Affairs of Art (8 page)

Jean-Pierre taught me the advantage of loving that is rapid, silent, unembarrassed. He hung out at the baths. Half an hour later we were ensconced in wicker chairs, some twenty of us debating the use of biodegradable materials in permanent installations. Did the work of art unmake or remake itself? I remember a tall Jacinthe who saw a prohibition there because of a question of ethics. “It would be deceiving those who look at the work,” she kept saying. Jean-Pierre shrugged, pointing to the old ladies who were already preparing for the six o'clock dinner sitting in the big room lit up like a boarding-house. “They'll see your work and they'll think it's shit. In our societies it's the professional objectifier who sees art as biodegradable.” I thought he was predictable and rather pompous, but the others were already listening to him with a hint of reverence. By now they all knew what had gone on in room 13.

I settled into my character. It seems despicable to you but it's not. There are certain circles in Montreal where a person can survive only by making himself the author of his own double. Long-haired, bespectacled, and slim, he eats phony croissants, skims a newspaper that takes itself for
Le Monde,
has lunch in a bistro that has no bar, reads the great public thinkers of Paris and rewrites them for a subsidized publisher, talks in the accents of cinema vérité thereby creating for himself, in the end, an oasis in this city that will never be much more than a Minneapolis that speaks French.

When I closed the door to my renovated duplex on Rockland Avenue, I was holding a scrap of happiness that was not so idiotic. And not so false. The light was blue, like the cat. He had started out as a pussycat, like all the tabbies that used to get run over on Mentana Street or were tortured in the lanes, he was as dumb as all dumb creatures and as warm to the touch, now he has flabby flanks like all castrated tomcats. But with his long hair the shade of melancholy, he is also Persian and makes you feel that you are stroking the thousand and one nights recounted by someone you know. He became my friend, a reincarnation of Flaubert who hung out in the sleazy bars of the Orient to escape the town-square of suburban Rouen, which he turned into the Croisset. I bought everything by Flaubert, but didn't read much, I knew him and he reassured me too, a genius born of tardy pox, of a thread of talent, and of his mother's
boeuf miroton.
He could have grown up in Pare Laurier and become a schoolteacher.

Unlike Bruno, I acquired paintings and objects to place under the light. I bought what spoke to me. Most people who came to my house looked at nothing. They were afraid of saying the wrong thing in the presence of a masterpiece, or they took the terror in Betty Goodwin's work for a drawn story. The rare questions had to do with the seven of hearts in the bathroom, which is a joke. A student print, hung there to mask a bulge in the wall that would have cost too much to repair. I invented a kind of cabal — I who believe only
in what I can touch — and they wondered if a spell would fall on my seventh lover, though they could not know who the seventh was. To tell the truth, I hadn't counted them, not all of them entered my oasis.

And truth to tell, Vitalie, I believed that I loved boys. I believed it because of a strong crush I had, an affair that never was. He was a teacher in a Sept-Îles high school, he had written me a long letter describing his attempts to introduce contemporary art into an unwilling environment. To the principal, a Borduas looked like the spots on a cow from poor stock, that was not unusual, but worse, the president of the parent-teacher association had inherited a Marc-Aurèle Fortin from the hideous years when the painter was blind and would paint boats and wooden shacks from memory for his jailers. The lady had been told that her faded watercolour was worth fifteen hundred dollars and she insisted on offering it, from a purely didactic concern, as an example of avant-garde art, since the broad brush strokes of the dying artist made practically no distinction between boat and shack. Before he jumped in the river with a Roussil sculpture around his neck, said my correspondent, would I accept an invitation to meet the gentleman and the lady, capitalizing on my titles and passing myself off as his friend? He had a French buddy, at sea in the kitchen of the local Greek restaurant, who was already offering me a pizza guaranteed edible and some good wine that would make the journey from his cellar under the counter. I found him amusing, I'd never seen Sept-Îles, it was January, the students were getting on my nerves. I took the bus, I saw Quebec turn from grey to white while I read, incognito, Yves Thériault on the great open spaces. I had decided all at once to round out my national culture.

Genest was less attractive than his name, but even funnier than his letter. He decked me out in a tuque so I wouldn't look like a lunatic in the thirty-below weather, and a tie so the gentleman and the lady, whom he suspected of doing it on the cushions in the gym after PTA meetings, would believe in my doctorate without my having to flaunt it. We worked together on the relationship between Marc-Aurèle Fortin and Borduas, actually bringing in bovine genetics to show that decomposition does indeed lead to abstraction, which is itself merely a manifestation of the landscape as a philosopher might present it. Contemporary painting, I was to explain, is a stand-in for the words of the philosophers. It does without images that are too harsh, it gets to the essence of things and so is accessible only to those who are discerning enough to perceive its music without being shown a picture.

Genest had palmed off my CV on them and introduced me as an adviser to the great museums of Montreal, whom I helped to find the successors to the Fortins and the Borduas in their collections. It all went very well. The next evening I even spoke to the PTA meeting, and I didn't have to play the clown in order to be understood. Genest had correctly spotted, looking behind his petty bosses, the forms of thirst that could be roused.

It was ten p.m. when we headed for the souvlaki joint, on a road crunchy with northern snow that was new to me. It was like the Little Match Girl's Christmas, cold enough to burn.

He was not for me, Genest. He belonged to distance, to the cohorts of adolescents who lived their lives through catalogues and television, who started drinking at fifteen, who couldn't tell a fir tree from a spruce. When he'd first arrived there two years earlier he had established his authority by dissecting his own motorcycle with them, then reassembling it completely. After that it was a muskrat, which they'd scrutinized from the eyes to the liver. And the pierced ears and the hair dyed pink. And the weight-lifting. And the anatomy lessons, beginning with fashion magazines that were soon re­placed with paintings by old masters. He cooked it all up after class, in the schoolyard or the basement of his bungalow nearby. Already a few boys and girls to whom he'd begun to lend books had emerged a little less bored.

He was from French Ontario and spoke like those who have been late to receive the gift of words. He never missed a comma or an agreement. He had settled in Sept-Îles for life, he was sure he'd meet there another immigrant from the interior who would know how to laugh and write and produce two or three children. We were alone in the restaurant that was lit up like a skating rink, the French buddy had concocted a soufflé which he shared with us, he dreamed of opening a bistro in Kuujjuaq and there gathering to himself the confidences of all those who were wild about the North — the most interesting people in the world. Genest had dark hair and brown eyes, he wore a jacket from Sears, I was gazing at a person who was clear and kind, I'd have given him my cat to dissect, my books to dispose of, my students to astonish. And myself, to overwhelm.

But that was the farthest thing from his mind.

For months he wrote me letters, always amusing, in which the one false note was the admiration I didn't deserve. I was venerated without being loved, I lost myself in it, I wrenched my guts replying to him without letting my distress come through. Then his face blurred, I told myself that my love life was definitely a failure, and I experienced a few appropriate binges. A good thing to do, if one thinks oneself an intellectual, is to watch oneself live. The spectacle prevails over the pain, one knows one is pale, drawn, lonely, doomed to dirty glasses and sleepless nights, and one finally has the backdrop for disillusionment, without which there will be none of the detachment from which masters are made. I turned thirty certain I would transcend it. Which brought me some small consolation.

The rest, Vitalie, belongs to you. I am writing it here only to reveal you to the others, at last. And to let you once again take from my words the love I forbid you to change.

The following winter, when my students got on my nerves, I decided I would treat myself to something absurd and take a trip to Florida. I'd been invited to a Canadian studies symposium at the University of South Florida, I was to be responsible for the artistic part, a minor one, of the program. I'm sure there is no university uglier than USF, sprawling between two malls in the countryside back of Orlando. It rained on the millions of posters for Disney World, the American professors of Canadian studies wore red jackets in honour of the Canadian flag and the federal government grants, I stayed in a Holiday Inn on campus where the rooms smelled of the beer, sperm, and spray net of the young student couples who had progressed from necking to doing it, now that
Seventeen
magazine was running articles on birth control, explaining to girls that they could still be married in white, with blue eyelids. To make a long story short, I fled at dawn on the day after my performance, in a rented Pontiac Sunbird, without even looking at a map. All roads must lead to the beaches. But it was still raining and the radio was pre­dicting frost in the orange groves.

There I was at the entrance to Disney World, I tuned in to the radio station that directs you to the parking area, nearly empty at this time of day. I mused that one could do worse, in this nowhere, than encounter the sixth degree of stupidity, and that I might get an article out of it, a very refined one perhaps, on the colours that comfort imbeciles and make them spend their money. I bought a one-day passport, the clerk gave me a funny look, Americans see pedophiles everywhere, after all, I was wearing a dark foulard and a raincoat as exhibitionists do, you never know.

The restaurants were already open. I lingered over an excellent hamburger as I watched the little families arrive, from Ohio or Quebec, with their broods of kids already freezing and whining, they'd come down with colds from standing in line at the base of the Ferris wheel. The sky was becoming overcast between the rides, the lamps stayed lit, the rain was turning to a viscous drizzle. An old lady slipped on her way off the train that runs from the ticket booth to the Magic Kingdom, her daughter upbraided her, holding on to her while the children got away. There was no husband, needless to say.

To kill some time I looked for newspapers and didn't find them. So then I went through all the knickknack shops, telling myself I was compiling a list of symbols. I took a liking to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, picturing them beneath my seven of hearts: I would wound each one in a different manner and my lovers would imagine a voodoo spell ordered by the virgin-sorceress. But I was also tempted by a red bear in an RCMP hat. I'd never seen a red bear, I realized that our animals are always the colour of earth, another sign of the margins of history, of life in negative. Elsewhere though, in other cities equally far from Paris, the birds are multicoloured, the wild boars golden. I bought the red bear.

It was noon, the parents know that's parade time. I was following the music, that of Sunday television when I was ten years old and happily watched
Royaume de la Fantaisie
in French translation on Channel 2. Mickey Mouse appeared, sloshing through the water. His heavy tread squelched and sprayed the children. I bent down to help a little girl make room for herself in front of a tall boy and I bumped into you. Why did I say
“Pardon”
instead of “Sorry”? I'm bilingual.

You replied,
“Il n'y a pas de quoi.”
I wish I could write that the sun then burst through the clouds, that the crowd fell silent for a moment, and that you smiled — the Mona Lisa found at last in the innermost depths of chance. But we were freezing. I don't even remember the colour of your scarf, if you were wearing one, or the second act. I must have assumed a smart-ass tone to decree that Mickey Mouse was inane; you asked what I was doing there and I asked you the same thing. An airport conversation.

I deduce that it started raining again, that I didn't have an umbrella, that we went for a coffee, suddenly
relieved to no longer be two forlorn individuals, weird and suspect in the midst of all those families. You took your coffee black and so did I, Disney's is like rust, that was our first common ground. And because you admitted it yourself without equivocation, I acknowledged that I was there because I used to dream about it on Sundays as a child. And that we'd been poor and it was impossible. No one on Mentana Street hopped on a plane to go somewhere. Walt Disney was the Angel Gabriel in black-and-white and a three-piece suit, who lived in no particular place. And when the first planes started leaving Montreal for Orlando, when excursion rates appeared in the papers, I was too old. You added that you were bored despite the books you'd brought on your vacation, that the beach at Clearwater was freezing cold and the horizon obstructed, despite your ocean-view room, and that you didn't despise Americans. It was one way of meeting them.