Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  About now I notice Dean Eliot’s car with its human cargo. He actually has a mattress roped to the roof. I’m aware of passengers but I can’t see how many because of the overlapping shadow from the mattress. Now I notice how short Dean’s hair is, a white gleam of protean scalp which I find myself peering at, and in particular a scar, thin and white, as if the past movement of a worm has stilled and calcified. Dean moves his hand up there. And I decide there and then if the car contains two or three more like him I won’t let Alma hand over the keys to the beach cottage.

  Dean Eliot drives very slowly. In fact, there is something ingratiating about how slowly he drives; it’s as if he is out to impress me and contain the Mad Max within. I actually have to slow down to a dawdle to keep him in my mirror. I still can’t see who might be sitting in the passenger seat with that flapping mattress casting shadow.

  The tip is one hill back from the fire-watcher’s cottage which has been Alma’s home for nearly forty years. His place looks down on my mother’s and on the farm where I grew up. There’s nothing nice to say about the tip. Except that since the closure of the paint plant the tip has sustained more of us than we like to admit in polite circles.

  It’s not a pleasant place to be. The air is eerily clear, still, the seagulls observant, circling, their beaked heads hanging. Far below, their view is of the bare heads roaming through the stew. I know everyone hates the sludge sticking to their shoes and the stone-eating noise of the grader with its puffs of black smoke. The same folk complain of the chemical stench. My mother doesn’t know how Alma puts up with it but I suppose the simple answer to that is that he does so because I pay him to. He spends half his week stomping around in this filth, salvaging any number of household items that one person will throw out without a second thought and the next person will buy from me and wonder how anyone could have acted so hastily. Without exception all my customers beam with proud ownership over the new thing in their hand and think its last owner to be a mug.

  I have my shop clothes on so I have to step carefully around the edge of the tip face. I can see the top of Alma’s beanie, his denim shoulders, the stick he holds to gauge the depth of layers when he goes to place his weight. Moving across a tip is very much like crossing ice floes. You don’t hurry it. He still hasn’t seen me and I cough so I won’t startle him. But he’s distracted by his enterprise. Finally when I call down his shoulders jerk up and seeing it’s me he looks a bit annoyed to have been caught out in this way.

  His whiskered face with its blue eyes peers up at me. I feel sinfully safe and clean.

  ‘Alice said you were back. How was London?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Adrian?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Alice said something about a black woman. You haven’t got the clap, have you?’

  ‘We’ll talk later,’ I say. ‘Someone’s here to see you about the cottage.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he says. He looks at the filthy gloves on his hands. ‘I biked up here.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll drive you over.’

  ‘Thanks, Harry. Maybe in an hour.’

  ‘No, now. It has to be now.’

  ‘What? They’re here, now?’

  ‘As we speak.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he says again. He looks down at the footstool and a yard broom and something wrapped in a carpet—I can’t tell what exactly.

  Dean Eliot has parked the Datsun on the edge of the mud. The driver’s side door is open and Dean is sitting while he puts on shoes. Shoes. Well, that’s something. I almost report back to Alma, ‘The applicant is putting on his shoes.’ Now the passenger side door opens and out gets a young woman, olive-skinned, big-hipped but finely featured, youth and destiny fighting for control, part-Maori I’d say, or Greek. Thick-rooted dark hair. A wave of it spills across her face as she stoops back inside the car. From that position she gives a sideways look and a little wave. I wave back. Reaching in the back door she pulls out two babies. Babies. I hadn’t thought of that—not in a thousand years. You have to wonder how they all fit in there. Dean Eliot has his shoes on now. She hands him the babies. Then she searches in the back for something. This time it is a milk bottle. And now the babies are handed back, one at a time, one for each hip; free at last Dean sets off following the dried track of the grader to where I have been taking all this in. It doesn’t look quite as bad as I had thought.

  Dean nods back over his shoulder. ‘That’s Violet,’ he says, and indicating over the edge of the tip face, I say, ‘Down there is Mr Martin.’

  Dean cranes over at Alma squinting up in to the low afternoon sun.

  ‘So Harry tells me you’re interested in the cottage?’

  ‘If it’s available.’

  ‘It could be. Could be.’ Alma thinks about his next question. I can feel Dean dying a slow death beside me. ‘Could be’ has sounded such a cautioning note. Dean has been thinking it either is or it isn’t available. What he can’t detect of course is Alma’s own thrashing angler’s heart.

  ‘Just for you, is it, Dean?’

  Dean’s eyes take off across the tip. How should he phrase this?

  He begins to look behind for the answer but quickly has it resolved and comes back to Alma.

  ‘For me and my family.’

  Alma gives me a look. I didn’t say anything about family. I shrug back as if to say this is recent news. I didn’t know either until a minute ago. Now Alma reaches to grab some petrified filth for purchase. He’s going to have to come up and take a look for himself.

  On the edge of the tide of mud is the orange Datsun. Soon as he sees its tired-looking mattress I can see every instinct in Alma railing at him to say ‘No’ but then comes the masterstroke—from the Eliots’ point of view. The young woman—she can’t be any older than Jess, I think now—gets out of the car. And the scene that just a moment ago looked so alarming and desperate with that mattress slopped over the roof dissolves some of the apprehension spread across Alma’s face.

  For his part, new hope enters Dean’s voice; it is as though at that same moment he cottoned on to his trump card. Proudly, possessively, you could say as he senses it will help his case, he says, ‘That’s Violet. And that’s Jackson and Crystal.’

  It was September, and towards the coast the land grew flat in the late afternoon sea light. I hoped for Alma’s sake the Eliots were taking all this in—the shredded leaves of the cabbage trees, wind worn, bashed but hanging on, and now the vast and tilted shingle beach with its litter of driftwood. I wound down the window but the dust was worse than the chemical stench clinging to Alma. The road ended with a short run up an incline on to a scrappy lawn with sandy tyre ruts and crushed white shells scattered here and there. I switched the car engine off and we got out to wait for the Eliots. The sea drew back and slurped ashore.

  Immediately the peace was broken by the throaty noise of the Eliots’ exhaust and I saw Alma’s thoughts shift to matters to do with risk management and liquidity.

  ‘You can always say no,’ I said.

  He thought about it, nodding, the thick skin above his eyes creasing and bristling.

  ‘Well, we’ll just see, shall we?’ he said.

  We
watched the Eliots unbuckle their babies. The young woman passed them out. Dean had shed his sneakers and was barefoot again. Now Dean handed one little bundle back to Violet and they were ready for the tour.

  ‘As you can see. It’s a little unlived in,’ said Alma.

  We followed him around to the front to a weatherboard porch of peeling blue paint, some white undercoat and a more distant experiment with pink. Dean sat one of the babies on the rail. From here the world opened up and in the distance a tanker appeared to sail off the line. Dean lifted the paw of Jackson and waved it at the disappearing tanker. So far, so good.

  The bottom of the door caught on the sandy carpet. Alma said something about the maritime climate. One after another we filed through and were met with the stale warmth of the house.

  ‘You hardly need electricity. The house cooks in summer,’ Alma said.

  That may be so, it was warm, but there is also no easy overcoming the atmosphere of an unoccupied cottage. The walls themselves actually seemed to frame and hold on to an air of deepening despair. Violet gazed at the front windows and I saw the problem. There were no curtains up and it occurred to me that I could easily donate something from the back of the shop. I passed this on to the Eliots but the offer hardly made a dent in their faces. Nor did they give any indication of how they felt towards the place. The attractive fireplace with its stone hearth and the problematic absence of a fridge were met with the same indifference, Dean blankly and Violet with the slightly more calculable expression of someone not used to giving an opinion.

  The bathtub had an ugly rust mark. Everyone stared at it until Alma ushered us out again. In the bedroom he artfully placed himself in front of the mouldy wall. I think he’d made up his own mind that he could live with the Eliots as his tenants. Still, there were things he needed to ask them. I didn’t like to butt in and run the show but he needed to find out how long they intended to stay. Did they have employment? References? On the other hand, I suppose he saw little point. Their silence seemed to indicate their lack of interest. Now Alma just wanted to end the tour and see the Eliots off.

  He led us back to the front door and stood aside as we filed past, the young woman with a ‘Thanks’. And while Alma locked up the Eliots conferred in a whisper down on the lawn.

  A moment later Alma turned from the door to find Dean Eliot coming forward with a fistful of notes.

  ‘Is a month in advance all right?’ he asked.

  Now the girl nudged him, her eyes lowered. ‘Ask ’im, Dean.’

  ‘Yeah, ah. The bond. Is there one?’

  All four of them stared at Alma—the fledgling adults and the babies.

  ‘No,’ said Alma. ‘There’s no bond.’ He caught my eye and we both turned and stared at the sea.

  Now Dean had something else to ask.

  ‘We were wondering,’ he said. ‘Is it all right if we move in now?’

  The question slowed Alma down. I could see what he was thinking. If he said ‘No’ where would they stay the night? Curled up in the car? The Eliots were passing on their amateurish lack of organisation. I couldn’t bear to look at Alma. I heard him say, ‘I don’t see any reason why not,’ which was possibly more generous than he really felt.

  Violet smiled and kissed the cheek of the baby she was holding. Jackson or Crystal. I didn’t know any more which was which; they kept swapping them. Dean put out his hand—he meant to shake on the arrangement but because Alma was slow to respond he dropped his hand back at his side. For the first time a bit of embarrassment entered his cheeks.

  ‘Of course there’s no power,’ Alma told them. ‘You’ll have to organise that. And I don’t know about the stove. There’s no hot water either.’ Now I could see him reconsider if it was wise for the Eliots to move in right away. ‘If you were to wait a few days…’

  But Violet pounced on that. ‘No. No. We’re fine, Mr Martin.’

  She dropped her eyes; almost closed them. Her mouth drew a stubborn line. We listened to the sea puzzle its way to the shore.

  ‘All right, I’m not going to change your minds. I can see that. It’s Alma, by the way. I don’t have a phone on at my place. If you want to contact me you need to call Harry at the shop. I’m there part of the time. If I’m not and there’s a problem Harry can pass it on to me. I still think you should wait. Have you got candles?’

  ‘No. But we’re fine.’

  ‘Bedding?’

  As one we glanced up at the mattress slopped over the roof of the Datsun.

  Alma told them, ‘You could do worse, a lot worse, than poke around at Harry’s. He’s got enough mattresses and beds and anything else you might need.’

  I chimed in with my earlier offer. They should drop around the shop and borrow whatever they needed. Then I had a thought. The cruise ship visit was less than three days away. In the back of the shop I had a carton of two hundred test tubes that needed to be filled with sea water and sand from our best beach so that the cruise ship people ‘could take a little of us home with them’. It’s not a big job, I told Dean. But it might be worth a few dollars if he was interested.

  Dean’s face twitched. He sucked his cheeks. I saw Violet give him a look. Dean should have said something by now. But you could see his problem. If he accepted it might suggest the finances were more parlous than they wished to let on. On the other hand, if he declined that was money they wouldn’t see.

  Finally it was left to Violet. She said brightly, ‘Dean’ll do it. Dean can do anything.’

  Saturday morning. A huge lump of sugar, interior lit and God sent, popped up on the horizon. Later everyone had a story to tell how they had been at their window and looked up to see the cruise ship.

  I drove into town around nine. Broadway was glistening and black-topped—it almost looked prosperous thanks to the overnight rain. Alma was working on the painting over the shop windows. I didn’t pay close attention, just noted with some satisfaction that he was almost finished. On the corner of Railway Avenue by the port the old NE Paints band were passing around sheet music. Groups of schoolchildren were being herded in the direction of the port.

  The crowd had to wait for the high tide. At eleven o’clock the harbour tug accelerated across the bar and headed off to the cruise ship lying at anchor still some distance offshore. The tug bashed its way into an opposing swell and spray lifted over the bow. At last we came around to the lee of the liner—the sides of the ship were immense.

  None of the passengers got their feet wet. A quick glance told me they would have complained if they did. Thirty-five passengers in all—less than what we had planned for. A lot less. I looked up at a large porthole and saw a man in pyjamas and reading glasses sitting up in bed with a book.

  I was able to greet each passenger with a flier containing information on the town they were visiting, some rainfall and sunshine figures.

  The older women wore silk scarves and sunglasses. Their skin was soapy, ageless, like marble. I had the impression they were on to second and third husbands. These were older men, tanned in short-sleeved shirts, iron-coloured hair swept back, proud of their ageing virility. Americans. Germans. Canadians. An English couple held things up while they argued whether to bring jackets
ashore. A final word came from the woman: ‘Well if it’s cold I’ll blame you.’

  At last the tug eased away from this gentle plaza of bottle-green water round to the exposed sea. We were running with the swell. At the first surge cameras swung out from swollen bellies and hands shot out to the nearest thing to grab hold of; each other as it turned out. The elements produced in me the usual mix of apology and pride. I let the spray settle on my face and squinted at approaching landfall, always impressive at this distance. First, the purple ranges, then the native bush and the spilling effect of wilderness. This same scene has found its way into a number of paintings, one famously by a Dutchman, which NE Paints in a civic-minded moment once produced as a calendar and is still to be found in fish-and-chip shops. The brooding ranges, the massed cloud slightly overdone in opal colour. On one level that is all there is to where we live. The rough outline of existence. You look at that painting and you think, it’s as if we are still to arrive, we are still ship-bound with our flutes and wild hopes. For a month I actually owned the original painting until I sold it to the former mayor, Tommy Reece. It was a large canvas with a gilt frame. Tommy was a little guy with abnormally long arms and huge hands. I remember the way he carried the canvas from the shop; his arms spread to contain this early landscape of where we live, his unnaturally large hands gripping the rolling gilt edges, his shiny-suited mayoral figure crucified against the ranges.