Free Catalogue Raisonne by Mike Barnes

But the surrealists seemed to generate a nothingness, a void that precluded articulation. Perhaps big names and bafflement had cancelled out in indifference.
    When the smoothing was complete and seemed to have taken, Neale said to Walter as they were leaving, “Same population base as Ottawa.”
    It was another of the entre nous , or statue, comments, spoken as if the rest of us weren’t there and wouldn’t have understood anyway. But this one wasn’t too hard to decipher. Hamilton was roughly the same size as Ottawa, though the latter, as the nation’s capital, would be entitled to many times more funding. As Neale and Walter would know down to the discrepant, rankling dollar. Which meant, presumably, that the National Gallery could afford a real top-notch integrated security system, rather than our two-tiered one, which funnelled from attendants in cheap suits down to a guy reading I, Robot at the control panel. (Or doodling key signatures, or reading Ubik .) Neale might or might not know about the other gallery’s security arrangements.

    Another thing he might know, but could pretend he didn’t, was whether our system had been forced on us financially, or had been chosen by Walter for other reasons entirely.

    â€œI’ll be pleased if it enlarges her dating pool beyond the knuckle-draggers,” Robert said.
    I’d just made a move that nudged us toward an endgame. Robert had stared at it, then retreated from the mess on the board back to Claudia’s personal life.
    â€œThe patrons?” I said.
    â€œGod, no. That might be a step up. The bouncers. A bouncer, lately.” He fondled the top of a pawn, then drew back from it. If I’d insisted on touch play our games would have ended in minutes. “She’s always had a tendency to mate below herself, no pun intended.” With Robert all puns were intended, and probably rehearsed. “You should hear our dear Mother on the subject. Not that Father is a strong case of marrying up .”
    â€œWhy, do you think?”
    â€œFather . . . oh, you mean Claudia. Hard to say. Lack of self-esteem, the pop psychs would probably say. And they must be right sometimes. Or maybe she just likes rough trade.”
    The last phrase had come from a prized movie or book. You could see it by the way Robert savoured the words, his eyes glinting above the exotic flavor.
    â€œSis is a little slippery on ethics. Always has been.” He passed his hand over the pieces, like a magician trying to conjure a strategy. The sentence he’d just murmured sounded familiar. Since I tended to tune Robert out, and he forgot what he’d said himself, we often found ourselves in conversations that I couldn’t be sure we hadn’t had before. The same thing happened to us in chess, ten moves into an opening when we realized we’d stumbled into the same morass we’d mucked about in before. But in either case, in words or moves, we felt compelled to play it out.
    Tonight, though, for some reason, I felt a greater than usual flicker
of interest. Maybe the game was just too bad, an amorphous tangling of troops. Or maybe, like a vampire, I’d become so drained that I needed to let the juices of another life flow into me. In any case, I locked my hands behind my head and leaned back in my chair.
    â€œHow so?” I said.
    â€œWell. . . .” And Robert gave me, interrupted by maddeningly languid drags on his cigarette, his portrait of Claudia as a fallen artist. The prize student at OCAD, the favourite of her painting teacher, who gave her straight A+s until she refused to sleep with him, at which point he demoted her to As, which was as low as he could plausibly go. In fourth year she was dating an action painter.
    â€œLike Pollock, you mean?” I’d definitely heard all this before, in outline anyway, and asked questions mainly to claim some minimum of air time.
    â€œâ€˜More muscles, less