Catalogue Raisonne (22 page)

But you could hit a minor jackpot and sell a painting, too. “Summer Lane, Ancaster” had found a permanent home after just four months, the $100 rental fees coming off the purchase price, leaving a balance of $50 before the red PAID stamp and the new owner's signature.

Fingers drifting along up the neck. I looked for a sheet under Jongkind. Nothing. The sheets were arranged alphabetically, by artist's last name, but even Jason might make a mistake. So I looked under Claudia and then in the A's for “Adjusted”. Still nothing.

I was about to start on the previous year – Mrs. Soames hadn't said when the painting had been sold – when I noticed a grey file card box sitting in the drawer behind the manila folders. Helping to keep them upright actually, wedged in behind them like a bookend.

I pulled the drawer out a little farther into the light and flipped up the top of the box. A label saying Gallery Rentals faced me from the inside of the lid. Yet the outside had been anonymous office grey, one of those functional plastic objects that seem designed to repel curiosity. In a short time they become invisible, disappearing even as they sit in front of you.

Like the box, the record cards were obvious at first, then less so. Crisper, more concise, than the regular rental sheets – but with some confusing touches.

Each card had a name printed in pen on the top. ALDERSON, BAGSHOTT, CARLSSON, FOURNIER – names familiar from the slotted silver boards in the lobby, donors to the gallery. Along with other names not on the boards but in the same social bracket,
or close to it: names I'd heard at openings, some of the upper-tier docents. Down the left margin were initials in blue pen: CC, CH, GR. I might have puzzled over these longer – they looked like people's initials, but that didn't seem right – except that I caught AbEx in one list. That clarified things on a couple of counts. Walter couldn't bring himself to further reduce the beloved shorthand to AE, and maybe saw no reason to. The word came off his lips like the nickname of an old friend. The initials were genres of art, then. Suggested genres, since they switched about, trying to suit or steer the renter's taste. The titles of works scrawled beside the genre codes seemed to bear this out. “Old Que.” beside CH: Canadian Historical, presumably. If a suitable genre was found and stuck with, the abbreviated painting names just ran down without the coded initials. Two or three hands entered the names of paintings, though the blue ink coder predominated. Walter was a careful delegater. And the abbreviated titles suggested people who knew the permanent collection much better than I did. Knew its dusty corners, especially. Expanding, even elaborating, the abbreviations as best I could, there wasn't a title I recognized.

Well there wouldn't be.
Fingers just touching down on the strings. Pre-strum.

And then I flipped to the Carlssons' card. Halfway down it I saw G7; beside it, “College St. Houses?” Which seemed to peep up into something recognizable. There'd been a show of Lawren Harris's early works, small vigorous oils of Toronto streets, which I'd found pleasant, but which had disappointed the people who came in expecting to be walloped by the cool northern geometries of his later phase. “College St. Houses?” was entered in a red pen. Beside it, near the right margin, was a blue check mark, dark, pressed hard. A concession? No mention of money, of cost, on the card. There wasn't on any of them.

Piccone's card told a small story in itself. A story of conflict and frustration – on both sides. They were having a hard time drawing a number on the man. First, it seemed, they had given him some old Quebec paintings. At least that was what I assumed CH, coupled with “Mme. Lacuisse”, meant. I'd seen those paintings in corners in
the vaults: dark, sooty-coloured portraits of old women in bonnets, some of them nuns. Piccone, separated by a thin wall from naked twenty-year-olds from Trois-Rivières and Chicoutimi, had returned those fast. Then they'd sent him some modern abstracts. Those had come back even faster. I remembered him saying “Noise” to me, about the electro-pop at the Gala Preview. Probably he'd soundproofed his office at The Tulips against the rock that boomed over the dancers, a din he'd accepted only as the price of trade. Then they'd gone out on a limb – another red question mark, blue check – to rent him a Milne, not one I recognized. A serious compromise, but that hadn't washed either.

Right at the end, the little narrative reached its climax. There were no more marginal initials, they'd given up on genre-guessing. But there was a clear name – “Krieghoff” – in red ink, no question mark. Beside it a blue NO, underlined with an exasperated slash, as if to someone who needed to be told things twice. Then a red RETURNED! So there.

Below this the little coda of CP, a title, and “Returned”. All in tiny pencil that had appeared spottily elsewhere. Bud's, I thought. Still trying. Switching to photographs, perhaps.

“Did you find what you were looking for, Paul?” Jason asked.

His expression didn't contain a trace of the smugness most people would have shown at catching a sneak. I remembered him telling me at a Christmas party that his 4:36 time in the mile would be “good for a high school runner.” Coming from a thirty-year-old, it should have been an ironic boast. But Jason's face over his eggnog was just too earnest to tell what exactly he meant by it. He might simply have been stating a fact, in case you weren't up on running times.

I slid the drawer shut.

“It's an open secret,” Jason said.

That much I believed. The passed-around cards, the various pens. Though obviously not open below this floor – Jason's placid face might even be reminding me of that. I wondered how many other open secrets the people up here shared. In two days of casual digging I'd learned new facts about their coke and sex lives, and now, their sweetheart deals with corporate chums. I'd worked here four years,
thought I knew the place to the point of phone book boredom. Now I had to ask myself if I knew it at all.

“The tax credits on donations aren't exactly generous. And they do nothing to generate any goodwill towards the gallery.” My silence, which was only because I hadn't thought of anything to say yet, seemed to be pulling more answers out of Jason than questions could have.

“I understand,” I said. And I did, perfectly I thought. The gallery was repaying large donations with loans from the permanent collection. It would certainly loosen the Carlssons' cheque book if, in return for their donation they got, not just a boring tax break, but a neat little Lawren Harris to grace a dinner party for friends. Lars and Leo had never mentioned it, but perhaps they hadn't seen anything worth mentioning. Maybe, as sons of privilege, they saw nothing strange in a
public
art gallery doing some interior decorating to hustle funds.

“It's a, um . . . it's quite a smart idea, actually,” Jason said.

I didn't necessarily disagree. At least more of the paintings got looked at.

“Don't worry. It won't travel downstairs through me.”

He smiled his wan smile. Tired-looking, despite all his running. When I passed Angela she gave me a helpless grimace, hands V'd out over her desk. No way to warn me of Jason's sudden return. The library was four steps from the elevator. I nodded. Then she remembered that she was pissed at me and, frowning, started tapping at her keyboard.

Walking up and down the streets with a buzzing head. Rehearsing the new facts. Playing the new chord in different ways: fast strums, slow pick patterns, feathery arpeggios. Combining it with the others. Just savouring it after the wait.

Though
savouring
didn't quite capture it this time. Away from Jason's blandness, I was getting a bad taste in my mouth about the Gallery Rentals scam. Perhaps from a taxpayer's viewpoint I couldn't
see much to complain about. It was slippery, irregular, but presumably as a result of it more paintings got bought and put on the walls. Or at least in the vaults. No, what bothered me more was the sense of arrogance, the smug immunity I sensed behind it all. It was just too cute, too smooth. It reminded me of a photo I'd seen of a chess park in Germany, with the players perched on towers at either end of a huge dyed-grass board. They pointed out their moves, and others below carried the milk-can-sized men for them. To another square or right off the board. The chess photo had the same sunny, fuck-proof feel as the Gallery Rentals game. Intellect from on high.

So what would I prefer? Rick's fat ass and fists?

Rule – art rule – by Joe Mass? “King Dumb” had been one of The Dogs' best covers, and I still liked listening to it. “Watch TV, livin large / I don't want you in charge. / Burger King, a fight with Marge / You don't want me in charge.”

What, then? A middle. A decent middle.

Christ, that sounded dull. And anyway, wasn't a decent middle exactly what I'd been talking to in Jason? He was in on it.

Walk on.

I could imagine the satisfaction Walter got from matching renter with painting, pushing the envelope of someone's taste, chipping away at ignorance and bias. A kind of missionary work. In his mind maybe. And though I toyed with the idea that Jason was naïve about Walter's motives, in the end I believed that there was no personal cash skim, it really was about attracting donations to the gallery. Walter had lived in the daisy-chain of the art world so long that it was like a private club to him, complete with dues and privileges and smoking rooms. He didn't see anything wrong with using public funds to decorate a businessman's dining room if the transaction allowed him to buy a new piece for the public gallery. It came from the public but it came back to it too. Besides, over ninety percent of the collection never left the vaults. Walter was canny about rotating the works on display, but there were just too many of them. They piled up. But these things had to be “done delicately”, as the Oz witch put it. Walter might have objected to the value of the Krieghoff rental. Or just to the recipient. Piccone the strip club
owner, chewing his carrot sticks and jingling his pocket change. In his own quiet way, Walter was certainly a snob. He was cautious too. More cautious than Jason, who had a record-keeper's necessary lack of subtlety. Though, by his “tax credits” line, he seemed to have picked up more snobbery than was natural to him. All of these people were snobs. They couldn't all have begun that way. At bottom, Jason seemed like a scrub-faced democrat. Maybe the place bred it. The rarefied atmosphere you breathed. The talk you heard, the clothes you saw. But it was interesting hearing the spin he put on something he assumed I didn't really understand. I was pretty sure
he
didn't understand all of the implications of Piccone's record card, which perhaps he hadn't even seen, and which was creating new spaces in my head. Wheels within wheels.

I walked the streets and had a series of coffees. But there's only so much playing of the new chord you can do by yourself. After a while you've got to try it out on someone else. And there was only one person I had in mind as an audience.

O
oh, fisticuffs,” Claudia said, reminding me of my face. The face I saw over the chain was changed too. Still pale, and bumpy on the cheeks, but the black around her eyes was carefully applied, and offset nicely by a pale silver lip gloss. She'd washed her hair – the Johnny Rotten tufts and flattened places meeting, more or less, in a fluffy brown cap with tawny streaks.

I was prepared to say as much as I could through the crack in the door, but after a few moments of looking at my face, she seemed to decide something and said, “Come on in.” Closing and unchaining and opening the door again.

She was changed and the room was changed. When I saw how she was dressed I remembered Robert's funeral had been that afternoon. I'd forgotten it for long intervals while I was snooping, and hadn't thought of it at all since leaving the gallery. “A private affair” Ramon had said when he'd got back from the funeral parlor. That meant no
gallery, and I thought would have come from Claudia. She was wearing a man's white shirt – too large, the cuffs rolled up: one of Robert's, I assumed. Many thin silver bracelets jumbled jangling on one wrist. A black choker, and, below two-buttons-worth of white skin, the top of a black bra. An ankle-length black skirt with Madonna studded belts, several of them, angling down one hip. Black ankle socks, black pumps. It looked to be an artful compromise between her own fashion sense and what might pass muster at a funeral. But I was only guessing.

“The place looks good,” I said. “Different.” The room, too, had been given a partial makeover. Things put away or stacked, the carpet vacuumed.

“Not for long,” she said. “Robert's the total slob. But I'm not far behind. My parents just left a while ago. They're driving back to the county with my aunt.”