Paint Your Wife (24 page)

‘Here,' said the woman. ‘Mind your step.'

Violet took the torch. She found the door handle and pushed. The smell of paint hit
her. She pushed the torch ahead, and the discovery took her breath away. Here were
the places Dean had spoken of, places he'd described in detail back in the days when
they both worked in the paint warehouse, when in the cafeteria he had first told of
the travelling life he was saving up for. Here were the lakes, and forested hills,
majestic mountains and long beaches with the curling waves he so admired, and she
saw Dean had injected some poetic licence; he'd found space for a Turkish minaret,
two unicorns and a vast bridge, a wonderful engineering accomplishment linking the
forested mountain with the virgin beach.

Monday. We drove past the Datsun with its shattered windows. It had been stripped
of its wheels as well. It was a desolate sight, and it was impossible to dodge the
thought that the Eliots were in quicksand up to their necks.

Violet was sitting out on the step as we pulled up on the lawn. The quiet dignity
we'd seen on the first day was still evident. She rose from the step, her face shifting
with different impulses—gratitude, sincerity, a tiredness as well, I thought.

She said to Alma, ‘I would have rung and thanked you for the potatoes—I guessed it
was you. There's no phone though.'

Alma patted her shoulder. He looked at the house.

‘So, I take it Dean's not here?'

Dean. Already. So quickly on to that subject. She shook her head and stared at her
bare toes poking out the bottom of that faded purple dress she favoured.

Alma raised an eyebrow. I think he'd finally realised that he had reached the point
where he could politely ask what was going on. Of course Violet didn't know what
was going on. The truth is she didn't know much more than we did. She didn't know
where Dean was, and she didn't know what to say. She'd run out of excuses.

‘I hope this doesn't sound out of line, Violet, but I'm going to ask you anyway.
Are you and Dean okay?'

She'd been expecting a question to do with the rent. When she looked up from her
toes her expression was defiant.

‘Why?' she asked.

Alma said he was just wondering. He hoped it didn't sound like he was prying.

I thought he should just get to the point and throw her out of there. At this rate
there would trips galore between the tip and the beach cottage, all of it time-wasting.

‘Nah. We're okay,' she said.

‘Because if you're in any kind of trouble I need to know if I'm to help in any way.'

You could see how tempting that sounded. Alma gave her a moment to think about it.

‘And if I wasn't okay?'

‘Well, in a way, it would be to my advantage. I need to pay someone to model for
me and I thought if that was to interest you, well we could come to an arrangement.'

Modelling. She hadn't been expecting that. Boy, was she not expecting that.

It was a surprise to me as well. On the way over there Alma hadn't mentioned it.
Maybe he hadn't thought of it, except of course such an idea had a history.

Now he was warming to the notion.

‘We could take it off the rent. It would be in lieu of…but that's only if you want
to.'

She didn't say thank you. That was the thing about the Eliots; it was like they couldn't
see or recognise a kindness shown to them. I didn't sense a trace of gratitude; it
was simply a change of circumstance, something new to react to. In a blink she'd
leapt Dean-style into that feral position of finding advantage; and now she was out
to hammer it home as best she could.

‘What kind of modelling?' she asked. And fair enough, modelling could mean a lot
of things.

‘Drawing, sketching,' Alma told her.

She was starting to nod now; starting to get the idea. Trying to picture it. She
folded her arms to think:

‘One thing though. I won't take my clothes off.'

‘Good. That settles that. I won't ask you to then. I won't ask you to do anything
that you're uncomfortable with.'

‘And how much would you pay me?'

Alma thought for a moment. The speed and the direction the offer was moving in had
caught him unprepared.

‘Oh, I don't know,' he said. ‘Three or four sessions a week to start with and that
can cover your rent.'

There was the same deliberate slowness I'd had to put up with in Dean while negotiating
the exchange of mattresses. Words weighed, pondered.

‘So, would I get more if I took my clothes off?'

‘After what you just said?'

‘But if I did, let's say…'

‘I hadn't thought about offering a different rate—but that's not to say I shouldn't.'

‘And just modelling, right?'

‘For purposes of sketching. Maybe even a painting. Portraits, that kind of thing.
I'm sure you know what I mean. But you take your time and think about it.'

She looked up at the sky, then back at Alma—all of two seconds.

‘I've thought about it,' she said. ‘I'll do it.'

15

Late on Sunday night we were hit by a cold front. The rain was extremely heavy. I
lay in bed listening to it flow over the guttering. The ground outside our bedroom
window made that pudge sound. The rain didn't want to end. My thoughts ran to various
disasters. Blocked drains, slippages, property damage. I waited for the phone to
ring. And that's how I eventually dozed off, while waiting for news of the worst.

Most of the rain was let go of in the night. In the morning it was murky out. When
I walked down to the store the air was still wet, soaked through like the washing.
Alice rang to make sure I would run Alma out to the Eliots'. She didn't want him
cycling in that weather. ‘And you know he won't ask…' As she spoke I could see patches
of sunshine hanging in a fine mist over Broadway. He could have biked. And anyway,
the tip was closed (it would be a quagmire) and whenever that happens business gets
down to a trickle. So I didn't mind, though just as I was about to lock up a very
tall man bent over with hay fever came and bought the hydrography set that has sat
around the shop hoping to catch someone's eye for nearly
eight years. Then Guy turned
up drenched in his raincoat. He didn't want anything in particular. He was just out
and about and thought he'd drop by. Since the job with the beautification scheme ended
I had no idea what he and Kath did for money. When Guy walked in I was about to slip
the ‘Back in an hour' notice on the door. Now it occurred to me that he could watch
over the shop. I made it clear that he would be doing me the favour, and of course
I would pay him.

‘Absolutely,' I insisted. I couldn't have him do it for nothing.

Guy's face turned red when I mentioned money. His eyes shot up at the stag head.
‘Well, I'm happy to do it for nothing, Harry. I wasn't meaning to hit you up for
anything. There's plenty here to keep me occupied.' His eyes flitted across the shop
and hesitated at the beaded curtain.

On our way out to the Eliots', Alma got me to stop at the supermarket. He came back
with tea bags, milk, biscuits; things which he aimed to pass off as morning tea and
leave with Violet. Alma often looked cross with the world. Alternately, he could
just as easily seize up if you said thank you. That was the case when he put out
the biscuits and tea at the Eliots'. As soon as Violet began to thank him he looked
around for a distraction. He found me heading for the door.

‘No point you leaving Harry. We'll be here an hour, that's all. You might as well
join me.'

He was inviting me to draw. Was this what I was hearing? In all the years I'd known
Alma, all the times he sat with a sketchpad perched on his knee drawing my mother
in our house, I'd never known him to extend this invitation. It was an obvious one
when you think about it, rain falling against the window, a boy restless in the house.

A funny awkwardness came between us, as though Alma had just logged on to my thoughts.

‘The fact is, I can't draw.' But he heard that coming.

‘Everyone says that, Harry.'

I said I hadn't drawn anything since primary school. ‘People say that too.' While
this conversation was going on Violet was looking from one to the other; now that
it was decided—since Alma had decided for me, I was still standing like a limp rag
with a big loopy grin—she said, ‘Will that mean extra?'

Alma looked at me.

‘How much?'

‘Ten dollars is the usual going rate,' he said.

Violet seemed happy with that; there was a skip in her tail as she gathered up the
goodies Alma had picked up from the supermarket.

It shouldn't be so threatening—pencil, paper. You can look at a sheet of paper and
find yourself thinking ludicrous thoughts such as, ‘I'm bigger than it is.' Or catalogues
of past work drift out of the back rooms of memory. Pictures of brown boats sailing
on blue seas, a perfect mountain cone in the background, a blob of snow on top. Round
faces with yellow hair and hands like small thickets suitable for firewood. I had
grown up with the neighbour drawing my mother so there were certain things I already
knew about drawing. I knew the breathy silence, the scratchy sound of pencil on paper.
I knew that strange practised stillness. I knew how to move around it. But I knew
it as an audience knows a scene in a play, never as one who harbours a burning ambition
to enter the scene himself.

Now as Alma took a free hand in moving furniture around, organising where we would
sit, a chair for him, one for me, a
place for Violet, I found myself trying to remember
if there had been another time, just once, when Alma urged a pencil or piece of crayon
on me. I began to feel strangely nervous, and as I do on such occasions I reminded
myself that I am the mayor. We are the modern-day Hercules holding up the pillars
of our little communities from ill winds of economic glut and ruin. We are the unseen,
unsung glue, I often think…

‘If you're thinking of making a mark on that sheet of paper you'll need to pick up
a stick of charcoal, Harry,' Alma said then.

He was smiling to himself; enjoying himself, I think. Violet's mood was more like
my own—apprehensive. Alma gave some instructions. First to Violet; he wanted her
to adopt a number of poses. He demonstrated. He dropped his chin on to his chest
and hung his arms so that everything about him had a downward flow. Next he placed
a hand against the wall and leant his weight in that direction. He showed her two
or three more poses and told her she could change whenever she got sick of one—apparently
we were just after some quick gestural things. And then he told her, ‘When you're
sick of those, Violet, you can come up with your own.'

Then he directed his attention to me and explained what he meant by a gestural drawing.
The body is hardly ever at rest. Weight hardly ever sits square as in a statue or
a porcelain object. He showed me with a few quickly drawn lines what he was after
and it came as a relief that I wouldn't have to get down to the detail of faces,
eyelashes, mouths. He just wanted lines indicating the way Violet's body fell.

The hardest thing was to make that first mark. While I was dithering Alma picked up
my wrist and crudely moved
my handheld charcoal against the paper. ‘There, now you're
started.'

He worked quickly, dashing off one drawing after another. Ripping out sheets of paper
that he'd obtained on the cheap from Persico's fish shop.
Quid pro quo.
Jimmy had
asked for some fish drawings. Alma had said, ‘How about drawings of your customers?'
And now the portraits of Jimmy's regulars were pinned up to the wall next to a large
chart of various fish species plus a very old NE Paints landscape calendar.

Violet finished Alma's repertoire of poses and began to explore a number of her
own. She tried sitting on a chair, tapping her shoe. Alma told her that drawing a
tapping foot was a bit beyond us, and after that she slid off the chair on to the
floor and sat with her back up against the wall, her knees tucked against her chest,
her face at a moon-gazing angle. Once more that glass dome of concentrated effort
fell over us. Violet was away in her own little world, spinning to a distant corner
of the galaxy. In her face I saw assembled various depths, layers, shadings, all
kinds of cravings that I had no idea how to ever get down on paper. For the most
part she appeared to be in a kind of reverie, then the circumstances would waken
her and she'd look with that same mildly troubled look sometimes found on customers
who come into the shop clutching something worthless that they nevertheless hope
I will buy.

‘You doing fine, Violet. Just fine,' Alma said at one point. Our eyes met and she glanced
away and fell back into the former planetary arrangement of drawer and sitter. What
a privilege it is to look at another's face, to explore it without causing offence.
Of course you are free to stare at Robyn's blonde vulva out of the glossy glare of
a magazine, and there
are places in the world where it is possible to shuffle through
a curtained-off area to sit and observe the same thing live as it were. But in the
end that is just voyeurism without any useful outcome. My mother once asked a man
in a picture theatre to stop staring at her. This was before the war, before George's
drunken advances, back when my mother lived in a world of neutered desire. Drawing
validates what that man in the picture theatre was ticked off for; it lets you get
away with a lot more. In a street or inside a shop or in a train it is possible to
look at the person at your side or in front of you or across the aisle but it tends
to be a stolen opportunity. A quick glance which turns and runs. The bounty is all
smash and grab—a neck view, the back of the head (grey hair, a neck wart, skin soft,
puce-like, and you return to your newspaper). Eventually an impression forms and
we race to fill in what we saw with words—happy, sad, forlorn, moody, anxious, idiotic.
But these words are of no use whatsoever when you draw. Things are simply what they
are. Neither the shadow beneath the chin nor the drawn one hold strong opinions about
themselves.