Catalogue Raisonne (25 page)

“German for ‘morning' and Yiddish for ‘fattening,'” he said, and looked pleased for having managed it.

“As poets,” I said, taking the paper with the lines I'd copied from Neale's office out of my pocket.

Sean's lips moved even as he was reading someone else's work. Habit maybe. Or my handwriting. “Tripe,” he muttered. But his eyes flicked at me uncertainly. How could you be sure? With anything that
wasn't bound and printed or, even better, introduced at length by a name you recognized. What would people make of “The Second Coming”, one of Sean's touchstone poems, which he declaimed, especially at openings, at least as often as Owen re-read the Dick novel, if they were handed it on a Tim Horton's napkin, scribbled down in pencil by someone who said he'd just composed it? Would they – would Sean – laugh in his face?

While I was wondering and Sean was wondering, Claudia strode past us into the inner room. Sean and I moved out into the MacMahon Gallery to grant her a little space – reflex attendant courtesy – but it wasn't more than a minute before she strode out again. Passing us with a curt nod that could pass for a greeting.

Klee, not me,
said the flicker in her eyes.

But since when? And for how long? Neither she nor I could answer that.

“Interesting-looking person,” Sean said, watching her go. “Could use a better dermatologist.”

He was exaggerating about her skin, or maybe, given his own blotches, hoping for a kindred spirit in those wan pebbly cheeks. He didn't seem to recognize her from her previous trips to the gallery. Sean was tuned out to humanity, of course. But also, in her black tights and short tartan skirt, white sweater top, there
was
an almost complete transformation. Maybe even more so than in the formal wear of last night, which had looked like dress-up. It was almost unnerving. She seemed like a new person. Or just a person. Her former black folds had obliterated her that well.

“Can I keep this till after lunch? I'll get back to you about it,” Sean said, jamming the paper into his pocket with a show of disregard.

While Sean was taking his half hour, I lingered by the walls of poetry that he'd been frowning at. Hans was having a pipeful at the front desk, lunch spell-offs the only breaks he really took, though he smoked rather than ate during them. His jeans and old grey shirt were darkly smudged, with a couple of sooty spots on his face that
he'd enlarged with rubbing. The cleaning of the gallery ventilation ducts and shafts was a job Hans cursed lavishly, but seemed to do more than was strictly necessary. A weird, as well as dirty, job, the couple of times I'd had to help. Up in the metal tunnels, or, if you were bigger than Hans, at least your upper half stretched into them, you heard voices, faint and directionless, echoing from different parts of the gallery. Spook voices. Discussing art, I always assumed, and thought I'd heard, though really the sounds were too faint even to be sure of the speaker's sex.

I liked those. They were clear, heartfelt, with odd twists that pulled you out of pattern. But in another way they confused me. Except for those occasional swerves –
blue rise of my Reason's field, standing on my lids
– they seemed like straightforward lyrics. Romantic, even sentimental. In what way were they forerunners of the surrealists? Walking around the room, perusing the walls in a haphazard way, other lines seemed more clearly to belong, but perhaps only because they confused me in ways that I enjoyed.

I stopped at the photo of Max Ernst. Big hawk nose, bush of white hair over one eye. A severe face, determined. But those qualities hadn't made it into his chess set. The pieces were dumpy lumps, with slight variations in size that looked accidental. Slightly curving, cleft in the middle – like crosses between an eagle's talon and a lobster's claw. If the set was a dream, it wasn't a compelling one. As art it seemed like a doodle-pad creation; to someone who might actually want to
play
chess it was hopeless.
A victim must be sacrificed.
It still wouldn't come. But I was getting better at making the other pieces disappear while I thought about it, mentally erasing all but the ones related to the problem.

And then I went to see “Wayward Guest”, drifting back behind the panel as if it really were just another stop on a meandering stroll I was taking. It looked different now. Of course. Given what I knew, how could it fail to be transformed? Claudia was right: a lot depended on what you
expected
to see. A masterpiece could stand or fall on your own whim, a mood, a crazy notion. Some might have felt a power in that, but to me it implied that my judgment was a bit of bark or leaf jigged and jogged by a stream's currents. I looked at the picture. It
seemed
like what I'd been astonished by on Robert's couch, but reason told me it couldn't be. Reason zipped up that possibility in a body bag.
He has a good eye
, I'd heard Walter say in praise of some buyer. But how good was any eye? All those psychology experiments that made good filler in magazine corners: ten witnesses viewing the same accident scene, ten different reports. Colours changing, people vanishing, a Chrysler becoming a Toyota. Everyone a surrealist, or just oblivious. Magritte's “Breakfast Prayer”, the man primly sitting at his table while a tree fills the room behind him, his plate empty.

I looked at the painting. It was all you could do, finally. Doubt kept swinging you back like a hammer, then driving the eye back down into
the matter. Scrutinizing it in little squares, attention to all its particulars. Not the little figure floating in space – triangle and circle and outstretched sticks – but the tiny jog in the black line of the head, a little extra load of paint deposited, as if the artist had paused before continuing his stroke. A tiny, almost imperceptible sliver of red in the lower left corner of the murky brown background, the subtlest hint looping the eye back to the pulsing red of the dress, perhaps Klee himself remembering it, perhaps unconsciously. I had no way of knowing whether these details had been present when I'd seen the painting before, but I could remember them now.

Dress
? I thought. Based on what? The symbol for washrooms used around here? Triangular things what a girl, a woman, wears more often than a man. But why not a cloak? Even that couldn't be trusted. Stick to bumps of black, cracks of red.

And then Sean was back, furrowed around the eyes and mouth like the line in the Eluard poem. Bawling before he'd quite reached me: “They're Spectrists!”

“Who?”

“Morgan and Knish!. They were bloody Spectrists!”

It was hard to calm him down enough to get at whatever he'd dug out of his shelf of reference books, mention of which slipped out rarely, since he preferred you to believe in the powers of his prodigious, albeit sometimes delayed, memory. But the explanation, though interrupted frequently by curses at the walls, came out.

The Spectrists had been a put-on. A hoax. Like the Disumbrationist school of painting.

“The what?”

“Disumbrationists. More bloody mountebanks. Wankers. We've probably got some of their doodles in our vaults.”

I doubted that, but it reminded me of something I should do next.

In 1916, two minor poets – Sean waved his hand when I asked their names – had invented the Spectric school of poetry and its two star practitioners, Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish. They'd wanted to spoof the many avant-garde schools flourishing at the time, by producing bogus poems that they would pass off as genuine among the duped literati. They'd collected some ardent admirers. Countless more had
taken them seriously. (Including, seventy years on, Sean and me. Not part of Sean's text.)

“A Republican mayor, you expect. But even Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams were taken in.” He scowled to show that his esteem for the two men had suffered irreparable damage.

“The poems didn't seem great,” I said. “But they didn't seem bad either.”

“Read them
closely,
” Sean said, shoving the paper back at me. Begging the question, which I didn't voice, of how bad something could be if you had to put it under a microscope to expose its badness.

Sean jerked his head about, grimacing at the displays. His gaze stopped at the Man Ray photograph of two pretty flappers: “Daughters of Rrose Selavy”. The cupid faces, half in shadow, screwed up his own face like a Shakespeare crux. “Those clowns! I'm surprised they didn't have them on the walls in here.”

“I think they almost did.”

“Pardon?”

I told him about Neale's office, wondering as I did so if I was committing a blunder. Banking in the end on Sean not really being a part of human society.

“What's that supposed to mean? He's too good for this place?”

I considered that. I turned the thought over like a coin.

“Well, maybe he is,” Sean allowed. “It wouldn't exactly be a
large
feather in his tail.”

“His hat, you mean.”

“Tail. Peacock? It's called metaphor.”

“No, I think it just means he lost an argument.”

“Hm?”

I spent my own half-hour lunch conducting a fruitless search for a red pen. Going to all the floors of the gallery, but concentrating on Administration. Poking my head briefly into doorways, collecting quite a few
Yes, Paul?
looks but ducking out again before the sounds could be made. Barbara did have a red pen. She had many of them. She also
had many blue and black pens. All sticking out of the ceramic holder on her desk. Walter kept a clean desk, bare except for a roughly rectangular metal sculpture that looked like a small misshapen ingot – or maybe it was just a paperweight. Neale's desk was too cluttered to see anything clearly. When I passed Bud in the hall he was carrying a blue BiC pen, twiddling it in his fingers as we chatted about the heat. Then I stood by Angela's desk – no words, just her quizzical frown as she tapped – and when she pulled out a bottom drawer to get something I saw side-by-side jumbo boxes of the BiC pens, red and blue. Anyone could help himself, or herself, to them. But then, on my way down in the elevator, I remembered somebody who didn't help himself. Who supplied his own writing instrument, thank you. One day soon after “Secrets of the Surrealists” opened, a familiar young man with trembling hands and liquid eyes, a psychiatric outpatient and our steadiest patron, stopped at the desk to ask if he could have the “brilliant” catalogue essay autographed. “If the author would happen to be available.” Sometimes a call to the third floor could feel like radioing Pluto, but Ramon said it was the fastest answer we'd ever got to an intercom summons. Neale towering on his cowboy heels in the lobby, the scuffed brown leather jacket worn indoors and out, like a heavy shirt. His face naturally falling a bit – and making zero effort to hide it – when he saw the shaking mental patient that had requested an audience. Quick hand inside the jacket to retrieve the pen: a nice fountain model, a sleek tortoiseshell cylinder with a gold-rimmed cap and clip, the casing a mottled green and black that gave a marble effect. Rapid chicken scrawl in wet black ink, and then gone without a word. Our patron closing the book too quickly on his prize, though I warned him.