The last time was when he almost choked a man to death by flicking an emerald clip into his soup. This time Marcie’s father-in-law Haze, whom Toby has not met, has committed her allowance to the purchase of a painting, and there goes their winter in the South Seas, unless Toby, and she has sent him on this mission, can get the price down.
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.
Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, lives Greece, Irish citizen. He is of towering intellect but, as is often the case with such people, not that bright.
