Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  Guy has increased his hours with me. Alma won’t be able to grub around up here in the tip forever.

  ‘Well, it’s that time-of-life change thing, isn’t it Harry?’ Guy said the last time we spoke about it.

  Another time all three of us are up here. There are some guiding principles to pass on to Guy. Once more heavy rain sweeping in from the hills in the west has everyone running for the Eliots’ car—me, Alma, Guy and this time Raymond as well. Though when the talk shifts to art Raymond falls quiet. As soon as the rain stops he’s out of there.

  For a while longer we stay in the car chatting; at least Alma is chatting. Guy and I are listening. Alma is recalling the day he heard on his wireless that Bonnard was dead. He went out to his porch. He said he felt numb. He looked down the far end of the paddock where George was shovelling away the hill. It was the one time he felt like grabbing George by the shoulders and shaking some higher purpose or goal into him.

  ‘What hill?’ asks Guy, leaning between us from the back.

  Alma gives me a quick glance.

  ‘You can tell him.’

  Guy has his mouth hanging open.

  ‘Back at the shop, Guy.’

  ‘Right,’ he nods.

  Then Alma says, ‘Cézanne used to complain about his wife. She liked only two things. Switzerland and lemonade.’

  Guy rocks back and claps his hands. ‘I like that,’ he says. ‘Switzerland and lemonade.’

  And Alma winks across the divide at me.

  22

  The other day at the tip I picked up a book on the French Romantics. In it I found a poem by Blaise Cendrars. Blaise is one of ours now, one of New Egypt’s chosen sons. In the poem ‘Portraits’, this is what he had to say about his friend Chagall, which speaks to all of us who meet down at the paint factory on weekday nights.

  He sleeps

  He is wide awake

  All of a sudden; he paints

  He takes a church and paints a church

  He takes a cow and paints with a cow

  With a sardine

  With heads, hands, knives…

  He paints with his thighs

  He has eyes in his ass

  And all of a sudden it’s your portrait

  It’s you, reader

  It’s me

  It’s him

  It’s his fiancée

  It’s the corner grocer

  The women herding the cows

  The midwife

  I have shortened Blaise’s poem. This is a trick for which we have Alma to thank. We’ve learnt in that old magpie way of ours to take what we have a use for and leave the rest out.

  I think I will end here, on one fine crisp Saturday morning in June. There are sunny skies. All the women are running and every man is smiling with his wife’s towel draped over his shoulder. The women are running in a benefit to raise funds to purchase easels and brushes and canvases in order to on-sell them down at the paint factory.

  The circuit takes them past the school down Endeavour Road and on to Broadway; there they cut across the railway line to run along Port Road and back up Stitchbury Hill through the reserve and back to the school. Three kilometres in all.

  A pleasing number of women have their sponsor’s name on their T-shirt or it is crudely written over their legs in black marker pen. All are red in the face. Their legs are covered in the same rash of exertion. For some it has got to be too much already. They look like they are drowning, especially up Stitchbury Hill where the motion of their legs becomes scrambled, the points of their knees are whacked out of alignment, their thighs are on the point of caving in. The whole shambling works looks ready to implode and would but for the determination shining in their eyes.

  They have all stopped hearing our cries of encouragement. Blindly they snatch at the paper cups of water. They have seen their face on a canvas, and this is what they are running, gasping, sweatily towards.