Читать книгу The Supreme Orchestra - David Turgeon - Страница 14
ОглавлениеAs he waited for the red light to turn green, Pierre-Luc massaged the back of his right wrist. The inflammation had returned the day before and, like every other time, he’d let himself sink deep into the dark slough of despond.
His tenosynovitis had made itself felt on Pierre-Luc’s thirtieth birthday. At that time he and his studio mates were a hyperactive crew with comics projects everywhere. The diagnosis was shattering: talented though he might be, it turned out that Pierre-Luc had no idea how to hold a pencil. His tendons had paid the price; from that point on he would have to give up everything, lest the damage become permanent. And Pierre-Luc would have fallen into the most total despair that year had not some charitable soul offered him a teaching gig at the art school. Such was his metamorphosis from brilliant young illustrator to dutiful teacher. The new job would prove much less harmful to his sinovial sheath, a region that nevertheless continued to air its grievances, as if bitter at so many years of mistreatment and wholly unmoved by Pierre-Luc’s efforts at conciliation, which came too late and amounted to too little.
The light turned green, the rusty station wagon trundled forward. The driver had circumnavigated the block several times without reward, and was in the process of succumbing to the siren song of underground parking. After paying the exorbitant price, he scurried over icy sidewalks toward the gallery.
Simone was finishing off her second smoke when she saw Pierre-Luc at the end of the alley, taking small quick steps and watching his feet. She called out just before he disappeared. He turned around, stupefied at first to hear his name. When he saw who had uttered it, he joined Simone in the alley.
‘What’s wrong with your hand?’ she asked, before he had the time to say something clever.
‘My hand? Oh. My tendinitis,’ he said dolefully. ‘You? Has it started?’
‘Yeah, yeah, I was on my way in. Coming?’
‘I told my students about the event,’ said Pierre-Luc as they went through the gallery’s service entrance. ‘I don’t know if anyone will make it. But there’s Sarah-Jeanne Loubier, the one we talked about the other day. She might come.’
Too late, Pierre-Luc: as always, Simone’s friends swoop in to steal whatever feeble thunder you have managed to drum up.
‘How was it?’ queried the one in a vanilla-coloured jacket with ironic crests.
‘Sell much?’ asked another whose prodigious red mane undulated weightlessly above her.
‘It was fine. Sales are good.’
‘Did you hurt your hand?’ grunted a third voice.
‘Tendinitis,’ Pierre-Luc murmured, embarrassed that his wrist should be the source of such concern.
‘Yeah, it’s unpredictable,’ said The Bear, pointing at his left paw. ‘I had to give up the piano for the same reason. Glass of wine?’
‘Sure, thanks,’ answered Pierre-Luc distractedly. A subtle gyration of his head brought a previously concealed zone into his visual field, through which he saw Simone being led toward a tall Black man in a pelisse who subtly bowed when introduced to the artist. She met this inclination with a sparkle in the very centre of her eye. Why stop there, fumed Pierre-Luc, go on, kiss her hand while you’re at it.
‘Red or white?’ asked The Bear.
‘Red.’
Time passed; Sarah-Jeanne Loubier kept them waiting – had she even remembered?; Simone chatted with her beguiling buyer; Pierre-Luc struggled to contrive an interest in the ambient conversation, including the one foisted on him by that Bear, whose geniality was almost infuriating. Almost.
‘You know Simone,’ was one of his gambits.
‘An honour so many here could claim,’ Pierre-Luc shot back.
‘The Simone Fan Club,’ The Bear rambled on.
‘What about you?’ parried Pierre-Luc.
‘I don’t know how long we’ve known each other,’ said The Bear dreamily. ‘I wouldn’t say I’m a close friend. We see each other once in a while. I do a little work on her house sometimes. What about you?’
‘About the same,’ Pierre-Luc judged. ‘She comes to my drawing class once in a while. The students love her.’
‘Oh, wait a minute,’ said The Bear with a spark of recognition. ‘The drawing teacher. She talks about you all the time.’
This unexpected tidbit should have cheered Pierre-Luc up, convinced him of his significance in Simone’s eyes. But no: he saw instead an illustration of the confounding multiplicity of his friend’s lives, most of which he had no sense of or part in. To be nothing more than a member, even a member in good standing, of the Simone Fan Club was not what he wanted, was not what Pierre-Luc wanted at all. Jealousy had gotten its paws on him, and he found he was ashamed.
‘Excuse me,’ said Pierre-Luc to The Bear. ‘I’m waiting for someone. I’m going to go see if.’
Back in the main room of the gallery, Pierre-Luc pretended to examine another artist’s abstract paintings, displayed in all their pastel blandness. From time to time he shot a look toward the front door, where Sarah-Jeanne Loubier continued to fail to appear. His glass was empty, his wrist a constellation of pins and needles. A little later the tall Black man in the pelisse walked out of the gallery. He was alone, which tempered Pierre-Luc’s jealousy, but he carried under his arm a package wrapped in kraft paper that all available evidence suggested must be an acquisition.
A connoisseur of erotica, said the narrator of the novel in Pierre-Luc’s mind. Italics his.
At this point, one would expect Pierre-Luc to retreat to the backroom to find Simone, where she might still be surrounded by an exuberant throng of admirers. Let’s entertain, however, the possibility that, driven by the misplaced pride with which artists have created so many dramas, Pierre-Luc decided instead to mope around on his own until such a point in time as Sarah-Jeanne Loubier should choose to appear.
‘We’re going to eat,’ Simone would say. ‘You coming?’
‘No, no,’ Pierre-Luc would say by way of an excuse, ‘I’m waiting for my student.’
‘Have it your way,’ Simone would counter, masking her surprise.
Pierre-Luc would answer with only an enigmatic nod. And then wait.
Only much later would Sarah-Jeanne Loubier darken the door, eyes half-hidden under bushy chestnut bangs, back bent under a too-heavy bag, looking apologetic to be there at all.
‘Oh,’ she’d say. ‘You’re still here. Sorry I’m so late. What happened to your wrist?’
(Insert further explanation of tendinitis.)
‘So you’re saying you were forced to stop drawing?’ Sarah-Jeanne Loubier would exclaim, deeply moved by his account.
‘Yeah, but that also made me a teacher,’ Pierre-Luc would offer as mitigating circumstances. ‘If it weren’t for the tendinitis,’ he would say, committed to dancing with the story he’d come with, ‘I wouldn’t have had the good luck’ – Would he really say ‘luck’? He would – ‘to teach you.’ And I don’t know if I was really good enough to make it as an artist. I was okay, sure … I think I’m better as a teacher.’
‘But we’ll never know now,’ Sarah-Jeanne would say.
‘I could have put out a comic or two,’ Pierre-Luc would reckon, ‘but I probably would have spent most of my time on illustration contracts. They pay better. Slowly but surely I’d have given up on my own work; best case, maybe I’d be a well-paid freelancer for magazines and kids’ books. Just another name in the directory of the illustrators’ guild. I’m not saying it’s a bad way to go, you know. A lot of you will end up as illustrators. Only a few will have the kind of career we’ve dangled out in front of you. It’s tough, but that’s how it is. And you have to understand that it’s better that way, I think, when you have a talent like yours, and good healthy muscles, it’s important to push to the very limits of what you can do. Seize every opportunity. Sorry to be so harsh. It’s not really my style but it has to be said. We live in a brutal world. Especially the art world.’
After this discussion they’d survey the backroom, which was, after all, the reason for their visit. They’d be the last ones left, aside from the gallery staff, busy cleaning and closing.
‘I didn’t know she drew that kind of thing,’ Sarah-Jeanne Loubier would let slip, and with it the appearance of, what, the seed of some trouble?
In any event, Pierre-Luc would feel, at the sight of Simone’s drawings of bodies inflamed with desire and unconscious of their nudity, an ache of his own compounded by his student’s uncomfortably close physical presence.
‘It is her favourite subject,’ he’d eventually spit out. ‘Want a glass of wine?’
‘White, I guess,’ Sarah-Jeanne would say quietly, still intent on Simone’s drawings.
‘Listen,’ Pierre-Luc would say in a commanding tone. ‘Go talk to her. She’s approachable. You have an exceptional talent, she thinks so, you’ve already heard it enough from me surely, and she can give you good advice, introduce you to the right people, galleries, artbook publishers, so you’ll never have to sell out. There are some things you can’t learn from me. See what I mean?’
‘You’re funny,’ Sarah-Jeanne would reply with a serene smile, she who never smiled.
And Pierre-Luc would know he had said too much.