Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  Later, in the hostel, after sneaking Dean upstairs and giggling under the duvet, he picked at her. Finding his way around. So this was a breast? And this was the part between the legs? She felt like a stocktaking. It was not quite dark in her room. The curtains she’d left open, and the streetlights played over Dean’s bare white body. She looked up at the green and white arrangement in his face. Dean was like a gecko to touch—his skin was cold, everything was drawn tight over his forehead and bony ribs; his fingers were bone and skin like someone severely dehydrated. When he arrived at his moment he released his breath in a series of shortlived hisses.

  16

  Violet had gone a long way into herself to retrieve the story about the photographer. Alma scoffed at the word ‘photography’. He said all photography proves is that the camera worked. He possibly felt a bit more short-changed than I did. Stories were fine but he was there to draw. There was an awkward moment when it came time to leave and the unspoken subject of payment jarred the air. Violet was hopeful and at the same time tense, her arms stiff at her sides. When I plunged my hand into my pocket her eyes automatically followed. Alma had no choice but to follow suit.

  ‘Less than ideal,’ he said as we got into the van.

  After I dropped him home I drove back to the shop to relieve Guy. Around five I rang Frances to say I would be late. I locked up and went to the back room to find the special edition on assorted African nudes. There was one woman, clothed as it happens, with a gorgeous pear-shaped mouth. She walked along a path through shoulder-high corn with a basket balanced on her head, a machete swinging from her hand. This image was more like that of someone from the Caribbean, not that I have been there, but it looked like it could be Ophelia’s home and that I was entering the blue and green landscape that she had played in as a young girl. As least that was my version.

  I kept switching between the clothed woman walking through the corn and the open-legged shots, but in the end—well, eventually—I found myself not so much bored as unsatisfied. I wanted more. I wanted to know more. Actually what I wanted was to hear her voice. And I wanted her to hear me sober and sound of mind.

  I knew she worked for a bank. Where? What bank? Then I heard myself say out loud, ‘What the hell is that?’ Staring back at me was a stuffed polar bear. It was hard to believe that it had taken me this long to spot it. Guy hadn’t said a word when I came in the back door. Its glassy eyes stared at me. It stood on its hind legs, its forearms extended like a wrestler’s, a head higher than me. There was a tag hanging from its right paw. ‘On appro’ it said, with name and contact details of the person it could go straight back to in the morning.

  I looked up at the bear’s sad eyes. It must have been there the whole time I was thumbing through the African spreads. Somehow the whole unsettling experience of the polar bear helped to flush out the name of Ophelia’s bank. I remembered then that she had said South London. Definitely she said South London. I rang up international directory and within minutes I was speaking to the bank in London asking for Ophelia. Ophelia who? Oh God, wait. Think. In the end I had to describe her. The person at the other end said they had three Ophelias. One in accounts, a cashier and a personnel manager.

  ‘That’s her. And can I have her surname, please?’

  Ophelia Williams. A second later Ophelia Williams was speaking to me.

  ‘Hallo, how can I help?’

  It was her. That voice. Accentless, educated, interested. Helpful. And now puzzled—she had no idea who I was. Then she was puzzled in a laugh-out-loud kind of way.

  ‘Who did you say you were? Mayor who?’

  Then she was alarmed as if she may have to ring the cops at any moment. ‘Wait. Where are you calling from?’

  I was too embarrassed to carry on. The creepy night-time menagerie effect of the shop—shadowed stag heads, golf bags, piled mattresses—made me seem even more ridiculous.

  ‘But you are the Ophelia who sometimes goes to the Fridge in Brixton?’

  There was a slight hesitation then she answered in an outside-of-work kind of way, ‘Yes, I’m that Ophelia…’ It was an admission, sad, regretful. I had torn it out of her but she didn’t want to go back there right at this moment during office hours. Especially with a nut she apparently didn’t know, and more joltingly of whom she had no memory. A shooting star in a night of shooting stars, interesting and diverting for the moment but that was all.

  I could hear her tapping a pencil from half a world away. I said, ‘Thank you. I’m sorry. I made a mistake,’ and hung up.

  For a while I sat in the dark, drum-rolling my fingers. I wish I could report on some clear path of thought but there wasn’t one. I sat there with my loss, thinking what to do with it. I don’t recall any conscious decision but after a while I stood up from my desk and went into the back room to get the magazine with the African spreads. There is a dumpster bin out the back. I tossed it in there. I felt like I was removing something in order to improve something else. Feelings, strategies—none was especially clear at this point. Except on my way home I had an inkling of what to do when I looked up at the clean painted side of the Lyric Theatre and remembered the lurid and mocking scene that used to sit there of two huge moa walking through reeds at a lakeside. It had been awful to have that glowering back at us after the collapse of the Gondwanaland theme park idea. Its cheap house paint seemed to sneer back at the civic vanity and greed that had put it there. I had to look at it every day to and from work until one day, sick and tired of hearing me complain about it, Alma had said, ‘Why not paint over it?’

  This was the night I picked up a pencil and began to draw Frances on the back of a power bill envelope. She looked up from her jigsaw and asked what I was doing. She sounded puzzled—she still didn’t know about my involvement in the drawing lessons at the Eliots’.

  ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

  The chair leg scratched on the floor as she got up.

  ‘Now you’ve moved,’ I said.

  She didn’t know whether to grin or call for help. She moved her hands to her hips.

  ‘Harry, what exactly are you drawing?’

  ‘I’m drawing you, Frances.’ I pretended to be drawing, head down, though in fact I wasn’t because that is not how you draw; at least it isn’t the way Alma had expounded. You look at what you are hoping to draw—not down at the sheet of paper. But Frances didn’t know that. She sat down again and turned to her scissored pieces of landscape.

  ‘You’re being silly,’ she said.

  That was all right. I could carry on drawing. She was in her dressing-gown, a characteristic pose: right elbow on table, hand supporting the side of her head, head turned slightly away and down at the scraps of paper covering her bench space. She was back to considering different scenes, this lake with that mountain; I’d seen a covered bridge from Vermont and a horse-drawn carriage outside Prague. Now the pencil squeaked on the envelope and she looked up.

  ‘Harry, stop it.’

  I waited for her to turn back to the jigsaw and resumed. This time she spoke down at her desktop.

  ‘You’re being silly and I wish you’d stop. I don’t see what you’re trying to prove.’

  I told her I wasn’t t
rying to prove anything.

  ‘I’m just drawing you. Be still, please, Fran.’

  That’s all I said, nothing more. She brought a shy hand up to her cheek, her delighted cheek as it appeared from where I sat.

  ‘Really, Harry? Is that what you’re doing? Drawing me?’

  ‘Rembrandt used to paint his wife,’ I said, and I saw my wife think things were getting queerer by the second. Rembrandt. Harry’s never mentioned him before.

  I didn’t say anything more since it seemed self-evident what I was doing now. I wished she would be still, however. She really needed to be in better light. At the Eliots’, Alma always took care to arrange the light. Light and shadow, he liked to say, are in constant negotiation as to which parts of the world the other can have.

  The spare chair at the nearer end of her workbench would be better. I stood up and pointed with my pencil.

  ‘I’m sorry Fran, can you change places? The reflection from the window is getting in the way.’

  She looked amused to hear this. She repeated what I had said. ‘The reflection in the window…’ Her tone was gently mocking, but that was all right. After all, what did I know about light and shadow? I heard myself regurgitate some of the stuff Alma had to say on the subject and Frances began to laugh in a quiet, pleasant, head-shaking way. She couldn’t believe this strange chick that had hatched before her eyes. Could it actually walk? And because I guess she wanted to see what would happen next, she happily complied.

  I helped her shift the chair and table into a better arrangement. I played around with the desk lamp and ended up with a nicely shadowed effect. Then I walked back to the chair, picked up the pencil and envelope and waited for Frances to compose herself.

  Of course what happened next was entirely predictable. She sat as she would like to be seen, her hands flat on her knees. She raised her face with a smile that aimed to please. But that wasn’t Frances at all. It was simply the face that she was willing to show, entirely different from the one I saw devouring the landscapes scattered over her work bench. So I didn’t draw. I did what I did out at the Eliots’ and instead I just looked and from time to time she asked me, ‘Is this all right?’ or, ‘Are you finished yet?’

  After a while she didn’t say anything. Her face began to relax and settle and I was reminded of the very last ripple moving to the edges of a pond, the final reminder of the stone thrown into its calm middle just a few minutes earlier.

  For a long time I waited. Frances was so still I could have walked up and pinched her skin. She looked like she did the first time I saw her at high school. She was walking with a group of girls but at the same time she was apart. She looked now as she did then, as if waiting for the world to come and touch her.

  Frances was always tall for her age. She deliberately walked half a step more slowly than the other girls to prevent her loping ahead like a giraffe. Of all the girls in our final year Frances was everyone’s favourite bet to be first on the train out of here. You never really felt you had her full attention. You could see her long legs walking past the hills and the ranges to that distant and as yet unnamed place that waited to claim her. Maybe it was the result of her putting so much effort into appearing graceful, but the first time she gave up the far horizon for what lay nearer and more conveniently to hand she discovered me.

  I don’t know how long I stared at Frances—ten, twenty minutes. But suddenly she drew a long breath and snapped out of wherever she had been.

  ‘Finished?’ she asked.

  ‘For now I am.’

  Immediately she sprang up. I knew what she was after and turned the envelope over.

  ‘Come on, Harry. Don’t be a tease.’

  ‘I’ll show you when I’m finished.’

  ‘You said it’s a sketch. A sketch by definition is finished when you are finished.’ She demonstrated with some rapid brushstrokes in the air. ‘There. Done,’ she said.

  ‘This is more work in progress,’ I explained.

  ‘A work in progress,’ she said after me, so we were back to that. She looked at me carefully, trying to see behind the corners of my very being. ‘You have been acting so strange lately. Ever since you got back from London.’

  She gave me one last searching look and dropped her eyes to the envelope in my hand.

  ‘Let me see. A peek. Just a little peek. Come on, Harry. The world won’t end. What are you trying to hide? You’ve seen something, haven’t you? You’ve seen something and now you’re out to hide it. One little peek, come on Harry.’

  I told her, ‘There’s really nothing to see.’

  That’s when she made a half-hearted grab for the envelope. I whipped it away and she said, All right, fuck you, Mayor. You can’t just draw me and not let me see. That’s the new rule from now on.’

  ‘I will. I will show you, I promise, okay, but not until I finish it.’

  In fact I’d just had this wonderful idea. With Alma’s help I would do a portrait of Frances and unveil it for her birthday. The idea was beaming out of me.

  ‘One teensy look won’t cause the world to end. Jesus, Harry.’

  She’d worn me down and so this time I decided, what the hell, and handed over the envelope for all the good that would do. I watched her turn it over. She turned it over again. Confusion and hurt hung from her face.

  ‘There’s nothing here, you teasing Mayorfuck.’ She threw the envelope back at me. ‘I thought you were drawing. You said you were and I actually believed you.’

  ‘I was looking. Looking is a preliminary step in the process.’

  ‘Process,’ she said. ‘There you go again.’

  By now I must admit that I was enjoying the baffling curiosity I’d become in my wife’s eyes.

  ‘What do you mean “just looking”? Not thinking?’

  ‘Once, maybe twice, but most of the time I was just looking.’

  ‘You must have thought something. You can’t have just looked and not thought something.’

  What she said was true. I knew what she was thinking—I must have thought something because to look is to take physical stock. To look is to weigh up and judge, at least that is what she was thinking. Had Alma Martin been in on this conversation he would have butted in then and said, ‘Well, actually no, that’s not quite right. When you are drawing you are actually learning how to see. You do this through looking. Looking is untarnished glass. No green bits of judgment hang from its lens. In order to draw you must learn to see how things are—not how you wish they were, or once were.’

  This piece of insight from Alma did a quick dash through my mind; I didn’t really feel I could bring it off were I to say it out loud. So what I told Fran was this.

  ‘Well actually, yes, I was thinking. I was thinking about your mouth.’

  Predictably she placed her hand there. There must be something wrong with it. There must be some defect.

  Now she looked worried.

  ‘My lips are too thin. Is that it? Well thank you, Harry. I really can do without you highlighting that to the world.’

  ‘I love your mouth. There is nothing wrong with your mouth. I was just looking. I should have been drawing
. Frances, I’m still getting the hang of this.’

  For a moment we stared at each other as if we were two entirely different species who somehow, by way of the zookeeper’s oversight, had slipped into the same cage. We’d never had a conversation like this one. Now we were both feeling and fumbling our way as it coursed between what had been said and something more intimate. She looked at me as if she was trying to figure something out. She experimented between looking doubtful and looking aggrieved.

  ‘Okay,’ she said finally ‘It’s been interesting but now I have to go back and finish this thing.’ She nodded through the glass doors to her workbench where a piece of Pacific sky waited to be fastened on to an Adriatic town.

  Later, in the dark of the bedroom, my wife said in a piping voice aimed at the ceiling, ‘That was nice before. For a while I found myself enjoying it.’

  ‘Enjoying what?’

  ‘Being looked at,’ she answered, and it brought to mind a story about a rat catcher that I could have told but would have taken too long at that precise moment. Instead, I found myself thinking how this drifting apart had come about; at what point had I stopped looking? After the birth of Adrian and Jess? I don’t think so. We had wonderful times together. Family times. I think it was around the time they left for university and overseas and we bought this house believing we wanted something new of our own as well; and around that time, before we’d even tied up to new moorings, the Gondwanaland thing had come up and suddenly I was preoccupied, preoccupied in an excited kind of way, and after it turned out to be one more golden calf (as doomed and vainglorious as George’s hill), Frances had her jigsaw thing, at least that was one good thing to come out of it, and I was left looking off in half a dozen directions at once, filled with shame, embarrassment, apology, determined not to lock eyes with anyone. Avoidance. Evasion. I banged down those twin doors of escape as fast as I could, burying myself in the shop as I tried to acquit myself of blame and shame by buying up whatever cast-offs people had stowed in their wardrobes or in their garage. When I got the letter from the bank and gazed up at that woman with the hedge-clippers I remember turning the car around and driving slowly home in what I can only call a jacket of cold sweat. In my mind’s eye I saw Tommy Reece, his little rooster body and outlandish arms crucified against that Dutch landscape, the one on the fading calendar on the greasy wall down at Persico’s, and I thought, I can’t do this any more. I can’t carry this place. I’ve failed them.