by Mike Barnes
From heart to soul to horizon’s tree
Lady Love
Paul Eluard
She is standing on my lids
And her hair is in my hair
She has the colour of my eye
She has the body of my hand
In my shade she is engulfed
As a stone against the sky
I liked those. They were clear, heartfelt, with odd twists that pulled you out of pattern. But in another way they confused me. Except for those occasional swerves – blue rise of my Reason’s field, standing on my lids – they seemed like straightforward lyrics. Romantic, even sentimental. In what way were they forerunners of the surrealists? Walking around the room, perusing the walls in a haphazard way, other lines seemed more clearly to belong, but perhaps only because they confused me in ways that I enjoyed.
Furrowing the mouth furrowing the eyes
Where furious colours dispel the mists of vigil
Set up love against life that the dead dream of
The low-living share the others are slaves
Of love as some are slaves of freedom.
I stopped at the photo of Max Ernst. Big hawk nose, bush of white hair over one eye. A severe face, determined. But those qualities hadn’t made it into his chess set. The pieces were dumpy lumps, with slight variations in size that looked accidental. Slightly curving, cleft in the middle – like crosses between an eagle’s talon and a lobster’s claw. If the set was a dream, it wasn’t a compelling one. As art it seemed like a doodle-pad creation; to someone who might actually want to play chess it was hopeless. A victim must be sacrificed. It still wouldn’t come. But I was getting better at making the other pieces disappear while I thought about it, mentally erasing all but the ones related to the problem.
And then I went to see “Wayward Guest”, drifting back behind the panel as if it really were just another stop on a meandering stroll I was taking. It looked different now. Of course. Given what I knew, how could it fail to be transformed? Claudia was right: a lot depended on what you expected to see. A masterpiece could stand or fall on your own whim, a mood, a crazy notion. Some might have felt a power in that, but to me it implied that my judgment was a bit of bark or leaf jigged and jogged by a stream’s currents. I looked at the picture. It seemed like what I’d been astonished by on Robert’s couch, but reason told me it couldn’t be. Reason zipped up that possibility in a body bag. He has a good eye, I’d heard Walter say in praise of some buyer. But how good was any eye? All those psychology experiments that made good filler in magazine corners: ten witnesses viewing the same accident scene, ten different reports. Colours changing, people vanishing, a Chrysler becoming a Toyota. Everyone a surrealist, or just oblivious. Magritte’s “Breakfast Prayer”, the man primly sitting at his table while a tree fills the room behind him, his plate empty.
I looked at the painting. It was all you could do, finally. Doubt kept swinging you back like a hammer, then driving the eye back down into the matter. Scrutinizing it in little squares, attention to all its particulars. Not the little figure floating in space – triangle and circle and outstretched sticks – but the tiny jog in the black line of the head, a little extra load of paint deposited, as if the artist had paused before continuing his stroke. A tiny, almost imperceptible sliver of red in the lower left corner of the murky brown background, the subtlest hint looping the eye back to the pulsing red of the dress, perhaps Klee himself remembering it, perhaps unconsciously. I had no way of knowing whether these details had been present when I’d seen the painting before, but I could remember them now.
Dress? I thought. Based on what? The symbol for washrooms used around here? Triangular things what a girl, a woman, wears more often than a man. But why not a cloak? Even that couldn’t be trusted. Stick to bumps of black, cracks of red.
And then Sean was back, furrowed around the eyes and mouth like the line in the Eluard poem. Bawling before he’d quite reached me: “They’re Spectrists!”
“Who?”
“Morgan and Knish!. They were bloody Spectrists!”
It was hard to calm him down enough to get at whatever he’d dug out of his shelf of reference books, mention of which slipped out rarely, since he preferred you to believe in the powers of his prodigious, albeit sometimes delayed, memory. But the explanation, though interrupted frequently by curses at the walls, came out.
The Spectrists had been a put-on. A hoax. Like the Disumbrationist school of painting.
“The what?”
“Disumbrationists. More bloody mountebanks. Wankers. We’ve probably got some of their doodles in our vaults.”
I doubted that, but it reminded me of something I should do next.
In 1916, two minor poets – Sean waved his hand when I asked their names – had invented the Spectric school of poetry and its two star practitioners, Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish. They’d wanted to spoof the many avant-garde schools flourishing at the time, by producing bogus poems that they would pass off as genuine among the duped literati. They’d collected some ardent admirers. Countless more had taken them seriously. (Including, seventy years on, Sean and me. Not part of Sean’s text.)
“A Republican mayor, you expect. But even Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams were taken in.” He scowled to show that his esteem for the two men had suffered irreparable damage.
“The poems didn’t seem great,” I said. “But they didn’t seem bad either.”
“Read them closely,” Sean said, shoving the paper back at me. Begging the question, which I didn’t voice, of how bad something could be if you had to put it under a microscope to expose its badness.
Sean jerked his head about, grimacing at the displays. His gaze stopped at the Man Ray photograph of two pretty flappers: “Daughters of Rrose Selavy”. The cupid faces, half in shadow, screwed up his own face like a Shakespeare crux. “Those clowns! I’m surprised they didn’t have them on the walls in here.”
“I think they almost did.”
“Pardon?”
I told him about Neale’s office, wondering as I did so if I was committing a blunder. Banking in the end on Sean not really being a part of human society.
“What’s that supposed to mean? He’s too good for this place?”
I considered that. I turned the thought over like a coin.
“Well, maybe he is,” Sean allowed. “It wouldn’t exactly be a large feather in his tail.”
“His hat, you mean.”
“Tail. Peacock? It’s called metaphor.”
“No, I think it just means he lost an argument.”
“Hm?”
I spent my own half-hour lunch conducting a fruitless search for a red pen. Going to all the floors of the gallery, but concentrating on Administration. Poking my head briefly into doorways, collecting quite a few Yes, Paul? looks but ducking out again before the sounds could be made. Barbara did have a red pen. She had many of them. She also had many blue and black pens. All sticking out of the ceramic holder on her desk. Walter kept a clean desk, bare except for a roughly rectangular metal sculpture that looked like a small misshapen ingot – or maybe it was just a paperweight. Neale’s desk was too cluttered to see anything clearly. When I passed Bud in the hall he was carrying a blue BiC pen, twiddling it in his fingers as we chatted about the heat. Then I stood by Angela’s desk – no words, just her quizzical frown as she tapped – and when she pulled out a bottom drawer to get something I saw side-by-side jumbo boxes of the BiC pens, red and blue. Anyone could help himself, or herself, to them. But then, on my way down in the elevator, I remembered somebody who didn’t help himself. Who supplied his own writing instrument, thank you. One day soon after “Secrets of the Surrealists” opened, a familiar young man with trembling hands and liquid eyes, a psychiatric outpatient and our steadiest patron, stopped at the desk to ask if he could have the “brilliant” catalogue essay autographed. “If the author would happen to be available.” Sometimes a call to the third floor could feel like radioing Pluto, but
Ramon said it was the fastest answer we’d ever got to an intercom summons. Neale towering on his cowboy heels in the lobby, the scuffed brown leather jacket worn indoors and out, like a heavy shirt. His face naturally falling a bit – and making zero effort to hide it – when he saw the shaking mental patient that had requested an audience. Quick hand inside the jacket to retrieve the pen: a nice fountain model, a sleek tortoiseshell cylinder with a gold-rimmed cap and clip, the casing a mottled green and black that gave a marble effect. Rapid chicken scrawl in wet black ink, and then gone without a word. Our patron closing the book too quickly on his prize, though I warned him.
Which told me what exactly? Nothing. I already assumed Neale was not an active participant in the Gallery Rentals scam, whose players and reasons I felt I understood – most of them anyway – and which had begun long before his arrival. But somehow, I don’t know why, the memory of the black fountain pen served as the tipping point, it pushed me over the edge into action. Often the hand touched down on a piece not because you had a move, but simply because it was time to stop not having one. The twenty further minutes of pacing the beige could be discounted, since they brought me no closer to a script, or even the start of one. Pure improvisation would have to do.
Peter admitted me to Conservation with his usual courteous indifference. His glance floated briefly up to my left eye – the swelling down, but plum-dark now. After a few jokes, boys will be boys had been accepted without further interest, or at least none I saw or heard. I sat on my stool in the corner. Soft Cell was this afternoon’s musical offering: “Tainted Love”. I reached over and turned it off.
“I was listening to that. That’s why it was on.” Careful enunication, the brush paused over the work, about as far as Peter would take anger. I turned the music on again.
I let that incident speak for itself for a few minutes. Reverberating, in whatever ways it might, in Peter’s mind. He would wonder why I’d done it, what I might do next. Though I’d done it for the simplest of reasons: I was sick to death of the song.
Peter was retouching a painting. Possibly the one he’d been wondering if he had the chops for; I hadn’t seen it face-up on the previous visit. I waited until he had a fair load of yellow on the end of his brush and was bringing it close to the canvas.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you and Neale would even bother copying a Klee. I mean, what for?”
A little too much yellow seemed to splotch onto the painting, though it could also have been exactly the stroke Peter intended. It was a pretty goopy daffodil, swirls and whorls of thick paint. And hard to tell, in just quarter profile, if the face he seemed to be making was anything more than concentrating-hard. Which it would have to be in any case.
He didn’t ask how I knew enough to ask my question. That was interesting too. Was he just too blind-sided by it to consider its origins? Too scared? He was too controlled a person for me to gather anything as, after no more than a craftsman’s pause, he started moving the yellow around, shaping it.
“We didn’t copy anything,” he said. “As I’m sure you know. And actually, it was Neale’s idea. I only helped him with some technical details.”
This was the way it went in a good game, or just a fast one. Pawn probes that you made nonchalantly, as if they were the routine beginnings of a well-known strategy. The other side reacting swiftly, without surprise, nothing you could possibly do that would not be grist to his own mill. Like two actors trying to cut in at places farther and farther along in the dialogue, while behind their bland expressions they were frantically flipping ahead to learn the script, write it.
“For his personal use,” I said.
“He loves Klee’s work.”
“I guess it’s also a vanity trip.” Side excursions, lulling with spurious issues, often a good idea too.
“It’s not vanity. It’s about the work. It’s all about the work. And yourself. About yourself and the work.”
And silence. Absorption time. Misdirection. And very important, when the next lunge, the real one, comes, to do it casually. Just a little notion I had, this queen up your king’s ass.
“Well, yes,” I said. “But then when you hang it in a public gallery, it does go out a little beyond yourself. In some way anyway.”
The daffodil, which had been reforming nicely, had to be put off for a bit now. Some vigorous swirling of the brush in a jar of turpentine, which also required that the back be turned.
“Neale just wanted to be able to hang it for a while. He said Klee was wasted on the patrons here.”
“Let them eat cake?”
“It’s not really about the patrons.”
Stop the presses! “No. More of a joke on the art world. A performance piece.” A jeu d’esprit. “But, c’mon, a joke on Steeltown too. HAG versus slag.”
“What?”
Too late, I remembered that Peter had been hired long after Walter took over, only a couple of years before me. He wasn’t from Hamilton either. From Guelph, was it?
“Putting a phony Klee under their noses would be a nice comment on our clientele,” I said.
“More on Walter.”
That comment, some gleam of a new bitterness buried in the flat tone, caught me off guard. I had to think quickly to connect it. “He can’t miss what he doesn’t look at,” I said.
“I don’t think Neale’s quite got that yet.”
Or he has and hasn’t told you.
Now we were ready to proceed with our daffodil. I gave it a minute, and waited until the brush was decently raised, then asked, trying to inject enough entre nous to assure him none of this was going beyond me anyway, for my own reasons I couldn’t afford it to:
“What’s in it for you anyway? I mean, even forgetting patrons – even forgetting Walter – there was still some risk.”
The pause might have meant a difficult patch on the daffodil. It could also have meant Peter reaching a certain decision: I’d better tread water until I find out what the depth is here. Until this fog lifts and I can see the shore.
“Neale has a line on a possible position at Kleinburg. Just a possibility, but he knows someone. They always hire outside too.”
The surfacing of the bitterness into clearer view reminded me of when I’d first heard about the outside hiring policy. It was another old bone that got gnawed in the gallery. They always hire outside. I’d been told of it – by Peter actually – when the registrar’s job became vacant soon after I started. As per gallery policy, the job was posted internally, on bulletin boards and on a Memo from Bud. I didn’t see any reason not to give it a shot. That might have been the official start of the shit between Angela and Jason. Angela not a gallery person yet, so feeling quite free to rant about “art cunts with their heads up their asses.” She swore more often, and more colourfully, in those days.
“Is that all, Paul?”
It wasn’t a normal Peter question, any more than the half-turn to ask it was. But he had to get at least one good look at my face. Another pass over the banged-up temple – what could that mean now? Trying to gauge what I knew, what I didn’t, when in both cases. What, if anything, I planned to do about it. All good questions, as I knew from asking them myself. There wasn’t any obvious anger in his face. Maybe he could back-burner all emotion when he needed to study something.
There was nothing in his blue-eyed gaze but the alert scrutiny he turned on paintings that might have hairline cracks or other flaws, varnish problems, mildew. Deciding what might be wrong and what, if anything, could be done about it. And who had the chops for the job.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s it.” And it was, for now. Minus me sailing headfirst down the grand staircase, which if Peter had had even a smidgen of Rick’s repertoire would have been the proper end to our interview.
16
At the chess club I kept switching boards, unable to find a player that was right for me. I checkmated a couple of bad players, then had the favour returned by a couple of better ones. When
Armin’s board came empty I went and sat down opposite him. The game bored me tonight, and I played in a loose thoughtless way that seemed, strangely, to improve my game. That was depressing. I saw a way that I could, if not win, at least make trouble for Armin. A sliding sideways attack with a lot of losses on my side, but possibly more on his. The threat was serious enough to make him bear down. His bluster vanished and he made his moves swiftly but deliberately, while I for once was the negligent one, knocking pieces with a crack as I snatched them. Playing with a fine disregard, that combination of attention and indifference that resembled recklessness and was so hard to find. In the end Armin found a way, he always did: dealing with the harassment on his flank while mounting a sustained, if more painstaking than usual, counterattack straight up the middle. As soon as I laid my king on his side – but not before – he started in again, the crowing sounding more like relief this time. “Bold player can make even blunder work . . . scared player wreck even good strategy. . . .”
Yeah yeah yeah, I thought, stalking out of the room like a sore loser. I wonder if Karl Marx still wore an overcoat in May.
Decided he probably had.
It wasn’t like in the movies. The car had to pass me three times – three times that I noticed – before I realized I was being followed. MacNab was a quiet street, dead even on a Friday evening, or I might never have twigged. But halfway home I became aware of the same red tail lights glowing in the dusk, right blinker on at the next block to come around again. A big grey car with a boxy back end. An Impala, I noticed on the next drive-by.
On Herkimer I stopped at the already-reno’d end of the landlord’s four buildings. I stood on the front step a moment, fishing in my pocket for my keys. The Impala slowed, its reflection a ghostly silver in the darkening glass of the double doors. It almost stopped, I imagined the driver noting the number, then rumbled away with a fart of black exhaust. I gave it a couple of minutes to return, turned on the step to face the quiet, cooling street. Then continued down to our end of the row. When I was almost to the door, I turned at a purring sound – the exhaust problem mysteriously fixed in one trip around the block – and saw the grey car ghost up to the curb.