Prochownik's Dream Read online

  He cleaned his brushes and lowered the drop sheet over the canvas. As he emerged from the studio the bright sunlight seemed to bite into the interior of his skull. He winced and put out his hand to the fountain to steady himself. His outline seemed no longer fixed but wavered around him as he moved, a charged and luminous corona of fatigue and hallucination. In the kitchen he leaned against the bench, the shining outlines of the telephone and the refrigerator beside it blurring and shifting, as though with an effort of will he might summon the power to dissolve their volumes into abstract patterns of light and shade . . . He closed his eyes.

  The doorbell pealed twice then someone banged on the front door.

  He stood staring down the passage. The banging was repeated. He went out along the passage and opened the door. It was Marina.

  ‘I’ve done it!’ she said breathlessly. She was obviously agitated and emotional, her eyes glistening with tears. She stepped towards him and embraced him. They held each other tightly. They might have been lovers who had been separated and had found one another again after a long and dangerous return. She was laughing softly, or perhaps she was weeping, her body pressed against his, her warm cheek against his cheek. ‘I’ve done it!’ she whispered. He could smell her sweat mixed with the paint extender. After a while she lifted her head and looked at him, her grey eyes alight with a kind of wonderment. ‘You’re trembling.’

  He kissed her on the lips and she did not resist but responded to him eagerly. They stood embraced in the doorway for a long moment, uncaring that they were in full view of passers by in the street. The pressure of her belly and thighs against him, the irresistible pulse of his blood arcing in his thighs, the intensity of the moment so great he thought he might faint. He took both her hands in his and drew her into the house and closed the door. She was barefoot and was wearing a loose, grimy black T-shirt with a tear in it over a paint-stained denim skirt. She resembled a figure stepped out of his op-shop installation, her short hair spiky and going every way, as if she had been sleeping on the street or was Haine’s fugitive figure emerged from the freeway undercroft. They kissed again, Toni’s father’s modest gouache on the wall behind them, their desire for each other was urgent now and he knew it had been decided and that they would not resist.

  ‘Not here,’ he said, taking her by the hand and leading her through the house and across the courtyard to the studio. They made love on the cane chaise; tenderly, slowly and passionately, like two people who knew something of which they had been forbidden to speak.

  Afterwards they stood hand-in-hand in front of his painting of The Other Family. They looked at the monumental group and the solitary naked figure of the man, and they wondered what it was that had brought them to this point in their lives. And they each knew that no one else would ever understand this moment as they understood it themselves.

  She broke the silence. ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hold me again,’ she said. ‘Just for a little while.’

  He took her in his arms and she rested against him. From the top of the plan press the portrait of his mother gazed back at him across the studio.

  •

  She drove fast, zig-zagging in and out of the traffic. They might have been fugitives fleeing the scene of a crime. At a set of traffic lights she turned to him, her eyes seeking his. ‘I reached the point where I hated your picture,’ she said. ‘I believed I wasn’t going to be able to do it.’

  He said, ‘You’ve got a green light.’

  She drove on.

  He listened to her talking and said nothing. Her cheeks were pale, her lips dry and without lipstick, fatigue lines etched around her mouth, and those familiar purple shadows under her eyes. She looked older than her years and he felt a rush of tenderness for her; the hours he had spent since that day on the island, looking and looking at her, and now to have been surprised by her in this way! Suddenly everything had changed.

  ‘You might hate me when you see what I’ve done to your picture,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t hate you.’

  ‘God, I just want to cry or laugh!’ she said. ‘How can we be so sane about it? What have we done, Toni?’

  She pulled up outside the Richmond house and switched off the motor. She did not get out of the car but sat behind the wheel looking down the street. After a moment she turned to him and she leaned and kissed him on the mouth.

  Did he feel he had betrayed Teresa? He was not sure. Surely it had been something beyond those ordinary things, betrayal and trust, something belonging to another realm, to another dimension altogether. Or had it been merely betrayal after all? Was this what betrayal was, something sudden, something disturbing and extreme that was not planned, but which interrupted one’s life, one’s reality violently set aside, so that the extraordinary might take place? He said, ‘Let’s go and look at the picture.’ He saw then how vulnerable she was, how vulnerable perhaps to everything; to life, to growing old, to dying, to being forgotten; touched by an instant of brilliant excitement then darkness and silence for ever. Vulnerable to all that. He saw it in her eyes and he felt her solitariness and her fear. He reached and touched her wet cheek tenderly.

  She walked ahead of him through the rooms of the house to the studio.

  Theo was sitting with his back to them on the hard-backed chair facing The Schwartz Family, which was mounted on the easel. Misty was sitting on the floor beside his chair. Theo turned and watched them cross the floor towards him, a knowing smile gathering in his eyes. ‘You two!’ he said. ‘You look as if you’ve walked ashore from a shipwreck.’ He laughed and waved an unsteady hand at the painting.

  Toni felt a touch of excitement to see his painting. He said hello to Theo and took the hand he offered, and he and Marina stood beside him and looked at the painting.

  The three pale unsmiling figures and the silver cat seated at the round table gazed mutely back at them; as if they were blind and had seen only the past and could see nothing beyond their own brief day. The features of the three figures were strangely unshadowed now, awaiting completion, figures waiting for a word of explanation: Why are we here? It surprised him to see how they shared something with the featureless figures of his installations. They were his all right, there was no doubting it. The source of their illumination puzzling and interior and belonging to the past. The silver-haired cat, detached, observant and knowing, by Theo’s hand—the cat-headed deity for whom no mystery was too deep. Oriel had been right, at least about that. He had got the cat.

  Behind the seated figures at the round table a diminishing perspective of leafless European trees now. A powerful quality of innocence and of dream and of something private and undisclosed in the heavy perspective of trees in the windless air; an enormous stillness imposed on the three figures by the great trees; trees that were not trees but were dreams of other worlds. The ghostly remainder of Robert’s naked man adrift had gone, sunk too deep under Marina’s medium to be visible any longer. But there all the same. He knew it. An invisible truth, returned to the unconscious. Through the intricate latticework of the leafless branches her parents’ enormous red-brick house, Plovers. And rising above the house and above the trees, commanding the painting’s visible weight as if it were the sky, the great dark bulk of Mount Macedon, the magic mountain of Marina’s innocent childhood, her solitary years, her fears and her dreams and, at last, her loss of belief. Why did he think this? What made him see such an encompassing sadness in her painting of her old home? Did Theo see it? Did Robert see it?

  ‘Well, what do you say, Prochownik?’ Theo laughed, and turned and looked up at Toni.

  Marina waited beside him.

  So Andy had passed the word around. They all knew now. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful. I love it.’

  Marina touched his fingers and looked at him and she said nothing.

  He turned to her. ‘I love it.’

  Theo said hoarsely, ‘The shipwrecked fools!’ He reached and dragg
ed at Toni’s arm. ‘Help me get to bed, Toni. I was hoping to stay up and drink coffee with you and do some talking. But I can’t. I expected you sooner.’ He laughed. ‘Now I’m running out of steam. Help me up.’

  In Theo’s bedroom Toni helped the stricken man into his bed. The warm, pungent smell of liniment rising from his open gown, a glimpse of scarlet ulcers, like sword wounds in his chest and abdomen. A rigidity in Theo’s smile, a freezing of his expression and a clenching of the muscles of his face and neck and shoulders; an effect of the drugs he was taking to dampen the explosive firing of his nerves. When Toni had made him comfortable, Theo reached and took his hand and smiled up at him. There was a youthfulness in his smile, a desire to share something yet of the beauty and the madness; a smile in which there was the acceptance of his own departure from life, looking at Toni from that place of the sick and the dying, which is not the place where the living spend their days.

  ‘I’ve got a lot to tell you,’ Toni said.

  Theo said, ‘I knew it that day she brought you into the house and introduced you. There’s nothing we can do. These things! We’ll talk soon. There’s no hurry.’ He closed his eyes and relinquished Toni’s hand. He was in some distress. He called as Toni was at the door, ‘We always confuse life and art in the end. It can’t be helped.’ He laughed, his dry, ironic cough of a laugh, as if something was caught in his throat. He waved Toni away.

  •

  They sat across from each other at a table in the window of the Red Hat café and she nursed her coffee and watched him. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said quietly and waited for him, and when he didn’t speak she said, ‘What will you do if Teresa finds out?’

  He didn’t want to talk about realities with her. ‘Theo’s right,’ he said. ‘This was with us from day one. From the day you rang and then I came over for lunch and you two asked me to join you in the island show. I wasn’t sure then, but when we went to the island, after that I was sure.’

  ‘I was too.’

  ‘I didn’t plan it.’

  ‘I know. Neither did I.’

  ‘I didn’t expect it would ever happen.’

  ‘I hoped it would happen. Now I’m glad it has happened.’

  ‘Sometimes we can know too much about another person. We become too familiar with someone and it prevents us from seeing them properly.’

  ‘I don’t think we can ever really know anyone,’ she said and looked past him out the window at the busy street. ‘Even ourselves. I don’t think we should expect to. Most of all not ourselves.’

  She was watching the people going by in the street, the flash and the colour of the traffic reflected in her eyes, the light playing across her features. He did not want to think about the real world with her. He wanted their friendship to be encompassed by the world of their art. There it would be safe. He did not want to admit it into the everyday. Theo was right, art was not life. How to keep them apart? Was there a severe and monkish discipline for it? A superhuman detachment? He thought of Theo’s torment, the frozen rigidity of his gaze, the terrible grip of his muscles, a man no longer able to be himself.

  She said, ‘I don’t believe we really want to understand other people, or ourselves. Not really. We say we do, but we like to be among strangers.’ She looked out the window. ‘To be anonymous is what we most want, not to be known. Secretly we want to be solitary. We can’t stand having people know who we are. It terrifies us.’ She turned from contemplating the street. ‘I love feeling lost and alone in the city. The city is our natural place. We need it. I fear more than anything being lost and alone in the bush. Out there we’re confronted with ourselves. In the bush there’s no escape from who we are or from each other. We pretend to love the wilderness, but we hate the thought of it, really.’ She fell silent, then after a moment she said, ‘When I couldn’t work out what to do with your picture I resurrected all my old work. Except for that Macedon sketchbook I found for you, I hadn’t looked at any of my old drawings for years. I got out all my folders and spread everything over the floor of the studio. And there it was. It was obvious. You were right. It was trees. Trees and the mountain! Plovers. Home. Me and my work! I’d forgotten how much I’d done on my own before I met Robert. My old work covered half the floor of the studio. Theo came and looked at it. He encouraged me. He helped me to see what I had to do.’

  ‘Theo’s been our secret collaborator,’ he said, and smiled.

  ‘Yes, he has. The idea of doing a new background paralysed me for days. I thought I was solving your problem for you, and I was scared to touch the picture in case I ruined it. Then when we saw my old work spread out on the floor, Theo told me not to paint a background for you, but to paint one for myself. Now your wonderful picture is like our day on the island. Other people will see one thing, but we’ll know it’s really our special secret.’ She reached and took his hand. ‘I feel better, suddenly. With some people we’re able to be more ourselves than we are with others. That’s just the way it is, isn’t it? There’s no point trying to understand this.’ She sat looking at him. ‘You’re worrying about Teresa now, aren’t you?’

  ‘She’ll be wondering where I am.’

  ‘I’ll give you a lift. What will you do?’

  ‘I may just tell her and get it over with. I’m a hopeless liar. I hate deceit. I can’t carry it off.’ The idea of Teresa’s reaction appalled him. It was what she had feared and predicted. She would believe he had been lying to her all along. Her confidence in him would be shattered forever. Things would never be the same between them. ‘I envy Theo in a way,’ he said with a laugh. ‘He seems to have earned the right to belong to his own world.’

  ‘Robert and his mother paid the price for Theo’s freedom.’

  ‘Theo has what I’ve always thought of as an artist’s freedom. It’s a pity someone has to pay.’

  ‘He’s horribly lonely. I don’t think he really wanted to go on living after Marguerite died. How utterly unpredictable these things are. He’s always talking about you in front of Robert. It’s not fair to Robert. He’s incredibly insensitive with Robert. He behaves as if it were somehow Robert’s fault that he left them when Robert was a little boy. He’s tough and unforgiving with his own son and with you he’s charming. Robert is forgiving. He’s generous. Despite everything Theo has done, he loves him and excuses him. He says, Dad’s an artist, as if that explains everything. People used to believe it was their duty to understand these things, now no one bothers anymore.’

  •

  They drove across town in silence. When they got to the corner of his street he asked her to let him out. ‘Drop me here.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘It’s fine here.’

  She pulled in to the kerb and leaned across and they kissed. ‘Take care. Ring me.’ Her hand on his arm. ‘Remember, whatever happens, you matter to me enormously.’

  He got out of the car and stood watching her drive away. You matter to me enormously . . . He turned into his street. Teresa’s Honda was parked outside the house. If he really were a coward, he would go around by the lane and sneak into the studio by the back door. He walked down the road towards the red Honda.

  seventeen

  As he walked towards Teresa’s car he noticed for the first time, as if it were something that had suddenly become important to him, that each of the tiny front gardens in the row of uniform weatherboard houses was planted differently from its neighbour. A miniature parterre of rose bushes was followed by a solitary gum tree, then came an arrangement of neatly clipped English box hedges, which was followed by a cluster of old-fashioned sweet peas growing on chicken wire. It had never occurred to him before that these gardens so strongly advertised the private dreams of the owners of the houses to which they belonged. Were these people oblivious to the existence of each other, or were they eager not to be influenced by the tastes of their neighbours, but determined to cling to a private idea of themselves and their property that, in the grandeur of its associations, far outstripp
ed the modest reality? He wondered if he had ever really been a true citizen of this place. The great black circles of dried sunflower blooms in a neglected garden swayed towards him in the hot wind and seemed to menace the air. The long night feverishly working on his figure in The Other Family and the vertiginous unreality of his day with Marina had left him spent. He calculated that he had not slept for thirty-six hours. He did not know what to think any longer, and he felt himself to be dangerously exposed to any random or bizarre idea that might take hold of him and influence his behaviour. He was exhausted.

  He turned in at the front gate and saw, with a rush of nostalgia, the low hedge of lavender bushes on either side of the path that Teresa had planted shortly after they arrived. This house to which they had brought Nada home from the hospital two days after she was born, swept up then in the excitement of being parents and becoming a family. He stood on the path staring at the front door. How could he still call this place his home or ever again take for granted Teresa’s love and support? He felt like a man who had been stripped of his liberty, and for the first time he knew something of what it must have been like for his brother, Roy, when he was removed from the family and sent to prison. How could he ever again speak confidently to Teresa? The whispered intimacies and private confessions they shared in bed at night before they went to sleep! His wife! As soon as he walked through that door Teresa would look into his eyes and she would know, and he would see the pain and the anger wash through her. He would be the one to bring Teresa’s reality down and to destroy it. He felt sick with the inevitability of it. And yet, in a secret place within himself that he could imagine disclosing to no one, he believed that what he had done possessed its own truth and its own necessity. He would admit his guilt to Teresa and would accept the consequences, no matter what they were, but secretly he would not relinquish his belief in the necessity of his friendship with Marina to himself as an artist. If only there were a way to make Teresa see the situation as he saw it himself! To recount to her calmly, and in all its detail, the true story of how events had unfolded for him from the moment of Marina’s telephone call that day when he was posing for Nada. Show her how these events had not been part of a conscious plan but had surprised him and had lifted him onto a wave of energy and confidence that had made the renewal of his work possible. He did not feel any more guilty for what he had done than Roy must have felt for defending their father from his persistent tormentor that day. Guilt, after all, was not concerned with consequences but with intentions.