Catalogue Raisonne (17 page)

He was carrying one of the large canvas bags, felt-lined and with sturdy wooden handles, that art rental packed its pictures in. Another of Hans's good ideas, drawn up by him and sewn by a local fabric artist who wanted a show. Without it the Release Form, with its forced purchase clause in the event of damage, wouldn't have made much sense.

“Where is picture rental?” Piccone called loudly, before he was very near the desk. But when I extended my hand, he brought his own up to return the courtesy. Big gold ring with blue stone, worn on the pinky. A wide plain copper bracelet on the hairy wrist that came out of his suit sleeve, and a chain one with a flat band falling over it. Arthritis? Medic Alert? I wondered. Stacking the ailments on the same wrist – but the hand you shook with? It was one of those curious handshakes that I've got mainly from Italian men: just the ends of the fingers lightly gripped for a moment. Brief, curiously delicate. Two courtiers in a hurry, crossing paths in the street. He didn't seem to remember me from the Gala Preview.

“Where is the lady who rents pictures?” he repeated.

I took him across to Mrs. Soames, then lingered near the sliding glass door. Pretending to fuss with its rubber-stoppered metal feet, which generally needed a good kick to dislodge at closing time.

Piccone was loudly, though still politely, complaining about the picture he'd rented, which apparently hadn't been his first choice, or perhaps had been picked out by someone else. “I liked the last one, that was good. All those little people. I liked that. I asked for another one the same. Maybe not exactly . . . but this! Not even close. I don't like it.” I was reminded of a difficult customer in a restaurant: all those “I”s and “like”s.

Meanwhile Mrs. Soames, flustered now, her sharpness gone, was opening and closing small drawers, the cash register, flipping through
some of the papers she'd described as “clutter”. She may just have been trying to stay plausibly occupied in the face of the male discontent that was leaning over her Windexed counter, raising its voice, giving off its smells.

“You want to see? I'll show you,” Piccone said, lifting the bag to unzip it.

I did, but Mrs. Soames said, “Um, no. No.” Getting the proper firmness into the second “no”, blinking rapidly at Piccone.

Piccone sighed, and said, “Where is head office, please?” The question, or its tone, nicely powdered with the courtesy owed to a lady, like a talcum covering the basic content: Show me someone who matters.

I was about to oblige him, since Mrs. Soames was lifting the corners of papers on a spike, when Bud said from behind me, “That's fine, Paul. I can help Mr. Piccone.”

He led Piccone into the yellow elevator. The complaints resumed before the doors closed, and continued, growing fainter, up the shaft. It occurred to me as I began the closing routine that I was suddenly getting a lot of the
Paul
treatment. Or just noticing it more. Bud, yesterday:
That's enough, Paul.
Stefan of course:
Yes, Paul. Yes, Paul.
Even Hans:
Just the required, Paul
. And now Bud again:
That's fine, Paul.
You could work someone over well with the first-name finish.
Paul.
An end-stop that felt more like a dangling icicle. It got added to my list of gallery grievances, a round-the-block queue by now, like the pictures of the line-up snaking through Madrid to see Franco's body, soon after I'd dropped out of first-year university and bought my first guitar.

S
till, I'd learned quite a lot in my time at the gallery. I had to remind myself of that sometimes, whenever I came too close to thinking of the four years as flushed down a toilet or dropped, day by day, into the temporal equivalent of a paper shredder. Working at a cultural institution, even a mostly empty one, you couldn't help but gain some knowledge. Picked it up effortlessly, by osmosis as it were. Literary lore from Sean, musical bits from Robert. Fix-it rudiments from Hans and

Peter and a stream of various repairmen I'd stood behind. Glimpses of the local scene, its cliques and power shifts, from Barbara and her circle. Art history and styles, from Walter mostly, but also from a variety of culture apparatchiks and mavens and patrons and wannabes. They all had opinions about the water they swam in, some of them worth listening to. And I learned from the artists, though they tended to be preoccupied and to talk least. And the ones that did talk were often strangely inarticulate, swept up by something and able to relay the sensations and the passing blur, but not really able to report on anything like a conscious, deliberate process. None of this knowledge needed to be actively sought. It pervaded the gallery air like pollen in May, a little of it inevitably settling on your hair and clothes and on your exposed skin.

These were natural thoughts to be having on my way to visit Peter, the person from whom I'd probably picked up the most interesting tidbits of knowledge.

On my way I looked up Sean. He was in one of his favourite lairs, tucked in between the potted ficus and the window at the end of the Pettit Gallery, looking out onto a tiny gravelled courtyard that couldn't have been entered except by mini-helicopter. His lips went still at my approach. He really did look afraid as well as startled.

“I'm sorry about Monday,” I said. “I played chess with him sometimes.”

“No apology required,” he murmured, but looked relieved. He closed his eyes a moment, and then intoned: “Passion is never disallowed, particularly in the place where passion is spent.” From the shy glance he darted at me I knew it was his own.

“Thanks,” I said. “That's good to know.”

We wandered down the sculpture corridor and took up our usual position leaning on the wooden railing, overlooking the MacMahon Gallery. Barbara was conducting one of her docent training sessions, a refresher course or perhaps a recruiting drive this late in the school year, standing in front of a painting with fifteen or twenty women in a semi-circle around her. Her voice rang out confidently, clear and dominating, but also warm. “Notice the little flip of red he gives the end of this brush stroke. It looks like an afterthought, at most a grace note
near the edge of the composition, but if you take note of your own eye movements as you view the work, you'll find that it might actually be the centre of the painting.” She had no script in hand.

“Harpies,” Sean muttered. For no good reason I could see. Barbara yielded centre space to a middle-aged woman, a new one, who began stammering some of her own reactions to the painting. Barbara smiled encouragement from the side. Today she wore a short brown leather skirt, brown heels, and a soft beige – taupe, Angela might call it – sleeveless sweater. Top two buttons undone, a thin gold chain hanging above the tanned cleavage. Tanned bare legs.
A Study in Brown
. Or Neil Young: “Cinnamon Girl”. Once when we were drinking tequila, soon after she'd started at the gallery, Angela said, “Barbara might drive me crazy, I think she probably will, but she's probably the most fuckable woman I've ever met.” She didn't clarify whether she meant fuckable from her point of view or a man's, or both. Tequila gave us both an
exploratory
stone: horny and reckless and curious and a bit brutal. I did one of those mental disclosure dances – tell the truth? lie? hopping from one foot to the other while my partner waited – before I just said “Yes.” Which seemed to go down fine. Angela frowned, but suggested we lick the salt from each other's wrist on our next shot.

Sean moved off one way down the corridor and I moved the other. I paused at my usual stopping-place, by another ficus and in front of a little bronze “Iris” by Rodin. The naked headless – and armless, and legless below the knee – girl leapt up, a leaping torso, one thigh cocked outward like a dancer from the glistening slit and ridges of her vulva. “Goddess of the rainbow, and by extension presumably, messenger of the gods” ran part of Jason's larger, more-explanatory-than-usual label. Even a minor Rodin, one of many versions, mattered. Above it, black letters spelled:
Soames Sculpture Hall
. Mrs. Soames had asked me, soon after we'd met, about my “people”. I doubt if she remembered what I told her, since it seemed to satisfy but not impress her. Now I wondered about her people, the legacy I was looking at. A husband? Perhaps a much older, long-dead one. The husband's father? Brother? No one had said. Only that Mrs. Soames was likely to be offended by Iris's ebullient splits, the hard little breasts polished by patrons' fingers, the yelping crotch. But I thought that was selling Mrs. Soames short, if
not from the standpoint of taste then just from the standpoint of long experience, of lived life. The young were naturally intolerant, the old had to work harder at it. Mrs. Soames seemed too busy working at everything else.

I knocked on the door of Conservation. After a pause, Peter opened it. No
Yes, Paul
treatment this time. There never was from Peter. He never gave any sign of how welcome your presence was, beyond the obvious
not very
. But he had no objection to being watched as he worked, as long as the conversation was limited to occasional questions. It wasn't the aloofness of Neale, which might or might not be making some kind of statement, and it wasn't Walter's cultivated inattention, which caught everything and filed it appropriately. This was just the concentration of a craftsman. Not even Hans denied Peter that title. “He does fine work,” Hans said, nodding glumly at a truth he wouldn't evade.

I sat on my usual perch, the swivel stool in the corner. Peter returned to his work at the long white table, cleared except for the picture he was unframing, face down on a rubber mat, and the tools he would need at coming stages. A Spandau Ballet tape case, always just the one he was currently listening to, placed beside the small ghetto blaster in the corner. Soft sounds, a non-urgent beat. Sometimes he had “Morningside” on the radio. Peter was wearing a lemon yellow T-shirt, tight black jeans, desert boots. His feet close together, as they nearly always were, even as he bent forward from the waist. Craftsman crossed with monk, say. Thin. The blond curls on his wiry arms lighter than the ones on his head. Blandly handsome in profile. He reminded me of a yellow-blond pencil, sharpened and set upright in a box.

It felt good to be sitting, just watching. Last night I'd walked halfway from the gallery to the Skyway Bridge. I didn't know exactly why I was doing it, or even
that
I was doing it at first. It wasn't a tribute or a penance. It felt more like some fumbling gesture towards clarity, a pawn probe when you have no better move. Did he walk there? I wondered after a few blocks, the question finally catching up to my feet.

The Skyway was far away, the other end of the city, past the steel companies, closing off the inner harbour like a steel-and-concrete cord at the top of a bag. He
walked
? On a head roaring with coke and alcohol, when Robert, for all his show of being a dissolute and a libertine, began to giggle three sips into a beer. I'd got to Ottawa Street, maybe three miles and half the way, and was just beginning to counter the ache in my legs with a little mounting thrill of excavating a mystery, when I recalled – the fact like a tarpaulin pulled over the hole I was scrabbling at –
4:45 a.m.
The time the east-bound buses started running. Early in a city where morning shifts could start any time between 5:30 and 7. “Time of death has not been established precisely, but is estimated to have been no earlier than 5 a.m. Police are again urging drivers who may have. . . .” The bus: no need to walk at all.

I dragged home away from the gritty, rotten egg smell feeling that I was behind the play. The king-side assault, or whatever it was, was going on along a flank or via combinations I couldn't even dream of, Armin not even bothering to scoop up my offered pawn in the centre. Leave it till later, when he had a spare move.

Besides being a good place to take a breather – and Peter didn't mind supplying a plausible motive for your being there, some delivery or pick-up, if an Admin person knocked – Conservation was probably the best place in the gallery to watch someone actually
doing
something. Anywhere near Hans was good too – though rarely as serene.

Peter had removed the hanging wire and the screw-eyes at the sides. Now he was bracing the frame against his thighs and gently but firmly – the tendons rising in his slender arms – teasing a sticky retaining nail out with pliers. Each part of the frame he removed he set in a plastic tray beside him. Nothing lost, everything ready to be reassembled in reverse order.

“What's the job with that?” I asked.

“A patch maybe. There's a small tear in the canvas.”

“Why maybe?”

“I have to decide if my painting chops are up to the retouching.”