Prochownik's Dream (24 page)

Toni stepped across and handed him a mug of coffee. He was not listening to Andy's spiel. He was preoccupied with how
The Other Family
was going to look to him this morning. He was working at visualising the picture in his mind's eye. It was an obsessive exercise in anxiety, coloured at the edges by his waking apprehension of violence from across the road. How to be alone with his work was beginning to be a serious problem for him. He was missing Marina's support, missing her confident assurance about what he was doing. He felt in danger of losing a vital connection.

Andy yelled, ‘Hey you! Prochownik! You listening to me? I'm not doing this with anyone else, okay? Pay attention. It's a special. A one-off for Moniek Prochownik's boy. It's him I'm doing this for. Me and Geoffrey are coming in behind you on this. Prochownik's
the one who doesn't show
. That's this new guy as he's coming onto the market. The one whose work is hard to get hold of. He's not showing his tits to everyone. I can't do this with two or three artists. It's an exclusive situation. Okay? You getting this?'

Andy got up off the couch and walked across and stood beside Toni and put a hand to his shoulder. ‘You're an innocent, brother. They'll eat you alive out there. I'm doing this for you and me and your old dad. You got that? For his belief in your gift. For Lola, too. You understand? For
us
when we were kids in the rat flats. I can't do this for someone I don't know.' He tapped Toni's skull with his forefinger. ‘You in there, buddy? You hearing what I'm saying? This is the style for you.
Prochownik
,
the one who never shows
. What's your old dad thinking about this? It's your moment. Take it. We only get one moment. Hesitate and we lose it. No one recovers from bad timing.'

Andy walked back and sat on the couch again and sipped his coffee. He picked up the remote but did not put the television on. ‘And get yourself a good accountant. There's only so much one man can do for another.'

Toni drank his coffee standing at the bench. Andy was always talking. So what? That was Andy's business. The piped music of continuous enthusiasm. Keeping the spirit strong. Creating the buzz. No one looked for long reflective silences from Andy Levine.
Silence is for the next life
, Andy always said whenever someone told him to shut up.
In this life I'm talking
. Andy was sitting there looking at him now. A rare pause in the flow here. Andy sitting forward on the couch with his elbows on his knees looking thoughtfully across the room at him as if he was making a diagnosis. Toni smiled. He loved his old friend. They went back so far they were family.

‘Prochownik's studio is out of bounds,' Andy said, thoughtful and slow, as if he were telling a story. ‘But for the director of the National, for Harvey, we make an exception. Harvey will like Prochownik. Harvey is Irish. Prochownik doesn't know Harvey. It's better Prochownik doesn't know him. There's no prejudice with him there. And Prochownik's not Irish. Harvey is about to discover Prochownik. I let him discover him. I give Harvey the right of discovery of Prochownik. Critically, Prochownik is virgin soil. He's unspoiled and he's got a touch of the ethnic. Which is a handy flag to have on the mast these days. Prochownik is nobody's darling. He is terra incognita. The prestige of discovery is all Harvey's. And Harvey is a man with a serious budget. I'm not asking him to go out on his own either. These people don't like going out on their own. I show Harvey
The Schwartz Family
and tell him to talk to Geoffrey Haine. Then I leave the two of them to get on with it. Geoffrey is buying a Prochownik and he won't be able to hide his admiration for that picture. He won't even try hiding it. Geoffey Haine is not a mean-spirited man. Believe me. I know the guy. Obstinate he may be, but not mean. I could tell you some stories about our Geoffrey. So it'll be Harvey's call after that. After Geoffrey speaks to him, Harvey's got the choice of going down in history as the curator who passed up Prochownik or being the genius who discovered him. Don't worry, there's going to be a waiting list for Prochowniks if Harvey takes
The Schwartz Family
. You want a Prochownik? Join the queue! We're talking the words here. Committed. Innovative. Challenging. Prestigious. These are the words, Toni. The trade words. They don't mean a piece of shit but without these words you're nowhere in the market. Work of the highest standard. A new benchmark. Prochownik and Haine are the forefront of the contemporary neo-figurative school. That's the way this operates. Trade words coming out of the right mouths and going into the right ears with the right timing. Smart. They like the idea of smart, it reassures them that they're smart. But first they've got to be told. If you don't tell them they're buying a work of genius, they'd never guess. They can go and tell their friends,
This is
a work of genius I just bought. It's a Prochownik
. Owning the Prochownik almost makes
them
the genius. That's the whole idea. These are the people who collected Aboriginal dot and line thirty years ago and are unloading it in New York today and making a bucket of money. This is not about love. This is about money. Don't forget that. Art, shmart! Forget it! Prochownik is the next spin of the wheel for these people. They'll see with him it's cool to celebrate being white Australian male and figurative again. That's going to be a big relief to them.' Andy drew breath and put down his coffee mug. ‘Well, let's go and do it! Show me what you've been up to. What are we sitting around here listening to me for?'

They crossed the courtyard and Toni opened the studio.

Andy made an exclamation and went straight over to the corner and put his hand on the old suit, as if he were putting his hand on the shoulder of an old friend. ‘You kept it!' He stood looking at the suit, touching it respectfully with his fingers. ‘Your old man was the one who made us believe. Now we know. Did we know then?
He
knew! We knew nothing. We believed him. Remember the day you brought this into the space? Your dad had been gone less than twenty-four hours. You were still finding it hard to breathe without him.' He bent and read the sign. ‘
Moniek Prochownik's Outsize Sunday
Suit
. That's it! He was a beautiful man, Toni. A beautiful man. Jesus, I loved that man. I can still see this suit sitting out there in the middle of the gallery all on its own. That was raw stuff, mate. You were the only one who could have done it. You didn't even have a clue what you were doing. You just did it and we saw what a massive thing you'd done. It stopped us cold in our tracks.'

‘No one knew what to make of it.'

‘
We
knew what to make of it.'

Toni went over to the easel and flipped up the drop sheet. He stood looking at
The Other Family
.

Andy came over and stood beside him. ‘Now we're here doing this. Your dad should see us today. Would you and me have been thinking about art if it hadn't been for him?' He looked around at the clutter in the studio. ‘Boy, you've been working! Look at all this stuff!' He stepped across and picked up the canvas of Marina asleep on the island and stood with it in his hands, admiring it. ‘This is the one for our Geoffrey.' He looked some more at the painting. ‘So, you and Marina Golding, eh? These things come around.'

‘We're just friends.'

‘Friendship's a great thing.'

‘I mean it.'

‘You mean everything, Toni boy. I never heard you say anything yet you didn't mean. You're a rabbit for sincerity. Meaning something doesn't make it true. Don't confuse the two things. Meaning and truth. They're not the same thing. Your old dad knew that.' Andy was silent. ‘So, she's doing a new background for you?'

‘We'll see. Maybe. Who knows.'

‘Yeah, what do we know? I never had the hots for those two, I have to tell you. Who are they showing with these days? What brought them back from Sydney? I heard they were doing okay with Number 8 up there. Robert Schwartz is like a guy with two glass eyes.'

‘They're my friends.'

‘Sure.'

Toni was standing in front of
The Other Family
. He was seeing himself in the empty space to the left of the big group; a figure looking on, an onlooker. The voyeur. That was him! For the first time ever he was seeing himself in his work. The imaginary image of himself in the picture was not so much a likeness as an enigmatic male presence, erotic and naked, a presence bearing a dangerous power to disrupt reality. There was no doubt this self-image owed something to the fantastic intensities of Theo's drawings, levering a crack in his defences. He was pleased. He liked the idea.

Andy said, ‘Hey! You've still got your mother. I can sell Lola this afternoon.'

‘Mum's not for sale.'

‘Prochownik's mother's not for sale! You hear that, folks?' Andy held up the portrait of Toni's mother. ‘You should be in my business. Tell them it's not for sale and you double the price. It's not for sale, it's the only one they want.' Andy set the painting down with care. ‘It's all for sale, old buddy.' Andy talking to himself now. ‘Your house. Teresa's underwear. Your mother. Find the price, that's all.'

‘Mum's not for sale.'

‘That's what they said about London Bridge. You're making it a serious enterprise for them. You've almost got me believing you. Mum's not for sale!'

Toni was squinting at the imaginary figure of himself in the painting, seeing in it a confirmation, a move into his own space. So there really was to be no escape for him from art? It was a good feeling. And it was true. Had he ever doubted it? Had there ever really been a choice for him? ‘Maybe Dad was right,' he said. ‘Maybe it
has
all been decided and we're just here filling in between the dots.'

‘What happened to his pictures?'

‘Mum's got them.'

‘You and I ought to take a look at them one of these days. I should give your dad the show he never had.
Prochownik I
. We could make him famous too.'

‘Dad didn't want to be famous.'

‘Everyone wants to be famous. You ever do a portrait of him?'

‘No.'

‘I'm taking these two. Okay?' Andy had the 35 x 60 of Marina asleep on the island and the 50 x 30 of Theo Schwartz sitting on the library steps reading in the corner by the bookshelves at Richmond, looking like the tragic bust of Seneca.

Toni was mixing a glaze. He was working. He was putting himself in the picture. ‘Take whatever you like,' he said.

Andy stood watching him for a while. ‘I'm leaving. I'll be in touch.'

As Andy was going out the door, Toni called, ‘Nothing's for sale yet.'

‘Listen to the voice of Prochownik, folks! Nothing's for sale!' Andy was gone.

Toni did not look up. He was working at the problem of himself. It was not Haine's monumental works, after all, but Theo Schwartz's illicit intimacies that he was drawing upon. It was a delicious surprise for him . . .

fifteen

A week later
The Other Family
was going nowhere for him. He found to his dismay, after the initial euphoria of beginning work on the problem of himself, that he was unable to translate his imaginary presence convincingly onto the canvas. He made no attempt at the figure of Marina, but painted himself into the composition and scraped himself back to the canvas a dozen times. Always, however, there was the feeling that something essential to the success of the figure was absent. It was a great disappointment to him that this image of himself remained so unresponsive, so without light and life; so without, in fact, the conviction of that elusive sense of presence that is necessary in all successful representations of the human figure in art, even if the representation is no more than an entirely impersonal depiction such as the fugitive figure of Haine's running man. He was finally forced to admit, with a faint feeling of self-disgust, that he was blocked. His visual sense of himself was inadequate to the task he had set himself. He could not deal with it. For days he did not know what to do, and he had begun to despair when, late one night, he thought of the book he had been holding in his hand the day Marina had telephoned out of the blue and told him that she and Robert had returned from Sydney—that day when he had not had the heart to do anything.

Glad of this distraction from the frustrating and enervating task at the easel, he got off the stool and went over to the pile of books by the door. The book was still on top where he had left it. He picked it up and examined it. It was his father's old Penguin Classics edition of Sartre's
Nausea
, the familiar and very beautiful greens and yellows of Dali's painting,
The
Triangular Hour,
on the front cover. He had been holding the book in his hand that day, not exactly reading it but looking at it, his eye touching down at a sentence here and there while he had posed for Nada. He could not remember what it was that he had read then that had made him think of the book now, but holding it he nevertheless felt a comforting sense of connection with it that provided him with a certain feeling of reassurance. He did not search randomly through the book's pages for the line that had arrested his attention that day, but sat on the stool and began to read the book from the beginning. It was a welcome relief from struggling fruitlessly with the attempt to paint his own image . . . Then, suddenly, when he had forgotten the impulse that had made him seek out the book in the first place and was already lost in the world of its story, the phrase that had arrested his attention that day was before his eyes:
I should like to understand myself properly before it is
too late.
He read the sentence over several times, feeling strangely comforted by it, as if he shared with its author, or at least with the character to whom the author had given this thought, the feeling of being lost within himself, and of being unable to solve a conundrum about his own existence that demanded a solution before he could move forward with his work. It was true, after all; as an artist he was, like the character in the book, a stranger to himself. Although the estrangement of the character in the book was of a more dramatic kind than his own, it nevertheless corresponded to his own in his imagination, which was where the realities of the book took shape for him. He felt an enormous gratitude to the book and, instead of going back to the arduous struggle of his work, he sat on the cane chaise and continued to read until he had finished the story. By then it was daylight outside his window and he could hear Teresa's voice calling to Nada and the sound of the morning cartoons on the television. He had been deeply absorbed for several hours in this strangely beautiful story of a man in search of an image of himself that would satisfy his sense of his own moral worth and would, indeed, justify his existence—and even, possibly, give him a certain pleasure in his life. The fact that the story had not ended happily with the fulfilment of this man's dream had the strange effect of uplifting Toni's mood and of making him feel more optimistic than if the story
had
ended happily. It felt good to have been reminded that the complete fulfilment of such a dream of perfect sanity as the character in the book possessed was unrealistic, and that it was the possession of such a dream, and not its realisation, that had prevented his otherwise inevitable descent into despair. He read the final sentence again before laying the book aside.
The yard of the New Station
smells strongly of damp wood: tomorrow it will rain over Bouville
. Then, with a feeling of regret at having to leave the familiar enchanted world of the story, he closed the book and set it aside on the chaise, promising himself that one day soon he would return to it and read it again, as if not to do so would be in some way a betrayal of what he had gained from it. He stood up and stretched the stiffness from his limbs, then went over and opened the door to the courtyard and stood looking out at the sunlit morning. He not only knew now exactly what he had to do, but he also believed that he would possess the will and the capacity to do it. Somehow his dilemma had resolved itself while he was reading, as if he had gone to sleep and dreamed away the block that had stood implacably before him only a few hours ago.