Catalogue Raisonne (2 page)

Walter looked slightly pained. It might have been a silly question. In the galleries not actually cordoned off, other gallery personnel were working, hanging pictures and lighting them and getting ready for the
Gala Preview. Volunteers were delivering platters of hors d'oeuvres, bunches of flowers, wines and cups and plates. There were about six actual patrons, most of them teenage girls waiting to catch a glimpse of Ramon. But like a lot of silly questions, it required an answer.

“Leave an L,” Walter said, not raising his voice despite Hans's sounds, which were bangs now. “They're the same suit size, right?” Smiling at the elegance of his solution, he strolled off toward the MacMahon Gallery, probably to check if I was right about the Bolduc.

I was about to go find Ramon, when I noticed Bud looking uncomfortable again. His shoulders had stiffened up, his hands fidgeted near the square end of his tie. In the silence when Hans had done his nail, which required several corrections from each side, Bud said, “Hans, we'll need to know your size.” Bud's voice could break a bit at times, too.

“Thirty-eight short,” barked Hans, his lips white around another nail.

Meanwhile Peter had briskly finished another painting and was starting on a third.

Neale was still reading his catalogue when I passed through the outer Braithwaite Gallery. He gave no sign of noticing me. Even when you stood in front of him, Neale's gaze roamed above and around you, or else passed right through you, like an X-ray seeking a blocked painting. Very tall and thin, balding spikily, he stooped slightly as he read, as if shielding the sculpture pedestal with the Comments book anticipatorily chained to it. I stepped over the rope blocking off the gallery. Just beyond, in a brightly-lit corner of the MacMahon, the hippy silk-screen artist we used for big shows was doing the title lettering on a divider panel laid flat on a sheet of plastic. He had his wooden rectangle stretched with fine mesh positioned on the panel. A part of the mesh was inked, and he was pulling a short squeegee carefully across it. His abundant long hair, which flopped bushily when he came to try to sell his prints, was tied back tightly now.

Farther out in the main room, Ramon was lighting the Ron Martin.
Lush, lazy-looking swirls in all-black, like fan turns. One of Walter's favourites. Ramon was up in the highest part of the gallery, the section cut through to the second floor. The extension ladder out full, jouncing with his smallest shifts as he adjusted the flaps on the lights. Even if Ramon hadn't been the best lighter in the gallery, no one else was willing to work up on those tracks. You felt the swaying ladder always about to snap, though as yet it never had. At the bottom, his gallery groupies were making small cries of alarm. “Oh, Ramon . . . Ramon, be careful. OH!” Giggling in between moans and gasps. Young bodies tight in jeans and T-shirts, pretty even through the caked makeup. Lars and Leo were trying to distract them with stories of their own heroism atop ladders. Perils impossible to imagine, even if the twins' parents had not been identified as Sponsors on the board in the lobby. Still, since Ramon was occupied, they got some attention. Though not in Ramon's league, they were, females from twelve to eighty agreed, “very cute”.

Ramon made a face when I called up the new errand to him. He climbed down the ladder. Louder coos of “Careful, Ramon . . . ooh!” Lars and Leo importantly bracing the bottom.

“Hans said it was okay?” Ramon asked, smoothing his dark hair back from his forehead.

“Yeah, does the Führer know?” In chorus.

“He heard about it,” I said. Ramon smiled. With his runway looks and easy fashion sense, he was the natural man for the new-suit detail.

Lars and Leo became frisky, pushing each other, foppishly boxing, when they learned one of them would have to stay behind as gallery security. It was Tweedledee and Tweedledum cast as two cute nineteen-year-olds of Thai-Danish mix, working part-time in the gallery until they could credibly play a part in Carlsson Interiors, the family Bathroom & Custom Kitchens business. The girls snickered. “You stay. No, you stay.” I helped Ramon put some of the lights he'd tried back in the box. Black box lights with hinged sides, a strangely sooty dust that came off on your hands. Then Lars – I was fleetingly sure it was Lars – must have realized that staying would mean a half hour of unshared face time with the gallery girls. “I'll stay,” he said, feigning resignation. But the minds were as identical as the faces, and the other
– now I wasn't sure again – said, “No, me. I'll stay, Ramon. Ramon, me.”

“Hey!” Ramon never shouted, but he had a neat trick of deepening his voice while raising it slightly. “Which one of you is supposed to be on the desk?”

The boys shared sheepish grins. They might not have remembered. Front desk to them was a boring, lonely exile in the lobby, to be abandoned at the first opportunity. Whereas Ramon and I – both nearing thirty, with ten years and four on the job – welcomed that half hour in the rotation as a quiet respite, time off your feet. Smokes and phone calls for Ramon. Magazines or deep thoughtless breathing for me.

“Go on! Go back!” Ramon brandished his black lights at them. And the boys – and girls – with scared pleased faces, backed toward the lobby. “Animals!” he muttered at me. “Incompetents!” Rattling his lights, he took a few mincing steps, mincing and stamping. Like an old lady shooing cats. But even being ridiculous, Ramon managed to look good. Natural cool. It was a pure gift. With squeals the teens dispersed. But a few seconds later were edging back in again. Ramon sighed. He prepared to wheel the dolly with the light boxes to the freight elevator. “Go find Mumbles,” he told me.

“Who's Mumbles?” I heard a girl say as I walked away.

“Mumbles, you know. That weird bald guy? Sean.”

Sean was never hard to find. Unless otherwise directed, and sometimes even then, he would be at the furthest gallery remove from everyone else. I found him on the second floor, pacing the U-shaped mix of corridors and back gallery that overlooked the main space. He came at me down the Soames Sculpture Hall, his lips twitching, his eyes wild. The brown polyester uniform, which looked merely awful on the rest of us (only bad on Ramon), looked as if it had been used as a duster and then thrown at Sean. A stranger would have seen a homeless man rushing at him, muttering. I saw my colleague of almost four years (he was hired right after me), whose chafing neurosis would probably never rise to the level of madness, composing poetry.

“Fucking shopping expedition. Buy the Emperor new clothes. Make the man.” Sean grumbled into the space between me and a large potted ficus that needed watering. If Hans's gallery venting was sudden and explosive, Sean's came out in a slow constant leak. He was forever denouncing the gallery and all its holdings and doings, perhaps mainly because they interfered with his concentration. I don't believe he would have been much different any place he worked. And he was forgetting now that one of his favourite diatribes involved the itchiness and “demeaning decrepitude” of the brown suits.

I leaned against the wooden railing, staring down at the wide staircase I'd just come up. You had to give the venting time to expire; you couldn't rush it.

Sean leaned and glowered a few feet away. “The
Grand
Staircase. Now why grand, exactly? It's a staircase. And why
Gala
Preview, pray? Wouldn't Preview have been accurate?

“What does ‘gala' mean exactly? You hear a word all your life and then – ”

“It means another excuse for the wankers to congratulate themselves.”

I looked sideways at Sean. If he was staring fixedly at something, like a staircase, he would tolerate this. He'd once said, speaking of the full-time guards (though L would not have altered his opinion), “We aren't a pretty picture. Sometimes I think we're a kind of freak show ourselves. Huh? No, not a rogues' gallery. Not that dashing or dangerous. More like a performance piece arranged by someone in the gallery.” Given Ramon, Sean was obviously putting some extra spin on the word ‘pretty', but I could see what he was getting at. When Bud had phoned me, after I'd spent six months looking for work in the recession of 1980, I thought I'd landed a dream job. Strolling and looking at slowly changing artworks, telling forgetful seniors and mischievous children not to touch them. I thought the space and time might even float me back to songwriting. But it was amazing how quickly the hours of pacing the beige carpet wore that down. Something about the stillness, that museum hush. Broken at intervals by petty squabbling – turf wars over uniforms, flower arrangements, cushion colours – that I overheard or had reported to me by Angela if they
occurred up in Administration. All for the sake, supposedly, of a minuscule number of patrons – fewer than twenty a week sometimes, if you subtracted the gallery groupies and the school and seniors groups led around by the docents. Shockingly quickly, I'd learned how to pass several hours without thinking anything. And not seeing or hearing a whole lot more.

Still, in the not-pretty picture we were presenting, Sean would have to be Exhibit A. His pale skin was blotchy, with pebbly red patches that sprang out from bad temper or scratching, or maybe allergies. His head resembled Renaissance depictions of Fortune, ideally bald in front, with long frizzy hair in back. Except with Fortune, the hank of hair hung at the front, so you could grab it on approach if you were wise enough. He also looked like Old Father William, Tenniel's drawing of him in
Alice in Wonderland
, though Carroll's character was old and fat and silly, while Sean was thirty-two and only slightly plump. These allusions and their limitations Sean had supplied himself; no one else had read enough to do so. He might have been hoping to spark a better nickname for himself than Mumbles. Though that name was unavoidable, as everyone had seen his lips moving as he paced, composing a long epic poem that would, he claimed, “unite Blake with Yeats.” Over one hundred stanzas so far, he said. No one had seen or clearly heard a word of it. No one would, he said, until it was ready to be “hatched upon the world.”

His truest likeness, he claimed, was to the death mask of William Blake. And when he showed you the faded Xerox in his wallet, it was true: except for Sean's weaker chin there was a resemblance. Mostly in the small, close-set eyes and the huge smooth brow.

“Tell them I'll be down shortly. I've got two more lines,” he said now as he moved off down the hall, fingers flicking out from his thigh to help him with the metre.

4
:30. Half an hour till close-up. Three and a half hours before the Gala Preview. And the gallery seemed dead. I was alone in the
lobby. Even the gift shop was empty, though I could hear a faint bustle and clatter from the upstairs lounge. I leaned against the semicircular front desk, which had been abandoned again.

The uniform did itch. Dark brown pants, white Arrow shirt, brown tie, beige jacket – all 60% cotton, but after a few hours of walking and standing in it, it began to chafe. Sweat trickled from your armpits, and it began to feel like Hercules' burning shirt – the poisoned one his wife gave him, mistaking it for a love charm. (Allusion courtesy of Sean, of course.) All the guards complained about it. You'd see guys taking off their jackets, examining the lining. Even Hans, who'd been wearing it and its predecessors almost thirty years. Looking for the source of the itching, whatever was trapped there. But I think it was just all the standing around. The sheer inactivity.

In terms of energy, the gallery was a black hole. Despite a lot of intermittent frenzy, nothing much happened there. Events got pumped up, haggled over, and then barely occurred. Despite that, or because of it, Bud regularly sent us down Memos on alertness and security, especially regarding the surrealist show.
“. . . the gallery's most valuable and thus VULNERABLE exhibition thus far.”
Yet years of false alarms had rendered us all panic-proof, almost action-proof. An alarm was an aggravation – more itching – more than a crisis. After a thoughtless period roaming the beige, you'd jump at a squawk from the walkie-talkie on your belt. “Attention all guards. I have an alarm on the southeast exit, Teale Gallery.” The Burns guard on the panel downstairs enunciating crisply, yanked from his sci-fi novel or Penthouse for just this moment. And you'd shake the rubber out of your legs and run to the exit, your heart thudding in spite of yourself, the excited chatter of “backup” and “converging” and “sealed” at your belt . . . and you'd come to the door in question. And, with a deep breath, go through it. Expecting, trying to expect, trouble. Discounting the past, the odds. Only to find a confused old person bumbling in the stairwell, whose eyes had missed DO NOT ENTER ALARM WILL SOUND below the glowing red EXIT sign. Or a surly adolescent prankster, who hadn't missed the signs, but hadn't known the street door would lock ahead of him, along with the door behind him, sealing him in a deeply uncool stairwell. Or a toddler, who'd been strong enough to push open
the door, but not strong enough to avoid wailing at the sight of the red-faced, panting man in beige. Hans said there'd been a couple of attempted grabs soon after they'd moved to the new building, in 1970, but he couldn't recall when the last one had been.