Prochownik's Dream (11 page)

‘The idea?'

‘You being out
there
! Being part of that scene out there with those people! With people like them. I don't know them. I never feel comfortable with them. I don't know what they're thinking. They're not my kind of people and they are never going to be my kind of people no matter how hard I try to like them or to understand them. They have agendas.' She was silent a moment. ‘I don't trust them. It's really as simple as that. I wonder if, to be an artist, you have to spend your time with people like that or whether you can do it on your own. I would really like to know the answer to that one.'

They were both silent for a long while.

‘You trust Andy?' he said.

‘Andy's different. He's not like them. He loves you. He loves me and Nada.'

‘He spends all his time with artists and dealers.'

‘Andy doesn't have an agenda.' After a time she said, ‘We need a holiday before you get into this new project. We need to
condition
ourselves for it.' She laughed. ‘Just you and me. We haven't had a real holiday together since that trip to Tassie before Nada was born. There's a new resort promotion on Noumea. The people who are running it owe me. I can get the accommodation for free and half the airfares. I'll write a piece for them in
The Traveller
. There's child minding at the resort. You and me can lie on the beach all day. I'll get a new bikini. Remember when you said they invented the bikini for breasts like mine?'

‘I remember.'

She rolled towards him and they kissed. ‘When were you thinking of starting work on this show?'

‘Tomorrow.'

They both laughed.

‘
Tomorrow
, he says! I can't afford to take time off for Noumea anyway. So who do I think I'm kidding? Jesus! I don't know how I'd cope if you ever became successful.'

‘And stopped being a failure, you mean?'

‘You're not a failure. I don't see you as a failure. Failure's not the only alternative to success. People can go along leading a good life without being successful. We don't have to have success. It isn't everything. We make too much of success.'

‘Success is good for you,' he said. ‘I felt it when I won the Kingsgate prize. Otherwise I wouldn't know. I remember it doing me good.'

‘Yeah, like drugs,' she said. ‘It's a feeling for a moment. Like when I make a big sale. I know that feeling. I meant we get used to being who we are, that's all.
This
is who we are. This is us. If you were successful,
this
would change. It's changing already with the end of your installations and this new thing. I'm not saying what we've got is perfect, but I can handle being who we are now. Success out there in the world is the unknown for us. For the first time it seems to me you're aiming for the unknown and turning your back on what we know. To be honest, that scares me more than Marina Golding. I know in my heart you're never going to be unfaithful. I know that.'

‘We both know that.' He kissed her. ‘But I can't stand still and repeat myself, or do nothing.'

‘We have to be honest about where we're going.' She moved his hand around on her belly. ‘I want our other baby before it's too late. I've always felt it out there, waiting for us to decide to let it through. I've been hearing from it a lot lately. Nada's little brother or sister.'

They lay silently side by side, her hand holding his hand on her stomach. After a while she moved his hand to her breast. The night noises of the city out beyond the window.

six

He parked across the road from the Red Hat café. He was still preoccupied by the previous night's conversation with Teresa, the prospect of another child arousing in him a troubling contradiction of emotions. He was watching two men in grey dustcoats unloading furniture from the back of a truck parked in front of him. He realised suddenly, with a start of interest, that the men were lifting down an old-fashioned cane chaise longue similar to the one on which Marina had been lying that day, years ago, when he had made his first drawing of her asleep.

In the normal course of everyday life it might have been a weakness to have made something of this coincidence, he knew that, but he had no doubt that in the other world of art, with its kinship with dreams and illusions, the intervention of chance could signify that critical moment when a project might leap beyond the control of the artist; a moment, in other words, when the work ceased to be the banal projection merely of the artist's own fragile ego and took on a larger existence of its own. He grabbed the two sketchbooks from the passenger seat, stepped out of the car and followed the men into the auction rooms, where they were just at that moment in the act of setting the chaise on the floor. ‘How much do you expect it to go for?' he asked. He reached and touched the back of it, as if he were already its possessor.

The older man considered the chaise with a professional glance. ‘Maybe one-fifty?' he said and transferred the casual appraisal of his gaze to Toni. ‘Two at the outside.'

‘One-fifty to two?' Toni echoed him, considering the chaise as if he had a choice in the matter of whether or not to place a bid for it.

‘You can leave a bid with me,' the man told him. ‘The auction's Tuesday morning. I'll call you lunchtime Tuesday if I get it for you. It could go for less. Leave me your number.' The men watched him examining it.

Toni saw that it was not identical to the one at Macedon, but was nevertheless of the same style and period; an old-fashioned piece from that leisured era of shaded verandahs and conservatories. A regime of daily life that had permitted time for cool drinks in the afternoon; a bygone era, in other words, when well-to-do people such as Marina's parents had employed housekeepers so that they might be at liberty themselves to enjoy life. He could see that the chaise would sit nicely in a modern apartment or in his studio. It needed only one or two cushions and a colourful throw rug to give it back its life. He was imagining Marina asleep on it in the pose of his old drawing. Perhaps he would do another drawing of her in the same pose now? The idea occurred to him then of a naked portrait of her lying on the chaise. A woman alone in the privacy of her own room, lying on her couch, looking away from the viewer and thinking her private thoughts, oblivious to the gaze of the onlooker. He found it was not easy to visualise Marina without her clothes. He could only see her naked body in his peripheral vision, as it were, and at the very extreme of his imagination, an elusive impression of an anonymous woman. In the exquisite moment of such an image, he was sure she would be a woman open to the erotic intensities of her private desires; desires of the daydream world, to be sure, which she would share with no one and which she would have no wish to satisfy in the real world. Such a painting would lend intensity to the other pictures in the suite. A painting depicting the interior life of this woman, a life which the viewer might read in her expression rather than in the lines of her body. For surely there would also be a certain poignancy of human solitude, a vulnerability and sense of the failure of desire even, about such a woman, exposed to the viewer and no longer in the prime of her youth? Such a picture could not be the portrait of a child-like odalisque, but must be an intimate picture of a middle-aged artist engaged with her unresolvable erotic tensions. Something difficult and intimate. But could he paint such a picture? Did he possess the skill for it? Did he have the vision that would remove such an image from the arena of the merely prurient? Could he hold it together long enough in his mind's eye to get it down on the canvas? And, anyway, would Marina agree to sit for him without her clothes on?

‘I like it,' he said.

‘You
do
like it,' the older man observed approvingly, and he ran his hand over the back of the cane chaise as if he were wondering if he might have missed something of special interest about it. ‘You know what you're looking at. It's a nice piece. We don't get many in this condition.' The man smiled, sure of his verdict. ‘You're a collector. I can always pick the collectors.'

‘How can I be certain of getting it?'

The man told him to leave a bid of two hundred and he would be sure to get it for him.

Toni left the bid and his telephone number and, with a last backward glance at the chaise, he stepped out into the street. It was another expense that would have to go on Teresa's agency Visa card. But it was a necessity he could not forgo. He stood at the kerb looking across the road. He could see the real Marina sitting at a table behind a red sofa in the window of the café, shadows and reflections of vehicles and pedestrians passing in the street and suggestively interrupting his view of her. She was alone and was reading a book. As he watched her he saw that she was reading the book, indeed, as if she was not expecting someone to join her but was sure of her solitude and was absorbed in the imaginary world of the story; a woman alone in a café reading, the woman of his imaginary painting, her private thoughts concealed within the book. She turned a page then, and as she did so she glanced out the window. He felt a thrill of excitement at the prospect of what he was about to undertake with her. To be a painter again! It had suddenly begun to seem real to him. His preoccupation with their second child, which had persisted throughout the morning, was so thoroughly forgotten now it might never have existed.

He crossed the road and went into the café. Marina looked up and closed the book as he came through the door, as if she had been aware of his approach all the time. She slid the book away from her across the table, leaving her fingers touching it as if she meant to return to it later. She said hello and presented her cheek, and he leaned forward to give her a greeting kiss. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite her. ‘So where's Robert?'

‘He had to go in to the university for a meeting.'

He was nervous now and was anxious to know whether she had decided to sit for him. He set the two sketchbooks side by side on the table between them. He found that he was already trying to solve the problem of her likeness, searching her features for keys, reaching for her story with the hungry painter's eye. She smiled. Grey-blue eyes, her lids half-closing as she turned away, her fingers going to her blue-striped top and picking at a stray thread, evading the direct scrutiny of his eyes. He considered telling her about the compelling omen of the cane chaise, but instead he reached and turned towards him the book she had been reading. ‘
The House in the Light
,' he said, reading the book's title aloud.

‘You've read it?' She was ready to share her feelings about the book with him.

‘Teresa read it,' he said, as if Teresa reading the book made up for his not having read it himself. ‘It's been out for years.'

‘I never manage to read books when they're first out.' She might have been confessing a forgivable weakness, or admitting something charming about herself.

He decided then that she and Robert must have had a talk last night and reached one of their collaborative decisions; a decision, in other words, that would have been principally Robert's. He felt sure they had decided that Marina would not sit for him. She was too light. There was nothing weighing on her mind. If she were going ahead with the project, she would have been nervous, as he was himself. Now that he was with her, her resolve would have been shaken by anxiety about what she might be getting in to. She would be ambivalent and uneasy. She was, he decided, too relaxed for a woman who was proposing to risk something of herself. He felt angry with Robert for not supporting his project and disappointed with Marina for not having the strength to make her own decision.

‘I nearly rang you this morning to put you off,' she said.

‘How come?'

‘This was all beginning to seem an unnecessary complication in my life just now.'

‘So have you decided whether you're going to sit for me or not?' The manner of his question, he realised, was blunt and aggressive.

She smiled at his anxiety. ‘Of course. Why wouldn't I?'

He felt a shot of adrenalin in his chest. ‘You're saying you're going to do it?'

‘If you still want me to.'

‘I thought you must have decided not to go ahead with it.'

‘Artists always sit for their friends,' she said with an exaggerated mildness, repeating his own words to him. She laughed softly, faintly sardonic. ‘Robert thinks it's a wonderful idea. So do I.'

The waitress came to their table and he ordered coffee.

When the waitress had gone Marina said, ‘Can I look?'

He pushed his old Macedon sketchbook across the table. So he was to have his project! They believed in him! They were trusting him to come up with something good for their first important show back in Melbourne. He felt, suddenly, the responsibility of what he was about to undertake, his responsibility to them as well as to himself. For something like this, something in the main game, unlike the installations, failure would surely be the only alternative to success. He watched her handling his sketchbook, her long fingers, her skin glossy and pale, as if she had been careful to keep herself away from the sun, a life spent in the unnatural light of her studio, labouring alone in her perfumed gallery to turn Robert's ideas into beautiful paintings that deftly sidestepped the historical banality of their medium. If only he could have touched the pale silk of her fingers, have closed his eyes and visualised an instinctive sense of her; the image of her in his mind shaping itself through touch and avoiding the complications of sight . . . The truth was, he had to find a way to paint her. That was his reality now.

She brushed at the table with the palm of her hand before laying the book flat. She might have been handling a precious object from the archive, incunabula, the earliest text. She examined each drawing with evident interest, turning the book sideways to look at the horizontal then back again when the drawings were vertical. Taking her time, turning back a sheet or two every now and then to look again at a particular drawing. She said nothing.