Murder At The Mendel (2 page)

Inside, all was light and airiness and civility. People dressed in holiday evening clothes greeted one another in the reverent tones Canadians use at cultural events. A Douglas fir, its boughs luminous with yellow silk bows, filled the air with the smell of Christmas. In front of the tree was an easel with a handsome poster announcing the Sally Love exhibition. Propped discreetly against it was a small placard stating that Erotobiography was in Gallery III at the rear of the building and that patrons must be eighteen years of age to be admitted.

Very prim. Very innocent. But this small addendum to Sally’s show had eclipsed everything else. To the left of the Douglas fir, a wall plastered with newspaper clippings told the story: Erotobiography consisted of seven pictures Sally Love had painted to record her sexual experiences.

All the pictures were explicit, but the one that had caused the furor was a fresco. A fresco, the local paper noted sternly, is permanent. The colour in a fresco does not rest on the surface; it sinks into and becomes part of the wall. And what Sally Love had chosen to sink into the wall of the publicly owned Mendel Gallery was a painting of the sexual parts of all the people with whom she had been intimate. Erotobiography. According to the newspaper, there were one hundred individual entries, and a handful of the genitalia were female. Nonetheless, community standards being what they are, the work was known by everyone as the Penis Painting.

The exhibition that was opening that night was a large one. Several of the pictures on loan from major galleries
throughout North America had been heralded as altering the direction of contemporary art; many of the paintings had been praised for their psychological insights or their technical virtuosity. None of that seemed to matter much. It was the penises that had prompted the people outside to leave their warm living rooms and clutch the shafts of picket signs in their mittened hands. It was the penises the handsome men and women exchanging soft words in the foyer had come to see. As I walked toward the wing where Nina Love and I had agreed to meet, I was smiling. I had to admit that I wanted to see the penises, too. The rest was just foreplay.

The south wing of the Mendel Gallery is a conservatory, a place where you can find green and flowering things even when the temperature sticks at forty below for weeks on end. When I stepped through the door, the moisture and the warmth and the fragrance enveloped me, and for a moment I stood there and let the cold and the tension flow out of my body. Nina Love was sitting on a bench in front of a blazing display of amaryllis, azalea and bird of paradise. She had a compact cupped in her hand, and her attention was wholly focused on her reflection. It was, I thought sadly, becoming her characteristic gesture.

That night as I was getting ready for Sally’s opening, I’d heard the actress Diane Keaton answer a radio interviewer’s question about how she faced aging. “You have to be very brave,” she’d said, and I’d thought of Nina. Much as I cared for her I had to admit that Nina Love wasn’t being very brave about growing older.

Until Thanksgiving, when she had come to Saskatoon to help care for her granddaughter, Nina and I had kept in touch mostly through letters and phone calls. I’d seen her only on those rare occasions when I was in Toronto to check on my mother.

Illusions were easy at a distance. I was discovering that up close they were harder to sustain. Nina had aged physically, of course, although I suspected the process had been smoothed somewhat by a surgeon’s skill. There were feathery lines in the skin around her dark eyes, a slight sag in the soft skin beneath her jawline. But that seemed to me as inconsequential as it was inevitable. She was still an extraordinarily beautiful woman.

The problem wasn’t with Nina’s beauty; it was with how much of herself she seemed to have invested in her beauty. I couldn’t be with her long without noticing how often her hand smoothed the skin of her neck or how, when she passed a store window, she would seek out her reflection with anxious eyes.

That night at the Mendel as I watched her bending closer to the mirror in her cupped hand, I felt a pang. But Nina had spent a lot of years assuring me that I had value. Now it was my turn. I walked over and sat down beside her.

“You’re perfect,” I said, and she was. From the smooth line of her dark hair to her dress – high-necked, long-sleeved, meticulously cut from some material that shimmered green and purple and gold in the half light – to her silky stockings and shining kid pumps, Nina Love was as flawless as money and sustained effort could make a woman.

She snapped the compact shut and laughed. “Jo, I can always count on you. You’ve always been my biggest fan. That’s why I was so worried when you were late.” Then her face grew serious. “Wasn’t that terrifying out there?”

Our knees were almost touching, but I still had to lean toward Nina to hear her. Sally always said that her mother’s soft, breathy voice was a trick to get everyone to pay attention to nothing but her. Trick or not, as I listened to Nina that winter evening, I felt the sense of homecoming I always felt when I walked through a door and found her waiting.

At that moment, she was looking at me critically. “You seem to be a little the worse for wear.”

“Well, I walked over, and as my grandfather used to say, it’s colder than a witch’s teat out there. Then I had an encounter with someone exercising her democratic right to jab me in the back with her picket sign.”

“Those creatures out there aren’t human,” she said. “It’s been a nightmare for us. Stuart’s phone rings at all hours of the day and night. I’m afraid to take the mail out of the mailbox. Even Taylor is being hurt. Yesterday, a little boy at play school told Taylor her mother should be tied up and thrown in the river.”

“Oh, no, what did Taylor do?”

“She told the boy that at least
her
mother didn’t have a mustache.”

I could feel the corners of my mouth begin to twitch. “A mustache?”

“According to Taylor, the boy’s mother needs a shave,” Nina said dryly. “But, Jo, I’m afraid I’m beyond laughing at any of this. I really wonder what can be going through Sally’s mind. First she leaves her husband and child, then she makes a piece of art that outrages everyone and puts Stuart in a terrible position professionally.”

“Nina, I don’t think you’re being fair, at least not about the painting. I don’t know much about these things, but from what I read Sally’s a hot ticket in the art world now. That fresco must be worth a king’s ransom.”

“Oh, you’re right about that, and of course that’s what makes Stuart’s position so difficult. He’s the director, and the director’s duty is to acquire the best. But he also has a board to deal with and a community to appease. Sally could have painted anything else and people would have been all over the place being grateful to her and to Stuart. As they should be. She’s an incredible artist. But she has to have her
joke. And so she gives the Mendel a gift that could destroy it. Jo, that fresco of Sally’s is a real Trojan horse.” Nina reached behind her and pulled a faded bloom from an azalea. “I guess I don’t have much sense of proportion about this. It’s been so terrible for Stuart and, of course, for Taylor.”

“But at least they have you, dear,” I said. “I’m sure Stuart would have broken into a million pieces if you hadn’t been there to make a home for Taylor and for him. You didn’t see him in those first weeks after Sally left. He was like a ghost walker. She was the centre of his life …”

Nina’s face was impassive. “She’s always the centre of everybody’s life, isn’t she? Right from the beginning …”

But she didn’t finish the sentence. Stuart Lachlan had come into the conservatory.

“Look, there he is at the door. Doesn’t he look fine?” she said.

Stu did, indeed, look fine. As I’d told Nina, his suffering after Sally left had been so intense it seemed to mark him physically. But tonight he looked better – tentative, like a man coming back from a long illness, but immaculate again, as he was in the days when he and Sally were together.

He was a handsome man in his late forties, dark-eyed, dark-haired, with the taut body of a swimmer who never misses a day doing laps. He was wearing a dinner jacket and a surprising and beautiful tie and cummerbund of flowered silk. When he leaned over to kiss me, his cheek was smooth, and he smelled of expensive aftershave.

“Merry Christmas, Jo. With everything else that’s been going on, the birthday of the Prince of Peace seems to have been lost in the shuffle. But it’s good to be able to wish you joy in person. Your coming here to teach was the second best thing to happen this year.”

“I don’t have to ask you what the first was. Nina’s obviously taking wonderful care of you. You look great, Stu, truly.”

“Well, the tie and the cummerbund are Nina’s gift. Cosmopolitan and unorthodox, like me, she says.” He laughed, but he looked at me eagerly, waiting for his compliment.

I smiled past him at Nina, the shameless flatterer. “She’s right, as usual. Do you have time to sit with us for a minute?”

“No, I’m afraid it’s time for me to make my little talk and get this opening underway. I just came in to get Nina.” Then, flawlessly mannered as always, he offered an arm to each of us. “And of course to escort you, Jo.”

It had been a long time since I’d needed an escort, but when we walked into the foyer, I was glad Stuart was there for Nina. The picketers had come through the door. They couldn’t have been there long because nothing was happening. They had the punchy look of game show contestants who’ve won the big prize but aren’t sure how to get offstage. The people in evening dress were eying them warily, but everything was calm. Then the
TV
cameras came inside, and the temperature rose. Someone pushed someone else, and little brush fires of violence seemed to break out all over the room. A woman in an exquisite lace evening gown grabbed a picket sign from a young man and threw it to the floor and stomped on it. The young man bent to pull the sign out from under her and knocked her off balance. When she fell, a man who seemed to be her husband took a swing at the young picketer. Then another man swung at the husband and connected. I heard the unmistakable dull crunch of fist hitting bone, and the husband was down. Then the police were all around and it was over.

The lady in lace and her husband were escorted to a police car; the protesters were shepherded outside, and the
TV
crews started to pack up. Stuart stood beside me, frozen, like a man in shock. Nina tightened her grip on his arm and said in her soft, compelling voice, “Stuart, it’s up to you to put things right here; you can still set the tone for the evening.
Now go talk to those
TV
people before they go. Put things in perspective for them. Then give one of those witty talks you give, and show the board you’re in charge.”

It was as if someone had flicked a switch in him. He squared his shoulders, straightened his beautiful tie and headed for the cameras.

Nina and I stood together and watched. The show was worth watching. Stu moved into the bright lights at the front of the foyer with the élan of a model in an ad for expensive Scotch, and the speech he made was impressive, full of references to the civilizing power of art, a gallery’s need always to go for the best whenever the best presents itself, a director’s obligation to exercise his professional judgement and the community’s obligation to support that judgement.

Stuart’s face was flushed with the joy that comes when you know that, at a significant moment in your life, you’re putting the words together right, that what you’re feeling and what you’re saying are one and the same. And the icing on the cake was that there were cameras grinding away, recording everything for posterity – or at least for the ten o’clock news.

And then, in just the way that the hour of enchantment ends in fairy tales, the heavy glass doors of the gallery opened and Sally Love walked in. One of the news people spotted her and called out, “Sally’s here.” And that was that. The crowd turned; the cameras swung around to capture her image, and as quickly as they had begun, Stuart’s fifteen minutes of fame were over.

There was always an element of the theatrical about Sally. Part of it, of course, was just that she was so physically striking. She was her father’s daughter in every way. She had Desmond Love’s talent for making art, and she had his looks – the blond hair that seemed to radiate a wild electric energy of its own, the eyes blue as a larkspur flower, the wide and
generous mouth, the long-boned animal grace. And like Des, Sally was always the focal point of whatever room she found herself in. The picture always rearranged itself so that Sally was in the foreground, and that night all of us in the gallery foyer found ourselves suddenly peripheral, background figures in yet another portrait of Sally.

She walked straight to where Stuart was standing with the microphone. She had just come back from New Mexico, and she was wearing a Navajo blanket coat that glowed with the colours of the desert: purple, turquoise, orange, blue. She slipped it off and handed it to Stu. He took it wordlessly. Suddenly he was redundant, no longer the champion of freedom of the arts, just a man holding his wife’s coat, waiting for his instructions.

Sally was wearing an outfit a Navajo woman might have worn to dance in: soft boots of pale leather, an ankle-length red cotton skirt belted with silver and turquoise and a black velvet shirt open at the neck to show more silver and turquoise at her throat. Her heavy blond hair was parted in the centre and tied, just above each ear, in a butterfly-shaped knot, and she touched one of the butterflies as she leaned forward to kiss her husband’s cheek.

“The traditional hairstyle of unmarried women,” she said huskily into the microphone. “With all the hassles this exhibit is causing Stu, I thought I’d better start looking for a new man.” Then she grinned wickedly. “Number one hundred and one.”

There was a burst of nervous laughter. Sally leaned closer to the microphone. “You know, the people outside are having a great time: they’re singing hymns and throwing snowballs. Lots of fun. A couple of people even threw snowballs at me. I think they wanted me to stay out there with them. But I wanted to be in here with you. This is our night. We always say that one of the purposes of art is celebration.
Well, let’s celebrate.” She turned and looked into her husband’s face. “Stu?”