“He certainly thinks he’s God’s gift to women, that’s for sure,” I agreed.
“That expression, ”God’s gift,“ implies the existence of a Being of higher consequence than Martin Galea himself, and therefore not something Galea could bring himself to support, I suspect,” Alex said dryly.
We all laughed. “I have to say I like his work, though,” Alex continued, naming several of Galea’s better known commissions. Galea did work all over the world.
I had to agree with Alex. Galea, despite his less ennobling qualities, had enormous talent to match the ego.
“You also have to agree he’s good for business, Sarah,” I said. “Monica Perez, who I’m sure was just browsing, was so entranced she bought a mirror similar to one Galea bought! With any luck, she’ll be back for more—furniture, I mean.”
“Why do you figure a man like that married a woman like that?” Sarah mused, ignoring the compliments we’d given Galea and our rather jejune attempts at humor.
“Money,” Alex replied. “McLean money to be precise,” he said, naming a well-known Toronto family. “Married while he was still an architectural student. Got him off to a good start, I’d think. Money and connections.”
“Do you think she actually had something to say, opinions and such, before she took up with him?” Sarah went on.
“We’ll probably never know,” I said. “Now, we’d better get started arranging all this. We don’t have much time. Are you sure you don’t want this one, Sarah? You wouldn’t have to deal with him directly very much, and you might enjoy having a few days in an exotic locale.”
Sarah had purchased the business from me but had asked me to come back in with her when she found she didn’t like the incessant travel it required nearly as much as she thought she might. She disliked the haggling with suppliers, the frustrating dealings with import and export officials in various countries around the world, the loneliness of being so far from home for so long.
I, on the other hand, loved it. It was why I had started the business in the first place. But I still felt a little guilty that I got all the travel while she minded the shop.
“Oh, I think learning to communicate with teenagers is about as exotic as I want to get right now,”‘ she replied. Sarah had a new beau who came as a package deal with two teen-aged sons.
“I’ll look after things at this end, while you’re over there, and we’ll ask Alex to do his usual wonders with our shippers,” she said.
I was happy with this, I had to admit. My partner in life, Lucas May, a Mexican archaeologist, had agreed to supervise a dig in Belize. He’d be off at a site in the middle of nowhere, out of cellphone range, for several weeks, so our regular time together, usually in Merida or Miami, had been postponed until he returned.
Unlike Galea, Lucas was self-effacing, equally attractive, I thought, but quietly so. A brilliant archaeologist, an ardent supporter of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, he had a way about him that I had come to find immensely reassuring. But we were both feeling the strains of a long-distance relationship, and I had a sense a bit of a break might help us sort out our feelings. I thought a few days in Malta, away from the distractions of daily life, might focus things a bit for me.
I called our shipper, Dave Thomson, and understood his expressions of dismay when I told him what needed to be done, by when.
“Money is no object here, Dave,” I said. “You know Galea. Just tell me how you want to do it. I’ll take measurements of the stuff at the house tomorrow and mark it for you.”
“Well, this is a new one for me. Can’t say I’ve ever shipped to Malta,”‘ he said. “Do they have a lot of falcons there, do you think?” he joked. “I’ll have to check into routings and costs. My favorite old movie, by the way, The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart at his best, I’d say. Anyway, I’ll make a few calls, find the best way to do this, and the best rate I can. It’ll be expensive, though, at least $3000, probably. But as you say, money is no object for this guy.”
After some discussion about insurance and logistics and so on, he rang off, and I relaxed a little knowing that if it could be done, Dave was the one to do it. He’d performed miracles for me more than once, starting a few years ago when he found a furniture shipment lost out of Singapore and got it to a fancy design show only hours before it opened.
I’d been the supplier to a young up-and-coming designer who’d been asked to decorate a room in the show house that was to raise money for charity. That was the event that launched his career and my business. The designer was a man by the name of Clive Swain, who after that show became my first employee and then my husband. But Dave could hardly be held accountable for that, and Thomson Shipping had been my shipper of choice ever since.
When I came out of the office, Alex had already started moving Galea’s purchases into our storage area and replacing them with stuff from our stock. Then we all surveyed the shop floor. Even with some replacements, it looked a little bare. Galea had certainly cut a swath through the place.
“I’d better get on to Dave about that shipment Lucas sent us from Mexico before he went to Belize,” Alex said. Lucas, in addition to our personal relationship, was Greenhalgh and McClintoch’s agent in Mexico. “We can fill some of the holes with the Mexican pottery and leather chairs he said he sent us,” Alex said.
The next morning I drove over to the Galea residence. It was located in a part of town which had once been thought to have charm. But now interspersed between the older, more gracious homes, were what are commonly called monster houses, those in which ostentation and sheer size have replaced aesthetics and good taste.
In such a neighborhood, Galea’s home came as something of a relief and a bit of a surprise to me, something more to the taste of Marilyn Galea, nee McLean, more old Toronto than the work of a noted modern architect. The face it showed to the street was refreshingly simple, a pleasant Georgian facade, a simple circular driveway of interlocking paving stones leading through iron gates to a European-style courtyard, and a very plain door surrounded by ivy.
The door was opened by a pleasant-faced young woman in a grey uniform. Filipina, I thought, and we were joined almost immediately by the unpretentious Marilyn Galea herself, dressed in the camel version of what she had worn the previous day. I stepped into an elegant octagonal-shaped entrance, all creamy marble. Even the flowers matched, a sumptuous bouquet of lilies arranged in a crystal vase on a table in the middle of the foyer.
Leading off the entrance toward the back of the house was a hallway, more art gallery than hall actually, with several works of modern art, a couple of them signed by Galea himself, discreetly lit from above. When we got to the end of the hall, I stepped into a large open area at the rear and the house’s secret revealed itself.
I think I actually gasped out the word “Wow!” then immediately regretted it, such an inarticulate expression certainly not in keeping with the sophisticated veneer I liked to think I projected. Neither did it do justice to what I saw.
All the houses on this side of the street back on one of the many lovely ravines that crisscross Toronto. But no others, I’m sure, made such exceptional use of the landscape. The back of the Galea house was two storeys of clear glass—perhaps two and a half, since the house was built down into the ravine at the back. The house seemed to float out over the ravine with no visible means of support. The eye was drawn into the trees, then above them, seemingly forever, to the office towers of the downtown core. Here, for certain, was the Galea touch.
I’m not certain how long I stood there, just gaping at the sight. When I looked around I found Galea himself watching, a look of amusement in his eyes. “Like it?” he said.