Goya'S Dog (8 page)

He was on the tenth floor of a crenellated office building and he watched fog dip into the shallows between squat grey stone towers. Dacres smoothed his tie down his shirt to cover a mustard stain, crossed his legs, and stared at the receptionist, a girl half his age with red hair and healthy jowls and a face like one of Brueghel's dancing peasants. He made her twitch. She sat beneath a stiff portrait, poorly executed, of a man with a military bearing. The subject was posed sitting on the corner of his desk in an attempt to make him seem approachable. It was passable, but the planes were all wrong, all on one level, and the furniture in the background was no more than sketched out. He had to ask if it was worth abasing himself for the opportunity to produce such rubbish—he had to ask himself what in hell he was doing—and then he thought of the cheque. He could charge $350 and not have to worry for months. He asked himself if he had the resources, right now, to work on a portrait; the internal resources. Given that he had not raised a brush in so long. He swept the thought aside.

“All I need is a push,” he said aloud.

The receptionist, moon-faced and squinty eyed, looked up at him and quickly down again.

Waiting is erotic, he'd read somewhere. He'd been sitting here an hour already, but had decided not to lose. Solid men carrying briefcases—hail-fellow-well-met—looked down at him as they came and went. He smiled enigmatically, showing his poorly arranged fangs. He refused to move, he refused to get up and stretch his legs, he would wait here like the cat at the kitchen door. Like the man in the fable he would grow a beard and eventually it would reach to his knees and the receptionist's daughter would become the receptionist but he wasn't going to let himself be fobbed off.

Dacres daydreamed. He leaned his head back. At twenty-two he'd gone to Paris; everyone did. The war, the previous war, had just ended. The world was beginning again. Full of hope, pride, and fat
ambition, he'd rented a room above a restaurant, planning to apprentice himself to an unknown master, planning to paint and learn and mostly live. There was a drawer in his washstand where he kept food: coffee, bread, potatoes wrapped in a crimson handkerchief. Soon he ran out of money and washed dishes in the bistro so as not to be evicted. He told himself Goya had washed dishes—in the oldest restaurant in Madrid—so there was nothing to be ashamed of. But Goya had been a boy then and Dacres was nothing of the sort. In cafés, he constantly heard that he'd just missed Signac or Vollard visiting one of his shabby acquaintances to magisterially dismiss their work—or worse, to trumpet it. The man who'd known Cézanne's cousin was just in for vichyssoise, why didn't you come and say hello. The models complained of pins and needles and were never quite slatternly enough, not with him. And always the feeling that he wasn't really working, that he wasn't really growing. With it the feeling that here he was in the capital of the world and still the action was always just around the next corner. Elsewhere. And the strange sense, which came over him late at night, when the clatter of the drunks kept him up (what had his life been but a succession of rooms with too-thin walls?), that he was fooling himself: that he didn't even want to be where the main action was. That all he wanted was a dog to sit by the fire with; all he wanted was to rest his feet in a dog's fur. In the mornings, he was fiery and lust-filled once more, and that feeling was gone, but sometimes he tasted it again, mid-afternoon.

After two and a half hours of waiting—Dacres was considering the
pro
and
contra
of setting up as a shoeshine boy outside the man's office—the girl had a message for him. She'd gone into back rooms to get it. He saw thin black lines of leaning ink through the thin paper, which trembled between her sausagey fingers. She read it out haltingly: “Mr. Tompkins says: Regards to Stanley Burner. If Mr. Tompkins wants his picture done, which he doesn't, he'll get it done properly, in London, like the last time. When the war is over.”

She twisted to indicate with one hand the portrait behind her.

Naturally I'll do everything in my power to help you.

Behind her, clouds swirled.

I am sliding down a metal chute, thought Dacres. Feet first. My fingers are scrabbling against the sides but there is nowhere for me to get any purchase. I am starting to pick up speed.

Around eleven that night he was down in the dining room, in a bleak mood, getting impatient with the pianist. A list appeared in the newspaper each day of Notable Guests staying in the hotel (he had not been mentioned), but he had no desire to meet a Dame or be met by one. No desire for much of anything, this evening. The tablecloths shone even in the low dark of the room, luminous lily pads. Only two or three tables were still occupied. Dacres watched himself smoke, rotate neck left, rotate neck right. He listened to the quiet chatter and the music and the porcelain language of his thoughts. A woman in a lilac dress knocked over a champagne glass and shrieked and the two men with her laughed good-humouredly. Dacres longed to be elsewhere but didn't know where. The word
rotogravure
came into his head and lodged itself there. He pictured healthy Canadians politely fulfilling their marital vows hundreds of feet above him.

There was a Rembrandt self-portrait he'd seen in Holland. One of a thousand but this one had stayed with him. It was placed in a room full of self-confident burghers painted by Dutch journeymen, their pristine, mean faces caught in narrow and perfect focus. Every wrinkle and the pink texture of the skin sharply preserved. In their black capes and hoods before empty backgrounds they were trying to say that they valued only God. But someone had to pay the artist to say it. (How long was it since he'd bought canvas?) And then van Rijn in the centre of all these householders: in a softer focus, the familiar pudgy features lit from the left. Painting the light on the folds of the skin. Dacres remembered that afternoon well: it had been burning hot in the museum, all the windows were open, three women fainted. He'd fanned himself with his paper, and was sweating so much that he even thought of leaving, and then he'd seen it: Rembrandt just starting to
enter middle age and just starting to doubt. Asking himself a question and asking it of Dacres. He wore a ridiculous hat and a gold chain, he was trying to look the middle-class part, but this was the point: the brushwork was as diffuse in his self-portrait as the other paintings were rigid. Most of the canvas, except for the face, was brown tones and the right hand at the bottom was painted over but still visible; he'd left it aside to finish it later and then forgotten. So genius leaves masterpieces as table scraps. Only the eyes were sharp—as sharp as Alberti's—and they asked what the next years would bring. Starting to get old. Asking if it had all been worth it and not at all sure of the answer. Now in the Canadian hotel Dacres remembered something: this is the reason to have more than one work in a room, because one is the masterpiece. Win our grand prize. But he was asking himself now: had it been worth it? Well, Edward, has it been worth it? Has it been worth it.

Dainty Edelweiss appeared and instantly Dacres forgot his thoughts.

“My painter friend,” said Edelweiss.

“My painter friend,” said Dacres, indicating a chair, and as usual Edelweiss blushed.

I have to remember what I am like, Dacres thought. I have my morose times: and then all I need is company. It doesn't matter so much whose.

“I have some bad news,” Edelweiss began.

“Let me have it,” said Dacres.

“Very well—”

“No, don't hold back. I can stand it. Both barrels.”

“Well, Edward—”

“Have some bad news of my own, actually. Just been thinking I'm never going to paint a dancer as good as a Degas. Not even if she's the size of a postage stamp. Not even if I work on her from now until my death-day. Which I won't, for reasons I don't want to share just at present.”

Edelweiss angled himself forward and Dacres saw for a moment his swan neck shining in reflected light.

“My news is more mundane.”

Dacres blinked and the effect was gone. Something the matter with my eyes, he thought. Whatever next.

“Now when I say postage stamp, I don't mean painting a miniature. That presents its own challenges.” Clarence, the burly waiter, had not come to refresh his drink, unusually. “Are there any Rembrandts in this city do you think?”

But Edelweiss was in a business mood.

“You're going to have to settle.”

“Settle? Settle what?”

“The bill.”

“Ah. You're not serious.”

Dacres lifted his glass hopefully at a white jacket but already it was gone. As if the waiters knew an assassination was afoot and didn't want to be implicated.

Dacres asked if Edelweiss was going to have a drink and Edelweiss shook his head.

“I was expecting this, to be honest,” said Dacres.

Woolworth's, I'm going to be eating at Woolworth's, chimed a voice in his head.

His superior was coming back from sick leave the next day, Edelweiss explained tersely. He was nervous and Dacres wondered if all his urbanity had come from the temporary power he'd had. Everything had to be aboveboard, Edelweiss explained.

Dacres drew on the tablecloth with his index fingernail. What am I doing now, he thought, etching? Who were the worst engravers of the nineteenth century? Make a list.

“So I'm going to have to clear out, am I?”

Edelweiss nodded. Dacres, curiously, didn't feel like fighting. This was the moment when he was supposed to scream and riot, and he knew Edelweiss was expecting him to.

“I'll do that tomorrow morning then, if that's all right with you,” Dacres said.

“Mr. Alleyn returns very early tomorrow.”

“What about the lessons?”

“I know you are in your troubled times,” Edelweiss said, and Dacres thought he must have this speech ready. “Go tonight. Pack up your things, I will have the room cleaned, and we say nothing more about it. You are an artist, after all. But if you are still here in the morning …”

Something in Dacres stirred.

“Edelweiss, it is bloody raining you know.”

They looked at each other.

Dacres wanted to say, who are the great Swiss painters anyway? But he let it pass.

“Well. Is there anywhere you can recommend?”

Edelweiss said, “Go east. Five blocks. You'll find some small hotels. Not quite what you're used to but you will be comfortable.”

“Oh, doubtless.”

Dacres's throat was heavy and glum. He listened to the music and then gestured in the pianist's direction: “You really should do something about him.”

Edelweiss permitted himself a small smile.

“Where do you live, Edelweiss?”

“Where do I live?”

“I'm not going to move in with you, I'm just curious. It's odd I don't know, I mean.”

“Why I live here—in the hotel.”

“No family then?”

“No family.”

How was it, Dacres wondered, that in the weeks he'd known this man he hadn't asked the most basic questions? Now this was probably the last conversation they would ever have. Dacres wanted to tell Edelweiss about his own past.

“Or you can rent a room in a private house. That will be cheaper. Depending on how long you plan to stay, of course. You can pay two weeks at a time, with deposit.”

Dacres thought of his bedsit in Broadhurst Gardens and rejected the idea.

He smoothed the tablecloth to erase his scratches.

He was already keen to be off.

And then outside in the rain walking east he felt oddly jovial. He carried his cases with him two by two. He walked under neon through the drizzle humming a waltz. He must have taken a wrong turn, however, because he saw no hotels. Turning left off King Street there was a shabby row of pawnbrokers, which gave him pause—his wristwatch was suddenly heavy at the bottom of his arm. He walked closer: he saw violins and fur coats through the holes in the iron grates over the windows. Did I turn too soon? he asked himself. Had Edelweiss said right or left? A couple walked by, arguing in French about money; they were arm in arm, but gesticulated with their outer fins. Dacres felt the damp on his hands. He'd been too excited and angry to listen to Edelweiss's directions properly (but then, he never listened to directions properly). He'd been too full of spirit and indignation. He'd also had the feeling that there was icing sugar on Edelweiss's betrayal: it was good to be free and wandering, carrying your house upon your back. That was what life was supposed to be.

But within an hour he was cold and tired and hungry and alone and miserable. Following streetcar tracks, assuming that they must eventually lead to a built-up area (the way if you follow a river you surely come to the sea—don't you?), he had walked down a deadly looking empty avenue whose name he couldn't ascertain. He had to keep his toes clenched to keep his feet dry, and there was a wet squelch with each uncomfortable step of his right foot. He was ready to retreat, cap in hand, to beg Edelweiss to reconsider, except all of a sudden he wasn't sure which direction the hotel was in and didn't want to ask. He couldn't see a soul, it was as if a child's great fishing net had scooped them all away. Except for the cars. One passed him now: its tires on the wet street sounded exactly like fabric ripping. The red lights on either side of the spare tire were reflected in the slick roadway: they gouged down into it like bloody scars on a seal's back.

“I should have stayed in the beverage room,” Dacres muttered as he heaved himself forward. “I should have chatted with Duchess
Notable Guest. I'd have invited her up to my room and she'd have said, ‘No, silly darling, come up to the penthouse suite.' At this moment I'd be bathing in her claw-footed tub, Duchess Standing Over Me, her tiny stone hands scrubbing my chest.”

He took a right, a left, he passed an A&P (shut), a Dominion Bank (shut), and a storefront window full of red and green tins (shut). On that last building a sign for Turret cigarettes was obscured by other advertisements for stomach powder and deodorant. His neck felt fat and wet and hairy, his shoulders felt askew, unsynchronized.