Paint Your Wife (35 page)

‘Thank you,' she said to Guy. ‘You were always such a nice boy.'

Guy beamed—he turned around to see we had heard that.

In the coffee break I said to Alma, ‘Hilary's changed. She seems transformed.'

His eyes went still.

‘Hilary has, has she?'

Okay. Point taken. The world never disappoints a jaundiced eye. Alma still tells
newcomers that it helps to actually like your wife if you're planning to draw her.
Otherwise, how you feel will show. There's no way to keep that out.

The jaundiced eyes sees the poor wager slumming it for extra cash in the Christmas
parade. The kids see Father Christmas.

Just supposing one day I had sat down with her on that bench outside the video store,
leant forward with my head hanging
between my legs, grinning back at the pavement
cracks, would I have heard a sane voice? There's no way of being sure, but I doubt
it. The paint factory made it possible. The light. The circumstance. Even the Boyers'
curtain fabric. The moment, shall we say. Our collective gaze stripping away the
crust we'd all had a hand in building down through the years, and at last the long-suffering
inmate inside of Hilary feeling it was okay to venture back out into the open.

20

There have been other successes. Another story is on its way, I'm afraid.

I don't think I will mention names except to say of this young couple (which will
almost
certainly
give the game away, but discretion in this instance is outweighed
by
the
lesson learnt so public good wins again), one was always coming and going.
He
had
come and gone. Now it was her turn. This was mere prelude to a future tearful
reunion
where
they would cling to each other and wonder how they could have ever
been
so
stupid to wander off when they did. Briefly, a kind of domestic balance
was
achieved.
You'd see them out and about, hand in hand or cuddling each other in
the
Garden
of Memories, laughing and having a good time. She with her tee-hee Maori
laugh.
Him
with his Pakeha snigger. They couldn't have kids of their own.
They.
Well,
it
was
her. She couldn't have kids. Something to do with her Fallopian tubes, some
past
injury
she was vague about. It was a shame, a great shame after everything they
had
been
through, because like everyone says, what else are we here on earth for?

The unfortunate thing is, of all the places to shove blame they chose to blame each
other. For a while it was his sperm count that came under fire. It was low, and some
who'd worked with him at the fish plant thought that was likely as he was a lazy bugger,
always drawing and scampering off in his lunch hour to ‘some other place'. It was
devastating for her to discover the real problem; though a let-off for him, you might
imagine. She threw herself into work with glue-sniffing street kids. She was always
palming off her own kids while she took herself off to a distant hui. It was amazing
where she rang back from—the Far North, and once, memorably, Hong Kong. It was a
spur-of-the-moment madness that saw her board the plane. Now she had phoned to say
she was working in a nightclub which, he said later, explained the jukebox in the
background. Eventually when she came back from Hong Kong she looked very smart, her
hair was done up differently, there was a wardrobe of black skirts. She was home
for a fortnight and then he ran off up the coast.

It is this couple that comes to mind whenever the grounding effect of drawing classes
comes up for discussion.

When she sits for us she smiles. She holds her knees together, one foot on the floor,
the other foot dangling in a way that puts us in mind of a Hong Kong bar stool. Still,
we are left with the feeling that she is finally where she wants to be, with all of
us looking at her. Her smile beams only in one direction, however. Craftily, he pretends
not to notice.

On the subject of Dean…There have been some more changes down at the paint factory.
A community arts board gave us another grant and with Guy's help we've built a proper
studio space. Dean runs the downstairs art supplies area. Aisle
upon aisle is filled
with tubes of paint, sketch pads, crayons, pencils, charcoal. Customers creep up
and down the aisles on their private shopping missions.

Newcomers are prone to feeling overwhelmed and unsure where to start. They tend to
thrust a sheet of paper with its list of items across the counter, then Dean might
say, ‘I see Alma has you working with charcoal. I see he neglected to put down the
HB 6 pencil. Shall I add one of those? I have a set on special.' And so it goes.
Dean enjoys his expertise. He's developed a range of frowns and purse-lipped deliberations
to go with his newly acquired know-how. ‘About the pencils,' he'll explain. ‘You
will want the darker and heavier lead for hatching. I know Alma favours the HB 6
but that's not to say you can't go darker.'

21

We're up at the tip one afternoon when the rain comes. It is sudden and violent.
And across the tip face the rats scramble for shelter. Alma and I make a beeline
for the Eliots' old banged-up orange Datsun. When we sit in it, shuttered into that
confined upholstered place, it is almost possible to hear the spluttering of the Eliot
kids in the back. You can feel Dean's white-hot silence, and the gentle corrective
glances of Violet from her side of the car. It is just a passing sense, a sniff as
we close the doors and silence walls up around us, quickly followed by the aromas
of the tip.

‘This woman Ophelia. That's all over now, is it?'

There are any number of ways to answer this. The easiest thing in the end is to say,
‘Yep. It's all over.'

Alma is pleased to hear that. His fingers tap on the steering wheel. His face livens
up.

‘I'll tell Alice. She'll be relieved to hear it.' He turns his face to look at me.
‘That is, if you don't mind, Harry.'

‘If you need to,' I say.

‘I don't like your mother feeling burdened…'

We watch the rain fall.

In a while Alma says, ‘That Douglas is a strange fish, isn't he?' And so it goes.

Guy has increased his hours with me. Alma won't be able to grub around up here in
the tip forever.

‘Well, it's that time-of-life change thing, isn't it Harry?' Guy said the last time
we spoke about it.

Another time all three of us are up here. There are some guiding principles to pass
on to Guy. Once more heavy rain sweeping in from the hills in the west has everyone
running for the Eliots' car—me, Alma, Guy and this time Raymond as well. Though when
the talk shifts to art Raymond falls quiet. As soon as the rain stops he's out of
there.

For a while longer we stay in the car chatting; at least Alma is chatting. Guy and
I are listening. Alma is recalling the day he heard on his wireless that Bonnard
was dead. He went out to his porch. He said he felt numb. He looked down the far
end of the paddock where George was shovelling away the hill. It was the one time
he felt like grabbing George by the shoulders and shaking some higher purpose or
goal into him.

‘What hill?' asks Guy, leaning between us from the back.

Alma gives me a quick glance.

‘You can tell him.'

Guy has his mouth hanging open.

‘Back at the shop, Guy.'

‘Right,' he nods.

Then Alma says, ‘Cézanne used to complain about his wife. She liked only two things.
Switzerland and lemonade.'

Guy rocks back and claps his hands. ‘I like that,' he says. ‘Switzerland and lemonade.'

And Alma winks across the divide at me.

22

The other day at the tip I picked up a book on the French Romantics. In it I found
a poem by Blaise Cendrars. Blaise is one of ours now, one of New Egypt's chosen sons.
In the poem ‘Portraits', this is what he had to say about his friend Chagall, which
speaks to all of us who meet down at the paint factory on weekday nights.

He sleeps

He is wide awake

All of a sudden; he paints

He takes a church and paints a church

He takes a cow and paints with a cow

With a sardine

With heads, hands, knives…

He paints with his thighs

He has eyes in his ass

And all of a sudden it's your portrait

It's you, reader

It's me

It's him

It's his fiancée

It's the corner grocer

The women herding the cows

The midwife

I have shortened Blaise's poem. This is a trick for which we have Alma to thank.
We've learnt in that old magpie way of ours to take what we have a use for and leave
the rest out.

I think I will end here, on one fine crisp Saturday morning in June. There are sunny
skies. All the women are running and every man is smiling with his wife's towel draped
over his shoulder. The women are running in a benefit to raise funds to purchase easels
and brushes and canvases in order to on-sell them down at the paint factory.

The circuit takes them past the school down Endeavour Road and on to Broadway; there
they cut across the railway line to run along Port Road and back up Stitchbury Hill
through the reserve and back to the school. Three kilometres in all.

A pleasing number of women have their sponsor's name on their T-shirt or it is crudely
written over their legs in black marker pen. All are red in the face. Their legs
are covered in the same rash of exertion. For some it has got to be too much already.
They look like they are drowning, especially up Stitchbury Hill where the motion
of their legs becomes scrambled, the points of their knees are whacked out of alignment,
their thighs are on the point of caving in. The whole shambling works looks ready
to implode and would but for the determination shining in their eyes.

They have all stopped hearing our cries of encouragement. Blindly they snatch at
the paper cups of water. They have seen their face on a canvas, and this is what
they are running, gasping, sweatily towards.