Murder At The Mendel (3 page)

Despite himself, Stuart Lachlan smiled, and Sally seized the moment. She slid her arm through her husband’s and said, “The director and I are going to find a drink. Why don’t you guys join us?” And she led him smoothly out of the foyer toward the exhibition.

Beside me, Nina smoothed the shimmering line of her dress. There was a flicker of anger in her face, but when she spoke, her words were mild.

“Quite a performance,” she said.

I had to agree. In the forty-five years since I’d tiptoed into Nina Love’s room to look at her new baby daughter, I’d seen many of Sally Love’s performances, but even by Sally’s standards, this had been a star turn.

CHAPTER

2

It was a lovely party. This was a major show and the gallery had pulled out all the stops. As we walked among the paintings, two men from the caterers circulated carrying silver trays of tiny tourtieres, so hot the juices were bubbling through the top crust, and fluted paper cups holding crab-meat quiches shaped into perfect hearts. In the middle of the main gallery there was a serving table with a round of Cheddar as big as a wagon wheel and platters piled high with grapes and melon slices and strawberries. And there was a bar.

I was watching the bartender grate nutmeg on top of a bowl of eggnog when I heard a familiar voice.

“I know you like strong drink, Joanne. I’ll ask Tony to make a Christmas Comfort for you. It’s a drink that’s out of fashion now but you’ll like it.”

I turned and found myself face to face with Hilda McCourt, a woman I had met the year before when a man who was dear to both of us had died violently. In the time since, our friendship had become one of the pleasures of my life. She was more than eighty years old and she looked
every minute of it, but she always looked great. She was as slender as a high-school girl, and that night she was wearing an outfit a high-school girl would wear: a kind of combat suit made out of some shiny green fabric, very fashionable, and her hair dyed brilliant red was tied back with a swatch of the same material.

“Well, Joanne?” she asked.

“I trust you implicitly,” I said, smiling.

“A Christmas Comfort for Mrs. Kilbourn, please, Tony, and another for me. He’s an old student,” she said as Tony went off to get the ingredients. He warmed a brandy snifter over a fondue pot he had bubbling on his worktable, filled the glass three-quarters full of Southern Comfort, added a slice of lemon and a little boiling water and then warmed the glass again.

“Drink it quickly now, while it’s hot,” said Hilda.

“There must be three ounces of liquor in that thing. I’ll be under the table.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Hilda said impatiently. “Just keep moving and eating.” When she shook her head, I noticed that she had tiny golden Christmas tree balls hanging from her earlobes. She took my arm and led me toward the pictures.

“Now, what do you think of all this brouhaha about the fresco?” she asked.

“I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m sure it’s extraordinary. Everything Sally does is extraordinary.”

“I hear ambivalence in your voice.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess when you’ve had the kind of history Sally and I’ve had, it takes a while to get rid of the ambivalence.”

Hilda raised her eyebrows. “A tale for another time?” she asked.

I smiled. “For another time. Hey, speaking of tales, the one that’s unfolding here tonight’s pretty engrossing. Those
people outside aren’t going to be satisfied until someone comes here with a brush and paints over Erotobiography. I wonder what the board’s going to do?”

“I can answer that,” said Hilda. “The board is going to give Sally a splendid dinner to thank her for her generosity and they’re going to issue a statement of support for Stuart Lachlan and then they’re going to renew his contract for another five years.”

“You sound very certain.”

“I am very certain. I’m on the board. I’ve known most of the other members for years. They’re decent people and they’re reasonable. A lot of them are from the business community. They may not know a Picasso from a Pollock but they do understand art as investment. That fresco of Sally’s is going to be worth a million dollars in five years. The board won’t want to be remembered as the fools who threw a bucket of paint on a million dollars.” Suddenly, her face broke into a smile. “Here’s the artist now.”

Sally slid her arm around my waist, but her attention was directed toward Hilda. “Miss McCourt, it’s wonderful to see you again. People tell me you’ve been my champion in all this.”

Hilda McCourt beamed with pleasure. “I was happy to do it. It’s always a pleasure to nudge people into acting in a civilized way. They generally want to, you know.”

Sally seemed surprised. “Do they?” she said. Then she shrugged. “If you say so. Anyway, besides thanking you, I wondered if you two would let me trail around with you for a while. There’s a picture here I want to see with Jo.”

Hilda looked at her watch. “I think you and Joanne had better look without me. I still have choir practice to get to tonight. We’re doing Charpentier’s ‘Midnight Mass’ for Christmas. A bit of a warhorse, but a splendid piece, and I think the Southern Comfort has prepared my voice nicely.”

Sally leaned forward and kissed Hilda’s cheek. “Thank you again for your heroic efforts. I know Erotobiography is troubling for some people.”

“Oh, I’ve had lovers myself,” said Hilda McCourt. “Many of them,” and she turned and walked across the shining parquet of the gallery floor. Her step was as light as a young girl’s.

I looked at Sally. “I’ll bet she has had lovers,” I said. “And I’ll bet she’d need a bigger wall than you have to mount her memoirs of them all.”

“Right,” Sally said, and she laughed. But then there was an awkward moment. I had told Hilda McCourt that Sally and I had a history. Like many histories, ours had been scarred by wounded pride and estrangement. Since I’d come to Saskatoon in July to teach at the university, Sally and I had moved carefully to establish a friendship. After thirty years of separation, it hadn’t been easy, and Sally hadn’t made it easier when she had suddenly left her husband and child for an affair with a student in Santa Fe.

This was the first time we had been alone together since she’d come back from New Mexico, and she seemed tense, waiting, I guess, for my reaction. In my heart, I thought what she had done was wrong, but at forty-seven I didn’t rush to judgement with the old sureness any more. And I had learned the value of a friend. I turned to her and smiled.

“Now, where’s this painting I can’t see without you?” I said.

She looked relieved. “In Gallery II – right through that doorway.”

The gallery was only yards away, but our progress was slow. People kept coming up to Sally, ostensibly to congratulate her, but really just to see her up close. She was as she always was with people, kind enough but absent. Not many of the clichés about artists were true of Sally, but one of them was: her work was the only reality for her.

“So,” she said finally. “Here it is. On loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. What do you think?”

It was a painting of three people at a round picnic table: two adolescent girls in bathing suits and a middle-aged man in an open-necked khaki shirt. The man was handsome in a world-weary Arthur Miller way, and he was wholly absorbed in his newspaper. The girls were wholly absorbed in him. As they looked at him, their faces were filled with pubescent longing.

“Wow,” I said. “Izaak Levin and us. That last summer at the lake. The hours we spent in the boathouse writing those steamy stories about his lips pressing themselves against our waiting mouths and about how it would feel to have him –what was that phrase we loved – lower his tortured body onto ours. Even now, my hands get sweaty remembering it. All that unrequited lust.” I stepped closer to the painting. “It really is a wonderful painting, two young virgins looking for … What were we looking for, anyway?”

“Someone to make us stop being virgins,” Sally said dryly. Then she shrugged. “And fame. Izaak was the toast of New York City in those days. Remember when he was a panelist on that
TV
show where they tried to guess people’s jobs?” Suddenly she smiled. “Izaak’s in Erotobiography, you know.”

Amazingly, I felt a pang. It had been more than thirty years, but still, it had been Sally who won the prize. She’d been the one to live out the fantasy.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you which one’s his.” She grinned mischievously. “Actually, maybe you could get him to show you himself. He just walked in.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, but she wasn’t. There he was across the room. Thinner, greyer, but still immensely appealing, still unmistakably the man I dreamed of through the sultry days and starry nights of that summer.

He came right over to us. Sally beamed, pleased with herself.

“Izaak, here’s an old admirer,” she said. “The other girl in the picture – Joanne Ellard, except now it’s Joanne Kilbourn.”

Izaak Levin looked into my face. His expression was pleasant but bemused. It was apparent that the only memories he had of me were connected with a piece of art Sally had made. He gestured toward it. “I’ve enjoyed this picture many times over the years. It’s a pleasure to see that you’ve aged as gracefully as it has.”

I could feel the blood rushing to my face. I stood there dumbly, looking down at my feet like a fifteen-year-old.

“Has your life turned out happily?” he asked.

“For the most part, very happily,” I said. My voice sounded strong and normal, so I continued. “It’s wonderful to see you again. Did you come up for the opening?”

He looked surprised. “I live here. This has been my home since Sally and I came back in the sixties. Didn’t she ever mention it?”

“Izaak’s my agent, among other things,” said Sally, and then she moved closer to him and touched his arm. “Incidentally, speaking of being my agent, I ran into these people in Santa Fe who bought
The Blue Horses
from you last summer. You’d better chase down the cheque because I never got it.”

Her words seemed to knock Izaak Levin off base. He flushed and shook himself loose from her. “And the implication is …?” he asked acidly.

“For God’s sake, Izaak, the implication is nothing. I don’t suspect you of financing a love nest in Miami. I’ve been travelling so much. I just thought the cheque must be stuck in a hotel mail slot somewhere. It’s no big deal. Just track it down, that’s all.” She grabbed my arm. “Come on, Jo, let’s go look at the filthy pictures.”

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.”