that I’d ever looked at a single one. When we went inside to find a washroom, there was a Guest Book which only foreign visitors bothered to sign, one of the last signatures from Lucerne, Switzerland.
Guest as in Wayward, Book as in LogBook. Lucerne as in the gallery lending Klee.
The Phantom Gallery. The name worked, at least. It was everywhere. And nowhere?
When we were just about finished our lunch, having found a nice grassy spot between some pines, a man slung with photographic equipment asked us if we’d mind moving. He needed the light for a wedding party. It was the other kind of group that found their way to the gardens, bookings necessary in the peak month of June. When the wedding party moved in, fifteen or twenty of them, I tried to find a happy face among them. Failed. Sun-squints and other kinds of scowls and grimaces, some just plain glum. When I pointed this out to Angela, she clucked disapproval, but then started chuckling. We got some looks and had to leave.
We took the bus back, done in by the trip out. Rinsed the thermos and fell into bed.
Awaking from our nap before Angela, I looked at my watch again. 3:05. Unbelievable. A month to go before the summer solstice and already the day seemed endless. To while away the minutes while I lay there, still groggy, I tried to remember books with that idea in their titles. Long Day’s Journey into Night. Journey to the End of the Night. Opposite idea, though; or maybe two sides of the same coin. I widened my criteria, accepting anything that suggested interminability. The Odyssey. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Journey to the Centre of the Earth. 1001 Arabian Nights.
I picked up Maldoror beside the bed and opened it at random, as Sean had suggested:
He told me that one evening his mother had summoned him to her bedroom and ordered him to strip and spend the night with her here, in the one bed. Without awaiting a reply this matron had doffed all her clothes, posturing before his eyes with the most shameless gestures.
I looked at the mound of Angela’s hip in her jeans. But she was still sleeping deeply.
Finally it was late enough to eat supper, though still three hours until the fireworks. We walked down James to the Sunshine and took our time over beers and clubhouse platters. It was just verging on twilight when we arrived back at the apartment, so we had another beer upstairs, then joined the crowd now assembling on the lawn of the house at the corner. This was another old brick mansion – beautifully chaotic, with additions and gables and even turrets – that had recently been colonized by an insurance company, though some tenants had won a nasty fight to linger for the time being in certain upstairs corners. The wide lawn was a good spot to view the fireworks launched over the city from Sam Lawrence Park, as long as you kept your eyes fixed upward and ignored Saint Joseph’s Hospital bulking to the lower left. After four years, Angela and I knew where to stand and where to look. But the place was gaining in popularity, and this year in particular the number of children running about, unchecked by their parents, gave the lawn a family outing atmosphere that I found oppressive. “I could use a little less Disneyland,” Angela whispered to me, the kind of line I was always glad to hear from her, since lately they had become mostly my department.
The show began. Just slightly before it was dark enough, this time. Every year the organizers complained that crowd pressure had not allowed them to wait until it was decently dark, but this year the Witness had argued in a strong editorial for “the patience that will permit maximum effect,” apparently with some success.
A loud bang announced the first tester. A little smear of smoke behind it as it arced out from the escarpment and dissolved over the city in a sprinkle of red flakes, followed by another loud bang. After the second tester, a few minutes later, the real show began.
A huge starburst of white, like a dandelion puff grown huge and radiant. Then one of red and blue. Then a smaller, dense gold one; rich and somehow wet-looking, like a marigold at dawn. The visit to the RBG had left its mark on me. In between came screamers, crazily spiralling sky snakes, with whistling whines that got the kids jumping and yelling. Thuds. Booms. Bangs. The explosions in the deepening dark gave the effect of an artillery barrage, the city under siege. It was a pleasing chaos. And the city, whose fortunes varied with the demand for steel but were never very assured, opened up the purse strings for this event. Given the three hundred foot launch pad the escarpment had endowed us with, it was one thing we could do better than Toronto.
In the pause after an especially thunderous bang and spray of light, ending in secondary fizzles with bright snaps, Angela said in my ear, “We could watch from upstairs.”
I looked into her eyes. We’d done that, a couple of years before, but had agreed it wasn’t quite the same. The kids were a drag – running and grabbing at each other, spinning at the bangs to catch remnants of light – but if you kept your head high they could almost be forgotten.
She slipped her hand around my waist and put the tips of her fingers into the pocket of my jeans. We went upstairs.
It was strange how it wasn’t the same. With the windows open, the night warm, it sounded as loud, maybe louder with the echoes off the walls. And we could see all of the sprays and bursts and spinners clearly over the rooftops. I decided it was just being inside, knowing you were. Or maybe, from a visual standpoint, the display needed all that empty black space surrounding it. Negative space. Angela would understand that better.
She came back from the kitchen with the tequila bottle and a shot glass. No lime or salt, but on the way she’d chang
ed into a skirt and blouse and panty hose. Tequila put us into strange, experimental moods. Maybe she’d changed in expectation of that.
After two shots we began kissing. Standing by the window lit by coloured glares and flares and showers of sparks. Whizzing bangs and cracks. Screams. It did add something, as Angela must have imagined downstairs. It was like seizing the moment as the army approached and thundered, though without the actual danger of being blown to bits. Amid the noise, we ran our hands greedily over each other, squeezing and gripping and cupping. Pinching hard. In no time we were on our knees, passing the bottle, kissing. Then I lay down on my back and pulled her down on top of me. My hands running up the tingly, vinyl-raspy skin of the pantyhose, up over the soft hillocks of her ass. No underwear. But when I tucked my fingers under the top of the pantyhose, she reached back and stopped me.
Tequila: you went with it. It was fine.
Crash. Thuds and screams. Angela tilted the bottle above my face. Some of it splashed into my mouth, bringing my head up in a laughing cough, and some of ran down my cheeks and onto the floor. She tipped some at her own face, drizzling down her throat under her collar.
Crash! Loud, with a splintery reverberation. A man’s screams detaching from the general mayhem and barrage. “Fuck!” I thought I heard. A roar from close by.
“Wait!” I told Angela. She continued what she was doing. I pushed her off me.
I took a couple of steps toward the crashing sounds, far enough to confirm that they were coming from our door, then stepped back into the living room to grab the half-empty tequila bottle. Capped and carried it at my side. Angela shot me a strange sharp look from the floor – it looked like disgust more than fear – but followed me down the hall.
The pounding on the door was frantic. As we approached it, the sounds of the fireworks behind us disappeared. Bang! Bang! Thud, thud. Crash! A heavy fist and forearm and maybe shoulder against the door. Like a maddened bull trying to smash its way out of a stall. The only saving grace of the din was that it masked any noise we might make. Still, I turned to Angela and held my finger to my lips. That scornful look, again. Only a little tempered by fear. Tequila bravado. It was dangerous.
