The Eye of the Beholder

by Janice Macdonald

  “That’s the thing. I feel as if it’s Christmas morning, and yet I also feel as if we’ve been together all our lives already.”

  “Well, that may be the secret, Randy. That may be the secret.”

  18

  Getting back to lectures after Reading Week seemed anti-climactic, as if most of the term had already taken place. I handed back essays, gave a summary of things to watch out for, gleaned from the most common errors in formulating their arguments, and handed out the final essay topics.

  “Some of you might think it would be kinder to wait till Wednesday before you got the next topics, but I can see from the depth of thought many of you put into the last essays that you like to make every moment count. The topics are all focusing on our final work, the Canadian novel Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland. I’m hoping you have managed to get the primary reading done, because we’ll be diving right in next class. In the meantime, as per starting each new section, I’m handing out a pre-quiz to reward early readers, and get all of you thinking about elements to consider in our discussions ahead.”

  I handed out the quizzes, telling them they could leave once they had handed a completed one in. Most of them ran through it in five minutes, meaning they’d either read the book over Reading Week as the break implied they should, or they hadn’t tackled it yet and knew nothing.

  I startled myself into recalling what I had meant to mention to Steve, and while someone waited by the door to get in for their next class, I quickly texted him to ask whether he had checked with Kristin’s profs about assigned reading. Perhaps that Frida Kahlo book had been hers for a class back here. And if not, then it still could be hers as special interest reading.

  If it wasn’t hers, it scared me to think that whoever had staged her body had known her well enough to place an art book in her bag, over a novel or history book. That was the question that needed answering. Was Kristin Perry targeted because she was just a cute, blonde tourist? Or was she killed because she was Kristin Perry? Or was she the victim because of what she represented: a Canadian, an art student, a single woman? Who knew what went on in the minds of killers?

  Before I had a chance to slide my phone into my satchel, I received a text from Denise asking me to come see her. Since her office was so much nicer than mine and I didn’t have another class for three hours, I packed all the material I would require for my next class with me, and caught the LRT over to the U of A. After running the gauntlet of HUB Mall teeming with students, I headed into the Humanities Building and up the same concrete steps I’d been climbing for twenty years. Unlike the marble steps in the old Arts Building and South Rutherford Library, these steps didn’t deign to show a groove where year after year of young scholars had trod. I pulled open the door to the third floor and headed past the main office.

  I could have been invisible for all the attention I got from the office staff, but to be fair, one of them was dealing with a student at the front counter and the other two were on the phone. Still, you would hope for a bit more spatial awareness from people, or maybe it was just me who would. After all, this was not the safest building I’d personally ever been in.

  Denise’s office seemed like a separate world radiating peace. The beech wood paneling that was similar to every other office somehow glowed more and I wondered idly if she had oiled the bookcases and the strips of wood under the windowsill. She had greenery along the window, but not a great deal, and I was pretty sure they were all plants listed as having beneficial effects on the air. Mostly, the place was decorated with books, as were all the offices along the hall. Denise’s specialty being Shakespeare, she also had a set of Toby Mugs along the top shelf with different characters like Falstaff, Shylock, Richard III, and Lear represented. I am not sure how she managed to seem so serene, with all of them staring down at her.

  “Randy! Want some tea? It’s just steeping.” She poured me a cup of fragrant Earl Grey and one for herself while I slumped down into her reading chair, a big overstuffed monster we’d dragged up with the help of one of her grad students a couple of years back one weekend. She had a regulation wooden seat for students across from her desk, and somehow managed to have her coat or a pile of books stacked on the reading chair whenever a student appeared for a meeting, but friends were allowed to sit in it, unless they showed up by surprise while Denise herself was curled up in it.

  “I did some asking about the art profs for you. I recalled that the Chaucer fellow, David Murchie, has been seeing one of the sculptors, that woman who always shows up to the Studio Theatre shows wearing all that turquoise jewellery, you know who I mean?”

  “Sort of. Thin and long grey hair, and a long black coat?”

  “That’s the one. Her name is Briar Nettles.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope, apparently it is a family name, but it does sound like the family lives in a fairy tale, doesn’t it? Anyhow, Briar is approachable and very interdisciplinary, which in this case means she connects with other profs and lecturers in other departments. Did you want me to arrange a meet cute?”

  “Film studies rubbing off on you?”

  “I suppose. It’s the students, really, who have begun to merge the language between their classes. If I never read another essay discussing the ‘beats’ of Macbeth, I will be a happy woman.”

  “Or the filmic value of the heath in Wuthering Heights?”

  Denise pretended to throw a book at my head.

  “Exactly. I don’t particularly mind the film gang being part of things—after all, they’ve really been part of the whole from the start when it was just Bill Beard teaching film studies against the world—what bugs me is the diminishment in the eyes of the rest of the university it seems to have. We used to be the bastion of rhetoric and style and interpretation of metaphor, and now we’re only good for dissecting one particular culture through words and moving pictures. On the whole, I think it’s a plot to undermine the Faculty of Arts in the eyes of the funders. If it’s not practical science and thereby worthy of mega-grants, It’s of no value at all. Studying the arts will soon be equated with embroidery for the ladies of the court. Utterly non-essential, but it keeps our hands and minds too occupied to foment rebellion.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “I do, too. The thought of having to fight our way out of the rubble toward a second Enlightenment just makes me weary.”

  I had never heard Denise quite so cynical before. Usually she was the one jollying me out of a funk. Of course, there was less at stake in the future of academe for me, because academe had never clasped me to its bosom the way it had Denise. From the distance I had been forced to maintain, the university game was just another business anymore. I got there on time, put in my hours, sat my requisite office hours, got my marking done in record time, and started all over again. I was getting to the point of wanting to just find a quiet retail job, or to snag an editing job for the City or the provincial government.

  I made motions to leave and Denise wrote down the phone number for Professor Nettles the sculptor. We hugged and I left her to ponder the value of her life choices for about a nanosecond before she remembered what a great path she was on. Meanwhile, I had half an hour until my next class.

  I pulled out my cellphone and dialed the number Denise had given me for Briar Nettles. It seemed strange to be dialing such a person this way, rather than sending her a message by means of a talking woodland creature, but she picked up on the second ring.

  I introduced myself and stumbled through my reasons for contacting her. She was polite, if a bit cool, and agreed to meet with me at three-thirty for a cup of coffee in Hub Mall.

  I went off back downtown to teach, managed to instill a bit more verve into my introduction to the new novel with that group, and gathered up the quizzes tossed on my desk on their way out the door. I had thirty minutes to reach the south end of HUB Mall, where I had agreed to me
et the sculptor. Thankfully, none of my students wanted to waylay me to discuss their upcoming papers, and the LRT was sitting in the station as I jogged to it. With only five stops between me and my destination, I managed to stroll into the mall from the underground station handily in time.

  I had just dumped my coat and satchel on a table for two in front of the coffee shop that had at one time been known as Java Jive when Briar Nettles appeared.

  Apparently, the black and turquoise was a special costume for fancy events. Today, she was dressed in overalls, very sincere ones with ground-in clay in places and patches in others. Her blouse beneath the bib was colourful and woven, perhaps Peruvian in origin. Her grey hair was wound up in a bun on the top of her head, with a pencil shoved into it. The pencil looked like it had almost as much clay on it as the knee of her overalls. I wasn’t sure she even knew the pencil was actually there.

  I waved, and she came right over to me and stuck out her hand to shake. I had a weird sense of déjà vu, as if I’d witnessed this scene before, even if I hadn’t actually lived it.

  “Randy? Briar. What can I do for you?”

  “May I get you coffee before we begin?”

  “Great. I drink it black.”

  She sat across from my stuff while I grabbed my wallet and went to buy us coffees, decaf with milk for me, and black for her. I also bought a muffin for us to share, and set it in the middle of the metal table. She looked up from her cellphone when I sat back down, and dropped it into the bib pocket of her overalls.

  “So, you said this might be about a student of mine? Is it a mutual student?”

  “No, and I’m not even sure she would have been your student, but she was in the Visual Arts program. I should backtrack a bit. I have become involved in a homicide investigation of a student in your department, mainly due to being on scene when her body was found in Mexico.”

  “Oh, Kristin Perry.”

  “Yes, Kristin Perry. My husband is with the Edmonton Police Service, and we were on vacation there when it happened. He has become the liaison between the police there and here, and I have been asked to read one of the books found in her bag to see if it could be of any importance to the crime.”

  “How could a book be of importance?”

  I gritted my teeth just to hear those words, and from a creative artist, but pushed on.

  “Well, everything else about the scene of the crime was posed, apparently. The police want to know if the book in her beach bag was one she had, which the murderer just left there, or if it was planted there to create a message of some sort.”

  “And what was the book?”

  “It’s a book on Frida Kahlo. In fact, it was a copy of this book, the same book I had bought and was reading.” I pulled out the Helga Prignitz-Poda book I’d shoved into my satchel that morning on the off chance I’d have a chance to read during my break. Briar Nettles reached for the book.

  “I love a good art book,” she enthused, and flipped through it reverently, or as reverently she could with her work-roughened hands.

  “Do you think this would have been assigned reading for Kristin?”

  “I doubt it. Most of the texts assigned are more theoretical than biographical. This would have been purely for interest, and I’m not so sure a BFA student would be spending time with a compendium of this sort. If she was being assigned something to do with Kahlo, it would likely not be something this mainstream. This looks more to the biography of the artist than her place in the movements of the time.”

  “Does it look like something an art student would be reading in her spare time?”

  Briar Nettles wrinkled up her perfect nose in thought.

  “I doubt it. For one thing, it’s relatively heavy, and we are so aware of how much weight we have to carry, in terms of paints and canvases and notebooks and pencils, and how careful we have to be of our own skeletons.”

  “Wow, you sound like a dancer I know.”

  Briar shrugged.

  “It’s a fair comparison. To be an artist, you are at the mercy of your own physicality. As you move toward professionalism, you understand that more and more. One of the things I insist my own students do is enroll in yoga classes to keep limber.”

  “We English types just try to remember to put both of our backpack straps on.”

  Her smile was a bit withering.

  “I’m sure you pay attention to your eyes, though, right?”

  I had to agree with her. The one time I had been terrified enough to head to the Emergency of my own volition was the time I’d scratched my cornea. I couldn’t imagine a world without sight.

  “I’ll pass your insights about the book along to my husband. If he requires you to make a statement, would that be possible?”

  “I would be happy to, but I am sure he’d rather hear from Kristin Perry’s own instructors? After all, I am just offering an opinion as to her free reading choices. I didn’t know her. Is that all you wanted to talk about?”

  “Actually, I really wanted to get a sense of your department and how she’d fit into it. She and her fellow students. This whole corner of the campus is relatively unfamiliar to me, except for the music library. I was hoping you could flesh it out for me a little. Did you by any chance teach—wait a second,” I pulled my phone out of my satchel and flipped through the photos from the student gallery, “a Dana Woodfield, Cole Vandermeer, Austin Stauffer or a Gerry Bradley?” I threw Kristin’s boyfriend in to the list to see if that might get a rise out of the art prof.

  Her eyebrows shot up into her forehead, and for a second I could tell what sort of tiny little crone Briar Nettle would eventually look like. Apparently, it wasn’t Cole’s name that made her take notice.

  “Austin Stauffer is one of my sculpture students. What do you want to know about him?”

  “As I understand it, he was part of an art exhibit Kristin Perry was involved in. Could they have been involved personally, as well?”

  “Well, I doubt it. Though it is not exactly common knowledge, Austin is married.”

  19

  Briar filled me in at length on the discussions both she and the Dean of Fine Arts had gone through with Austin Stauffer, as they did with all students whose portfolios had made the grade, about the rigours of the coursework expected of them, and the time commitment entailed.

  “I also tried to impress on him that the chances of making a regular wage as a sculptor were impossible to predict. It’s not just a matter of how talented you are. It’s about the commissions, and whether a client sees from your last work the possibility of what you could do for them. This is not necessarily the way to put your kids through college or even pay for orthodontia.”

  Austin had seemingly put them all at ease, explaining that he had been that unicorn of a mythical creature, a responsible roughneck. Instead of buying a new truck every year and blowing his money on his two weeks’ home from the rigs, he had saved and invested and turned ten years of rig work into a nest egg that he and his wife could rely on while he took his BFA. His wife was a licensed practical nurse who worked part-time at the children’s hospital, while taking courses toward her masters in nursing.

  From the way she spoke about him, Austin Stauffer sounded like a paragon of virtue and wisdom. That didn’t mean he wasn’t also a cheating asshole; it may have just meant he was better than most men at hiding that portion of his personality from at least his professors. I made a mental note to tell Steve about Austin as soon as possible. Meanwhile, there was one more thing I wanted to ask Briar Nettles before she got too incensed at my besmirching her student’s reputation and stormed off in high dudgeon.

  “I noticed in the shows at the Abernathy Gallery that several of the works in the last couple of shows owed quite a lot to Mexican traditions. Could you posit an opinion on why it was that Frida Kahlo and other Mexican elements would spark such enthusiasm in a bunch of Edm
onton art students, all at the same time?”

  “Ah, well, for that you’d probably have to talk to Diego.” Briar’s eyebrows shot up into the top of her forehead, indicating there was something possibly unsavory about Diego, whoever he might be.

  “Diego, as in Diego Rivera?”

  “Exactly, though not THE Diego Rivera, obviously. His name, originally, was Daniel or Darrell Rivers, or something equally white bread. He began to sign his name Diego in art college, and now Diego Rivers makes a living as an artist-in-residence, moving gypsy-like from one campus to the next, imbuing the students with dreams of living in a beach shack in Tahiti and painting canvases that will eventually hang in the Louvre, or at least the Tate Modern. To my way of thinking, it’s utterly irresponsible, but there you have it. The chair is funded by alumni and having one more person on faculty allows for students to have wider access to philosophy and technique. Our last artist-in-residence was an Inuit print maker from Aklavik and she was amazing, so it’s swings and roundabouts.”

  I scribbled down Diego’s name and number for Steve to consider, which Briar had in her smartphone, and thanked her once again for her time. She nodded, as if she was releasing me from a royal visit, and turned on her heel back toward the Fine Arts Building. It was the same direction I needed to take, but instead of prolonging our connection, I decided to take the stairs down to street level and walk home overland.

  I walked through the block of campus housing and the subsequent block of old homes, some renting to students, others renovated to the max. The traffic along 109th Street streaming up off the High Level Bridge wasn’t too heavy at this time of day, though rush hour was creeping earlier every year. Like it or not, Edmonton had turned into one of Canada’s six major cities in the last decade or so. It was trying to manage traffic responsibly by paying major attention to rapid transit, bicycle lanes, and pedestrian friendly areas, but even with studded winter tires, sane bicyclists didn’t risk freezing their lungs and skidding on ice during the stretch from December to March each year, when it was sort of hard to see lines painted on the road, anyhow, for all the snow and ice built up.