Martin Sloane (7 page)

Now he was coming to the podium, slick and glinting in a shark-coloured shirt and a black tie, and he steadied himself with his flipper-like hands. He leaned down into the microphone. Today we’re celebrating the acquisition of a marvellous new work of art from the Canadian artist Martin Sloane.

Not Canadian, Martin said out of the side of his mouth.

There was applause. I joined in, but he took one of my hands in his. Don’t applaud, he said.

Why?

You don’t throw confetti at your own wedding.

A little bit about the artist, Johannson said. Born in Dublin, raised in that city, as well as Galway, Montreal, and Toronto. Divides his time between Toronto and our little town. The winner of the prestigious Carrick Foundation Prize for a body of work in 1975, and he’s had some major shows since then, at the National Museum of American Art, the Menil in Houston, the Tufts University Art Gallery, and of course the group show at Castelli, a very popular show in 1983. But his work is hard to come by! Very few galleries have anything in their permanent collections, and what the public gets to see generally goes home with the artist. Mr. Sloane’s reputation has grown via a peculiar kind of absence on the art scene. Very clever, Mr. Sloane!

Laughter. A weak smile from Martin.

But today, we unveil
three
boxes, albeit a single work, but three pieces which will take pride of place in our contemporary galleries.

Someone at the back dimmed the lights and Johannson said, I give you Going Under, and I leaned forward with the crowd. In the darkness of the room, we could now see three squares of faint light glowing behind a sheet. An invisible hand drew the sheet back and revealed three boxes on a dais, barely lit from within, as if their surfaces were giving off the last of a light they’d somehow stored. They were breathtaking in the darkness and immediately a silence that was like intimacy came over the crowd. When our eyes adjusted, the box at the left revealed only a miniature buoy floating against a background of inky darkness. The middle box was empty but for (so Martin claimed) eighty-five layers of warped, cracked, bubbling blue paint and varnish on the back wall. The third showed a rotting galleon hidden amongst a copse of weed and thickly laid twigs. Martin’s handwritten instructions for installation indicated the effect was to be of muted moonlight. And so they seemed to float in the air at the front of the auditorium, phosphorescent pale, like drowned rooms.

The applause started and grew louder. The lights came on slowly, so that the boxes faded a little, their magic retreating. People at the front turned to face us and Martin stood up beside me, stiff, uncomfortable. I applauded and Molly stood up to kiss Martin on the cheek, and then he leaned down and kissed me, and everyone just stood there clapping. Molly sat back down and I watched Martin taking it in, and after a few moments of smiling, his face tired and he dropped it, and then the three of us remained there, waiting for it all to end.

Back at the house, we tossed our coats over the back of the brown couch and Martin went straight to the back door, murmuring, Back in a minute. Molly turned to me, surprised, but I’d learned to smile inwardly at these abrupt withdrawals. It was one of the things we fought about, but I’d learned to stash my frustration with this behaviour in the Unchosen Battles part of my mind. Sometimes he told me what was on his mind at these times, or he just didn’t; I learned to live with this spectacle of concealment. I always imagined that from it emerged the things that I loved, the general peace of the rest of our lives together, his art, his self. I waved off Molly’s expression of confusion and said, He’ll be just a second. She shrugged and joined me in the kitchen. It was dusk now, that light that presses distances together and makes the world look like a charcoal drawing. I poured us both some of the sherry Molly had brought — we were already a bit drunk, but a little more wasn’t going to hurt. The light in Martin’s shed blinked on, and we could see his shadow behind the high smoky window. A misty fog coming off the river was drifting through the yard and the light from the window hung in it like something solid.

Trouble in Paradise? Molly said.

No … it’s just. This is actually normal.

Normal.

Well, I’m used to it, I said.

She looked back out toward the shed. It’s funny what we can get used to.

It’s not a big deal. I put my hand on hers. Don’t be insulted. It gives us a few minutes to catch up, see? I led her into the front room and we sat on the couch. It really has been a long time, I said. Molly sipped from her sherry, distracted.

You know, she said, looking over the tops of her glasses at me. I haven’t seen you in about two years, but I haven’t seen him in five.

Well, you never —

Exactly. I didn’t wait five years to meet Martin only to have him go have a sulk on me.

He’ll be back in two secs, I said, but she’d already gotten up.

I have my ways, she said, smiling sweetly, and she put her drink down with a faint clink on the glass table in front of us. Before I could say anything, she went out where Martin had gone out just minutes before and started crossing the grass. I rushed to the door and stood on the verge, watching her stride across the now-dark lawn toward the faint yellow light at the back of the property. I was trying to get past the stunned feeling so I could find the thing to say that would stop her in her tracks, but before I could manage it, she reached the door and simply opened it. Then went in and closed it behind her. I stood frozen to the spot, feeling the bite of the cool misted air, my mouth stuck open.

Shortly, across the small expanse separating me from the shed, I heard soft voices. Calm, quiet voices, floating in the air between there and here. Never mind frog-marching her out of there, he was actually talking to her. He didn’t
mind
that she had invaded that silence I had always, so assiduously, honoured. This was a different silence than my father’s, and maybe I had misread it. I stood in the doorway separating me from these two people I loved and it felt like my heart would just stop beating.

My father’s silence had sunk my childhood house in impenetrable gloom; it was a silence I disturbed at my peril, not because my father was prone to violent reactions of any sort but because if roused, he was capable of starting off on terrifying tangents. He might ask if I thought the couches in the house ought to be recovered, or if there were any churches I wished to join (and it seemed to him the more the better, saturated, as he must have thought I was, with my mother’s inclination to sin). So I left him to stew, and stew he did, until he died of it. Standing there in my adult home, I wondered if the outcome of our unhappy life in Ovid would have been any different if I had charged into my father’s room and made him speak to me. What if I had forced that connection on him, that same angry reaching-out that Molly was forcing on Martin now? Was I capable of that? And was it courage or selfishness? With my father, I’ll never know if I could have saved him from his grief. It may be simple why. I may have lacked — I may still lack — the humanity.

I put on a pleasant face and began crossing the lawn. I came at an angle that closed off the light from the single window, and then gently wheeled in toward it so that it burst gold in my eyes like the light in the honeycomb had. I called out to them as I approached, anxious that I sounded as though I was going to catch them in something, although I couldn’t imagine what (she may have been beautiful, but Martin’s fidelity was something I never questioned). As I came round toward the door, it opened and Martin stepped out.

I was just about to come and get you, he said. I saw Molly behind him stepping out into the dark beside the door. Martin put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me. Rescue me, he said quietly.

I was just thinking you might need some help.

He took my hand and reached for Molly’s. She brought one hand out from behind her back to take his, and smiled childishly. Does this mean we’re not done yet? she said.

It’s an evening of firsts, he said. Let’s see how many people we can get in this thing. He led us both back inside.

Entering the shed with them made me anxious because of my own misdemeanors. It wasn’t true that I wasn’t allowed in Martin’s workplace (I’d said that to take the sting out of the potential insult to Molly); I’d been in there with him many times. But when he was out of town, it was assumed I would not go in there by myself. However, with as long as two weeks at a time between visits, I went in frequently, and being able to be among the things that he loved made the wait bearable. I even told myself that he probably knew I did this, since the keys were so obviously accessible, and he’d never actually
told
me not to go in. I’d started small, opening the door and just standing in the verge, like I was now. And then, later, actually entering. And finally, in recent months, sitting and doing as I pleased, opening drawers, taking things out, turning both finished and unfinished things over in my hands, even opening them and touching the objects inside. I’d cracked the rim of a clay bowl in one of them, and knowing Martin had a box full of them — bought in New York City a number of years back for next to nothing — I removed the broken bowl and glued down a fresh one in its place. Each time I left the shed, I left it exactly as I’d entered it, and went back into the house with a queer mix of guilt and satiation. As if there were something in the sin itself that was needed, as well as the pleasure of being there, alone, as it were, with him.

Well? What’s been the subject of conversation? I probably have a few things to add to it, whatever it is.

Just life, said Molly, turning. She smiled at me.

Art, said Martin.

Yes, we were talking about
art
, Molly said mockingly.

Really?

Molly was just telling me she’s a fan.

Well we all know that, I said, and I smiled.

Stranger things had happened somewhere, I was sure, but not here. Molly walked past both of us to where floor-to-ceiling shelves on either side of the door were stacked with finished artworks. It was the least-safe place in the world to keep such things, I’d told Martin numerous times. But for him they were not “artworks” the way the world thought of them; they were references and guides and records of something that was always in progress, that he constantly referred to. It made no sense to him to keep them “safe.”

The shed wasn’t much bigger than four outhouses set up in a square, but he’d made the most of the space. There was a single old typesetter’s stool that could wheel across the smooth tin floor. Opposite the door was a deep shelf taking up the whole wall, at lap level, which served as his workspace. A variety of things in different stages of completion rested on it. Above the shelf, dark cubbyholes labelled with Dymo tape labels — dowels, 3 inch–8 inch, rings and balls, glass, lenses (although it said lemses), hinges, dowels, 1 inch–3 inch, screws, nails — the latter two of which were in bottles.

Each of the other two walls had a library catalogue drawer against it. These were labelled alphabetically and contained small objects and pictures from everywhere — from postcards to magazines and comic books to stamps to advertising and photographs.

Even graphic police and morgue images, none of which had found a home in his work yet but suggested a bewildering openness to unforeseen change. The pictures, and the little toys and bits of fabric and pieces of broken things, were organized by genus and contained in #3 envelopes with holes punched out of the bottoms so they would fit on the pipe slides in the bottoms of the drawers. Upon opening the drawers for the first time, I had the impression of entire worlds labelled and laid out in white rows. The levels of organization stunned, and even frightened, me. If Martin wanted a picture of a leopard frog, for example, there were perhaps a half-dozen to choose from. He’d have them in a single envelope behind a card that said “Amphibians, Freshwater,” which was in a set of six drawers labelled “Non-mammalian,” which was in a section five rows wide called “Animals,” which was itself in the cabinet labelled “Sentient” on the left side of the shed, which he had designated “Natural.” It faced the other cabinet, with its own complex taxonomies, which was labelled “Man-made.”

Above the drawers, now directly behind where I was standing, there were cubbyholes on both sides, the ones on the right containing manufactured things of every variety — dollheads, coins, cans, apothecary bottles, tintype photographs, the clay bowls, and so on. The left held things mainly found on walks — driftwood, birds’ nests, dead insects, moss, bark, hay, stones, sand in bottles, quartz. The contents of the shed had been collected everywhere, but gradually Martin had been bringing down what he had in Toronto as well, and now the two workplaces each contained about half of what he had, as far as I understood it. Around us, on the walls and on the desk in front of us, was the complicated jumble of all the things that got drawn down into his work.

Martin must have told Molly she could look at whatever she wanted, because she was taking things off their shelves, plucking them like she was finding coins in the street. Soon, she had more than a dozen of them out, and they faced us, their glass fronts reflecting us and the night behind. Many, of course, I had seen and knew well, not just because I’d looked at them in here but because Martin had kept them in the house from time to time (he said it helped to see them out of the corner of his eye), and many of them had been on public display. There was Linwood Flats and The Curtain, Sunken and Universe. Voluptuaries (the first thing Martin ever made specifically for me, it was full of butterflies hidden behind twigs), Childhood Game, and Downstairs.

Molly whistled low and then sat down in Martin’s chair and looked at the boxes, and they looked like a row of front windows in houses, arrayed there. Let’s turn off the light, she said, and Martin did, and when our eyes adjusted, the moon was throwing the shadows of things onto the backs of the boxes. Molly was breathing them in and I looked back at Martin and he was leaning against a shelf on the back wall and watching Molly with a look of Sunday-morning pleasure on his face. Then he closed his eyes, and his face went to stillness. I realized I could relax, I was here with permission, and I stepped up with Molly and breathed them in too. Pine resin and cold iron and moss. In Childhood Game, a crank on the side moved a row of colourful animal faces along a track, like the targets in a shooting gallery. A plate of smoked glass below revealed the underside of the game, family photos pasted onto the targets. (Two separate chains made it look like the animal heads, sinking out of sight, transformed into real people upside down — I’d opened the back of this box with a screwdriver and marvelled at its construction, at the fact that, somehow, Martin would know how to make something like this.) Molly had one hand on her chest and her fingertips over her mouth. They really are beautiful, she said.