Prochownik's Dream Page 8

  ‘And now you do like her?’

  He measured his response. How to negotiate this sudden maze of uncertainties. How to reinstate the simplicity of their trust. He did like Marina now. She interested him. He had been surprised by how much he liked her, by how easily he had shared his memories of his father with her. It was important to him. ‘Marina has changed,’ he said. He was remembering her saying, That young woman at Macedon is not me anymore, you know. It was true. ‘None of us is the same person we were back then.’

  An empty gravel truck bounded over the railway crossing like a sudden beating of drums in the night.

  When the echo of the truck had passed Teresa asked, ‘So you do like her now, or you don’t like her?’

  He was slow to reply. ‘I think she’s probably more ambitious now—for herself, I mean, for her own work—than she used to be. That’s bound to make someone more interesting. Even to themselves. I don’t really know Marina all that well. She and I were never close. She was often there, but it was Robert and I who were friends in those days. Marina was content to go along with whatever Robert’s plans were. Now she seems to be taking more of a lead. But I don’t know. I’m only guessing. It seems to have been her decision that’s brought them back to Melbourne.’

  Teresa did not interrupt. When he fell silent, she said, ‘That drawing you did of her on the island today. It’s not just a drawing.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It’s suggestive.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ What he had seen on the island this afternoon, Teresa was seeing now in her recollection of his drawing. In the mind’s eye seeing is believing, the voyeur disclosing the hidden storyline whether he intends to or not. His own vivid recollection of the dimple in the back of Marina’s knee, inviting his eye into the shade of the silver wattle where she lay on the grass.

  ‘It’s suggestive,’ Teresa repeated.

  He said nothing, the word spinning through his head.

  ‘Do you think it’s suggestive?’ she persisted. ‘Or not?’

  ‘I drew what I saw,’ he said. ‘What seems suggestive to one person might not seem that way to someone else.’

  The sounds of the night beyond the window, always somewhere a dog was barking.

  Teresa said tightly, ‘I couldn’t bear it. You know that.’

  He put his arm around her and kissed her on the mouth. ‘You don’t have to bear anything. Don’t be silly! There’s nothing to bear. I love you.’

  She kissed him back. ‘And I love you too. But I’m jealous of her. I can’t help it. The thought of her makes my stomach crawl. It’s not my fault. It’s just how it is.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be jealous about.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. One hundred percent sure.’

  ‘I wish you weren’t planning on doing pictures of her for this show. I wish it was someone else.’

  ‘Nothing’s settled. The island show is a great opportunity for me. It’ll attract a lot of attention. I could make some money at last.’

  ‘I don’t care about the money. You don’t have to make money. I’m the one who’s making the money while you establish yourself. That’s what we agreed. I married an artist. I know what I did. I believe in you. You didn’t promise me money, you promised me you’d do your work. You have to do what you have the feeling for or there’s nothing for either of us. Don’t get sidetracked by money now. That’s what Dad’s waiting for. He’s waiting for the day you dump your dream and go after the money like the rest of them, so he can say he told me so.’

  ‘It’s not your dad I’m thinking about. It’s you. If you really don’t want me to paint Marina, then I won’t paint her.’

  She propped herself up on her elbow and gazed down at him in the night glow from the window. ‘It’s no good talking like that. You’re fired up with it. I can feel it. I told you weeks ago to take all that stuff from your installations back to the op shops and get on with something new and now that’s what you’re doing. And here I am complaining when I should be happy. What do you suppose you’re going to do if you don’t do this? If you drop this, you’ll be at a loose end again.’

  ‘I’d find something else.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t. Listen to you! I know you better than that. I’m happy that you know what you want. There are hazards, that’s all, with knowing what we want. There always are. How many people know what they want? They don’t look it in the eye the way you do. That’s what I love about you. I see them every day. They wander in off the street and sit in front of me looking at brochures of Tanzania with dazed expressions, distracting themselves from what? They’ve made their money and now they’re wondering what they can get from life with it. Like they finally earned enough frequent flyer points to buy anything they want, only they don’t know what they want. So I tell them to buy a digital camera and go on safari and look at lions. Then they come back and they’re still lost and they start to feel cheated. How come Tanzania wasn’t the answer? It’s a conundrum for them. So I say, Maybe you should have gone to Paris instead of Africa. I know all they’re thinking about is escape, getting away to some place other than where they already are. And thank god, or we’d be broker than we already are. Staying home just makes them think of getting old and dying. Staying home they worry all the time.’ She leaned and kissed him. ‘I love you. You know why? You know what you want. It’s not a conundrum for you. That’s your gift. You’ll have it till you die because it’s you. That’s your real gift, not drawing. You know what you have to do. You don’t want to escape from it, you want to focus on it and do it. Sometimes it scares me. I felt good when you were doing your installations. I didn’t understand them, but I felt good about you doing them. I always thought it was about your family, your love for your dad. That’s what it was, wasn’t it? I saw you putting those things together with love. And you never talked about making money or having a big opportunity or any of this stuff that you’re talking about now. I’d look out the kitchen window and see you out there lost in your work for hours, and Nada sitting there in the courtyard with you doing her own thing. And when you two came in for your dinner you were both tired and happy.’ She gave him a long kiss then pulled away. ‘When I saw you at Andy’s party that night I knew you at once. I knew who you were. Meeting you changed me. I was dancing with poor old Lang but I was only seeing you from the minute you walked in the door. Until then I was always going out with artists and wondering why I did it. When I saw you I realised I wanted you to live your dreams through me. I don’t have that passion for my work that you have. But with you I’m part of it. We’re a team. We’re a family. When I saw you I knew I’d found the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and I could stop fooling around. I wanted to support you in your work.’ She was silent a long while, then she said worriedly, ‘This is not a trap for you, is it? The way I’ve set things up for you? Jesus, if I thought that . . .’

  ‘Of course it’s not a trap. Hey! Don’t say that! How could it be a trap?’

  ‘It’s not me just keeping control over you is it? You never feel like that about us, do you? I couldn’t bear it. There’s always a price for these things. I know that. We don’t get away without paying the price. It’s not as simple as we think. That’s what Dad always says. Sometimes I wonder how we can ever be sure of anything.’

  ‘Don’t talk like this,’ he said gently. ‘You’re going to work yourself into a state again.’

  She took his hand and placed it on her belly. ‘I never liked those two. You know that. Of all the people you might have decided to paint, it would have to be Marina Golding! I think they’re bloodless, the pair of them. I never worked out what you found interesting in them. I was glad when they left. Is it fate they came back? What is it decides these things? Why them? Why not someone I like? Why not your lovely brother, Roy? Roy’s a man with a story in his face. That’s what I always think. He is a man who has suffered and said nothing about it. If I were a
n artist, I’d paint a portrait of Roy and everyone would see his story in his eyes. In the old days in Calabria, when my dad was a boy, Roy would have been a hero.’ She was silent a while. ‘The idea scares me.’

  ‘The idea?’

  ‘You being out there! Being part of that scene out there with those people! With people like them. I don’t know them. I never feel comfortable with them. I don’t know what they’re thinking. They’re not my kind of people and they are never going to be my kind of people no matter how hard I try to like them or to understand them. They have agendas.’ She was silent a moment. ‘I don’t trust them. It’s really as simple as that. I wonder if, to be an artist, you have to spend your time with people like that or whether you can do it on your own. I would really like to know the answer to that one.’

  They were both silent for a long while.

  ‘You trust Andy?’ he said.

  ‘Andy’s different. He’s not like them. He loves you. He loves me and Nada.’

  ‘He spends all his time with artists and dealers.’

  ‘Andy doesn’t have an agenda.’ After a time she said, ‘We need a holiday before you get into this new project. We need to condition ourselves for it.’ She laughed. ‘Just you and me. We haven’t had a real holiday together since that trip to Tassie before Nada was born. There’s a new resort promotion on Noumea. The people who are running it owe me. I can get the accommodation for free and half the airfares. I’ll write a piece for them in The Traveller. There’s child minding at the resort. You and me can lie on the beach all day. I’ll get a new bikini. Remember when you said they invented the bikini for breasts like mine?’

  ‘I remember.’

  She rolled towards him and they kissed. ‘When were you thinking of starting work on this show?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Tomorrow, he says! I can’t afford to take time off for Noumea anyway. So who do I think I’m kidding? Jesus! I don’t know how I’d cope if you ever became successful.’

  ‘And stopped being a failure, you mean?’

  ‘You’re not a failure. I don’t see you as a failure. Failure’s not the only alternative to success. People can go along leading a good life without being successful. We don’t have to have success. It isn’t everything. We make too much of success.’

  ‘Success is good for you,’ he said. ‘I felt it when I won the Kingsgate prize. Otherwise I wouldn’t know. I remember it doing me good.’

  ‘Yeah, like drugs,’ she said. ‘It’s a feeling for a moment. Like when I make a big sale. I know that feeling. I meant we get used to being who we are, that’s all. This is who we are. This is us. If you were successful, this would change. It’s changing already with the end of your installations and this new thing. I’m not saying what we’ve got is perfect, but I can handle being who we are now. Success out there in the world is the unknown for us. For the first time it seems to me you’re aiming for the unknown and turning your back on what we know. To be honest, that scares me more than Marina Golding. I know in my heart you’re never going to be unfaithful. I know that.’

  ‘We both know that.’ He kissed her. ‘But I can’t stand still and repeat myself, or do nothing.’

  ‘We have to be honest about where we’re going.’ She moved his hand around on her belly. ‘I want our other baby before it’s too late. I’ve always felt it out there, waiting for us to decide to let it through. I’ve been hearing from it a lot lately. Nada’s little brother or sister.’

  They lay silently side by side, her hand holding his hand on her stomach. After a while she moved his hand to her breast. The night noises of the city out beyond the window.

  six

  He parked across the road from the Red Hat café. He was still preoccupied by the previous night’s conversation with Teresa, the prospect of another child arousing in him a troubling contradiction of emotions. He was watching two men in grey dustcoats unloading furniture from the back of a truck parked in front of him. He realised suddenly, with a start of interest, that the men were lifting down an old-fashioned cane chaise longue similar to the one on which Marina had been lying that day, years ago, when he had made his first drawing of her asleep.

  In the normal course of everyday life it might have been a weakness to have made something of this coincidence, he knew that, but he had no doubt that in the other world of art, with its kinship with dreams and illusions, the intervention of chance could signify that critical moment when a project might leap beyond the control of the artist; a moment, in other words, when the work ceased to be the banal projection merely of the artist’s own fragile ego and took on a larger existence of its own. He grabbed the two sketchbooks from the passenger seat, stepped out of the car and followed the men into the auction rooms, where they were just at that moment in the act of setting the chaise on the floor. ‘How much do you expect it to go for?’ he asked. He reached and touched the back of it, as if he were already its possessor.

  The older man considered the chaise with a professional glance. ‘Maybe one-fifty?’ he said and transferred the casual appraisal of his gaze to Toni. ‘Two at the outside.’

  ‘One-fifty to two?’ Toni echoed him, considering the chaise as if he had a choice in the matter of whether or not to place a bid for it.

  ‘You can leave a bid with me,’ the man told him. ‘The auction’s Tuesday morning. I’ll call you lunchtime Tuesday if I get it for you. It could go for less. Leave me your number.’ The men watched him examining it.

  Toni saw that it was not identical to the one at Macedon, but was nevertheless of the same style and period; an old-fashioned piece from that leisured era of shaded verandahs and conservatories. A regime of daily life that had permitted time for cool drinks in the afternoon; a bygone era, in other words, when well-to-do people such as Marina’s parents had employed housekeepers so that they might be at liberty themselves to enjoy life. He could see that the chaise would sit nicely in a modern apartment or in his studio. It needed only one or two cushions and a colourful throw rug to give it back its life. He was imagining Marina asleep on it in the pose of his old drawing. Perhaps he would do another drawing of her in the same pose now? The idea occurred to him then of a naked portrait of her lying on the chaise. A woman alone in the privacy of her own room, lying on her couch, looking away from the viewer and thinking her private thoughts, oblivious to the gaze of the onlooker. He found it was not easy to visualise Marina without her clothes. He could only see her naked body in his peripheral vision, as it were, and at the very extreme of his imagination, an elusive impression of an anonymous woman. In the exquisite moment of such an image, he was sure she would be a woman open to the erotic intensities of her private desires; desires of the daydream world, to be sure, which she would share with no one and which she would have no wish to satisfy in the real world. Such a painting would lend intensity to the other pictures in the suite. A painting depicting the interior life of this woman, a life which the viewer might read in her expression rather than in the lines of her body. For surely there would also be a certain poignancy of human solitude, a vulnerability and sense of the failure of desire even, about such a woman, exposed to the viewer and no longer in the prime of her youth? Such a picture could not be the portrait of a child-like odalisque, but must be an intimate picture of a middle-aged artist engaged with her unresolvable erotic tensions. Something difficult and intimate. But could he paint such a picture? Did he possess the skill for it? Did he have the vision that would remove such an image from the arena of the merely prurient? Could he hold it together long enough in his mind’s eye to get it down on the canvas? And, anyway, would Marina agree to sit for him without her clothes on?

  ‘I like it,’ he said.

  ‘You do like it,’ the older man observed approvingly, and he ran his hand over the back of the cane chaise as if he were wondering if he might have missed something of special interest about it. ‘You know what you’re looking at. It’s a nice piece. We don’t ge
t many in this condition.’ The man smiled, sure of his verdict. ‘You’re a collector. I can always pick the collectors.’

  ‘How can I be certain of getting it?’

  The man told him to leave a bid of two hundred and he would be sure to get it for him.

  Toni left the bid and his telephone number and, with a last backward glance at the chaise, he stepped out into the street. It was another expense that would have to go on Teresa’s agency Visa card. But it was a necessity he could not forgo. He stood at the kerb looking across the road. He could see the real Marina sitting at a table behind a red sofa in the window of the café, shadows and reflections of vehicles and pedestrians passing in the street and suggestively interrupting his view of her. She was alone and was reading a book. As he watched her he saw that she was reading the book, indeed, as if she was not expecting someone to join her but was sure of her solitude and was absorbed in the imaginary world of the story; a woman alone in a café reading, the woman of his imaginary painting, her private thoughts concealed within the book. She turned a page then, and as she did so she glanced out the window. He felt a thrill of excitement at the prospect of what he was about to undertake with her. To be a painter again! It had suddenly begun to seem real to him. His preoccupation with their second child, which had persisted throughout the morning, was so thoroughly forgotten now it might never have existed.

  He crossed the road and went into the café. Marina looked up and closed the book as he came through the door, as if she had been aware of his approach all the time. She slid the book away from her across the table, leaving her fingers touching it as if she meant to return to it later. She said hello and presented her cheek, and he leaned forward to give her a greeting kiss. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite her. ‘So where’s Robert?’