The Eye of the Beholder Read online

  “Diego Rivers, right? Pretentious son of a bitch. We questioned him about his relationship with his students and his push for Mexican primitivism, and he shrugged it all off as if he couldn’t be bothered to look up anyone’s name on a class list, let alone recall anyone. And I am pretty certain he didn’t even recognize me from that food tour, so he could be right about not paying attention to the students.”

  “So he didn’t teach Kristin?”

  “He thought he might have, but couldn’t be sure. His mind was on larger things than naming conventions, or some such blather.”

  “So I take it you two didn’t hit it off?” I giggled in spite of the topic at hand.

  Steve smiled and shook his head.

  “You should have seen Iain trying to hold in his disdain. No, Rivers was not a fave of ours, but he wasn’t the only person we talked to over there that seemed vague. It’s like they are more focused on their own work than that of their students in that faculty. And besides that, he had an alibi in Mexico from his wife and her cousin and his family.”

  “That can be the trouble with working artists, and it’s the same with some research scientists. You aren’t always going to get the blend of academic, practitioner, and teacher that the university assumes every professor will be. It’s a special combination, and sometimes it’s the professors who study and admire, but don’t practice the art or science they lecture on, who are the very best teachers.”

  “So you don’t believe in an artist-in-residence sort of program?”

  I shook my head.

  “I didn’t say that. It can be immensely important for a young writer or painter to connect with a professional working in the field, if only to measure themselves against the reality of the situation rather than some romanticized version of Kirk Douglas shearing his ear off.”

  “You think people go into art because they’ve watched Lust for Life at an impressionable age?”

  “Well, it’s not because they like the smell of turpentine.”

  Steve laughed and I remembered what I wanted to tell him.

  “I just brought this all up because I wanted to let you know Diego Rivers is going to be part of The Works this month. He’s been commissioned to paint a mural by the MacEwan transit station.”

  “Is he? That might be worth looking into. I wonder if he’s going to have anyone apprenticing.”

  “I’m not sure. I am not even sure if he’s going to be painting outdoors at all. The article stressed that it wasn’t a permanent installation, so I don’t know whether that means they’ll just wipe it off the arena wall later or whether it will hang on the wall, to be taken away later.”

  “Interesting.” Steve made a note in his leather-bound notepad that was always with him, and which he set next to his keys by the door, and we moved on to other topics.

  About a week later, I was finished teaching at MacEwan for the morning and answering a text message from Denise, who was suggesting lunch. I decided to head for the LRT station instead of walking, although it would likely have been less effort to walk to the U of A from MacEwan than to walk back to the condo, which I had been planning to do. After all, the High Level Bridge spanning the valley took away the need to climb down one steep hill into the river valley, across the lower bridge and back up the other side of the valley, which was the route home. Still, both routes would take me about an hour, whereas the LRT would get me there in approximately twelve minutes if I got the train immediately.

  I texted her back that I could meet her within an hour, just to give myself leeway. This leg of the train circuit was notorious for being slow. I walked along with a small but steady group of students, through the adjoining buildings that composed the MacEwan campus all the way to the east end, where we cut through a small parking lot toward a crosswalk. The path wound behind a block of apartment buildings that had to be really noisy to live in now that the massive arena had opened beside them.

  Tucked behind the brushed aluminum behemoth of the arena was the LRT station, which was a chilly little station no matter what time of year it was, because the sun seemed to be perpetually blocked by the arena.

  There was no train, meaning I had up to a fifteen-minute wait, though it could be as short as two minutes. I purchased a ticket from the machine and went to stand slightly away from some rowdy students who were hitting each other with their binders.

  Diego Rivers was at work on his mural. The wall had been whitewashed in a huge rectangular space, running at least twenty feet long and about twelve feet high. He looked dwarfed by his “canvas” and I felt suddenly how scary art could be.

  He was taping a long roll of paper up at one end of the whiteness, as if he was hanging wallpaper. He wasn’t at the very end of it, more like four feet in. I moved closer to see what he was doing.

  Very faint pinkish dots could be seen on the first four feet, and once he was satisfied with the placement of his paper, I saw him reach for a pouch and what looked like a big sea sponge. He climbed back on his stepladder and began to hit the paper with the sponge, dipping it into his pouch hanging across his body. Pinkish dust went everywhere, though he was careful not to get it to the right of the paper.

  Suddenly, I got it. He was transferring the pattern for his mural onto the wall by means of stencil. There were tiny holes in the lines he had drawn on the paper, and the pink dust went through the dots and created an outline of what he wanted to create. So that was how someone could keep perspective and lines happening accurately on a huge canvas. I pulled out my cell phone to take a few pictures of the process and the artist in situ. Who knows, Steve might find it interesting.

  Just then the train arrived, and I regretfully pulled myself away from the show. It occurred to me that Diego Rivers had met me. If he or one of his acolytes had killed and staged Kristin Perry, he might think I was spying on him, not just admiring his industry. Just then he turned and looked straight at me. It was as if he could sense I’d been photographing him, but that didn’t seem to bother him. This was a man who craved an audience. And perhaps meeting me hadn’t registered in his self-absorption. Or maybe he knew exactly who I was.

  I shivered and leapt on the train.

  21

  Denise and I were delighted to get some time together, since she too was teaching a spring course, and our timetables had been overlapping. Being on different university campuses didn’t help, either. Denise was pretty certain it was my newly married status that was making me incommunicado, but I assured her that it had more to do with my need to keep up with massive marking schedules than my desire to nest.

  Nesting was fun, though. Steve and I had been rearranging things bit by bit, and I had to hand it to my mom: buying art together was a very good means of rethinking a space for two. We had added a couple of bookcases to the living room, making it automatically homier, in my opinion. If the truth was known, my idea of decorating was more books.

  Denise’s spring class was the survey course on Shakespeare that the theatre students all tended to take as their English option, even though some of the papers almost killed a few of them. She had a relationship with the Drama department through a team course she had taught a couple of years back, and I could tell she enjoyed having practitioners in her class to shake up the focus of the students who were reading Shakespeare as if he was a trial to be got through.

  “We had a big discussion about all the productions that bring the plays into different time periods and what that does to the interpretation, like Richard III wearing jackboots, or Titania looking like a hippie, and I could almost see a couple of heads exploding, because it had never occurred to them that directors and producers put their own stamp on things. Can you imagine being eighteen again, when the whole world contains glorious and magical surprises?”

  “How do you feel about that sort of appropriation?”

  “It doesn’t bother me in the least, if it’s thoughtful
ly done. Mostly, I see that sort of reinvention bringing people back to the immediacy and energy of the text. They are such great stories and such wonderful writing that they can withstand anything. And if putting everyone in Beatle wigs brings you anew to the Bard, I’m all for it.”

  I picked at the dregs of my poutine, and thought about the last few productions I had seen. She was right. The shifting of time periods helped to create the scene anew, so that plays I’d read and seen several times on stage or on film were always a new pleasure.

  “I wonder why it is that I never mind seeing a new production of a Shakespeare play or an opera, and yet I whine about Hollywood remaking European movies or even redoing movies they’ve already done. There’s something about the movies that seems set in stone, I guess.”

  “Well, it’s there, to watch over and over again, whereas a live theatre production is always ephemeral, always changing.”

  “You can extrapolate to the visual arts, too. We get Van Gogh painting several versions of his Sunflowers, and instead of the art world saying, ‘well, here’s the best one,’ or even, ‘well, that’s just him churning out a still life to make some grocery money,’ we look for distinctions between the one in the Netherlands and the one in the National Gallery, even turning that into an art experience. And of course, what about Monet and his endless water lilies?”

  “Or take it a step further. We have artists copying the great masters. We get forgeries. Or we get post-modernist takes on previous works, like Duchamp’s ‘nude descending the staircase,’ or the various versions of Le dejeuner sur l’herbe. I like that one by the Cuban artist where it’s a man who is naked and the women are clothed, but everyone has done a version of that Manet. So what makes that different from redefining the place and time for Hamlet or Othello?”

  Something Denise said twigged something in my mind, but I wasn’t totally clear, not enough to make a quick note and leave it for later. Distractedly, I made my farewells as soon as possible, and went home to pull out my art books.

  Denise had been making comparisons to new ways of looking at Shakespeare with parodies of famous works of art. What if that was what we had been supposed to see when we looked from the bridge at Kristin Perry all set out on the shore, a parody or a reworking of a famous painting?

  Was the book in the beach bag a pointer that we were to look to Frida Kahlo to find our original? Or was that just another part of the setting? A book about an artist?

  The thing was, it could indeed be Frida, because she had painted herself lying in bed or dying so often, being bedridden herself with all her back operations. There was one painting in particular I was recalling, made after her stillbirth, which I wanted to check against my memory of Kristin on the beach.

  I had expanded my interest with Frida to include several books I’d found in secondhand stores, and had even indulged in a book of Frida Kahlo paper dolls. A black and white version of the picture I was recalling was in the original book I’d bought in Puerto Vallarta, the biographical guide to her work and life. It was called Henry Ford Hospital or The Flying Bed, and had been painted in 1932 after her miscarriage. I also had a colour plate of it in another book in my Kahlo library.

  It showed Frida lying naked on an iron bedstead, with a distant Detroit in the background. There is blood on the sheets beneath her and tears running down her cheeks. She holds one hand to her stomach, and six red threads come out of her hand, tied to symbols of her situation. The stillborn baby floats above, her narrow, broken pelvis below, and a model of a uterus on a stand is yet another thing tied to a red thread. The others, an industrial vice grip, a purple flower and, for some reason, a large grey snail, were supposedly sexual images, according to the notations in the books.

  The flower I got. I’d seen enough Georgia O’Keefe and Judy Chicago to understand the flower as vagina. I was also pretty sure the vice was tying the pain she had gone through to her distaste for being in Detroit, or the United States in general. She had been longing to go home while Diego stayed to paint yet another mural for plutocrats.

  But what was the snail all about? I would have to check that out.

  There was another disturbing painting that I marked with a sticky note to show to Steve when he got home. It was called A Few Small Nips and was painted to depict a story Frida had heard about in the news, but was considered to be symbolic of her feeling of betrayal over Diego’s infidelity, after he had an affair with her sister. In this painting, the woman on the bed is definitely dead, and her murderer stands over her, wearing much of her blood himself. She is cut all over, and is naked, apart from one shoe, and a stocking and garter puddled around her ankle. The phrase the husband used at his trial to excuse himself, “unos cuantos piquetitos” is written on a ribbon being held in the air by one white bird and one black bird.

  The more I looked at Frida’s paintings, the more they seemed like intricate clues to a painful revelation. The biggest problem was that the code was out of my cultural context. How odd that I could understand the intricacies of conduct and poetic references several hundreds of years extinct, from the literature I’d studied and absorbed, and yet just down the globe, on the same continent, I couldn’t interpret the rebuses painted, and sometimes even labeled, in painstaking clarity.

  It reminded me of the milagro lady down in Puerto Vallarta, telling our fortune on the heart we’d purchased in her store based on the little brass and tin figures that were hammered into it. Each of those symbols meant something different, and not always what I would have assumed.

  Perhaps Frida was using the same milagro symbol system? I wondered what a snail on our heart would have said to the woman.

  I began to circle some of the notes I had been taking, to get things straight in my mind for discussing with Steve. As I did so, I sketched out the miscarriage painting, and then the little cuts painting. Then, for good measure, I went to get my cell phone from my purse and sketched a layout of Kristin Perry’s murder scene as if it were a painting.

  When you hear old-fashioned or clichéd phrases like “a goose walked over my grave” or “my heart stopped” you may not realize that they accurately represent an exact feeling of dread and clarity. As I looked at the three sketches I’d just made, I felt a pressure on my heart, as if my entire body was trying to impress on me the importance of what I was seeing.

  Kristin’s body had been laid out as if she was a character in a Frida Kahlo painting. Her left hand was placed exactly where Frida’s had been in the Henry Ford Hospital painting. Her right flip flop was on, but no other shoe was in sight, and she was wearing an ankle bracelet on that foot, as well. This had to be a reference to the A Few Small Nips painting. And her belongings: the beach bag, the thermos, the sun tan lotion, the book and the pile of clothes; were all laid out in an arc around her, as if Frida had set them there to signify vital clues.

  What was important about anything beyond the book, though? Steve and the officers in Mexico had been assuming things were laid out to avoid suspicion for as long as possible. The body had been placed to look to the casual viewer like a sun tanner who had staked out a prime position, and was there for the day.

  What if the murderer was saying more with that set up?

  I was up to my elbows in research when Steve got home, and it was lucky I had tossed some beef chunks and potatoes into the stew pot the last time I’d got up to use the washroom, or he’d have gone hungry.

  “Did you know that a bare foot represents happiness and health, but a boot signifies wealth?”

  “Good evening to you, too, darling.” Steve grinned and came over to kiss me and see what I was babbling about. By this time, I’d unearthed several sites detailing milagro ciphers. The little charms were quite elastic in their meaning, from what I had gathered. They could represent exactly what they were in some cases, like a horse meaning you would get a horse, or they could be symbolic in the extreme. That same little horse could translate to
be a journey for another supplicant, or a solid business to someone else. The meanings could be fluid. One thing, though; none of the milagros spelled out misfortune for anyone. They were all seen as positives.

  No one cursed others using holy elements. There was likely some other, darker system for that in ancient Mexico that I’d just never heard about. There always was something, like voodoo from the Caribbean, or herbal witchcraft from the Celts, or the painstaking ways to placate the Julenissen in Norway, or Baba Yaga in the Slavic countries. Eventually, after praying for a miracle to lift themselves fell through, human beings would start to look around and try to bring others lower than themselves.

  If Steve’s instincts were right and this whole business had been a plot to deliberately kill Kristin Perry, then who knows what other symbol systems might have worked their way into the tableau. Maybe the killer hadn’t managed to stick strictly to the symbology that Frida would have followed, but had imported some of his or her own social background.

  Steve and I ate our dinner quietly, mulling things over and putting our minds to rest before a relaxing evening ahead. This was one of the things people rarely spoke about when they extolled the blessings of marriage, the glorious way you could be quiet together. Maybe it was a product of our long courtship, or even our relatively late middle-aged entrance to the union, but the combination of knitting our lives together was turning out to be a very easy pattern to fall into.

  We went to bed around nine-thirty like the party animals we were.

  “What are your plans for tomorrow?”

  “Oh, I was thinking of staying close to home. I have a little bit of marking to do, but no reason to head out, unless you need an errand run?”

  “I’m just wondering, would you have time to write up a little report on those milagros? There is something there that we should be paying attention to, I think.”

  “Sure, darling. You might want to ask Detective de Valle about them, though.”