Catalogue Raisonne (38 page)

There was still the inspection prior to crating to get through. I elected to stay in the Braithwaite Galleries, beginning the patching and sanding of nail holes, during that. Peter had done the real inspection up in the gallery, of course, checking the works off on his clipboard. Barbara only needed to make a show of overseeing the crating. If she could be seen doing that, and signing the labels that went in the plastic sleeves, she was unlikely to be bothered by how much of anyone's work could be discerned through rows of plastic air bubbles. Claudia's touch of taping directly over the
Hauptman's
stamp had been another nice attention to detail, another smart move. And dead obvious, too – though I'd overlooked it.

Finally, it was done. Peter appeared, looking grumpy enough that I knew the inspection had been worse than cursory. He would have done well at Kleinburg.

I was released to the pure pleasure of imagining where, from which direction, and how hard, the first squeezing would come. From the curator in Switzerland? Or was there another gallery first – yes, I seemed to remember Winnipeg. How sharp were they there? Or would the police be the first to appear? Interpol?

One scene I kept coming back to was the luncheon next Sunday. All the volunteers seated around a central chair, places allotted by tier. The careful opening, respectful of each thoughtful offering.
Oh, what a lovely . . . . Oh, this is just too . . . .

It was very pleasant to imagine things you couldn't really imagine at all, especially when every possible version of them was agreeable.

On my way out I stopped by the panel to see Owen.

“Frankenstein graduated to Nights?” I said.

“What?”

“Owen, I know Neale liked to promise people things. What did he promise you?”

Owen recoiled as if from intimate contact with the dead man. “Neale didn't promise me anything.”

“Was it Barbara then?”

“What are you talking about, Paul?” But his eyes were sliding back and forth, as I'd seen them do so often over a lengthy description in search of the remembered good bit.

“Well, all of it really. The sloppiness. That night, especially. The sign-in fudgings. People in and out. You can't be that out of it.”

“I'm
not
out of it.”

All I had to do was wait. Twenty, maybe thirty seconds. Maintaining eye contact when the sliding allowed. Finally he said glumly:

“Bud told me there might be an opening upstairs. For an attendant.”

Bud did? It seemed to open yet another slant on mystery. Or another mystery. Not a very interesting one probably, was my hunch at this point. Bud tidying, most likely, his job to know more than anyone
else and to cover them when their secrets got tangled up. An assistant. But you never knew. Once again, for the second time in a week, Bud had given me a reason to stay a little longer at the gallery.

“Paul?” The sliding had stopped at a resentful gleam. “You've changed lately. And I'm not the only one who's noticed it.”

“Really?” I said. “You think so?”

W
ithout 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 disappointing 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?