No Dark Valley (14 page)

“Stuff,” Celia said. “Definitely stuff.” She was in the middle of checking her e-mail. As usual, there were a dozen or more messages she could delete without opening.

Ollie grunted and held the photo of the ovals out at arm's length in front of him. He studied it for a long time, then set it down flat on the desk and stood up to look at it from above. The first time she had looked at the photos, Celia had wondered if
Under Glass
was some sort of loose interpretation of what the artist remembered seeing under a microscope, but she knew better than to suggest such a thing to Ollie, Craig, or Tara. She had come to this job knowing you didn't try to find a
picture of something
in every piece of art. She remembered at least that much from her course in art appreciation at Blackrock College.

Ollie studied another couple of photos, even turned them around in circles to see them from every direction. Tara's method of looking through artists' photos or slides was cursory compared to Ollie's. “I see fast,” she was fond of saying. “I can tell at a glance if it's right.” And Craig fell somewhere in between Ollie and Tara. He would look through them once very quickly, then go back through a second time a little more slowly, and then zip through one last time.

The three owners had agreed years ago that they had to be unanimous in their decision to invite an artist for a show, and so far they had stuck with it, though not without some sparks of conflict. Whenever one of them disagreed with the other two, Celia always heard about it for days. The dissident might come to her privately and complain, “I don't know what they're thinking. It's all so
imitative
.” And one of the other two might sigh and say something like “Well, when the guy becomes famous, we'll remember we had our chance to give him a show.”

Ollie propped a photo up against the ivy plant on the desk and stepped back to look at it. “Sometimes stuff can translate into money, though, you know,” he said to Celia.

“Not this stuff,” she said.

“You never know,” Ollie said. “Friend of mine in Ohio told me his cousin found an early Jasper Johns wrapped up in a beach towel in his aunt's attic when they were cleaning out her house. A
Jasper Johns
! Totally bizarre, he said, because the aunt was supposedly this conservative teetotaler fanatic, some kind of foot-washing Plymouth Brethren sect or something, so what was she doing with a Jasper Johns?”

“Evidently hiding it,” Celia said. She opened an e-mail from a collector in Raleigh who was looking to buy an Edmund Yaghjian painting, preferably an oil, and had heard Trio might have one. She began a reply, telling the woman they had had a Yaghjian show the year before but had returned all the unsold works to the family. Trio had an address where the collector could write, and Celia stopped for a minute to look it up.

Ollie picked up the photo from beside the ivy and brought it up close to his face, then returned it to the stack. “‘Severely tacky tastes,' my friend said. The aunt was an art collector but didn't have an eye. The whole house was pure kitsch top to bottom, but then she had this phenomenal piece of real art sitting up in her attic all wrapped up in a towel.” Ollie picked up another photo and held it above his head, then looked up at it, turning it around and around as he did so. “So you never know, Cecilia. You never know what might turn up in your so-called
stuff
.”

Ollie was the only person Celia knew who ever called her by her full name. He had told her once that as a boy he had dreamed of marrying somebody named Cecilia because he had so admired St. Cecilia, the martyred patroness of music. In high school he had even painted a picture of St. Cecilia in her legendary pose of playing the organ. He had entered it in the Virginia Young Artists Expo and won first place. But then Connie had come along shortly after high school, and he had given up on his dream of marrying a Cecilia, though he still loved the name. Celia was quite sure that her name had gained her favor in Ollie's eyes when she was first interviewed for her job at Trio.

“Well, I knew my grandmother,” Celia said now, “and I can safely say there's no Jasper Johns in her attic.” She laughed. “No attic even.”

After he had looked at all the photos, Ollie told Celia that he voted yes for booking the artist for a show. He already knew that Craig agreed, because Craig was the one who had first seen the artist's work in Winston-Salem and suggested they contact him. Celia had predicted when she first saw the photos herself that all three owners would vote yes. She almost always guessed right, and more than once Craig had suggested in his terse way that they just let Celia make the final decision since she knew their minds so well by now. He really disliked anything extra that took up his time, especially looking through slides or photos of other artists' work.

“If Tara bucks us on this one, she needs to have her head examined,” Ollie told Celia on his way out. Tara had been the lone holdout against another artist recently, a woman from Savannah whose specialty was moonscape collagraphs in browns, grays, and blacks. Though Celia never said so, she was glad Tara had voted no on that one. The thought of looking at all those dark colors and pocked surfaces for six solid weeks hadn't appealed to her in the least.

She was finishing her e-mail business a few minutes later when the phone rang.

“Craig here,” the voice said brusquely. She would have recognized his voice anyway. “Need you to do something,” he continued. Craig never wasted time chitchatting. “I'm coming by today to pick up my Madonna. Is it still out?”

“Uh, I don't . . . no, I don't think so,” Celia said. She pretended to be having trouble remembering, though she knew very well it was in a storage bin, not out on display.

“Well, find it if you can. It'll save me some time. I'm in a hurry.” As if that were anything new, Celia thought. Craig sometimes stopped by the gallery for a minute, literally, and then was gone. But before she could say anything, she realized Craig had already hung up. Nothing new about that, either. Phone etiquette wasn't one of Craig's strong points, nor any other kind of etiquette for that matter.

With a sense of dread, she went back to the workroom and climbed up on a ladder over by the topmost bin. She might as well get it over with now. Underneath the dread, though, was another feeling—happy anticipation that the painting was going to leave the gallery. She would find it and set it by the back door, and that way she probably wouldn't even have to speak to Craig, which would suit them both. While Ollie sometimes dropped by the gallery just to talk, Craig never did. Craig was one of those men who seem to be engaged in a lifelong contest to see if they can use fewer words today than they did yesterday. Before long he would be down to grunts and hand gestures. It was remarkable to Celia that he was a teacher. She knew he couldn't be a very good one, since teaching required communicating. Of course, maybe he took on a different personality in the classroom, though she seriously doubted it.

Celia did try to rotate these things on the top shelf regularly, although because of their larger size, the inconvenience of getting to them, and the extra trouble and space required to hang them, it was very tempting to skip over them. She dutifully kept track, though, and kept careful records in a file named “Circulation.” Only a few times had she deliberately skipped a turn for a certain painting. Celia felt a pang of guilt now as she scanned the frames in the top bin, for the Madonna was one of the pieces she knew she hadn't been fair with. It had been hidden away up here for a long time.

When Craig had first completed it four years ago and brought it to the gallery, she had instantly hated it, though she generally liked Craig's work more than either Tara's or Ollie's. She had hung the Madonna but had left it on display a shorter time than she usually did with single new works by the gallery's small stable of artists. She generally gave the three owners an even longer exhibit time if a work didn't sell, but she had made an exception with this one. She remembered the great relief of taking it down and storing it away on the highest shelf in the back.

She couldn't have gotten away with it had it been one of Tara's or Ollie's own works, but she had taken advantage of the fact that Craig so rarely came by the gallery and appeared to be in another world when he did come. He seemed so detached from everybody and everything, even his own art. As soon as he finished a painting, he either gave it away or dropped it off at the gallery, thereby divorcing himself from that one so he could immediately take up with a new piece.

He had told Celia once, in one of the few real conversations they had ever had, that he lived to paint and that what happened to the painting after he finished it wasn't of much consequence to him. It was the immediate pleasure of the creative process that “keeps the blood coursing through my veins.” Those were the exact words he had said to Celia before standing up and walking out the door to get in his old green wood-paneled Chevy station wagon.

He lived with his mother and never mentioned a girlfriend. Not once had he seemed to notice that Celia was unmarried and available, for which she was glad, since she wasn't at all interested in dating him. He had a wispy mustache and an annoying habit of sucking on his teeth as if food were trapped between them. She had often wondered how he related to students and if they made fun of him behind his back. He taught at Harwood, a private college over near Spartanburg.

For a teacher he was quite prolific in his output, but Celia doubted that he had any idea how many unsold pieces he had in storage or loaned out to friends. For him to ask specifically about one of his paintings, therefore, was very unusual.

Some of these bigger pieces were heavy, but she knew the Madonna wasn't. It was actually quite light for its size. She spotted it now among the others, its slender gold frame looking out of place, even though it was just right for the piece. As she lifted it down, she felt her pulse quickening. It might have been out of her sight for a long time, but she had never gotten it out of her mind. She would see it most often at night in her dreams. She had put it up in the top bin partly for its size, of course, but also to get it as far away from her as possible.

She thought of a plan for right now. She wouldn't look at the painting directly. She would lightly brush it off with the feather duster, but she would not actually look at the picture itself, only at the frame and the very edges of the canvas. This was also how she had coped with it when it had been on display four years ago. She couldn't always avoid passing by it, but she could avert her eyes.

She turned the piece around backward and set it on the floor against a cupboard, then climbed back up the ladder. While she was at it, she might as well look through the other paintings up here. There was a large gouache and pastel of a mountain stream she remembered—one of Ollie's works, in fact, done during his early years before he had entered what he called his architectural phase.
Little Tweed Creek
, it was named. She would get that one down and put it back out.

Several minutes later she had moved things around in one of the small side galleries to accommodate two of the large works she had selected from the top bin. It would be a little crowded, but that was okay. She would be taking some other things down soon anyway, and she had a buyer for the carousel painting, so that one would be leaving in a few days.

Besides the Madonna and the mountain stream, she had also taken from the top bin a large enamel on canvas that reminded her of several magnified black Rorschach blots on a very pretty patterned field of blues, greens, and yellows. She had never understood why no one had bought the piece, cryptically titled
The Deep Twenty
. It was one of the few she had expected to be adopted quickly but had instead been stranded at the orphanage.

Tara had flatly declared
The Deep Twenty
too symmetrical, and Ollie was sure the artist had inadvertently hung it upside down. It would be a much stronger piece, he had argued, if the large blue background square were at the bottom instead of the top. When it was first displayed, he would stand in front of it, then lean over and contort himself sideways so he could study it upside down. “Yep, that's better,” he would say. He even mentioned it to the artist one time, a cadaverous, scary-looking woman whose blond hair was about an inch long all over, but she made it very clear that she had
not
mistaken the top of the painting for the bottom.

Celia hung
Little Tweed Creek
above a collection of ceramic pots on a low shelf, and
The Deep Twenty
right above it, between the carousel painting and a crazily stitched fabric piece in three panels titled
sun moon stars
, a work which Tara scorned as “crafty,” meaning it wasn't her idea of true art. This particular room was what Celia called her eclectic room—no unifying theme or common medium, just some miscellaneous things she liked most.

As she headed back to the workroom to get the Madonna ready for Craig to pick up, she kept concentrating on breathing deeply and steadily. She imagined her fingertips glowing red where she had touched the frame while getting it down. She gave herself a speech consisting of several short points, which she numbered as they came to her: (1) It's just a picture in a frame. (2) Treat it like merchandise. (3) Think about other things. And her final point was emphatic: (4) Don't look at it!

The Madonna piece—titled simply
Mother and Child
—was a batik, a laborious procedure of printing fabric using wax and dyes, adding one color at a time. The colors on this one were gorgeous muted maroons, purples, golds, jeweled greens, and blues. It had a mottled, somewhat fractured look, like stained glass. In fact, the Madonna herself appeared to be sitting in front of a stained-glass window of sorts, large blocks of dark, rich colors through which a mellow light diffused. The whole scene looked soft around the edges, slightly out of focus.