Paint Your Wife (28 page)

One day she felt another person's hand in her pocket. She nearly jumped out of her
skin. But it was only Dean, straight as a bowling pin at her side. He nodded down
at the paint sample in his hand. ‘It was sticking out,' he said. So he knew. Possibly
he'd known for a while, the way he watched her; he watched her like a hawk.

A week later the thin boy in the all-weather T-shirt saved her from herself again.
The siren went for what she thought was one of those tiresome fire drills. It was
near the end of the day when they filed out into the yard where the warehouse manager,
a rarely seen man, came out, removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes, then addressed
them on an entirely different matter. In his twelve years, he said, this was the
first time he had had to deal with the matter of employee theft. Paint was disappearing
out of the warehouse. He said some other things. Out there in the frigid yard the
word ‘amnesty' had a jailhouse sound to it. She tuned out and filed back with the
others, the line moving past the manager and the supervisor; and it was as she was
asked to step aside that Dean rushed up and rudely asked her for his coat back. Dean
must have seen and understood what was about to happen. A storm gathered in his
face as he demanded back his coat. It wasn't his and yet he was so fierce about it
she didn't want to deny him. As she shrugged out of it and passed it to him she could
feel the sagging weight of the pockets, and in that little transaction all interest
shifted from her to Dean.

She didn't see him in the cartage dock after that. She didn't see him until she left
for the day and across the road she spied him in that orange Datsun she'd seen him
in before. He was waiting for her, because as she appeared he climbed out and grinned
over the rooftop at her.

He said he didn't like the job anyway.

They went to the movies that night. And the next day when she finished work he was
waiting for her again. In the car over the smell of oil rags and the noise of the
fan heater that smelt of melted plastic they talked and talked. She had an idea he
liked talking in the car. That way he didn't have to wholly commit to whatever he
said because he had to concentrate on the road. His eyes darted left and right, and
sometimes they seemed to go right up into his forehead if he had to think about something
or pull on the handbrake. One night when they were driving nowhere in particular
she asked him if he wanted to kiss her and Dean was able to nod and at the time accelerate
as the lights turned green.

Later, in the hostel, after sneaking Dean upstairs and giggling under the duvet,
he picked at her. Finding his way around. So this was a breast? And this was the
part between the legs? She felt like a stocktaking. It was not quite dark in her
room. The curtains she'd left open, and the streetlights played over Dean's bare
white body. She looked up at the green and white arrangement in his face. Dean was
like a gecko to touch—his skin was cold, everything was drawn tight over his forehead
and bony ribs; his fingers were bone and skin like someone severely dehydrated. When
he arrived at his moment he released his breath in a series of shortlived hisses.

16

Violet had gone a long way into herself to retrieve the story about the photographer.
Alma scoffed at the word ‘photography'. He said all photography proves is that the
camera worked. He possibly felt a bit more short-changed than I did. Stories were
fine but he was there to draw. There was an awkward moment when it came time to leave
and the unspoken subject of payment jarred the air. Violet was hopeful and at the
same time tense, her arms stiff at her sides. When I plunged my hand into my pocket
her eyes automatically followed. Alma had no choice but to follow suit.

‘Less than ideal,' he said as we got into the van.

After I dropped him home I drove back to the shop to relieve Guy. Around five I rang
Frances to say I would be late. I locked up and went to the back room to find the
special edition on assorted African nudes. There was one woman, clothed as it happens,
with a gorgeous pear-shaped mouth. She walked along a path through shoulder-high
corn with a basket balanced on her head, a machete swinging from her hand. This image
was more like that of someone from the Caribbean, not
that I have been there, but
it looked like it could be Ophelia's home and that I was entering the blue and green
landscape that she had played in as a young girl. As least that was my version.

I kept switching between the clothed woman walking through the corn and the open-legged
shots, but in the end—well, eventually—I found myself not so much bored as unsatisfied.
I wanted more. I wanted to know more. Actually what I wanted was to hear her voice.
And I wanted her to hear me sober and sound of mind.

I knew she worked for a bank. Where? What bank? Then I heard myself say out loud,
‘What the hell is that?' Staring back at me was a stuffed polar bear. It was hard
to believe that it had taken me this long to spot it. Guy hadn't said a word when
I came in the back door. Its glassy eyes stared at me. It stood on its hind legs,
its forearms extended like a wrestler's, a head higher than me. There was a tag hanging
from its right paw. ‘On appro' it said, with name and contact details of the person
it could go straight back to in the morning.

I looked up at the bear's sad eyes. It must have been there the whole time I was
thumbing
through
the African spreads. Somehow the whole unsettling experience of
the
polar
bear helped to flush out the name of Ophelia's bank. I remembered then that
she
had
said South London. Definitely she said South London. I rang up international
directory
and
within minutes I was speaking to the bank in London asking for Ophelia.
Ophelia
who?
Oh God, wait. Think. In the end I had to describe her. The person at
the
other
end said they had three Ophelias. One in accounts, a cashier and a personnel
manager.

‘That's her. And can I have her surname, please?'

Ophelia Williams. A second later Ophelia Williams was speaking to me.

‘Hallo, how can I help?'

It was her. That voice. Accentless, educated, interested. Helpful. And now puzzled—she
had no idea who I was. Then she was puzzled in a laugh-out-loud kind of way.

‘Who did you say you were? Mayor who?'

Then she was alarmed as if she may have to ring the cops at any moment. ‘Wait. Where
are you calling from?'

I was too embarrassed to carry on. The creepy night-time menagerie effect of the
shop—shadowed stag heads, golf bags, piled mattresses—made me seem even more ridiculous.

‘But you are the Ophelia who sometimes goes to the Fridge in Brixton?'

There was a slight hesitation then she answered in an outside-of-work kind of way,
‘Yes, I'm that Ophelia…' It was an admission, sad, regretful. I had torn it out of
her but she didn't want to go back there right at this moment during office hours.
Especially with a nut she apparently didn't know, and more joltingly of whom she
had no memory. A shooting star in a night of shooting stars, interesting and diverting
for the moment but that was all.

I could hear her tapping a pencil from half a world away. I said, ‘Thank you. I'm
sorry. I made a mistake,' and hung up.

For a while I sat in the dark, drum-rolling my fingers. I wish I could report on some
clear path of thought but there wasn't one. I sat there with my loss, thinking what
to do with it. I don't recall any conscious decision but after a while I stood up
from my desk and went into the back room to get the magazine with the African spreads.
There is a dumpster bin
out the back. I tossed it in there. I felt like I was removing
something in order to improve something else. Feelings, strategies—none was especially
clear at this point. Except on my way home I had an inkling of what to do when I
looked up at the clean painted side of the Lyric Theatre and remembered the lurid
and mocking scene that used to sit there of two huge moa walking through reeds at
a lakeside. It had been awful to have that glowering back at us after the collapse
of the Gondwanaland theme park idea. Its cheap house paint seemed to sneer back at
the civic vanity and greed that had put it there. I had to look at it every day to
and from work until one day, sick and tired of hearing me complain about it, Alma
had said, ‘Why not paint over it?'

This was the night I picked up a pencil and began to draw Frances on the back of
a power bill envelope. She looked up from her jigsaw and asked what I was doing.
She sounded puzzled—she still didn't know about my involvement in the drawing lessons
at the Eliots'.

‘What does it look like I'm doing?'

The chair leg scratched on the floor as she got up.

‘Now you've moved,' I said.

She didn't know whether to grin or call for help. She moved her hands to her hips.

‘Harry, what exactly are you drawing?'

‘I'm drawing you, Frances.' I pretended to be drawing, head down, though in fact
I wasn't because that is not how you draw; at least it isn't the way Alma had expounded.
You look at what you are hoping to draw—not down at the sheet of paper. But Frances
didn't know that. She sat down again and turned to her scissored pieces of landscape.

‘You're being silly,' she said.

That was all right. I could carry on drawing. She was in her dressing-gown, a characteristic
pose: right elbow on table, hand supporting the side of her head, head turned slightly
away and down at the scraps of paper covering her bench space. She was back to considering
different scenes, this lake with that mountain; I'd seen a covered bridge from Vermont
and a horse-drawn carriage outside Prague. Now the pencil squeaked on the envelope
and she looked up.

‘Harry, stop it.'

I waited for her to turn back to the jigsaw and resumed. This time she spoke down
at her desktop.

‘You're being silly and I wish you'd stop. I don't see what you're trying to prove.'

I told her I wasn't trying to prove anything.

‘I'm just drawing you. Be still, please, Fran.'

That's all I said, nothing more. She brought a shy hand up to her cheek, her delighted
cheek as it appeared from where I sat.

‘Really, Harry? Is that what you're doing? Drawing me?'

‘Rembrandt used to paint his wife,' I said, and I saw my wife think things were getting
queerer by the second. Rembrandt. Harry's never mentioned him before.

I didn't say anything more since it seemed self-evident what I was doing now. I wished
she would be still, however. She really needed to be in better light. At the Eliots',
Alma always took care to arrange the light. Light and shadow, he liked to say, are
in constant negotiation as to which parts of the world the other can have.

The spare chair at the nearer end of her workbench would be better. I stood up and
pointed with my pencil.

‘I'm sorry Fran, can you change places? The reflection from the window is getting
in the way.'

She looked amused to hear this. She repeated what I had said. ‘The reflection in the
window…' Her tone was gently mocking, but that was all right. After all, what did
I know about light and shadow? I heard myself regurgitate some of the stuff Alma
had to say on the subject and Frances began to laugh in a quiet, pleasant, head-shaking
way. She couldn't believe this strange chick that had hatched before her eyes. Could
it actually walk? And because I guess she wanted to see what would happen next, she
happily complied.

I helped her shift the chair and table into a better arrangement. I played around
with the desk lamp and ended up with a nicely shadowed effect. Then I walked back
to the chair, picked up the pencil and envelope and waited for Frances to compose
herself.

Of course what happened next was entirely predictable. She sat as she would like
to be seen, her hands flat on her knees. She raised her face with a smile that aimed
to please. But that wasn't Frances at all. It was simply the face that she was willing
to show, entirely different from the one I saw devouring the landscapes scattered
over her work bench. So I didn't draw. I did what I did out at the Eliots' and instead
I just looked and from time to time she asked me, ‘Is this all right?' or, ‘Are you
finished yet?'

After a while she didn't say anything. Her face began to relax and settle and I was
reminded of the very last ripple moving to the edges of a pond, the final reminder
of the stone thrown into its calm middle just a few minutes earlier.

For a long time I waited. Frances was so still I could have walked up and pinched
her skin. She looked like she did the
first time I saw her at high school. She was
walking with a group of girls but at the same time she was apart. She looked now
as she did then, as if waiting for the world to come and touch her.

Frances was always tall for her age. She deliberately walked half a step more slowly
than the other girls to prevent her loping ahead like a giraffe. Of all the girls
in our final year Frances was everyone's favourite bet to be first on the train out
of here. You never really felt you had her full attention. You could see her long
legs walking past the hills and the ranges to that distant and as yet unnamed place
that waited to claim her. Maybe it was the result of her putting so much effort into
appearing graceful, but the first time she gave up the far horizon for what lay
nearer and more conveniently to hand she discovered me.

I don't know how long I stared at Frances—ten, twenty minutes. But suddenly she drew
a long breath and snapped out of wherever she had been.

‘Finished?' she asked.

‘For now I am.'

Immediately she sprang up. I knew what she was after and turned the envelope over.