Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  ‘We’re almost there,’ he told her. ‘Almost. Hold it. Hold it… Yup. That is gorgeous.’ Click. Click. Click. Still with his eye attached to the camera the man had asked, ‘What’s your favourite side? Sunny side or the other?’ She didn’t know what he meant by the other until he explained, ‘Your deep secretive side, honey bunch. The side that no one gets to see. That piece of you that lies out of bounds. That part which each of us takes to the grave more or less intact.’ He swung the camera up to his face and once more asked if Mum was around. He took his face away from the lens and poked at the dials. She realised she was being given the chance to lie if she wished. Presented with that option something pushed her to say that her mother was in there but she was tied up. He received the news thoughtfully and appeared to make a snap decision there and then. He reached inside his pocket and handed her his business card. He told her he really thought she was a good shot. He said, ‘I hope you realise it’s not every day that you get your face minted on to the side of a coin. It could change your life, Violet. Think of all the places you’d end up! In people’s deep pockets. In their hands. Set on velvet cushions. Life is short, gorgeous. It’s over in a blink. If you’re not going to climb Everest this isn’t a bad option…’ She was thinking as he spoke, thinking that what he said made sense, thinking that she would like to…’

  ‘Costs twenty-five bucks to enter and I need the signature of your parents, one or the other,’ and as he glanced back towards the house he thought to add, ‘or a guardian.’

  Later she watched her father’s mumbling lips move down the clauses and sub-clauses on the form. To hurry him up she pointed to where his signature was required and he snatched the form away.

  ‘Damn it, Violet, you don’t just sign any old thing. I have to read it first.’

  He went back to reading—but in a little while she saw him sneak a look at her and she knew he wasn’t reading. He was putting her in her place. All the sharp angles in his face and his narrow eye-slot spoke of denying her, because to deny her would mean she was back in the same sinking ship. She had to learn she wasn’t anything special. She might as well get used to reining in false hopes, otherwise it would lead nowhere but to disappointment.

  Later, she sat on the edge of her mother’s bed. Her mother was nursing and in that musky half-light she sat fondling a fifty-cent coin. On one side was a young-looking queen with a tiara, on the other the raised edges of the wind-filled sails of the Endeavour. It was a funny way to bring up the subject with her mother. She only wanted to know if she had signed the form that would allow her portrait to go forward into the competition.

  The Queen caught her mother’s eye and she began to reminisce: there were two occasions she had seen the Queen; once riding in the back of an open car looking floral and waving a gloved hand, and more recently when she had opened parliament and the disgrace of our prime minister choosing a smart trouser suit over a dress. Her mother had opinions on such matters. As Violet’s youngest brothers suckled on her teats she talked about the Queen’s problems with her own children, their marital difficulties, which just went to show no matter who you were, even the Queen, trouble could sneak up and touch you on the shoulder, though more often than not, sighed her mother, it was trouble in the shape and form of offspring.

  ‘Now about that coin nonsense, Violet, if you fall for a clunker of a line like that, the first man who pretends to speak just half the truth will have your pants off in a flash.’ A half-stifled laugh rose in her chest, creating a rolling wave that made the two babies bob their heads. One became detached and its little red face looked up angrily. It opened its mouth to cry but had no time to. Her mother, unsighted, shoved her large nipple back in to the complaining mouth and the tiny package grunted obscenely and went on sucking. Here was rude life unminted, breathing, preoccupied. Her mother hadn’t brushed her hair that day. A stale odour of old bed sweat stuck in Violet’s throat when her mother shifted the duvet. She continued in her tired dreamy voice, ‘I don’t know why Charles doesn’t marry that horsy-looking woman. Why do people make things so difficult for themselves?’ She drew in the silence and thought deeply. ‘I don’t want you going to that photographer by yourself. I’ll speak to your father.’

  Her mother was suddenly aware that she had slid too far down in the bed because now there were two suction noises as she detached herself without ceremony and dragged herself back up the sheets, a movement like a heavy seal dragging itself up the beach. The angles of the room changed and now that she could see the window a softer, more considerate voice came from her.

  ‘At least you have your good looks, Violet. That’s no secret. You have a head on you. And just by the way, between me and you, whole cities make room for a pretty girl. It’s not supposed to be so, it’s not the way you probably hear it at school, but it’s the bloody truth, Violet. There’s other things a mother should say so I’ll say them now. I have always found it better to allow other people to tie themselves up with their foolish tongues. You might also want to think about using Optrex to make your eyes nice and bright, and one last thing. A thin smile will serve you better than a generous smile. Don’t ask me why. And don’t laugh too loud otherwise men in snakeskin shoes will take you for all tits and teeth and an easy lay.’

  Violet listened politely and when her mother had finished saying her piece she was able to counter with an interesting opinion of her own. She asked her mother, ‘Which side of your face do you prefer to show? Sunny side or the other?’

  The question that had seemed to just blow in from nowhere lodged in her mother’s face and pulled her away from the dark boozy countryside of memory. Gobsmacked, she asked, ‘What do you mean, sunny side?’ And Violet was able to repeat the photographer’s sentiments, pretty much word for word what he had said, and watch with delight the effect these had on her mother. Something like a shift of light from the window to a distant corner of the room; a shift in worldly know-how, the unthinkable possibility that Violet might know something about the world out there that had escaped her mum and passed her by.

  Two nights later her mother intercepted her in the hall, took her by the hand, led her into her bedroom and said, ‘Just come and talk with me.’

  Violet could smell the booze on her mother and after she shook free she went out to the kitchen where she found her father sitting at the kitchen table next to his drink. His face was covered in mischief. Delight showed even in his molars. In one hand he held the form from the photographer and in the other a lighter.

  After she had been paid, after she heard the car go, she sat by the window looking at the listless sea and the grey sky and wondered where Dean was. ‘Where are you Dean? Have you gone out to the world or have you disappeared inside of that painted one? Where are you, Dean?’ she said back to the day. ‘Where are you?’ And she turned her thoughts back to where she had first found him.

  She had left home and was on a bus on her way to one of those cities where her mother promised buildings would jump out of the way to make space for a pretty young woman. Her face was lost in its own window reflection. Bits of countryside tangled in her hair gave way to motorway, housing development, traffic, street lights and finally the city itself. When she got off the bus not knowing where to go she followed the national flags of two foreign girl backpackers. She didn’t want to lose them. She didn’t want to turn up someplace as a lost dog.

  The buildi
ngs, she noticed, were stubbornly anchored in place. They seemed not to know what her mother had said about them, their windswept foyers unwelcoming with that shooing noise. Two more turns and the backpackers led her into a busy street with cafés and lights and people entering and leaving a supermarket.

  She followed the girls into a backpackers’ hostel where she paid for a first-floor room overlooking the busy street and that night she sat on the edge of her bed looking down at the street, at the people going in and out of the laundromat, the carousel lights of the picture theatre. She was there several days when she noticed the foreign girls had left. There were new faces. And around this time the manager, Dale, a large man who sat in a low leather armchair so that his head and shoulders never rose higher than the desk top, asked her if she’d like a job setting up the buffet, filling the dishwasher, mopping down the halls. It meant she got her room for nothing, and that was a saving while she looked for a job. She had to find something because there would be no going back. If she went back her world would close up like a clam.

  She got a job as a trainee stock controller at a paint warehouse. The hardest part was boredom. The next-hardest part was walking on the concrete aisles. For hours she and two Chinese girls who didn’t have much English between them, but who nonetheless were quick to pick up the various codes of paint pots, walked up and down aisles under a vast roof of white plastic light.

  The movies were her treat. She went there as often as she could afford to, deliberately seating herself next to someone else, but no one ever spoke to her. Sometimes there was brief eye contact before both parties retreated into the bashful dark.

  The traveller who made her pregnant arrived in her life at 2 a.m. She woke to hammering downstairs, pulled on a coat over her undies and tiptoed down the stairs to open the door to a backpacker like any other, the practised heave of the pack through the door, the accented English, the apology for the lateness of the hour. As he straightened up from lowering his pack he said, ‘You were asleep. I am sorry.’

  It didn’t matter. There was a room left, one room, and he breathed a sigh of relief to hear that, but then came the catch; the key was in Dale’s office and he wouldn’t be in until 8 a.m. However, if he liked he could sleep on her floor.

  He answered by picking up his pack. And as they climbed the stairs she was amazed by her offer—it had just flowed out of her without any pause between thought and speech.

  She lay awake the rest of the night listening to the heavy sleep of the traveller. When she got up to go downstairs to set out the buffet he raised his forearm and laid it discreetly across his eyes. Then as she was letting herself out she heard him say, ‘Thank you. My name is Hans.’

  As it was a Sunday she accepted his offer to accompany her around town. They visited the museum. Walked in the park. Talked with increasing ease and intimacy, especially after he told her a joke about a crow that she didn’t really get but recognised when to laugh, which she did a bit generously, she worried about this, but needn’t have because he slipped his arm around her after that. They hired paddleboats and afterwards sat in a courtyard café. They laughed. This time he touched her hair. He said what nice hair she had, and she closed her eyes and drifted on praise. When they reached the steps of the hostel she glanced up at her window and felt a surge of joy. For once she was where she wanted to be, on the threshold of something exciting and new. And as they arrived on the landing, their sides touching, he held up her room key and asked, ‘Yes? No?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He was gone a few days later. He left while she was at work. He had South America to do, then North America. Within a week she was back sitting next to strangers in picture theatres.

  Three weeks later, feeling queasy, she bought a pregnancy test kit from a pharmacy and spent the best part of a Saturday sitting on the edge of her bed daring herself to find out. She thought it might be worth a day of not knowing. How would she spend that day of not knowing? The pictures? A walk? Whatever she did it would be with the knowledge it might never be the same after that. In the end she didn’t do any of these things. It was enough to experience the thought. It was enough to hold the options in her hand and see the world gently tilt this way and that. In the end she lay down on the bed and fell asleep. When she woke it was dark and instantly she knew what to do. It took less than ten minutes and she sat on the bed dazzled with the sequence of events. This was one of those times her mother meant her to ring home. She couldn’t bring herself to do that.

  But she had to tell someone so she decided to tell the skinny boy who kept coming in from the loading bay to sneak looks at her. She found Dean in the canteen and sat herself next to him. He was hopelessly shy. He would turn his head away to take a bite of his ham roll. She introduced herself and because she actually had to ask for Dean’s name she thought he probably wasn’t the right person, then two days later he’d seen her rubbing her stomach and asked if she was all right.

  One afternoon a large number of paint samples fell out the end of a loose carton. The cans wheeled and sprawled. She stood disabled by the task before her. She didn’t even hear Dean sneak up behind her. He gathered up the cans in half the time it would have taken her.

  He was more talkative these days. Warming to her, she supposed. In the canteen she heard about his travel plans. As soon as he had saved for a van he would roam in whichever direction the road took him. He’d just drive anywhere and everywhere until he found a place he liked and he would pull over and see what that part of the world had to offer. As he talked she felt an envy, envied him his plans and his going places. Her mother had got stuck, and now she would be like her.

  The gentlest questions seemed to come out of his white chattering frame. Sometimes he would look away at the moment of asking, as if to distance himself from a question such as what names she liked best. Which one did she think would be right for her baby? It was baby. Not babies. The shock that she was carrying twins would come much later.

  Dean had made up his mind it was a boy. She had liked that, liked it that Dean involved himself in this way; it made it feel like a joint project.

  Away from Dean though she worried about supporting herself and her baby. She would have to give up work. She would have to find somewhere else to live. At night she sat on the edge of her bed staring down into the glistening road streaked with neon and reflections; it reminded her of a school trip to the rock pools, they were searching out different niches. She would have to find one of her own; knowing this and at the same time not being able to do anything about it drove her to doing something she never thought she’d do. Because she had to do something, make preparations of some sort and feel that she was progressing towards the new life arrangement, she began to take paint from the warehouse. She had never stolen anything in her life. But now she filled her coat pockets with paint samples, taking some home every day. At night she got them out from under her bed and out of her wardrobe and spread the small sample cans over the floor, arranging them in pyramids, proof that she was building for her future. And because it was the only thing available she couldn’t stop stealing.

  One day she felt another person’s hand in her pocket. She nearly jumped out of her skin. But it was only Dean, straight as a bowling pin at her side. He nodded down at the paint sample in his hand. ‘It was sticking out,’ he said. So he knew. Possibly he’d known for a while, the way he watc
hed her; he watched her like a hawk.

  A week later the thin boy in the all-weather T-shirt saved her from herself again. The siren went for what she thought was one of those tiresome fire drills. It was near the end of the day when they filed out into the yard where the warehouse manager, a rarely seen man, came out, removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes, then addressed them on an entirely different matter. In his twelve years, he said, this was the first time he had had to deal with the matter of employee theft. Paint was disappearing out of the warehouse. He said some other things. Out there in the frigid yard the word ‘amnesty’ had a jailhouse sound to it. She tuned out and filed back with the others, the line moving past the manager and the supervisor; and it was as she was asked to step aside that Dean rushed up and rudely asked her for his coat back. Dean must have seen and understood what was about to happen. A storm gathered in his face as he demanded back his coat. It wasn’t his and yet he was so fierce about it she didn’t want to deny him. As she shrugged out of it and passed it to him she could feel the sagging weight of the pockets, and in that little transaction all interest shifted from her to Dean.

  She didn’t see him in the cartage dock after that. She didn’t see him until she left for the day and across the road she spied him in that orange Datsun she’d seen him in before. He was waiting for her, because as she appeared he climbed out and grinned over the rooftop at her.

  He said he didn’t like the job anyway.

  They went to the movies that night. And the next day when she finished work he was waiting for her again. In the car over the smell of oil rags and the noise of the fan heater that smelt of melted plastic they talked and talked. She had an idea he liked talking in the car. That way he didn’t have to wholly commit to whatever he said because he had to concentrate on the road. His eyes darted left and right, and sometimes they seemed to go right up into his forehead if he had to think about something or pull on the handbrake. One night when they were driving nowhere in particular she asked him if he wanted to kiss her and Dean was able to nod and at the time accelerate as the lights turned green.