The White Body of Evening (16 page)

Before his doubts could resurface, he promptly marched over to Little Collins Street in search of the address Gines had jotted down. The shopfront under the Mercantile offices consisted of a large, open room connected to another behind it by a narrow hallway. A round man in a black suit busied himself sweeping dust onto the street.

“Can I help you?” he said without raising his eyes from the steady motion of the broom.

“Thought I might be interested in taking these rooms,” Paul said boldly, determined not to take a backward step.

“Too right?” said the man. “Young fella like you.”

“Yes. Young fella like me. Thought I’d use them as a studio.”

“That right? You’re not the young fella I was told about, are you?”

“Depends.”

“Mr Gines’s young friend?”

“I suppose I am,” Paul said, wondering at the extent of Gines’s influence.

“Yes, I suppose you are. Come in then. John Perryman, pleased to meet you.” The man thrust out a sweaty hand and gave Paul’s a vigorous shake. He led Paul through to the second room, concealed from the street. It contained an old, threadbare couch, pushed into a corner, a few chairs and a small writing desk. Perryman opened a back door which led onto a filthy alley running onto a slightly wider lane that linked Little Collins with Collins Street proper.

“Private access, of course. The soul of discretion. This would do nicely as an atelier,” he added with a pretentious flourish of French vowels. “And the main room, fronting the street and exposed through a large plate-glass window, would make a very decent exhibiting space. I’m told that you will want to show some of your work there.”

Paul was overwhelmed by the possibilities. By the end of the week he had arranged to rent the two rooms, paying Perryman up-front for the first two months. As soon as he could he showed Ondine his new retreat and the two of them, like overexcited children, converted the back room into a lavish fantasy of bohemian living. They bought an Oriental carpet, a large cut of velvet to throw over the old couch, an antique Venetian lamp with a deep red shade, a second-hand graphophone, some cheap lithographs depicting scenes from classical mythology and a host of other useless miscellanea all of which conspired to turn the studio into a rather tawdry expression of the artist’s rich inner life.

Ondine threw herself onto the couch, naïvely charmed by the transformation. “So, you are going to be a famous painter, after all,” she said. “Of course, I never doubted you. But I may end up being envious. What am I going to do when you’ve outgrown me?”

The sight of his sister’s long, elongated form reclining on the velvet excited him. He sat beside her and held her hand.

“We are like two children in a fairytale, Paul,” she said. “Like Hansel and Gretel. You, because you are a man, will be able to remain a child as long as you wish. In a way this is the privilege of art. But I, because I am a woman, will have to stop this sooner or later.”

He looked at her, barely comprehending. He kissed her gently on the lips. She returned the kiss, but then smiled weakly at him instead of pursuing his ardour. There was no envy in her expression. Without being able to explain why, she felt pity for her brother, and feared for his happiness, wondering why he would stake so much of himself on such a grand, but transparent illusion.

The next morning, Paul arrived at his studio and found a haggard young woman ensconced on the couch, admiring the crimson velvet and the accompanying effects.

“Hello,” she said brazenly. “I hope you don’t mind. Mr Gines asked Mr Perryman to let me in. He said you’d be needing a model and that I shouldn’t have to wait on the street. Might embarrass you.”

Paul was startled and took a step back. The young woman’s appearance had something both miraculous and comical about it, as if she’d been conjured out of thin air. The room he’d decorated only the previous day reeled in front of him as the young woman stood up. She was bedraggled but becoming, with a vampish appeal that he attributed to her pointed, triangular face.

“Bit of a chill in here. Mind if we light up a fire?” she asked, suppressing a shiver.

The earthiness of her voice convinced him that she was real. It was the voice of the street, not of some enchanted forest.

“Not at all. There’s a gas heater.”

Paul crouched down at the small space heater built into the wall and momentarily filled the room with the deathly smell of methane, before managing to summon the flicker of gentle blue flames inside the ceramic frame.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Roxanne,” she replied. “Mr Gines said that you might make me famous, or my body at least.” She giggled. “I said I’d not come, but he promised me your intentions are respectable.”

“Respectable. Yes, of course,” Paul said distractedly. He still hadn’t quite recovered from the shock of finding a stranger waiting for him in his own studio.

“What other surprises does Mr Gines have in store?”

“Oh, he’s full of surprises, that one.”

“Tell me what you know about him,” he asked, sitting down and lighting a cigarette.

“Mind if I smoke?” she asked.

He offered her his case and a silver lighter he’d bought the day before along with his other purchases.

“What would you be wanting to know?”

“How, for instance, he found you.”

“Well, if you must know, Mr Nosey, he found me at the Arcadia, where he’s been coming by from time to time.”

“What’s the Arcadia?” Paul asked.

“Well, it’s a place, ain’t it. A place where men come to make themselves at home.”

“I see.”

A brothel, Paul thought to himself. For a moment he couldn’t take his eyes off Roxanne, and was fixated on the idea that this woman in front of him, close enough for him to touch, would exchange herself for money.

“What else do you know?” he asked, still lingering over the shape of her legs, the way she held a cigarette, the hint of a dimple, the purse of her lips.

“Not much. I know he’s in the theatre. I think he manages something. Not sure what.”

“Nothing else?” Paul asked sceptically.

“I ain’t going about biting the hand that feeds me, am I?” she said.

“He’s paid you?”

“‘Course he has. He said I’m to serve in the name of the art of the future.”

Paul tried to take this declaration in his stride, concealing his discomposure at the thought of her capacity to serve, and of Gines’s hand in the orchestration of their meeting. He was conscious of maintaining at least the fiction of the artist’s aloofness.

“All right then,” said Paul. “Have you modelled before?”

“I’d say we’re both new at this, wouldn’t you?” Roxanne said with a smirk. “Where do you want me?”

The varying hues of the woman’s skin worked their way into Paul’s vision as she undressed before him and, still shivering, sat back down on the couch, affecting an air of casualness as she lifted one stockinged leg towards her chest and stretched the other out across the Persian rug.

Paul felt the blood rushing into his penis as he fidgeted indecisively at the easel. He tried not to stare, acting as if he knew what he was doing, and endeavoured to push the fact of her nakedness from his mind. Finally he squirted some paint onto a palette and started dabbing at the blank canvas. He worked quickly, eager to be done with it. The play of shadow looked more like a series of greenish bruises on her mottled skin. His abrasive, reddish brushstrokes might have been scratch marks weaving through sallow flesh, circling around the tonal intensity of black vulva and florid purple lips dominating the centre of the image. Her limbs were like extended, sinewy knots or the gnarled branches of a dead tree twisting around her torso. He made her neck disproportionately long, extending it forward into an erect posture that highlighted her sharp chin and the unnerving symmetry of her clear, green eyes. Paul smoked as he painted, mixing greens and blues and reds into the flesh tones, barely paying attention to the background at all, which was little more than a mess of errant brushstrokes.

When he paused and Roxanne stood up to look at herself she was appalled. “My God, I don’t look nothing like that. You’ve turned me into a hag.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’ve turned you into the thing of flesh and bone that you are, not tried to hide you under a contrived, artificial surface.”

She looked again. “I’m hideous.”

“Call it what you want,” he said, enthused. “I could have painted you like a corpse. A smooth white surface with still, lifeless limbs. Would that have flattered you more?”

“I’m not sure about you,” she said, sitting down again. “You’re weird.” She smiled at the thought of it. “Do I really seem hideous to you?”

Paul’s head was buzzing. The heater had taken the chill from the room and Roxanne’s body gradually lost its reserve as she held herself in front of him, dissected by his maddened, increasingly frantic stare. He could channel his lust for her into the paint for only so long. Finally he put down his brushes. Roxanne rolled over onto her stomach and rested her head on her arms. He sat down beside her and stroked her back.

“Do you want it, then?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

She sat up and fondled his collar, running her forefinger along his jaw. On cue she leaned into him, sighing theatrically as he groped her buttocks, sliding her hands up inside his shirt, tossing her head back, losing herself in the performance. The urgency in her movements made Ondine seem so hesitant by comparison. Paul pushed his sister from his mind and threw himself at Roxanne. She stifled a laugh at his ineptitude and kept her mind firmly fixed on the quiver in her breathless gasping.

For the next month Paul worked feverishly, neglecting the Gallery School and avoiding Bannister, who sensed that the boy had ignored his advice and recklessly struck off on his own path. Paul kept Ondine away from the studio on the days when he’d arranged to see Roxanne, and treated his model with the freedom that came from the low esteem in which he held her. In four weeks he finished six canvases, each a full-body portrait in the same expressionist style, each with a crudely patched-up background of soft yellow or pearl white that was inconsequential to the violently arranged bodies in the foreground. Roxanne figured in three of these paintings. Other women from the Arcadia Club had posed for the remaining three. In consort with Gines he arranged an evening for a public showing in the Little Collins Street shopfront and placed advertisements in the
Argus
and the
Age.

A few days before the appointed night, Bannister appeared blocking the narrow footpath as he knocked on the glass door and peered into the dark hallway that led to the studio. Paul was surprised, but let him in and nervously showed him through to the paintings, fully expecting the teacher’s disapproval.

Bannister paused and surveyed the room with its exotic, somewhat exhausted sense of opulence. The six canvases were pushed up against the wall. He glanced at them and shook his head.

“Paul, I’ve come to try to stop you.”

“What do you mean?” Paul pretended to be puzzled.

“If you make an exhibit of these, these
works,
you’ll be a laughing-stock.”

“A laughing-stock?” he replied with a callow puffing of the chest. “If I sell them for over a hundred pounds I promise you that no one will laugh.”

“And who’s going to pay that sort of money?” Bannister asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “Money like that just doesn’t materialise out of thin air.”

“Gines has assured me they’ll all sell.”

“And who in billy-o’s name is this Gines?”

“Clearly someone with a keen eye for the contemporary.”

“Please Paul. This is Melbourne, not a Henri Murger novel. The dreams of the artist have to be tempered by some harsh realities. What’s more, the public taste hasn’t even learnt to accommodate a Norman Lindsay. You’ll be lucky not to be charged with obscenity and dragged before the magistrate’s court.”

Bannister glanced around again at the naked limbs, the crimson pudenda visible underneath raised skirts, the abrasive, flushed features that reminded him of consumptives, and the sinister, serpent eyes of a wild, reptilian sensuality. For a moment he saw something he couldn’t quite describe. He couldn’t tell himself that these were accomplished paintings. On the contrary, he thought them vile and impure. But at the back of his mind was some half-formed sense of paint and flesh, a vision of intensity just beyond his reach.

“Paul, these barely get beyond the visual gimmicks of pornographic illustration, though with none of the poise and control. As for Gines, I’ve never seen the man before in my life, though he claims to know me from somewhere or other. I’d say the man is a charlatan, though God only knows what he’s playing at.”

The two men were quiet and Bannister knew his efforts were defeated.

The day before the exhibition opening Paul was so anxious that he didn’t sleep for a whole twenty-four hours. As his moment arrived he was both frantic and fatigued. Anna and Winton appeared early with Ondine, but almost immediately decided that they couldn’t be seen anywhere near such compromising images. They awkwardly withdrew, insisting that Ondine, who was also embarrassed for her brother, leave with them.

“I would like to stay. It’s so important to him,” she remonstrated, secretly confident that her mother and her stepfather wouldn’t be persuaded. She couldn’t quite admit it, but the canvases were insulting. She wondered whether her brother hated the women he had painted and wondered whether that was how he saw her as well.

“Come along, Ondine,” Winton said. “I’d drag Paul out as well if he weren’t the one responsible for these abominations. What on earth was the young man thinking?”

Anna was already on the street, careful not to look back through the plate-glass for fear of catching her son’s disappointment. A tremor of disgust ran through her. Once she had looked at Paul’s drawings and dismissed them as the innocent works of a child. Now his paintings made her think of Albert pushing her down and raking her body like a wild beast. Is that what men see? She caught her breath and stood there in the twilight, frozen in horror at the thought of the correspondence between the father and son. It was not mere nakedness that shocked her, it was the violence intimated by the brushstrokes. It was too awful to think about. They would have to get help for him. Charles would know of someone good. A doctor or an alienist who could talk Paul through his ghastly visions towards a healthier state of mind. She regained her composure as Winton led Ondine towards her. He took Anna’s hand, but ashamed of her son she couldn’t look into his eyes.