Catalogue Raisonne (12 page)

I took the passenger elevator upstairs. No police. No yellow crime scene tape securing the MacMahon Gallery. No bullet-headed constable leading suspects up to the lounge, commandeered as a temporary interrogation room by the pock-marked inspector so good at sweating people.

No
, I told myself. Comedy is dangerous. Like nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream of the rising diver, making him goofy before they kill him.
Stay alert. Last checkpoint the hardest.

Crossing the main gallery, approaching the “Secrets of the Surrealists”, I felt my stomach tumble and pitch. My legs wanted to slow and I forced them to hurry, the result a kind of stumbling stroll. It was the classic approach to a binary moment – the cheque that may or may not be in the mailbox, the girl who may or may not have shown up to forgive you – and my reaction was classic fight-and-flight. Telling myself the reasons success was assured. Which had pretty much been covered in the three-way with Robert and Claudia last night. Seeing pictures, more detailed and vivid than the reasons, why disaster was imminent. A blank grey panel displaying two nails and a label – a
jeu d'esprit
no one had happened to discover yet. Rick shaking off his torpor belatedly, or shedding it at exactly the right moment, sprinting after Robert and knocking him flat. But why bother bruising his own shoulder? One good wrench of a bony wrist would do the trick.

But in that case Robert would have been bleating and pounding on my door two minutes later. If he still
could
bleat and pound.

Why didn't I follow him all the way to the gallery? Five minutes. Or, hell, walk with him? Nothing but the pure animal instinct of self-preservation. I left at the last moment I could still claim it had nothing to do with me. That was only sensible. So why do I feel ashamed?

The questions and recriminations, agonizing as they are, are actually what carry you through the silent walk, which would be worse without them. The panel loomed up ahead. With a gulp of fright, I rounded it.

Back.

Back intact. Last checkpoint passed. “Wayward Guest” hung in its appointed place. I leaned close to it. No dints or scrapes where Robert had whanged it against a wall. The little figure – heartbeat
red and hovering pink – was back home again, after a brief floating excursion.

Relief drained my head and made my knees wobble, as if the mass of me had rushed downward and settled somewhere near the floor. Now – for the first time since that blazing glimpse on the couch – I could afford to savour, just enjoy with a kind of whirling thrill, the contours of Robert's mad stunt. The mass at my feet transformed, Einsteined into pure energy that rushed back up my spine to flood my vacant head with wild, hilarious ecstasy.
Crazy, crazy fucker! Fucking maniacal demented insane . . . fool! Idiot!

Paintings littered the floor of the smaller Teale Gallery. Leaning against the walls, many partially overlapping their neighbours. Lying down in rows, again with space-saving overlaps, like toppled dominoes. It looked as if someone trying to get a view of several decks of cards had spread them out as much as possible in a large closet, leaving narrow aisles for pin-step walking. Over two hundred works had been submitted to the CHOP show, with space on the walls for maybe fifty to seventy-five. That was the maximum, even throwing out normal rules of spacing, crowding in more panels than the small room should bear, and “double-hanging” over and under a centre line. Hans and Ramon and Peter and Jason and I stood, by necessity, outside the gallery. Hans and Peter wore their carpenter's belts for hanging, Hans's with level shot through on an angle like a short sword, Peter just as obviously unarmed. Jason had his clipboard to begin assembling information for the labels. Ramon turned his head to yawn. “The little girls?” I said. He nodded, yawned again. Bud was there at first, but then seemed to realize that there was nothing for him to do, and left to see if there was perhaps something upstairs.

Inside the gallery, Walter and Neale stepped carefully along the narrow aisles. Showing good balance, arms only occasionally coming up from their sides in slow teetering flaps. It wasn't clear to me why Neale was here. Walter said – though not often, to his credit, and only in front of certain people – that this was his annual “dirty job”. Or, in
better moods, “penance for my sins”. Neale's presence might have been intended as an oblique reminder of those sins, whatever they were. It could just as easily have been a sign of the new companionship that I'd noticed yesterday. Walter had a habit of murmuring to himself as he considered works, from CHOP contenders up to Frank Stella drawings. “Oh,” he'd say. Or, “Oh!” Or – even more ambiguously – “Yes?” Occasionally, with evident relaxation, “Mm hm..that works.” There was no doubt he enjoyed art, but he did not seem to have intense feelings about it. It was an easygoing passion, if there is such a thing. He confessed to a weakness for what he called “naïve stylings” or “folk art”. You stood a better chance of getting into CHOP with a portrait of your cat, even a fairly good one, or a horribly executed picture of any other subject, than you did with an earnest but unexceptional abstract. Walter himself had worked in the AbEx line – “decently enough,” he admitted, skirting false modesty – back in his student days when he'd still painted.

Neale said nothing, though he looked and nodded sometimes. Soon Walter began choosing the first rejects, and Walter and Neale began handing them out to us. This went faster after there was enough space cleared for us to get in and help. We started ferrying the rejected pictures back to the space cleared for them in the coat check area behind the reception desk. Lobby duty the Tuesday after CHOP selection was an unpleasant task. Listening to the curses and grumbling, or just the silence surmounted by a stricken face. Directing the boldly outraged few upstairs when they demanded to see the boss. I'd wondered if we really curried enough favour with this show to offset the number of patrons we lost permanently.

Beyond that, I felt a personal tension as I transported each work. Afraid each time to look down and see Angela's name, always a little too largely claiming responsibility in the lower right corner. (The Dundas Valley teacher strong on “pride of creation”, less so on means of same. A perverse personal opinion, aired only once.) Afraid, but needing to know, I snuck looks at the paintings the others were carrying and depositing. Each time the name was not hers I felt I'd dodged another bullet. Dodging bullets – large and small – definitely the morning's theme.

Finally, Walter was done chucking things out. Except for a few question marks, lying in pairs in the centre of the floor, the shortlist was laid out around the perimeter. I was happy for Angela. Happy and proud. She'd be walking on air tonight. And when I found her painting, and stood with a pretense of nonchalance near it, I felt a double shot of pride to realize that it was more than gallery nepotism – which, again to Walter's credit, would only have carried her a short way. “Bruce Trail Near Dundas” – the title on the entry form taped to the top, along with contact phone number, our phone number – was her best work yet. Less muddy and cluttered – sharper – with more empty spaces and light-shot ones. She'd seen what she wanted and had mostly got it. To my eyes anyway. I had no idea she'd advanced so far. She'd made a leap of some kind, at least with this painting. I couldn't wait to see her and tell her that.

Walter and Neale were standing nearby, disagreeing in their repressed way about a painting leaning in front of them. Two people, nude, probably male and female though the room was dusky and they were both slender, sitting on the edge of a bed with their backs to the viewer. Walter called it “the strongest piece . . . the most painterly” – which from what I'd seen, it might well have been. And Neale, while nodding, called it “skilled but facile” – which might also have been just. I wasn't critic enough to say. But I could catch the subtext to the discussion: neither of them was entirely happy about a local painting that might not be inferior, or recognized by locals as being inferior, to the famous Europeans in the next room. Naturally the unhappiness came more, though not entirely, from Neale's direction. Payback time peeped out again, momentarily slivering the comradery. After the failure of the surrealist show, his baby, he needed to cast aspersions – some kind, any kind – on this populist annual, Walter's baby (even if an unwanted and often abused child), a deal cut between him and the community that had shown itself to be largely indifferent to Max Ernst.

When they moved off, I took a closer look at “Two Figures”. There was a current running between the forms, with their slumped shoulders but stiffly held necks, something fibrous in the air between them . . . something fraught, told in nervous tangling spidery filaments. You couldn't tell if it was before or after whatever might take
place on the bed. I wasn't really surprised to see the initials
CJ
tucked deftly into the corner. Curt, like the title. Diffident, or assured; assured enough to be diffident. And poor Robert had got it dead wrong again. No one
undisciplined
, not in her art anyway, had done this. She was reaching consciously ahead to develop her own style, and from the evidence it looked like she might find it, even if she hadn't yet, not quite.

By two we had the room mostly pulled together and broke for a late lunch. A bit more hanging, Jason's labels, and some standard lighting were all that remained. On a Code 1 excuse, I took another pass by the Klee. The checkpoints didn't really stop, I saw, at best they just got spaced farther apart. In the basement there was the usual newspaper knot around the panel. Ted and I usually split the
Globe
neatly; Ted took the Business section and I took everything else. Ted, with only nickels to invest, pored over the stock market figures, scratching out his findings with a pencil with a worn-down eraser: some Asimov-Burnsian avidity to find the formula that makes the world work, which depressed me if I thought about it for very long. Anyone else wrangled over the
Witness
. It was such a small, easy-reading paper that all sections could be covered in the lunch hour, but for some reason everyone wanted to read Sports, Entertainment, Local, National and International, in that order. It had to be that order. Sean was there too, unfortunately as it turned out. Later I learned that he had just dropped by to pick up a scrap of his epic that he'd left in his locker. A rare slip of the truth that he couldn't, Homer-like, keep it all locked in his head. But bad timing regardless, for both of us.

Strangely, today there was no wrangling over sections. The elevator doors opened and I saw Ted holding the
Witness
open – yellowish banner of the late edition, which came out in early afternoon. The others standing on my side of the panel, leaning and peering in to read. When I came close, they parted in eerie silence to let me through. I felt like Walter entering a room ready to hang.

Ted handed me the paper. The
Witness
used photographs wherever possible, the larger the better, and the first thing I saw was a
nice shot of the eastern end of the city. The smoking steel companies, the bridge over the narrow part of the bay, a bit of the big lake beyond. Divided, though, in the deep middle by one of those gruesome dotted white lines, in case you'd forgotten which route gravity took.