The Eye of the Beholder Read online

  “I may not know John Wright, but I know what I like. This is well within our budget, what do you say we buy this for the wall right by the kitchen island?”

  I thought about sitting at the island, marking, and being able to look up at the joy in this splash of flowers.

  “Yes, that would be perfect!” So this is what my mother had been hoping for, that bright moment when you connected over a piece of art. Steve and I beamed at each other, and he waved the waiter over to see what the mechanisms were to purchase one of their collection.

  We would need to wait three weeks to pick up our painting, but we happily watched the waiter put a red sticker onto the sign beside it, denoting it was sold. We left the restaurant feeling well fed and pleased with ourselves.

  “There are three galleries on this side of the street, or do you want to pick up where we left off and do the full circuit?”

  “Let’s go back to where we left off. I don’t get down here often enough to skip over any of it.”

  “Well, remember, your parents won’t mind if we don’t spend all their money right away. We can go at this over some length of time.”

  “For sure. I don’t want to buy just because we need a painting to match the sofa. I never want to be those people.”

  Steve laughed.

  “Don’t worry. I don’t think you could even pretend to be that sort of person.”

  We caught the walk light and went back across 124th Street and up the block to where we had stopped to forage for lunch. There were two more glass-fronted shop galleries that held nothing that wowed us. We left the second ten minutes after entering. Steve looked down the block.

  “There is just this one little house left, and then we need to cross over to the Lando Gallery to head back on the other side.”

  “Are you sure this house is a gallery?”

  Steve pointed to the sign, saying “Abernathy’s Gallery,” which indicated the entrance to the gallery was down a small set of stairs. A young woman all in black met us near the door, and welcomed us in.

  “We are a collective of new artists, students and new immigrants. The mandate is to introduce new names to the public and offer new artists that first leg up in their gallery careers. However, we are not affiliated with the University or any particular art school. Shows are curated as in any other professional gallery.”

  I liked the idea behind the gallery immediately. It reminded me a bit of the Art Walk that happened in Old Strathcona annually, where local and upcoming artists and craftspeople purchased outdoor sites all along Whyte Avenue and a couple of side streets, and sold their pieces directly to the street traffic pedestrians who wandered the length of the avenue, looking for new work.

  We moved into the gallery, which was indeed in the basement of an old house. The first room was the largest, and held some white sculptures of the human form with an unfinished air to them. They were white stucco over fabric, with metal chicken wire sticking out of one edge or another. Then I realized that hanging behind the chicken wire was a shiny, perfect red or brown organ—heart or liver—and the opening was there for us to see it. I wasn’t sure what I was meant to take from these shambling mummies, or where I could put one in our living room, even if I’d wanted to.

  On the walls were multimedia pieces either by the same artist, or his friend in internal anatomy, with photos of hearts and lungs placed in paintings of nudes, with collaged bits of Grey’s Anatomy glued on. While it was an interesting commentary on how we objectify the human body, it wasn’t necessarily something I could live with comfortably on my walls.

  We moved in toward the back of the gallery and the rooms got smaller. I suppose it had been a basement suite in another lifetime, this area we were wandering through. The hall had a series of paintings that were quite cunning. One small section of the canvas contained a shiny photograph of a tea cup, and the rest of the canvas was painted in relation to the placement of the photo. In some cases, it was a logical extension, such as on a counter amid dirty dishes, or with other tea cups on a coffee table. In others, the painted section took on a surreal aspect, but still logical in some weird way. I liked the one in which the tea cup was set on the side of a sick bed, with tissues and books and cough syrup and what seemed to be a huge werewolf hand reaching for it. Steve didn’t seem all that interested in them, and I wasn’t thrilled enough to want any of them on my own hallway walls, so I moved along, too.

  In what might have been the basement bedroom, we came across a splash of colours that took us both back to our time in Mexico. There was an homage to Kahlo, with a woman sitting like Kahlo in her ornately embroidered, colourful clothing, but with a mirror in place of her face.

  Another piece showed several female figures dressed like Kahlo, standing one behind the next in front of a blue wall. It reminded me of the house Kahlo lived in next to her husband’s that I had just been reading about. Were all the women Frida herself? Or were they other women inspired to be artists because of her initial vision? A third painting was a study of male human figures, one dark haired man who looked vaguely familiar sitting at a ninety degree angle from the viewer, a stockier red-headed younger man standing with his back to the artist holding a sombrero in one hand, and a young blond in the bottom right whose hair flopped over his face as he kneeled forward on an intricately woven rug, making him impossible to identify. The first two figures were less articulated than the females in the previous painting, with more cartoonlike limbs and very strong shoulders, but the colours were similar and they were in front of a blue background, like the Casa Azul blue wall. The blond man’s arms had more in common with the women in the other painting than the other two men he was sharing a frame with. It was as if Diego Rivera had leaned over and tried to add some people into his wife’s painting. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen a painting with two warring styles on the same canvas.

  “Have you ever felt like you were living an example of gestalt so clearly?” I asked Steve, who was also drawn to the Frida-esque paintings. “We go to Mexico. We see a Frida exhibit. We decide to buy art. We see Frida everywhere. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of Kahlo’s work before, but suddenly she is everywhere.”

  Steve was peering at the information besides the three paintings.

  “Here’s another element of gestalt or synchronicity, or coincidence, if you want to believe in that. Guess who painted all three of these paintings?”

  “Oh no,” I said, jumping to the awful conclusion just as Steve nodded.

  “Yep, this is work by Kristin Perry, and being deceased, I am sure their value just went up.”

  16

  I took photos of the paintings while Steve went to talk to the girl in the gallery. I emailed the photos to Steve so he could forward them to Iain and the Mexican police working the case back in Puerto Vallarta.

  These paintings had been hanging since the beginning of February, and were slated to be rotated out on March 15, when the gallery would have a new show starting. While the gallery girl knew the tea cup painter personally, she only knew of the other artists, including Kristin Perry, by name. The gallery owner was connected to the Fine Arts Department at the University of Alberta through a friendship with some of the faculty, and regularly showed student work. That was all she knew, but diligently wrote out all the names and numbers Steve requested, the first being the gallery owner, Drake Abernathy, and the other students being displayed. Steve reasoned they might be in Kristin’s class and would be useful people to question.

  I sat on a small wrought iron stool near the door waiting for him, and took a photo of a poster behind the door, detailing the shows for the first half of the year. All the artists’ names were listed, but only one work was featured. This was one of the white sculptures with the shiny heart showing through the exposed chicken wire chest. Granted, it was big and memorable, but not to my mind one of the most interesting things in the gallery. I peered at the show prior to t
his. The featured work then had been a wooden heart covered in milagros, those little metal blessing favours that looked like feet or hands or hearts or donkeys that people used as prayers in Mexico, in a sort of combination of Catholicism and some earlier religion. It was not like the valentine heart we’d bought, more like the sacred hearts that Catholic statues held. I wondered which of the listed artists had also been focused on Mexico, and whether they had anything more in common with Kristin. Maybe they had connected while they were pulling down their displays and she was putting up the new work. I zoned in on the list, and snapped another picture, hoping the close up feature on my phone would make the tiny print legible. Steve might be interested in those students, too.

  We finally left the gallery, climbing the narrow concrete stairs out front, and found ourselves back on 124th Street. My interest in art galleries had waned considerably, as had Steve’s. We made our way back to his car, and headed home.

  Back in the condo, I put on the kettle for a pot of tea, and Steve got on the phone with Iain. It looked like his day off was going to get whittled away if we didn’t watch out. I went over my notes for Monday’s lectures and took the shoe buffer to my black boots. In just another month and a half, I’d be able to push my boots to the back of the closet, but these days they were all I would wear, morning and night. There was no point in creating outfits that couldn’t handle tall leather boots or grippy short booties, because although Grant MacEwan was entirely interconnected with pedways between the buildings, getting there was another matter. From where we lived, I either took a bus, which only came within five blocks of the campus, or I walked a mile back to the university LRT stop and caught the train. Either way, I was going to be walking through a winter wonderland of slush, ice, snowdrifts and/or grime for quite a distance.

  Fortunately for me, my wardrobe didn’t favour much more than boots in the winter and flats or sandals in the summer. It wasn’t that I hadn’t inherited the shoe-buying gene, I think it was just that the book-buying gene was so much stronger.

  Having checked on my wardrobe for the coming week, I wandered back out into the kitchen where it seemed Steve was still talking to Iain. I got a bit closer and realized he was reading something in Spanish into the phone. He must have decided to contact the Vallarta police after getting Ana Maria de Valle, a bilingual Edmonton police officer, to translate what he needed to say. Iain had conscripted Ana Maria from the downtown station the minute Steve had called back to Edmonton with the news of the Canadian connection in the crime, and she was proving very useful as a conduit. She had been translating for Iain, who was taping everything the Mexican detectives said over the phone, and Steve was using her to make sure the material shared in return was received accurately.

  I saw him turn on the small recorder he kept in his kit, and sure enough I could soon hear very fast Spanish coming through the receiver. I tiptoed off to the living area to make myself useful by taking notes on what had earlier been my relaxing reading material.

  Now, of course, it was an obligation, and as a result, lost quite a bit of its lustre as entertainment. This was likely how my students felt diving into novels I’d lovingly placed on syllabi. Oh well. I brought out a notepad, and roughed out the earlier part of the book as I recalled it from my initial reading.

  Frida had been a bit of a tomboy, or else was trying to please her father who had wanted a son, but she had polio in her leg as a child. Her father pushed to make her compensate for her issues by striving to be faster and better in every way. She was an eager and bright student from the sounds of things, until she was injured severely in a bus crash when she was eighteen. She spent more than a year in a body cast, and would suffer thirty operations throughout her life to deal with a broken back and excruciating pain.

  Her handicaps became her strengths. While the rest of the female intelligentsia and art set in Mexico were wearing the same body-skimming styles as the rest of the early twentieth century, she adopted traditional Techuana styles of dressing, with long full skirts and blousy, embroidered tops to mask her medical corsets and her shorter leg. After she died, Diego Rivera ordered all her clothing packed up and locked into a room in the Blue House until fifteen years after his death. Eventually, an exhibit of her clothing, smelling of tobacco and turpentine, went on display at the Frida Kahlo museum in Mexico City.

  She painted her corsets, which she wore to help her tortured spine, to take ownership of her situation. She also turned to self-portraiture not from ego, but because of all her time spent in solitary confinement in her bedchamber. She said that she herself was the subject she knew the best.

  Her famous strong eyebrowed self-portraits were often tortured with arrows or missing parts. In some ways, while delineating her own personal pain, she was also speaking to Mexico’s search for independence and autonomy, and tying an umbilical cord between the Mexico of the milagros and peasant revolts and the atomic age holding a promise of world unification.

  She was a fascinating person full of contradictions, as so many of the most interesting people are. I could certainly see why a young visual artist would be inspired by her, so much so that she spent her spring break week in Mexico, soaking in the ambiance that had created a Frida.

  Of course, Kristin’s holiday plans could have been entirely coincidental. After all, it wasn’t as if she was making an accurate Frida pilgrimage. That would have entailed visiting Mexico City and the Casa Azul, which had been the Kahlo family home and then where she and Rivera lived off and on, and was now the Frida Kahlo Museum. Or she would have headed to Cuernavaca where Frida and Diego had spent time after they were first married.

  Maybe she had planned a trip to Puerto Vallarta to coincide with the Fantastic Fridas display that Steve and I had stumbled upon and enjoyed so much. I made a note in the margin of my notepad to remind Steve of that exhibit. Perhaps the Vallarta police could compare a list of the artists in that display to the list of people known to Kristin that Steve and Iain were compiling.

  Maybe it was all a big coincidence that Kristin and her friends had chosen Mexico instead of Hawaii or Florida for their Reading Week destination. After all, flights from Edmonton to Puerto Vallarta were considerably cheaper than any other hot destinations, as Steve and I knew, having made our honeymoon choice very much based on our budget.

  Kristin might have justified the frivolity of a Reading Week party trip by her devotion to Frida, and painted Frida-like work before the fact in anticipation of her vacation. I didn’t think that would be quite enough, though, especially from a student in the visual arts program, where the need to express an artistic vision was required from each student as the work was being undertaken. If Kristin had been painting a la Frida, she would have laid the groundwork for that long before she had purchased a ticket to an all-inclusive on the beach for a week.

  I looked up and realized that Steve was off the phone and working on his laptop instead.

  “Would you be interested in some dinner?”

  He looked up and smiled.

  “So much for a weekend off, eh? My only consolation is that if I get this report in now, I think I can stay away from the office tomorrow.”

  “That sounds worthwhile. Why don’t I whip something up while you finish off there, and we can binge watch something on TV?”

  “You’re playing my song. Am I in your way here?”

  “No, having mastered the concept of cooking with very little counter space, I am still in awe of this island. You are safe there.” I moved around said island and burrowed into the fridge to see what we had in stock.

  In the freezer, I found a bag of green beans and some lean ground beef. I set the meat on a paper towel in the microwave to thaw, and hauled out the eggs and bread that had been in the fridge since before our trip, and a can of mushroom soup from the pantry. After crumbling up three pieces of bread in a bowl, I added the still very cold meat, a raw egg, some Worcestershire sauce, which we had
noticed in Mexico was called Salsa Tipo Inglesa, and undiluted soup. I stirred up everything along with a pinch of salt, and popped it into a loaf pan, one of the few bits of kitchenware that had come with me, since Steve hadn’t owned one, while I had two glass ones and a tin version.

  I sliced some cheddar cheese into strips and laid them across my meatloaf and popped it into the oven. Steve had raved once about my meatloaf, a recipe I had learned in grade seven home economics, so every now and then I hauled it out to feed him what my mother would call “comfort food.” I poured some frozen beans into a pot with a small amount of water and set it on the back of the stove, ready. I wouldn’t start them for another forty-five minutes. I rummaged in a basket at the bottom of the pantry for a couple of baker potatoes, and scrubbed them up and poked them with a fork before popping them into the microwave and setting them to bake for ten minutes.

  Having a microwave was a blast. There had never been room for one in my small kitchen, so I’d done without, but Steve had a powerful one hanging above his stove, which had become one of my favourite tools. No more tepid coffee, no more waiting for one dish to be ready while the others wilted or cooled. The euphoria of the 1980s housewife was mine.

  I set the table with the place mats and matching napkins Leo had sent us for a wedding present. They were red and had black moose walking along the top of the mats, and only one moose on each napkin. They were woven and designed in Newfoundland, where Leo taught, and were likely chosen with the price of postage in mind, but I loved them on sight, and was happy to use them. He had thoughtfully sent along five sets of napkins, so I could toss them into the washing machine and still match the place mats all week long.

  I decided to go all in and pop candles into the crystal heart-shaped candleholders that Valerie had given us. Saturday night meatloaf by candlelight might seem silly, but it was still officially our honeymoon, and I wanted to mark it. Even though Steve’s work had pulled him back early, I didn’t want to lose it entirely. Monday morning would come soon enough.