Catalogue Raisonne (10 page)

“And you like them? This should be a crime of passion too.”

“Yeah, I do. Very much.”

We went on in this way a bit longer. Bypassing the hassles of getting the money to the various ways of spending it. Drawing it out pleasurably. The old lottery-win fantasy. The Bangkok girls, or their equivalents, figured largely in all versions. Robert did a nice variation where Cleo Carlsson absconded from her husband, ditching him for the bigger catch of Robert on a beach in Maui. Bringing with her a few hundred thousand dollars of hubby's spare change. Before I left, Robert fished in his trench coat pocket and brought out yesterday's chess problem from the
Toronto Star
. In lieu of the checkmate he actually owed me. “Try this. It's got me stumped,” he said. It might have been his way of resigning.

A
t home I got a beer from the fridge. It was the one constant in the round of Sunday night diversions. Chess, music, reading, walks. Sometimes a spin around the TV offerings, looking for a documentary or an old movie. I sat in our plaid armchair by the window facing the back, the glass grazed and curtained by a shaggy old maple. Spring had been slower, cooler this year. Some of the leaves were still emerging from buds, tight scrolls, the new green glowing even as the long dusk
deepened toward black. I imagined Angela painting one of the seasonal still lifes her teacher artfully arranged, perhaps some of these sticky, budding twigs in a cluster of mature leaves, all in the weathered wooden vase he liked, scatterings in front of it. Or perhaps tonight was a night off in celebration of the CHOP show. Angela wouldn't have been the only student to enter. Leave the canvas blissfully blank for once. Get an early start on the “sob session” that followed each lesson at a nearby pub. “Misery loves company,” Angela had said, amazed at first by the self-doubt and self-pity and rivalry and envious gossip that were the artist's lot – though it was exactly as I remembered it. Away from the pick and amp – or brush and easel – the demons started nattering. Still, she always took the last bus home, and arrived seeming buoyant, more optimistic. That too was familiar. The long bitching over jugs of draft ending in hugs and apologies, renewed pledges. Ready for another go. It was a matter of infinite hope. Though time itself exposed how few had even a portion of that.

I dug in the pile of tapes on the floor, searching for the last one Robert had given me. Put his music on while I tackled his chess problem. My fingers found “The Planets” by Gustav Holst. Like the Schoenberg and Monk and Indian ragas, it was part of Robert's campaign to give me a “more thorough grounding” in music.
Thorough
, like
disciplined
, was vintage Robert.
Grounding
even more so. Sometimes he did make me smile. At fleeting moments I recognized him as one of a fragile coalition of amusements I was distracting myself with, diversions that, taken singly or for long, would have been intolerable, but that taken together, in rapid succession, got me through my days. Slid it in.

Mars began thumping. Striding and blustering. Threatening. It was powerful, stirring stuff. Familiar, too, in some way I couldn't put my finger on at first. And then realized that it reminded me of movie soundtracks, action or suspense segments. “Alien” came to mind. “The Terminator”, too.
I'll be back
: the cyborg with the Austrian accent. And that too was vintage Robert: a composer with a toe in Beethoven and most of the rest of him in Hollywood. But then I looked at the dates Robert had scrawled behind Holst's name – 1874-1934 – and realized that the influence had gone the other way, the studio composers catching the nearest way. Still, it reduced the effect.

I got another beer and took out Robert's chess problem. It showed a cluster of opposing pieces in one corner of the board, with the usual teasing caption:
A victim must be sacrificed.
That seemed obvious, though I knew the hints were meant to mislead more than help. But I tried a pawn sacrifice first. Nothing: not in the prescribed three moves anyway. The other pawn, then the two of them in different combinations and sequences, didn't work either. I sipped my beer, considering it. The knight, my other piece, couldn't be considered a victim. He was a middle power, even if sacrificed. Then I had an inspiration. (“Ready the slot, the penny drops.” I convinced the other Dogs to cover “Bright Idea”, and it actually worked in our up-tempo slam, though the crashing didn't let the words shine through properly.) Queen the pawn first. Then sacrifice it immediately. Let it pass through a brief portal of power, then trash it to the higher cause.

Excited, sure that I'd found it, I began working out the possible combinations. But Holst had taken me to “Neptune, the Mystic” – Pluto mustn't have been discovered yet – and I'd killed the queen many times, in many ways, without getting any closer to the answer. The king often figured in these exercises, a good secret weapon since most players didn't think of using him to attack, only of protecting him. But the king, while he was the opponent's intended victim, could never be sacrificed. Obviously. Robert was right: this one was a kicker.

I took out Holst and gathered my Clash and Kinks tapes in a little pile. Time to get serious.

When the phone rang, I barely heard it. I was floating in a Carlsberg-“Clampdown”-
victim . . . sacrificed
haze, like a fly suspended in a soft sagging web, no closer to an answer. I glanced at the clock. 11:15. Angela sometimes phoned midway through the pub debriefing, a little drunk, checking on the state of my parallel play, urging me to go to bed if I got too tired, no reason to wait up paranoid.

It was Robert. “I've got it!” he crowed. “More elegant than you can imagine. Come on over and I'll show you.”

If he hadn't sounded so exultant, so smug, I would have just told him to give me the moves over the phone. But I was in a pissy, frustrated mood by that point anyway, ready for any excuse to leave the chessboard and the room. He hadn't allowed for any chance that
I
might have got it too, I noticed. On my way out the door, I turned back and put the Holst tape in the pocket of my leather jacket. It - wasn't something I'd be listening to again.

Robert and Claudia's building down on Park Street was about as old as ours, though even more dilapidated. Dark, chipped brick – the colour of over-steeped tea – with sagging balconies crammed with old furniture left over from previous tenants. The landlord, like everyone currently renting, too lazy to cart it away. There was a For Sale sign on the front lawn. Even out of the recession, as we supposedly were, you could imagine it impaled there for a long time.

The dim vestibule, though lit by the standard sixty-watt bulb screwed in overhead, had a curiously blotchy or stained appearance. Peering closer, I saw where the wainscoting and banisters had been coated with a dead beige, but so long ago that the paint was cracking and flaking off. The wood underneath, oak by the grain, showed through in large patches, glossy, almost raw-looking. I found
Jongkind
on the mailbox for the third floor.

As I climbed the stairs to the top, I felt a bit embarrassed to be finally visiting Robert at home. Scooting over near midnight to get the dope on a chess problem, when I'd never even seen his place before. Though I enjoyed his company fitfully, I'd never tried to take our friendship outside the gallery basement. Neither had he, it occurred to me now.

The door flew open when I knocked on it, as if Robert had been waiting anxiously on the other side. He was still wearing his shabby black trench coat. He must have called me as soon as he'd arrived, and still hadn't bothered to take it off.

“Shh,” he said, a long finger up to his lips. “Claudia's entertaining a visitor.” The eyes above the finger were wild, dancing with excitement. Glazed, out-of-focus with it. With anyone else, you'd assume by those eyes he was drunk or stoned. But Robert was more easily intoxicated than most. He could get those eyes by sniffing a wine glass as it passed. Or by figuring out a chess problem ahead of the guy who always checkmated him.

He led me into the living room, which took the theme of Robert's physical and mental dishevelment and extended it in space. Records and tapes strewn about, paperbacks. Piles of dirty clothes, which looked to have got to a rough sorting stage but no further. Robert standing in the middle of it all, grinning. A musty smell. No plants. Also no chessboard yet. The problem of finding it perhaps tacked on to the actual problem. I was on the verge of leaving.

Look around, he seemed to be gesturing, flapping his hands.

Kitchen table, two mismatched chairs. Pizza box, beer bottles. Mirror with a few grains dusting it. Candle sitting in a blob of wax. The remains of Claudia's party, I gathered. Part one, anyway. More cast-off clothes on the ratty couch, a heap at either end. And between them, snuggled in, Paul Klee's “Wayward Guest”.

The feeling that came over me as I stared at it was exactly the one I got from the rare, frighteningly good pure line. The top of my head lifted open cleanly, lid of a jar. Cool air pouring in, then down the empty corridor of my spine.
Iced.

I turned away from it slowly, with effort, and that was another drug similarity: movement gone voluptuous and grave. Significant.

“Are you fucking crazy?” I said softly.

Robert had stopped grinning. Was looking soberly down his nose at me, some popish assumption of dignity he must have thought the occasion warranted.

“Just look at it,” he said. Slight wave of the gracious host.

“Are you totally insane? I don't want to fucking look at it. Are you nuts?”

But then – beyond the shock, beyond the rising anger – beyond the
fear
. . . of
course
I wanted to look at it. It was all I wanted to do. And so, swivelling my head slowly like a man enspelled, I did. It was just too luscious a magic to think of this idea transmitted through the fingers of a Swiss genius sixty years before, living its half-life in catalogues and auction houses and museum storage, now sitting on the Sally Ann sofa in this apartment, like a ghostly angel brought back to grubby life. I stared at the little square in its plain wood frame, mesmerized.

“You know, it's not that good,” said his voice behind me. “If you don't know what it is, I mean.”

I disagreed entirely. But wouldn't interrupt my looking to say so. The muddy brown background. The little figure – the wayward guest – floating in it, triangle body and circle head. Done in thick black lines, like the stick legs and two-fingered, outstretched arms. Little black eye in profile, like a crow's eye or a squirrel's. The one jump-out colour the brilliant, biting red of the body. Seconded, faintly, by a pale pink aura where the limbs met the brown, a suggestion just eased into the background. It was the perfect proof, Exhibit A, for those who claimed that modern art was a sham, “a child could do it.” It was also the perfect refutation of that argument. No child had ever done anything like this. But no one who could be convinced by that reasoning needed to hear it. Klee's creation was poised between the camps, between all camps, hanging by its divine thread.

Again I turned away with difficulty. I'd felt something of the painting's force field in the gallery, but everything was dulled there. There was nothing like this buzz. And Robert was grinning again, which actually helped.

“How?” I said. “No, fuck that. Why?”

But he answered the first question. “Just like we planned it. Like you said, it's very small.” He nodded at the briefcase by the table. “I turned off the motion detectors and I went up and I took it off the wall. When Owen arrived, I wished him a good shift and I left.”

“Don't pull me into this,” I said, wishing like hell I didn't already feel neck deep in it. “We didn't
plan
anything. We chatted up some fantasies over a fucking chess game. A little ‘thought experiment', remember? But Einstein didn't try to hop on a light beam. He just imagined he could.”

Robert's face clouded. He looked startled, startled and a bit hurt. “You don't think I
stole
it?”

“Of course not. It just happens to be sitting on your couch beside your underwear.”

“I thought you of all people would appreciate a surrealist gesture . . . a
jeu d'esprit
,” he mumbled. Italics from the first page of Neale's catalogue. Robert was definitely hurt now, no question. He turned his back on me and shambled off into the kitchen. With a frightened glance at the couch, I followed him. To be alone with the
thing was impossible; it made me culpable, somehow. Was I?

Robert rummaged in his fridge and came up with a beer. “Can I offer you a refreshment at least?” he said stiffly.

My arm flew up and knocked the bottle out of his hand. It smashed by the table. Robert's eyes went very wide and he gulped, his Adam's apple lurching. It might have been the first time I'd caught his full attention since we'd met. I grabbed his upper arm, a bone in the trench coat, and started for the living room. He jerked his arm free, but followed me.