Murder at the Mendel

by Gail Bowen

  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 unselfconsciously 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.

  “Nina and Us,” it said in my handwriting on the back of the photo. And now, after thirty years of wounds and alienation and unfinished business, we were together again. It was, I thought as I went over to take the kettle off the burner, enough to make you believe in the workings of cosmic justice.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The next morning I awoke to the smell of coffee perking and bacon frying. In the kitchen my son Peter and Johnny Mathis were singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” I rolled over and looked at the clock. I still had fifteen minutes before I had to get up. So I burrowed down in the warmth of my double bed and thought about my kids and Christmas.

  The holidays hadn’t been an easy time for my family. Four years earlier, my husband, Ian, had died in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and the year before this one I had spent the holidays recovering from an attempt to kill me that had almost succeeded. Not exactly material for a remake of It’s a Wonderful Life.

  But we had begun a new life in a new city, and I was optimistic. My sons and I had been in the house we’d rented on Osler Street since July. In the sixties, when it had been built, houses like this one had been called split-level ranchers. It was a solid house on a well-treed lot near the university. A Milton scholar who was spending a sabbatical year in England had built it himself, and apparently he had an affection for generous spaces and sunlight. In the months since we’d moved in, I’d thanked this man I’d never met a hundred times. His house had smoothed a rocky passage for me.

  There were a handful of logical reasons why the move to Saskatoon, a hundred and fifty miles north of my home in Regina, had been a good idea. My two oldest children were enrolled at the university here, and the political science department had offered me a chance to teach a senior class in the contemporary politics of our province. The fact that the appointment was for one year only was, oddly enough, a plus. No commitments, no committee work, so I had time to finish the biography of the man who had been my friend and the leader of our party. Logic. But the real explanation for our coming couldn’t be calibrated on a scale of reason. The year before we moved, bad things had happened in our old house, and in my bones, I had known we had to get out for a while.

  As I sat listening to the cheerful, tuneless voice of my son, I smiled. This Christmas on Osler Street was going to be a good Christmas. I rolled over and pulled the blankets close. It didn’t get much better than this. But as Gracie Slick used to say, “No matter how big or how soft your bed is, you still have to get out of it.” It was December twenty-second, and I had things to do.

  Half an hour later, when I went down to the kitchen, showered and dressed for a run, Peter was slipping eggs out of the frying pan onto a plate, and his brother was feeding his toast crusts to our dogs.

  “Perfect timing,” said Peter. “Two more minutes in the pan and they would have been what Dad used to call whore’s eggs, black lace around the edges and hard as a rock at the centre.”

  “Whenever did Dad say that?” I asked.

  “At the fishing camp up in Manitoba when we’d go there with the guys. He told me not to say it in front of you because you’d think it was crude.”

  “Well,” I said, looking at the eggs on my plate, “he was right about that. But it’s a moot point. These eggs are perfect, Peter. You do know, don’t you, that I’ve already bought all your Christmas presents?”

  Peter poured me a cup of coffee. “I want to borrow your car tonight. Christy and I are going to The Nutcracker and it’s going to be tough for us to make a grand entrance if we drive up in the king of junkers.” He sat down opposite me. “One of those presents you got me wouldn’t happen to be a new car, would it?”

  “Nope,” I said, spearing a piece of bacon, “no new car, but you can have the Volvo as soon as I’m through with it today. In the spirit of the holiday, I’ll even throw in a coupon I’ve got for a free car wash and wax.”

  “Careful, Mum, those coupons don’t grow on trees. When will you be finished, anyway?”

  “Let’s see. First, I’m going to take the dogs down to the river bank and run off this terrific breakfast. Then I’m getting a ski rack put on the car to carry the secret skis we’re all getting for Christmas for our secret ski holiday at Greenwater. Then I’m going to meet Sally Love and humiliate myself at the gym. Then probably I’ll come home and collapse. You can have the car by one o’clock.”

  “That’ll be okay. Angus wants me to take him Christmas shopping. He can go to the car wash with me and vacuum out the back seat. It’s really gross. He’s still got Halloween candy back there.”

  “A mark of maturity, being able to hold on to candy for almost two months,” I said to my youngest son.

  He reached over and took a piece of bacon off my plate. “Oh, you couldn’t eat the stuff that’s back there. Most of it’s got dog hair on it.”

  I shuddered. �
�I don’t think I want to know about this. Let’s talk about something else. How much Christmas shopping have you got left to do?”

  Angus smiled innocently. “All of it.”

  I moved my plate toward him. “Here, have another piece of bacon. You need it more than I do.”

  I rinsed my dishes and put them in the dishwasher. The dogs were by the door looking at me anxiously.

  “Anyone want to go for a walk?” I asked as I did every morning. As soon as I opened the drawer to get their leashes they went crazy with pleasure. They did that every morning, too. None of us liked surprises.

  The morning passed happily. It was a grey day, but the dogs didn’t mind, and neither did I. Along the river, there were lots of clear spaces where the brush had kept the snow off the path. It was a good day for the dogs and me to run and feel the fresh air knife at our lungs. When I stopped to look at the South Saskatchewan curling toward Lake Winnipeg, the river’s cold beauty made my breath catch in my throat.

  The man at the garage got the ski racks on first crack, and when I went to pay him, he smiled and said it was a Christmas present for a new customer. As I pulled into the parking lot across from Maggie’s, I was filled with seasonal optimism about the human condition. It really was the time for peace on earth and good will toward one another.

  Two hours later, I knew I’d peaked too soon.

  The seventies gave us earth colours and macramé and places like Maggie’s: private clubs where women could work out or learn about Oriental art or sit over plates piled with sprouts and talk about sisterhood. People didn’t talk about sisterhood at Maggie’s any more, but the food was still good, and the exercise classes were the best in the city.

  Sally was sprawled over a chair in the lobby when I came in. She was wearing boots, blue jeans, a man’s shirt and an old woollen jacket that looked vaguely military. Her long blond hair was loosely knotted at the nape of her neck. Over her shoulder she had slung an exquisite leather bag – the same bag that had hung over Hugh Rankin-Carter’s shoulder the night before.