by Alex Miller
He made a pile of the clothes and racks in the doorway, as if he were building a barricade. He was working his way back through time, down through four years of dismantled installations, clearing his way towards the plan press against the wall at the back of the studio.
The storm broke over the city, a gust of cold wind from the Southern Ocean whipping through the studio and clearing out the smell, snatching Nada’s drawing from the table. He retrieved the drawing and weighted it with Marina’s sketchbook. The barricade of old clothes in the doorway was soaked in moments by the downpour. The rain thundering on the tin roof. He tossed the clothes and racks behind him now without caring where they fell.
He was down to the last of the old garments when he stopped. He realised, suddenly, that he was looking at his father’s old Sunday suit. He read the display sign that was still attached to the rack: Moniek Prochownik’s Outsize Sunday Suit. He lifted the rack tenderly and stood it upright in front of him.
He might have been helping a fallen man back to his feet, brushing at the jacket as if he’d had a hand in the man’s fall. This was it then, the resistant, unremembered element of the installations that had been holding him back. With care, he removed the jacket from the rack and pressed the dark serge to his face. His dad was still there; faint, elusive, but there, the deep familiarity of his father’s smell lingering in the tight weave of the material: the telephone call that afternoon four years ago telling him bluntly that his father had died on the moulding line at the Dunlop plant. In his blind grief he had got hold of his dad’s old Sunday suit and hung it on a rack out in the middle of that great empty space of Andy’s gallery. What had he intended by the gesture? To deny the loss of his father? He was not sure. But that was it, and his dead father became his first installation; the old suit standing out there on its own like Everyman. A man’s defeat exposed mercilessly in death for the world to see. A power in that old suit, something more real than reality. His dad’s workmates from the plant had come to stand and look at it, silent, awkward and abashed. His older brother, Roy, the only one who did not flinch to see it there. When he took his mother along she told him, Your father would not have wanted this, Antoni.
He held the suit jacket out in front of him, moved by the memory of his father, then he slipped his arms through the sleeves and put it on over his T-shirt. The jacket fitted him. It had been a size too big for his dad. The other kids’ dads wearing T-shirts and jeans at weekends, and his dad dressed in a three-piece suit that was too big for him. The terrible sense of his dad’s vulnerability in that suit. His oddity and isolation. His own agony, longing for his dad to be like the other fathers and at the same time loving him for not being like them. He looked down at himself and tugged at the lapels, just the way his dad used to tug at them, the little smile his dad would give him, a secret between them with this sign, the gods of fire and vengeance placated once again. His father’s morbid fear that his nightmares might once again invade the day.
Toni was seeing his father in his mind’s eye so clearly he could have drawn his likeness from the memory. He possessed no likenesses of his father, no drawings, no paintings, no photographs. All he possessed of his father was in his memory, but at this moment it was sufficient, a vivid recollection of the expression in his father’s eyes. He turned around and faced the door.
Teresa was standing in the rain on the other side of the barricade watching him. She was clasping Nada to her and holding a coat over them both. The rain blowing against them, her dark hair drifted across her face. Nada was clutching Snoopy Dog, her expression shuttered and unhappy.
‘Why didn’t you pick her up?’ Teresa yelled, shouting over the noise of the rain.
‘I forgot. I’m sorry!’ He spread his arms in a gesture of helpless contrition.
She stared at him, flinching from the driving rain. ‘We thought you must have had an accident! What are you doing?’ She was angry and offended, demanding a convincing explanation for his behaviour.
‘It’s okay. I’m just looking for my old Macedon sketchbook,’ he yelled back.
The thunder of the rain on the tin roof.
‘What Macedon sketchbook?’ she shouted.
‘Don’t worry about it. It was before your time.’
She stood clutching Nada, cringing away from the vicious slap of the rain, the slap of his words.
He yelled, ‘Sorry, darling!’
Teresa was a big woman. She was physically strong and sure of herself. He knew her to be a willing, generous, forgiving, loving and emotional woman. And she was loyal. That above everything. Loyalty was the big thing with Teresa. She was hard-working and loyal. And she was beautiful.
The rain drove into the doorway with redoubled force, lashing them. Nada started crying.
Teresa yelled, ‘You forgot her!’
‘We got caught up.’
‘What do you mean, you got caught up?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re a shit, Toni Powlett!’
‘Sorry.’
‘I was in conference with these people! They want to do bulk travel. Don’t you care? You and I had an agreement! What happened to our agreement? How am I supposed to keep this thing going for us?’
‘Sorry.’
She shouted fiercely, ‘You don’t give a shit!’ Nada was struggling in her arms, the rain sweeping in, gusting against them, Teresa ducking away from it. She yelled, ‘All I do is work!’ She flung the word work at him like a stone through his window and turned and ran for the house.
He stood looking out across the barricade through the grey downpour. He should follow her and apologise. He was thinking, suddenly, of the night they met. She was still teaching then. It was at one of Andy’s famous parties in the biscuit factory. Teresa arrived with an older man, a friend of Andy’s, a Chinese painter who was the art teacher at the school where she was working. There was a band and people were yelling and drinking and dancing, and there was a lot of dope and other stuff going around. He did not remember what he and Teresa said to each other, but in the early hours she was walking him home through the empty streets and they were holding hands. They did not make love that night—she told him, We have the rest of our lives—but lay naked beside each other on her bed. She was very calm and sure of what had happened between them. The next day she took him to meet her family. Me and Toni are getting married, she told them. Her father asked him, What do you do, Toni? When he said he was an artist, Teresa’s father said, I meant for a living, son.
He turned away from the door and picked up Marina’s sketching pad from Nada’s table. He flicked the pages until he came to his drawing. There was an immediate recognition in him, the attraction of something unfinished, something begun, the mysterious offer of a work-in-progress. It excited him to see it.
The rain ceased as abruptly as it had begun. A moment of silence followed, then a drift of air through the open door, chill and clean, the smell of the country in it. Nada was wailing over at the house, Teresa’s voice raised, still putting her case to the ear of universal justice. He should go over and offer them comfort. Take Nada in his arms and weep with her. Take them both in his arms. Weep together, then laugh together. Show them how much he loved them and how sorry he was to have caused them this distress.
He carried Marina’s sketchbook to the back of the studio. His bookshelves and his old work table and, the centrepiece of this arrangement, the timber plan press Teresa had bought for him with the settlement of her first big account at the agency. It had been an extravagant gift, her rebuttal of her father’s scepticism, a sign to her family of her faith in Toni Powlett’s art. Her four brothers carrying the heavy piece solemnly across the courtyard, one at each corner like pallbearers, the plan press wrapped in silver foil and tied with a white silk ribbon, as if it were an Italian funeral casket. He wiped at the dust with the flat of his hand. He had not stood on this spot since the death of his father. The back door to the lane was misted with cobwebs, his easel leaning in the shadows cov
ered with a sheet. The white frame of a painting showing in the gap between the bookshelves and the press. He put Marina’s pad on the press and reached in and pulled out the painting. He set the painting up in front of him and stood back. It was oil on a 40 × 30 cm piece of cheap masonite from the hardware store in Bay Street. The portrait of his mother that had won him the Kingsgate Prize at art school.
There she was! The woman he had known back then when he was an ardent young student. Mrs Lola Prochownik leaning on the parapet of their balcony at the rat flats, taking a break, a cigarette between her fingers. Her dark eyes looking out of the frame at her son painting her, an expression of knowing disbelief, and of abiding love, and just that touch of pride. His mother. Still a believer despite everything. Her skinny arms brown and wrinkled, reminding him of her brown wrinkled stockings. The black dress under her wraparound apron. The model for the treatment had been Max Beckmann’s stern-faced Duchessa di Malvedi from the exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in eighty-nine. There was a postcard of that painting in a drawer of the plan press somewhere. He had studied Beckmann’s painting until he knew every brush stroke by heart, going back to the gallery day after day and examining it until his eye fused with its texture. Feminine beauty without softness, that was his portrait of his mother, a woman’s beauty rendered as the determination to survive against all odds. The kind of beauty that spoke of an undisclosed and private self that had withstood the erosion of great suffering. How had he done it? Rendering the kind of quiet beauty his father disclosed in his modest studies of their domestic items, works achieved in that place where his father was alone with the silence, at the moral centre of his beliefs. It was not a quality that could be freely exposed to the casual observer. He had asked his father, What should I paint? And his father had said, Paint what you love.
When Robert had told him his painting had won the prize he had felt a surge of delight, a little triumph—then was humbled by the mysterious power of his gift. He felt a fugitive echo of that emotion now, the confirmation that had emboldened him to say for the first time, I am an artist! Robert had been one of the prize’s judges. With success, it seemed there was always the element of luck, chance working with you or against you, what his father had called Fate, as if with that word he solemnly pronounced the name of God.
Behind his mother on the balcony were her bits and pieces. The tools of her trade. Her mop leaning in the corner where it would catch the sun later in the day. A slack arc of clothes line strung from one side of the balcony to the other, small items of underwear pegged to it. Smalls. Her long-disused word returning to him now.
He had never painted a portrait of his father. He had not believed himself ready for that task. Then came the day they told him his father had died on the line, and it was too late for a portrait. His beloved father was gone. The unpainted portrait of his father was still in him, however, still lodged in the eye of his mind as if he had painted it, an image of his father at the kitchen table at night, looking over the top of his spectacles, a paintbrush in his hand, in his eyes the consolation of his dream.
Toni opened the sketching pad again and stood looking at his drawing of Marina lying on the grass in the sunlit bush that afternoon, the invitation to his eye of the dimple behind her knee among the soft shadows of the wattle’s overhang. He knew what it was now, this drawing. He understood what he had done. He set her sketchbook aside and opened the top drawer of the plan press. The drawer was filled with sketchbooks, sheets of drawings, photos, postcards, cuttings from newspapers and magazines, pages of pencilled notes, gouaches, watercolours, pastels. He saw his old Macedon sketchbook at once, his bold block lettering on the cadmium cover: MOUNT MACEDON, WINTER 89. He took the sketchbook out and flipped through the sheets until he came to the drawing of Marina asleep in the conservatory on the cane chaise. He placed the two drawings side by side on the press. Underneath the Macedon image, in his neat cursive script of those days, he had written: Marina Golding in the conservatory at Plovers, June 19, 1989.
It was a dark, confident drawing, vigorously made, with areas of heavy overworking and rubbing. The sleeping woman was half-turned away from the viewer, her right arm trailing on the floor, the backs of her fingers touching the white marble tiles. Her hair was long then, and lay loosely around her shoulders on the cushions. The sleeping woman in the silence, the weight of that big house under the shadow of the mountain holding her suspended in its stillness, as if some delicate unspoken thought waited to be expressed.
The trace of himself off the edge of the drawing, the cast shadow of the voyeur crouched by the sleeping woman taking her likeness. Something of guilt and secrecy in it that day. Art! As if it were a vice against the sound governance of an orderly life. He stood considering the drawing a while, then he walked to the telephone by the door and dialled her number. When she picked up, he said, ‘Remember Macedon?’
‘I hoped you’d call. Of course. What do you mean, do I remember Macedon? Today was wonderful, Toni. I loved it. Thank you! Did you show Teresa your drawing?’
‘The time I came out to your mum and dad’s place during the winter break with Robert? It was the first time we’d met.’
‘What made you think of that now? I was sorry Robert brought you. I couldn’t believe it when he asked me if he could bring one of his first-year students with him. I’d been looking forward to some time alone with him. I scarcely saw him during term time in those days.’
‘You and I were alone in the house one afternoon. Your mum and dad had taken Robert to meet some neighbours. I came past the conservatory and saw you asleep on that cane bed.’ He waited. ‘I did a drawing of you.’
‘You were always drawing us.’
‘This one was different.’
There was a small silence.
He said, ‘You had a migraine.’
‘I probably did.’
He could see her now, as he had not seen her before today, the woman on the telephone, his familiar subject of the afternoon, the visual knowledge of her he had gathered on the island.
‘I don’t get migraines any more.’
It was quiet over at the house now. In the courtyard a blackbird stood on the lip of the fountain celebrating the passing of the storm.
‘You haven’t lost your touch,’ Marina said. ‘I envy you. If I stopped painting, my technique would soon slip away.’
‘Painting’s something else,’ he said. ‘I don’t imagine I haven’t gone stale in that department.’
‘You’d soon get it together again.’
‘I’m looking at my Macedon drawing of you right here. I unearthed my old sketchbook. Things have come full circle.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Me drawing you asleep again.’
‘You never showed us those drawings. Not me, anyway.’
‘Do you still have your sketchbook from that holiday?’
‘It’s sure to be here somewhere.’
‘You were secretive about your drawings in those days.’
‘So were you.’
It was true. His drawings had represented for him the private journal of his obsession, his experimentation and the record of his endeavour, his failures and his successes, the small, precious increments of the craft. With drawing he had been feeling his way towards the projects that had stirred his imagination and his ambition, inscribing the influences of other artists in the bare-faced copies of their work and the incorporation of material stolen from them. His drawings had been the record of his confusion and uncertainty as much as a record of his confidence. He had not, in the end, shared them freely even with his father, and to Robert and to his friends he had shown only a careful selection. It had been his painting that had been the public expression of his art. His private obsessions had not been masked in his drawings as they had in his paintings. Drawing had always been for him something of a solitary and even secretive act, a primary pleasure of the senses that had had little to do with his understanding, but which had fed
on his dreams and those appearances and associations that possessed for him a private poetic or sensual reality; love, beauty, fear and the erotic had always been at the core of his drawing. When his drawings were transposed to paintings the subjects had invariably lost something of their intimacy. It had been a problem he had never learned to overcome. Until his father’s death his art had been a magnificent mystery to him. ‘I’m going to need more information,’ he said. ‘More visual information.’
‘For what?’
‘I’m going to do a painting of you from my old Macedon drawing.’ Was he a bad judge of character? How was he to know the answer to this question without risking something of himself?
‘It’s for the show, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘It could be. If it works. You don’t sound too surprised.’
‘You’re a painter, Toni. What else is there for you except painting?’ There was something of impatience in her voice. ‘What else can you do? You’ve finished with the installations. You as good as said so yourself. We come back to the things that have rewarded us in the past. We can’t suddenly decide to be someone else.’
He laughed. ‘I’m wondering if I can still paint.’
‘Of course you can still paint! I’d love to see your Macedon drawings. Why don’t you bring them over to Richmond one day next week? The three of us can have coffee and go over them together.’
‘Do we have to wait till next week?’
‘Is this what you really want?’ she said. ‘A painting of me from that old drawing? That young woman at Macedon isn’t me anymore, you know.’
‘No,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I suppose not.’