Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  A stubbornness took hold of Kath; she folded her arms.

  Guy said, ‘What’s this about, Harry?’

  ‘Not about anything. Just thought it would be interesting if Kath drew you. That is, it would be interesting for you both. It’s something I’m getting to understand and enjoy. Something I want to share with my friends.’ Kath and Guy eyed each other wearily.

  ‘Perhaps another time, Harry. I don’t think Kath…’

  But I’d made up my mind and nothing was going to stop me. Kath was going to draw Guy and that was that. I pulled out a stool and made Guy sit on it. I went out the back for my sketchpad and pencil; and when I returned Guy was standing again and Kath was whispering furiously at him.

  ‘Sit!’ I told Guy.

  He gave a helpless look, his hands moving out to his sides, and sat down.

  Kath said she wasn’t drawing anyone. This was stupid. Who the hell did I think I was anyway? She was sick of me ordering people around.

  The other week a man from another town had brought in a World War One rifle. The rifle happened to be standing behind the counter where I’d left it before driving out to the beach to pick up the Eliots. Now it was within handy reach, and to my shame, to my ghastly gut-wrenching eternal shame I picked it up and trained it on Kath and said, ‘Now fucking draw Guy.’

  Guy started to say it really wasn’t necessary.

  ‘The sitter does not speak, Guy. The sitter sits and shuts the fuck up and the drawer draws. That’s you Kath, so start drawing.’

  She started to cry. I don’t think she really thought she would come to any harm. It’s just the way things had got out of hand.

  Guy grumbled from the stool, ‘You’re upset and emotional, Harry. Honestly, I don’t need to be drawn.’

  Kath was sobbing into her hands. I lowered the rifle. It was only for a few brief seconds I’d held the rifle on her. But of course it wasn’t the best persuasive route. Drawing requires absolute concentration and a still heart. These conditions were entirely wrong and all I’d ended up doing was frightening good friends.

  I felt terrible. I tried to apologise. I tried to buy them Chinese. Guy said he didn’t think this was the right occasion. I said, ‘Persico’s? They’ll be still open.’

  Guy said. ‘No, Harry. Give me the rifle.’

  I handed him the rifle.

  ‘Thank you, Harry. Now I think it’s about closing time. If you like I can close up.’

  He put the rifle away. Kath was still sobbing but every now and then she peered out her fingers at Guy. She didn’t want to be left alone in there with me.

  That’s all in the past. I don’t try to promote drawing in that way any more. There’s no need to.

  After that incident with Kath and Guy I got on with my ideas and activities more quietly. I let word of mouth do the rest. Word got out that the mayor was spending all his waking hours drawing, sketching. ‘Harry’s doing what?’ ‘Why would Harry do that?’ And so people came in to look for themselves. They crowded the door. The only things missing were the cage bars and bags of breadcrumbs. I didn’t mind it, though. For one thing this was a quieter way to proceed. I didn’t need to call a public meeting. I just went about my thing and allowed it to rub off on the population.

  Doug and Guy joined me early on. How long ago that already feels! How long ago it is that we had our first tentative start at my mother’s house where the walls were used to the activity and it had felt right. Soon the same space had become too crowded to accommodate everyone’s easel.

  Over the winter months we opened up the old paint factory. Guy and I went through with a lantern, skirting puddles, gazing up at leaking ceilings. We got a grant from the Lotteries Board to buy this old relic, and over summer we formed teams to do up the space. With Dean I drove the van over the Main Divide and picked up two cheap potbelly stoves. We visited second-hand bookshops and came out with armloads of books on various artists. I had a shopping list. Everyone had their favourite.

  Alma’s advice on mentors—pick yourself a dead artist and save yourself the humiliation of presenting yourself at a live one’s door. There’s the example of Schiele who picked Klimt (still alive, and herein lies the moral). Schiele turns up at Klimt’s door after godly anointment. Klimt was in his blue working smock. He could have quite reasonably sent the younger man away. Instead he looked over Schiele’s portfolio and to the question, ‘Do I have talent?’ he kindly replied, ‘Talent? Yes! Much too much.’

  Think what he could have said—or for a clue, listen to what our wives said about our first fumbling portraits. That’s not me. You’ve made me look like a tart. My hair’s not right. My God, look what you did to my neck! Do you not believe in necks? All in good humour—mostly.

  Goya’s example gave Dean a roaming commission. These days we saw him on his bike with drawing materials, his rat’s arse hoisted off the seat. Alma and I had finished our Violet series. And besides, the relief emergency was over. Dean was back at the fish-processing plant, bored silly, until Alma asked him what he did with ‘all that time’ it took for a bin to fill with fish heads and skeletal remains. The light returned to Dean’s eyes.

  ‘Remember,’ Alma told him, ‘you can draw any time, anywhere.’

  In his lunch hour Dean sometimes caught the final hour of the morning court session. He’d sit back in the public gallery in silent rapture at the details of Saturday night’s misdemeanours. He divided the accounts into a six-panel narrative. Girl jilts boy. Boy gets drunk. Passes her house, sees girl with another boy. Original boy knocks on door. Heated words. Later returns to throw brick through window.

  Okay. So it is a cartoon. But look at Goya’s narratives of the Spanish War of Independence. And the gory stuff that features there.

  The first time Dean latched on to Goya he took down the heavy volume from the shelves at the local library and its pages fell open at a gruesome castration scene. The victim’s legs point up in the air as the sword is viciously lowered into the area of the victim’s crotch. On the page opposite is a hanging; a general sunnily reclines before the swinging corpse. The general’s face records amused interest in the detail of the other’s death.

  Dean was instantly smitten. Up to this point he had no idea that drawing could be so out there in the world. He’d never heard of this dude Goya. Now he made up his mind to look into the man’s life. Alma chose not to steer him elsewhere. Dean needed to follow his own instincts, act under his own steam.

  Soon Dean had rattled through everything the local library had on Goya. Gloria said she could order in more books from city libraries, and then swallowing hard said there might be some she would need to buy. She was apologetic about that.

  Granger used to say something similar whenever we brought our cars down to his garage. He’d lift the bonnet and poke around for a while, then he’d straighten up with a dazed look and pull at his earlobes. He could fashion a part out of most things. He climbed over abandoned cars with a spanner. We used to see him up at the tip at the rusted scrap end. It was almost a point of embarrassment with him if he had to order in a new part. Embarrassing for him, expensive for the rest of us. We clawed blood from our breast while we awaited the news.

  At the library I said to Gloria, ‘Why
don’t you order those books in?’

  She whispered the filthy word ‘money’ and I waved it away and said I’d see what I could do. Gloria knows my weakness for the extravagant gesture. She smiled down at the floor. She wasn’t holding out hope.

  I spent an hour digging through council accounts and found two thousand dollars sitting in an escrow account, paid to us by the National Roads Authority for an easement. It wasn’t doing anything, just sitting there. Within the month the shelves at the library were filled with new titles.

  So we draw and we draw. If you come down to the paint factory on a Tuesday or Thursday night you will be struck by the silence. Newcomers invariably are. They report the same sensation of ‘hearing’ silence. What they mean is the sharp intake of breath, the scratchy sounds of crayon and lead on paper, maybe a muttered oath of personal condemnation at a line taking another deceitful turn.

  We tolerate mistakes; in some ways we encourage them. What voyage of discovery would not? We are also mindful of Bellinghausen’s error—his failure to trust what his eyes were seeing. We can always tear out the page and start again. Or else we can cover our mistakes, bury them so that the past mistake becomes texture.

  Otherwise the silence you might hear is simply that of women concentrating on being themselves and of men paying attention. Sometimes it feels like we have come into a new and quieter arrangement with the world. The incessant rain that beats down on our roofs is not the problem it used to be. It’s there registering above our bowed heads its right to exist. The salty wind that blackens our vegetables and the ferocious sun are just one or two of the many things we’ve learned to grin and bear. Things are just fine the way they are. Things are because they can’t be any other way.

  19

  Rembrandt began sketching Saskia in their first year of marriage. Two years on and Saskia shows up in a series of portraits—there she is gazing directly back at her husband; here, away from him, and through him. She appears almost to be paying attention to the fact that her husband is paying attention to her. She is aware of her role, so much so that it’s easy to think of her as contributing.

  When Frances first began to sit for me she would do so with her eyes closed. These days she forgets I’m there. She sits in the bath staring at unflattering magazine pictures of film stars lifting their heavy thighs out of the breakers in the Caribbean. She sits on the phone twirling her hair around a pencil discussing with Diane what to do about Doug. She dozes off, half her face closed to a smile.

  You discover early on that portraiture is a collaborative act. The subject cannot sit for long periods like a landscape can. A sitter never quite achieves the inner contentment of, say, a vase or a bowl of fruit. Gainsborough never had to rest those English meadows or put aside his brushes while the sheep got up to make a cup of coffee.

  Portraiture can also be a dangerous business. Some tough decisions have to be made. Risks taken. Saying what is can be a lot harder than running from it. You can get yourself into hot water. You have to feel sorry for poor Sutherland after Churchill tore up his portrait. Sutherland had argued that to put feet on the great man would be to reduce him, make him merely mortal…I tried sketching Frances without legs and the results just looked like forgetfulness on my part. Then, for fun, I added back the legs but lopped off the feet and that effort looked more callous than forgetful.

  ‘My awful bum,’ a sitter is sometimes likely to complain. That’s another thing about our classes—the subject is given to talking back. We don’t encourage this, but vanity has its own persuasiveness.

  ‘What are you talking about? Your bum is wonderful.’

  ‘No. Marthe’s is wonderful. Mine is awful,’ comes the reply.

  Bonnard’s wife is also dead. It’s hardly worth mentioning except to say that this is the broader community we move in these days. And also to make this point: in our drawing classes there is no such thing as an awful bum, or for that matter a superior bum. Again, things simply are what they are.

  On that point there are no flatterers amongst us and this is something we are proud of. It’s also why we steer away from the example of Rubens who is guilty of having made one or two of his women more lively and intelligent than they reportedly were in life. He had a habit of enlarging their eyes and exaggerating the darkness of their irises. For the record, let me say here, unequivocally, ‘We don’t tart up our women.’

  I also know that other drawing classes like to make their models comfortable and surround them with electric bar heaters. But all you end up with is a drawing of a fat contented cat sprawled on the rug before the hearth. We are after a larger, more varied truth, so we let the weather in, and if one of the sitters complains of the cold and draws up her arms we’re just as likely to call over to her to ‘hold it there’ and let the breeze go unchecked, let our sitters feel the chill.

  Certain women, no names, try to hold in their stomachs. We let them fight it out on their own. We play around with little sketches in the top corner of our sheets of paper. An hour is a long time to sit and wage civil war with one’s own body. Occasionally the struggle will tip the balance in our sitter’s face (anxiety, fright, guilt —all trying to cram into the same square inch of space) and usually I will have to speak up; or Alma, who is not averse to demanding what he thinks he needs or wants, will say quietly but firmly, ‘Just as you are, please…’ And you think, what a simple phrase and why did we have to wait until our lives were half over and the town was on the brink of collapse to hear this said?

  Things are just fine the way they are. You can’t move the hills back—I have heard that said and often paused to consider whether I should say something to correct that viewpoint.

  By the way, in case you are wondering, it’s not an easy or comfortable thing to look upon another man’s wife without her clothes on for the first time. You find your eyes making all the usual stops and this is in spite of the counselling you gave yourself on the way over to the paint factory that night. The stern words you may have addressed to yourself have a way of burning up to nothing when faced by the nakedness of a neighbour for the first time. It’s not the same as looking in a magazine. This is real, terrifyingly real. This isn’t Robyn and her horsey hobbies and most fervent desire for world peace. This is it. But if you stop thinking and start looking then what you see, that is, what you slowly begin to see, are lines and areas of light and shadow—or valleys and plains. This is what was meant when the question was put by an out-of-town reporter to one of the artists: ‘It’s about as sexy as a geography lesson.’

  The night Frances was rostered on for the first time I didn’t know what to do with myself. I sat down with the telly and turned on the news. The pictures showed rescue workers with surgical masks moving around the edges of a stagnant lagoon filled with bloated bodies. Victims of a tidal wave that had swept a whole village of Papuans out of their beds and into oblivion. Briefly I put aside my anxiety to listen to a survivor describe the middle-of-the-night noise of a jet plane half a minute or so before a wave as high as a five-storey building swept through the village. Sleeping bodies ended up a kilometre away. Small children and fish were discovered in the branches of trees. The pictures shifted to the newsreader and as quickly I had left the scene of disaster and was back to fretting over the scene down at the paint factory. Three times I got up to open the fridge and stare at food pre
pared and half-eaten a month ago. Leftovers wrapped in silver foil at Fran’s insistence. I don’t like cooked food lying around the place. Once I’ve nibbled from it I’m no longer interested. It’s just me and Fran these days and yet we stock the fridge with food we never get round to eating. When Adrian and Jess were here it was different. It was like living with food hoovers. The final time I opened the fridge I decided I wasn’t hungry. An altogether different appetite gripped me. I was curious.

  At 8.30 I opened the door and stood on the front porch in the evening air. Our house is at the very end of Brunner Avenue, named after the explorer and surveyor, one of the few streets to have survived regime and name change over the years. I looked out into the New Egypt night, darkness piled upon darkness, and decided, no, I didn’t need a coat.

  The paint factory is eight minutes’ walk away. I didn’t hurry. I didn’t tell myself I was headed for the paint factory. I told myself I was out for a walk and if our paths happened to cross, then so be it.

  Of course very soon I found myself approaching the small outside light at the entrance. In another minute I was feeling my way in the dark to the side window, broken glass and rubble underfoot.

  I saw a tidy arc of heads, all with their backs to me. It was like sneaking up on a religious order. And there on the small stage we had built sat my wife—bare-breasted. My attention alternated between the milky white of my wife’s breasts and the equally attentive arc of heads. I must confess to feeling initially uncomfortable. But as I stayed at the window it began to pass. What had presented itself as a stunning, even shocking view really was now familiar and I went back to studying the look on Fran’s face, her white toothy smile of triumph, the years exerting downward pressure on her pendulous breasts, and yet she did not look like a woman with two grown-up children—not at that moment she didn’t. While my eye was pressed to the window she looked like some other possibility of the woman more familiar to me in dressing-gown and socked feet hunched over a work table bringing together bits of a dissociated world.