Toby Shops for Art

Marcie’s father-in-law Haze has committed her allowance, the money with which she keeps Toby in style, to the purchase of a painting, and she has sent him to the gallery to try to get the price down. He gazes sadly at it in the window, and then goes in. He has not, at this point, met Haze.

Inside I was on familiar ground. Galleries may not be my usual habitat, but I know a thing or two about them through friends who work the scam. If you’re a painter in Paris with some work to sell, what you do is rent a suite for an evening at one of the big hotels, call in the caterers and send out invitations to dealers, agents and known art addicts.

Most people show up at your soiree to socialize with other artos and vacuum up the free food and drinks, which of course was where I came in, but somebody always gets drunk enough to buy a few of your large-eyed orphans and velvet cats. Prices being what they are, you can make enough to keep you in corn-flakes until you whip off a few more canvases.

But what’s more important is that once you’ve sold something it becomes easier to talk a dealer into exhibiting your work. And once a dealer mixes in you’re headed for real money.

The dealer, you see, can borrow the ones you’ve sold and hang them at the exhibition with sold signs on them. Nothing inflames your art addict like a sold sign. He feels he has to get in there and snap up the goods before he gets left completely out.

I had consumed my share of pickles and pâté at these occasions, and always made sure to follow up with the free beaujolais at the openings, so I knew where I was. The mud-colored carpeting, the white wall panels, the indirect lighting, the hallowed hush over which could be heard the faint gurgling of the humidifier, these were familiar to me. From Cairo to Copenhagen, your art gallery is pretty standard. It’s like your Hilton Hotel: two steps over the threshold and you could be in Buffalo, if that’s where you really wanted to be.

A half-dozen patrons were in attendance, milling about awkwardly. Even the adept, perhaps I should say especially the adept, mill about awkwardly in art galleries. Displays of certainty are considered unseemly.

The basic step, as taught in the best dancing academies, is to approach the painting obliquely and stand close at one side. Then back away and circle so as to outline an inviolable aura, waver a moment full-front, zip in to inspect a detail, withdraw, waver again and back towards the next exhibit, dithering slightly as if reluctant to pass on, perhaps pausing to make a remark to your partner, though this is optional. Bend the head as if in church to await the reply, which, if your partner knows the step, will not be made immediately.

Never raise the voice above a murmur. The murmur is also absolutely de rigueur and there for your own protection. You don’t want to blurt something really stupid all over the place and give the others a chance to relieve their own pain by mocking yours. Strict propriety requires a morguish silence.

I made my way discreetly from printed name plate to printed name plate. These gave the titles of the paintings—Hot Flash was one, and Wet Spot may have been another—mounted under clear plastic to one side, and enabled me to skip the paintings themselves and go straight to the hard information.

I hope I’m not creating the impression that I was altogether ignorant of movements in the arts. We had, I knew quite well, recently emerged from a phase of “committed” or “commando art,” whose chief theme had been the immanent ascendancy of the horde, and had now moved into a period of what is best defined as “women’s art,” identifiable by its propensity for circles and fueled by artistic outrage at the length of the checkout lines at Food City.

A desultory perusal sufficed. Indeed, so studiously did I avert my eyes from the canvases as I made my survey that I almost walked into a solid but not highly visible wall of objets d’art, arranged on wire-suspended glass shelves. Lead and ceramic lumps, they seemed to be, twisted into abstract shapes, the sort of knickknackery from which the mind relieves itself with thoughts of bulldozers.

I looked around anxiously to see if anyone had noticed my near collision. No one had. A small group stood near the receptionist’s desk nodding and murmuring, engrossed in the delicate ritual of price negotiation.

I pretended for a moment to be amused by one of the objets, whose resemblance, in fact, to a rubber turd did bring pleasant possibilities to mind. Then, assuming my most expensive manner, I tiptoed over to the little party and addressed myself to the receptionist.

“Uh, I’m looking for a painting by Johna Nerg,” I said, pronouncing with all possible charity a name I felt sure any right-thinking person would long since have had burned off.

With the discreetest of glances she directed me to the head honcho, and I turned to face a sour-looking woman with the alert poise of someone who has supposed a pickle. I recognized instantly the clipped severity of an independent career woman and, knowing that even the briefest of smiles would be read as an improper advance, proceeded to repeat my sentence.

I got no further than “Uh” when she stopped me with a raised hand. “These are all,” she said, waving it, “Johna Nergs.” She lifted an eyebrow at the obvious gap in my culture.

“Ah,” I said. “What I’m looking for is one particular Johna Nerg, called Big Bang?”

Her expression showed that I had further undone myself. “That one has already been sold.”

“Sold?” My mask of urbanity fell away. I put forth a hand to steady myself. She regarded it with suspicion. “Sold?” I repeated. “You mean he’s given you the money?”

This was gauche indeed. I may as well have broken wind as raised the subject of money by name. She stiffened as if I had. Someone gasped. With strained delicacy she informed me that she did not discuss her clients’ arrangements.

I relaxed. I knew very well that if the painting were already paid for she would not have hesitated to say so.

Restored to my lightsome swagger I said, “Good! I’d like to see it, please. Uncle Haze asked me to drop around and give it a glance before he hands over the scratch.”

“Uncle Haze?”

“Uncle Haze.” I beamed and fluttered the lashes.

“Mr. Hazelton Harding?

“The Fourth.”

The gallery hush deepened and communed with itself. Even the humidifier bubbled more softly.

“Well,” she suggested, all tact now but by no means abject, “it’s the one hanging in the window.”

“Ah.” I looked around. But how could I deliver my assessment standing out on the sidewalk? Who would hear?

“Of course,” I said, “it won’t be at its best through dark glass. Would you mind having it brought here?”

She shifted her footing. “I suppose it would be all right,” she allowed. The receptionist got up and went to get it.

All other activity having meanwhile ceased, it was for the moment my party, and I tried to ease what the others seemed to find an uncomfortable silence by smiling at everyone. What smiles I got back were faint and craven. A tall woman in spike heels and feminist glasses seemed particularly restrained. I blinked fastidiously and looked away until the receptionist brought the painting and rested it on a chair.

It was a large canvas onto which a bottle of red paint seemed to have been dropped from several stories up. The explosion was surrounded by concentric smears and dotted with minor yellow splotches. It looked like the pizza that comes off on the lid of the box.

Madame the Dealer and the others crowded around in close attendance.

“What happened,” I said, “did somebody get sick on it?”

A nanosecond later the tall woman had seized me by the lapels and was backing me across the room with an implacability that stirred reflections on the problem of evil, leaning lenses as large as television screens into my face. This, I gathered, was the artist, though I might have concluded so earlier, had I had the nerve to observe her more closely: red shirt, red pedal pushers, red heels, red earrings, red lacquer on the lips and nails, red frames around the lenses and, at the center of each pupil, a red gleam of fury, though she remained otherwise as expressionless as a subway passenger. I mean this was hostility. Had I thought to provide myself with a crucifix, this was the moment to raise it.

Of course, now that I come to recall it in tranquility, I can understand her anger. These artists can be forgiven for a high degree of sensitivity about their mistakes. Part of the great search, and so forth. But this was extreme.

As she tangoed me backwards, searching herself for an impulse sadistic enough to act upon, my life flashed before me in selected excerpts, chiefly episodes like this one. There can’t have been more than a dozen.

The previous evening’s confrontation reran, of course, but what flashed past most vividly was being caught once on a ship coming out of the ladies’ toilet by someone who had not paused to notice that the gentlemen’s was occupied. With the strength born of indignation she had collared and pinned me to the wall, incensed, I suppose, by the thought of sexually commingled urine in the lower reaches of the plumbing. Unless I’d left the seat up. Of course, there was more at stake here. One sees that.

I must have been looking back at my life at that moment because I couldn’t see forward, if you see what I mean. Apart from sending another suit out to be pressed, I had no notion what the future held.

Then, suddenly, when I felt I could no longer bear the uncertainty, the ground became uneven and I was shoved forward with a force slightly greater than that with which I was being shoved backwards; and judging by the accompanying expletives, with a burst of superior impatience.

“Oh!’ cried Madame la Propriétaire. “Monsieur Harding!”

It was rather a stagy exclamation, and uttered, I believe, for Johna’s benefit so that she would cool it before she did something uncivilized and blew the deal.

She straightened up and backed off a little. I straightened up too, my lapels firmly fist-molded. Who knows, they might have been worth something could she have been induced to sign them, but the thought fell away as I turned to meet Marcie’s father-in-law, groping for an explanation.

Conceive my surprise when I found myself facing the old choker who had gulped down the emerald clip the night before! And he was purpler than ever! I could think of eight possible reasons for this: a) His pain at having his toes ground down had flowered into anger and deepened his color. b) He had recognized me from the previous evening, when we had after all been at tight quarters, and the recognition had flowered, etc. c) He was naturally purple much of the time. d) The night before I had in some way damaged him, rendering him permanently purple. c) All of the above. f) a) and b). g) b) and d). h) a), b) and d).

“You!” he shouted, breaking into my thoughts and incidentally confirming that b) at least was involved; whereat he lunged at me and seized fistfuls of my lapels. I was beginning to feel used.

He looked much bigger standing up. “Do you know,” he growled, backing me back the other way again, “that I have to get up every day and poke around in my kaka until I find that God-damned trinket? I’m gonna bill you for the X-rays and God help you if I have to go under the knife to get it out! I’ll just take your name.”

At this revelatiom, i.e., that I was not known to the steadily advancing Haze, Madame fell in alongside and spoke up. “But Monsieur Harding!” she yodeled, working her elbows as if she were in a walkathon. “Monsieur Harding! This man says he’s your nephew. He’s been insulting your painting!” She had me now.

Haze bared his teeth. His anger rose by the power of six. My progress backwards, if that’s how you say it, was unimpeded now that Johna was in remission, and we were picking up speed. But before Haze could work out some suitable form of annihilation I stumbled. There was a loud crash and then a musical clatter suggesting a twister in a wind-chime factory: I had backed through the wall of shelves.

Shards of glass swayed precariously on their wires. I shook slivers from my hair and clothes. Objets lay everywhere.

For a moment there was no sound but the last drip-drop tinkles of destruction; then, as Johna scrambled to retrieve now this objet, now that, her whimpers. Madame hovered breathlessly with raised hands. The extras stood frozen as if before some kind of epiphany.

Beyond the roughly Toby-shaped opening stood Haze, no less purple but nodding now as if he had come to a grim understanding of something that should have been clear all along. He glared at me sideways and stepped through the gap, crunching glass beneath his tiptoes. His expression was of one who has planned a murder to the detail and is rolling up his sleeves to proceed.

I backed away, not in cowardice but to collect my thoughts, and he came on, refusing me any such interval, moving slowly and deliberately until we were arrested by a ripping sound, as if a fat person had suddenly bent over; or indeed, as if wind had at last been broken.

With strained hesitation we looked behind me at the floor. The receptionist had taken the painting down from the chair and I had, well, stepped on it. In it. Through it.

I don’t know if my reader has ever had the experience, perhaps as a child, of stamping a foot through the bottom of a cardboard box. If so, it will be recalled that, while the foot enters with ease up to mid-calf or so, it is not so easily retracted. The cardboard closes like a valve and impedes withdrawal.

The same is true of paint-stiffened canvas. Embarrassing enough, of course, to have stepped through the thing and be wearing it like an enormous shoe. But how much more awkward trying to get it off without increasing the damage!

The hush as I struggled was profound, the crescendo in a symphony of hushes. Jaw adroop, Johna sank to her knees before the spectacle. With some minimal tearing and the loss of a few flakes of paint, I succeeded in working myself loose, but she remained there, weeping softly.

I turned towards her to make my apologies, but she didn’t seem apt to hear. The others stood agape, eyes fixed on the ragged hole in the painting. Haze was the only one watching me, and even he was wonderstruck, as if what he were seeing partook of the supernatural.

“Gee,” I said, “how did that get there?”

Madame was the first to shake herself awake. “I’m telephoning for the police,” she announced, circling me widely towards the desk.

Haze continued to stare as if afraid to take his eyes off me, and then leaned his head and gazed at the painting with a kind of sickly sympathy.

I edged towards the door. “Well,” I said, “I’m sorry. Really I’m, I’m very sorry. A little masking tape,” I called to Johna, “it’ll be like new. Touch up the seams. Be great.”

No one paid me any attention but Madame, who was speaking rapidly into the receiver.

There was little else to do. I ran away.