Catalogue Raisonne (5 page)

The beautiful and the bright, the businessmen and professors and media journalists whom Barbara had squeezed funds or cachet or coverage out of, parted to let the artist take his seat.

And then the playing began. First, a violently syncopated jazz that sounded a bit like the Thelonius Monk tape he'd lent me, but a Thelonius Monk mixing steroids and uppers . . . then lush chords, all chords – again, he'd spoken approvingly of Brahms's “impossibly lush orchestrations,” and perhaps was trying to convey that impossibility by means of a piano.

The first people moved upstairs.

Others, less musical or more curious, moved closer. Could he play
this tune? they asked. Robert inclined his head soberly at the request, oblivious to the possibility that they meant
could
in its ruder sense. And for five minutes or so he played pieces of show tunes and pop songs, the melodies not entirely disappearing under his embellishments.

The lobby was about half empty now. Trousers and toned legs in stiletto heels disappearing up the staircase to the lounge.

Over a murderously striding bass, Robert crooked a finger and beckoned me over. “Why don't you sit in?”

“I don't know the chords,” I said. Or the piano, I was ready to add, but Robert was grinning hugely, imputing irony where there was none. Full lips in a wide mouth, big discolored teeth. One of the reasons I could be honest with Robert was that he was incapable of accepting the simple truth at face value. The more straightforward a remark was, the more outlandish he assumed it to be. It was part of his absolute – though temporary I hoped, for his sake – disconnection from common sense. And, I'll admit, it's what allowed Robert to look up to me as something of a mentor. In music as well as chess, though my days with The Chile Dogs were four years behind me, and on some days felt like forty years away. Five years hacking out covers of The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Kinks, The Who, The Stones – calling ourselves, and getting called, a punk band, but really just three guys needing songs that were fast and short, with four chords or less and no guitar solos. The Thursday we finally played Duffy's Rockpile, one of three local bands replacing the headliners who were snowed in in Buffalo, I had the sense of my fingers just grazing the bottom rung of an immense vertical ladder.
I don't have it
, I thought – a weird, perverse spark in the smoke haze of exhilaration. But a spark that grew as the smoke dispersed, enlarging and steadying into an overhead spot that gave a bright, even glare.

And then there was the way Robert mistook for intellect my magpie memory and habit of figuring things from the sidelines. Which tickled me, when it didn't make me feel like a fatally flawed fake.

Angela was watching me from across the now mostly vacated lobby. Smiling and frowning, both faintly. I went over to her.

“Have you seen the show?” she said. “It's incredible.”

“I'll get plenty of chances.”

The frown gained, the smile weakened. And I felt shitty again. Why do it? It probably was a good show. It was just that sense again of Angela slipping, traces of the girl I'd first met, with her vial of good hash oil at a Chile Dogs gig, dissolving. Disappearing. Eaten into, eaten away, by the subtle acids of the gallery's self-importance.

She kissed me on the cheek. Glancing around first: public kissing a little past wine in Walter's book. “I love you,” she said. “Ditch that guy and come up where the action is.”

I looked down into her face. Clear brown eyes, freckled cheeks. Her new hairstyle – bangs and a bob with a saucy flip – was a big improvement over the old yanked-back ponytail. “I love you too.”

I looked back at Robert: head down, banging away. He probably didn't need an audience; he certainly didn't deserve one. I followed Angela up the stairs. It had been one of the pleasantest surprises of my life to discover how much better her plump short body looked out of clothes than in them.

Ramon was charming a group of the younger society ladies. Hans was telling a story to an older couple. The Carlssons were standing by with fond smiles while a trio of middle-aged women tried to tell their sons apart. “Leo? No, Lars? No!” The disputed objects grinning vacuously. Looking at Mrs. Carlsson, the former Miss Bangkok, and her tall blond, almost white-haired husband, you could trace the origins of the twins' striking looks: the genes that had combined, softening each other, into neat small bodies, cat-like lifting eyes, and the long noses and square chins offsetting the delicate, faintly amber skin. “Lars has a mole.” “So does Leo!”

Angela had been absorbed, laughing with her head thrown back, into a group including Barbara and Jason, the gallery registrar. I moved up another short flight of steps, from the rotunda where the speeches had been made, to the upper lounge with the small servery. Volunteers were picking up the trays of canapés, fruits and cheeses, and vegetables and dips, and circulating through the crowd with them. The oldest volunteer, Mrs. Soames, covered with a long yellow smock splotched
with wine and water, was feverishly washing dishes at the small sink, her beringed fingers scarlet.

“Hello, dear!” she called. “Wine's on the counter.”

Barbara spoke often of “my volunteers” as if they were one treasured group. But it was a group that had at least three tiers. The oldest, Mrs. Soames and a few others, did most of the cleaning and lugging; they also ran the gift shop and art rental. The youngest and prettiest, who were usually the best-married too, were the stalwarts of the docent program, the most public face of the volunteers, guiding groups through the galleries on educational scripts prepared by Barbara. Mrs. Carlsson was a regular docent. The middle tier was a bit fuzzier; there were some sliding criteria and functions, and one could move in or out of it, though usually only in a downward direction. Some of this group, for instance, who had catered or served at other functions, were well-dressed guests at this one. Served by colleagues who were slightly more dowdy or older or whose husbands were less successful. Some of the servers wore the shapeless yellow smocks, and some didn't; though the unsmocked ones had good but not their best dresses on, the ones it wouldn't be a crime to spill food on. There were gradations.

“Who's he?” I asked Ramon when he came up for more wine for the ladies, after watching Walter smoothly engage and then disengage from a heavyset man in a blue pinstriped suit.

“That guy? That's Piccone.”

“Piccone?”

“Yeah, you know, man. The Tulips.” Ramon winked.

It was the wink more than the name that made me remember. About a month ago, after another opening, we'd all trooped over after close-up to check out the new strip club. A lot of winking that night. A good night, fun, but at six bucks a beer not one a wage slave could indulge in often.

“Did that stuff die down?”

“Stuff, man?”

“Those hassles, I mean.” I remembered a photo of some picketing, editorials in the
Witness
. The city had its share of peeler palaces, of course, run-down places on run-down streets, but not a fancy one shouldered into King Street, two blocks from Eaton's.

Ramon made a motion, one hand sliding up and over the other, that was a good combination of greased palms and greased wheels.

“What's his actual business?” I'd read it, but I couldn't remember.

“Buncha different things.”

“Legitimate?”

Ramon shrugged, palms up. It was one of those times when he seemed to be working the barrio street mojo a little too hard. I wished I could tell him he didn't need it.

“What's he doing here?” I said.

Ramon raised his eyebrows. “You don't read the signs?”

“I guess not.”

“Read the signs, man.” This time the wink seemed more in character. Just Ramon being Ramon, a handsome easy guy. Too passive maybe, but everybody's friend. Mrs. Soames gave him a little tray for the glasses he was taking to the ladies downstairs.

I watched a couple more men come into Piccone's orbit, converse with him briefly then move off, as Walter had. Alone, he gave the impression of aloofness, but he seemed to make an effort to talk up each new person. When I went over I got a cooler reception. One of those head-to-toe, slow inspections that a man feels free to give another man under only two conditions: he's willing to get down and fight, actually fight, the man being appraised; or else he's sure enough of his higher status that a fight is out of the question. It's already happened, so to speak. We weren't wearing our walkie-talkies tonight, but of course there was no hiding the suit.

“Who are you?”

I told him.

“Paul.” He put out a wide, warm hand. “John Piccone.” Close-up, he gave off a strong smell of cologne mixed with an earthy masculine odour. With the handshake came a fiercely frank stare, a big white smile. Italian charm. The face was florid, reddened with rib-eye and biscotti and cigars. The face of a man whose heart will burst one morning when he's sixty, which was still a few years off, but will pump lustily every second until that moment. Short grizzled hair receding at the temples.

“Try some of the veggies,” he said, surprisingly. With a nimble step
back and an expansive sweep of his arm, as if we were in his living room, he indicated two platters of raw vegetables sitting on the low table behind him. Perhaps the other visitors had really just been searching for these trays, which Piccone seemed almost to be guarding. Curiously, there was no dip on either platter. I took a celery and carrot stick. Piccone took several of these in one hand, broccoli and cauliflower florets in the other, and began munching. I wondered if his heart doctor had already given him the heads-up and he had decided to pay it heed.

“Must be nice,” he said. “Working in the gallery, I mean. Not so much for a young guy, maybe.”

“You may be right about that.”

“I love art,” Piccone said, as if I hadn't spoken. “I love it,” he said warmly, but nodding as if the thought made him sad.

When I moved off after a bit more small talk, I had the curious sense, despite the alpha stare at the start, that I was deserting the man. Standing in his bankerish suit with his vegetable sticks and smile, the strongest impression he gave was of neediness. Like the kid at the edge of the dance or party, wanting to get in but not quite knowing how.

Down in the lobby, I saw the sign Ramon had been alluding to. Opposite Josh MacMahon in his armchair, on the big
Gallery Contributors
lists, with their sliding flat silver bars so new names could be added or their places changed,
G. Piccone and family
now appeared. Not in the usual starting-place under
Donors
or
Friends
, but leap-frogged right up to
Sponsors
, just a few slots below the Carlssons. Only
Benefactors
occupied higher ground, but those were mostly corporate: the steel companies, Westinghouse, a couple of banks and the city; and Josh MacMahon, who had started the gallery and had left it his entire collection of pictures painted by himself and his more famous friends.

I also saw Walter finesse another situation, the way he had finessed himself away from Piccone. Ninety minutes remained until the start of Robert's shift downstairs. Eighty-nine minutes and some seconds in which he could still play. The notes banging and plinking and trilling off the long-empty lobby tiles – “acoustically perfect,” Robert had warned. Just around the corner, a few feet out in the main gallery, I saw Walter lean close to Barbara, who nodded and then went over to the
piano and whispered something to Robert. He looked very grave, which meant he was very pleased, and clutching his briefcase, he rose and followed her into the gallery. It was Robert's dream vision: Clement Greenberg (young and thin and still with hair) being led by Peggy Guggenheim (also much improved) to a private viewing of the surrealists in North America.

In the short time they were gone, Ramon got the piano covered with its drop cloth and a tape player set up on the reception desk. He popped in a mixed tape from his DJ sample box, and within minutes the lounge party had moved down to the lobby, the lights dimmed, music happening, and attractive women moving their bodies, and then a few men joining them. People invented one-armed dancing styles, chugging wine with the other hand. A party had begun. Even Robert, trailing the fast-striding Barbara on their return, looked pleased at the action his exit had allowed. He began a flailing dance with Angela, his belt ends whirling dangerously.

Electro-pop was in. Synth chords over peppery bass and drum machines, sweet melodies. And Michael Jackson. And Madonna. But Ramon mixed it up well, throwing in Bob Seger and the Stones to get people up on the floor, playing requests when he could find them. “Give the people what they want,” he'd shrugged once when I asked him about his DJ gigs, making it sound easy. Maybe it was. For the right temperament. Chairs were brought down from the lounge for dancers to rest in, and some people made a point of staying seated until their particular brand of music came on. Peter waited for his beloved OMD, then danced in a precise, slightly effeminate way, his feet close together and barely moving, his torso making sinuous shivers. By himself at first, then with Lars and Leo and their mother, who copied his movements. Neale, looking sour again, was sitting with his cowboy boots stretched out in front of him, a long statement of non-dancing as well as a tripping hazard.