by Mike Barnes
III
Secrets of the Surrealists
21
When the gallery reopened on Thursday, after a two-day hiatus, it was manned by a skeleton crew. Just Sean and me, plus Lars and Leo, who hadn’t been scheduled but had shown up anyway, thinking to pick up some easy cash and not expecting anyone to be too fussy about the time sheet. All of the Administration staff had gone to Toronto for Neale’s funeral. Hans and Ramon had gone too, as quasi-administrators, or at least the highest-ranking underlings. Sean was in an uncharacteristically chipper mood, expecting hours of undisturbed mumbling. But the first hour brought in a surprising number of visitors, drawn by curiosity about “the curator guy”. Quite a few pronounced it Cure-a-tor, like the name of a newly-discovered dinosaur. They mostly hung about the front desk, probing for info-bits, but inevitably a few strayed up into Sean’s domain. After the first few curses had blatted over the walkie-talkie, Leo (slightly bolder in his mischief, I could see now) suggested simply taping the Closed sign of the last two days back on the front doors and locking up. Ted, transfixed by an Asimov story, made no trouble. No sound, even. We frolicked in the empty galleries. I played nerf football with the twins in the MacMahon Gallery, sending them scrambling out for long soft bombs, while upstairs Sean worked on uniting Blake and Yeats. Mrs. Soames came out from the gift shop at one point and said, “I agree with you completely. It’s disrespectful to rush right back into business. Especially today.”
Tuesday I’d moped around the apartment, finishing the tequila and wandering about the rooms I’d shared with Angela. Not doing a very good impression of the grieving cuckold – not even getting very drunk – but feeling that something of the sort was required of me. I certainly felt drained, and somewhat bleak, but it was hard to tell how much of that came from getting no sleep the night before. When I woke up on Wednesday, I went out for coffee at the Donut Castle. Found the story in the Witness, shrunken already to a small box on the local pages. Suicide Not Ruled Out in Curator’s Death. That, along with a few other details which the paper threw in, got me thinking and I walked over to the Bay 200. They had found a strange solution to the stain on the front walk, applying bright white paint over the concrete. The gleaming rectangle concealed what was underneath, but magnetized your eye at the same time. Inside, the security guard got his skin mag closed before I reached the desk, but he kept his thumb in the middle, a patch of glossy beige showing. No, he said, checking the tenants list, Maxwell Ernst did not reside there.
“Where were you yesterday?” Claudia asked when she opened her door. “I was worried,” she said, without really looking it. What she looked was preoccupied – heavily paint-stained, this time. “I don’t even know where you live,” she said, smiling at that as she made the tea. But she didn’t ask now, either.
“I think Rick might actually be in the clear,” I said. And told her about my visit. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a security system that isn’t a joke. VIDEO-MONITORED on all these little gold signs in various places. So I strolled around looking for the cameras. There’s one in the parking lot. It makes these slow jerky swivels from one side of the lot to the other. You wait until it’s pointing the other way, then you walk across. Then you’re in the lobby. Same thing. It pans – too slowly – from one side to the other. You wait your turn, then walk across. I think even Rick could figure that one.”
“Hnh?” She hadn’t really been listening, but had caught the familiar name.
On Saturday I met her at The Tulips after her first shift back. Piccone was starting her on the quieter afternoon, either easing her back in or still worried about the costume issue in prime time. The bouncer on the door was the same one who’d helped Rick throw me out. He gave no sign of recognizing me. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe, after you’d done it often enough, pitching someone down stairs became like taking down a painting and carrying it to the vaults.
Piccone was standing with Claudia at the far end of the bar, just outside the door to his office. He was saying something that made her smile, a big hand on her shoulder. “This your boyfriend?” he said when I reached them. Claudia didn’t answer, but she seemed to be enjoying the moment. Her eyes bright and flicking. “What do you think?” she said back.
Piccone shrugged. Then levelled a serious man-stare at me: “You should fatten her up.” Which confused me a bit, since I would’ve thought in Piccone’s world, that was what she was supposed to do for me. Someone had done it for him, after all. But maybe he was just thinking about the costume.
“Two hundred pounds?” I suggested.
“Two hundred?” Piccone’s face scrunched up in disgust, Arcimboldi’s bulbs and stalks instantly more prominent. He turned away from me. “What, please.” He pinched Claudia on the ribs and hips, starting at her side but working forward a bit with his fingers. “Good-looking girl . . . but too much skin-and-bones.” Claudia smiling at all this. Smiling and blushing.
Out on King Street again, we were headed for the bus stop, when Claudia stepped off the curb and hailed a Blue cab. It confused me, since we’d already been talking about her shaky finances, the possibility of my lending her some of her June rent. “Piccone gave me an advance,” she said as we got in. “He started in on the thong again, but then he said, ‘Nobody can pour like my skinny girl.’ Gives me this big hug.”
It certainly made for an easier ride where we were going. As the driver took us down to Barton and turned east, I thought about Claudia’s evident enjoyment of the flirting with Piccone. A comfort and an ease in her face that I seldom saw there – there was always that edge, hyper-alterness. The eyes quick, even when seemingly heavy-lidded. Rick-eyes, though far more subtle naturally. I tried to configure it: the lusty old uncle, who might cop an occasional feel but means, or at least can do, no real harm and flatters you besides? I’d seen some of the same at the chess club last night. The chess geeks flocking to Claudia – a girl showed up only rarely, and no matter how into the game, seldom returned – eager to show her their openings, pins, forks, gambits and mates. Her play was nearly as bad as Robert’s, but in a different, really an opposite, way. She had laser concentration but she didn’t know the game, so got caught in routine traps. Not the same trap twice, though. When we got to Armin’s board, he rose and, straightening his shabby suit jacket, extended a yellow-nailed hand to her. He was always sitting when I arrived; I don’t think I’d ever seen him standing up. Watching him turn on the Old World charm, a bit of courtly chat, modest shrugs down at his battlefield, I felt I was seeing how it used to be done. How you could still do it, maybe. With adjustments for changes in tastes and temperaments. With tweaks and updates.
As we were nearing Ottawa Street, I turned to her in the back seat. She was looking out the window, watching the taverns and bakeries, the funeral parlors and strip clubs of Barton Street blur past. “You never said about his walls.”
“No Krieghoff yet. Not even a Kurelek.” She kept her eyes on the passing street. “We’re back to charcoal sketches of the hometown. Stone houses leading down to the Mediterranean, grapes. Pretty bad actually.”
“Probably a relative. I’m sure he has an immense family.”
She turned and caught my eye, as if I’d just tapped her on the shoulder.
“I feel like you’re giving me my edge back,” I heard myself saying.
“No one can give you that.”
“O-kay. Then you’re helping me get it back.”
She smiled. “That’s better.”
Like a lot of pilgrimages, this one fell a bit flat. Local complications got between us and the intended effect, which was sketchy to begin with. Claudia had just said, last night, “I never even saw the spot.” We planned to take a slow ride over the bridge, getting a passing look which seemed best. But the driver warned us of the long fare this would entail, zipping up the Queen E toward Burlington to find a turn-around spot. He tried to sell us on a longer, “first class” tour around the whole bay, starting from the other side. “North shore
. . . nice spots,” he said hopefully. In the end we settled for him pulling off onto a shoulder at the north end of Woodward Avenue, in a flat poisoned-looking stretch between the last of the factories and the sewage treatment plant, beside a pond of sludgy waste. The smell was awful: a toilet reek, overlaid with rotten eggs and something sinisterly sweet, like toffee.
We started up the narrow walkway at the side of the bridge. Not far up, we began to squint in the whipping wind. Breezes barely strong enough to chop the water below, but clashing and whistling this far above it. Claudia stopped before we were near the highest point and put her hands on the railing. Her eyes weren’t tearing any more than mine were in the wind. Hamilton spread out below us. The freighters by the smoking factories, their pyramids of black and brown raw materials – white sailboats leaving the yacht club, veering on the still-blue water – the more confused, and smaller-looking city centre, with its modest office and apartment buildings – the far bridge, York Boulevard that Angela and I had walked across to reach the botanical gardens, the bay narrowing beyond that and going so toxic and muddy that it never froze, at most congealing a thin skin on the coldest days.
“It’s high,” was all she said.
And then we started back down.
Rehak’s was our first choice for a coffee, but their closing routine was due to start, so we settled on breaking the budget a little further, going dutch on dinner at the Black Forest.
“Your boss . . . the one you call the Führer. He must love this place.” She was looking at the walls around our booth, cuckoo clocks and wooden plaques with four-line poems – rhyming in the German and in English – celebrating home and family and friendship.
“Hans? You’d think so. But strangely enough, he’s a complete shut-in. Hockey Night in Canada and pizza on Saturday night. Mostly beer, I think, on every night.”
“Total assimilation.”
“He’s been here a long time,” I agreed.
After our schnitzelburgers, when we were having coffee with our Black Forest cake, Claudia said over the rim of her cup, “So how do you see it?”
I didn’t need to ask her what she meant. I’d known she would get there eventually, on her own time. But I did worry now if she was ready. Or would ever be.
“Do you really want to do this? Now, I mean?”
She had an especially harsh look for when she was asked to repeat things she’d said clearly the first time, especially if there was any hint of coddling attached.
“I can see it happening a couple of ways,” I said. “You remember that story, ‘The Lady or the Tiger?’”
“I think so. Maybe.”
“A high school staple. At least at my school. Where you have to decide at the end which door the princess is going to let her lover open.”
“I remember that part.”
“That’s all there is really.”
“And . . . Robert?”
“Well, what I see most often is Barbara picking him up outside the gallery. We know she picked up the phone when Peter called. Neale’s apartment, but she answers the phone.”
“Neale could’ve been in the can.”
“True. It all depends on how you’re seeing it.”
“One question. Does she already know about the Klee?”
“I keep coming back to that, too. I think yes, she’s got to. I think, with a jeu d’esprit, there’s always got to be one person who knows what you’ve done. Apart from Peter, I mean, who’s just your basic lab rat. I mean someone worth boasting to. And really, what else does Neale have to offer Barbara as a lover?”
Claudia raised her eyebrows like I might be underestimating him again. Still.
“But Neale could’ve simply told her who I was. Given her my number.”
“Ah, but now you’re underestimating him,” I said. “Like you told Rick, he loved his art. And, in his stuffy, closed-in way, he loved his artists too.” She was just listening, taking it in. “He might’ve been willing to sleep with Barbara, but that doesn’t mean he’d let her get her hooks in you. A matter of respect.”
She thought about that, sipping her coffee. “After Barbara picked up Robert,” she said.
“She feeds Robert coke and booze. He’s flying in no time.” I caught the look in her eyes at the word ‘flying’, but I was too deep into what I was seeing to apologize. The pictures were leading me on. There was a kinkier version, the one suggested to me by Ramon that had Robert not dying as a virgin, that I wouldn’t show her yet; I might never be able to. “She’s talking to him about his plans, the painting. Buttering and threatening at the same time. Tough cop and good cop – but not one after the other. Mixed together, blended so you can’t tell them apart. Trying to find out what he knows. What he’s up to.”
“But he didn’t know anything. And wasn’t up to much.”
“Right. But ignorance – if you’re Barbara, I mean – it’s just as maddening as stubbornness. If she has any inkling that something – a big deal – is really nothing, or else suspects that he knows more than he’s telling. . . .” Off her stick. I thought of the jerky stalking as the alarms rang in the black and white box. The white-faced fury at Stefan.
“Robert always knew less than he was telling,” Claudia said, twirling her coffee spoon. Sadly now, and ready to give this up. But I couldn’t.
“Once he’s really off his head, that’s where it splits. The Lady or the Tiger time. I think it’s quite possible she cut him loose” – discarded him, I almost said, then realized I had anyway – “and it happened just like you said. Misadventure. Some wild crazy vision when you’re buzzed out of your face. But I also think she could have driven him up there and lost it. Maybe starting as a threat.” Talk. Tell me who – “It doesn’t even have to be really intentional. I mean, he’s tall, two thirds of him is above the railing. A little shove in the chest. . . .” Just like Rick and Neale.
“Maybe she was showing him the city that could be his,” I added, when too much time went by without her saying anything.
“That bitch,” Claudia said. So quietly that it made me afraid of my own scene, the one I’d just sold to her. Finally she raised her eyes and gave a thin, pinched-looking smile.
“Afflict the comfortable,” she said.
“Pardon?” I said. Though I’d heard her perfectly.
“There was an art school guy who used to say that. It was his slogan.
He was a shitty painter who turned to semi-sadistic performance art out of sheer desperation. I thought it was stupid at the time – let’s all put on our leather and play de Sade. But it comes back to me sometimes. I think it may be what I want to do, even if it’s stupid. I mean, look at those dumb ‘Adjusted’ things. What have I got against Vermeer?”
“I know exactly what you mean.” Afflict the comfortable. It wasn’t a noble goal, in fact it could feel downright pissy. But at times it was all you had. At the moment it was damn near all I wanted. What kept me moving most of the time. ATC. Like the acronym of a disease. A wasting one. But maybe a notch, a small one, above Galleria.
Angela was doing a great job of removing her things from the apartment while I was out. She knew my schedule, and she was doing it in stages. Each time I came back another box-load of books or tapes or knick-knacks was gone. There was lots of room in the closets again. We hadn’t even seen each other at the gallery since Tuesday morning. Nobody asked me to go up to Administration, and she must have gone out through security on her lunch breaks. I hadn’t seen Jason either. Bud was right: we did do awkward well. But that couldn’t last forever, surely.
I looked around rooms that, space by added space, were beginning to resemble the ones I remembered from four years before, the ones I’d asked Angela to move into on an impulse over coffee in Le Papillon. And there was nothing pissy or mean about the way she was doing it. Nothing that was definitely mine got touched, and not much that we’d bought together. It was a slow, gentle draining of the shared life, a careful siphoning off.
I set up the c
hessboard and started playing out a transcription of Bobby Fischer’s “Game of the Century”, the one he’d played to become U.S. Champion. Fourteen-year-old Bobby sacrificing his queen, in what looked like a stupefying blunder, then pushing middle-aged Robert Byrne all around the board in a staggeringly long series of forced moves. Getting back a pawn for his lost queen, another pawn, a bishop . . . then the checks started. The book described Byrne’s position as “severely embarrassed”, a term usually used to describe a king pushed around helplessly in an endgame, forced from his corner to flail about in the open, seeking cover where there was none, his troops all dead or dying. The term was popular at the chess club – a sweet thing, to severely embarrass someone, to humiliate his king, before finishing him. Only Armin never used it. He didn’t severely embarrass opponents: he crushed them.
Severely embarrassed was the minimum I wanted to see Barbara be. If she was capable of it. If I could arrange it somehow.
And that, of course – embarrassed – led me back to the sight of Angela and Jason standing in the library doorway. It’s amazing how many things you can understand seeing two people standing together, just lightly touching each other . . . but closer than a couple locked in an embrace. And the embarrassment was mainly for myself, for how late my understanding had come. Ignorance was a shameful thing. The oblivious or willed kind anyway. Angela’s boozy Sunday lateness; her – our – fits of flaring passion; her improved painting that I never saw in progress and that must have been painted elsewhere, in a more inspiring location . . . all the missed fragments flashed through my mind in an instant – not in sequence, not deduced or reasoned retrospectively, but apprehended all at once, like the details of a wreck raised to the surface.
I looked around the familiar, space-spotted room. Like an old sketch that someone was applying an eraser to, rubbing bits out. One month more on the landlord’s time. And I thought how not giving much of a shit about anything crept up on you gradually, like lead poisoning. You didn’t notice it for a long while – in fact that was one of its most insidious symptoms – and then suddenly it was up at toxic levels, your indifference making a harsh mess of your life.
