Prochownik's Dream (29 page)

‘It had better be quick. I should have gone ages ago.'

They went up to the house and he made coffee. She sat at the table leafing through one of Teresa's magazines, not reading the magazine but flipping the pages, glancing at the ads for perfume, the photographs of celebrities partying.

He set a mug on the table by her hand.

She pushed the magazine aside, her action reminding him of the way she had pushed the book aside in the Red Hat.

She smiled, regretful. ‘I love you,' she said simply. ‘I just wanted to say it. It seems important to have actually said it.'

He looked at her. In a few minutes she would be gone, and the chair she was sitting in would be the chair she had sat in at this moment—how to capture the strange, beautiful, surprising, dangerous unreality of such a moment? Hold a person preciously within that moment against the rush of time? Hold oneself within the image of the other? He reached and touched her fingers where they lay touching the magazine. His father telling him,
The artist is the only one to ever know how
great his failure is. Other people see only what he achieves. Not what he has
attempted.
‘Before you went to Sydney you used to stand back and watch us,' he said.

‘Did I?'

‘I didn't see you in those days, except in that drawing I did of you at Plovers. I saw you then, just at that moment, and I was caught up in you lying there in the shadows for a few hours that day. It was a secret truth for me, that drawing. But then I forgot it. When you came back from Sydney it was as if you'd stepped into the light and wanted to be seen. And then I began to remember you and to see you for the first time.'

‘I wanted you to see me.'

He sat considering what she had said. ‘Why?'

She shrugged. ‘Does it matter? Do we need to understand these things? I don't know why. I just
felt
it. I wanted you to see me.'

‘You seduced me that day I came over to Richmond for lunch.'

She laughed.

‘You stood beside
Chaos Rules.
And the way you stood insisted I look at you.'

She got up. ‘I'd better be going.'

He stood beside her, conscious suddenly that this was the moment when it was to come to an end. They would go on being friends, of course, but it would never again be as it was at this moment, this place they had made of their own and the precious sharing of the work.

‘Don't say anything, please!' she said. She put her arms around him and kissed him firmly on the mouth.

He held her, his eyes closed, the pressure of her belly against him, her lips. Now he could
see
her. He knew he would get the figure of the woman for his picture . . .

There was the sound of the front door slamming. The crash of the front door was followed by the rapid click-clack of Teresa's heels as she hurried down the passage towards them.

Marina and Toni pulled away from each other, shocked and off balance.

Teresa stood in the doorway looking at them, her briefcase in her hand, her black suit crushed at the button line where she had been sitting in the car, the white V of her blouse vivid against her tanned throat, her big dark eyes filled with fierceness and pain.

Marina said breathlessly, ‘Teresa. Toni and I were just saying goodbye.'

Teresa stepped forward and dumped her bag on the settee, then she turned and looked at Marina as a killer might look at her victim, calculating how she will do it, where she will bury the knife.

‘I'd better be going,' Marina said. Her voice husky, her words catching in her throat.

Toni came out of his frozen pose. ‘Yeah. I'll see you out.'

Marina turned to him, her hand to his arm. ‘No, it's okay!' Her hand on his arm the touch of an intimate.

Teresa registering the touch.

Marina hesitated as if she were going to say something more, but she said nothing and turned and left.

Through the window they watched her cross the courtyard.

‘It wasn't the way it looked,' he said.

‘Gina's picking up Nada,' Teresa said, as if he had not spoken. Her tone was unreal, calm, menacing, tight, a voice in an empty space. ‘I thought, well it's Friday and we're going to be having some entertainment money soon, so I'll go home early and me and Toni will go out for a meal and a movie later.' She looked at him. ‘I thought we might make love before we went out.' She spoke in a flat monotone, as if she were saying,
I thought we might burn the house down
. ‘Like we used to, in the afternoon. Before Nada. That was my idea.' Her black eyes were filled with contempt.

A passing truck's engine brakes rattled the windows.

She said, ‘So you've really been fucking her all this time, then?' She turned away. ‘You disgust me!' She turned again and faced him, threatening suddenly. ‘I'm not taking any more of this shit. I want my life back in one piece.'

‘It wasn't the way it looked,' he repeated. ‘As Marina said, we were just saying goodbye.' He stepped towards her and would have touched her, but she thrust him away with her forearm. She was a big woman and she was strong. She was proud of her Calabrian stock. She relied on it. Teresa knew who she was. She was
certain
of who she was and was calling upon those certainties now without even thinking about them. She was wife, mother, businesswoman, dutiful daughter, a beautiful woman, and a loyal friend. ‘Just have the guts to tell me straight,' she said.

‘Marina and I are not lovers.'

‘I don't believe you.'

‘What can I do then?'

‘Convince me.'

‘How, if you won't believe me?'

She brought both hands down hard on the table and shouted, ‘Convince me! Fuck you! Fucking convince me!'

‘I love you,' he said, shocked by her pent-up violence and her pain. ‘You know that. We're a family. You're tired. We're both tired. We're strung out.'

She gave a sob and flailed wildly at the air. ‘I'm not being convinced by this shit!'

‘If I was cheating on you, you'd know. You know you would. You'd feel it in your guts.'

‘I didn't ask you if you were cheating on me, I asked you if you were fucking that skinny old bitch.'

‘No, I'm not.'

She wiped at the table with her palm. ‘I'm in an important meeting with clients and suddenly I get this feeling. It's like I'm waking from a dream. I'm giving everything to the business and nothing to Toni, I think. That's what this pain I'm feeling is. I'm neglecting my husband. That's the real problem, not his art. His art's not the problem, it's me! This is what I suddenly think. I stop hearing what they're saying in the meeting and I'm thinking about this feeling that I should be more attentive to you, to us, to you and me. I never have any energy left at night after working in that place all day. So I close the meeting and I close the office and I call Gina to pick up Nada and I come home early. I choose my freedom. That's what I do. Just for once. I choose
us
, you and me against all the pressure, and to hell with the rest of it. Why am I stuck in this meeting with these people on a Friday afternoon when I could be home with my man? That's what I say to myself, and the answer is clear. In the car on the way home I'm thinking of us getting it together. I'm laughing out loud in the middle of the traffic at the thought of us making love in daylight the way we used to. When we couldn't help ourselves. Then we go out and we see a grown-up movie in the Europa as if we're singles and we have a drink and a meal and we hold hands and watch the people on the street.' She fell silent. ‘I get home and you're fondling that slut. Why do I feel jealous if you're not fucking her?'

‘I don't know. I wasn't fondling her. You tell me.' He realised as the words were coming out of his mouth that it was a mistake to have added,
You tell me
.

She closed her eyes. She was struggling to hold it together, her fingers gripping the table edge as if she was trying to snap a piece off. ‘I just work. And then I work and then I fucking work some fucking more.' She opened her eyes. ‘The business is going to shit. I've told you this? How much I owe Dad and the bank? When's Andy going to pay you the money he owes you? What are you doing about it?' She crumpled suddenly against the table. ‘I can't take it anymore!'

She let him take her in his arms, unresponsive and limp. He cradled her head against his chest.

After a minute she lifted her head and stepped out of his embrace, pushing her hair back and wiping at her eyes. ‘I'm not one of those women who can live with this kind of thing.' She pointed towards the kitchen bench. ‘I'd grab one of those kitchen knives over there and drive it through you. I'd do it! We've never been down this road. We've never been anywhere near it. I couldn't bear it.'

He said steadily, ‘Nothing improper is happening between me and Marina.'

‘
Improper!
' she laughed wildly. ‘I'm trying to stay reasonable. Why do I hate her? I hate her! You know that? You ever feel hate for someone?
Improper
, for Christ's sake! Do you even know what I'm talking about? I've never liked those people, her and that weird fucking husband of hers. But I never hated them. Now I hate her. You know what this is? Hating someone? It eats you up. It sucks your energy. It's all you think about. You lie awake at night with it. You see it everywhere. Everyone I look at reminds me of it. You get the feeling they know and you don't. I tell myself we don't hate without a reason to hate.'

She looked at him. ‘I want to kill her,' she said seriously. ‘I think about killing her.' She was staring at him, a suffused intensity in her expression, as if she might suddenly let out a great howl of pain and hatred.

He could see her holding Marina to the floor, driving the big Victorinox carver into her back with powerful strokes of her arm. It was an image from a horror movie, but it was real to him; the sweat dripping off Teresa as she held Marina's neck in a death grip, straddling her with her big thighs and driving the knife into her body again and again. And Marina struggling, but pinned. No hope. Teresa too big and too strong for her. The violence of the image was so real he went dry in the mouth. ‘It's true,' he said. ‘You work day and night. We never see each other except when we're both tired.'

‘The business will fold if I don't work day and night. So what am I supposed to do? What do you know about it? You're down there with her. Or over at Richmond. Or on that fucking island, for all I know. While I'm working day and fucking night and looking after Nada and doing everything.' She stood gazing at him. ‘You've never done a portrait of me. You've never even done a decent drawing of me or your daughter.'

‘I will. Soon. I intend to. I haven't been doing portraits since you and I met. I haven't
been
drawing. I've been doing installations till now. This project is something different. It's a new beginning. Now I'm painting again I'll be doing portraits of you and Nada. And I'll do your mum and dad and your brothers. I'll do everyone. There's a life's work in it. Roy and Mum and Andy and everyone. I'll do lots of portraits of you all. It's all in front of me. I know what I have to do. I'm ready for it.'

She may as well not have heard him. ‘You've never once asked me to sit for you. I would have. You could have done a nude of me for our bedroom wall. You used to say my body was the ideal woman's body. Why did you never want to do a nude of me? Artists paint nudes of their wives and lovers. That's all those guys over at Andy's ever wanted to do. Every time they saw me,
Pose for me, Teresa!
'

‘You always said you didn't want me to paint you in the nude.'

‘I never said that.'

‘You said it.'

A small, intense silence gathered between them.

‘So, have you done a nude of her?' she asked.

He could think of no way of answering her question without igniting her fury.

Teresa took one look at him and made a strangled noise in her throat. She pushed him aside, flinging herself past him and going through the door, taking the courtyard in a couple of strides.

He caught up with her at the studio door.

She stood inside the door breathing hard. Beside her the shrouded naked portrait of Marina on the chaise. ‘Where is it?'

‘Where's what?'

‘The painting you're doing of her?'

‘I'm doing paintings of all of them.'

‘Show me the ones you're doing of her.'

He eased himself between Teresa and the shrouded portrait and opened the top drawer of the plan press. He took out a sheaf of charcoal and pencil drawings and gouaches and put them on top of the press. There were several nude studies of Marina among them.

Teresa stood at the press looking through the drawings and small studies, pausing for a considerable time at each drawing or coloured wash of Marina's anatomy, going methodically through the pile. When she had finished she stood looking at a small gouache of Marina lying on the cane chaise. ‘She's beautiful,' she said. ‘She's got perfect skin. I've noticed her hands and her neck. She's smooth and slim. She's a smooth sexy woman. Wouldn't you say?'

‘I wouldn't describe her like that.'

She gestured at him with the drawing. ‘She lies there for you like this with nothing on?'

‘We had models at art school doing this every day. It's normal. It's part of the job. With figure painting you have to work with the model naked before you can understand what you're doing. You have to know what's under the clothes or nothing ever looks right. It's part of the process. It's work.'

‘Just the two of you down here? Does she go behind a screen to undress? Or does she slip her panties off with you watching her?'

‘It's my work,' he pleaded. ‘This is my studio. It's the way it is. It's the only way to see the vulnerability of people. You have to see them naked. All artists know that.'