Paint Your Wife (9 page)

The next time she met him at the door and asked where he
wanted her, he looked down
at the porch, used his foot to shift an old boot to one side, and said, ‘Here's good.'

It was to become a favourite pose that turned up in a number of paintings. My mother
leans against the door jamb; there's the glare of her bare legs and feet, the lazy
angle of her head. Thoughts to the soft pillowing sea. The eager-to-please shop assistant
had been sent packing.

It was progress. And it was progress that prised her from the house, a bit at a time,
until one afternoon after weeks of wondering if she should ask first or just go without
invitation, she walked up Alma's dirt hill road. In quick time the surrounding farmland
revealed itself, straw coloured, the black flecks of telegraph poles; and on the far
edge of everything stood the ranges, in shadow at this time of the day, but their
jaws dropped open in the February heat. At the top of the drive where it levelled
out to a half-kept lawn and the start of Alma's porch she was alarmed at how much
of her life was on show—the red roof of the farmhouse, the washing line; she could
even see scored into the paddock the track she took each day to the top of the hill.

She knocked timidly on the door and Alma called out, ‘Door's open!' which made her
wonder if he'd seen her lurking around his letter box trying to force herself up
the hill. She pushed on the door. Alma was standing at a bench filling a kettle. He
didn't seem at all surprised to see her. Pleased though, his mouth buttoned down,
some pleasure seeping out despite his efforts, but hardly surprised. ‘Just in time
for some chai,' he said.

While he busied himself with that task she looked around. The rat catcher's cottage
was basic. One large room crowded
with drawings and canvases, none of them framed.
All the work was pinned to a back wall. There was a door to the bedroom which Alma
kicked shut on his way to closing the door behind her. A coal range stood at one
end, a potbelly at the other; a pile of chopped wood climbed the end wall.

My mother passed along the wall with the drawings. She picked out faces, identified
names. Victoria—grimly captive. Hilary's face crammed with smiles; knees pressed
together, like a schoolgirl about to sit a piano exam. Some of the women had settled
for the chaste expression of someone asleep. Sadness was another subject. In two
or three cases the eyes stirred with times long gone, opportunities once theirs for
the taking; or else they showed confusion at the turn the world had taken, or were
commiserative for the fish that once swam by so elegantly and was now the white skeleton
lying on the sea bed.

Now she arrived at the series of the life that my mother feared Alma had seen far
too much of—sketches of her pegging up the washing; standing at the letterbox; walking
back to the house with folded arms, containing herself rather than cold; sitting
on the porch, back to the door frame. She was disappointed to see that in every
sketch he hadn't bothered with the detail of her face—instead it was represented
by a crosshatch of lines, a loose scribble, a wool ball of light and shadow. She
was better represented by gesture—the working struts of her arms as she reaches up
to the washing line, the sag of her shoulders, her domestic solemnity as she chops
the carrots.

There was one she almost missed. She was sure Alma would have removed it had he known
in advance of her plan to visit. The sketch was of two figures sitting on the beach—a
few dashed-off lines is all they get yet there is no doubt who they
are. The more
fully worked figure leans into her knees. There is the heavy fall of her breasts;
one pigtail falls over her front shoulder; in the raised face there is a sharp look
of annoyance. Alma has just waded around the point past the nude sunbathing women.
One of them has sounded the alarm and at once the other has sat up. And already Alma
is looking away with what he saw. The sketch is a commemorative in which my mother's
breasts feature prominently.

This was the first of many visits up to Alma's cottage. It was on the second visit
that he talked a little about himself for the first time. It was prompted by her glimpse
of a tattoo on his arm, another portrait as it turned out. It was a gorgeous sunny
day so they were sitting outside on the porch; it was as Alma reached for his cup
that his shirt sleeve rode up his forearm and she saw it, a bluish oval shape already
faded away beneath fine blond hair.

Alma quickly noticed my mother's interest.

‘That's Claire,' he said.

It was the first time Alma had mentioned his wife. He excused himself and disappeared
inside.
A
few minutes later he returned with a photograph of his wife, his only photo
of
her,
but this version was no clearer. Blonde hair fading into an overexposed white
background.
A
young pale face staring out of the middle. They were on their way to
a new
life
when the train plunged into the river. Alma lost Claire and the baby she
was
carrying.

It begins with a weather system, thereafter a steady aggregation of detail ending
up in tragedy. Heavy rains, a slip, the railway tracks shifting. Lives are jolted.
Lives end. And the next day, as Alma hears later, people place wreaths over the mud
slip. Others throw wreaths into the river. A man who lost his nine-year-old son nails
up a white cross.

Into that river plunged Alma Martin's old life. A lengthy period of convalescence
follows. He's taken some head injuries. Obtrusions. Concussion. Bruising around the
eyes. There is other internal damage that is harder to gauge. For one thing, he can't
recall anything of his immediate life. He can't think why he and Claire had boarded
the train in the first place. He can't explain for himself where they were headed
or what they intended to do when they got there. Relatives might have filled in the
missing spaces, but Alma's parents are dead. His one sibling is in Australia. Some
strangers professing to be second cousins come in to see him; he has no idea who
they are and is glad when they leave. Each morning a man in a white coat approaches
his bedside and shines a torch into his eyes. He asks questions which is silly because
even if he knows the answers Alma can't reply. His jaw is broken and wired up.

He drifts off; when he wakes it is dark. He can hear crying from another part of
the ward. But in the dark nearby is the heavy breath of someone asleep. His bed must
be parked up alongside another patient. He dozes off again. When he wakes a face
he's never seen before hovers over him. There is news to digest. His wife is dead.
Sorry. A needle punctures his arm and he drifts off.

Eventually the time he is awake increases and soon he is able to sit up in bed. He
has been told to expect a certain amount of memory blackout. The brain is a mysterious
organ. He is encouraged to think of it as a castle with as many rooms and entrances
as a honeycomb; a castle with its own inclinations to open this door and close another.
The doctor has asked him
to think of it in this way, to think of different bits and
pieces of himself residing behind different doors. Some of those doors are opening;
others remain stuck. In short, the whack to his head has created a spectacular erasure,
a white flash across the blackened detail of the life lived so far.

As part of his rehabilitation the doctor recommends he try drawing. There are classes
available at the hospital. And why not? He can't talk. He might as well draw pictures.
Someone from the WEA visits every day. Others in the class hobble in on crutches,
with bandaged heads, in wheelchairs. The teacher tells the assembled class, ‘What
I want you to know is there's no such thing as a mistake. I call it a starting point.
If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter. It'll work its way out in the end. After that
you'll be content to call it texture.' Mostly though they hear about technique. The
geometry of the head, its various partitions of vertical and horizontal lines, the
downward weight of a body at rest, the shifting compass of the body's disposition.

He draws every day. He draws for hours on end. Whole mornings and afternoons disappear
in this way—slabs of time previously marked by the
tick tock
of a wall clock and
the squeaking progress of the meal cart up the corridor.

It is a slow passage back into the world. When people ask about his wife Alma casts
around for the photo, and since it is also an illustrative story he might roll up
his sleeve.

He told my mother that when he looked at the photo of his wife he was struck by how
little he could say about her. He had read somewhere about the ability of the great
French painter, Pierre Bonnard, to paint from memory. Bonnard was able to get down
accurately every movement of his wife getting in and out of the bath.

Whereas, Alma has to stop and concentrate hard to remember whether he had ever seen
Claire in a bath. He must have, he thinks, but can't recall it. He has an idea that
she had also gardened—again, it isn't information based on memory. And obviously
she must have walked as well. But that is back in a life when he simply told himself,
Claire is gardening or Claire is walking. He hadn't looked carefully enough to see
how she did either.

My mother has an interesting thesis. She believes Alma decided to build a picture
of his late wife from the bits and pieces of the women in the district that caught
his eye. It's an appealing idea, bolstered by the fact that the tattooed portrait
had already started to fade; it no longer resembled anyone but looked more like a
net or a mesh. If he was fishing for attractive features, my mother thought he would
find Victoria's drawn mouth attractive and Hilary's youth a source of vibrancy; Tui
Brown, stalwart of the tennis club, had a nice figure, and so on. It was just an idea.

He loved Bonnard. For hours he would talk about the painter's life with my mother.
He showed her a photo once. The man's eyes stood out. They bulged. She said he looked
like someone under threat of being struck blind who was taking a final look around
at the world. My mother didn't think much of him—Bonnard, the man. He didn't look
like a man participating in the cut and thrust of life. She couldn't imagine him
mending a fence or waiting at a bus stop or taking his place at the back of the line
for tickets to a film. She liked the portraits she saw in the library books, however.

Alma was a regular visitor to the library. My mother would often see him push his
bike up the hill, a heavy book of colour
plates in the bike carrier. When they made
plans for a last swim at Easter he smiled at his ‘water baby'. He told my mother
she was like Marthe, Bonnard's wife and model.

‘You both have water in common. She spent her life in a bathtub. In her husband's
sketches she is forever getting in and out of the bath. She was devoted to cleaning
herself, and Pierre was devoted to capturing her cleaning herself. Do you know how
they met?' It was no longer necessary to answer, because Alma would tell her whether
or not she wanted to hear, but as he talked on my mother was besieged by the thought
that here was a man who must have once told his wife he loved her, and who had known
her intimately, and yet couldn't begin to tell you about her breasts, how she tasted
or what she felt like. And in startling succession came this thought, and not without
a shudder of responsibility, that the woman Alma was coming to know best in this
world was herself.

Alma Martin once told my mother a story that Matisse had Madame Cézanne in mind when
he painted his own wife, and that Amélie was said to have wept for the ‘lost image'.
My mother and Alma were looking at Bonnard's bath series at the time, and she was
beginning to think that if it was good enough for Matisse to strip Madame Cézanne
into his wife's painting then maybe, just maybe, she would pose nude for Alma in
order to help him flesh out his memory of his lost wife. It took my mother some time
before she raised the courage to propose the idea, but eventually she did, and Alma
took a slow sip of his tea. For the moment neither could shift their eyes off Bonnard's
painting. ‘Well, let's just think about it for now,' she said.

At Easter they went for their final sea swim. They waded around the point at low tide
and arrived at the beach where a
year earlier Alma had looked up and seen my mother
and her friend nude sunbathing. Seeing Alma glance up the beach to that same place
my mother said, ‘I'm still thinking about it.'

That winter the women's club hosted a series of talks. Weather permitting my mother
tried to get to as many of these talks as possible. It was the war years and everything
was in short supply—including stimulation. Like plankton eaters they sat with their
mouths and minds wide open. Alma sometimes came along. He would double my mother
on George's bike. Within view of the town lights he would stop pedalling Alice to
dismount and to hide the bike in the bushes. Whereupon my mother would start walking
and after a pause of five minutes Alma would follow her, in case their arriving
together caused tongues to wag.

Victoria helped to organise these talks in the large space above the Plunket Rooms.
She asked Alma to give a talk on drawing, or maybe his favourite artist. ‘Or ratting,'
she said by way of another option.

In September he was due to give his ratter's talk but was troubled by what to wear.
My mother went to George's wardrobe and found a white shirt, and while Alma sat
in the kitchen in his singlet she ironed her husband's white shirt. In all sorts
of ways Alma was replacing George. He rode his bike. Wore his shirts. Wore his gloves
when he tore out the blackberry threatening to smother the bridge over Chinaman's
Creek.