Catalogue Raisonne (19 page)

But what I saw there made me stop for a longer look.

He had no paintings, no artwork of any kind on his walls. His desk was cluttered with papers, notes and newspapers and magazines and clippings, and some of the papers had made their way up onto his walls. Despite myself, I went into the room to take a closer look. The papers taped to walls – with Scotch tape, which he had to know was hell on paint jobs – were reviews from art shows, clipped from
newspapers and magazines. Photographs included. A couple from the
Globe
, one from the
New York Times
. . . others written in French and what looked like Spanish. A German one on glossy paper. By Neale's standards this statement didn't seem hard to read. In fact it seemed obvious, crude and petulant.
Import the grade of art I can't find around here.
Something like that. It was faintly disappointing, as well as faintly exhilarating, to be finally reading the mystery man so easily.

Not everything came clear. Two poems, mounted like the ones in the surrealist show – black type on laminated white boards – were stuck on one wall. The gesture seemed clear enough, according to the new language I was understanding: he'd lost the argument about including them in the show. But the poems themselves were more elusive. I read them as Sean would have, trying to commit them to memory.

The
Yes, Paul?
voices chased me out long before I could be sure I'd got them. Halfway down the hall, attacked by just as strong but less distinct voices, I hurried back and, snatching a pencil and paper from the jumble on Neale's desk, scribbled the poems down quickly, glancing every line or two over my shoulder.

“That was a short coffee,” Angela said.

“A good one, though,” I said chirpily. But the smile on her face had dimmed.

R
amon showed up at a quarter to five and announced that we were all going to The Tulips to do a wake for Robert. Lars and Leo had already been contacted and would meet us over at the Food Court for a bite beforehand. It was like Mrs. Soames's idea with the flowers: so good, so right, you felt a bit embarrassed not to have thought of it yourself.

The Tulips, two blocks east of James on the south side of King, had a discreetly elegant entrance. Two tall, polished wooden doors with brass handles, a brass plaque affixed to the sandblasted brick at eye level:
Gentlemen's Club.
A greeter – serviceably large but stretching a nice blue suit – standing beside the doors to say again, “Gentlemen.” It might have been this veneer of elegance, combined with the uptown location, that had got up some citizens' noses. The other strip clubs, down on Sherman North or Barton Street, were shabby dives where a forty-year-old took it off with slow, tired grinds, and the only greeter was a homeless drunk panhandling for sherry money.

Inside, with the blare and thump of music, and the little tables and chairs with men's faces locked and staring, or bent together laughing, ignoring the flesh since it wasn't going anywhere – the place reverted to more of the usual trappings. Though not completely. There were touches – dark wainscoting, something like red velvet covering the walls, scrolled and gilded mouldings on the mirror behind the dancer, its surface clean and polished like the brass pole at the front of the stage – that made “peeler
palace
” more than just ironic. Or ironic in a different way at least.

And the flesh. Female flesh. Young and sleek, brown and white and pink and all around. Onstage, between the tables serving drinks, writhing on the table dancer's portable pedestal. Even the new bartender was gorgeous and nearly nude, none of Claudia's problems with the bra-and-thong combo. A shock at first, as always, all the exposed skin after the street of clothes. But amazing, too, how quickly you got used to it. Some of the regulars turning to talk to their buddies out of simple familiarity, if not quite boredom, with the human wallpaper.

That would take some time with these girls. Dark-eyed, gym-toned. From Quebec, said Ramon, who'd filled in once or twice when Piccone had had DJ trouble. Controlled by bikers, he said, and usually dating one. “Muscles or a Porsche,” Sean had muttered over his fried rice at the Food Court. “Muscles
and
a Porsche,” Ramon corrected him. “No touching,” he warned the twins.

“Spaces in front, gentlemen. Or I can give you a table on the upper level,” said another suited greeter inside the door.

Hans took Lars and Leo down to the three chairs in droolers' row. Ramon and Sean and I sat at one of the tiny round tables on the second level. Ordered our five-and-a-half dollar beers, an even twenty with tip. At first the twins kept turning to look up at us, embarrassed and excited, like kids sipping their first beers. But then settled down, following Hans's example: the long steady eye-drink.

“Babylon,” Sean muttered, but quietly, the Blake bluster fading. And then just permitted himself, as the poet would surely have done, to feast on the opulence.
The nakedness of woman is the glory of God.
Sean had quoted a lot of things to me, but I remembered that one clearly.

“French . . . from Quebec,” the announcer kept reminding us, between and sometimes over the dancers' music. “C'mon, gentlemen! A little
parlez-vous
in your lap – GIVE IT UP!” Pushing the table dancing. It seemed absurd, but after a few dances I found my eyes straying around the room. It wasn't the lack of beauty, as in the Sherman dives, but the opposite problem: overabundance. Each girl was flawless: taut trim figure, dark sultry eyes, Colgate smile. A little taller, shorter, larger or smaller breasts – despite minor differences, they might have come from lust's cookie-cutter. And the two-dance routines followed a set pattern, too. The first a flirty romp, thrusts and rolls to up-tempo rock. “Start Me Up” came on every third tune. “Jump” and “You Really Got Me” were other staples. Then the slow second set, languid, more like gymnastics. To candle-lit pop: “You Light Up My Life”, “You're The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me”. Shedding the G-string and making more prolonged use of the brass pole and mirror. Ending with the little blanket on the floor, and gymnastics moves – splits and walkovers – giving the room the Iris-eye. Focused at the droolers. Lars and Leo pushed shy bills onto the edge of the stage. Again Hans corrected them: holding a folded twenty between two fingers, letting the dancer squat over his hand and squeeze.

It was incredible. It was boring. It felt incredible to be bored. Some Roman looking for another bunch of grapes while slave girls fuck in front of him. But it wasn't just me. The rest of the room came alive too, responding with claps and cheers, whenever a girl stepped out of line with a witty variation. The one who shadow-boxed, throwing jabs and uppercuts to “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”. The girl in pigtails and baby doll pyjamas, sucking her thumb on the blanket over the Eurythmics' “Sweet Dreams”.

Scanning the room, I saw Rick standing against the wall with his arms crossed. Looking the opposite of sleepy, and doing it in my direction.
Who is this guy?
I thought. The same question I'd been asking since my first sight of him. For the reasons Rick no doubt intended, and for others he couldn't have dreamed of.

“A bouncer,” Ramon read my mind.

“A biker?”

Ramon shrugged. “Could be, man. They don't advertise.”

Who goes home with a skinny girl with bitten-down nails? I thought, and felt guilty for trashing Claudia. But it was another mystery.

“Which one you guys is Sean?” said a woman. She had long brown hair and was wearing a black G-string and bra. Carrying the little round pedestal. It was the shadow-boxer, the mix-it-up twinkle still in her eyes.

Sean, blotching up in the cheeks and dome even in the dim light, was too flustered to react. No words, not even lip twitches. Looking down past his shoulder I saw the twins twisted in their seats, laughing and grinning. Shouting or maybe just mouthing what looked like “Go, Mumbles!” Hans grinning too.

Sean got his dance. Sinuous writhings and wriggles down to within an inch of him from the pedestal. And, given the size of the table, we, along with the patrons close to us, got most of Sean's dance too. In some ways, being the recipient of the smiles and soft words and hot looks from close range could be as much burden as privilege. That was certainly the case now, to judge from Sean's face, which looked more anxious than enthralled. Looking away was rude, but to stare straight
at
? The best place to enjoy it was from nearby.

I
was
enjoying it, when something smashed against my shoulders, clamping hard and yanking me up out of my seat. Before I had a chance to look back, to look anywhere, I was being propelled stumbling through the tables toward the door, knocking people and things out of the way, the hands lifting as well as shoving, an almost floating sensation except for the sharp blows of hitting things. “No touching!” shouted the voice. “No touching, pervert!” By way of explanation for the spilled drinks and toppled tables. And possibly to the staff as well. This wouldn't be the prescribed exit procedure at the Gentlemen's Club. Probably, given the size of the bouncers and the price of drinks, it hardly ever happened.

The suit at the door opened it as we approached, and the hands behind me sent me sailing through the air. I crashed down on three points on the sidewalk. A knee, a hand, my face near one eye. Skin tore off all the slam-down spots, hard jolts followed by more painful scrapes, skin shearing off. I lifted the bad hand, the palm red and bleeding, and got myself over on my side in time to see a leg and foot on a
short backswing. Then the black pointed boot was flying toward my crotch and there was only time to begin rolling forward, just far enough that it thudded into my thigh. A point of incredible arrow-sharp pain, boot driving into bone, waves of nauseous ache rolling outwards from it. An inkling of what I would have felt if the boot had hit its target a few inches north.

“You were warned,” Rick said loudly. About what he didn't say. The other bouncer smirked from the doorway as Rick climbed with his wide-assed, splay-footed walk back inside.

I was still lying gasping on the sidewalk when the others joined me outside. Scuffling a bit in solidarity as they were shoved, though not thrown, through the same doors I'd gone flying through. “Oafs!” Sean brayed after the door had closed.

“Shit, man, you look like shit,” said an L, sounding impressed.

The rest of Robert's wake was less eventful, though it went on a while. Hans begged off, saying that he'd had “enough thrills for one night, boys.” The rest of us continued down King Street to Ramon's apartment, a walk-up over Book Villa across from Denninger's. It was only a few blocks, but I was limping badly by the time we got there. The pain jolting in my leg with each step was bad enough that I wondered for a moment if the bone was broken. Then realized that I wouldn't be able to stand, much less walk, with a fractured femur.

To the twins' repeated question – “Why, man? Why?” – I had no answer. But neither did I think it was a huge mystery. Rick felt a need to assert himself over me. Because of Claudia? Because he'd had a bad day? Who knew? You didn't survive as a Rick by analyzing the drive to dominate.

Cleaning myself up in Ramon's washroom, I assayed the damage in the mirror. My left hand had taken the worst of it. White shredded skin with blood still oozing between the strips. Soap hurt it, water hurt it, any movement of the fingers hurt it. There was something bad I wanted to do to Rick. So bad, and so badly, I couldn't decide on what it should be. Just misty blurry pictures – of blood, of a huge
face screaming – flitting by. The scrapes on my cheekbone and knee were raw but more superficial, though red and puffing up already. When I lowered my pants I saw an angry red dot on my thigh, surprisingly small, though I knew it would colour and spread in concentric rings.