Prochownik's Dream (25 page)

He went across to the house and joined Teresa and Nada, who were having their breakfast in front of the television. He was tired but anxious to get on with his work and so, instead of going to bed after Teresa and Nada had left, he drove to the local hardware store and purchased a cheap full-length mirror of the kind used on the doors of built-in wardrobes. He brought the mirror home and set it up at the back of the studio. Then he took off his clothes and sat on the stool.

There he was. A naked stranger.

He might not have been looking at himself but at another man who, until this moment, through a kind of mental blindness, he had been unable to see. Looking at his naked body as a subject for his art was a novel experience for him, and was quite unlike looking at himself in the mirror in the normal narcissistic and semi-critical way that he did every day while he was having a shower or shaving. Now his eye was detached from his vanity and he was at liberty to search in the mirror for the truth of the visual form of the naked man reflected there. As he sat gazing at himself it was as if he had become two people.

During the following nights he worked up dozens of studies of his naked torso and limbs in pencil, charcoal, gouache and oil. The studio was soon filled with these intimate images of himself. As he worked on a large freehand charcoal drawing of his shoulders and chest, he was aware that all this self-research, the newness of it and the promise it seemed to hold for him of a real and substantial future as an artist, was linked in some way to his having accepted his identity as the artist Prochownik and to having cast off the old false identity of Powlett—a name which had been given to his father before his own birth by the foreman at the Dunlop plant, who had told his father on his first morning at the factory,
Prochownik
is not a name in Australia
. In what precise way this relinquishing of the falseness of his past name was linked to the revolution of his view of himself and his art, he did not know, and perhaps he never would know. All he knew for certain was the feeling of rightness about it. Belief in himself was the key to it, not understanding. As he worked he wanted very much to tell Marina everything that had happened to him since they had taken
The Schwartz Family
to Richmond. But he resisted the desire to telephone her. He was not sure why he resisted, but was aware that there were probably a number of good reasons to resist. So instead of speaking to her over the telephone, or even in the flesh, he made do with imaginary conversations with her in his head. He was at liberty, in these very real but imaginary conversations, to say whatever occurred to him without censoring his thoughts, and so during this time alone with himself and his own reflection, Marina became the ideal companion of his hours and seemed to share with him a perfect intuitive understanding of his situation.

He did not attempt to depict his facial features in any of the studies of himself. Seated on the stool in a variety of poses, and sometimes standing close up to the mirror, he examined his body hour after hour, and as the days and nights passed he gradually became his own familiar. When he closed his eyes before going to sleep beside Teresa in the early hours of each morning, the intricate details of his body remained imprinted on his inner eye . . .

Teresa said very little to him during this time either about his art or about the absence of Marina from his studio. She was being watchful and careful. She was crafting the situation along and was hoping for the best, like a woman in a war zone waiting for the resumption of normality and praying her family would emerge intact. Nada had all but disappeared from his days and in his moments of lucidity away from his studio he regretted this intensely, but he did nothing to change it. He had not heard from Marina on the progress of her new background for
The Schwartz Family.
But this no longer seemed an urgent matter to him.

One night he was playing around with Theo's head on a drawing of his own torso when he realised there was something about the composition that greatly intrigued him. He set up a small canvas on the easel and painted an oil study of the subject. When he had finished it he titled the painting
The
Eye of Tiresias
. The bizarre, but beguiling, image came to him not only from Theo's drawing of the youthful satyr with the head of an old man, but also from the passing glimpse of Theo's head on the pillow, framed by the doorjamb, as he went by his bedroom that day; imagining the old man's sorrow at the loss of his beloved Marguerite, and seeing his features hollowed by misery behind his closed eyelids. There was something beautiful and poignant in the perversity of this image for Toni, the dying man's head on his own youthful torso. He was aware of dealing not with strict likeness but with the repressed, the inarticulate, the unconscious, the as-yet-unrealised, and knew himself to be in touch at last with that dimension of himself that had always eluded him, a place only revealed by a trick of the light at night when he was tired and his mind was no longer clear but was open to the bright, sudden, uncanny energies of fatigue. He could scarcely bear to leave his work and his studio even to eat or to sleep and he did so only reluctantly and briefly, anxious all the time he was away to get back as soon as possible. As he worked he was conscious of touching upon something concealed that he would only be able to recognise when the work was finished. He did a larger painting of Theo's head on his own naked body, working for hours without a break, lost in the process and unaware of the passing of time. It was an image that seemed to hold for him the key to something of great importance . . .

•

He smelled the cigarette smoke and looked up from the canvas. She was standing in the doorway. She took the cigarette from between her lips and let the smoke drift from her mouth. The way she stood—loose and careless, the cigarette held close to her lips, her other hand propping her elbow, her eyes squinting at him through the smoke—he realised she had been drinking. She was wearing her dressing-gown, her weight resting on one leg, the gown held closed as carelessly as her attitude, her hip thrust out, giving in to the heaviness of her body. Looking slowly over the scene, seeing the interior of his studio as if it were at the bottom of a lake.

‘I can heat something up if you're hungry.' She spoke in a lazy tone, as if she could scarcely muster the energy to speak at all, or addressed him from some other place, a place where these events were of no consequence, her gaze going over his naked body, lingering on his glistening skin.

‘What do you think of it?' he said.

She looked at his painting, considering the head of the old man, alone with himself at the end, in the secret, sacred place of the dying. The naked body of the young man, smooth, cool, charged with energy and expectation. She gave a small lift of her shoulders and took a drag on her cigarette, her expression indifferent. ‘You're not painting her anymore then?'

He got off the stool and pulled on his underpants and his jeans and put on his T-shirt. ‘It's a way of approaching myself,' he said, standing looking at his picture and making a futile effort to include Teresa. It sounded, however, as if he were offering her an excuse. ‘It's a way of taking myself by surprise,' he said and he turned from the painting and looked at her. It sounded silly,
taking myself by surprise
. It would have been better to have kept silent than to have attempted to explain himself. He loved the painting and knew she saw it as something weird and inexplicable. ‘My problemis to get myself into that picture.' He pointed. ‘That big one. There!'

She looked without interest at
The Other Family,
unveiled and leaning against the press.

He noticed how a drooping of the flesh at the corners of her mouth had begun to interrupt the clean youthful line of her jaw. He felt guilty, as if the signs of her ageing were the result of his neglect. She was tired and was beginning to give way a little. Tired of work. Tired of waiting for
him
. Tired of their money problems. Tired of dealing with it all on her own. He said gently, ‘We should take a holiday after the show. Go to Tassie for a couple of weeks. Or over to Perth. We've never crossed the Nullarbor together.' Once again, as soon as he had spoken, he realised it would have been better if he had remained silent.

She turned towards him, cool, sardonic, removed, the wine of disbelief in her eyes. ‘You want me to heat something up for you before I go to bed?'

‘No. It's okay. I can do it. You go on. I'll clean up down here.'

‘I made a lasagna and opened a bottle of Dad's red earlier.' She watched him. ‘I was hoping you might have come up and shared it with us.' She did not wait for him to respond but turned abruptly, faltered, a hand to the doorframe, steadying herself, then left.

He should have followed her at once and comforted her. But he did not move. Instead he stood looking into the darkness after her . . . Then he turned from the doorway and examined the bizarre fiction of himself. It was, of course, the image of himself that he had been looking for to include in
The Other Family
; a young man's body with the head of a grieving monster. The fascination of the paradox. The artist, in other words. Himself! It was the most important thing he had ever done. He was sure of it. One day Nada would forgive him his neglect of her. But would Teresa ever be able to forgive him? Tomorrow he would begin transferring the image to
The Other
Family
. Marina would know it the moment she saw it. There would be no need to explain or to excuse it to her, or to Theo or Robert, or to Andy either. Whatever the opinions of these people about the painting's success or failure might be, none of them would require an explanation from him. It would not distress them or threaten them in any way that he had chosen to stay up night after night neglecting his family in order to do such a thing.

Reluctantly he turned away from his painting and went over to the door and stood a moment, his hand to the light switch, looking back at the
The Other Family
. He loved the painting, and he feared it. His life as an artist! He switched off the light and closed the door. The house was in darkness and there was the stale smell of cigarettes and the heated lasagna. He turned the oven off. He was too distracted to eat. He stood in the darkened room at the window looking across the courtyard toward the studio. Teresa's fountain was still on, the glint of water spouting from the wall in the tinkling silence, splashing into the stone bowl . . .

3

Prochownik's Dream

sixteen

As he stood at the tall window in the house gazing across the darkened courtyard towards the studio, he was trying to decide whether to return to the studio and begin work at once on the image of himself in
The Other Family
—for it felt to him that its moment had arrived—or whether to go and get into bed beside Teresa and give her the comfort and reassurance that she needed and which was the very least she might expect from him at this moment. He stood at the window for some minutes before he turned and went out to the studio. He felt bad about abandoning Teresa, indeed he felt like a miserable traitor for doing it; but he did it, nevertheless.

He set up
The Other Family
and mixed a glaze and, within a few minutes of beginning work, Teresa and the rest of the world had gone out of his mind—the rest of the world, that is, except for Marina, with whom every now and then he enjoyed a brief imaginary exchange; the perfect companion of his solitary hours. He worked without a break through what was left of the night and on through the dawn and into the day, until the naked male figure stood boldly to the left of the principal group in the big painting, poised side on to the viewer. It was a figure that was strangely familiar to Toni, one which in some essential way represented himself, even though its features—or such of them as could be made out, for it stood within a puzzling array of shadows—were those of an old man. As he stood in front of the painting, seeing the figure with a feeling of surprise, he had little recollection of the hours he had spent painting it. He felt that he had at last taken root in his own work, and the possibilities for his art seemed to him to be endless. With the inclusion of himself, he had stepped through a doorway and the field of his future endeavour lay open to him. He would paint them all. Teresa and Nada and Teresa's family and Andy. All of them. Repeatedly. Naked and clothed. He would depict their vulnerability and their humanity. That is what he would do.
Paint what you love,
his father had told him, and at last he seemed to understand what his father had meant.

He cleaned his brushes and lowered the drop sheet over the canvas. As he emerged from the studio the bright sunlight seemed to bite into the interior of his skull. He winced and put out his hand to the fountain to steady himself. His outline seemed no longer fixed but wavered around him as he moved, a charged and luminous corona of fatigue and hallucination. In the kitchen he leaned against the bench, the shining outlines of the telephone and the refrigerator beside it blurring and shifting, as though with an effort of will he might summon the power to dissolve their volumes into abstract patterns of light and shade . . . He closed his eyes.

The doorbell pealed twice then someone banged on the front door.

He stood staring down the passage. The banging was repeated. He went out along the passage and opened the door. It was Marina.

‘I've done it!' she said breathlessly. She was obviously agitated and emotional, her eyes glistening with tears. She stepped towards him and embraced him. They held each other tightly. They might have been lovers who had been separated and had found one another again after a long and dangerous return. She was laughing softly, or perhaps she was weeping, her body pressed against his, her warm cheek against his cheek. ‘I've done it!' she whispered. He could smell her sweat mixed with the paint extender. After a while she lifted her head and looked at him, her grey eyes alight with a kind of wonderment. ‘You're trembling.'