Paint Your Wife (32 page)

‘The next part I'm not so proud of. I hear this song in my head and I start to sing.
I stop, because suddenly I'm weeping. These tears. I mean, my God, Kath, get a life,
please. Dougie gives me his hanky. I tell him, Carole King. That's who I want at
my funeral. Well, by now Edith Piaf is winding down, and that's when another Carole
King melody comes to me. I stop there because I need another cigarette. I dig around
in my handbag without much success. Then I lay the bag on a gravestone. Eloise.
Eloise Sim. That's whose grave it is. I just remembered that. “Excuse me, Eloise,”
I say, “while I have a cig.” Dougie has one too and we sit on the gravestone, smoking,
then he leans forward with a song of his own. And he starts
singing Louis Armstrong's
“Stormy Weather”. Not my choice for a funeral. Definitely not, I tell him. I want
people to cry at mine. Louis Armstrong would just have them dancing in the aisles.
No one's crying. None of the shits care because they're singing “Stormy Weather”.
Well, screw that. Then I see all the faces at my own funeral. I see them sitting
there. I can see my coffin up the front. And it's so, so awful, so awful that I start
crying, and Doug puts an arm around my shoulder. He puts his face against mine. Then
he kisses my cheek.

‘Well, we both have a list of songs we want played at our funerals. We start sharing
those. He wants Bob Dylan singing “Ballad of a Thin Man”. But then he changes that
for Al Green's “Take Me to the River”, which in my view I don't really think is appropriate.
Too much on the driving side. He agrees and says, “Maybe something soft and gospelly
then?” And just like that, without a signal, we both start to sing, “I Bid You Goodnight”.
So that is what we're singing, not loudly or obnoxiously, just quietly on Eloise's
gravestone, Eloise Sim born eighteen hundred and seventy-eight, when we see the pallbearers
coming out of the church. They glance across the churchyard and we both bounce up
as if we've been caught out, which we have in a way. I pick up my bag, dust the leaves
off my black funeral dress. Now, listen to this. Dougie threads his arm through mine
and draws me across the yard away from the entrance. Nothing's been said. Not a word.
It's as if we are being guided. We cross the lawn beside the church. We can hear
the shuffling of feet, the sharper noise of a pew moving, someone's cough. We have
forgotten poor crippled Dean. I know where we're headed before I actually see where
we're headed, if you follow me. Across from the church is a KFC.
Beside it, a SKY
TV-winking vacancy. Vacancy. “Hello? This way.” That's what it might as well be saying.
So Doug, he gives my hand a little press, and at the first gap in the traffic we're
pulling each other across the road, then we're hurrying across the flagstone parking
area.

‘Our room is on the street side, and there's that nice downy light of curtains closed
in the afternoon. While Dougie undresses I pull the curtains back a whisker. It has
started to rain and the funeral people milling around the hearse have put up umbrellas.
Poor Dean must be in the hearse because I see this white-gloved hand reach up and
close the rear. There are faces in that crowd I've known from high school, one or
two I have kept in touch with. But the one I desired back then, twenty-five years
ago, is raising my funeral dress over my shoulders. I don't look pretty. I mean,
the youth has gone. My boobs sag. There's a bulge of white flesh tumbling over the
waistband of my panties. Oh God, it's not pretty. There's a long scar from a caesarean.
Another scar on my thigh is from an op to wind up my veins. My body is a battleground,
let me tell you. So I let go of the curtain and I say to Dougie, “Tell me I'm not
ridiculous.” That's the word I use. Ridiculous. And he says, “You're not ridiculous,
Kath. You're lovely.”

‘Lovely,' she repeated. She smiled, mysterious, enmeshed in all kinds of complexities
of belief, make-believe, faith. She may not have believed Dougie but she's glad to
have heard those words, and especially that word,
lovely.

‘So, we make our way over to the bed and you'll never guess but by some weirdly strange
coincidence we both start humming Carole King. See, the melody was just to get us
across the carpet and under the bedcovers. The rest you don't
need to know about.
Except this. Later, much later, I'm talking about after we've left the motel unit
now, in sunglasses and with an unspoken vow never to see each other again, at least
until one or the other's funeral, we all die, after all, I'm picking up pasta in
the supermarket, bumbling along with my cart, thinking, What the hell were we doing?
Just what were we doing running from that funeral? I'm sure we must have looked like
we knew. To those people in their cars going by, all that traffic, I'm sure they thought
we knew.'

She looked up sharply into the corners of the sky, a funny look lightly sketched
on her face, now a quick exploratory look at Violet.

‘What do you think? What do you think was going on there?' She spoke slowly, almost
with exaggerated slowness, and watched carefully the impact of each word on Violet's
face. She said, ‘You know something? It's like watching a jug fill, to hear me and
watch you.'

18

The world is off-balance most of the time. You can never see it in its entirety.
All you really ever manage to obtain is a glimpse, an angled view, three-quarter,
quarter view.

This is what you get to hear if Alma Martin is your teacher and you are into your
second or third drawing lesson.

Here's another. When sketching your wife there are always three people in the room
with you at the time. There's yourself, the artist, your wife who is the subject,
and there is the figure emerging on the canvas.

The first time I heard that was in the car on our way to the Eliots'. The second time
was at my mother's place. Doug and Guy and their wives were in attendance, Guy with
a look of apprehension, Doug with his raised smile, like he's along for the ride
to see what will happen.

Diane was sitting rather testily doing her best not to look Doug's way. Kath, as
it appeared, was also trying not to look Doug's way, and at the same time finding
it hard to look back at Guy. Frances was smiling back at me as if to say, Isn't this
a hoot? Only my mother was in professional mode,
silent, moving quiet as a shadow
into position while the old master held court.

Alma gave me a searching look and held it on me as he explained the next part. ‘The
trick is to make sure that the woman sitting for you and the woman emerging on canvas
are the same person.'

Doug gave me a nudge. Alma saw that and switched his attention to Doug.

‘Douglas, how well do you know your wife?'

‘Pretty well.'

A scoff from Diane.

Now Alma found Guy.

‘And you, sir?' He'd forgotten Guy's name.

‘We've been married seventeen years.'

Alma's eyes twinkled while he considered that answer, unexpected you would have to
say, possibly misunderstood by Guy, but Alma decided to let it pass. He still didn't
know Guy that well.

‘And Harry, of course,' he said. But that wasn't a question. It wasn't anything in
particular but it had the effect of making me feel guilty all the same, especially
when Frances raised her eye my way.

Nowadays this is a sample question from Alma's introductory classes on portraiture.
‘How well do you know your wife?' It's designed to disarm.

You're not supposed to actually answer. The question is the preliminary step to finding
out.

At my mother's house that night Alma invited Doug and me and Guy to take a final look
at our wives (the ‘end-of-the-pier view' Alma calls it). Then he asked us to go into
the next room and draw what we think we saw.

He said, ‘Take your time but don't take too long about it—the National Gallery isn't
holding its breath.'

We pushed into the dining room with our pencils and sketch pads. By dint of the sessions
out at the Eliots' place, I knew the drill. I said, ‘Don't procrastinate and fart
about. Just get it down.'

Doug started to say something—I cut him off: ‘…and don't talk.' We scribbled in silence.
Once Guy cleared his throat and half stuck up his hand for my attention. He asked
if he could start again. ‘There are no rules,' I told him. ‘Just get Kath down on
that sheet of paper.'

‘How much time is left?' he asked.

I told him, ‘There's no time. A sketch doesn't know time.' Though less than a minute
later Alma opened the door and invited us back in for step three, which is:
Take
your sketch back to the other room and compare it with the woman sitting/reading/eating
an apple in the model's chair.

Alma waited until Guy was through the door. Guy would rather have stayed in the dining
room and closed the curtains and hid behind the couch.

‘Now ask yourself. Are there two different women in your life? No? Really?' (Smirking
now.) ‘Okay, let's put it this way. Is the woman who sleeps in your bed and who bore
your children the same woman you carry around in your head? Let's find out. Harry,
let's start with you. Let's see your drawing.'

It's a cheap fairground trick designed to rattle and alarm, but effective, because
it sets the student up for the first lesson. Memory is unreliable. Secondly, seeing
is not the same as looking. And in learning how to draw what you really learn is
how to see. Once you learn how to see, good or bad or better
doesn't come into it.
Yearning just flies out the window. The only thing of consequence is what sits before
you.

In recent weeks there are things I have wondered about the old rat-catching days
of Alma's ‘in lieu of' arrangement. I can't understand why it didn't catch on. Why,
in those first uneasy truce-making months of soldiers returning to their women after
an interval in some cases of years, why drawing classes weren't introduced. Imagine
if drawing had become an activity with a community focus? Imagine if Alma had wandered
up to George in the early days of his quixotic hill removal exercise and tapped
him on the shoulder and led him back to the house, sat my mother down and put a pencil
in George's hand. The one and only explanation is that he was in love with my mother
and he couldn't give her up as he almost certainly would have had he shown George
in which direction both to look and focus his efforts. Far better to watch George
labour day after day on that hill and have his wife to himself. Of course Frank Bryant
was a surprise; he never anticipated that event happening. Yet I can't help think
that if Alma had put my mother to one side he might have killed that yearning for
better things that spawned in the years following World War Two.

Still, it is never too late to make amends.

The day I changed my mind about Dean Eliot was the day I led him back to the Garden
of Memories where Violet was waiting and somewhat unexpectedly talking to Kath Stuart.
They were sitting on the same bench, the Eliot twins playing on the grass by their
feet. Violet was first to see us. Then Kath looked up. She rose to her feet, smoothing
out her skirts. She kissed Violet on the cheek, gave me a little wave and started
to
move to the far gate. She was out to avoid me and I wasn't going to let that happen.

‘Kath,' I called out. ‘Why don't you come down to the shop? Guy's there.'

She stopped to think. There's surely a dozen reasons why I can't do that. She must
have had a total mind block because at the moment when she so desperately wanted
an excuse she couldn't think of one.

I made another discovery ten minutes later back at the shop. No matter how much you
may want to, you can't force people into doing what they don't want to do.

In retrospect I blame my heady success with Dean. Flush with that, I thought I could
now wave a magic wand over Kath and Guy and make things better between them. Moreover
I was convinced that I knew how.

As we came into Pre-Loved, Guy was touchingly shining up some bronze doorstops and
that immediately enamoured me of him, especially after Kath's attempt to slide away
from me at the gardens. I had heard whispering. I gathered something had gone down
between her and Doug. I didn't know the details and didn't want to, and I hoped I
was wrong. Still, if I had the feeling that something had happened then I'm sure
Guy was also well aware of it.

He looked up from the brass doorstops, pleased to see me. Then he saw who I had with
me and suddenly he looked unhappy. His eyes started blinking. For an awful few seconds
I thought he might cry. Kath looked away. She'd just discovered the child's zebra
rocking-horse. In retrospect I was a bit too loud, forceful, eager to make things
happen after my success with the Eliots, still bathing in the warm feeling of
seeing
them drive away to the beach—in my van, I should add, reflecting the new cooperative
spirit between me and Dean. He said he would bring it back and walk back out to the
beach. I told him, no, he could return it in the morning and even Violet looked surprised.
I was still feeling bad for slapping him. All the same, it was a good result. Well,
anyway, for all that I felt like I was on a roll; that of all days this was one where
I might be invincible. I should have just bought a raffle ticket and been content.
That's what I should have done.

Instead I said to Kath, ‘Why don't you draw Guy?'

She gave me a crazy look. Guy stopped blinking. I said, ‘Sure. It's fun.'

A stubbornness took hold of Kath; she folded her arms.

Guy said, ‘What's this about, Harry?'