The Junk Shops of Montréal

by George Young

As Louise left the pâtisserie to return to work at the Museum two young men sitting at a patio table looked away laughing. She was surprised she had heard their words as the rush of traffic on Sherbrooke Street was swirling all sounds into confusion. Ordinarily she would ignore comments about her body but it was a warm autumn day and she simply felt too generous to do nothing. She eased her way onto the tiny patio, crammed with people, and took a chair at the corner table of the young men. They watched this happening with an abrupt lack of humour. They were undergraduates as a thick art history textbook was before one on the table. When the other nervously moved to leave, "Come on, Fadi," the art student gestured for him to remain seated. Fadi’s eyes were unflinchingly on Louise as she silently opened the box containing her raspberry tarts. She ate them slowly, smiling over the heads of her tormentors, turning to one side, then the other, poised, displaying her charms.

She wanted these two young men to see her warm eyes, her thick brown hair cut straight across her shoulders, the rosy glow of the skin on her arms, her hands with their long fingers and sensibly cut nails made nicely powerful from conserving works of art. If they were bold enough they might glance into her opened blouse and see the milk-white softness of her breasts pushed up with an exquisitely pretty brassier that cost more than the thick textbook, and probably explained more in a second about beauty that its thousand pages. Louise wanted to personify one of beauty’s myriad forms, to reveal to these rude young men how it expresses itself differently with every person. When she looked into their eyes to judge whether they comprehended the morning’s lesson, the nervous student rose in his seat. He fell back down with a little cry as Louise, using her weight, and strong hands, aggressively pushed the table against the corner walls, trapping them.

"I’m not sure," Louise said quietly, daintily touching her lips with a tissue, "if you meant for me to hear that comment about the air hose up my bottom?"

The art student, Fadi, scowled, "Aren’t you being paranoid? It’s moot that we meant you at all." The other student was flushed, wondering what a moot was, tears in his eyes, "Let us go, please?" Louise pulled the table back and shrugged at the intractability of these young men.

"I love my fat ass," Louise declared, now in a white lab coat, explaining to her fellow conservator how stung she felt.

"And there’s much to love," Janice agreed.

They were standing over a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger.

"I dislike this younger Brueghel’s work," Janice said, manoeuvring a lens. "It’s just crass commercialism compared to his father’s work."

"Even his father was pleasing a public," Louise responded. "Each generation has its standards of beauty, I know that."

"Oh forget those kids," Janice consoled. "Come look here."

"So," Louise asked, scanning where Janice indicated, "Pieter Brueghel the Younger added a Canadian beer bottle in this painting?"

"You tell me," Janice smirked with confidence.

Arguing drunks spilled from the open door of a tavern into the too bright light of day. The painting was from the early 17^th century, a period when Canadian beer was surely unknown in Holland. Louise stiffened with a shock of recognition confirming that a 20^th century rhinoceros-like beer logo was just visible on a bottle inside the tavern.

"Is the painting a forgery?" Janice asked.

"No," Louise assured her, being familiar with all the paintings in the collection after decades of work on them, "this is vandalism of a high order. But who would want to be so creative?"

Janice handed Louise an old notebook listing paintings that had been sent outside of the Museum before in-house conservation began. The Brueghel had been restretched by a now dead conservator who had worked from his art gallery on Van Horne Avenue.

Louise walked silently through the museum’s hushed galleries to inform her boss about the vandalism. She came upon university students being herded by their professor before a series of etchings. Her eye was drawn when a student jerked his head with surprise toward her. Fadi was unmistakable in his sleek black clothes, sensuous, sneering lips, and jet black hair expensively cut. Louise couldn’t resist approaching him, stopping a few metres away when she was met by an unpleasantly strong waft of perfume. She hadn’t noticed his odour on the patio but in the long print gallery he reeked, though he probably thought his commercial stink attractive. He quivered with annoyance as Louise stood nearby, quite noticeably watching him and in her white lab coat making him feel like a guinea, or some other sort of, pig. He raised his hand and for a second Louise thought he was going to complain about her.

"I want to say something," Fadi blurted. "Advertising has more meaning than this old junk," and he waved a hand toward the wall of 15^th century prints and Louise, who now understood the source of his belligerence to her unfashionable behind.

A few students laughed nervously as the professor took a breath. "Yes, yes," he said in blasé agreement, "on one level this really is just a better-kept junk shop."

That seemed to satisfy his bold student, relieving the professor who just wanted to get on with a lecture he’d given for years without provoking such controversy. He refocused the first-years, shuffling them along like penitents before revered icons. Louise watched as Fadi again caught her eye, histrionically slipping his hand down the back and onto the small bottom of a lovely young woman as he walked away. She sighed that she had once looked like that and sighed again that Fadi could be so unpleasant. Like the outrageously applied perfume on his body, which she could now taste, Louise generously forgave his intolerance because it was an extravagance of his all too ephemeral youth, soon to pass, as confidence or indifference or perhaps even generosity grew, and his own firm flesh inevitably aged.

"I think he still lives over there," her boss, Frank, assured her, fidgeting behind his big desk, looking over his laptop. Frank always gave the impression of being about to leave, though he usually spent the entire day in his office.

"No," Louise reminded him. "Ron is dead."

"Not him," Frank said. "I drive past that shop all the time. I usually see his old assistant, Archie, sitting outside in a chair."

"I don’t know him."

"I guess we need to examine every painting we sent over there?" Frank questioned, sighing at the stress of the effort, though he would be doing none of the actual work.

"Let me go see this Archie first," Louise suggested, to spare them all any real and imagined effort.

Archie was sunning himself in a broken chair outside his shop. Behind him in the window was a painting of a woman, naked from the waist up. All manner of wooden furniture and chained used bicycles crowded the sidewalk. Archie had curly hair to his shoulders, which belied his sixty years; he was missing a front tooth, which didn’t, and his hands were stained, or dirty, or both. He surreptitiously sipped a bottle of beer from beside his chair, his fourth since noon, and was beginning to feel the pleasant effect. His eyes were bright with intelligence and his manner, as that of the good salesman he was, was immensely polite. He had changed his name from Archimedes after tortured pronunciations and a few high school fights had taught him about Canadian tolerance. He’d been called from Greece when a teenager by relatives to help in their bakery. He found the work hot and tiring and astutely used a nascent artistic ability to find work up the street with the elderly Ron, who needed an assistant. What had once been a gallery, offering well conserved paintings and sculpture, since Archie’s genial ownership, had transformed into a dreadfully messy collection of anything that was now restored or repaired, which sold more quickly than fine art ever had. As well, anomalously fresh amongst the junk, were numerous velvet paintings of bare-breasted women. Incredibly, not only did they sell quite often, but the business itself was very successful.

As Louise approached she heard a growl and a large grey dog, hidden in the shade, rose and barked savagely as she tried to introduce herself.

"Oh, don’t worry about her," Archie assured Louise, his English accented lightly by Greek and alcohol. "She won’t bite you unless you hit me."

Louise remained unconvinced so he tucked his hand under the dog’s collar and pulled her to the back of the shop. Louise followed, shaking her head when she realised she was staring at the animal’s nipples, the longest she had ever seen on a dog. When Archie locked the creature safely away in an office she looked about the shop, again seeing mammary glands, this time young women’s painted on black velvet. They were clearly by the same person, garish in colour, and, sans any pretence of making art, they revealed the artist’s prurient interest in sexually arousing the viewer.

"You like them?" Archie asked with the smug self-interest of a pornographer, his words hissing slightly through his missing tooth.

"You painted them," Louise smiled, recognizing that look of near perversion she had often seen on other artists’ mugs when they got a chance to discuss their creations.

Archie nodded and gestured for Louise to sit down. She wished she had brought her lab coat to protect her expensive blouse and skirt from the dirty chair she eased her bottom into. Archie, without asking, poured two glasses, dubiously clean, of ouzo. He leaned against the table and unashamedly stared down her blouse, which Louise accepted as a compliment from such an obvious connoisseur. As she was interested in accusing him of a real crime, Louise was only too happy to imbibe with him, coming quickly to the question after he downed two glasses.

"Finally!" Archie cried, only too happy to admit his culpability. "I was a young man when I did that to five of your paintings. A beer bottle in each one! I was sure someone would have noticed before now!"

"Why did you do it?" Louise asked, so pleasantly surprised to have solved her first criminal case so efficiently.

"Let me show you my very best painting to explain. Be right back," Archie said, pushing away from the table and disappearing downstairs.

The dog began growling from behind the far door when someone came briefly into the shop, Louise played with her unfinished drink, yet Archie had not returned. She got up and went to the top of the stairs and called out.

"Sorry! I will be right there!" Archie answered in a voice muffled by distance.

Louise was so curious she went carefully down the old wooden stairs, into a dimly lit basement. Broken furniture littered the floor, some pieces being repaired; others looked as if a large animal had bitten off irreparable chunks. There was only a bare light bulb but to the back Louise saw a brightly lit doorway. She poked her head in and was surprised to find that the basement opened into an attached greenhouse, then a small back yard. Beyond, through overgrown bushes, she could see the backs of row houses. Archie sat on a stool touching up a large velvet painting of a naked girl looking happily to the side, her breasts outlined and aglow with summer sunlight.

"My masterpiece!" Archie exclaimed, smiling at Louise for approval and she did smile, enjoying the pleasant sexuality of the painting.

"See," Archie said, turning, absently wiping paint from one hand onto the other, "I paint women beautifully. But they will never get into a museum. I know that. So I wanted something by my hand to be in your gallery so maybe someday people would come to me and wonder what else I painted. Now that day has come."

"And what happens on this day?" Louise asked.

The dog began barking loudly and Archie rushed upstairs. Louise saw a stack of magazine cut-outs of naked women. Pasted on the window were five images of similar looking women posing in sunlight. Archie had blended them all into the painting before her. Louise laughed out loud when she thought of hanging that in the Montréal Museum of Art and she abruptly caught herself, seeing a sneer on her face in the greenhouse glass that unpleasantly reminded her of Fadi’s. She took another look at Archie’s painting.

In her imagination she compared images of naked women in the Museum’s collection and considered why Archie’s work would never be seen there. His rude paintings, distilled from pornography, painted on the much neglected medium of velvet, were not beautiful in a way currently appreciated. Louise couldn’t think of an era in the West when art that elicited sexual arousal as its main purpose found wide public acclaim. Yet even young Fadi was intelligent enough to see that the demure art in her museum was just one way of understanding beauty, and that advertising images, from the outright filthy to the equally demure, had more influence now. Louise bristled that Fadi and his friend had not found her beautiful in a way currently appreciated. She felt embarrassed that she would mock Archie’s view of beauty and was relieved he had not witnessed it.

Physically Louise understood why Archie had vandalized. He had not done it out of spite, the young Fadi might learn something from that, but with frustration that his sense of beauty meant nothing to those in public museums who presumed to show what they believed beauty to be. Like ignorant youth, those who chose the art in museums aggressed, while Archie and she had to fight back with determination and patience every single day to ensure that recognition of others’ views was possible, that all might feel comfortable in their skin.

"You want me to paint you!" Archie cried, anxious yet excited by the suggestion. "I have to lock the shop, be right back."

Louise removed her blouse and brassier, pleased to be showing her body, and sat on the hard couch in the warm greenhouse, oblivious that anyone might see her. Archie returned and set up quickly and was soon painting his first live model.

"Work well, Archie," Louise mused aloud, "because I think I’m going to buy this painting to display in my office in that better kept junk shop downtown."

Archie cocked his head in appreciation and true to his view of beauty, twisted her generous smile into a come-hither leer and of course, incited wanton lust with the milk-white softness of her breasts.

George Young was born in 1956 in Kingston, Ontario. He has been writing since his teens and has largely self-published over the past 20 years. He is beginning to read his stories for youtube and they are available here.  He is self publishing three booklets this month of stories, a novella and a travel essay. Contact him through youtube if you are interested.