The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn

by Gail Bowen

  “I can answer that,” said Hilda. “The board is going to give Sally a splendid dinner to thank her for her generosity and they’re going to issue a statement of support for Stuart Lachlan and then they’re going to renew his contract for another five years.”

  “You sound very certain.”

  “I am very certain. I’m on the board. I’ve known most of the other members for years. They’re decent people and they’re reasonable. A lot of them are from the business community. They may not know a Picasso from a Pollock but they do understand art as investment. That fresco of Sally’s is going to be worth a million dollars in five years. The board won’t want to be remembered as the fools who threw a bucket of paint on a million dollars.” Suddenly, her face broke into a smile. “Here’s the artist now.”

  Sally slid her arm around my waist, but her attention was directed toward Hilda. “Miss McCourt, it’s wonderful to see you again. People tell me you’ve been my champion in all this.”

  Hilda McCourt beamed with pleasure. “I was happy to do it. It’s always a pleasure to nudge people into acting in a civilized way. They generally want to, you know.”

  Sally seemed surprised. “Do they?” she said. Then she shrugged. “If you say so. Anyway, besides thanking you, I wondered if you two would let me trail around with you for a while. There’s a picture here I want to see with Jo.”

  Hilda looked at her watch. “I think you and Joanne had better look without me. I still have choir practice to get to tonight. We’re doing Charpentier’s ‘Midnight Mass’ for Christmas. A bit of a warhorse, but a splendid piece, and I think the Southern Comfort has prepared my voice nicely.”

  Sally leaned forward and kissed Hilda’s cheek. “Thank you again for your heroic efforts. I know Erotobiography is troubling for some people.”

  “Oh, I’ve had lovers myself,” said Hilda McCourt. “Many of them,” and she turned and walked across the shining parquet of the gallery floor. Her step was as light as a young girl’s.

  I looked at Sally. “I’ll bet she has had lovers,” I said. “And I’ll bet she’d need a bigger wall than you have to mount her memoirs of them all.”

  “Right,” Sally said, and she laughed. But then there was an awkward moment. I had told Hilda McCourt that Sally and I had a history. Like many histories, ours had been scarred by wounded pride and estrangement. Since I’d come to Saskatoon in July to teach at the university, Sally and I had moved carefully to establish a friendship. After thirty years of separation, it hadn’t been easy, and Sally hadn’t made it easier when she had suddenly left her husband and child for an affair with a student in Santa Fe.

  This was the first time we had been alone together since she’d come back from New Mexico, and she seemed tense, waiting, I guess, for my reaction. In my heart, I thought what she had done was wrong, but at forty-seven I didn’t rush to judgement with the old sureness any more. And I had learned the value of a friend. I turned to her and smiled.

  “Now, where’s this painting I can’t see without you?” I said.

  She looked relieved. “In Gallery II – right through that doorway.”

  The gallery was only yards away, but our progress was slow. People kept coming up to Sally, ostensibly to congratulate her, but really just to see her up close. She was as she always was with people, kind enough but absent. Not many of the clichés about artists were true of Sally, but one of them was: her work was the only reality for her.

  “So,” she said finally. “Here it is. On loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. What do you think?”

  It was a painting of three people at a round picnic table: two adolescent girls in bathing suits and a middle-aged man in an open-necked khaki shirt. The man was handsome in a world-weary Arthur Miller way, and he was wholly absorbed in his newspaper. The girls were wholly absorbed in him. As they looked at him, their faces were filled with pubescent longing.

  “Wow,” I said. “Izaak Levin and us. That last summer at the lake. The hours we spent in the boathouse writing those steamy stories about his lips pressing themselves against our waiting mouths and about how it would feel to have him – what was that phrase we loved – lower his tortured body onto ours. Even now, my hands get sweaty remembering it. All that unrequited lust.” I stepped closer to the painting. “It really is a wonderful painting, two young virgins looking for … What were we looking for, anyway?”

  “Someone to make us stop being virgins,” Sally said dryly. Then she shrugged. “And fame. Izaak was the toast of New York City in those days. Remember when he was a panelist on that TV show where they tried to guess people’s jobs?” Suddenly she smiled. “Izaak’s in Erotobiography, you know.”

  Amazingly, I felt a pang. It had been more than thirty years, but still, it had been Sally who won the prize. She’d been the one to live out the fantasy.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you which one’s his.” She grinned mischievously. “Actually, maybe you could get him to show you himself. He just walked in.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, but she wasn’t. There he was across the room. Thinner, greyer, but still immensely appealing, still unmistakably the man I dreamed of through the sultry days and starry nights of that summer.

  He came right over to us. Sally beamed, pleased with herself.

  “Izaak, here’s an old admirer,” she said. “The other girl in the picture – Joanne Ellard, except now it’s Joanne Kilbourn.”

  Izaak Levin looked into my face. His expression was pleasant but bemused. It was apparent that the only memories he had of me were connected with a piece of art Sally had made. He gestured toward it. “I’ve enjoyed this picture many times over the years. It’s a pleasure to see that you’ve aged as gracefully as it has.”

  I could feel the blood rushing to my face. I stood there dumbly, looking down at my feet like a fifteen-year-old.

  “Has your life turned out happily?” he asked.

  “For the most part, very happily,” I said. My voice sounded strong and normal, so I continued. “It’s wonderful to see you again. Did you come up for the opening?”

  He looked surprised. “I live here. This has been my home since Sally and I came back in the sixties. Didn’t she ever mention it?”

  “Izaak’s my agent, among other things,” said Sally, and then she moved closer to him and touched his arm. “Incidentally, speaking of being my agent, I ran into these people in Santa Fe who bought The Blue Horses from you last summer. You’d better chase down the cheque because I never got it.”

  Her words seemed to knock Izaak Levin off base. He flushed and shook himself loose from her. “And the implication is …?” he asked acidly.

  “For God’s sake, Izaak, the implication is nothing. I don’t suspect you of financing a love nest in Miami. I’ve been travelling so much. I just thought the cheque must be stuck in a hotel mail slot somewhere. It’s no big deal. Just track it down, that’s all.” She grabbed my arm. “Come on, Jo, let’s go look at the filthy pictures.”

  There was a lineup for the Erotobiography exhibit, but we didn’t wait in line. Everyone recognized Sally, and no one seemed to mind being pushed aside. People flattened themselves against the walls to allow us safe passage. It was very Canadian – the artist as minor royalty. And as if she were royalty, Sally’s entrance into the room transformed the sleekly clothed art lovers from their everyday selves into people who talked in muted voices and used significant words: “life-affirming,” “celebration,” “mutability,” “variability,” “transcendence.”

  “Balls,” said Sally as she moved toward the painting just inside the door. “They have to be the hardest thing to draw. Now look at this.” The painting she pointed to was of an intimate encounter. The woman, clearly Sally Love, sat naked in a kind of grove while a young man knelt before her, performing an act of cunnilingus. It was a beautiful work: the colours were pure and vibrant, and the lines were all curved grace. Sally reached out unself-consciously and traced the lines of her own painted genitals with
a forefinger: “Look how lovely a woman is – all those shapes opening up, moistening. There are so many possibilities there, but balls are balls – small, hard, bounding around in their crepey skin like avocado pits or ball bearings. Just from a technical standpoint, they were a problem – I mean to make them individual.” She looked thoughtful. “Cocks, on the other hand, were easy. Anyway, come see.”

  They were three deep in front of the fresco, but the sea parted for Sally and me, and in a minute we were standing in front of it. The first thing that struck me was the size. It consumed a wall about ten feet by thirty feet – huge. And Sally had played with scale too – some of the genitals were so large they were unrecognizable as parts of the body; they looked like lunar landscapes, all craters and folds and follicles. Some were tiny, as contained and as carefully rendered as a Fabergé egg. The second arresting feature of the fresco was its colour. The genitalia seemed to be floating in space, suspended in a sky of celestial blue. I looked at those fleshly clouds and I thought how impermanent they seemed against the big blue sky, the blue that had been there before they came into being and would be there long after they were dust. People had been made miserable, yearning for those genitals; lives had been warped or enriched by them; they had made dreams become flesh and solitudes join, but isolated that way …

  “The perspective is pretty annihilating,” I said. “I don’t mean in a technical sense, lust in human terms. All the agonies we go through about those little pieces of us. They look so bizarre floating up there.”

  Sally looked at me with real interest. “You’re the first one who’s picked up on that.”

  “And the other thing,” I said, my lip suddenly curving with laughter. “Oh, God, Sally, they are funny. Did you ever see Mr. Potato Head, that toy the kids have where they give you a plastic potato and a box full of detachable parts, so you can cobble together a funny face? Well, that’s what the little ones look like to me – things you’d stick into Mr. Potato Head.”

  “Or Mrs. Potato Head,” said Sally, grinning. “Oh, Jo, what a Philistine you are. But it is so good to be with you. Sometimes I feel as if …”

  But she never finished. A man in a leather bomber jacket had come up to us. He was slight, fine-featured and deeply tanned. He had a leather bag the colour of maple cream fudge slung over his shoulder.

  “Sally, it’s transcendent,” he said. His voice was soft with the lazy vowels of the American South. “But, you know, pure creation isn’t enough any more. Idle art is the devil’s plaything. That’s the new orthodoxy. We have to put Erotobiography into a socio-political context. Be a good girl and tell me what all these dinks are saying about our social structure.” He patted my hand. “You can play, too. But I get to go first. And I want to know about that wonderful pinky one at the top, second from the left.”

  Sally bent over and looked at the stitching on his over-the-shoulder bag. “I’ll tell you that if you’ll tell me where you got this. Jo, look at the needlework on this leather. Incidentally, this is Hugh Rankin-Carter; he’s an art critic and an old friend.”

  We talked for a little while, but it was clear I was out of my league with Rankin-Carter. Besides, I was beginning to feel the effects of my Christmas Comfort, so when there was a break in the conversation, I said, “Sal, I’m going to let you two look for social context. I’m going to get something to eat.”

  Sally put her hand on my arm. “Don’t just wander off on me, Jo. Please. At least let’s make some arrangements to get together. I was going for a workout at Maggie’s tomorrow. Do you want to meet me there? I’ll even buy lunch.”

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  “Eleven-thirty okay with you?” she asked over her shoulder as Hugh Rankin-Carter pulled her along after him. “I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

  A voice behind me, pleasantly husky, said, “I find it hard to believe that anyone who looks like that needs a workout.”

  The voice belonged to a small woman in a high-necked grey silk dress. She looked to be in her late thirties with the kind of classic good looks that grow on you: ginger hair cut boy-short, pale skin with a dusting of freckles across the nose and grey, knowing eyes. She was smiling.

  I smiled back. “I think it’s because she works out when she doesn’t need to that she looks the way she does.”

  “Right,” she said. “Sally Love’s always been good at taking care of herself.” She extended her hand. “I’m Clea Poole. Sally and I have a gallery together – womanswork on Fourteenth Street.”

  “Of course,” I said. “That old stone lion on your front lawn is terrific, and I love the wreath you’ve got around his neck for the holidays.”

  “Around her neck,” Clea said. “It’s a female lion. Anyway, sometime you should beard the lion in her den and come in and look around. We have a wonderful eco-feminist exhibition on now, Joanne – very gender affirming.”

  “You know my name,” I said, surprised.

  “Right,” she said. “I know a lot of things about you. You’re the other girl creaming her jeans over Izaak Levin in the lake painting.”

  I could feel my face grow warm. “It’s a little unnerving to have your teenage lust out there for all the world to see.”

  “That’s what Sally does – she captures the private moment.”

  “And makes it public?” I said.

  “And makes it art,” she corrected me gently. “You should be flattered.”

  “I guess I am,” I said. “Not many people get to hang in the Art Institute of Chicago.”

  “Right,” she said. “You’re between a Georgia O’Keeffe cow skull and a Mary Cassatt mother and child.”

  “Great placement.”

  “Yes,” she said seriously, “it is a great placement. Sally’s the only Canadian woman artist they have.”

  “Another gold star for Sally.”

  “Right,” said Clea. Then she looked at me with real interest. “I’ll bet it was tough being friends with someone who got all the gold stars.”

  I felt myself bristling. “She didn’t get them all,” I said. “I’ve had a couple myself.”

  Clea Poole looked amused, and I laughed.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “it was tough. I was one of those blobby ordinary little girls. Even when Sally was a beanpole of a kid, everything lit up when she walked into a room. She’s always had that extra wattage.”

  Clea pointed across the room. Sally and Hugh Rankin-Carter were still together in front of the fresco, but they weren’t alone any more. The private talk had become public. An earnest young man with a microphone was asking Sally questions, and a crowd had gathered, hushed, listening.

  Clea shrugged. “As you say, extra wattage.”

  From across the room, a woman called Clea Poole’s name. She waved, then turned to me. “I’ve got to get back to her. I said I wouldn’t be long. But I had to meet you, Joanne. No matter how much drifting apart there was, you’ve always been a major player in Sally’s life.”

  Puzzled that she knew so much about Sally and me, I watched Clea as she started to walk across the room. When she had gone a few steps, she suddenly turned.

  “I’ll bet Sally’s tickled pink that you two are friends again,” she said. I think she intended the comment to be sharp and ironic, but her tone was wistful. As she disappeared into the crush of the crowd, I thought there wasn’t much doubt about the identity of the major player in Clea Poole’s life.

  Suddenly, I was tired of the emotional crosscurrents. I’d had enough of the art world for one evening. But there was one more drama to be played out.

  The crowd in front of Erotobiography had changed. Stuart Lachlan was standing there now, and nose to nose with him was a young woman with a hand-held TV camera. Neither of them looked very happy, but the crowd watching them sure was. Stuart said something, and as the woman responded, she put down her camera and began to punch him in the chest with her forefinger. Sally, standing a little to the side, was watching the scene intently. Finally, she looked across at
me. When she caught my eye, she raised two fingers to her temple in the suicide gesture I had seen her use a hundred times at school when someone was droning on too long in chapel. I smiled, and when she grinned back, I felt a rush of pleasure. As Clea Poole would say, I was tickled pink.

  Despite all the Southern Comfort I’d drunk at the opening, when I crawled into bed that night, I couldn’t sleep. At 2:00 a.m., wondering if Janis Joplin had had the same problem, I gave up and went downstairs. I decided on herb tea, filled the kettle and sat down at the kitchen table. The shoe box of pictures I’d hauled out that night to show my sons was still at my place. “Capezio,” said the legend on the box. I remembered those shoes, soft leather dancer’s shoes that had cost me a month’s allowance and promised to make me graceful. The shoes had lied, and I’d pitched them out before I’d graduated from high school, but the pictures were still there.

  I’d been surprised that the boys had been interested. My sons were teenagers, and knowing Sally Love wasn’t exactly like knowing Darryl Strawberry before the Dodgers gave him his $20.5 million contract. But apparently being childhood friends with a woman who’d covered a wall in the Mendel Gallery with penises had a certain cachet, and after dinner that night the kids and I had had fun looking at old snapshots. There had been the usual dismissive comments about mothers in bathing suits and guys with nerd haircuts, but the pictures of Sally at thirteen had inspired reverence in my thirteen-year-old, Angus.

  “Oh, she was awesome,” he said, “truly awesome.”

  “She still is,” Peter, who is eighteen, had said quietly.

  In those early morning hours as I sifted idly through the pictures I realized how right the boys were. Sally had always been awesome. But the picture that stopped me wasn’t one of Sally. It was one of the three of us: Sally and Nina and me. I hadn’t remembered it existed. It wasn’t an exceptional picture, just a faded black-and-white summer picture taken by an amateur photographer. We were in a rowboat. Sally and I were rowing, and Nina was sitting in the front. We were all smiling, waving at whoever was standing on the dock taking our picture.