Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  Alma Martin once told my mother a story that Matisse had Madame Cézanne in mind when he painted his own wife, and that Amélie was said to have wept for the ‘lost image’. My mother and Alma were looking at Bonnard’s bath series at the time, and she was beginning to think that if it was good enough for Matisse to strip Madame Cézanne into his wife’s painting then maybe, just maybe, she would pose nude for Alma in order to help him flesh out his memory of his lost wife. It took my mother some time before she raised the courage to propose the idea, but eventually she did, and Alma took a slow sip of his tea. For the moment neither could shift their eyes off Bonnard’s painting. ‘Well, let’s just think about it for now,’ she said.

  At Easter they went for their final sea swim. They waded around the point at low tide and arrived at the beach where a year earlier Alma had looked up and seen my mother and her friend nude sunbathing. Seeing Alma glance up the beach to that same place my mother said, ‘I’m still thinking about it.’

  That winter the women’s club hosted a series of talks. Weather permitting my mother tried to get to as many of these talks as possible. It was the war years and everything was in short supply—including stimulation. Like plankton eaters they sat with their mouths and minds wide open. Alma sometimes came along. He would double my mother on George’s bike. Within view of the town lights he would stop pedalling Alice to dismount and to hide the bike in the bushes. Whereupon my mother would start walking and after a pause of five minutes Alma would follow her, in case their arriving together caused tongues to wag.

  Victoria helped to organise these talks in the large space above the Plunket Rooms. She asked Alma to give a talk on drawing, or maybe his favourite artist. ‘Or ratting,’ she said by way of another option.

  In September he was due to give his ratter’s talk but was troubled by what to wear. My mother went to George’s wardrobe and found a white shirt, and while Alma sat in the kitchen in his singlet she ironed her husband’s white shirt. In all sorts of ways Alma was replacing George. He rode his bike. Wore his shirts. Wore his gloves when he tore out the blackberry threatening to smother the bridge over Chinaman’s Creek.

  The rat talk drew a large crowd. There were questions at the end, some discussion. Its success encouraged him to give a talk the following month. This one on Pierre Bonnard and his wife, Marthe, was less well attended but still a success. Much of it my mother had heard before. Marthe’s obsession with water and personal hygiene. Pierre the eager chronicler in close attendance.

  Later they picked the bike out of the bushes. It was a warm night. A white moon hung in the clouds. Instead of mounting the bike they walked along beside it. My mother had a question she’d been bursting to put to him ever since leaving the talk. She warned him first that she had something private to ask. And Alma smiled, ‘Not too private, I hope.’ He stopped wheeling the bike and waited, and my mother said to him, ‘Tell me honestly, can you remember what your wife looked like undressed?’

  For a moment he looked up at the trees. She saw him begin to frame an answer. She saw the upward roll of his eyes, a taut drawing of his cheeks that warned her to expect an untruthful answer. Then he looked at her and his eyes rolled back; the face reluctantly recomposed itself. He shook his head. ‘No, Alice,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘In that case I’ll do it,’ she said.

  To look at the nudes of my mother is to know what the painter is thinking. She is some sun-kissed landscape sitting at his feet. Horizontal lines cut across her knees like surveyor’s pegs indicating where future heaviness may lie.

  The Saturday after Alma’s talk my mother wore a raincoat up to his cottage. As she said, when the objective is to remove them no clothes seem more appropriate than others. Up at Alma’s when the time came to take off the coat she said she felt as naked as a shelled pea. It was a warm day, sunny. They moved out to the porch. While Alma set up his easel he hummed some tuneless melody. He never usually hummed. He fussed with the gear. Without looking up he asked her if she had heard from George, and she said, ‘George would blow his brains out if he could see me now.’

  ‘Well, George is in North Africa,’ he said. Now, at last, he raised his eyes and looked at my mother. ‘Alice, let’s have you lean up against the door jamb and just hang your arms, and maybe cross your legs. Let your head drop and just let everything flop back.’

  She asked if she could close her eyes and he said if she wanted to.

  ‘George had better not ever find out about this.’

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

  ‘Oh you will, Alma. He’d shoot both of us.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alma. I’m not very professional, am I? I’m probably not what you’re used to.’

  ‘You’re fine but I need to concentrate now, Alice,’ he said.

  When a sitter begins to talk the pose loses all its binding; arms and legs fall away, the mouth widens, the tongue waggles, a sense of form withers. By now my mother was aware of this and so shut up. She held the pose for twenty minutes, the whole time with her eyes closed. And the whole time she didn’t hear him draw. There was none of the usual scuff on paper or the punctuated breathing.

  They stopped twice for breaks. Alice didn’t bother with putting on her raincoat. There was nothing left to hide. So she stood on Alma’s porch completely naked except for an enamel cup of tea in her hand. Across the valley floor people were doing the normal Saturday things, mainly women of course, removing the heads of chickens, bringing wood inside their kitchens, shifting cattle across paddocks. How far and apart their lives seemed.

  For all the nervousness surrounding the exercise, in this series of nudes my mother looks happy. Someone has just told a great joke on the big screen and she is looking up at it.

  The session was interrupted once when a kingfisher mistaking Alma’s blue carpet for a pond flew into the window. The blue-crested bird flew a garden-sized circle to show it wasn’t hurt or embarrassed, but its tiny fast-blinking eye knew. It knew. It had known all along. Until the next time they heard it fly into the same window. Temptation is tireless and forgetful in that way.

  Two other nude paintings completed that November and December are from Alma’s sketches of my mother down at the river. They have walked along the shingle in the hot and dusty blackberry air, swaying like drunks, bumping into each other. Along the riverbank all the way up to the pools they hold branches back for each other to pass through. The pools are high with water off the tops; their bloated surface swirls with twigs and brown water.

  My mother didn’t bother to change behind a bush. She hadn’t brought anything to change into anyway. In one painting that as far as I know no one else in the world has seen, thank God, she is scrambling over the white boulders for the top pool. Alma has caught up with my mother’s womanhood—a rear view, what in the painting is made to look like a small purse; the delicate line is the colour of watermelon. In the second painting she is a fish in water—a streak of white bone in the depths.

  There is one other painting from that summer. This is my mother’s favourite and it was the one Alma made a mistake in giving her.

  Here, she is fully clothed. From the window seat at home she leans forward—she is the kingfisher who has just glimpsed the blue pr
omised land.

  I have made it sound like it was all one-way traffic; endless women for prey, notably my mother, Alma in pursuit with his drawing materials. But there were times when observation flowed in the other direction. At the pools she trod water, her eyes sparkling out of goose-pimply flesh, taunting him to come and join her. Alma will swim in the sea at the drop of the hat but lakes and rivers fill him with dread. So did changing out of his clothes in front of my mother.

  Slowly he unbuttons his shirt. He is in no hurry. My mother slips over on to her back and lies there gazing up at the bits of sky suspended from an overhanging tree. Alma is a shy man, that much is obvious. The way he carefully stuffs his socks back into his shoes and starts for the water only for my mother to roar back at him, ‘For God’s sake, Alma, you still have your underpants on!’ His face burns. The whole damn world must have heard that. Now he looks down at himself, at this oversight—he will pretend it is. My mother, happy as a frog, yells out once more loud enough for the world to hear. ‘Take them off!’ Slowly he starts back for his clothes. He is going to have to take off his underpants and my mother hasn’t seen him this unhappy in months, not since a dying rat outwitted his best attempts to recover it behind the hot water tank. But as she is about to discover, there is no elegant or interesting way for a man to take off his underpants. As he lifts one foot, and now the other, he looks like a man getting ready for his own funeral. There is just this final thing to attend to—the folding of underpants which peculiarly reminds Alice of Alma’s finicky arrangement of his tubes of paint.

  As he began his sad procession to the water she performed a duck dive to give him the privacy he so obviously craved and by the time she surfaced he was standing up to his midriff, shivering behind his folded arms, looking disgruntled. She laughed and swam gleefully towards him.

  She wasn’t given time to fall in love with Alma Martin. Before Christmas there was a phone call. She didn’t catch the man’s name but it didn’t matter anyway. The news he had for her was so astounding. George’s battalion would be home in the New Year. There was some other information she didn’t pay attention to, and there was also the sense that she hadn’t sounded quite as excited and heartened as the voice at the other end was used to hearing. She thanked him, and after replacing the phone she went about the house opening windows and chasing out traces of the neighbour up the road.

  It was time to meet Alma and walk to the river in that delicious smell of blackberry air. Now as she left the house she walked right past the towel hanging on the clothesline. Alma was waiting for her on the other side of Chinaman’s Creek, a white towel slung over his shoulder. As she approached he looked up with a smile. She could see he had no notion that the world was about to change. She had an idea he was thinking of something clever to say so she came right out with it.

  ‘George’s battalion is coming home after Christmas.’

  She saw Alma’s face fold up and look off in half a dozen directions at once.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  ‘I just got word.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Alice. I just don’t know what…except I suppose what I should say…’ She waited, but it seems he wasn’t about to say that.

  They found themselves shaking hands, but that just felt silly. And so, out there on the road in plain view, they hugged. They kissed briefly, and parted. There was nothing else to say. No rules to make for the future. They held hands until my mother drew her hand away, her fingers drawing through his, regret trailing Alma’s mouth. Already my mother and Alma Martin were falling back from each other, and as Alma took the towel off his shoulder and bunched it up in his hand, my mother said he looked at it as if to ask what in God’s name use had he for this thing.

  5

  Throughout the month of January the men arrived back in the district at different hours of the day and night. They left the troopship and ran from one another back to their old lives. They disappeared inside their homes and didn’t come out for two or three days. There was some catching up to do. Some anxious smiles to cross the room. Some misunderstandings to come to grips with. And a lot of starting over. Favourite chairs, favourite meals, peculiar mannerisms, sayings, affections, ways of being—all had to be unscrambled from memory. No one was unaffected, and of course sadder stories began to leak out.

  Alma’s sketches of Victoria reveal a mother worrying about her son. All his failings list in her face. Dean was no good at sport. He walked away from games; the shrieks of delight came from other boys. They were like scampering monkeys whereas Dean held himself like a delicately built adult. He fell out of a tree once and broke his arm. Other boys faced with the same swift change of circumstance somehow manage to break their fall or make a grab for a branch and swing to safety. But Dean wasn’t like that. He fell with the heavy resignation of a human being that knows it is not supposed to be airborne and so must face the consequences.

  Victoria received some warning. She was told to meet her boy in Wellington. She stood in the crowd down on the wharf, wearing her new hat, her hand placed against her chest to conceal the missing button on her coat. She kept smiling bravely. Teeth and wind—hoping for the best. She wasn’t sure what to expect. Soon the crowd began to thin and she was able to move closer. Now, at the top of the gangway, a number of naval ratings juggled a stretcher. It was halfway down the gangway before Dean raised his pale face—so much paler than she remembered. She wondered if he was sick. He was always coming down with a stomach bug; always first in the street to catch a cold. There he was, coming down the steps, clearly without the use of his legs. It was hard to know how a mother should look and conduct herself under these circumstances. It was hard to know whether to rush forward or to hold her place as you do on a platform for the train to come properly to a halt.

  Dean raised his pale face and smiled weakly. ‘Hallo, Mum.’ The men carrying him stood waiting like removal men. She hadn’t come prepared for this. She hadn’t even thought to have a taxi waiting. She looked around the wharf and pointed to where a number of pigeons were pecking the asphalt by the iron rail. She held Dean’s hand and walked alongside. After they lowered him on to the asphalt she reached into her purse and gave Dean a chocolate bar she’d bought off a man in a monkey suit in town.

  It was yet another story about luck. Dean had been in a lorry that clipped a landmine. Others lost their lives. Dean was only paralysed from the waist down. Well, that counted as good luck. What did you say to those who had lost their loved ones?

  With the men back, the world was a noisier and busier place. Up at Alma’s cottage the view had more detail vying for his attention. It used to be he’d notice a cow get up and change direction and sit down again on a farm two miles away. Now, over the same expanse, he saw men walk out of their farmhouses and stand in a paddock; cigarette smoke kite-tailing across farmland. He could see George wandering the property below.

  Used to smaller places, old habits continued as the men took over corners of rooms, disappeared inside sheds, sat on upended apple cases.

  Machinery that hadn’t sparked for two or three years now tore fields up into irrigation ditches. The trembling white apple blossom and the roar of machinery and the dogs! How can it be that the dogs barked more—my mother is certain they did. The dogs barked and howled into the night, setting one another off from one farm to the next.

  By winter
of that year there were more pregnant women in the district than at any other time in its history. The younger women tottered around on swollen ankles. They strained to recover clothes pegs from around their feet while the men gazed away into the distance with thought to the next project.

  It was a time of confusion, of great change. A motorised tractor and a horse-drawn plough were often seen working the same paddock. Changes came to Alma’s life as well. A letter from a firm of solicitors in Melbourne brought news of a modest inheritance. The money was forwarded to a solicitor in Nelson, and this man sat Alma down and advised him to buy something. Until that money was cabled he hadn’t given a moment’s thought to owning anything. That all changed when the money went into his account. Suddenly he was a rat on a raft looking for the nearest landfall. Of all the houses he could have bought he ended up buying the place Hilary and her soldier husband, Jimmy, were renting. Money did seem to change one’s view of the world. Until it came up for sale he realised he hadn’t properly looked at Hilary’s cottage. He had known it the way a rat knows a cottage, a collection of cupboards, dusty hard-to-get-to corners, stuffy ceilings. He knew the kitchen—most of their drawing sessions had been conducted in there. And if someone was to hold a gun to his head he could probably remember the blue-and-white patterned curtains and walnut grain of the chairs. But the rest of the house in its full-bodied self? He couldn’t have told you what colour it was. Now it was up for sale he suddenly noticed the defect in the chimney that leaked smoke, the sand in the carpet, the sloping pitch of the sitting-room floor to the corner of the cottage most desperate for re-piling. For all that the house had a pleasant kind of lean, as if it was meant to be. What is commonly condemned as derelict when inland has by the sea a knack of acquiring character. Some strain told on the window panes—a tension where the floor went one way and the windows another; it was an arrangement that made the ordinary blue sky sing in the way glass achieves in chapels and courtrooms. He signed for the house and kept Hilary and Jimmy on at the same rent.