Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  I thought I’d bluff it out. I said, ‘I don’t know anyone with the name Ophelia.’

  Frances gave me a peculiar look. Her lying bastard look, though it trailed off to a corner of self-doubt.

  She said, ‘I’m sure that was her name. Ophelia. I kept hearing her name. I kept asking you, “Harry, who is Ophelia?” but I couldn’t reach you. You sleep so heavily these days.’

  ‘Jet lag.’

  ‘No. I’m certain. Actually, I do know. I’ve got it written down. Ophelia.’

  ‘Well it could be anyone, Frances. If it was a name that came out of a dream how the hell am I supposed to know? I can’t even remember such a dream.’

  She sat up straight in her chair and turned her eyes away while she thought.

  ‘I don’t know, Harry. Dreams never come just out of nowhere. Dreams come from somewhere. They live somewhere firm and secure even though we may not know it. Some experience…craving. I don’t know what, except they’re connected. Everything is connected.’

  Later, much later, after I cleared the dishes away, I stood watching her through the glass-panelled doors that separate her study from the dining area. And I thought, it isn’t those doors separating us, or the sanctified air of her workspace. I could see too that she’d forgotten Ophelia now she was at her table, but I couldn’t escape thinking about this woman who was my wife, arranging bits of mismatched landscape scissored out of magazines scavenged from the tip and in a rotting pile by her socked feet. What a strange place for a life to end up!

  I could see her hands sifting through the layers of pictures. The stone walls of Scotland that had been lifted off the stony hillsides of Fife and dropped on to the fertile countryside outside Lisbon. She told me this morning what she was working on. The jigsaw manufacturers F W Horst of Frankfurt had asked for something rustic and heavenly to go with their Great Escape series sponsored by Holidays in the Sun. Snip, snip, snip went the scissors. My wife’s hands moved. The head pondered. The hands reached for another magazine from the filthy pile on the floor.

  She hadn’t seen me through the glass; she was too engaged with finding a windmill. She flipped over the pages. A windmill would deliver a timeless element, restful to the eyes, soothing on the soul. Lovers or perhaps another lonely jigsaw enthusiast would piece together a future life in which they appeared hand in hand beneath the slow-moving blades of a windmill on the lake shore. A lake shore. Of course there had to be a lake shore. For the next five minutes as I watched, magazines were picked up and discarded. The expression on Frances’s face was the same unyielding one that sat through my lies about Ophelia. Lakes. We were on to lakes. Lakes came in all shapes and sizes. She would persevere until she found the right one. It is a nice little earner for which she doesn’t even need to leave the house, unlike Frank, and her own father, Dickie, who for decades punched a card into the time clock at NE Paints.

  In the course of the morning the draft image for the jigsaw would be sent electronically. Some electronically delivered comment would come back. A problem to do with the windmill had been identified. It was standing next to a lake and yet its reflection was not obvious. Not to put too fine a point on it, there was no reflection. How could this be? Some further tinkering and by that afternoon Frances had sent a shadow digitally to Frankfurt. The email came back saying thank you. Danke schön!

  I remember Ophelia catching a glimpse of my ring finger and saying with some satisfaction, ‘So you’re married, Mister Mayor, and what does Mrs Mayor do?’ And knowing that she would never guess, that it would surprise her, I told her. ‘She makes jigsaws of places that don’t exist.’

  14

  The Eliots entered more fully into our lives over the coming month. The first lot of rent Dean paid Alma in such a flamboyant manner must have cleaned them out. I knew the job at the cemetery had come to an end. Now I heard Dean had been down at the wharves and paid one of the scallopers a visit. Unfortunately for Dean he had to zero in on Rob Sciasia who told him he could give him a job but first he’d have to sack himself.

  We weren’t used to having youth live in our midst. Usually they had cut and run by the time they reach Dean and Violet’s age. For years we’d set our clocks to school holidays and in summer kids crowding the beaches like masses of sand plovers. It was simply the cycle of things, I guess. But a young couple like the Eliots were fresh air in other, unexpected ways.

  Some of us hadn’t seen a mother or babies in yonks. Beth Young who has the second-hand clothing shop saw a bit of Violet. Whenever she came into the shop Beth would emerge from behind the counter and take one or the other babies off Violet, sometimes both, in which case you’d see a weightlessness enter Violet; if she brought up her arms too quickly she might end up floating to the ceiling.

  All the same, there was an uneven spread of feeling towards the Eliots. Whereas Violet inspired sympathy, Dean was a reason to lock your door at night.

  The day the rent fell due I drove Alma out to the cottage. We knocked on the door, then pushed on it and tiptoed into the hall and out again. The girl was asleep. Alma didn’t want to wake her. And Dean we saw rowing away like a pirate from the beach in a dinghy he must have borrowed or stolen from somewhere. Dean didn’t row like others did, in unhurried bliss; he didn’t stop to rest the oars. He rowed like he was trying to beat a storm. I was sure he must have seen me and Alma standing on the sand dune at the front of the cottage.

  It was all an annoying waste of time. I’d gone up to the tip to collect Alma. We’d driven here and now we’d have to come back in the morning.

  This time Violet was awake; in fact it was almost as if she was expecting us at precisely that moment. She stood juggling the twins on her hips; as we got out of the car she nodded in the direction of the beach and sure enough, as we came over the sandhill there was Dean. He was hauling up the dinghy and seagulls were flying in all directions.

  He was barefoot and in jeans, those skinny white arms hanging out the loop of his T-shirt. Dean didn’t look like someone with money. He approached us with his head down and passed a beggarly hand across his mouth. ‘Sorry about yesterday,’ he said. He’d gone out to set a cray pot.

  Anyway, he said, he hadn’t been able to get to the bank down in Clearwater. There was a problem with his car, a gasket or something. He pulled a battered-looking chequebook from his back pocket. He would have written a cheque if Alma hadn’t stopped him. It would be more trouble than it was worth. Alma generously told him he’d wait, and while Dean should have been thankful he frowned and scratched his head. It wasn’t as simple as that. He’d have to wait until his car was fixed before he could get to the bank in Clearwater.

  It put Alma in a difficult situation. I knew he was dependent on me driving him down to Clearwater to bank the cheque. He looked at me for a nod. ‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘I can do some business there.’ A lie, but anyway. So after all this mucking about Alma said he’d take a cheque after all.

  Dean went over to the porch where he wrote with childlike concentration, his lips moving as he spelled out the amount; it was the same with his signature.

  In the morning we drove down the coast. It was a nice still day. Blue sky. Blue ocean. Waves piling up on one another’s shoulders for a glimpse of the land. Alma didn’t notice any of this.

  On the way back, after a particularly
long and thoughtful silence, I said, ‘You could throw them out and you would be entirely within your rights to do so.’

  Alma raised an eye. ‘Well, let’s wait and see, Harry.’

  Notice of an ‘unpaid item’ bears a stinginess you can feel right through the sides of the envelope. It arrived in the mail three days later.

  Once more we drove out to the cottage. The Datsun wasn’t there. This time we let ourselves in with Alma’s spare key. The house stank of sand and urine. A few toys lay in the hall. A poster of a dreadlocked man with a head band was pinned to the wall over the bed. There was enough arrested activity in the place to suggest they hadn’t done a runner, and it was hard to know whether that was reason for relief or regret. We were letting ourselves out again when we heard the Eliots drive up.

  Violet looked relaxed. Crystal and Jackson waved iceblocks at the windows. Dean looked almost pleased to see us. He bounced out of the car and began counting from a wad of notes. Alma handed him the notice of unpaid item which Dean pocketed without a glance or even acknowledgment that he knew what it was or the trouble it represented for Alma first, and then for me. There was no apology, no explanation given. He paid the money and so that was that; the history leading up to the moment obviously held no further relevance. The Eliots had just bought themselves another hunk of time, in this case a fortnight, but without our knowing it then events were moving Alma to a whole new set of circumstances where a new generation of portrait subjects would avail themselves.

  Living on borrowed time, the Eliots sometimes go out for a drive. It’s a cheap thing to do. Dean drives carefully; he doesn’t want to stress the car before he’s sold it. At this time of the year the evenings are long and sometimes theirs is the only car out on the road. Violet loves to sit back and wrap her hair around her finger and have a sense of the countryside sliding by. Sometimes something will stick. Maybe Dean will point out something comical. Yesterday it was a whole lot of women’s bras tied to a farm fence. Maybe a hawk hovering over road kill. A hare or a possum. They argue over that, and—possum or opossum.

  At night when the babies wake he gets up and hands them to Violet in the dark, one by one, their little paws scratching at her shut-eye face. If he’s sly about it he’ll slip into bed and snuggle up against all that bodily warmth. If he’s too awake he will go out to the lounge, stoke the fire and sit there until dawn listening to the tide draw in and out. Perhaps this was where the disintegration of things began, with Dean getting up in the night and keeping his own company? With all that time to himself, perhaps his mind went wandering.

  They got drunk one night, just to treat themselves, just to go off the rails for once. They toppled into bed and made love and fell into a deep sleep. Violet slept through feeding time. She didn’t so much as stir. So Dean had to get up and attend to the babies as best he could, walking them around the front room until they stopped bawling. He opened the door and the smell of the sea came searching. There was a rustling noise from the lawn. Probably a hedgehog. The babies, floating under each arm like tiny pink astronauts, looked around with wide-awake curiosity. In another four hours he’d be over at the cemetery trimming grass.

  The new supervisor, Guy Stuart, picked him up outside Granger’s abandoned garage. That was fine, convenient, but he drove so slowly along roads that were completely empty. Dean glanced past Guy’s big immobile face to the mist rising off the backs of cows. They drove so slowly that each cow had time to lock eyes with him. When Guy spoke his lips hardly moved.

  ‘I’ve got a new project that might interest a young fella like yourself. An opportunity’s come up to purchase some shoe manufacturing machine. I think I can get it at a good price.’ Guy glanced across—he’d gone out on a limb. He hadn’t even told Kath about this. He wasn’t into making promises any more until he had them nailed down so they couldn’t escape from his grasp. ‘I was thinking I might move into footwear.’

  And now silence—Dean waited and waited. ‘Sure,’ he said at last.

  ‘I was thinking of calling it Gondwanaland Footwear. But I’ve looked into one or two things. If I use the Gondwanaland name I can’t protect it. Someone else can come along and steal it. Whereas if I call the line Dodo Shoes then I’m on safe ground.’

  Silence—this time even longer than before. But Dean couldn’t for the life of him think what to say.

  ‘Dodo kiddies shoes. I think we could move some,’ Guy said.

  Dean noted it was the first time that Guy had used the royal ‘we’.

  ‘Slippers, sandals, school shoes. What do you think, Deano?’

  Deano. That was new too. Dean didn’t have a strong opinion but as the supervisor’s eyes were on him, and as by the sound of it he was more or less included in the scheme, he pretended to roll the question in his mind a few seconds more.

  ‘Not Kiddie Gondwana?’ he asked.

  ‘Well now you’re thinking laterally. I like that. But we’d run into the same problem. I don’t want to get tied up with semantics. Dodo Shoes is definitely a contender.’

  As the blackened cemetery stones, came into view Guy told him, ‘Of course you must understand Dean that everything is strictly exploratory at this point. I’ve still got to get over the Main Divide and check out the machinery. There’s a hundred and one things to inspect, but if everything goes to plan I’d like you on board, Dean. I like the way you work, you knuckle down, and best of all you go well unsupervised.’

  This time they shook hands. They hadn’t done that before. ‘Oh, and Dean, keep it under your lid for now. Ideas are too hard to come by to give away for nothing. Thataboy. Catch you at four. Don’t slam the door.’

  To be included, to be in on something, how that raised the spirits! Dean couldn’t stop smiling. He couldn’t wait to tell Violet. All day he crawled over the ground containing dead people, clipping the grass and smiling at his change of fortune.

  In the afternoon, on the way home, Guy picked up where he had left off.

  ‘Your dodo, Dean, was seen by Portuguese sailors approximately around 1507. Imagine something bigger than a turkey. Blue, grey plumage, a big head.’ Guy glanced across to see if Dean had got that, and Dean nodded. ‘The bill measured nine inches, or twenty-three centimetres in your language, Dean. That’s another thing. You’ll have to look after the metrics. I’m too old to learn new tricks like that especially when they add up to the same thing.’

  Later that night, the babies asleep, he and Violet sat around the fire talking. He told her about the dodo. All that remained of an entire species came down to a head and a foot at an English university, a foot at the British Museum, a head in Copenhagen.

  ‘What about skeletons?’ she asked.

  ‘By the truckful,’ he said, and Violet smiled. Dean was learning things. She was meeting new people as well. There were the women at the crafts shop. Women in their long green and black velvet dresses. One of these women had taken Violet down to the beach and shown her how to identify those bits of driftwood that contain the soul of a fish. Sun-bleached bits that arched—that’s a dolphin. That’s a seahorse. Slowly this place was opening up to them.

  Towards the end of the month funding for the beautification scheme came to an end. Dean had a sense of foreboding when Guy dropped by the cemetery at an earlier hour than normal. He knew it f
or sure when Guy switched off the engine and actually got out of the car to wander up the knoll past the graves, hands in pockets, dragging his eyes over the broken bits of gravestone; evasive, but with eyes too that had glimpsed the bottom of the ocean. Dean knew a bad-news face when he saw one.

  Guy gave him the news, told him straight, and afterwards Dean picked up his tools and walked down to Guy’s car. They drove back to town without a word. Normally they would have talked at length about the dodo shoes, various designs. But there was nothing said. Guy didn’t bring it up and Dean didn’t ask. The feeling was one of flatness, signalling the end of something. The end of a plan, the end of dreaming out loud around those headstones. In the car he fell to copying Guy’s manner. When they pulled up outside Granger’s, Guy said, ‘Here we are.’ He nodded down at the clippers at Dean’s feet. ‘I better have those,’ he said, and that was that.

  They were back to the needle being on empty and freewheeling God only knew where.

  Dean got a day’s work down at the fish plant watching filleted fish drop off a conveyor belt into a waiting bin. He wore a white cap, white coat, white gumboots. As soon as a bin was filled with hundreds of startled-looking fish heads he wheeled the bin across to the fish meal plant and returned to the conveyor belt with an empty bin. Someone came and told him it was lunchtime but as he didn’t have anything to eat, and was embarrassed about that, he crossed the road and sat on the pier looking dreamily at the fishing boats at their moorings. A single duck cast its shadow across the glass estuary. It occurred to Dean that he hadn’t made any new friends. He smiled down at the water. Here was one of those moments where you could feel sorry for yourself, bask and wash around in it a bit. It was a shame about the dodo shoes though. To have a dream like that snatched away. The sunshine, and these still shadows floating under the pier, put him in a mood.