Catalogue Raisonne (13 page)

I didn't want to look at it any more, especially the ghastly diagram, but the only alternative was to look up into the faces I could feel watching mine.

“Jesus,” someone said. I didn't even recognize the voice. It could have been anybody's. But the single toneless word matched the numbness I felt spreading through me.

The panel intercom burped on. Ted jumped at the sound. So did I; flinches ran round the group in a ripple. Walter's voice said: “Ted, I've talked to Burns. Owen says he can work a double tonight, and they're sending someone in with him for panel training. Stefan will take Robert's place, but then of course we'll still need someone for swing rotation.”

“Stefan,” Ted said, glancing at the rest of us. “Right.”

The intercom closed with a softer burp. Now I did meet the other eyes, expecting to find blame of Walter, anger. But the expressions were more chagrined, sheepish, as if embarrassed for the man. Or for themselves, perhaps. It was Walter's job, after all. And he'd had no way of knowing he was speaking to an audience. The intercom was deceiving that way.

Sean, who had the paper now, said, “Hackneyed title as usual. ‘Death of a Dilettante' might have been closer to the mark.”

I turned to him. “Isn't there a limit to cynicism?”

Sean answered calmly, in his own world even now, and disarmed by the quietness with which I'd spoken. That was the way it always started: quietly. Quietest of all before the worst times. With just this inner hum I could barely make out, like a turbine starting.

“Dostoyevsky's ‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man' also comes to mind.”

“This isn't a Russian novel, asshole.” Too late, I saw Sean's eyes bulge in fright, eyebrows scooting up into the blotchy, reddening dome. He was not oblivious, could never be – why else did he need to take perpetual flight into literature? But the turbine merely gathered these thoughts into its whipping speed. Sluggish to start, it was much, much slower stopping. Everything that occurred, anything that was said, just multiplied its power. “And if ridiculous men are going to start dropping, who's next? Eh? How many of us will be left?” I took a step toward him, fists clenched.

“That's enough, Paul,” said Bud, who had suddenly appeared. “You're relieved.”

The military phrase, which would have been absurd on any other occasion in the gallery – sub-commander dismissing the hothead private in the garrison – somehow fit the present situation perfectly. Bud had found the right words somehow. Plucked them out of the charged air.

“We're all feeling the stress of the situation. We need to – ” But these more conventional Bud-offerings were already behind me, bouncing off my back like Nerf darts. And Ted buzzed me out so briskly that what we needed to do got snapped off by the click of the door.

P
inball. Pinball machine. The ball lolling, falling to a flipper, whacked spinning again. “Pinball Wizard”. The chords simple, but way too fast.

I walked down King Street to the Tim Horton's at the corner of Caroline. Sat at a corner table by the washrooms and the newspaper shelf, with the usual coffee and cruller. The coffee fine (though hardly what I needed), but the donut centre gooey, undercooked. I flipped through a copy of the
Sun
– the Sunshine Girl a slippery brown, oozing out of her bikini like molasses, but her hobby: “sketching and drawing”. I couldn't get away from it. Across the street was The Sheik restaurant. Excellent falafels and shish tarwoo, Angela and I went there sometimes. The Arabic lettering on the sign: interesting squiggles and lines, deep blue like ocean waves on a silver background. There had been an exhibition of paintings by a local artist who did “colour field” canvases (Walter said he had the name wrong), like these telegraphic jots and dashes and sudden turns. But no curlicues, all straight lines . . . and the colours precisely reversed, metallic silver squirts on a background of airbrushed blue. He visited the gallery every day, coming in faithfully to catch the reactions to his work. There were none. Working eight hours a day, I rarely surprised a patron doing even a walk-by of “Signals” in the Pettit Gallery upstairs. I doubt he ever came face to face with a viewer. One day I asked him about his technique. It was “no great mystery,” he confessed. He drew grids of lines in pencil, then used the eraser to rub out some of them at random, making the templates for his silver jots and dashes, which went from near-mazes to just remnants of a maze, bits and fragments. It sounded like a depressing procedure. The procedure a depressive would invent. And he did seem depressed, standing there with me in the empty room, surrounded by his labours of the past two years. Raised out of his funk a bit by my interest but not really cheered. Not confusing the curiosity of a suit (the brown one then) with that of a real patron.

Up the street ran a row of small businesses. The new café, Bauhaus, like the band, with an opaque black window and, inside, uncomfortable tubular chairs in a mostly bare room, okay espresso but bad desserts, Xeroxes of Joy Division covers hung in a crooked grouping on one wall. Next to it the shabby little insurance office I'd always wondered about. Little white clapboard bungalow in need of a paint job. How could insurance – which I'd always taken to be the easiest, most foolproof of legal scams – not afford a better building? How did you
fail at no-fail? And then, up at the corner of Queen, Déjà Vu. Where I'd bought some shirts. Where Robert might have picked up the trench coat, I'd never asked him.

And never will.
Death was a nag with a mouth full of clichés.

I turned back to the people in Tim's, my fellow patrons. Tried to focus on their faces, wonder about their lives. Angela called herself a people person, and was. Which meant, I thought, that she had the ability – which I envied at the moment – to enjoy people as a passing spectacle. I wasn't a people person. People's mysteries got under my skin and crawled around, if I let them. That was why I often preferred to let them remain blurs, smudges spinning around my own orbit. Onstage was good for that. It might have been the thing I missed most about it.

I couldn't escape the image. It was there whenever I stopped thinking for a moment. Sometimes it elbowed its way right to the front of the queue. Robert flailing, the trench coat a collapsed umbrella, belt ends spoking up, down into the sludge of the harbour, smashing into water like concrete, filled with toxic chemicals, huge cancered carp moving sluggishly away at the splash. Then, as fright dissipated, turning to move back.

I imagined his reaction to appearing in a news story for the first time as a security guard who had died a pathetically stupid death. I imagined deep embarrassment. The irony set too deep to laugh or formulate away.

I left Tim Horton's and went up Bay, past the New and Used car lot. Across Main Street. Past Jackson, Hunter. The big Bay 200 building, posh and high-gloss by our standards, doorman in uniform loitering behind the lobby glass. Up on the twentieth floor, Neale must have felt he was
almost
back in Toronto. Odd, though, that he didn't think
almost
almost mocking. Close but no cigar. A room over The Running Pump would have made a better statement.

Pinball thoughts. Lolling, falling to a flipper, getting whacked spinning again.

When I turned down Bold, out of the businesses and the city
buildings, passing small old houses, I began to relax. Deep breaths of lilac, spring finally settled in after a fitful start. Warm sun.

I dropped into The Bookcellar for a few minutes. Looking at the rows of coloured paperbacks I rarely bought, I read them too fast. I was a library man. But the old stone library at the corner of Main and James was closing. Too expensive, the story went, though they had a hole dug behind Eaton's for a new one. I'd never seen that incongruity debated in the
Witness
. It was mostly just which bank had the inside track on buying the old building from the city, and occasionally, where the temporary library would be in the interim that the books were homeless.

On impulse I ducked into House of Java a few doors farther along James. Just long enough to get a head full of coffee smells, rich jagging dusts I didn't need. Nor the real coffee and another donut – cooked this time, but dry and stale – I had at the Donut Castle at the corner of Duke Street. People skills – even in my sense – definitely faltering when I couldn't tell the customers from the ones I'd left in Tim Horton's. Features I snagged on looked exactly the same. Eerie.

The chords in “Pinball Wizard” easy, but way, way too fast.

It wasn't until I reached the Sunshine Restaurant, my old dim air-conditioned basement, light seeping in through slits near the ceiling, that I felt myself begin to settle. And ordered appropriately for the first time: a beer and western sandwich. The waitress knowing me again, no recognition trouble since the episode of the suit. She was young and kind of brainless. Sometimes we exchanged a few words about the weather or her day. Today she just set down the order with a reflex smile and went back to her magazine in the corner.

After another beer, it was getting on to six and I had a simple decision to make about direction. I could go up the street and around the corner to the apartment. Angela had probably read the paper today or heard it on the news. Or I could head back downtown for the usual Monday night chess club at seven. Angela would understand my need to distract myself from Robert. She understood the need for solitude – more so since the start of her painting classes – as long as it didn't go on too long. “Sharing” was a legacy of Sociology, or maybe just Angela. But the fact was – not a pleasant one to face, and trailing clouds of guilt
– though we lived together, Angela wasn't always the first person I wanted to share bad news with. And not this news especially. If I couldn't tell her all of it, and I couldn't, then I felt better telling her nothing. For as long as I could. For now anyway. In the end it really
was
a simple decision.

Armin never sat in the middle of the room. He occupied a little table against the wall, but it always
felt
like he held sway in the centre. Partly it was because the other players kept looking over at him, and not only when a “BOOM BOOM!” signalled a checkmate. The chess nerds who vied for primacy at the centre boards loved the game too much not to acknowledge, however sourly, who the best player really was. They might deplore Armin's gloating commentary and his lethally chaotic style of play, but no one could beat him except by a fluke blunder. He cursed these rare losses viciously, being almost as bad a loser as he was a winner. There seemed an essential Balkan unruliness about him, some foundational distemper and disarray, from the flyaway white hair to the matted, jam-and-tobacco-flecked beard, coarse unwashed layers of clothes – always many
layers
of clothes, no matter what season. Poverty by no means the cause of all of this, though it might well be incorporated as a keystone. But it was the deep-rootedness, more than the number, of these eccentricities that rankled the younger players – all of whom affected peculiar habits, oddball tics inseparable from excellence in
the game
– and was another reason, besides the blitzkrieg humiliations, that many players refused to play with him. As a result, he often played against an imaginary, perhaps a remembered, opponent, checkmating himself or this projection with no less fury than he turned on any other enemy.

He finished me off swiftly in our first game, dispensing his usual post-mortem advice, which may have been merely generic. “You know how to wait, not make mistakes . . . but you need weapon too – BOOM ! BOOM!” He flourished his queen in a short arc, swinging her base rudely against my bishop and king, knocking them flat. Sometimes he pissed me off as much as he did the other players. He was a
nasty piece of work really. To be treated to the brilliance you had to eat a lot of shit.