Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  ‘It’s written in the Bible, remember?’

  No one did. Our eyes scratched the floorboards between the rows of desks.

  ‘Two of everything,’ Hilary repeated.

  The dark side and the lit side, she went on to say. The proportions of a face neatly measured up by a vertical line. (I’m more or less paraphrasing now I don’t remember her exact words.) The same applied to any understanding of land mass. A mighty continent such as Russia must have its companion piece to the south. In the mirrored rooms of the Russian Admiralty all this made sense, but in New Egypt primary school Hilary’s class sat dazed.

  That night when Frank asked me in his usual perfunctory way what I’d learned at school that day I was able to tell him, ‘A Russian explorer once described our place as a “frozen sea”.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. He got up with his plate and walked to the sink. He said as casually as he could, a disarming flight of words over his left shoulder as he rinsed off his plate, ‘I left something at the plant. I’ll be back in an hour.’

  My mother didn’t ask what he’d left; she closed her eyes and clung on to a faint smile.

  The next day Hilary led the class down to the beach where we stood in readiness to spot on the horizon a wooden sailing ship bobbing south past this ‘frozen sea’. Hilary rose on her toes. She held back a strand of hair that kept falling across her face. And as she strained to see over the tops of the swell falling against the horizon I shifted to a spot behind her where I could see around the sides of her face a line curving into a tiny pit of regret etched at the corners of her mouth. It was a look so closely approaching sadness that I wondered if she really had expected to see Bellinghausen’s ship.

  On our way back to school a man got out of a car parked near the school gates. I was pretty sure this was Jimmy Phillips. As we got closer we could see his car packed with things. Cartons, pillows. It was impossible to walk up Endeavour Street and miss the car or the man and yet Hilary gave exactly that impression. It may have been that her mind was on other things, that she might even be considering becoming a gymnast or a vet or maybe she was wondering if Persico’s fish and chip shop would be open by the time she finished marking our homework later in the day. Jimmy didn’t stop grinning.

  At the school gates things took their inevitable turn. Hilary stood to one side as we filed through. She told us to go to the classroom and wait there.

  We did what she asked, some of us with backward glances. In the class we moved as one to the windows. By then Jimmy had placed his hands on our teacher’s shoulders. Now she placed her face against his chest. We understood this to be a farewell. No one spoke until Jimmy crossed the road to get in his car; the way Hilary’s arms had fallen at her side was the saddest thing and one little girl at the window said, ‘He’s leaving her.’

  When I passed all this on at home and reached the part where Jimmy drove off, there was a sustained silence and it was left to Frank to think of something to say.

  ‘What kind of car was Jimmy in?’

  I couldn’t remember the make. ‘A blue one,’ I thought.

  ‘Probably the Cambridge I saw him in last week.’

  Without a word my mother got up and left the room. Frank’s sigh of relief was audible as it was long.

  Questions were posted over the blackboard.

  What kind of man becomes an explorer? What qualities might a man (or woman) need? Why would a man give up one life for another that didn’t necessarily promise anything better?

  We heard later that Jimmy had gone to work on one of the big hydro projects.

  He was never gone for long, as I recall. Soon we got used to seeing the blue Cambridge car parked outside the school with no one in it—a kind of calling card that made Hilary smile. Jimmy was home again.

  It was obvious she never knew when he’d be back; the decision was his alone.

  There is nothing like longing to wear down the insides. In the absence of Jimmy, Hilary’s interest switched to Mrs Bellinghausen. Now we heard about the white nights of Leningrad, and how neat and composed the world will appear when in fact it is completely at odds with itself: she invited us to imagine, outside the window on our burnt playing field, a crust of snow; below that, ice; and beneath the cracks the shiftiness of water.

  School broke for summer and we forgot about Bellinghausen. Instead there were farm chores, days at the beach, and at home the sad figure of my mother. I longed to tell her about Frank and the woman from Wages, of what I’d seen. There was no way of knowing if she already knew; and if she did, then I’d make things worse. If she didn’t know, well I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be responsible for what then might follow. Some bleak survival instinct told me that a gloomy household was better than no household at all. And I didn’t want to be responsible for things getting worse than they already were. The only thing to do was to pretend that I didn’t know anything.

  When school resumed the appearance of Hilary was a shock. Her face had grown flabby and despite it being summer her skin was pale. Her eyes were red. She looked like someone who had been up all night three days running. When she brushed by our desks we smelt the nicotine. Her hair was untended. She’d always been fluent, and as I’ve indicated, excitable when a subject aroused her. But now she lost the drift of what she set out to say. In silent reading we heard her crying very softly at her desk. No one dared look up.

  The headmaster who I remember as a fair-minded man with two vertical lines folding the skin between his eyes had shown patience with his star teacher. Maybe he’d been aware of a problem before the rest of us because now there was a definite sense of Hilary being on report.

  What had happened was this. One of Jimmy’s absences had been unexpectedly long. He had meant to be home for Christmas, then at the last moment sent word that he wouldn’t be. Something had come up. Over the summer break Hilary responded by contriving to put on weight. Some will have issue with the word ‘contrived’—it sounds a bit strong, as if she knew what she was doing. In retrospect though I believe this to be the case. Hilary ate fearlessly, and this fearlessness of hers grew into an amazing appetite. Even in class she had food on her desk. She ate when marking our homework. On lunch duty she patrolled the playground with a paper bag of sandwiches and cakes. With the benefit of hindsight her plan becomes more clear. If Jimmy could remove himself from her life and distance himself whenever he so willed, then she would do the same. She would bury the person Jimmy knew inside a roll of fat. She would place that person Jimmy had once known and loved right back on the edge of memory. She would teach Jimmy what it felt like whenever he willy-nilly removed himself from her life.

  There was that final absence and that was it. Jimmy forgot to return. And eventually we would forget the man with the long legs who used to lounge up against the blue Cambridge outside the school gates. Hilary had grown to such a size she couldn’t fit her swollen feet into shoes any more. She had to make do with rubber jandals in all weather. She carried a string bag for her groceries. She wore a shapeless cotton dress that angled out from her enormously flabby arms like a pup tent. And because of the great depths at which she had buried herself she seemed indifferent to cold or rain.

  She wasn’t up to teaching any more. We heard it said she had lost her mind. When Alma fin
ally had to get her out of the cottage he found a chair-bound woman surrounded by a pile of rubbish that seemed to pour like the tide down from the walls to her bare toes.

  There was a time at high school when those of us who were lucky enough to once have had Hilary as a teacher would stop to talk to her. But that time passed. We had grown and changed ourselves and our old teacher, we hoped to God, would no longer recognise us. She sat on the bench muttering to herself, the rain pouring off her red face. She wore a plastic see-through coat that she couldn’t button up. The weather lashed at her bare legs. She had become just too embarrassing to recognise any more.

  12

  It was nice to see Alma and the women in the newspaper. The ‘old and new fruit’ headline was a bit unfortunate. Alice wanted to write a letter but I stopped her. The important thing was the photo. It showed that we were alive and well, still kicking. It was timely because as usual, after the Pacific Star fiasco, I was feeling down in the dumps and as it does on such occasions, the thought came to me that maybe Tommy Reece hadn’t done such a bad job after all. Down at council during the review of the ship’s visit I had to look up at Tommy’s sober black-and-white portrait and when I thought of the frilly soft porn I’d pulled from the tip that day and cleaned up with a damp cloth for resale, it was hard to resist the thought that all mayoral dignity had drained away with Tommy’s death.

  There are times when I wish I could stand in the door of the shop and gaze down the street and find a canyon of office buildings with lines of yellow cabs double- and triple-parked for women to step out of like spoilt pelicans into expensive department stores. There are times when everything here is just insufficient and everywhere else is better. I must admit when I get down like this I tend to pop through to the section behind the beaded curtain and pull something off the shelf to lift the spirits.

  That morning I found myself staring at the vulva of someone called Robyn, admiring its gentle rise and the sunlit ends of her pubes. There is something deeply unserious about blonde pubic hair. There was not a single wrinkle on her face. I had an idea it would be like marzipan to touch. Her mouth was heavily painted to the point where it didn’t really look real. The lips didn’t even look fit for talking. I couldn’t imagine them biting into an apple or slobbering with curry. And her skin really was too glossy. The shop lights are over the counter but even when I shifted the magazine around, the page would not lose its shining reflectiveness. It’s like when you try and lock your eyes on something bobbing out to sea on one of those summer days of dazzling white light. You squint. But instead of this bringing the object closer, it disintegrates into bloodshot blurriness.

  Her bottom though was perfect, architecturally speaking. In a smaller photo she sat cross-legged, dressed only in thick black reading glasses. Presumably the book in her lap was proof of ‘reading’ listed under ‘hobbies’. In the full-page spread she looks ridiculous. She holds the reins of her favourite horse. She’s wearing a black equestrian helmet and nothing else. Her vulva has gone back under cover, it’s just polite fringe, almost sexless really. Over the page and we’re back to a full-face shot where Robyn—and not the horse—is climbing one of the equestrian hurdles. Her left foot is raised—the camera gazes admiringly, longingly it’s fair to say. Isn’t it extraordinary to think of men in warm baths all over the globe right at this minute thinking about Robyn, her name more recallable than the Pope’s or Neil Armstrong’s, her interest in ‘the environment’ and ‘reading’ noted but not really taken that seriously?

  I would have lingered longer with Robyn had not some old friend of my mother’s, deaf to the point of hopelessness, come in to ask if I would buy his dog. I told him we don’t do dogs but on he went deafly listing Chester’s qualities—his loyalty, his obedience. Then he ran through his pedigree, by which time I’d actually written a sign. ‘We don’t do dogs.’ This took him by surprise and I wonder if the dog read the message before he did, because suddenly Chester was wagging his tail and feeling better about the day’s prospects.

  Possibly I was also feeling a bit down because our friends Kath and Guy Stuart were off to Caloundra. Yet another export to Australia. I’d sat on the same school mat as them. We’d stood on the shore looking for Bellinghausen’s ship with Hilary. Alma had painted our faces for the NE Paints picnic. I remember Guy and Kath squabbling back then. Kath said she was a zebra. Guy said she was a bee.

  I was thinking about this as I drove over to their house. Bee or zebra. You think of these things and remind yourself, hang on, I’m forty-four, I’m the mayor and I’m thinking about face painting when I should be thinking about drainage. There are days when I question my ability to do the job. I am not a grave man; not nearly grave and serious enough for the office of mayor. Tommy Reece never smiled; there must be something in that—he was returned as mayor a record number of times. I should be thinking up ways of saving New Egypt. I should be thinking sewage. Rates. Or even the slightly more awkward matter of pricing Kath and Guy’s household stuff. This was going to be tricky. This was going to be awful in fact.

  As I pull up the drive the Stuart kids aged eight and ten are playing out front. There is something staged about the kids’ play, I don’t know, it is like they’ve been sent outside in anticipation of my visit. I suppose Kath and Guy are just being good parents. Who wants their kids to see their life’s goods picked over by a man with a clipboard?

  I switch off the van and stay put for a moment. On the other hand, it is possible Guy and Kath have not mentioned anything to their kids about the move across the ditch. I make a note to be careful what I say to them, although when I get out of the van I see something akin to upheaval register in their eyes. After that I don’t think there is any doubt that they know their world is about to change.

  The girl clings to a well-thumbed Harry Potter book. The boy with his kid-sized cricket bat plays a cover drive over the buttercups. That is interesting—Guy has let the grass grow. The task of the lawns has been handed on. Emotionally the Stuarts are already on that plane.

  I pat the boy’s head, say hallo to the girl and look up at the house in time to see a shadow move behind the door glass. I am relieved it is Kath who comes out to the porch. On his own Guy can be hard work. With Guy you have to make the conversational running and be prepared to shift and move with his long silences, cruise them, enjoy them even, but resist the panic to fill in the silence with a rush of whatever comes into your head. That just makes Guy blink faster. At the shop I have a class photo of us all at primary school. As far back as all those years ago the tension rising in Guy’s shoulders is plain to see; a feeling that whatever is happening will soon pass and be replaced by something worse. Now he shows up behind Kath and places his big hand on her shoulder. In the same photo Kath is the little girl with the pigtails and missing teeth sitting in the front row. Thirty years later she is also the good-looking barefoot woman in jeans smiling at her boy practising the cover drive.

  ‘He lives for it. He’s his father’s son to a tee.’

  Guy’s face goes all rubbery and turns bright red.

  ‘Right,’ he says and brings his hands together with a forced cheerfulness. ‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’

  I have an idea I will catch up with Guy when it comes time to look over the toolshed.

  For starters we begin in the master bedroom. I follow Kath to the window where we find the Stuart kids
out front staring back, concern on their faces, wondering why their parents are acting so weirdly. Why is their father so eager to please and at the same time quick to remove himself? And what is the man from Pre-Loved Furnishings & Other Curios doing inside their house with that clipboard?

  ‘I told them the mayor was coming around,’ she says. This is the most hilarious thing she can think to say. I told them the mayor was coming around. She starts laughing then.

  ‘I hope they’re not too disappointed?’

  ‘No. I told them what to expect.’

  ‘Thanks, Kath.’

  She says she’s told them they have three more sleeps. This morning she says she heard them down the hall experimenting with the word Caloundra. It sounds like the name of a shampoo or something from the lizard family. She looks past me for the window. She says what a close thing it’s been. For years they’ve watched the street empty out. They could have been stuck here. They could have died here. Of course it was up to her. Guy with his big blond shoulder tied up in sheet and sleep. Next to useless really, isn’t he? She was the one who had to make the play and get Guy to apply for the paint technician’s job with a marine company. Left to Guy they would be in the hold of a fast-sinking ship as everyone rowed away in lifeboats. She says they’ve been careful not to buy any more groceries. All week they’ve been eating the fridge back to its humming white panels.

  ‘It’s been a good fridge but now along with everything else I guess it’ll go to you, Harry.’

  She opens the window and yells at the kids to ‘scoot’. The girl takes off. The boy stays nudging the grass with the end of his cricket bat.

  ‘Go on, Michael. Daddy will be out soon.’

  Closing the window she says, ‘He’s sad for some reason. Wonder why?’ But she doesn’t wonder; she doesn’t spend another second wondering. She has leapt ahead to the matters at hand.