Paint Your Wife (29 page)

‘Come on, Harry. Don't be a tease.'

‘I'll show you when I'm finished.'

‘You said it's a sketch. A sketch by definition is finished when you are finished.'
She demonstrated with some rapid brushstrokes in the air. ‘There. Done,' she said.

‘This is more work in progress,' I explained.

‘A work in progress,' she said after me, so we were back to that. She looked at me
carefully, trying to see behind the
corners of my very being. ‘You have been acting
so strange lately. Ever since you got back from London.'

She gave me one last searching look and dropped her eyes to the envelope in my hand.

‘Let me see. A peek. Just a little peek. Come on, Harry. The world won't end. What
are you trying to hide? You've seen something, haven't you? You've seen something
and now you're out to hide it. One little peek, come on Harry.'

I told her, ‘There's really nothing to see.'

That's when she made a half-hearted grab for the envelope. I whipped it away and
she said, All right, fuck you, Mayor. You can't just draw me and not let me see.
That's the new rule from now on.'

‘I will. I will show you, I promise, okay, but not until I finish it.'

In fact I'd just had this wonderful idea. With Alma's help I would do a portrait
of Frances and unveil it for her birthday. The idea was beaming out of me.

‘One teensy look won't cause the world to end. Jesus, Harry.'

She'd worn me down
and so this time I decided, what the hell, and handed over the envelope for all the
good that would do. I watched her turn it over. She turned it over again. Confusion
and hurt hung from her face.

‘There's nothing here, you teasing Mayorfuck.' She threw the envelope back at me.
‘I thought you were drawing. You said you were and I actually believed you.'

‘I was looking. Looking is a preliminary step in the process.'

‘Process,' she said. ‘There you go again.'

By now I must admit that I was enjoying the baffling curiosity I'd become in my wife's
eyes.

‘What do you mean “just looking”? Not thinking?'

‘Once, maybe twice, but most of the time I was just looking.'

‘You must have thought something. You can't have just looked and not thought something.'

What she said was true. I knew what she was thinking—I must have thought something
because to look is to take physical stock. To look is to weigh up and judge, at
least that is what she was thinking. Had Alma Martin been in on this conversation
he would have butted in then and said, ‘Well, actually no, that's not quite right.
When you are drawing you are actually learning how to see. You do this through looking.
Looking is untarnished glass. No green bits of judgment hang from its lens. In order
to draw you must learn to see how things are—not how you wish they were, or once
were.'

This piece of insight from Alma did a quick dash through my mind; I didn't really
feel I could bring it off were I to say it out loud. So what I told Fran was this.

‘Well actually, yes, I was thinking. I was thinking about your mouth.'

Predictably she placed her hand there. There must be something wrong with it. There
must be some defect.

Now she looked worried.

‘My lips are too thin. Is that it? Well thank you, Harry. I really can do without
you highlighting that to the world.'

‘I love your mouth. There is nothing wrong with your mouth. I was just looking. I
should have been drawing. Frances, I'm still getting the hang of this.'

For a moment we stared at each other as if we were two entirely different species
who somehow, by way of the zookeeper's oversight, had slipped into the same cage.
We'd never
had a conversation like this one. Now we were both feeling and fumbling
our way as it coursed between what had been said and something more intimate. She
looked at me as if she was trying to figure something out. She experimented between
looking doubtful and looking aggrieved.

‘Okay,' she said finally ‘It's been interesting but now I have to go back and finish
this thing.' She nodded through the glass doors to her workbench where a piece of
Pacific sky waited to be fastened on to an Adriatic town.

Later, in the dark of the bedroom, my wife said in a piping voice aimed at the ceiling,
‘That was nice before. For a while I found myself enjoying it.'

‘Enjoying what?'

‘Being looked at,' she answered, and it brought to mind a story about a rat catcher
that I could have told but would have taken too long at that precise moment. Instead,
I found myself thinking how this drifting apart had come about; at what point had
I stopped looking? After the birth of Adrian and Jess? I don't think so. We had wonderful
times together. Family times. I think it was around the time they left for university
and overseas and we bought this house believing we wanted something new of our own
as well; and around that time, before we'd even tied up to new moorings, the Gondwanaland
thing had come up and suddenly I was preoccupied, preoccupied in an excited kind
of way, and after it turned out to be one more golden calf (as doomed and vainglorious
as George's hill), Frances had her jigsaw thing, at least that was one good thing
to come out of it, and I was left looking off in half a dozen directions at once,
filled with shame, embarrassment, apology, determined not to lock eyes with anyone.
Avoidance. Evasion.
I banged down those twin doors of escape as fast as I could,
burying myself in the shop as I tried to acquit myself of blame and shame by buying
up whatever cast-offs people had stowed in their wardrobes or in their garage. When
I got the letter from the bank and gazed up at that woman with the hedge-clippers
I remember turning the car around and driving slowly home in what I can only call
a jacket of cold sweat. In my mind's eye I saw Tommy Reece, his little rooster body
and outlandish arms crucified against that Dutch landscape, the one on the fading
calendar on the greasy wall down at Persico's, and I thought, I can't do this any
more. I can't carry this place. I've failed them.

At home I walked in circles saying over and over, ‘I don't know what to do. I don't
know what the fuck more I can do.' Frances was magnificent. She kept saying it wasn't
my fault. I had tried. Done my best. She bundled me into the car and we drove up
Paradise Valley. There is a ghost town up there with lofty views out to sea. Here
and there a gate swings on a broken latch. It swings until the long grass catches
it, holds it briefly, then lets go. Once upon a time five thousand people lived up
here. Main Street marched from A to B, gathering and collecting lives. My God, elections
were held up here. Here, in the long wavering grass of Main Street, people in Paradise
Valley voted for a smartly turned out fellow. His promises were made in a particular
register. There were no visible signs of distress in his face when he said, ‘All
this here in Paradise Valley, this here is our children's future.' Brave words, and
yet on the other hand the future is always gilded with promise. It is the trophy
on the mantelpiece with our name on it. The future is waiting for us to step up.
All of us will be there when
the roll-call takes place. Who would not vote for a
man who spoke so ably about the future? And now, now that the future has been reined
in, what do we find? Another experiment in living. Traces here and there. Scattered
evidence. The Historical Society has been active. You can tramp around in the long
fairy grass and stumble over the foundations where once there stood a Bank of Australasia,
a drapery, a colliery, a school, a church; forget-me-nots still come up each spring
faithfully tracing the plots of the dead. Once upon a time people had been happy
to be buried there. Here and there photo displays are posted across the paddocks—put
up by the Historical Society—of dolls, toys, clothes of an abandoned wardrobe. Traces
of life lived. Offcuts of material and shadow.

When Frances and I got out of the car and wandered around, me in my benumbed state,
we stopped by a photo of a woman dressed top to toe in black on the steps of a store
and in her eyes I saw the look that had plagued us from Day One—
life is elsewhere.
Life is always elsewhere. I could see it in the woman's eyes, there, scored against
the dead walls of her eyes the thought that in the morning she will break the news
to the man who is taking her photograph that she is leaving this place. You can see
by the backs of her eyes that she has already left. She is planning her way out of
Paradise. She has seen the future. Tomorrow morning, when she wakes up she will break
the news to her husband.

I found myself unusually affected by this woman's face and its pessimism. So much
so that when Frances sat me down on the grass and stroked my knee and proposed, ‘You
know, Harry, we could always leave,' I heard myself say, ‘Nope. I'm staying.'

Frances, bless her, kissed me on the cheek.

Late the next morning I caught up with Guy on the matter of the polar bear. As soon
as he shambled in the door I knew he'd driven here with the bear on his mind and
how he would explain it to Harry. Now he circled defensively, saying, ‘It seemed
like a good buy,' and although my intention was to be patient, since I had woken
up in that kind of mood, I found myself asking the obvious question, ‘And what do
you suppose is a good price for a stuffed polar bear?'

Guy shrugged and looked hurt. He said he thought I would be pleased. And why would
that be? Because, he said, as far as he knew and I should correct him if this wasn't
the case, there had never been a stuffed polar bear in Pre-Loved Furnishings &
Other Curios.

He was correct. There hadn't been a polar bear and soon, I hoped, there would be
none. I told him he'd have to phone up the owner of the bear and get them to come
in and pick it up. I saw him inwardly wince at the thought of having to disappoint
someone. I had no idea what he could have been thinking. A polar bear for Christsakes.
But then I wouldn't be the first to notice he hadn't been the same since Caloundra
fell through, and I'd heard it from Kath that for a while after their setback he
started daydreaming again and rekindling the old idea to manufacture children's footwear.

Despite the business with the bear and Guy, I was in a good mood as I drove out to
pick up Alma. This morning he was waiting at the bottom of his drive for me. As soon
as he got in the car he handed me a photocopy of a sketch. He said, ‘I saw
this and
immediately thought of you.' It was Schiele's
The Artist and His Model.

In the sketch there are three elements—a mirror, the model and the artist, Schiele,
himself, looking on with vampiric interest at the naked upright figure of his model.
Schiele has the rear view. The mirror has the front view. In the mirror we see the
perky tuft of pubic hair, a look of high disdain on the model's face, and further
back the artist sitting on an apple box, a sketchpad on his knee. ‘The artist,' explained
Alma now, ‘sometimes finds himself divided between the woman on his left and the one
on his right, the one who is sitting for him, and the other one that is emerging
on paper. There is a third woman which is really of no use to anyone. It is the one
in the artist's mind. The idealised woman. She neither breathes nor speaks. She does
not live except in his mind. So it is useful when you draw to keep your eyes and
full attention on the subject before you.'

I had to smile and yet at the same time I didn't feel like explaining Ophelia, how
we met, or confessing to the thinly grounded experience from which her substance
had grown to preoccupy me. I did tell him about trying to draw Frances the previous
night, and he asked me if she'd demanded to see it. Looking straight at the road,
and older than Methuselah, Alma said, ‘They always do that.'

There are times when all the years he's lived congregate in his face and his eyes
blink impatiently at what is before him. Out at the Eliots' there was another moment
like that when we found Violet tiptoeing around the cottage with a raised broom ready
to strike. She explained she'd seen a rat. Alma's shoulders appeared to stoop and
his head advance on this
ancient information, and again there was that concentration
of years in his face, a complexion like white dust, red-eyed, crumbled skin.

For the second time in a row the modelling session was far from satisfactory. In
anticipation of our arrival Violet had put down the twins. The cottage was quieter
too, quieter for our nervous whispering. And we spent a few minutes rearranging where
she would sit and playing with the light. But we couldn't get Violet to sink fully
into herself and properly relax. Her head was cocked ready for distraction and even
when asked to look directly ahead, her eyes appeared to turn corners.

Her expectations were duly met. The cries of Jackson and Crystal travelled up the
hall. Their mother groaned and slapped the floor. She started to get up but Alma rather
curtly told her to stay put. The look was still there, although it was in danger
of drawing attention to itself. Child and adult swilled back and forth in Violet's
face.

She made a move to get up and again Alma told her to be still. There was just the
dashing sound of pencil and paper and the enraged cries of Violet's babies from the
hall. Poor Violet looked more and more distressed. And when Alma flipped a page over
and held up a hand to show he wasn't finished she looked to me for help.

I got up and walked down the hall to the bedroom. When they saw me the bundled red
faces stopped their bawling and gaped up at the stranger's face. I had two to three
seconds in which to do something. I picked up a music box and wound on the ‘Sugar
Plum Fairy'. They listened to that, their black eyes glistening up at me. ‘Sugar
Plum Fairy' finished and I wound it up again. This was easy enough. The Eliot twins
listened. The third time I began winding they started to twist inside their bundled
nappies and cry. In a few seconds I heard running feet. Violet came in and scooped
them up.