Catalogue Raisonne (37 page)

“Barbara could have put together something better,” I said. “If she'd had the imagination. I mean, she had the contempt. But maybe that blinded her to bigger possibilities.”

Claudia didn't take her eyes off the board but I felt her attention sharpen. She said:

“Why are we suddenly in the past tense? And what are you talking about?”

“Well, I mean. Why run the risk of passing off forgeries as real? If the renters really don't know any better, why not create a true phantom gallery. Have paintings done – maybe in styles similar to famous painters, so they jog people's memories – then sign them with other names.”

“Artists that don't exist, you mean?” While heading off a pin I was working on.

“There's no law against a pseudonym is there? Or a bunch of pseudonyms. ‘Haystack', by Omar Watson, say.”

“It would still need a pedigree. A provenance.”

“Maybe coming from Barbara would be provenance enough. Or, no. Someone working for Barbara, but outside the gallery. I think she could finesse it so she wouldn't even have to claim it came from the gallery collection. It would just be hush-hush. Nod, wink. ‘I've got a very special painting for you this month.'”

“People would compare notes. Maybe look things up.”

“Look things up?”

“They might. You can be rich
and
smart.” That surprised me somehow, coming from Claudia.

“Barbara would know how to pick them. Someone titillated by secrecy . . . getting a hidden treasure for a while. . . .” It did seem far-fetched. As soon as I stopped talking, it evaporated. Popped like a bubble. But Claudia seemed pensive; she seemed to be considering it.

“I still say it would be risky,” she said a few moves later.

That brought it back into view. “That's what I'm saying. Safer
and
riskier. Better.”

“It would beat faux finishing at least.”

“Yeah, I guess it would.”

“Oh, you know about that?”

“Robert and I talked.”

That funny look crossed her face, the one I'd seen in Rehak's and was seeing more often lately. Like she was trying for her sneer but it turned into a wince.

“And played chess,” she said.

“It was mostly talk, really.”

“Tell me about it,” she said.

“Hnh?”

I'd offered to bugger off when she was painting – catch a movie at the Broadway, or check on the emptying of my place – but she said she needed to learn to work with someone else around. Why, she didn't say exactly. It may have been simply pride. Bothered by her need to cocoon herself in silence, the crack in concentration that betrayed. So far she'd got as far as priming canvases in front of me, then dragging them down the hall for the real work. From the number of rectangles I watched her coat with white, she seemed to be working rapidly. She shrugged, said maybe she had something going, but it might “just be verve.” I didn't understand that at all. Nor did I repeat the
Maldoror
line, which I thought she'd heard.
Hnh?
was a kind of mental processing, I thought, audible but not really a question.

I said, “It's patchy. But great in spots. Sean was right. They could have found a better quote.”

She slapped the brush loaded with gesso back and forth. Among other things, priming seemed to be a rest. A restoration.

“Listen to this: ‘Reading Shakespeare is like dissecting the mind of a jaguar.' What do you think of that? Do you like that?”

“I do. I like it better than Shakespeare actually. What I got of him in high school anyway.”

You could tire yourself out trying to get a positive reaction from this girl, I told myself. And then she'd be gone for sure.

On Monday I agreed to overtime as usual and we took down the surrealist show. Barbara, whom Walter had named Temporary Curator while the job was posted, stood in the centre of the room looking luscious and concerned, but never having participated in the hanging of a show, she had no real notion of how one came down. Peter was in charge, though at the moment he appeared to be doing nothing more important than slicing a length of bubble pack off a roll.

“Though we know whose name will be on the shipping order,” he said to me when Barbara had gone. Her annual thank-you luncheon for the volunteers was to be held the following Sunday at her house, and there was a planning session up in the lounge about which lady should prepare which hors d'oeuvre and other details. “Once I show her how to fill it out.”

It was another version of
They always hire outside.
Peter had dusted himself off after the death of his Kleinburg plans and had applied for the curator's position though he knew it was hopeless. He'd come to me and told me so – and that was another mystery. He didn't seem to hold the bulky white bandage on his nose against me, though the occasional glance at my hands told me he hadn't forgotten its source. Maybe he thought he'd got off lightly. And he had, actually. In this kangaroo court there seemed to be only two sentences: too lenient and too severe. Robert and Neale had drawn the short straws.

Taking pictures down was another time – along with stealing
pictures or forging them – that jaded eyes could be jolted into actually looking. Holding the painting between your legs as you sat on the floor, leaning it away from you as you began taping the bubble wrap. This time it was the Duchamp that snagged my attention, though previously it had seemed more trick than artwork. One of the troubles with the surrealists, I'd decided, was that they didn't really repay repeated viewing as much as other artists. The first look could be a splash, but after that it was usually diminishing returns. A lack of mystery, somehow, though with plenty of elaborately weird complications. Which was a strange criticism to make of a group that allied itself so strenuously with dream, with the unconscious. In some ways they seemed
too
rational.

Etant Privé
, the Duchamp was called. Was the failure to provide an English translation – alone among all the titles – another of Neale's in-jokes? Not subtle necessarily, but too aloof to inspire curiosity. I peered through the glass that Duchamp had whited out then scratched in places to allow slivers of viewing. Saw bits of the back of the nude girl behind, the waterfall she was facing toward. It still seemed trick-like, but it held me longer. There was something there.

“Would you give me a hand, dear?” Mrs. Soames asked as I was wheeling the padded trolley of paintings into the freight elevator. She had a large box of tissue-wrapped gifts that she needed lifted off the counter and into a corner. She herself was busy tying gold and silver ribbons into a double bow on one gift, a card ready to slip under the corner when she was done. “And if you could just help me down with it when I'm ready to go. About two o'clock.”

“Sure. Where are these all headed anyway?”

“Pardon, dear? Oh, to Barbara's for the luncheon. But I'm taking them out to her house today. I'm in charge of preparations.” I gathered that meant cleaning.

Opening the card Mrs. Soames had inscribed, I said, “Mrs. Soames, they asked me to bring a little more wrapping material up to the lounge.”

“Oh well, yes. Yes. Whatever you need,” she said, tugging on a slightly shorter loop.

Since she was occupied, I took a plastic bag to put the paper, bow
and card in as well. I left it at the front desk and went back to the Braithwaite Galleries. “Hans,” I said, “Would you mind if I took first lunch? There's something – ”

“For Christ's sake, we're – ” He broke off when he saw that we were far ahead of schedule. It had been a small show, after all. Looked at his watch. “Be back here in no more than sixty minutes.” In four years, I'd never left for lunch without that sentence ringing in my ears. It was almost the equivalent of a dinner bell.

As the freight elevator descended I put “Wayward Guest” in the plastic shopping bag, then walked out of the gallery with it. Pulling a Robert. My arm seeming to tingle with an energy that came up from the bag and circled in pins and needles my shoulder joint.
Right behind you, buddy. At least as far as the bridge part.
The short span between glee and hysteria – no span really, just an alternating current – gave me an instant understanding of the blunders thieves make. The ones the newspapers use for their “World's Dumbest Criminals” boxes.

“How's your cursive script?” I said to Claudia.

“I can do anonymous female.” And she did:
With appreciation from the volunteers
in graceful blue curves and loops. Whatever she came up with would have had to do; my hands were trembling too much. Claudia had taken the picture down the hall and come back with both of them wrapped. One in white tissue with a silver bow, the other in the bubble-pack.

“Wish me luck,” I said.

“Be careful and you won't need it.”

Owen buzzed me in and I went into the freight elevator and put the bubble-wrapped Klee back on the trolley. Backed away. Then remembered that I was supposed to lean the paintings against their crates for inspection. That's why I'd brought them down in the first place.
Careful!

I did that then. “Wayward Guest” was blurry beneath the plastic; it was only the triangle of brilliant red that cinched it at a glance. I started to walk away, and then hesitated. Some doubt that made me feel
ashamed pulled me back slowly like an elastic with most of its bounce gone. I looked over at Owen: deep in Dick. Then tugged loose the bottom left corner of the taped wrapping, until I could see the tiny seam of echoing red I'd marked. I didn't need to see the checked brush stroke on the head. It would be there anyway. Either way.

I added our gift to Mrs. Soames' box. “Don't forget dear, two o'clock,” she said, bent over another elaborate bow. It occurred to me that I'd never seen her in an addled phase when it was something
she
needed.

Hans met me at the Braithwaite entrance with a scowl, a tiny glowering Hun with his hands on his hips. “Don't waste a lunch hour if there's no real need,” he said, confusingly, until I remembered: he hated early returns as much as late ones; they were equivalent irregularities. Under pressure the headpiece really did fill with straw. Loose stalks, drifting around the barn.

Helping Mrs. Soames load the trunk of her Lincoln Town Car was a pure pleasure.
She
was driving off with it, after all. And as much as I enjoyed her company, if someone had to stand trial for stealing a masterpiece, then . . . . Mrs. Soames, her face barely clearing the dash, reversed the big car handily up the sloping garage floor and out onto King Street, flipping me a thank-you wave out her window.

And with that “Wayward Guest” was off on another journey.