Paint Your Wife (34 page)

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 prepared 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.

I felt I could leave that scene now. I could continue on my walk. I was back in the
shadows of Furness Lane when I remembered with striking clarity what a model, a nurse,
once said of sitting for the American painter Andrew Wyeth: ‘I feel the colour going
right through my face. That's the intensity. My nipples were erect three-quarters
of the time.'

Colour, face, intensity—all that I was comfortable with. Nipples, though. I thought
perhaps I had missed something and went back to the window for another look, just
to check.

Of course it was ridiculous, and I felt ridiculous. You could argue, rightly, I think,
what business is it of mine if Frances's nipples choose to react? You could argue
I shouldn't feel so bloody proprietorial about it. You can run all these things through
the chamber of cool reason in your brain and still you march forward to press your
nose against the windowpane. You simply have to see. You need to find out.

For several generations the factory produced only paint, a fact we find embarrassing
today. It brings other anomalies to mind, factory workers arriving on bicycles to
car assembly plants, vegetarian butchers moving past swaying carcasses on the chain
at the abattoir. It does seem crazy now to think that when we swam in paint we didn't
know what to do with it. We used it for all the wrong things. We used it to cover
up our lives. We were quite open and forward on this. We spoke about the need for
a coat of paint. Paint was something to pull around our shoulders, take refuge in,
use to cover up. But no one could
say, truly say as our advertisements boasted, that
our
paint
knew local conditions. In truth, it only knew itself as a fast-bonding
chemical
adhesive
that came in a number of colours, though pleasing to the eye. This
isn't
paint
as our early forebears knew and understood it. In the caves of Lascaux
a
colour
chart is not as important as the rendered figures of bison and mammoth.
Closer
to
home, the pre-European rock art on the limestone escarpments worn away
by
grazing
cattle still make sense of the moa and their prehistoric hunter. Along
the
shore
where NE Paints used to host their picnics, thin men in hair knots and
rain
capes
used to stalk these huge flightless birds. It was an unfair contest—wit
and
prior
knowledge versus the witless—but one which has given us our most enduring
art.
The
giant birds with their small heads look very much like women on all fours
under
hair
dryers. One year while digging a hangi the men uncovered a pit into which
the
stick
men had driven the giant bird. All of us kids were hauled over to stand
at
the
edge of the pit and gape down at the white markings of the moa, its flight
plan
ensnared
in clay sediment built up over centuries of windblown deposit and floodwaters.
How
sad
it looked in its spina bifida arrangement. The mayor and other dignitaries
were
due
soon, so the men shovelled in another layer of dirt, dropped in the oven
stones,
and
lit the fire. Hours later when they hauled up the sacks of steamed chicken
and
pork
and kumaras, the thought of the giant extinct bird heating up another foot
down
wasn't
as remote as some of us would have liked. We picked at our kumara and
left
the
chicken wings on paper plates to rot in the hot January sun.

Sometimes I like to think, what if the paint management was to come back? What if
that row of generals in shiny off-
the-rack suits and fleshy faces were to stand in
the doorway scratching at their freckled scalps to see these old walls once covered
in calendars and pinups now covered with the portraits of various wives, ours and
others, Rembrandt's Saskia with pearls in her hair, Madame Bonnard in her shallow
bath, half her body washed away. In one corner the hissing and roaring potbelly that
sees us through the dark winter nights. Along one wall we are growing a handsome
library. And among our choice of mentors we all have our favourites. Bonnard is one.
Chagall another. Matisse's
Interior at Nice
lends a more cautionary note to our
aspirations. Is it his wife? I'm not even sure it is. I imagine it could be. Let's
assume it is Matisse's wife, this woman who sits in the doorway on the far side of
the kitchen. It is as if Matisse has said to himself, I cannot understand this woman.
I cannot know her. However, I can understand the kitchen in all its surface simplicity
so I will place this woman on the edge of what is understood.

One night Alma produced Hilary to sit for us. She looked a bit like Queen Victoria,
but that isn't something to share out loud. When you draw, comparisons are unhelpful.
All the same it was hard to shut out thoughts of Queen Victoria as we concentrated
on that red rumpled face and folds of heavy curtain material.

The curtains had come from the Boyers. A year ago, after the Gondwanaland fiasco,
the Boyers sold up and announced they were moving to Ireland. Ireland! ‘Ireland!'
we gasped. We tried to think where in Australia there was an Ireland. But they meant
Ireland
Ireland. It gets wilder. The Boyers hadn't actually been to Ireland but they'd
seen Ireland in the movies. In other words, the passing-ship view. A glimpse. A taste.
The Boyers
didn't care. Ireland's was a go-ahead economy. It was booming, in major
forward-thrust mode.

So off they went leaving us with their cast-off furniture, some oddities in amongst
it all.

A cannon ball from Waterloo. I said to Jamie Boyer, ‘How do we know it's from Waterloo?'

Jamie looked suitably put out. He said he knew because his dad said it was from Waterloo,
and his dad before him. Family history is always the last thing I rely on when matters
to do with provenance come up. On the other hand it doesn't pay to fool around with
family history. To mock it or doubt it is to play with fire.

After thinking about it, I decided, well, the cannon ball
could
have come off the
fields of Waterloo. Then we came to that difficult point in any negotiation. I laughed
out loud when Jamie mentioned the price.

‘Well it
is
from Waterloo,' he said. He had me there, and suddenly we were back to
discussing origins and matters to do with authenticity. I pointed out that while
I was happy to accept that the cannon ball came off the fields of Waterloo it didn't
mean the next customer would see it in the same way.

‘You see my point, Jamie.' In my game value depends on proof.

Things became heated. Julia Boyer said it was this very small-mindedness that was
driving them away. In the end I talked them around to a price reflecting the value
of a cannon ball that might have come from Waterloo. No sooner had I done that and
I began to have second thoughts.

Who would buy a cannon ball? For what purpose? A cannon ball is a bit kitsch these
days. I could feel myself getting cold
feet. The Boyers also sensed my waning interest,
and panicked. They were so determined to see me buy that cannon ball. They glanced
around their living room for another chattel to throw in with the cannon ball.

The curtains! Of course.

‘Tell you what, Harry, why don't you take the curtains and the cannon ball.'

I could see the determination in their eyes. It scared me to tell the truth. If I
declined, what then? A brick through my window?

As it happened, Doug picked up the cannon ball a week later for a bit more than what
I paid for it—reflecting the fact this was a cannon ball that may have rolled off
the very fields of Waterloo. The curtains were a bit more of a problem. Long heavily
braided drops that no one wanted or came near for months on end. Occasionally someone
would rub the material between thumb and forefinger while I stood behind the counter,
holding my breath.

The morning of our session with Hilary, Alma came in and sniffed around. He said
he didn't know what he was after until his eye fell upon the Boyers' curtains. For
tax purposes I put the curtains down as a community donation.

At the paint factory Hilary sat compliantly as Alma wrapped her in curtain. He could
have wrapped her in seaweed and she wouldn't have minded. He spent some time with
the lamp until Hilary was side lit. Some instruction followed.

‘I don't want anyone to draw for ten minutes.'

We were just to sit and look at the crumpled face of our old schoolteacher, a woman
who, as the expression goes, was once pretty as a daisy, and who had once lied to
Alma that she had
a rat in her kitchen just so he would draw her, and she would get
to feel the sunshine on her body while her Jimmy was away at the war.

We saw the cheap foliage of the curtains, their second-hand wretchedness. We didn't
see a movement from Hilary, not a breath. Only her eyes moved. At first her gaze went
over the top of us. Then she seemed to reel it back to her frontal lobe interior.
For five minutes we stared. I remember several years ago, plans for a historical route.
There was talk at council and the subject of Hilary came up when we paused to consider
what our visitors, hungry for local experience and history, might see, and it went
without saying that such a historic route would have to get around the public ruin
of Hilary. One suggestion was to relocate her as you might a public building, or
walk her to a bench inside the Garden of Memories. The idea was abandoned, and some
blamed Hilary. She was an embarrassment to us all.

I looked at the Boyer curtains. I saw how comfortable she felt in them, as if they
were years she could feel against her. If you looked carefully you could see her
mouth move. Hilary was shaping to speak and when she did it came unexpectedly and
ghostlike, as though a mummified corpse had suddenly found its voice through all those
bandages.

‘I thought I saw Harry Bryant out there?'

I stuck up my hand.

‘I'm here, Hilary.'

‘And little Dougie Monroe? Is that you?'

‘It's me, Mrs Phillips.'

Guy had his hand up though she hadn't mentioned his name. But then he stood and introduced
himself. He said, ‘I remember
your lessons on the Russian…' He couldn't remember
his name.

‘Bellinghausen,' I said, and Hilary moved her head my way.

‘And what do you remember, Harry?'

Her voice was firm and gentle as it had been all those years ago.

‘I remember a man who was looking for the Great White Continent and who mistook the
ice shelf for fog.' And I did what Doug had done and called her Mrs Phillips.

A tear ran down her cheek. She sniffed, then looked down, possibly for something
to wipe her eyes with. We all waited for Alma to do something. He seemed unsure of
his role and chose the easel for refuge. In the end it was Guy who got up and lumbered
onto the stage with a handkerchief.