Prochownik's Dream (3 page)

She said over her shoulder, ‘Robert's running late. He apologises. He rang to say he'll be in a meeting. We'll have a minute or two to catch up before he gets here.'

He followed her through the archway at the end of the passage into a lofty rectangular room. It was cool in here, the light filtered through pale blinds. The faint background hum of an airconditioner. An old man was sitting by a wall of books on a set of folded library steps. His loose cotton robe had slipped from his shoulders. He was barefoot, craned forward unsteadily over the book that he was holding open on his knees.

Marina stood beside a circular table in the centre of the room, the vivid poppies held against the white of her blouse, the tips of the fingers of her free hand touching the table beside her, steadying herself. She watched him, interested, her feet neatly together in smart Italian sandals.

‘You
have
changed,' he said.

‘Yes. I'm older.'

‘That's not what I meant.'

The table was set for lunch, a chair at each of the four places. On the table were breads, Greek dips, a green-glazed bowl of olives. There was the faint aroma of dill.

‘What
did
you mean?'

‘I suppose we're bound to have changed,' he said. ‘In some ways. All of us, I should think.'

‘You're being evasive.' She laughed. ‘Come and meet Robert's father.'

The old man did not get up but stretched an arm around Marina's waist and drew her to his side. It seemed to Toni to be a gesture of possession rather than of fondness. He was trembling, his head jerking and nodding. The lower lid of his left eye drooped, disclosing the livid weeping membrane. ‘I've come home to die,' he said and laughed, his breath catching in his throat, his glance quick and amused. ‘I shan't be around to bother you for much longer.'

‘This is Theo Schwartz,' Marina said. ‘Robert's father. Toni is an old friend, Theo. He was one of Robert's most gifted students.'

He took the old man's hand, catching a whiff of body or bowel rising from the gown where it fell open. As he stepped away his eyes were drawn involuntarily to the gape of the material, his eyes encountering a glimpse of what he should not see, a mound of coiled and yellowed flesh, the inadmissible disaster of old age and disease.

Theo Schwartz smiled and released Marina. ‘Gifted and in his prime,' he said in a tone of mild irony. ‘Did you know that Nero murdered his wife and mother, Toni? People do such things.' He patted Marina's arm. ‘My son's wife.' He might have wished a connection to be registered by them between the present situation and Nero's murderous violence towards the women of his household, the idea that murder, giftedness and youth were commonplaces of existence.

Toni read the title of the book. It was a German edition of the diaries of the artist Paul Klee, Klee's
Tagebücher
, the spidery inked lines of an illustration between blocks of text, Klee's occult signs and portents. Toni considered making a comment, but Theo turned his shoulders away and re-entered his reading, lifting one hand to them in gentle dismissal, preferring the company of Klee's immortal journal.

Marina said, ‘Let's put these in water before they wilt. They're beautiful.'

He paused to inspect a bronze figure of a running man that stood on a small table. He grasped the heavy figure around the waist and picked it up, turning it and examining it. ‘This is new. Whose is it? I have a feeling I should know it.'

Marina said, ‘You should. It's Geoff Haine's. His show followed your installation at Andy's. We were at his opening. We thought we might see you there.'

He remembered the preoccupied, offhand greeting of the famous Sydney artist when Andy had introduced them. He set the heavy figure down on the table. ‘I met him.'

Marina reached over to adjust the figure's line of flight, as if she knew its secret destination. ‘Robert wrote a piece on his sculpture for
Art & Text
. Geoff gave him this by way of thanks.'

‘Haunted,' Toni said unhappily. ‘Isn't that the word they always use for Haine's work?' He stood looking at the bronze running man. He recognised it now as the figure that appeared and reappeared in the artist's monumental post-industrial landscapes, a solitary fugitive human presence in vast wastelands of rusting machinery and empty office towers aglow with the unearthly light of the end-of-days, visionary scenes calculated, perhaps, to impress the viewer with the towering moral authority of the artist himself. They had been hanging Haine's pictures at Andy's when he was carrying the last of his own dismantled installation out of the gallery, his arms filled with the wooden racks and old clothes, a rag-and-bone man. He had been feeling dismantled himself that day. Helpless. Gutted. Angered by the deathly silence with which his work had been received. He turned away from the sculpture, the enormous weight of Geoff Haine's reputation too much for him to deal with generously.

‘So Sydney didn't work out for you two, then?' he said. ‘We all had the impression you were doing brilliantly. I'm sorry!' He apologised quickly. ‘I didn't mean that the way it sounded.'

‘No, it's all right. I know you must be wondering.'

‘I was thinking earlier of that great send-off we had for you two on your last night in Melbourne.'

‘Wasn't it terrific! It was like being students again.' She spoke with enthusiasm of the memory. ‘You stayed and we talked in the park until dawn.'

‘Teresa was ready to kill me when I got home.'

‘Of course. Teresa wasn't with you. I'd forgotten.'

‘She was home with Nada. Nada was only a few weeks old.' His guilty reluctance that night to leave Robert Schwartz's magic circle. Staying until dawn, knowing Teresa was alone with their new baby waiting for him. Teresa had made plain to him her satisfaction that they had seen the last of Robert and Marina.
They're not our kind of people
. He had defended himself with the claim that they were his friends.

‘It's funny, but I always picture you on your own,' Marina said. She smiled to soften her remark. ‘I mean, we don't seem able to separate what we actually remember from what we invent about other people's lives, do we?'

She might have observed that it was not possible to ever know one's friends except through one's own imagination. A comment on the slight awkwardness between them, the lapse of time and the failure of the friendship suddenly being reversed.

Theo cleared his throat and turned a page.

‘This house is still very much you and Robert,' Toni said. Their lives childless and mess-free, the assurance of their fastidious idiom persisting.

‘I'm glad you feel that,' she said.

The room was bare of ornament except for Haine's running man and a solitary canvas leaning against the wall on the mantelpiece above the fireplace.

She turned to him. ‘We
did
do well in Sydney. And of course we had that wonderful six months of Robert's residency at the university of Minnesota. He finished his book. Lots of good things happened.' She considered him. ‘I missed Melbourne. How frivolous does that sound? I only realised once we'd left how deeply I belonged here. I still remember our first night in the apartment in Glebe, looking out the window at the lights of Sydney and knowing, suddenly, I was never going to be at home there.'

He looked at her.

‘I couldn't possibly justify such a feeling, so I didn't try to. I didn't say anything about it. Sydney was very beautiful and everyone made us welcome. And I was supposed to rejoice at being there. After all, wasn't Sydney where everyone wanted to be? I went along with the idea that I'd eventually get used to it, but I knew I was never going to. I should have had the courage to say so that first night. I should have said,
I can't do
this, we have to go home
.' She was silent a moment. ‘Robert loved it. It had taken him an enormous amount of energy to plan the move. I could see that Sydney was everything he'd hoped it would be. He had his job and his connections. For Robert, Sydney is the heart of the world. It's where the main game is. It always will be. But I knew that in Sydney I was not in my right place and that I would be cast as an onlooker for the rest of my days. Anyway I don't know that I belong at the centre of things. Not everyone does.
The main game!
What a pompous idea that is, really. As if anything can be the main game for everyone. Last Christmas I told him I needed to move back to Melbourne for a period. For a few months of each year. I need to feel at home somewhere at least for some of the time. I didn't insist he come with me.' She turned and looked at him. ‘After a very long silence he said,
If that's the way
it is for you then we must go back together or this will become a trial separation
for us.
Neither of us wanted that. So here we are. Trying things out in Melbourne again. It's not fair to be unloading all this on you.' She turned away. ‘I've needed to tell someone. I must sound terribly selfish. Robert's Sydney friends are convinced I'm being manipulative. But I'm not.' With a sudden impatient fling of her hand she indicated the painting above the fireplace. ‘Well, what do you think of it?'

He said, ‘I would have thought being cast as an onlooker is something you
allow
to happen to you, isn't it?'

‘Don't! Please! Look at the painting! Tell me what you think.'

He turned to the large two-metre square unframed canvas. It was an image of a naked man falling upward into a sombre sky of deep lustrous black. The figure sharply defined against the sky, suspended in a place without atmosphere. The luminous blue curve of the earth infinitely distant below. The man's body foreshortened, viewed from underneath, a perspective from the Sistine ceiling, his genitals and grey skin chilled by the life-neutralising forces of outer space, the wrinkled soles of his feet presented to the viewer. He was not dead, it seemed, but was a man adrift. An ironic
ascent of man
. A suggestion of crucifixion, but without the cross. Below the wrinkled soles of the naked man's feet a
trompe l'oeil
of an open book, the deckled edges of the pages casting a delicate filigree of reflected light onto the black sky, so that it appeared as if an actual book had been artfully attached to the canvas. Toni recognised the complicated ideas of Robert, the exemplary theoretician and assiduous practitioner of the contemporary, the
post
-postmodernist absenting himself from his works. His pictorial images a comment on the outmoded act of putting paint on canvas. The painting was a beautiful, sardonic self-apology for the abstracted hand of the artist, the absent master of his own designs. Robert's generous, calm and reliable good sense behind the carefully articulated idea of the painting. He could see Robert now, considering Marina's nervous announcement that she wanted to return to Melbourne, soberly reflecting on the realities of their situation and concluding that his choice was either to lose his beloved Sydney or to lose his beloved wife.

‘You two have always been serious about wanting people to enjoy looking at your pictures,' he said and moved in close to the painting to examine its surface. He turned to her. ‘But is it still both of you?'

‘You guessed!' She was pleased. ‘No. It's just me. Robert doesn't paint any more. I do all the painting now. The subjects are still Robert's. The ideas are still his, but the brushwork's all mine these days.' She laughed. ‘That was very good, Toni.'

‘Your technique's fantastic,' he said.

‘I love painting.'

‘You were always good, but you're way ahead of where you were four years ago. It doesn't look like a painting by someone who is unhappy.'

‘Oh, I'm not unhappy! For goodness sake, don't think that. Please!' She turned to him, reproaching him gently. ‘You don't like it, do you?'

‘It's brilliant.'

‘You don't like it, Toni. Why don't you say so? Or can't we tell each other the truth anymore?' She watched him. After a moment she asked, ‘Why did you never come to Sydney to see us in the early days? You promised solemnly that last night that you would come and visit us. It was almost a sacred vow. Do you remember?'

‘Of course I remember.'

‘You and Robert swore to remain friends forever.'

‘We'd all been drinking pretty solidly that night.'

‘That wasn't all it was.'

Did she believe, he wondered, that the neglect of his old friendship with Robert had been deliberate? He was silent for some time, meditating on the injustice of such a view. ‘Once you've got a child,' he said, ‘you can't just drop everything and go whenever you feel like it.'

‘No, I suppose not. I'm sorry, I didn't think of that. We're such incredibly selfish creatures, aren't we? We only see the complications in our own lives.'

‘I often thought of coming up. Teresa wouldn't have minded. It wasn't that.' But in fact Teresa would have minded greatly if he'd ever suggested going to Sydney to stay with Robert and Marina.

Marina held up the poppies and said, ‘I'd better go and put these in water.' She turned abruptly and walked out of the room, as if she were leaving him to consider what had been said.

He did not feel invited to follow her. Robert's father gave his cough; the dry metallic comment of a sceptic. Toni turned and looked at him. There was something in the old man's style that attracted him; his age and his nearness to his end, no doubt. There was an uncanny likeness of father to son in the shrunken frame of Theo Schwartz. It might almost have been Robert himself present in the room in the transfigured form of his dying father, Robert's features locked in behind the mysterious mask of old age and sickness.

Marina called from the kitchen, ‘Come and see!'

As he went out the door he was unable to resist a backward glance at Theo. The old man was watching him.