by Mike Barnes
And then, three strides to the door, I couldn’t take another minute in the place.
“You didn’t see it coming?”
I thought about this. “No, I didn’t.”
“Really?”
“No. Should I have? I mean, are there always signs?”
“I’m hardly the expert. But yes, I would think so. Some sign anyway.”
“Well, I don’t know then. We had arguments. Though not many lately. Things got a little slow sometimes, after four years. But the sex was still good. Great, actually. And we were still talking. Laughing.”
“Great sex.” For some reason she was shaking her head.
“Don’t knock it.”
“I’m not. Why would I?”
We were still standing just inside her door. I’d started talking before she’d even closed it. She was wearing another of Robert’s white shirts, untucked, over black jeans. I wondered how she’d spent the hours since dinner.
“You wouldn’t do that, would you?” I said.
“Do what?”
“I mean, if you were with someone, you’d let him know.”
Her look – a little smile, her eyes rolled up – like she was hearing a joke told on herself. Or maybe telling it.
“You’d – ”
“Give him the message?”
“Yeah.”
“He’d probably know before I did.”
She reached behind me and slid the chain lock on the door.
Her fingers at my temple, below my eye. Pressing until the burn started.
“I think that’s when I started to get interested in you. When I saw your bruises.”
“Bruises turn you on?”
“People who get them sometimes do.”
And that’s when the answer to the problem came to me. A victim must be sacrificed. It wasn’t a misleading riddle. It was the simple truth, albeit on a slant. The king was the victim. Always. But how could a king be a victim? By being threatened. And what could he sacrifice then? Not his life, or the game was over. But his safety. By leading the king out of his nest of pawns, exposing him to danger, two successive checks, the plays with knight and pawn became routine. I didn’t even need the board or the scrap of paper, whichever pocket I’d left it in. I could do it all in my head.
22
How do you know when it’s time for a change? When you can’t stop thinking about one. Or especially when you do stop. If I really believed I’d learned that lesson, why did I have to keep repeating it to myself? Like an old person patting his pocket for his keys.
Doing things with Claudia felt interesting again. Not always pleasant, and certainly not always comfortable – but with a fresh slant and edge to them. Our conversation felt like one that was continuous, though we could be silent for long stretches, the silences part of the talking. Even awkward questions belonged.
“You don’t really think that kind of thing’s bolder, do you?” she said one afternoon when we were setting up the chessboard. Somehow I knew immediately what she meant.
I thought about it. “No, I guess not. There’s nothing like an outright grab. The Great Train Robbery. Remember that teller who fiddled with the bank’s computer to skim a fraction of a cent off millions of transactions? People thought that was kind of cool – but kind of laughable too.”
“Clever maybe. But small-minded.”
“Yeah. I guess it would fall under the heading of sustainable development.”
“Which is fine if you’re just looking to be sustained.”
I had nothing to add to that, and there was something happening on the board, but the silence made me nervous for some reason. So I said, “Apparently she would never have got caught, or was unlikely to, but she upped her electronic skim from something like one twentieth of a cent to one fifteenth.”
“Got greedy,” Claudia said.
Excursions – no, expeditions – out of common sense. I didn’t have the slightest doubt that Claudia would be up to them. Or that I wouldn’t be always. This was what I knew that I could have with her. That, the appetite and stamina for it, was what connected her with the surrealists. What drew me to her. What I knew I wanted, and even more, needed. Expeditions out of sense.
The “bolder” conversation was actually the looped-back coda to one we’d had over another chess game. Claudia hadn’t come close to beating me yet, but I had to work a little harder each time. Talking over the board didn’t bother her at all. I began to wonder if, instead of the bad listener she’d called herself, she was actually a perfect one. Able to screen out everything except what she needed to hear.
“Barbara could have put together something better,” I said. “If she’d had the imagination. I mean, she had the contempt. But maybe that blinded her to bigger possibilities.”
Claudia didn’t take her eyes off the board but I felt her attention sharpen. She said:
“Why are we suddenly in the past tense? And what are you talking about?”
“Well, I mean. Why run the risk of passing off forgeries as real? If the renters really don’t know any better, why not create a true phantom gallery. Have paintings done – maybe in styles similar to famous painters, so they jog people’s memories – then sign them with other names.”
“Artists that don’t exist, you mean?” While heading off a pin I was working on.
“There’s no law against a pseudonym is there? Or a bunch of pseudonyms. ‘Haystack’, by Omar Watson, say.”
“It would still need a pedigree. A provenance.”
“Maybe coming from Barbara would be provenance enough. Or, no. Someone working for Barbara, but outside the gallery. I think she could finesse it so she wouldn’t even have to claim it came from the gallery collection. It would just be hush-hush. Nod, wink. ‘I’ve got a very special painting for you this month.’”
“People would compare notes. Maybe look things up.”
“Look things up?”
“They might. You can be rich and smart.” That surprised me somehow, coming from Claudia.
“Barbara would know how to pick them. Someone titillated by secrecy . . . getting a hidden treasure for a while. . . .” It did seem far-fetched. As soon as I stopped talking, it evaporated. Popped like a bubble. But Claudia seemed pensive; she seemed to be considering it.
“I still say it would be risky,” she said a few moves later.
That brought it back into view. “That’s what I’m saying. Safer and riskier. Better.”
“It would beat faux finishing at least.”
“Yeah, I guess it would.”
“Oh, you know about that?”
“Robert and I talked.”
That funny look crossed her face, the one I’d seen in Rehak’s and was seeing more often lately. Like she was trying for her sneer but it turned into a wince.
“And played chess,” she said.
“It was mostly talk, really.”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
“Hnh?”
I’d offered to bugger off when she was painting – catch a movie at the Broadway, or check on the emptying of my place – but she said she needed to learn to work with someone else around. Why, she didn’t say exactly. It may have been simply pride. Bothered by her need to cocoon herself in silence, the crack in concentration that betrayed. So far she’d got as far as priming canvases in front of me, then dragging them down the hall for the real work. From the number of rectangles I watched her coat with white, she seemed to be working rapidly. She shrugged, said maybe she had something going, but it might “just be verve.” I didn’t understand that at all. Nor did I repeat the Maldoror line, which I thought she’d heard. Hnh? was a kind of mental processing, I thought, audible but not really a question.
I said, “It’s patchy. But great in spots. Sean was right. They could have found a better quote.”
She slapped the brush loaded with gesso back and forth. Among other things, priming seemed to be a rest. A restoration.
“Listen to this: ‘Readi
ng Shakespeare is like dissecting the mind of a jaguar.’ What do you think of that? Do you like that?”
“I do. I like it better than Shakespeare actually. What I got of him in high school anyway.”
You could tire yourself out trying to get a positive reaction from this girl, I told myself. And then she’d be gone for sure.
On Monday I agreed to overtime as usual and we took down the surrealist show. Barbara, whom Walter had named Temporary Curator while the job was posted, stood in the centre of the room looking luscious and concerned, but never having participated in the hanging of a show, she had no real notion of how one came down. Peter was in charge, though at the moment he appeared to be doing nothing more important than slicing a length of bubble pack off a roll.
“Though we know whose name will be on the shipping order,” he said to me when Barbara had gone. Her annual thank-you luncheon for the volunteers was to be held the following Sunday at her house, and there was a planning session up in the lounge about which lady should prepare which hors d’oeuvre and other details. “Once I show her how to fill it out.”
It was another version of They always hire outside. Peter had dusted himself off after the death of his Kleinburg plans and had applied for the curator’s position though he knew it was hopeless. He’d come to me and told me so – and that was another mystery. He didn’t seem to hold the bulky white bandage on his nose against me, though the occasional glance at my hands told me he hadn’t forgotten its source. Maybe he thought he’d got off lightly. And he had, actually. In this kangaroo court there seemed to be only two sentences: too lenient and too severe. Robert and Neale had drawn the short straws.
Taking pictures down was another time – along with stealing pictures or forging them – that jaded eyes could be jolted into actually looking. Holding the painting between your legs as you sat on the floor, leaning it away from you as you began taping the bubble wrap. This time it was the Duchamp that snagged my attention, though previously it had seemed more trick than artwork. One of the troubles with the surrealists, I’d decided, was that they didn’t really repay repeated viewing as much as other artists. The first look could be a splash, but after that it was usually diminishing returns. A lack of mystery, somehow, though with plenty of elaborately weird complications. Which was a strange criticism to make of a group that allied itself so strenuously with dream, with the unconscious. In some ways they seemed too rational.
Etant Privé, the Duchamp was called. Was the failure to provide an English translation – alone among all the titles – another of Neale’s in-jokes? Not subtle necessarily, but too aloof to inspire curiosity. I peered through the glass that Duchamp had whited out then scratched in places to allow slivers of viewing. Saw bits of the back of the nude girl behind, the waterfall she was facing toward. It still seemed trick-like, but it held me longer. There was something there.
“Would you give me a hand, dear?” Mrs. Soames asked as I was wheeling the padded trolley of paintings into the freight elevator. She had a large box of tissue-wrapped gifts that she needed lifted off the counter and into a corner. She herself was busy tying gold and silver ribbons into a double bow on one gift, a card ready to slip under the corner when she was done. “And if you could just help me down with it when I’m ready to go. About two o’clock.”
“Sure. Where are these all headed anyway?”
“Pardon, dear? Oh, to Barbara’s for the luncheon. But I’m taking them out to her house today. I’m in charge of preparations.” I gathered that meant cleaning.
Opening the card Mrs. Soames had inscribed, I said, “Mrs. Soames, they asked me to bring a little more wrapping material up to the lounge.”
“Oh well, yes. Yes. Whatever you need,” she said, tugging on a slightly shorter loop.
Since she was occupied, I took a plastic bag to put the paper, bow and card in as well. I left it at the front desk and went back to the Braithwaite Galleries. “Hans,” I said, “Would you mind if I took first lunch? There’s something – ”
“For Christ’s sake, we’re – ” He broke off when he saw that we were far ahead of schedule. It had been a small show, after all. Looked at his watch. “Be back here in no more than sixty minutes.” In four years, I’d never left for lunch without that sentence ringing in my ears. It was almost the equivalent of a dinner bell.
As the freight elevator descended I put “Wayward Guest” in the plastic shopping bag, then walked out of the gallery with it. Pulling a Robert. My arm seeming to tingle with an energy that came up from the bag and circled in pins and needles my shoulder joint. Right behind you, buddy. At least as far as the bridge part. The short span between glee and hysteria – no span really, just an alternating current – gave me an instant understanding of the blunders thieves make. The ones the newspapers use for their “World’s Dumbest Criminals” boxes.
“How’s your cursive script?” I said to Claudia.
“I can do anonymous female.” And she did: With appreciation from the volunteers in graceful blue curves and loops. Whatever she came up with would have had to do; my hands were trembling too much. Claudia had taken the picture down the hall and come back with both of them wrapped. One in white tissue with a silver bow, the other in the bubble-pack.
“Wish me luck,” I said.
“Be careful and you won’t need it.”
Owen buzzed me in and I went into the freight elevator and put the bubble-wrapped Klee back on the trolley. Backed away. Then remembered that I was supposed to lean the paintings against their crates for inspection. That’s why I’d brought them down in the first place. Careful!
I did that then. “Wayward Guest” was blurry beneath the plastic; it was only the triangle of brilliant red that cinched it at a glance. I started to walk away, and then hesitated. Some doubt that made me feel ashamed pulled me back slowly like an elastic with most of its bounce gone. I looked over at Owen: deep in Dick. Then tugged loose the bottom left corner of the taped wrapping, until I could see the tiny seam of echoing red I’d marked. I didn’t need to see the checked brush stroke on the head. It would be there anyway. Either way.
I added our gift to Mrs. Soames’ box. “Don’t forget dear, two o’clock,” she said, bent over another elaborate bow. It occurred to me that I’d never seen her in an addled phase when it was something she needed.
Hans met me at the Braithwaite entrance with a scowl, a tiny glowering Hun with his hands on his hips. “Don’t waste a lunch hour if there’s no real need,” he said, confusingly, until I remembered: he hated early returns as much as late ones; they were equivalent irregularities. Under pressure the headpiece really did fill with straw. Loose stalks, drifting around the barn.
Helping Mrs. Soames load the trunk of her Lincoln Town Car was a pure pleasure. She was driving off with it, after all. And as much as I enjoyed her company, if someone had to stand trial for stealing a masterpiece, then . . . . Mrs. Soames, her face barely clearing the dash, reversed the big car handily up the sloping garage floor and out onto King Street, flipping me a thank-you wave out her window.
And with that “Wayward Guest” was off on another journey.
There was still the inspection prior to crating to get through. I elected to stay in the Braithwaite Galleries, beginning the patching and sanding of nail holes, during that. Peter had done the real inspection up in the gallery, of course, checking the works off on his clipboard. Barbara only needed to make a show of overseeing the crating. If she could be seen doing that, and signing the labels that went in the plastic sleeves, she was unlikely to be bothered by how much of anyone’s work could be discerned through rows of plastic air bubbles. Claudia’s touch of taping directly over the Hauptman’s stamp had been another nice attention to detail, another smart move. And dead obvious, too – though I’d overlooked it.
Finally, it was done. Peter appeared, looking grumpy enough that I knew the inspection had been worse than cursory. He would have done well at Kleinburg.
I was released to the pure plea
sure of imagining where, from which direction, and how hard, the first squeezing would come. From the curator in Switzerland? Or was there another gallery first – yes, I seemed to remember Winnipeg. How sharp were they there? Or would the police be the first to appear? Interpol?
One scene I kept coming back to was the luncheon next Sunday. All the volunteers seated around a central chair, places allotted by tier. The careful opening, respectful of each thoughtful offering. Oh, what a lovely . . . . Oh, this is just too . . . .
Oh.
It was very pleasant to imagine things you couldn’t really imagine at all, especially when every possible version of them was agreeable.
On my way out I stopped by the panel to see Owen.
“Frankenstein graduated to Nights?” I said.
“What?”
“Owen, I know Neale liked to promise people things. What did he promise you?”
Owen recoiled as if from intimate contact with the dead man. “Neale didn’t promise me anything.”
“Was it Barbara then?”
“What are you talking about, Paul?” But his eyes were sliding back and forth, as I’d seen them do so often over a lengthy description in search of the remembered good bit.
“Well, all of it really. The sloppiness. That night, especially. The sign-in fudgings. People in and out. You can’t be that out of it.”
“I’m not out of it.”
All I had to do was wait. Twenty, maybe thirty seconds. Maintaining eye contact when the sliding allowed. Finally he said glumly:
“Bud told me there might be an opening upstairs. For an attendant.”
Bud did? It seemed to open yet another slant on mystery. Or another mystery. Not a very interesting one probably, was my hunch at this point. Bud tidying, most likely, his job to know more than anyone else and to cover them when their secrets got tangled up. An assistant. But you never knew. Once again, for the second time in a week, Bud had given me a reason to stay a little longer at the gallery.
