Catalogue Raisonne (29 page)

Rehak's didn't give you a warning at closing time. They carried on with business as usual and then, at five to six, began scurrying about behind the counter and among the tables. At one minute to six, they asked you to pay the bill, and shoved your change at you with a chilly “
Danke schön
. Goodbye.” Or: “Thank you.
Auf wiedersehen.
” It was a very uptight, very cosy little café.

When we were about five minutes from close-up, Claudia said, “There's still one thing you don't know.”

“Oh, that thing.”

Ghost of a smile. It would be tiring, I thought, trying to coax it out of her.

“I did get another call from the gallery.”

Fucking Peter.
“Another commission?”

“More like the possibility of one. ‘Would you ever be interested,' et cetera.”

“Would you be?”

“No. I told him that.”

“When was this?”

“I don't know. I'm not good on dates. Maybe two weeks ago.”

“How'd that go down?”

“Didn't seem to be a problem. He didn't call back.”

We sipped our coffees. Always this bad, bitter coffee at Rehak's, though the traffic was steady enough to keep the pots fresh and the pastries were amazing. And coffee so simple. Once you started focusing on mysteries, they began sprouting up all around you. Like mushrooms in the dark.

When I raised my eyes Claudia was looking at me. Smiling faintly – not her nasty smirk, a warmer version. It flustered me.

“Whaddya think” – I started, too fast, then began again. “What do you think someone like Neale would say if you suggested forging art works on a larger scale?”

“To sell you mean?”

“Sell or rent.”

“Rent?”

“Humour me.”

“I think he'd say, Don't be silly.”

“That's what I think too. But tell me why.”

“It's too hard. It's almost impossible actually. There was this
New York Times
article about these two guys. . . .” No sign in her face that she remembered telling me the story two days ago. Well, she'd warned me she was a bad listener. Apparently the crowd of people she could tune out included herself.

When I caught the first sharp look from the waitress – a sort of warm-up scowl – I said, “You don't think. . . .”

“What?”

“I mean, with things turning upside-down so much in that place . . . you don't think Robert would actually try to steal a painting?”

She didn't laugh. Or smile even. “Hide a real grab behind a phony one, you mean?”

“Yeah. I guess that's what I'm getting at.”

“He might have thought about thinking about it.” Past tense. The first time that I'd noticed. “Planned to plan.”

“You sure?”

She drained the bitter coffee. “I think we both know he'd need some serious help.”

We stopped in at Book Villa on our way back up King Street. The young clerk was sulky, then jolted out of it by my request, suddenly eager to lead me back to a paperback translation of Lautréamont's
Maldoror.
I wasn't very curious about the encounter on the dissection table between the sewing machine and the umbrella, but Sean had said there were better lines in it. And it was another strand. Claudia waited by the door. As I was paying, I noticed Ramon at the magazine rack. A copy of
Rolling Stone
open in his hands, but glancing over it out the window at the street.

“Ramon, what are you doing – ” And then I remembered that he lived upstairs. I'd been up there with him just three nights ago. I seemed to be forgetting and remembering things at random. Bits sloshing out of an overfilled pail.

“I saw Rick out my window. He's been coming to see me.”

“What for?”

“Coming to my gigs. Coming to my place. Asking me do I have names, man.” It took some persistent hassling to make Ramon lose his cool and start muttering.

“What's he want?”

“He wants
in
, man.”

Which matched the impression I had exactly. Someone desperate to find a way inside, any inside. Like a wasp pestering window panes at the end of summer . . . fat squirrels and chipmunks scouting open doors, gnawing the weatherstripping in November.

“Like a mouse,” I said.

“A big mouse.” Ramon put the magazine back and picked up
People
. “Cruising around in his shitty car, he sees Barbara and me, just talking outside the gallery. Now he wants to meet her.”

I looked around me. “To sell to?”

“To do
whatever
to.” Seeing Claudia behind me, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, diverted him from Rick for a moment. He checked her out with a
slower
eye: maybe that was the secret. Slow. Then raised his eyebrows at me.

“Just friends,” I said.

“Art friends.”

“You got it.”

But then Rick came buzzing back, he always did. “That guy, man, you know, he's really got a hard-on for you too.”

“To each his own.” Ramon smiled at that. His sense of humour maybe the exact opposite of Claudia's: a spring or stream bubbling just below the surface, welling up through any small crack. “What'd you tell him?”

“That you were cheap. Never buy your own. Just get off on someone else's.” Ramon winced, remembering it was the truth. “Sorry, man.”

“No problem.” This time I was the one who shrugged.

“What can I say, man?” I think we were back to Rick.

“I know,” I said. “I know. It's like you with the little girls.”

“It's a weakness, man.”

As we were walking away up the street, Claudia said, “Cute guy.”

I looked at the side of her face. She was a fast walker, like Robert, skimming on stalks like a waterbug. “You never noticed him in the gallery?”

“Put a pencil in my hand, I'm pretty much blind.”

T
his time it was the deadness, the sheer dead hanging space, that was the tipping point. No sound but the
sherf sherf
of my crepe-soled shoes across the beige, like the plaza in the Chirico but without the interesting, ominous shadows – well-lit by Ramon . . . that tipped me.

But it was a slow poisoning: it took all day.

After a couple of hours of it, I encountered Walter up in the Pettit Gallery. Walter had left word at the front desk that he was waiting to meet Barbara, but that seemed like hours ago. It might have been half an hour. The two often kept each other waiting. Barbara kept a lot of people waiting, but Walter sometimes returned the favor. The services they rendered each other, and the mutual tolerance these required, left room for, and maybe made necessary, some lashings of petty punishment on the side. Their last Sunday tour through the galleries had resulted in Barbara's Spring Fling Fashion Show: a runway built from our risers running the length of the MacMahon Gallery, a Thursday evening attendance record, and Cleo Carlsson – the surprise highlight of the evening – looking not at all out of place among the local models in the swimsuit finale. Though I wondered why she stuck to a one-piece Jantzen instead of the prevailing bikinis. “She's had two kids,” said Hans, puffing on his pipe under Josh MacMahon afterwards. Which brought the twins' blushes, which had been fluttering all evening, up to crimson again. “Mom's
old
,” they'd moaned, deflecting all tributes.

I'd been in the sculpture corridor, ogling the leaping Iris from a lust of pure boredom, when I moseyed into the back gallery and found Walter. Most of the visiting shows got hung downstairs. The local artists, ten or
twelve of them a year, were shown up here in the Pettit Gallery. Currently displayed were watercolours of flowers, very large, seen from close-up. Soft-focus Georgia O'Keefe under a magnifier. Walter, a little unusually for him, was leaning in close to view one of them. Like Peter, he was vain about his
eye
, and liked to give the impression that he could take in everything about a room by standing in the centre of it.

“What do you think of these, Walter?” I said, approaching him.

“They're fine, Paul.”

Meaning, I thought, awful. Along with: Fuck off. Walter had another dark suit on, blue but not banker's blue, richer and darker,
almost
black; his longish silver hair trained back, but not severely. As a photograph in a picture dictionary, I thought, he would be a good demonstration of the limitations of the word
cute
, where it had to give way to something with more resonance and shading, reaching up toward
handsome
or
distinguished.

“They seem to be selling well,” I said. Looking around the room I could see at least six red dots on Jason's labels.

“Yes, we-ell.
Now
they are.” And Walter, who could be expansive when he was waiting, began telling me – in that drawl he called on intermittently – about the “little talk” he'd had with the artist about his pricing. Walter had suggested doubling the prices, since “many collectors only respond to a challenging figure.”

I remembered, when I heard the “challenging figure” phrase, that he'd told me this before. Two or three years ago maybe. Then it had been a more blatantly cautionary tale, perhaps even a kind of revenge, told on a pugnacious artist, a painter of detailed planetary surfaces – “Saturnscape”, “Plutonian Summer” – who hadn't taken the advice and hadn't sold a piece. “You mean that's the only way they can tell if it's good?” I'd asked. But Walter wasn't a sucker for innocence, feigned or real. He'd smiled indulgently: “It's a personal decision in the end.”

“I told Donald Donalblatt that when we were both in art school,” Walter said now. “Before long he was selling like hot cakes.”

I did, or tried to do, a quick mental review of the paintings I'd seen in my four years here, plus the undisplayed ones in the vaults. Walter must have read my mind. He smiled.

“Too rich for our blood, I'm afraid. Besides, Don's reputation never really recovered from that first critical mugging he got.”

Time ticked by, much as it had in the Clock Gallery. With an hour to go, Hans found me and offered me extra hours working with him on the ventilation ducts. He thought it could all be done tomorrow, but wasn't positive; he wanted to get a good start tonight to be sure. If Ramon was busy – he had a private party tonight – Hans always gave me first chance at any overtime. “As a married man,” he'd said the first time, classifying Angela and me as Ramon did. Hans had a bit of a thing for Angela, I knew. Pretty, plump, vivacious, with study skills – she would fit his ideal of a
schönes Mädchen
pretty neatly, I thought. Just as she'd always fit mine.

But this time I turned him down. Tempting as it was to stick my head in those grimy tubes, maybe hear some ghost voices parleying around me, I just couldn't stand another minute past the required in the place. Forgetting for a moment that the gallery became much more tolerable to me as soon as it was closed. As soon as it was
officially
empty of people.

“You're sure, now. There'll be no backtracking tomorrow,” Hans said sourly. Young people declining work always rankled him. He might also have been looking ahead to the hours with a giggling L. Or just alone, if there was something good on television that night.

But I was sure. Whatever it cost me – money, information – I wanted out. The gallery poison had crept up to toxic levels without my noticing, and now all of a sudden, I was nothing but a bundle of symptoms.

Amnesia was the next sign. I found myself upstairs in front of Iris again, without remembering how I'd got there. I stared at the corrugated bronze slit between her muscled thighs, trying to feel at least arousal. Trying to imagine the leaping girl alive, the man who had fashioned her. Fingers in wet cool plaster, firming and finding shape. Something came through to me of that, a remote buzz. But it was weak, like the faint echo of a knock on a metal shell encasing me, dead
air between myself and the shell's sides. I could almost
see
the shell, dull and dark. Lit by low, low light, or else somehow gleaming faintly from within. Pencil lead in a room with the lights off.