Catalogue Raisonne (8 page)

The hole I'd punched recently in the closet door had pale ragged edges around a black centre, blond wood fibres tearing through coats of varnish. The causes of the argument already obscure as it was happening, it had escalated so quickly into something all-inclusive and consuming. When Angela used to say I had a bad temper, she smiled sometimes, not seeming to think it was an entirely bad thing. “It helped you to play a mean guitar,” she'd pointed out, during the endless post mortem of The Chile Dogs' failure. And of course she had her own inner screamer, though it hadn't come out in a while. But now anger seemed to be more of a problem. Sometime during the sociology course, bad temper had been filed under “anger management problems”, which had recently been upgraded – or downgraded – to “rage issues”. She referred to the hole in the closet door, often by inclining her head at it, as a symptom. Which I thought was naïve. The splintery crater fell well within, or just within, the normal parameters of male expression. Even considered as a mistake, a blurted aberration, it belonged in the total vocabulary. It was a hiccup, really.

Y
our move,” Robert said. It was a Sunday, and we were sitting over a chessboard in the basement a couple of hours after everyone else had gone home. Little screens set in the panel beside us showed black and white, slowly changing views of the gallery, inside and out. Neither of us paid any attention to them, except for when the motion detector alarm in one gallery started blinking green, for reasons no one had been able to discover yet. Someone was supposed to be looking into it. Robert glared at the red Reset button, then pushed it.

“Whose move is it exactly?” he said. And then: “Did Angela get her picture in?”

“Mine,” I said. “And yes, I think so. I was on the floor.”

I pushed a pawn into a congested area, and Robert lit another cigarette. He stared at the menace, or more confusion, I had created, looking worried and then pleased. Pleased to be worried, perhaps. “Well, wish her luck for me. If the judges develop a sudden attack of integrity, she won't need it.” Absolved from the difficulty on the board by this courtly sentiment, he raised his head and blew a pretty good smoke ring. We watched it wobble, a raggedly dissolving O.

Because of Robert's sloppy play, the result of incurable inattention, I had developed a lazy general strategy against him: after the opening, introduce a lot of complications in the middle game, knowing that he couldn't or wouldn't bother to untangle them. My own game suffered – according to the YWCA's resident master, a distempered Karl Marx look-a-like from Croatia – from being “too quiet. Just react. Some good moves, sure. Little fork, pin. Never BOOM BOOM!” Which was an odd handicap considering the rage issues Angela said I had. But it was true that Robert's and my games usually followed the same pattern: sharp beginnings, followed by increasingly muddy and blundering middles, then long dawdling endgames, in which he didn't know enough to resign and I didn't know enough to checkmate him. The
games we bothered to finish, I invariably won. But winning palled after a while when the contest wasn't hard-fought.

“Did you see Claudia's entry?” he said.

“No. Not yet. Like I say, I was on the floor.”

“It's quite interesting actually. Undisciplined, still. But definitely an advance. Something more than the usual – what should I call it? Sterile facility? Something approaching a style of her own. A pin-step in that direction, at least.”

Undisciplined.
What did that mean coming from Robert? But his critique was not as harsh as it sounded. When he spoke of his older sister, as he often did, you heard real fondness and concern for her in his voice. If you knew what to listen for, at least. She got the exasperated criticism Robert reserved for those he considered fellow artists. Colleagues and rivals, whose delays in development he was duty-bound to deplore. Whereas other women, like Angela, got the courtly best wishes, even a slight forward inclination from the waist when he met them.

“She got fired, you know.”

“No, you didn't say. From The Tulips?”

“Yes. Apparently she has no ass.”

“Hello?”

“That's her version anyway. Well, as a brother I wouldn't want to comment extensively, but it's true we're a family of ectomorphs. Even the females, I'm afraid. Apparently Mr. Piccone kept insisting on skimpier and skimpier costumes, even for the bartenders. I guess the naked flesh on stage isn't enough; sometimes you have to turn away to get your drink.” Robert grinned, then stubbed out his cigarette and began the elegant business of lighting another with his old gold Ronson. He smoked with elaborate ease, puffing and blowing sensuously, but not quite seeming to inhale and seldom finishing a cigarette.

“It's still your move. So she drew the line?”

“Well, yes and no. It wasn't a question of principle. She made that point rather aggressively to me. She had no feminist scruples, or even a moral objection. ‘I have no ass.' The lady's own words. Followed by ocular proof – clothed, at least. To her
brother
.”

I had no mental picture of her. Robert had said she came into the
gallery sometimes to sketch, but if we'd met I didn't remember it. “So, is she looking?”

“At her canvases. She seems to be suffering from the delusion that we will find our rent there. Until she recovers, I'm afraid we're subsisting on the largesse of Burns. Ah!”

With a quick pounce down at the board.

During the convoluted mid-game, it frequently became necessary for Robert to leave the board in a physical sense. He was over by the rows of CHOP paintings that were leaned against the centre jumble. Head down, puffing importantly, he pulled each work toward him and briefly considered the next, like someone riffling through a card catalogue, glancing for a masterpiece that would not be found. Every year the city's main radio station – C.H.O.P. – hosted a juried exhibition for local artists, for which the gallery donated the smaller Teale Gallery for three weeks and awarded prizes at the end. It was poignant to see “Smokestacks by Sunrise”, in its neatly tacked pine frame, leaning against a huge yellow crate stencilled in black KLEE, with a red-stamped packing slip in a plastic sleeve from the gallery in Lucerne. Or “Bruce Trail Splendour” tucked in under PICABIA, like the mushroom at the bottom of the tree in the awkward watercolour. MASSON managing with one word to shout down the busily-painted “Main Street West”.

The poignancy wasn't helped – was just made worse – when I looked back at the ash-stained confusion on the board. Robert's voluminous briefcase beside it, left gaping in the hope of tempting someone to pry among its paper scraps: fragments of symphonies, poems, novels, “aperçus” – unless his minuscule chicken scratches clarified into musical notes and rests, it was hard to identify the genre or even the art form he was working in. How was it, even allowing for all the weird arcs and tricks of art, that there were still people who you knew at a glance could never accomplish anything serious, not even if they were glued to a chair for a hundred years? Robert was a moth flitting along a string of patio lights. And there was another reason he got to me. Some
difference between us. A crucial difference, but also one that united, and which led straight down that road to poignancy . . . or was it just self-pity? It was the difference between a wannabe and a has-been. They can look the same – at times, in certain lights – but the differences between them are unbridgeable. Like the differences between two women talking about babies: one a girl who assumes she'll have many (though she may in fact be sterile), the other a woman who after a series of miscarriages and stillbirths has had her uterus removed. The obsession they share can obscure the fact that they are staring at it from opposite sides of a canyon.

“What did you think of the Führer's latest tirade?” I heard from behind me, and was glad for once for the new tangent. “Sometimes I honestly do believe the man's a psychopath.”

It
had
been a vintage performance, even by Hans's standards. But say one thing for Robert: he could take a chewing-out, possibly because – as always – he didn't pay close attention to the details. This time the reaming had been over his laxness in letting CHOP entrants troop down to the basement, and even through the security doors, because of the congestion their numbers were creating upstairs. Setting up this drop-off overflow in the jumble. Robert defended himself feebly with recent examples of security breaches by Administration – Barbara's multiple flower deliveries for the Spring Fling, for one – but this only incensed Hans more. Robert himself incensed Hans, his dabbling and his pretensions, but it was more that he reminded Hans of all the other negligent, pretentious dabblers he had to deal with and couldn't shout at. Owen and Ted were almost as careless on the panel, but Robert made a much bigger show of enjoying the byplay with the visiting artists. He was a louder and more naïve, a cartoon, version of the meeters and greeters upstairs. Hans fell to barking curses, Robert to bleated polysyllables. And neither recalled the real source of the chaos. It was Mother's Day, and asinine scheduling had combined the CHOP drop-off with a screening of “The Sound of Music” in the MacMahon Gallery and a docent-led paint-Mom-a-picture session in the lounge. Kids playing tag on the beige carpets, hide-and-seek behind panels and under stairs. CHOP hopefuls wandering around with their darlings clutched to their chests. The gallery was a circus and a funhouse and a
big soft gym. The Tom Thomson could have walked out the door by itself without anyone noticing.

While Hans was taking it out on Robert, Walter and Neale came down in the elevator. They seemed to be sharing a joke, smiling anyway. “We-ell now, gentleman,” Walter said. “What's all the ruckus about? And who's minding the store while we're at it?”

Neale, still smiling faintly, stood behind Walter while he took the depositions and smoothed things out. They seemed to be getting along better these days. Hardly buddies, but something had been ironed out or set aside. Which was odd considering the ever-more-apparent failure of the surrealist show over the last four weeks. After a spurt of initial interest, the citizens were ignoring it. We hadn't had to open the second box of Neale's catalogues, and often the last work of the day, as we were checking the galleries before close-up, was to return the discarded ones, those not torn or crumpled, to the sculpture pedestal. And the Comments book was strangely blank. Other shows had garnered abusive feedback, notably “Ordeal”, in which a local performance artist had let hot wax drip onto her bare navel area, until finally one of the horrified onlookers had realized that it was possible to interact and intervene, that that was the point. But the surrealists seemed to generate a nothingness, a void that precluded articulation. Perhaps big names and bafflement had cancelled out in indifference.

When the smoothing was complete and seemed to have taken, Neale said to Walter as they were leaving, “Same population base as Ottawa.”

It was another of the
entre nous
, or statue, comments, spoken as if the rest of us weren't there and wouldn't have understood anyway. But this one wasn't too hard to decipher. Hamilton was roughly the same size as Ottawa, though the latter, as the nation's capital, would be entitled to many times more funding. As Neale and Walter would know down to the discrepant, rankling dollar. Which meant, presumably, that the National Gallery could afford a real top-notch integrated security system, rather than our two-tiered one, which funnelled from attendants in cheap suits down to a guy reading
I, Robot
at the control panel. (Or doodling key signatures, or reading
Ubik
.) Neale might or might not know about the other gallery's security arrangements.