The Amateur Science of Love (17 page)

Tilda’s jealousy was just getting into full swing. I liked it at first. I came to fear it—felt condemned by it, imprisoned.

I had begun treating Tilda like a fan: I was the important one and her job was simply to adore me. This went to my head. I started running with my shirt off for any eyes that were interested. (You can tell when curtains are being spied through—the parting flicks shut when you wave.) I kept thinking what a waste it was: Scintilla was my audience, windows with only biddies looking. When I panted in through the back gate Tilda stomped up the gravel path to have her say. ‘Are you trying to provoke me? Are you trying to advertise yourself like some half-naked ape?’

I never answered, just panted ‘leave me alone’ and ‘Hitler of the backyard.’ One day I trumped her with this: ‘Why don’t you take your top off and come running with me?’ I said it with a snigger.

‘All right then, I will.’ She unlatched her overalls, unbuttoned her shirt down to her navel.

For a moment I was sure she was going to do it. I glanced for any sign of parted curtains. I said, ‘Jesus, Tilda, do your buttons up. Jesus.’

That gave her a victory. She had out-bluffed me. She raised her chin and smiled her satisfaction.

I trumped, ‘Take your top off then. Go on, give the town an eyeful.’ I headed for the hose for a champagning.

Tilda yelled that I was cruel. How else could she describe a husband who told her to go naked in public?

I didn’t see her unbutton everything. I was snorting water from my face and moaning like a lowing cow. When I peeped through the spray her top was off, her overalls were already at her ankles. She wore black knickers and asked if she should take them off as well.

I leapt out of the water and covered her with a bear hug. I picked her up and marched into the kitchen. She laughed all the way, kicked her legs like paddling. When I let her down she put her fists on her hips to signal another victory, another out-bluffing. She said it felt so wonderful to at last go, ‘Here I am, world. This is me, one tit and all.’

‘I have a responsible job in this town. You want people saying I have a missus who runs around starkers?’

‘Oh, Mr Responsible. Grains writer for the
Wimmera Wheatman
hardly makes you Prime Minister.’ She gave a slow, mocking shake of her head.

Then, whether by accident or instinct, I produced the ultimate trumping. ‘Fuck it, I’m leaving. No more of this shit. I’m having no more.’ I put my hands out in front of me and waved: ‘No more. I’m leaving.’ I strode up the hall, gripped the balustrade knob and swung onto the stairs, bounding up three at a time.

In the bedroom I stomped when I walked, cursed: ‘I’m off. I’ve had a gutful.’ I opened and closed drawers with as much bang and crash as I could. I emptied my sock and underwear drawer onto the bed, same for my wardrobe shirts and trousers from the ironing pile. Razor and toothbrush from the bathroom cabinet. I was leaving. Or at least that’s what I wanted to show. I had instinct enough to know this trumping needed an aggressive display of packing; not just saying ‘I’ve had a gutful’ but actually shoving possessions in a backpack.

Tilda arrived at the bedroom still topless but with one arm across herself for modesty. I snapped at her, ‘Where’s my blue polo neck?’

‘In the futon room on the clothes horse. What are you doing packing?’ There was no mocking from her now. There was shallow breathing, quick little gasps: ‘What do you mean,
leaving
? Please, sweetheart. No. Don’t leave. No. Don’t go.’

I kept packing but slowed down my jamming the backpack full. If I finished too soon and had to fasten the straps shut there wouldn’t be time for Tilda to plead more.

‘Baby, please, where would you go? Sweetheart, don’t.’

‘I’ll get a hotel room until I find my own place.’

‘Darling, no. I’m sorry, darling. I’m sorry. Don’t leave, please. Please.’ She held my arm to prevent me hoisting the backpack to my shoulder. She embraced my neck, pressed her face into it. Her voice smelt sweetly and sourly of tea and a tooth on the turn needing drilling.

If I had my life over again I would not have my life over again. Not from this point on in the story, anyway. I would have thought more decent thoughts. Thoughts have consequences though they never leave your brain. They do damage if the bad ones get too prominent. Thinking darkly rots your decency. Among us small people—people in small towns with pipedreams over—the staleness of disappointment makes you mean. Add in dark thinking and you’re history.

Two months after my trumping win Tilda was admitted to hospital. There was blackish blood on her toilet paper. A tumour in her woman’s parts was her amateur diagnosis. Her cancer must be on the march.

It turned out to be a benign ovarian cyst easily dealt with, scalpelled out and forgotten.

‘Get plenty of rest,’ Roff advised.

‘Rest is the best medicine,’ Philpott agreed.

Rest
, I scoffed in my thoughts to their faces. Rest is her main occupation these days. Art is too hard for her so she has a long lie down. If you spend your life resting what are you resting towards?

She had stopped her complaints about my parading without a shirt—I’d trumped those out of her. In their place, however, came
rest
and the silent treatment. That’s what I called her new polite distance. Silence, I was convinced of it, was her latest trumping strategy. It never occurred to me she might be acting in good faith, trying to help me love her by letting me breathe a little. I was too busy letting my thoughts run away: I felt let down by the black blood not being cancer. I expected it would be. I expected Tilda would die soon. I would nurse her. I would grieve. I would get sympathy. I would live in this big home a widower. I was still a young man: one day I’d remarry. Till then I would play the field—one-night stands in Melbourne; a week in Surfers or Byron. I would buy a David Jones suit and act a man of means. I would wait a year or so, a respectable period, then clean out Tilda’s clothes, her studio. This building would go on the market and I would exit Scintilla, make a beginning from an end.

Then Tilda broke her silence with this declaration: she wanted to embrace life with fresh resolve. She blessed the cyst as a reprieve, a reminder that life is temporary and we must make our mark before perishing—any mark, something to say we were born into this world and have lived a life that’s worthwhile. She wanted me to be proud of her again, not think of her as a patient or a nuisance. She wanted me to relish her presence and not feel trapped by petty put-a-shirt-on demands. Jealousy drives the person you love away, she realised that now: ‘It’s a very unattractive quality. It’s like you don’t trust the very person who has vowed themselves to you.’

At night I faked sleeping, my back turned against her.

‘Please, sweetheart, don’t fall asleep yet. Talk to me. Talk to me.’

I kept my eyes closed tight.

It was her idea to ring the Wilkins household. It was her decision to attempt the Archibald Prize, nothing to do with me. I supplied the phone number, yes, but at her request. I didn’t think anything would come of it.

She was almost too late: Cameron’s cancer was back and in the process of killing him. He could barely sit upright; his bones were eaten out and could not take his weight. Tilda apologised for even fetching him to the phone, let alone suggesting he might pose for her. ‘Art is so trivial alongside illness,’ she said, tucking the phone under her chin, pressing her palm against her forehead. Her face had lost its pink cheeks and pink lips; they were sick-bed pale from embarrassment and cancer memories. ‘Just forget I rang,’ she apologised.

Cameron insisted she not apologise more. He was accepting of his fate. So was his wife. Dying needs its distractions too: a portrait might be the perfect tonic. There were plenty of photographs of him around, family ones, a few formal shots for book covers—his daughter, Ruth, eighteen months old, would have those images to say, ‘This was my father.’ But a painted portrait was another matter, he said. It’s an artist’s impression in oils of what’s inside us, of who we are. It’s an artefact.

And so it was arranged. Donna took care of the details. Thursday week; a three-hour session for preparatory sketches should do it. He’d be comfortable enough if propped on pillows, and he would doze if the morphine got to him.

Tilda maintains she never liked Donna. Right from the start she had a bad feeling about her. You wouldn’t have thought so listening to that phone call. ‘Donna,’ she said. ‘I can’t thank you enough for letting me have your husband’s precious time.’ She hung up and smiled, ‘What a woman, this Donna. Such dignity and graciousness. Such strength given the situation.’

I remembered the day at the Barleyhusk silos. I imagined I wouldn’t look twice at Donna now. Women in the country go fat from having children. I imagined her no further. Not yet.

Never liked Donna. Bullshit, Tilda! You came home from the portrait session like you were smitten; like you felt a little bit lesbian towards her. The prettiness of the woman; her hospitable, intelligent nature; so loyal to her husband, and caring. Never liked Donna. You didn’t spend much time telling me about painting Cameron Wilkins. It was Donna, Donna, Donna. You had made a new friend, and if the cyst had taught you anything it was that you hadn’t valued friendship enough. You had locked yourself up inside this old building and it had driven you lazy and loopy. When Cameron died, three weeks after posing, it was you who insisted we attend the funeral. I said, ‘We didn’t know him enough to go to his funeral.’

It was you who said, ‘We need to be more social.’

Never liked Donna. You’re rewriting history. You liked her so much you forgot to think about me. That
I
might like her too; I might get smitten. I might end up wanting her more than I want you.

There were two lunches—one at our place, one at Donna’s.

Ours was Tilda’s idea, to do with Cameron’s portraits and the Archibald. Three months after the funeral a series of six oils had been completed. Tilda wanted Donna’s opinion about which was the best of them. The best would be the prize entry. Donna could choose a gift for herself from the others. It was a nervy Sunday lunch: would the widow be in tears? Would she look at Cameron’s image and collapse on us? Her daughter, too, would she get spooked seeing her father in frame? Having no child ourselves we predicted a grief tantrum.

Death doesn’t register with kids. While mummy did her choosing I took the wee girl to the park and she was thrilled to ride the plastic horse, hold on for dear life on the swings. She wept at having to dismount and hurry home with me. I didn’t want to be at the park being counterweight on plastic horses. I wanted to get back and pretend not to be watching Donna. At Cameron’s funeral (which involved no church, just a burial) I had kept my distance, felt an impostor. I didn’t get a good view of her. Her head was bowed; relatives shrouded her in hugging. She still had that Spanish look from the day at the silos, in the hair sense, the black shawl sense. Her hair blew forward as she tossed a handful of dirt in the grave. The rest of her was hunched around a handkerchief. She wore sunglasses. Her blue dress was too long down her legs to see anything more than ankles.

But in our small living room eating dips on sticks of celery she was all bare arms and pants cut off at the knees. I focussed there—on her knees. Or rather, stared into spaces either side of her knees, taking little glimpses and keeping her on the edge of my vision. Tilda’s tape-measure eyes couldn’t complain about knee spaces: I wasn’t looking at a face or cleft of bosom, though I wanted to. Donna’s knees were like most knees—a dry-skin knob putting a blemish in her tan skin. But most faces were not like hers. I don’t just mean the U-chin and dimple. I mean her brown eyes. Our culture values blue eyes as if blue eyes are purest—miniature replicas of sky. But brown eyes can have earth-dark gleams to them. Donna’s eyes were this way. It was a pity not to peer into them.

I am not an open smiler. I smile self-consciously, lips askew or pursed. Donna’s smile put all her big white teeth on show; not as an act, performing smiling like
cheese
for cameras, but as a pleased-to-see-you friendliness. Unless, of course, I had been fooled and she had perfected smiling for vanity’s sake. That’s what Tilda would say. Anyway, it was a pity not to look.

I listened instead. Donna was explaining how she was doing fine. Fine in the tears sense, in the dropping-your-bundle sense and needing a good cry. A month ago the crying stopped and in its place came money worry, and does she stay in Watercook or move somewhere urban for Ruth’s schooling? If it wasn’t for Ruth she would go somewhere like Darwin. A complete change, a new life, exotic and tropical. Ruth required stability, not exotic and tropical.

‘I’ve even felt like cutting off all my hair,’ she said. ‘Shave it off to symbolise grief, but also for saying
there’s a new me starting
.’

Cut off her hair? I jerked up my head at such a notion. I took an admiring look at it, the dark mesh of curling; then stared off before Tilda saw.

The lunch ended with an agreement to a do a lunch again, next time at Donna’s place. She had been thinking of a modest party in a few months. A daytime soiree with local people she knew—neighbours and parents from Ruth’s playmate group. Nothing wild or late-nightish. Would we come?

‘Delighted,’ said Tilda. ‘Who knows, we might be celebrating an Archibald!’ She kissed Donna on the cheek. Ruth too. I shook hands and said nice to see you again.

They were walking up the backyard, across oleander leaf shade, when Ruth’s hairclip, a fake-glass tiara adornment, snagged on a low branch and dropped from her head, broken. Donna knelt to retrieve it, pausing in a crouch to comment how it was just a cheap old thing. I did not stare off from the band of white flesh that appeared because of her crouching—almost all of her lower back. It was so smooth and transparent you could see a faint few veins where her T-shirt rode up. And the top of her pants, the shadow and crease of her bottom.

No sooner had we waved Donna’s car goodbye than Tilda said, ‘You seemed very quiet. What do you think of Donna? I got the impression you don’t like her, staring into space like you were bored. I hope she didn’t think you were rude.’

I shrugged that I had no opinion of her either way.

‘She’s very attractive.’

‘Is she?’ I shrugged again. ‘I suppose she is. I wasn’t paying much attention.’ If Tilda was fishing I was matching her with yawning nonchalance.

‘Don’t you think it’s a bit early for her to be stopping crying?’

‘What?’

‘If it was me who died I’d want you to cry over me longer than three months. You would, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Promise?’

‘Of course.’

She hugged my arm as we walked towards the back door. ‘I like Donna well enough, I just think she’s, you know, a bit cold. A bit hard and cold.’

‘Same here.’

Tilda squeezed my arm as if relieved we were of a similar mind. She said if I died she would never stop crying over it.