Catalogue Raisonne (26 page)

Which told me what exactly? Nothing. I already assumed Neale was not an active participant in the Gallery Rentals scam, whose players and reasons I felt I understood – most of them anyway – and which had begun long before his arrival. But somehow, I don't know why, the memory of the black fountain pen served as the tipping point, it pushed me over the edge into action. Often the hand touched down on a piece not because you had a move, but simply because it was time to stop not having one. The twenty further minutes of pacing the beige
could be discounted, since they brought me no closer to a script, or even the start of one. Pure improvisation would have to do.

Peter admitted me to Conservation with his usual courteous indifference. His glance floated briefly up to my left eye – the swelling down, but plum-dark now. After a few jokes,
boys will be boys
had been accepted without further interest, or at least none I saw or heard. I sat on my stool in the corner. Soft Cell was this afternoon's musical offering: “Tainted Love”. I reached over and turned it off.

“I was listening to that. That's why it was on.” Careful enunication, the brush paused over the work, about as far as Peter would take anger. I turned the music on again.

I let that incident speak for itself for a few minutes. Reverberating, in whatever ways it might, in Peter's mind. He would wonder why I'd done it, what I might do next. Though I'd done it for the simplest of reasons: I was sick to death of the song.

Peter was retouching a painting. Possibly the one he'd been wondering if he had the chops for; I hadn't seen it face-up on the previous visit. I waited until he had a fair load of yellow on the end of his brush and was bringing it close to the canvas.

“What I don't understand,” I said, “is why you and Neale would even bother copying a Klee. I mean, what for?”

A little too much yellow seemed to splotch onto the painting, though it could also have been exactly the stroke Peter intended. It was a pretty goopy daffodil, swirls and whorls of thick paint. And hard to tell, in just quarter profile, if the face he seemed to be making was anything more than
concentrating-hard
. Which it would have to be in any case.

He didn't ask how I knew enough to ask my question. That was interesting too. Was he just too blind-sided by it to consider its origins? Too scared? He was too controlled a person for me to gather anything as, after no more than a craftsman's pause, he started moving the yellow around, shaping it.

“
We
didn't copy anything,” he said. “As I'm sure you know. And
actually, it was Neale's idea. I only helped him with some technical details.”

This was the way it went in a good game, or just a fast one. Pawn probes that you made nonchalantly, as if they were the routine beginnings of a well-known strategy. The other side reacting swiftly, without surprise, nothing you could possibly do that would not be grist to his own mill. Like two actors trying to cut in at places farther and farther along in the dialogue, while behind their bland expressions they were frantically flipping ahead to learn the script, write it.

“For his personal use,” I said.

“He loves Klee's work.”

“I guess it's also a vanity trip.” Side excursions, lulling with spurious issues, often a good idea too.

“It's not vanity. It's about the work. It's
all
about the work. And yourself. About yourself and the work.”

And silence. Absorption time. Misdirection. And very important, when the next lunge, the real one, comes, to do it casually. Just a little notion I had, this queen up your king's ass.

“Well, yes,” I said. “But then when you hang it in a public gallery, it does go out a little beyond yourself. In some way anyway.”

The daffodil, which had been reforming nicely, had to be put off for a bit now. Some vigorous swirling of the brush in a jar of turpentine, which also required that the back be turned.

“Neale just wanted to be able to hang it for a while. He said Klee was wasted on the patrons here.”

“Let them eat cake?”

“It's not really about the patrons.”

Stop the presses!
“No. More of a joke on the art world. A performance piece.”
A jeu d'esprit.
“But, c'mon, a joke on Steeltown too. HAG versus slag.”

“What?”

Too late, I remembered that Peter had been hired long after Walter took over, only a couple of years before me. He wasn't from Hamilton either. From Guelph, was it?

“Putting a phony Klee under their noses would be a nice comment on our clientele,” I said.

“More on Walter.”

That comment, some gleam of a new bitterness buried in the flat tone, caught me off guard. I had to think quickly to connect it. “He can't miss what he doesn't look at,” I said.

“I don't think Neale's quite got that yet.”

Now we were ready to proceed with our daffodil. I gave it a minute, and waited until the brush was decently raised, then asked, trying to inject enough
entre nous
to assure him none of this was going beyond me anyway, for my own reasons I couldn't afford it to:

“What's in it for you anyway? I mean, even forgetting patrons – even forgetting Walter – there was still some risk.”

The pause might have meant a difficult patch on the daffodil. It could also have meant Peter reaching a certain decision:
I'd better tread water until I find out what the depth is here. Until this fog lifts and I can see the shore.

“Neale has a line on a possible position at Kleinburg. Just a possibility, but he knows someone. They always hire outside too.”

The surfacing of the bitterness into clearer view reminded me of when I'd first heard about the outside hiring policy. It was another old bone that got gnawed in the gallery.
They always hire outside
. I'd been told of it – by Peter actually – when the registrar's job became vacant soon after I started. As per gallery policy, the job was posted internally, on bulletin boards and on a Memo from Bud. I didn't see any reason not to give it a shot. That might have been the official start of the shit between Angela and Jason. Angela not a gallery person yet, so feeling quite free to rant about “art cunts with their heads up their asses.” She swore more often, and more colourfully, in those days.

“Is that all, Paul?”

It wasn't a normal Peter question, any more than the half-turn to ask it was. But he had to get at least one good look at my face. Another pass over the banged-up temple – what could that mean now? Trying to gauge what I knew, what I didn't, when in both cases. What, if anything, I planned to do about it. All good questions, as I knew from asking them myself. There wasn't any obvious anger in his face. Maybe he could back-burner all emotion when he needed to study something.

There was nothing in his blue-eyed gaze but the alert scrutiny he turned on paintings that might have hairline cracks or other flaws, varnish problems, mildew. Deciding what might be wrong and what, if anything, could be done about it. And who had the chops for the job.

“Yes,” I said. “That's it.” And it was, for now. Minus me sailing headfirst down the grand staircase, which if Peter had had even a smidgen of Rick's repertoire would have been the proper end to our interview.

A
t the chess club I kept switching boards, unable to find a player that was right for me. I checkmated a couple of bad players, then had the favour returned by a couple of better ones. When Armin's board came empty I went and sat down opposite him. The game bored me tonight, and I played in a loose thoughtless way that seemed, strangely, to improve my game. That was depressing. I saw a way that I could, if not win, at least make trouble for Armin. A sliding sideways attack with a lot of losses on my side, but possibly more on his. The threat was serious enough to make him bear down. His bluster vanished and he made his moves swiftly but deliberately, while I for once was the negligent one, knocking pieces with a crack as I snatched them. Playing with a fine disregard, that combination of attention and indifference that resembled recklessness and was so hard to find. In the end Armin found a way, he always did: dealing with the harassment on his flank while mounting a sustained, if more painstaking than usual, counterattack straight up the middle. As soon as I laid my king on his side – but not before – he started in again, the crowing sounding more like relief this time. “Bold player can make even blunder work . . . scared player wreck even good strategy. . . .”

Yeah yeah yeah
, I thought, stalking out of the room like a sore loser.
I wonder if Karl Marx still wore an overcoat in May.

Decided he probably had.

It wasn't like in the movies. The car had to pass me three times – three times that I noticed – before I realized I was being followed. MacNab was a quiet street, dead even on a Friday evening, or I might never have twigged. But halfway home I became aware of the same red tail lights glowing in the dusk, right blinker on at the next block to come around again. A big grey car with a boxy back end. An Impala, I noticed on the next drive-by.

On Herkimer I stopped at the already-reno'd end of the landlord's four buildings. I stood on the front step a moment, fishing in my pocket for my keys. The Impala slowed, its reflection a ghostly silver in the darkening glass of the double doors. It almost stopped, I imagined the driver noting the number, then rumbled away with a fart of black exhaust. I gave it a couple of minutes to return, turned on the step to face the quiet, cooling street. Then continued down to our end of the row. When I was almost to the door, I turned at a purring sound – the exhaust problem mysteriously fixed in one trip around the block – and saw the grey car ghost up to the curb.

You can let him grab you by the shoulders again, I thought, or – But there was no
or
.

So I went down the walk and opened the door and got in.

No surprise
being the only surprise, the only tactic, I had in me at the moment.

Rick's choice of a Tim Horton's for our meeting surprised
me
, though. Like his choice of car. Not a muscle car, a Corvette or Trans Am, something at least imitating the Porsches and Lamborghinis higher up in the coke chain. Though Rick would've had trouble squeezing down behind the wheel of a sports car. The Impala gave him plenty of room. Its interior was filthy with wadded Kleenex, candy wrappers, pop cans, food bags and cartons. A smell of rot and sperm. The warm Brie of blowjobs mingling with the chow mein and pizza bits liquefying in cardboard corners. He straddled the parking line, forcing plenty of space for his doors. Though these were already trimmed with rust, a dark fur like mould. Scratches gleamed around craterish dents.