by Mike Barnes
“Paul?” The sliding had stopped at a resentful gleam. “You’ve changed lately. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed it.”
Christ, I should hope not.
“Really?” I said. “You think so?”
IV
CHOP
23
Without false modesty, I can say that I was once a good painter, though apparently not good enough,” Walter began in a strong voice, “so I know with certainty that the spirit of Picasso hovers behind anyone who picks up a pencil to try a sketch or drawing. On a less angelic plane, I also know that local artists are the true lifeblood of any gallery.”
It was most uncharacteristic of Walter to seem to be stating something definitely, and the audience paid close attention, if not to all of his words, then at least to his changed manner. The art on the walls surrounding the stage made a no-less-strong impression. Once again, as for the Gala Preview six weeks before, Walter had raided the vaults for the best of the gallery’s contemporary Canadian pieces. Bolduc, Rogers, Ewen, Martin, Iskowitz. Ronald, Gagnon, Coughtry, Craven, Snow. Shadbolt and Bush. If, after the conclusion of the awards ceremony, anyone ventured into the back galleries, they would experience a tasteful segue into more realistic and historical genres, again the best the gallery had to offer, and our biggest guns from the Group of Seven. In the Braithwaite Galleries Walter had stuck to the international or at least European theme, finding, along with our Picasso and some other regulars, some works that I’d never seen before. “Plan for an Unfinished City”, for example, a little pencil sketch by Dali that suggested he’d once spent an afternoon with M.C. Escher. It was strange to see a Dali without the gloss of finish and without colour – it made me wish he’d finished things less often. Walter hadn’t done anything special with the second floor; no one entered Sean’s domain unless determined to make a tour of the entire building, or else related to the artist in the Pettit Gallery. Small boys checking out Iris probably made up half of the annual head-count. Besides, the floral watercolourist still had another ten days left in his run.
When Claudia and I had finished our tour, we found a place in the crowd around the stage, as far from Jason and Angela as we could be and still get a good view. After a few strained telephone conversations about pick-up times and banking details, Angela and I had endured that first agonized eye-lock – a chance meeting when an elevator stopped – and some subsequent ones, unpleasant but less intense, so that now we could safely, and not too uncomfortably, avoid looking at each other. Jason had his arm around her waist again. I wondered when she’d get sick of that, this time deciding the answer might be never.
It was a good crowd. One of the rare occasions in the gallery when “crowd control” might signify something more than self-delusion. Walter had been right to move the presentation out from the Teale to the MacMahon Gallery. Two deaths in one week – “two tragic falls and possible suicides” as the Witness put it – had given the gallery an aura of tabloid danger that no exhibition, not even “Ordeal”, had ever managed to do. Also, as Walter was more typically remarking now, this year’s CHOP show had brought out “entries in record numbers and record quality,” which meant at least 250 attending artists, 200 of them disgruntled, but unable to resist mocking the travesty they’d been excluded from. Plus consoling and provoking friends and relatives. Plus some simple patrons. The huge room was packed.
I had to keep reminding myself I wasn’t working. It was my day off. For some reason that seemed hard to remember. I would see children running toward an Exit sign, and feel myself tense to move, and then look down at my bare arms and remember. What worked better as a reminder than my own arms was the sight of the other attendants stationed around the room. Not just the navy-maroon-white uniforms, but even more, the looks they were giving me. Lars and Leo kept smirking and giving each other little hand signals and winks over the crowd – not an untypical display, except that this time I knew, even when it wasn’t directed at me, that it had to do with Claudia and me and Angela and Jason. Hans’s sour look was also easy to read. He would have to judge as lunatic my preference of a skinny nail-biter over plump, docile, pretty Angela. It hadn’t made any difference when I’d told him about Jason. “Well, you must have given her a damn good reason,” was all he’d said. Which I could hardly dispute.
Even Sean’s customary glower before he’d fled upstairs had seemed strangely personal. As if the one living person he was on record as finding “interesting” should be his by natural right. Only Ramon had kept his cool, and his opinion to himself, granting us his usual white smile and a toss of his black hair. He’d been left, unusually, on the front desk for the entire afternoon, the most literal example of Walter putting the best face on the gallery. But it meant Hans had to stay stationed near Josh MacMahon to keep the gallery groupies from drifting back into the lobby.
“And now,” Walter finished up, “it’s my privilege to introduce the representative of our chief sponsor for this annual event, the station manager of CHOP, Mr. . . .”
A man in a suit no better than ours – or theirs, rather – and fat, with a pitted red face and scanty hair, whom you couldn’t imagine living past fifty even if he did stop drinking immediately, got up when he heard his name, starting a little as if out of a daze. As he began rambling without a glance at the paper in his hand, looking up from the faces to the paintings and, once, to the high ceiling with its bright aimed lights, I tried to imagine him as a young man hacking guitar chords under a Hendrix poster. CHOP played a surprisingly good mix of mainstream rock – oldies and some fairly new – and this man must have something to do with that. But the picture was hard to sustain; it kept wisping out at the edges, like clouds dissolving in a breeze.
Barbara was the only other person on the stage. Looking no less scrumptious than usual, but partly hidden behind a large cardboard box that was on her lap. Though usually good at finding the right people in an audience to smile at, she seemed to be actually listening to what the aging rocker was saying, her head tilted slightly, giving us a Grecian profile.
“Would you say she’s beautiful?” I whispered to Claudia. It seemed strange to be able to say that to a woman I hadn’t placed in the “friend” category, and wouldn’t no matter what. I wondered if it was wise.
“Very pretty,” she said.
“What’s the difference?”
“That’s easy. Pretty is harder to draw. No strong lines to grab on to. It can be damn near impossible in the worst cases. I did a ‘Charlie’s Angels’ series once to try and show that. But even as satire it didn’t work.”
“Shh!” someone hissed behind us, and I turned to see our hippy silk-screener, glowering.
The station manager trailed off in some thank-you’s that he read from his card and then sat down. But Barbara, in a break with tradition, didn’t replace him at the lectern. I’d often thought the gallery relied on her people skills as a kind of warm-up routine, except that in our business we needed the warm-up at the end rather than the beginning, to dispel whatever hostility and coldness our main speakers had provoked. But she stayed seated, clapping over the box on her lap, as Walter returned to the microphone.
“And now,” he said, “it’s time for the moment I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for,” as he produced three white envelopes from the breast pocket of his suit. A buzz, a ripple to deepen stillness, ran through the crowd. “Our judges,” he said, breaking with the other tradition of naming them, “had the usual difficult decisions to make, but I’m happy to report that in the end their choices were unanimous.” He smiled over at Barbara, identifying at least one other member of the jury. She smiled back.
One tradition we hadn’t broken from was the tradition, unlike the one used in beauty pageants and other contests, of naming the first-prize winner before the runners-up. Bad experiences had taught that it was best to get the worst nastiness out of the way promptly. The other artists would stick around to see if they’d won something at least, whereas if you gave them their d
isappointing seconds and thirds right away, they and their cohorts might just bugger off noisily. It was like handing out Easter candy to children: you could give away the huge chocolate bunny, weathering some tantrums, if you had as back-up other bags of jujubes and cream eggs.
“First prize this year, and a cheque for one hundred dollars,” said Walter, opening the top envelope, “goes to ‘Two Figures’, by Clau – ”
Her last name, and the last part of her first, was swallowed by the rising swell of reaction, polite applause completing rather than contradicting the grumbles and scattered groans. A version of the same sound would have greeted any winner, it always had, but this seemed longer and chillier than usual. It continued as Claudia approached the stage – back in her shapeless black, her hair a little oily-looking – and only began to subside when Walter, with a sober expression, raised his hand. In the relative silence, Claudia’s Doc Martens boomed across the hollow risers. I kept my eyes away from Angela, who might have found this an irresistable moment to flash a triumphantly disappointed question: Satisfied? or Happy now? or maybe, worst of all, Really?
Second and third place got warmer receptions, if only because the crowd needed to signal that these, at least, would have been tolerable first choices.
“I hope this isn’t just a pity trip,” Claudia, back from the stage, said in my ear.
“It isn’t. Walter knows what he’s looking at. It’s the one thing I’m sure of in this place.”
“He seems to have missed a few things lately.”
“Sometimes getting him to look at things is a problem.”
This exchange was conducted under cover of applause, but I felt a hot spot between my shoulders, and turned my head to see the silk-screen artist still glaring. Then I remembered: “Monarch and Mourning Cloak” had hung beside Claudia’s picture in the show. The butterflies perfectly and cleanly printed, just like his signs.
Now, at last, Barbara did get up. She put the box on a little table in front of her. I wondered why she hadn’t put it there before. Angela liked to keep big purses on her lap, especially when feeling “chubby”, but Barbara had never shown the slightest inclination to hide. As she crossed the stage her white knitted dress clung daringly – very daringly, for a forty-year-old – and completely winningly to her breasts and hips, outlining each thigh as she stepped forward. No, beauty, I thought. This time it was Claudia who was underestimating.
Barbara looked out over the waiting audience with a serious expression that, just for a second, made my stomach lurch. But then, with an ordinarily dazzling smile, she said, “I think this is very, very special.” And proceeded to list some of the ways in which it was special, and some of the “too many people” owed thanks for making it so. It was classic Barbara. Winning and graceful, its warmth not easily disputable unless you were grinding an axe.
Still. Something about the performance nagged at me. A subdued, a slightly diminished, quality I detected in the smiles and hand flourishes. Usually Barbara was in top form at the CHOP awards, which, followed by the luncheon tomorrow, marked the end of her major initiatives until September. Her docents could handle what remained of the school tours in June, and the donors that needed approaching would be, like herself, away at cottages for much of the summer. She might have been in top form today; if there was a tarnish on her lustre, it was a subtle one. It could have been my awareness of a ticking bomb, of course. That changed how you looked at anybody. ATC: Afflict the comfortable. But why then, watching her, was it I who felt uncomfortable, troubled by a sense of disproportion? Almost, at certain moments, of panic. What if carelessness had been the main force operating here? Not reason, not justice, though these might fumble – sometimes successfully – in its shadow. But mainly carelessness. Carelessness all around, by all concerned, my own carelessness near or at the top. Like Boris Karloff in full-bolt mode, swinging inadvertent arms to smash walls and people. It was an unpleasant view of myself, and I dealt with it severely. Though in its wake bubbled panic sensations. I had an odd impulse to rush the stage. To do what I couldn’t imagine.
“I’ll now call on my two assistants to tabulate the final results of our poll,” Barbara said.
Cleo Carlsson and another pretty young docent walked up onto the stage and joined Barbara at the little table with the box on it. Some of the bugs of the “People’s Choice Award” had been worked out over the years, though not all of them. Ballot-stuffing had been curbed by keeping the ballot box behind the front desk and taping up Bud’s memo to “make every effort to remember faces...in view of past irregularities,” so that not only the attendant but the voter could see it. Also good was the shortlist idea, avoiding the embarrassment of forty-five or so small piles of paper, which only underlined the fact that almost everybody had a few friends and relatives, except for those few who did not. But the four piles of paper that remained, rising at roughly equal rates as the women’s arms crossed each other to add to them, still gave the unfortunate impression of a lottery. A recount was necessary, then another. The crowd shifted restlessly, making disgruntled sounds, even though its own will was about to be heard.
“Good old HAG,” I said in Claudia’s ear.
“What?”
“Never mind,” I said. She hadn’t grown up here either.
Finally, Barbara leaned into the microphone and announced, “And the 1984 CHOP People’s Choice Award goes . . . to our own Angela, for her painting ‘Bruce Trail Near Dundas’.” She straightened, then, as if remembering something, bent with a sly smile – a very sexy smile, to my eyes – to the microphone: “Angela, as some of you may already know, is an employee of the gallery. So let me just remind you: on this one we just did the counting!”
This got a good laugh. Looking around me at the faces, I seemed to be the only one who found it tacky and awkward. Even Angela was grinning on her way to the stage. Again I had that fleeting sense of a diminishment. Of aplomb just starting to slip. Despite the body and the beauty, Barbara looked diluted somehow, almost as if she were the secretary as she handed the envelope to Angela, who appeared to be glowing, lit up with a soft radiance like a La Tour woman. I felt the sadness of not being able to share this happy moment with her, of having to watch it from a distance. We’d been through some low and struggling times, and now, when she at least gave signs of breaking free of them, we couldn’t share a smile and a sigh of satisfaction.
I raised my face from the scene on the stage to the railing on the second floor, over which Sean was leaning, his lips twitching as usual. But this time the movements of his mouth looked slower and more distinct, as if he were trying to mouth something at me. But whatever it was, I couldn’t make it out. I looked away.
During and after Walter’s closing remarks – a few last thank-you’s followed by details about the retrieval of paintings – the crowd thinned rapidly. The most unhappy banged straight out the front doors. A smaller number dispersed in muttering knots towards the back galleries and the stairs, no doubt to confirm what other mistakes the gallery had made recently. Angela’s painting had been one of the first to acquire a red dot indicating it had been sold. Now she had a small crowd of well-dressed people around her, perhaps congratulating her, perhaps commissioning other views.
I looked carefully around the high-ceilinged room, studying it as if committing it to memory for the last time. Which was hardly necessary, since I’d be back pacing it in my Sears suit tomorrow.
Claudia, perhaps misunderstanding the meaning of my frown, said, “You’re forgetting the three laws of profitable painting.”
I looked sideways at her. She had a twinkle in her grey eyes. “Which are?”
“Landscape, landscape, landscape.”
She slipped her hand in mine, and together we left the gallery.
Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Dennis Priebe,
printed offset on Rolland Zephyr Laid paper and Smyth-sewn
at Coach House Printing in an edition of 750 copies.
An additional 25 copies case-
bound by Daniel Wells.
BIBLIOASIS
WINDSOR, ONTARIO
Copyright © Mike Barnes, 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Although set in the real city of Hamilton, Ontario, and borrowing (loosely) the physical layout of the Art Gallery of Hamilton circa 1984, this novel is a work of fiction, and no correspondence between its characters and events and real people and events is intended or should be inferred.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Barnes, Mike, 1955-
Catalogue raisonné / Mike Barnes.
Text in English.
eISBN : 978-1-926-84566-1
0-9738184-0-9 (HAND-CASED)
0-9735971-9-4 (PBK.)
I. Title.
PS8553.A7633C37 2005
C813’.54
C2005-906000-X
Photos by
HEATHER R. SIMCOE
Readied for the press by
JOHN METCALF
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
