Paint Your Wife (17 page)

As far as Frank went, my mother says he and Alma Martin never hit it off. Alma's
mind was made up early in the piece when he saw Frank wander out one morning across
the paddock with a shovel over his shoulder. All that remained of the original hill
was a small mound of dirt, a morning's work, probably not much more. Frank was still
some distance short of George's old site when he stopped and swung the shovel head
down; he tapped the earth in front of him in the manner
of a cricketer patting down
a rough patch on the pitch, then shouldered the shovel and turned back to the house.
It is unfair to dislike a man for perhaps not being in the mood right there and then
but that was the moment Alma made up his mind that he didn't care for Frank. It's
the oldest story around—the artist falling for his favourite model. And for years
after, whenever the subject of Frank came up Alma would drop his eyes and wait until
the malignancy of the subject had passed.

For his part, my father, Frank Bryant, appears to have taken a more generous view
of the neighbour always hanging about in my mother's life. Alma drew my mother throughout
her pregnancy. She leans back in the armchair, that immense belly, her hands resting
on top. The point of her chin seems to sit another mile or two back in sunny exile.

There are plenty of other examples of this kind of arrangement.

Rembrandt accompanied his favourite model, his wife, Saskia, right to her deathbed
with sketchpad in hand. Chagall and his wife, Bella, are another example. Bella flies
from the hand of the artist, though
Double Portrait
is more relevant here. In this
painting, Bella sits at his knee in a wedding dress and watches his work in progress.
Her life is being drawn as she lives it. She lives as she is being drawn. She lives
to be drawn. All three probably describe the arrangement between Alma Martin and
my mother.

In the earliest years of her marriage to Frank Bryant, Alma didn't like to intrude
for the long periods of time it took for a proper drawing session, and instead would
take his chances as they turned up and snatch at whatever lay to hand for purposes
of a quickie—the back of an invoice slip, old envelopes, in the
margins of the sports
pages, once on the back of a matinee ticket when the film broke down and they had
to wait twenty-five minutes (Frank was doing overtime at the plant). Once, memorably,
he drew on the back of an egg carton—tiny miniatures of my mother crowning each
cardboard bump, a class of desk-bound Alices.

Frank couldn't talk to Alma, and Alma couldn't talk to Frank. They were like two
dogs who come around a blind bend, stop and regard each other just long enough to
register the futility of further engagement and move on past each other. Whenever
talk turned to matters of paint, of the kind that ends up on canvas, Frank was up
out of his chair and reaching for his hat. On house paint, Frank might have offered
an opinion. But it never came up.

I was thirteen when I discovered his secret. A woman walked at the edge of the sea,
a shoe in each hand, her blonde hair grainy with sunlight. She may have been smiling.
She was too far away for me to tell.

This was during the NE Paints picnic. A group of us kids are sitting in the sandhills.
Kath Wheeler. Douglas Monroe. Guy Stuart. Raymond Pierce. Diane Huxley. In the near
distance a group of men stand around the side of the hangi pit. Kath's dad. Dougie's
with the soggy smoke. Kath's is the smaller wiry man checking the time on his watch.
Frank is there but not really part of proceedings. He has a leather flap on his watch
and he's holding it open like time is a secret and slightly scientific thing to manage.
It turns out that Frank and Kath's dad are comparing the time.

From our hollow in the sand dunes we study these strangers who are our fathers and
who conform to some rough notion of themselves, approximate and fumbling.

Now Frank comes sauntering over the dunes, larger than life in his NE Paints-issue
overalls. A good-looking man—that's what I hear everyone say, and never in a tone
of approval but with the voice people use to warn of a rip. I can smell Old Spice,
sweat and various tinctures from the mixing bay of the paint factory. Frank's boots
are covered in limonite used to make yellow paint. It spills off his white overalls,
a powder as fine as sulphur.

‘Harry boy,' he says. ‘Where's ya mum, mate?'

‘Haven't seen her,' I say.

The other kids are watching Frank, the way he's raised his head to look around. He
looks testy but it's hard to tell. Frank could be about to pat me on the head or
tick me off.

‘Having a good time?' he asks.

‘It's all right.'

‘Good,' says Frank, and now he looks around for another face to ask the same question
of.

‘What about you, Kath my girl?'

‘Yep, fine Mr Bryant. Thanks,' she says.

Then the rest of them.

‘Yep.'

‘Yep.'

‘Yep.'

‘Dougie, what about you, son?'

‘Yep,' says Dougie, staring at the sand and swallowing hard.

‘Well, that's good isn't it?'

Now he rises to his full height and looks down the beach as far as the rocky point.
His gaze pokes around in that direction. Smoke and ash drift from his fingertips.

‘That's good,' he says once more. He draws on his cigarette, holds the smoke in and
removes the cigarette which he turns
in his fingers, studying it. He releases the
smoke. He says, ‘I hope none of you kids have snuck down here for a smoke.'

‘Nope,' we say quickly.

‘Harry?'

‘Nope.'

‘Because if you have it'll rot your lungs. You do realise that, don't you? Smoking's
a mug's game.'

With that he drops the cigarette in the sand. The other kids look away so they won't
have to see my father littering.

There's some activity over at the hangi pit now. The other fathers are hauling up
the wire baskets of food. The steam is thick and figures in overalls ghost in and
out of the steam and sunlight, some coughing as they laugh.

My mother has been handing out wet towels. Now she has one towel left. She looks
around for someone to give it to and there is Alma Martin. He must have said something
funny, maybe possibly even shocking, because my mother puts a hand to her mouth as
Mr Martin drops down a sandhill with a pleased look on his face. About now my mother
spots us and starts over.

‘Harry, I see your father has done his disappearing act again just as we're about
to eat. Hallo Dougie. Kath. Raymond. Diane. Guy.'

‘Hallo Mrs Bryant,' they chant back.

‘Harry go and find Frank, will you.'

I don't know where he is. But I know how to find him. That's easy. I follow the trail
of limonite through the sandhills. Now there are yellow sprinklings on the flat
stony part of the beach. Blackened sea necklace dried to a crisp has the same yellow
dusting. In an area of hard sand I catch up with a
footprint made from a pair of
NE Paints-issue boots. The trail of limonite peters out on the rocks, but all arrows
seem to point to the cave entrance and as I come around the corner I am stunned to
see the bare buttocks of my father with his paint-splattered overalls gathered around
his ankles, and without fully seeing who she is, I remember the woman I saw walking
along the shoreline with a shoe in each hand.

The tip opened the same year as Frank ran off with the woman from Wages.

It was through the tip that I came to work for George. The tip was in the vee of
the hill one around from the farm, and George paid me for a few hours after school
each day to comb the tip for other people's discards—doing much what I pay Alma to
do today.

Sometimes, and without advance notice, George would turn up at the tip for a few
hours and the two of us would call to each other like fishermen on either end of a
dragnet whenever we pulled something of interest from the smouldering layers of disintegrating
filth. There was a lot of
rubbish
rubbish, there's no denying that, but there was
a lot of good stuff as well, and the status of some things moved between those two
points of assessment. A tossed-out vase turned into something precious in George's
hands. He used his spit to rub away the grime, and it is through George that I first
came to develop a contempt for those who would shun and discard so carelessly.

You can see the rub of the pre-loved in everything if you look hard enough. What
tends to happen is this. It gets a little shiny, develops signs of wear—a rip appears,
and it's on the
scrap heap. The very thing you wrapped your arms around and just
loved to pieces is shown the door and tossed unceremoniously on the back of the
ute destined for the tip. Well, you tell yourself, the stuffing was coming out, the
fabric had worn. It was depressing to look at. It made the room look shabby. It made
you feel shabby. And yet, once you strip away the old worn fabric more often than
not the innersprings of the pre-loved object and what we might call here new love—if
that isn't too cute—are much the same. In the case of an armchair a spring might
need tightening. Maybe a new protective layer is called for.

After Frank left, it didn't take more than a slight adjustment to think that together
with household stuff, you could lump the household, you could lump the family, the
wife, the kid.

Still, if Frank is good for something, perhaps it is this. His vote-catching smile
was to pass on to me. I've always had this ability to appear like I was smiling at
some deep thought which any moment soon I would stun the world with. It has served
me well at endless council meetings. Ophelia at that London club had commented on
my smile. ‘You have nice eyes, Harry Bryant.' Though that was before she twisted
out of the corner I had baled her up in and disappeared into the crowd with her drink.
And on the tug bringing the people ashore from the
Pacific Star
I believe it was this
same expression of mine that had had a calming effect on everyone when we rolled
and pitched over the bar.

11

My mother wouldn't let Alma near the tip while the newspaper people were here for
the story on the portraits. It would be undignified, and she was right to point out
that Alma was the hero of the moment. He alone had managed to attract out-of-town
coverage, a goal we spend most of our winter months in council pursuing, dreaming
up new schemes, plans to bring people here. What if we were to have a treasure hunt
and fill a paint can with silver coins? What if we were to open a paint museum? It's
always been a struggle to see our way past paint, and even the interest in Alma's
portraits wasn't such a distant cousin to those other schemes we thought up.

The problem continues to be one of geography. The road south passes away under our
sills. It careens away from us in polite horror. You see the small cars of tourists
bobbing into a head wind; usually it will be a retired couple, him or her with the
map spread over their knees. You see them slow down and glance up, wondering. Is
this it? Have we arrived? We smile back and shift to one side of the window sills.
Just our short-haired dogs stare back. We wait to one side of our curtains
until
we hear through our thin walls their jumpy foot on the pedal followed by a tinny
burst of acceleration.

When people come here to live, like the Eliots, it means they've reached the end
of the line. There is nothing after this. When they wonder how they got here, by
what road, they find themselves thinking, surely not that meagre two-lane broken-up
strip? How and at what point did the glorious highway they were on downsize to such
a narrow strip?

I'd spoken with the reporter on the phone. Sally somebody. I saw them pull up outside
the store. Nervous expectation hung off the ends of her eyelashes. She saw me and
pointed with her finger, ‘You are…?'

‘Yes,' I nodded back.

I'd done a bit of ringing around on the newspaper's behalf. I wanted everything to
be easy for them. No hiccups. The newspaper's idea was to have the sitters by now
well advanced in age to pose next to the portraits of their younger selves. A caption
story—and that would be nice; it would put the town up in lights. Something positive
for a change instead of the usual casualty stories.

At first glance, though, I wouldn't have blamed the newspaper people for thinking
Alma Martin was one. His clothes were old and patched. His hair is grey but in some
mad and desperate bid to recapture something of the past, perhaps in anticipation
of the newspaper interest, he'd tried out a sachet of dye he'd found in a perfectly
good toilet bag tossed out at the tip, and now his hair featured a raccoon strip
down the middle and over his right temple. If you looked closely you saw that the
dye had stained the tops of his ears. It invited all kinds of comment that could
not politely be said aloud. Alma did not
look the kind of human being who speaks
lovingly on end about Pierre Bonnard.

When it came time to organise the group portrait Hilary proved to be difficult. The
others waited while my mother spoke with her. Nervous glances were sent in the direction
of the newspaper people. We didn't want them to give up on us. Finally my mother
got Hilary up from her bench and pushed and sweet-talked her across the street to
the painted shop windows. But, as soon as the photographer tried to place her in
the group, she bolted. My mother shrugged and looked at Alma.

‘All right,' he said. ‘I'll give it a go.'

We watched him limp across the road—in bad light at the tip the night before his
foot had gone right through a sofa he was standing on to get at an expensive-looking
leather bag. We saw him crouch down and speak with Hilary. He was like that for a
few minutes before he stuck up his hand and waved over my mother. She crossed the
road, spoke briefly with him, and went over to his bicycle and opened a saddlebag.
She got out his drawing gear and hurried back with it. For the next ten or fifteen
minutes the group of the original sitters and the newspaper people stood whispering
among themselves while Alma sketched Hilary. In a way it was nice for the newspaper
people to see this, that Alma's portraits weren't just a thing of the past.