Catalogue Raisonne (7 page)

Robert was too busy manipulating the levers of the lobby cameras, considering the dancing women from various security angles, to detain me in the basement. Without bothering to be sure who I was, he buzzed me out when he heard me jiggle the door handle.

T
he earlier rain had passed leaving a tattered sky, big dark clouds scudding like galleons. Mild fuzzy vapours, cutworm smells. Within a month or two, the mild damp would intensify into the sticky burning haze that was our invariable summer. There'd be a couple of scorching days soon, warning of it. But this was the window, our short spring, when the temperature felt just right.

I cut through the parking lot behind city hall and walked up Park Street, passing the apartment building where Robert lived with his sister. I'd never visited him there; we had a gallery acquaintance only. I'd never met Claudia either, though I knew from my meandering chess talks with Robert that she was in her mid-twenties, a few years older than him, and a painter. A bit of a mixed-up case, too, though Robert never put things that simply. He called her “a talent in exile . . . a refugee from the Toronto arts scene.” Robert being Robert, I couldn't tell if that was any kind of real appraisal or a grab at reflected glory, borrowing a little self-inflation from a troubled sibling. Across the street, behind a black wrought-iron fence, was an old two-story
limestone building surrounded by a spacious lawn with tall maples. It was an odd place to pass in the morning on my way to work, because the top floor had been rented out to an insurance company, while the ground level remained an elementary school. Or perhaps the insurance company had bought the building. “Saving the school” despite its shrinking enrollment had been another civic controversy briefly covered by the
Witness
. In any case, it was funny to see the mix in the morning just before nine, the children playing with ragged shouts, the businessmen stepping through them with their briefcases and takeout coffees.

Those blue suits looked anonymous to me – more upscale versions of the Sears job I was wearing – but I'd got a lesson in their power one day. It was during my six-month tour of the city during the recession of 1980. Over 200 applications to factories and offices and stores, taking me from the industrial zones in the east to the struggling downtown core and out to McMaster in the west end. Applying at first to jobs that looked decent, then to anything that advertised, and finally to many that didn't, just hopeless walk-ins off the street. No bites. About five interviews. For the first of these – already about a month in – I wore the grey suit I'd had since high school graduation. For luck, I splurged on a big breakfast in the Sunshine Restaurant. The Chile Dogs used to drink coffees in a corner booth there, arguing over the slurred or screamed lyrics we had transcribed from tapes, debating whether a G chord was really a G7 and if so could we still get away with the G which was easier. And on this morning a waitress I knew brought me a menu and said, “Good morning, sir.”
Sir?
I thought she was joking and rode with it, chatting her up, mistaking the flirtatious twinkle in her eye for a prank, a send-up. But “There you go, sir,” she said when she brought the food, making extra trips to fetch ketchup and jam, fussily clearing other tables nearby. It was no joke, or not the kind I'd thought. The suit had sold her. Finally I got into a mass hiring for a new mall at the ass-end of the mountain, acres of parking lot around a giant concrete box, right on the southern outskirts, nothing but fields with signs announcing future subdivisions surrounding it. Clerks were needed for every store; the one I drew was a clock outlet. Whenever time in the gallery
became an IV-drip about to stop, and I thought that no seconds could be more excruciating, I remembered my month in the Clock Gallery. Trying to look busy without a customer in sight, while clocks on the wall told you how that minute stood in Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, Vancouver, Honolulu. Bud had found my application floating in the files he inherited. His first question, when he phoned me at work, was, “Can you talk?” I was interested that it would occur to him that I couldn't. It seemed a mark of sophistication. An
art
gallery
.

But I didn't remember that time as all bad. Far from it. I'd lost The Chile Dogs, we'd given up, but I'd found Angela. Watching “Thief” at The Broadway, James Caan drilling slowly into vaults to steal jewels over a brooding Tangerine Dream soundtrack, then strolling back to the apartment to get stoned and have sex until four a.m. – that wasn't a bad life, no matter what the papers told me.

And in fact, comparing it with our present routine, it seemed idyllic. We still tried to keep a kernel of the old days alive. Saturday night was still our night (when it wasn't the gallery's, every six weeks or so) – and watching Elwy Yost over takeout Chinese could be fun, certainly comfortable, though it did feel a little
settled
for 29. Sex flared up sometimes like a fanned ember, but more often it was dwindling into cuddles and snuggling – which sometimes felt just fine, and sometimes like we were turning each other into small furry animals at a petting zoo. Sometimes these long hugs necessitated a short trip to the bathroom after Angela had fallen asleep, but increasingly not. Angela wasn't the wild-eyed groupie who had dogged me at my gigs, proffering her pot like she didn't know what else to give – but then I wasn't the guy who had croaked out “I Wanna Be Sedated”, either. Be careful what you wish for. Unless you really are Joey Ramone.

Apart from Saturday, Angela and I spent most evenings of the week in different places, doing different things. Recently I'd been directing my energies into chess, learning some openings and endgames, visiting the chess club at the YWCA on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Angela was taking a painting course on Sunday at the Dundas Valley School of Art. Tuesdays and Thursdays she studied Art History at McMaster. She was moving deeper into art just as I was quitting it for
good. She was clawing her way towards something from the inside, like a chick trying to peck free of its shell . . . while I was drifting, untethered, away from it all.

The positive spin Angela put on our diverging lives was that we were branching out, finding ourselves in different directions. Though she wished I would study something at a school; that was necessary somehow. At times I was persuaded by the notion of “parallel play” that she'd brought home from one of her courses. A sociology intro, before the program became all-art. “It's what toddlers do at a certain stage. Playing alongside each other at different games.” And – ignoring the advisability of using toddlers as our model – I thought we could stay together – which was all I wanted to do, deep down – as long as we kept doing that. I'd even worked up a theory to go along with it, that most couples fell apart because they were too much in each other's faces. Trying to make one person where two should exist. Whereas we were keeping it sane.

At the corner of Herkimer I turned left. We lived at the eastern, still-shabby end of a row of four attached Edwardian-era buildings. All three-storied and narrow, all containing four apartments including the basement. Recently the landlord had slid our eviction notice under the door. He regretted, etc., but with the “extensive renovations” he had planned, no one would be able to occupy the building until he was finished. He had city permits if we needed to see them. It wasn't a surprise. For the past two years he'd been working his way along the line of buildings and now he'd got to us. We still had two more months – June 30 was our exit. He said we'd be welcomed back as “preferred tenants”, but there was no question of us paying the extra $200/month he would be asking for his baseboard trim and carpeting on the stairs. We hadn't even bothered to discuss it. Nor had we started looking for another place.

Coming up the worn stairs to our rooms at the top, I heard the faint sounds of music coming from behind our door. “Avalon” again. I imagined Angela asleep already, and thought that tonight that might
mean a stop-off at the bathroom before bed. She had a maddeningly sexy habit of smoking up and falling asleep with her music on – naked, her arms and legs splayed. Like Dali's staked-out nude, though usually face-down.

When I opened the door, though, I saw candles flickering from the bedroom down the short hall. She was sitting up in bed in her housecoat, her back against the wall, feet tucked under her. A bottle of wine was opened on the bedside table, two glasses.

“How'd you know I'd be back so early?”

“I was willing to wait.” Her shyly wicked smile.

I loved it when she surprised me. I craved it. She'd been working at a collection agency when we met, and one day, picking her up unexpectedly, I'd come up the stairs to a torrent of screamed abuse, someone's vocal cords ripped raw by the threats she was shrieking at the deadbeat on the line. The screamer was no one I knew or wanted to know, but it turned out to be Angela. She'd gone scarlet in embarrassment, then later had downplayed it as a “persona”, an ugliness the job forced her to put on like a fright mask. But I'd found it weirdly exciting, as well as a bit appalling – this rage she could find or pretend to find. The job made her miserable, she said – it wasn't who she was – and she cried with relief when she got the receptionist's job at the gallery.

I stepped out of the Sears rags and joined her on the bed. She poured the wine and we kissed.

“To the Gala Preview,” I said.

“No, fuck that,” she said harshly. “To us.” By her slightly muddied voice, I gathered she'd started ahead on something. We clinked glasses.

“Do you want to do a line?” she said.

“We have some?”

“Just a bit. Ramon gave me some extra.”

“Tonight?”

“What'd you think all those people were going upstairs for?”

“I didn't notice them. I mean I saw people get on the elevator. But.”

“Seriously.”

“I am. I didn't notice.”

She smiled and shook her head. It was a quietly intense pleasure – another calm before the storm – to watch her prepare the coke on her
makeup mirror, emptying it carefully from Ramon's foil packet and dicing it with her razor blade. Back and forth, finer and finer. My features when I bent over the mirror appeared terribly enlarged, flickering in the candlelight like Zeus looming from a cloud. Soon after the soft explosions happened in my head, we were naked and fucking wildly. A brief interruption to replace Roxy Music with “Exile on Main Street”, cranked up a notch. Angela and I liked things noisy and semi-rough: tastes better suited to a detached home than to apartment living. Then back to hypertrophic forms in my hands, on my chest and lap, bobbling and shimmering over my face, pillowing up at me like giant white mushrooms off the sheets.

For a while we lay without speaking. Touching each other gently as the buzz dissipated. “You looked good out on the dance floor tonight,” I said.

She turned toward me. “Once you rescued me from old tightass. My hero. Christ, what a nerd.”

She had to be talking about Jason. Robert might well qualify as a nerd, but there was nothing tight about him. He was more like a spill of loose parts. But why were we talking about the gallery again? And then I remembered that I'd brought it up.

“Oh, I don't know. I'm sure he's absorbed a certain amount of gallery snobbery. It runs through the air in that place. But under it he's a decent guy. There are worse crimes than dullness.”

“Name one.”

For a moment before I thought of an answer, it struck me as curious that our talks had taken a sudden turn south just when we'd started working at the same place. On almost everything concerned with the gallery we had opposite viewpoints. On the paintings, the running of the place, especially the people. Like this little matter of Jason, who wasn't worth talking about, but since we were, whose annoying habits were far outweighed by the fact that he was probably the best, certainly the most solid and reliable, person in Administration. Stuck in a lower echelon, naturally.

“Your ass,” I said. “It's a crime against my sanity.”

“Even when it sits on your face?”

“
Especially
then.”

That started, and partly scripted, a better interlude. After Angela fell asleep, I looked around the room in the dark. Not really dark. Just city dark. Deep dusk, lit by pale fuzzy blooms from the street lights below. The rays looked like milkweed filaments, fraying as they drifted into the room. Angela's pictures on the wall: landscapes and still lifes she was labouring to make less muddy. Now, in the dusk, mostly bunched dark masses. Composed with careful balance, forms set off against one another. No guitar in the corner. Sold on the clean break theory after the last spasm of The Dogs' dissolution. The right move.