Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  ‘Well, I still need to pay you, Alma. You can’t come all this way for nothing.’

  He told her she could pay him when he caught something and not before.

  ‘No. I’m going to pay you now.’ She sounded firm. But then as she opened her purse she seemed to linger as if she had forgotten why she’d opened it. She raised her eyes and gave him a hopeful look and the penny dropped. Alma smiled.

  ‘There is another way,’ he said.

  Hilary’s was one of two portraits he could never get right. She couldn’t wait to see what he’d drawn. She couldn’t wait to find out what he had seen. Her brimming eagerness made him rush. Then he wouldn’t show her. Together they’d arrive at a decision to start over and for her to sit back in her chair a little more and think of Jimmy or vanilla ice cream.

  In the case of Victoria she complained that her body lacked figure, that her dress bulged in all the wrong places. She said she looked like she was made of mattresses or armchair stuffing and that bits of twine had been pulled tight in all the wrong places. Two weeks after Alma finished and presented her with her portrait he was around there on another rat job when he noticed she had taken down the painting above the hearth. Its absence was puzzling. They had spent a pleasant hour deciding where to hang it and Victoria had been excited at the time. Now the blank space on the wall made him question the accuracy of his memory. They skirted the subject, but after a while their eyes kept returning to the emptiness above the hearth and finally Victoria told him, ‘Alma, I had to. You gave me no choice after I saw what poor company I make…that downturned mouth, those grumpy eyes.’

  And as was their habit in those days the conversation stopped there. Then they both heard it—a scratchy sound behind the skirting. Alma told her, ‘Victoria, let this one be on me.’

  As far as the rest of the women in the district were concerned, to be looked at or observed was as rare as sugar or chocolate. They could have looked in the mirror, of course. But there is nothing like another’s eyes to set us alight, to make our nerves stand on end, to tell us, in effect, who we are.

  A long period of fine weather put further distance between their lives and the war in Europe. When you walked outside you saw dragonflies. You saw waxeyes in their upside-down efforts to get the nectar of the flax flowers. You saw the great unhurried parade of clouds. You breathed in and forgot the war until you picked up that day’s newspaper off the lawn, or a letter arrived, and then the local imagination crept into areas of the map previously unknown. When a name such as Tobruk arrived in a letter a face would go slack, like sailcloth.

  With the men away some things continued as they had before. The sound of tennis balls smacking against the wooden volley-board, balls kissing the net, only it was women playing women. Like at the dance at New Year’s Eve, the hall decorated as it had always been with streamers, flowers, trestles sagging under sponges, music, the same old dances, but no men.

  In 1942 the last of the married men were called up and with these men gone the altered world was more or less complete. Every second or third day Alice found something to ask Alma’s help with. The beehives. Thistle to dig out of the paddock. Those drainage canals that had been bugging her. For a farmer’s daughter she didn’t have much of a stomach for blood so Alma did the butchering, and when he grabbed a chook and smacked it down on the saw horse, its neck stretched, she made sure her head was turned or better that she was inside so she wouldn’t hear the light splatter of chicken blood. Once when a neighbour’s bull tore a boundary fence down Alma helped fix that. There were also the rats, of course.

  By now she was so used to his being around they dropped certain formalities. When he turned up at the door she no longer headed for the sitting room to perch on the edge of the stuffed armchairs. While the hot weather lasted the door was open day and night, and to the extent that Alma was part of the outside world there was no attempt to hold him at bay.

  In those days there stood a hill about a hundred metres from the farmhouse. When Alice’s parents had lived there her mother complained endlessly about the hill blocking the sea view. Various sheep tracks wound to the top. Every morning Alice would walk up the hill until she could see the rooftops of town and the blue ocean. When she was very small, before she could talk or walk, her father used to pop her in his fishing net and drop her over the gunwale then drag her back and forth through the top layer of warm ocean, curled up like a trout in her father’s net, her gummy mouth wide with laughter, or so it is told in family lore.

  From her father she inherited this love of the sea. And on those days she decided a swim was in order she’d run down the hill tracks, cornering like a vehicle, her hips moving like swing doors. But on days when it was too rough or windy she would raise her elbows and let the breeze fan her; and maybe she’d turn and look the other way, follow the ridge up to Alma’s cottage on the hill. Maybe then she’d see a movement beneath the guttering of the rat catcher’s cottage, and she would smile at the thought that Alma had been watching.

  4

  After that first sitting my mother was naturally curious to discover what Alma had found in her that she could not see for herself in the mirror. At first he was evasive and put her off. He made up excuses why now wasn’t the right time. He glanced at his watch. He tried to change the subject. My mother wouldn’t give up.

  ‘It’s just a drawing Alma, no one will go to jail.’

  Eventually he relented, unhappily it has to be said, and she saw what he had been trying to hold back from her, what she now saw for herself, some strange inclination on her part to present herself to the world as an eager-to-please shop assistant. It wasn’t her—so how did that look get there. Where did that person, that stiff-looking shop assistant come from? It wasn’t how she thought of herself. But Alma must have seen something to come up with that. And maybe he wasn’t entirely wrong. But it wasn’t all of her either—not the whole story. Not the representative self she wished to be seen out in the world.

  The next time she met him at the door and asked where he wanted her, he looked down at the porch, used his foot to shift an old boot to one side, and said, ‘Here’s good.’

  It was to become a favourite pose that turned up in a number of paintings. My mother leans against the door jamb; there’s the glare of her bare legs and feet, the lazy angle of her head. Thoughts to the soft pillowing sea. The eager-to-please shop assistant had been sent packing.

  It was progress. And it was progress that prised her from the house, a bit at a time, until one afternoon after weeks of wondering if she should ask first or just go without invitation, she walked up Alma’s dirt hill road. In quick time the surrounding farmland revealed itself, straw coloured, the black flecks of telegraph poles; and on the far edge of everything stood the ranges, in shadow at this time of the day, but their jaws dropped open in the February heat. At the top of the drive where it levelled out to a half-kept lawn and the start of Alma’s porch she was alarmed at how much of her life was on show—the red roof of the farmhouse, the washing line; she could even see scored into the paddock the track she took each day to the top of the hill.

  She knocked timidly on the door and Alma called out, ‘Door’s open!’ which made her wonder if he’d seen her lurking around his letter box trying to force herself up the hill. She pushed on the door. Alma was standing at a bench filling a kettle. He didn’t seem
at all surprised to see her. Pleased though, his mouth buttoned down, some pleasure seeping out despite his efforts, but hardly surprised. ‘Just in time for some chai,’ he said.

  While he busied himself with that task she looked around. The rat catcher’s cottage was basic. One large room crowded with drawings and canvases, none of them framed. All the work was pinned to a back wall. There was a door to the bedroom which Alma kicked shut on his way to closing the door behind her. A coal range stood at one end, a potbelly at the other; a pile of chopped wood climbed the end wall.

  My mother passed along the wall with the drawings. She picked out faces, identified names. Victoria—grimly captive. Hilary’s face crammed with smiles; knees pressed together, like a schoolgirl about to sit a piano exam. Some of the women had settled for the chaste expression of someone asleep. Sadness was another subject. In two or three cases the eyes stirred with times long gone, opportunities once theirs for the taking; or else they showed confusion at the turn the world had taken, or were commiserative for the fish that once swam by so elegantly and was now the white skeleton lying on the sea bed.

  Now she arrived at the series of the life that my mother feared Alma had seen far too much of—sketches of her pegging up the washing; standing at the letterbox; walking back to the house with folded arms, containing herself rather than cold; sitting on the porch, back to the door frame. She was disappointed to see that in every sketch he hadn’t bothered with the detail of her face—instead it was represented by a crosshatch of lines, a loose scribble, a wool ball of light and shadow. She was better represented by gesture—the working struts of her arms as she reaches up to the washing line, the sag of her shoulders, her domestic solemnity as she chops the carrots.

  There was one she almost missed. She was sure Alma would have removed it had he known in advance of her plan to visit. The sketch was of two figures sitting on the beach—a few dashed-off lines is all they get yet there is no doubt who they are. The more fully worked figure leans into her knees. There is the heavy fall of her breasts; one pigtail falls over her front shoulder; in the raised face there is a sharp look of annoyance. Alma has just waded around the point past the nude sunbathing women. One of them has sounded the alarm and at once the other has sat up. And already Alma is looking away with what he saw. The sketch is a commemorative in which my mother’s breasts feature prominently.

  This was the first of many visits up to Alma’s cottage. It was on the second visit that he talked a little about himself for the first time. It was prompted by her glimpse of a tattoo on his arm, another portrait as it turned out. It was a gorgeous sunny day so they were sitting outside on the porch; it was as Alma reached for his cup that his shirt sleeve rode up his forearm and she saw it, a bluish oval shape already faded away beneath fine blond hair.

  Alma quickly noticed my mother’s interest.

  ‘That’s Claire,’ he said.

  It was the first time Alma had mentioned his wife. He excused himself and disappeared inside. A few minutes later he returned with a photograph of his wife, his only photo of her, but this version was no clearer. Blonde hair fading into an overexposed white background. A young pale face staring out of the middle. They were on their way to a new life when the train plunged into the river. Alma lost Claire and the baby she was carrying.

  It begins with a weather system, thereafter a steady aggregation of detail ending up in tragedy. Heavy rains, a slip, the railway tracks shifting. Lives are jolted. Lives end. And the next day, as Alma hears later, people place wreaths over the mud slip. Others throw wreaths into the river. A man who lost his nine-year-old son nails up a white cross.

  Into that river plunged Alma Martin’s old life. A lengthy period of convalescence follows. He’s taken some head injuries. Obtrusions. Concussion. Bruising around the eyes. There is other internal damage that is harder to gauge. For one thing, he can’t recall anything of his immediate life. He can’t think why he and Claire had boarded the train in the first place. He can’t explain for himself where they were headed or what they intended to do when they got there. Relatives might have filled in the missing spaces, but Alma’s parents are dead. His one sibling is in Australia. Some strangers professing to be second cousins come in to see him; he has no idea who they are and is glad when they leave. Each morning a man in a white coat approaches his bedside and shines a torch into his eyes. He asks questions which is silly because even if he knows the answers Alma can’t reply. His jaw is broken and wired up.

  He drifts off; when he wakes it is dark. He can hear crying from another part of the ward. But in the dark nearby is the heavy breath of someone asleep. His bed must be parked up alongside another patient. He dozes off again. When he wakes a face he’s never seen before hovers over him. There is news to digest. His wife is dead. Sorry. A needle punctures his arm and he drifts off.

  Eventually the time he is awake increases and soon he is able to sit up in bed. He has been told to expect a certain amount of memory blackout. The brain is a mysterious organ. He is encouraged to think of it as a castle with as many rooms and entrances as a honeycomb; a castle with its own inclinations to open this door and close another. The doctor has asked him to think of it in this way, to think of different bits and pieces of himself residing behind different doors. Some of those doors are opening; others remain stuck. In short, the whack to his head has created a spectacular erasure, a white flash across the blackened detail of the life lived so far.

  As part of his rehabilitation the doctor recommends he try drawing. There are classes available at the hospital. And why not? He can’t talk. He might as well draw pictures. Someone from the WEA visits every day. Others in the class hobble in on crutches, with bandaged heads, in wheelchairs. The teacher tells the assembled class, ‘What I want you to know is there’s no such thing as a mistake. I call it a starting point. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. It’ll work its way out in the end. After that you’ll be content to call it texture.’ Mostly though they hear about technique. The geometry of the head, its various partitions of vertical and horizontal lines, the downward weight of a body at rest, the shifting compass of the body’s disposition.

  He draws every day. He draws for hours on end. Whole mornings and afternoons disappear in this way—slabs of time previously marked by the tick tock of a wall clock and the squeaking progress of the meal cart up the corridor.

  It is a slow passage back into the world. When people ask about his wife Alma casts around for the photo, and since it is also an illustrative story he might roll up his sleeve.

  He told my mother that when he looked at the photo of his wife he was struck by how little he could say about her. He had read somewhere about the ability of the great French painter, Pierre Bonnard, to paint from memory. Bonnard was able to get down accurately every movement of his wife getting in and out of the bath.

  Whereas, Alma has to stop and concentrate hard to remember whether he had ever seen Claire in a bath. He must have, he thinks, but can’t recall it. He has an idea that she had also gardened—again, it isn’t information based on memory. And obviously she must have walked as well. But that is back in a life when he simply told himself, Claire is gardening or Claire is walking. He hadn’t looked carefully enough to see how she did either.

  My mother has an interesting thesis. She believes Alma decided to build a pi
cture of his late wife from the bits and pieces of the women in the district that caught his eye. It’s an appealing idea, bolstered by the fact that the tattooed portrait had already started to fade; it no longer resembled anyone but looked more like a net or a mesh. If he was fishing for attractive features, my mother thought he would find Victoria’s drawn mouth attractive and Hilary’s youth a source of vibrancy; Tui Brown, stalwart of the tennis club, had a nice figure, and so on. It was just an idea.

  He loved Bonnard. For hours he would talk about the painter’s life with my mother. He showed her a photo once. The man’s eyes stood out. They bulged. She said he looked like someone under threat of being struck blind who was taking a final look around at the world. My mother didn’t think much of him—Bonnard, the man. He didn’t look like a man participating in the cut and thrust of life. She couldn’t imagine him mending a fence or waiting at a bus stop or taking his place at the back of the line for tickets to a film. She liked the portraits she saw in the library books, however.

  Alma was a regular visitor to the library. My mother would often see him push his bike up the hill, a heavy book of colour plates in the bike carrier. When they made plans for a last swim at Easter he smiled at his ‘water baby’. He told my mother she was like Marthe, Bonnard’s wife and model.

  ‘You both have water in common. She spent her life in a bathtub. In her husband’s sketches she is forever getting in and out of the bath. She was devoted to cleaning herself, and Pierre was devoted to capturing her cleaning herself. Do you know how they met?’ It was no longer necessary to answer, because Alma would tell her whether or not she wanted to hear, but as he talked on my mother was besieged by the thought that here was a man who must have once told his wife he loved her, and who had known her intimately, and yet couldn’t begin to tell you about her breasts, how she tasted or what she felt like. And in startling succession came this thought, and not without a shudder of responsibility, that the woman Alma was coming to know best in this world was herself.