“Injun lashes, real deal.”
Raven’s dream was to go to massage school. She disliked museums and all the dead things they contained. She told me she was in the program to please her mom and because it was subsidized by Northern Affairs.
“After this, I’m doing massage therapy. Then I’ll open my own place. I’m calling it Body Poets.”
“Thanks for the flower,” I said.
“You married?” she asked.
“No.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Sort of. It’s complicated.”
“What’s complicated’s name?”
I paused, unsure how much to disclose. It was the first time I spoke to anyone about Liam.
“Liam Livingstone.” Liam. Liam Livingstone. Edith Livingstone. Liam and Edith Livingstone. Mrs. Livingstone.
Raven crinkled her nose. “Sounds like a stripper.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what? A stripper?”
“Married?”
“Going on four years.” She pointed to a crescent moon tattoo on her neck above where her spine began, telling me about Zachary. “We met at a yoga retreat in Halfmoon Bay. We got matching tattoos and eloped to Niagara Falls. He’s from Ottawa, that’s why I’m stuck here.”
“You’re young to be married for that long.”
“I’m twenty-two with an old soul.” She twisted her back to the right then to the left, cracking it. She was Viv’s age, then.
“My sister has a tattoo,” I offered.
She cocked her head. “Why are you here? Who made you do it?”
“I want to be here.”
“Is this, like, your calling?”
“I guess so.”
“Yikes. Not a passionate one, are you.” She put on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, sizing me up. “Bet you end up at the National Gallery.” She took off the glasses and handed them over. “Use these to get in. They’re a prop.”
* * *
AFTER CLASS, I’D take the river path home, passing a small island covered in black-backed gulls whose high-pitched cries bounced off the rocks, through the wind and waves.
The terrain was similar to Vancouver’s stone seawall that I’d walked along with Liam and Viv. Only Place du Portage loomed on the other side of my bank, obscured by smokestacks sticking out here and there like my mother’s cigarettes in the sand bucket on the porch. She was smoking furiously again.
Fishermen on the shoreline occasionally nodded at me, but mostly they continued staring into their watery silence.
I thought about my sister, coveting her life. She barely called me. She was too busy playing the rising talent, the hot young west coast artist mingling in elite circles.
Based on her recent success in the art scene, I figured she’d cleaned up her life and wasn’t partying hard or popping pills anymore. I pictured her at galas and soirées where handsome, wealthy men fell at her feet. During her current stint of fame, she told us her organic forms were selling so much to galleries and collectors that she hadn’t finished her degree and couldn’t take time off for a visit home.
Yet when I phoned her, the odd time she picked up, what she said didn’t quite make sense. She spoke in broken phrases, all jumbled together, which created nonsensical conversations that reminded me of the griffins with mismatched body parts that I used to clean on coins.
I felt like I was talking to Alice in Wonderland. She’d left me behind and gone off into a brilliant world I couldn’t infiltrate.
TWENTY-ONE
I WAS A NATURAL at collections care. Fast-tracking my diploma, I finished in eight months and then I applied for jobs across the city. No one returned my calls with the exception of one employer. I took a cab to the interview, crossing the interprovincial bridge into the barren concrete landscape along with thousands of civil servants, returning to the federal government towers where my father had spent his life.
Inside the Chaudière complex, the Heritage receptionist accompanied me through a maze of grey cubicles. The odour of instant coffee attached itself to my skin and hair. She led me to a windowless room for a two-hour exam.
She closed the door, but I opened it when I sensed my usual anxiety coming on. I took two puffs off my inhaler. A janitor came by with a bucket on wheels, setting his mop aside to empty out the garbage cans by the window with a vista of the river and the Gallery. Just like Henry would have done, day in and day out.
I couldn’t write a word. When the receptionist returned to bring me to the interview panel, I told her I was late for a meeting and I left.
I sent the taxi away and walked to the river’s edge. I crossed the long steel truss bridge that my father had driven on twice a day for all those years. The wood boardwalk creaked and vibrated while cyclists and cars flew past. The bridge railings were littered with love locks—padlocks fixed there by couples, who threw the key into the water below to express their undying love. Thousands of these toy keys corroded at the bottom of the river. I hoped the relationships had lasted.
When I reached the art gallery’s glass dome, I remained fixed there in the grass, looking up at the structure. Eventually some incorporeal presence propelled me around to the staff entrance. A security guard unlocked the sliding window.
“I’d like to speak with someone in Human Resources.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
“You need to be on the roster.”
“My father died. He wanted me to work here.”
“That’s nice.” The guard stood up and adjusted his pants. The radio hooked to his belt emitted voices through the static.
I pulled my resumé from my knapsack and raised it to his window. “I just want to drop this off”—my voice got croaky—“please.”
My poly-blend dress clung to my back. I hadn’t taken the time to cool off after crossing the bridge in the scorching sun.
He exhaled until his shoulders slumped forward. “You can’t walk in unannounced,” he told me. “But I’ll give it to them for you.” He took the papers from my hand and slid his window closed again, turning back to his surveillance screens.
* * *
A MONTH LATER, I was called in for an interview.
When I arrived, the same security guard was there. This time he treated me like a proper visitor, asking me to sign in before taking a seat in the waiting area.
A woman whose hair was blacker than mine and who wore a denim jumpsuit and fur sandals appeared at the doorway.
“Miss Walker, pleasure. I’m Jeanette.” The hand I shook was decorated with an enormous topaz ring. I followed her through the doors as she went on, “Lucky for you, we happen to be desperate. Three of our juniors defected to the War Museum, where the pay’s better. I’m thinking of going there myself. Come in.”
Once we were seated in her office, Jeanette scanned my file. “You’ve worked with coins?”
“A little.”
“How’s your eyesight?”
I removed Raven’s glasses. “These are an accessory.”
“You’d be taking measurements and recording numbers. Essentially, it’s a data entry job.”
“I can do that.”
“Do you collect?”
“Not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I have few things to which I’m sentimentally attached.”
“Excellent.” She rearranged her pencil holder and stationery on her spotless desk. “Hoarders tend to have messy offices, and that doesn’t reflect well on the institution when funders tour around. Where did you get that necklace?” She pointed with her pencil to the medallion.
“A friend. He was a collector. We lost touch.”
I must have seemed nostalgic because Jeanette opened up then. “It happens,” she said, her almond eyes glazing over. She looked a little heartbroken. “Some people. Nothing we can do about it.”
* * *
I STARTED THAT same week. When I told Raven about the job, she asked me to find her someth
ing there too—anything, she said. She was working at a hosiery store called Fancy Sox and she detested it.
On my first day, Jeanette brought me up to the fourth floor and introduced me to Alejandro, a middle-aged, slender man with a dark goatee who wore a pinstriped suit. Alejandro would train me on Avalon, the database I was to work with as a cataloguer.
Two desks took up the snug room. Once Jeanette left, Alejandro moved a stack of magazines over and motioned. “You can sit there, but the chair’s broken.” Then he angled his monitor toward me to demonstrate how to complete tasks in Avalon. “It’s a temperamental system that’s going to crash and thousands of hours of entries, all the history, will be gone,” he told me. “This is technically not my problem. I’ve voiced my concerns and no one listens.”
Alejandro went on. “Avalon estimates that we show 4 percent of our collections to the public. Most mornings you’ll be in the vaults for at least an hour or two with a laptop, pencil, notepad, and tape measure, cataloguing the other 96 percent. It’s riveting work.”
Vault doors stayed closed at all times. He confided that he doubled his lab coats while in storage to keep warm in the strictly climate-controlled environment. He pontificated about handwashing and the ban on lotions and jewellery, and how dust was the enemy, its particles tiny daggers causing irreparable damage to surfaces.
Alejandro also explained the coding for the works on paper, stored in archival black boxes one on top of the other like rectangular coffins on steel shelving units.
“Light and humidity levels are verified daily. It’s freezing in there and coffee’s not allowed. I slip chocolates and power bars into my pockets, but if you do it, be careful. You don’t want to be on your knees collecting crumbs when a curator walks in. There are infestations to think about, insects and mice.”
In the afternoon, Alejandro gave me a tour of the viewing room, which we would alternate supervising, bringing works on paper to researchers arriving with permission letters.
“Make sure they don’t have pens or chewing gum, and that they don’t spit onto the art while talking. In my opinion, the buggers should wear masks,” Alejandro said. “And ask that they leave their bags at the door. Give them gloves from the desk drawer and check in on them once per shift. Otherwise you’re free to do whatever.”
The viewing room had the most windows and light in the entire complex. It was on the top floor. The ceiling was a skylight and the front wall was all glass.
My new refuge steadied me and lifted my spirit.
I stood at the window, gazing down at the river and the iron bridge. The gulls and clouds swept down so low, it was as if they were inside with me.
* * *
I HARDLY NOTICED the seasons passing. I sent letters to Liam via a general delivery address, but I was uncertain if he had received them. I ploughed through Avalon, correcting typos and inaccuracies, knowing that in the future someone would go in and alter the information I’d entered until every digit was swept away like a sand mandala.
The watercolours, prints, and drawings I catalogued were deteriorating at varying rates and were as translucent as petals. Each one had its own digitized consultation chart like a patient in rehabilitation. I was almost paralyzed by the thought that one false move, one slip or catch of the sleeve, could destroy a work forever.
It was an unglamorous job, but it suited me. If I was in the storage cage a day too many, the skin of my fingers cracked and chapped, sometimes I speculated about what course my life could have taken had I any real talents like Viv.
The female Gallery workers were as striking as my sister. Especially the managers in their silk skirt suits and impressive heels. A flock of forward-thinking, handsome curators had landed on-site like stately monarchs, replacing academics who’d died off and been buried all at once like terracotta warriors, Alejandro told me.
He said affairs went on behind the scenes after hours, when these important individuals laboured into the night, preparing for blockbuster exhibitions—Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, or Egyptomania, or The Great Parade, showcasing artists as clowns, which caused children to run screaming from the galleries. I regretted having missed that one.
I caught glimpses of these luminous beings flashing past the door to our small office, or wandering through the vaults where I was stationed. They heaved lugubrious sighs and my imagination teleported them into trendy bistros and romantic symphonies, recruiting them into one large-scale orgiastic canvas titled The Lucky Ones.
Little by little, I let go of the life I’d planned.
Liam had not written back. I felt like a woman seated at a loom unravelling a tapestry or standing on a cliff, skirts and hair blowing wildly—Woman on Precipice.
I found Raven a job in the membership sales department. It was temporary, while she and Zach settled in and he moved up the ranks in Foreign Affairs. Then she’d open her massage place.
“I went to school to make cold calls and you’re no better off with your data entry,” she repeated on our outings.
We had lunch together weekly. Since buying a house, Raven was consumed with decorating. One day it was an ecru bed in a bag, the next it was a chenille pillow. Heading for the department store, we often stopped in the ByWard Market’s stone courtyard, where windowsills were covered in nails glinting in the sun to ward off pigeons.
We ate our sandwiches on a bench then strolled down Sussex Drive past exclusive boutiques—the children’s clothing shop with its chaotic display boasting designer swaddles! beanie pods! and the haute couture bridal shop where daughters of government leaders and the city’s prominent businessmen shopped.
Dresses of twill and silk floated in the window front on headless mannequins. I pressed my face against the glass, thinking of my future with Liam. A chandelier hung above a few gowns dangling from a rack like exquisite skinned animals. Two ethereal women with pearls and kinky tresses turned away.
* * *
FINALLY A POSTCARD arrived.
It was a picture of a blue stone mask. Liam’s note said that he was coming home for a university job in Earth Sciences. He was going to arrive in a month and wanted me to help him find a place to live.
I’d been thinking of moving as well. Constance was selling the house and buying a condo where, she’d not so subtly told me, there wasn’t much room.
I wrote back saying that he could stay with me and then I rushed to find a downtown rental. I secured an apartment on the main floor of a turn-of-the-century house with crown moulding and hardwood floors so uneven I had to prop slats under the furniture. It wasn’t unusual to hear the plumbing in the units above and beneath me, and the steaming radiators clanked as though someone was taking a hammer to them. But there was a garden, big windows, and stained glass. My father would have liked the original light fixtures.
It was mine and I was finally on my own. I stood at the window holding the postcard and waited for Liam.
TWENTY-TWO
WHEN I HELPED CONSTANCE pack up the house, I found Henry’s white scenes rolled in the attic like obsolete maps, covered in dust and cobwebs.
She was selling our home for next to nothing and could easily have doubled the price. Our once-sketchy neighbourhood had been gentrified, its main street lined with pet groomers and gourmet food shops—but she didn’t care. Con wanted to move on.
“Forget the past. Swim forward like a shark. That’s how to survive, ma fille.”
Beside the neglected rolls, there were more paintings on an old flat-top trunk. Ones that were stretched and tacked onto wooden frames, stacked neatly beneath a clear tarp. I tore off the sheet of plastic. From each of my sister’s small works there dangled, like an earring, an exorbitant price tag from one Vancouver gallery or another.
“He wanted to encourage her. Not my idea.” My mother sat on the floor in her kelly green jogging suit, a matching kerchief tied around her head. Mirabelle, the teacup Yorkie she bought after my father’s death, was asleep in her lap. Letters surrounded h
er, and as Con leaned against the couch, she glanced at the piles of envelopes, setting a few aside and throwing others into the garbage bag beside her.
“Dad bought them? Viv said she had clients!”
“Your father used different names. She didn’t ask her agent who purchased. She wasn’t interested.”
“But who’s been buying lately?”
“He left them a sum to continue. Mais … I’m sure that’s gone.”
“How could he afford it?”
“Second mortgage.”
“What about the debts—”
“I told you”—she cut me off—“who helped us pay those off. I don’t want to discuss it again.” She picked a yellow mailer from the floor with my father’s handwriting on it, pulled the papers out, leafed through them, and tossed them in the garbage bag.
“Then why is she so broke she can’t fly home for a visit?”
“We helped her get a name, a reputation,” my mother replied, avoiding my question.
“Who wrote those newspaper reviews?”
“One teacher in particular was very fond of her. He had journalist friends.”
I remembered the fight between Viv and Liam on my last night there. “She wouldn’t forgive you, if she knew,” I told her.
My mother stood up without removing Mira from her lap. The dog dropped to the floor like a duster. She went over to the mantel that held my father’s ashes, picked up the brown urn, and examined it thoughtfully before pressing it against my abdomen.
“I don’t know where to spread them.” She sat down on the floor again, lit a cigarette, and opened another letter. Mira crossed under the path of smoke and hopped back onto her legs.
“What did you do with Dad’s collections, his memorabilia?”
“I gave all that to the junk collectors. The diabetes foundation didn’t want anything.”
“What about my purple chair? My clowns and Viv’s carnival scenes?”
“I saved you the glass balls. Prends la Buick.” Her red ’96 Buick Century was over ten years old. She’d recently bought herself a Lincoln Town Car.
I felt my hostility rising. “I want the paintings.”
The Gallery of Lost Species Page 10