Catalogue Raisonne (34 page)

“He loves his art,” Claudia said.

Rick turned uncomprehending eyes on Claudia. Big brown glossy eyes that reminded me of Frankenstein's, but filled with self-pity, the injustices foisted upon him by the weak. He saw me then, and the sorry eyes caught and flared, but then spun out like a screamer, leaving black air.

But even the memory, the reflex, of rage seemed to galvanize him. “Listen, babe,” he said to Claudia, speaking rapidly as if he'd just remembered that time was running and he had to catch up to it. “You gotta help me. You gotta do me one big favour, okay? I just gotta leave this thing with you for a while” – he tilted the picture between his knees up briefly, like a placard – “just until I can figure out where to move it. I gotta disappear for a while. You okay with that?”

I am, I thought, thinking of the disappearance part. Some of the earlier Rick-pictures bubbled back into my head, blood and groans and thumps down stairs, but they flickered out like the screamers had. I couldn't sustain them in the face of the sorry sack of man staring at Claudia, thick wet lips parted as he waited for her answer. But she was rubbing his back in small circles between the shoulder blades, listening to his babble instead of throwing him out, feeding him back to the streets. Was this how he did it? The baby that threw vicious tantrums, then hung its head and moaned about them. It wasn't something I could ever have imagined Claudia responding to, wanting to soothe. Ramon's cool
slow
made sense . . . but this?

Though when she did speak, it was sternly. “That's fucked, man. It's totally silly. This thing in your hands . . . it's not real. It's not worth anything. You need to just leave. Fast. Now.”

“Not worth anything. What the fuck you – ”

“Turn it over.”

Rick did.

“What do you see? On the stretcher. The wooden part. Above the frame.”

“
Hauptman's Art Supplies
,” he read.

“You know where Hauptman's is?”

“How the fuck would – ”

“It's an art store out in Westdale. I buy my supplies there.”

Rick stared at Claudia, then turned “Wayward Guest” around and stared at it, then back at Claudia again. Not understanding all or even much of it, but getting the part about himself being screwed. He lifted one heavy haunch and farted. Then let the painting fall to the floor. Kicked it sideways with one of the pointed black boots.

“You need to go,” Claudia said. “That's a posh place. They probably have video surveillance.”

Rick looked startled at the thought. A
biker?
I thought. A
dealer?

“I'm outa here,” he said, then started mumbling, “I'm going back to Timmins. I hate Quebec. Quebec is totally fucked. I can't even speak French.”

I removed myself to the kitchen, partly to avoid witnessing this, and also to avoid being in range if a last screamer went off. “Sorry about the door, man,” I heard, the low voice sounding honestly regretful, and then a click shut.

And then Claudia found me and we got busy on some tea.

We sat in our usual positions at opposite ends of the brown couch, sipping our teas, not saying anything for a long time. Where to start? Truthfully, I felt too tired at the moment to even try. We had two fallen men between us now. Two men dropped from heights by a series of mistakes. The dead men seemed to occupy the space where “Wayward Guest” had sat, no less freakish, no less astonishing. Plugging the mouth with wonder, first, before the other feelings hit.

“I want to tell you something,” she said finally.

“Yes,” I said. Half knowing what she was going to say before she said it. I could see ahead to a time when there would be no more of these secrets to tell, no more gradual risings of the truth. It was still distant, a dust devil on the horizon, and I looked forward to it, while at the same time, for reasons I didn't understand, dreading it too.

Claudia set her mug on the floor. Stared at the patch of grey carpet in front of it. “Nobody phoned here from the gallery. Not that night anyway. I just said something, the first thing I could think of, to wind you up. I don't know why. So you'd start digging maybe.”

“Yes.”
And?

“It was me. I phoned Peter that night. As soon as Robert left here. I was just so freaked out. Seeing my painting. Not knowing what those assholes were doing, what they were mixing me up in. I never thought . . . it never crossed my mind what I was dragging Robert into.”

She covered her face with her hands. “He never entered – ” she began, but broke off and pressed her hands tighter while a shudder ran through her. But when I'd moved over beside her and managed to pry loose her fingers, her eyes were barely damp. Rinsed-looking. Like grey pebbles after a dew.

We wrapped our arms around each other and just stayed that way a long time. Locked tight like figures carved out of the same block of stone.

“Don't go home tonight,” she said, close to my ear.

“I won't.”

I glanced down the hall and somehow she caught it, perhaps the slight movement of my head near hers, and she said, “No. No. Just stay.”

And with that, the long day of time shifts entered its final slow, dream-like phase. It felt like underwater time, dream time, with sharp sights, corners of things looming suddenly, followed by long quilted intervals where you just drifted. It felt magical – eerie, but with the fright that dreams can bring somehow suspended. We hugged at times, not kissing yet, then drew apart and talked. Talk seemed able to proceed almost telepathically, using phrases as the visible tips of great language icebergs that glided on below the surface. “So you think,” I said at one point. “I don't know,” she said. “I don't.” It seemed like a long, packed conversation.

Toward dawn, when the sky was turning rose above the insurance-schoolyard, I lay down on my back on the carpet and drifted in and out of a daze. Claudia lay down on the couch and slept for a while. It felt peaceful. It felt like home, though not at all like anything permanent. When the sun came up I felt refreshed.

Peter opened his door already talking, which was another new twist. Neale's bloody fall the catalyst for wholesale change in the gallery? Of the magnitude, if not the type, he would have felt was long overdue.

“If you'll recall, I answered exactly what you asked me. No more, no less.”

It was the last phrase – like the tag line in a fastidious cookbook – that made me snap. Though another proximate cause would have presented itself in a moment. I drove my fist into Peter's nose, felt something crumple.

“That's for being so fucking stupid,” I said.

“Take a few days off,” Bud said. “Think about it. It's been a hard morning for all of us. Walter's going to close the gallery for a couple of days anyway.”

“It's going to be awkward,” I said. Wondering as I said it what exactly I meant, and what Bud thought I meant.

“Awkward?” Bud looked perplexed a moment, as if someone had just complained about the difficulty of dealing with oxygen. “We're used to awkward around here.”

And realizing that we were – all of us were – the notice I'd just given popped like a bubble of
jeu d'esprit
.

Angela hadn't been at her desk on my way in: one lucky break. News of Neale's death seemed to have acted like some sort of universal negative charge in the gallery, dispersing everyone to their own nooks and corners, each as far away from everyone else as possible. Now I saw her, standing just inside the library door with Jason. They had their arms around each other's waist, holding each other close. Jason had his chin up at a challenging tilt, combat readiness for any trouble I might make. Angela just looked sad, her lips set thinly together. She would expect violence of some kind, the fist through the closet door. Would she be disappointed at not getting it?

At the sight of them together, so many other things flew together suddenly, it was as if they were the positive charge, the attractive force, to counter Neale. Jason's sudden return from lunch as I looked through his files. And Jason lived in Dundas, not far from the art school. I remembered that now. But why just now? Why not before? Are there some things you can't or won't prevent, so you just don't let yourself see them happening? They fit, I found myself thinking. A
giddy impulse came into my head to rush forward and shake their hands. They'd make it. For a while at least. In the end I might have nodded slightly, a terse blessing.

Ramon:
Read the signs.

W
hen the gallery reopened on Thursday, after a two-day hiatus, it was manned by a skeleton crew. Just Sean and me, plus Lars and Leo, who hadn't been scheduled but had shown up anyway, thinking to pick up some easy cash and not expecting anyone to be too fussy about the time sheet. All of the Administration staff had gone to Toronto for Neale's funeral. Hans and Ramon had gone too, as quasi-administrators, or at least the highest-ranking underlings. Sean was in an uncharacteristically chipper mood, expecting hours of undisturbed mumbling. But the first hour brought in a surprising number of visitors, drawn by curiosity about “the curator guy”. Quite a few pronounced it Cure-a-tor, like the name of a newly-discovered dinosaur. They mostly hung about the front desk, probing for info-bits, but inevitably a few strayed up into Sean's domain. After the first few curses had blatted over the walkie-talkie, Leo (slightly bolder in his mischief, I could see now) suggested simply taping the
Closed
sign of the last two days back on the front doors and locking up. Ted, transfixed by an Asimov story, made no trouble. No sound, even. We frolicked in the empty galleries. I played nerf football with the twins in the MacMahon Gallery, sending them scrambling out for long soft bombs, while upstairs Sean worked on uniting Blake and Yeats. Mrs. Soames came out from the gift shop at one point and said, “I agree with you completely. It's disrespectful to rush right back into business. Especially today.”