by Alex Miller
She listened seriously, watching his features, as if she possessed a full understanding of everything he said, everything that was in his mind, the importance to him of his work. As he talked to her he was remembering waking in the night when he was a boy and seeing the light under the bedroom door, getting out of bed and going into the kitchen. His dad’s arm slipping around him. His dad sharing his precious night hours with him, as if he had been waiting for him. Feeling his dad’s pleasure at having him beside him in the night while he worked. The two of them together. Privileged beings. No longer dwellers in the rat flats, but painting their dreams. Absorbing the arcane language of his father’s art. Drawing and painting the same familiar objects night after night and seeing something different each night in their figurations. There had been no limit to what they had visualised in those household utensils and cheap pieces of furniture, repeating their studies of them again and again. It had been for him the unveiling of an enchanted landscape that had lain concealed from his sight until then beneath the banal familiarity of the everyday appearance of things. You can never paint the same picture twice. It was Nada and Snoopy Dog and Meg and Mog. You can’t hear the same story twice. How often had she ordered, Read it again, Dad! . . .
‘Please, Dad,’ she said. She was anxious but calm. She was not going to panic. She was observing the play of his thoughts in his eyes. She was not pleading with him, but was asking him seriously to have her request understood by him for what it was, asking him whether he wanted her at his side while he worked or whether he would rather be alone and without her. For that had become the pattern of the past weeks, since he had begun the project with Marina. She had been shut out from his company. Exiled from the magic zone of their art. It was as if she were to refuse Snoopy Dog admittance to her bed. Was she not asking herself at this very minute, Is this the way it is to be with my father from now on? Or am I to be readmitted?
He tucked the bedclothes around her and kissed her forehead, inhaling the smell of her warmth.
He knew she was not going to insist.
It would have made it easier to refuse her if she had insisted. If she had cried and ranted and thrown a tantrum. There might have been a case against giving in to that kind of thing. But she did not insist. And then, suddenly, he knew that she was not going to ask him again. If he said no to her request this time, she would let him go without further protest and would turn over and face the wall and confide her disappointment to Snoopy Dog and wait for her mother to come and kiss her goodnight. She was not going to throw a tantrum. That was not her style. He set Mog’s Mumps aside on the night table and got off the bed and stood looking down at her.
She lay there watching him. Waiting for his verdict . . .
What if she never again asked to join him in the studio? The thought chilled him. What if this became the moment in her life when she turned away from her father and began to follow a new and solitary direction of her own? Accepting, in the way of her certainty, that he no longer wished to share with her the privileged world of art?
‘Come on then!’ He leaned down and helped her out of bed. ‘Just one picture. Your mother’s not going to be impressed with this idea.’
She did not show any reaction. She did not jump up and clap her hands. It was not a triumph. It was not a moment for exuberance, but was a reaffirmation of the way things ought to be between her and her dad. Composed, she got up out of bed and turned and knelt on the covers to tuck Snoopy Dog in. ‘You can come on the weekend,’ she told the toy dog as she kissed him and patted the bedclothes into place around him.
In a former time, Snoopy Dog would have been included. Now he was to be left behind. It was her sole concession to the necessity for change. Her acknowledgement that not everything could be quite as it had been before. Innovation had become a necessity and in one stroke she had made it her own.
He took her dressing-gown from the hook behind the door and helped her put it on. It was not a cold night, but all the same he helped her fasten the four pink buttons down the front of her dressing-gown, for he was sensitive to her need for a certain formality at this moment.
‘There!’ He stood up.
She took his hand in hers.
In the living area, Teresa was leaning on the bench talking on the telephone.
He held up one finger and mouthed, ‘One picture. Okay? Then I’ll bring her back to bed.’
Teresa asked the person on the other end of the line to hold on and she set the phone aside on the bench. ‘This is not on!’ she said firmly and she stepped up and reached for Nada.
Nada drew away, gripping his hand, her little body pressing against his leg.
‘Just one,’ Toni pleaded quietly. ‘Please!’
Teresa stood between them and the back door. In this matter, her daughter and her husband were united against her.
They were silent, the three of them, waiting.
Teresa said, ‘I just hope you don’t think you can make a habit of this.’ It was surely a phrase from her mother’s book of good mothering, dug from her memory to meet the occasion. ‘She needs her sleep.’
‘Half an hour,’ he said. ‘I promise.’
‘Half an hour.’ It was an important concession. Teresa stepped aside and went back to the bench and picked up the telephone. She watched them.
He and Nada did not look back or speak. They were alert, like refugees who have tricked the guard into letting them slip across the border, aware of the guard’s suspicious gaze following them, tense in case his voice suddenly calls them back.
He pointed to the far corner of the studio. Nada’s drawing of him with flaming hair was pinned to the wall above her grandfather’s old suit.
She looked up at her old drawing of him, then sat at her little table and got her pencils out and began to draw at once; as if for her, also, an image already existed in her imagination and had been waiting to be brought into the light of the page.
He set up a new canvas on the easel and sat on his stool gazing at the blankness of the prepared ground, struggling to reconnect with his image of The Other Family. Nada’s unselfconscious clarity of vision was not available to him. He sat there looking at the pale field of the empty canvas for many minutes, then he stood and took a large brush, loaded it with a thin grey medium and began to draw the shape of his group with long, looping, confident strokes, reaching and bending and standing back, then up close washing over the negative spaces. He was painting with energy . . . During the next hour a grey ghost of the sculptural group emerged on the prepared ground of the large canvas. It might have been a granite monument approached through dawn light. A massively portentous work of civic sculpture, a memorial to some long forgotten occasion, or a ruin. An illusion of solidity and presence. A first state. Oriel Liesker’s large limbs and monumental head providing focus and substance. They were there, there was no doubt of that, these ghostly presences, figures of memory and imagination, anonymous, seeming to embrace or to struggle with one another. A viewer might already have begun to read their story; something human, tangible, and reluctant. They were as yet still akin to the figures of his installations and without the grace of individuality, without the distinction of personality. Not portraits, but effigies in stone or bronze, closer to Haine’s fugitive figure than to real people. He did not attempt a placement of Marina. In his sense of this picture Marina stood apart from the group and he was unsure of her relation to them.
When he at last broke off he saw that Nada was asleep at her desk, her head resting on her arms. He put down his brush and his palette and wiped his hands and walked over to her. He leaned and eased his arms under her and carried her to the cane chaise, her warm body close to his face. He laid her on the chaise and covered her with the rug. She stirred and murmured but did not wake. He stood looking down at her.
He left her sleeping and went over to her desk and looked at what she had drawn. A triangular little girl with red hair held Snoopy Dog’s hand and looked out of the frame of square paper at th
e viewer, as if the two of them stood before a mirror, contemplating themselves.
He lifted his canvas from the easel and on the reverse wrote in black, The Other Family. He leaned the canvas against the wall and took a sketching block from the drawer of the press and sat on the stool and began a drawing of Nada sleeping. As he drew he thought of Marina sleeping on the chaise at her parents’ home in the conservatory all those years ago, himself crouched in the shadows taking her youthful likeness . . .
At a sound behind him he turned.
Teresa stepped through the door. She walked across and gathered Nada in her arms and lifted her from the chaise. She stood in front of him, angry and reproachful, the child cradled against her breasts. ‘You said half an hour. You promised.’
‘I didn’t think it would hurt to let her sleep.’
‘You promised,’ she accused him. ‘I left you just to see how long you’d keep her. You’d obviously have kept her out here with you all night!’ She turned and left the studio.
He rested his sketching block on his knees. Standing defiantly in the doorway with Nada in her arms, Teresa had presented to him a strong composition, an image that was both archaic and monumental, the timeless subject of mother and child. The great passion of the artists. The greatest. One day soon he would paint them. Something of strength and devotion and ageless determination . . . He sat on the stool staring vacantly across the studio at his father’s old suit where it clothed the wooden frame he had built for it, a presence in the shadows of the dark corner. It suddenly came to him then that for the Bream Island show he must call himself Prochownik. He stood up. It was as if something had woken up in him. Prochownik would be his painting name from now on! It was obvious. Why had he never thought of it before? He must phone Andy in the morning and make sure the advertising material for the show carried his new name—his new name, his old name. The name of his father. It was a feeling of reclaiming something more than the name, a feeling of opening himself up to his capacity to make art. The decision excited him and he set the sketching block aside and started working again on The Other Family. It was to be the first work of the painter Prochownik . . .
•
It was four in the morning when he at last draped the sheet over the picture and left the studio. He was hungry and his head was buzzing with the intensity of the session. The image of the emerging painting swam about before his vision. He crept into the house, not putting the light on but relying on the night glow of the city through the tall windows. He opened the fridge and stood looking into its interior.
The room light came on and he turned.
Teresa stood by the entrance to the passage. ‘I’ll make you something,’ she said and she came into the room. ‘What do you want? How about coffee and scrambled eggs?’
‘I can get it,’ he said. ‘You need your sleep.’
‘I wasn’t sleeping.’
Her eyes were swollen and her cheeks blotchy. She had been crying.
‘When you’re working you’ve got to eat.’ She said this as if he were a builder like her brothers and she was doing her wifely duty—the good woman feeding her man.
He sat and watched her cook and they did not speak.
She brought the plate of food and the coffee and set them in front of him and pulled out a chair and sat and watched him eat.
‘How’s the new picture coming along?’
He did not want to talk about The Other Family. His connection to it was still too tenuous and he feared he might lose it. It was a private thing and he did not yet understand it; the exploration of its human landscape was still a place of uncertainty and struggle. It was a thing composed half of desire and half of dream. It was nothing. It was an illusion. It was not yet a painting. It might not be there when he looked again. ‘This is great!’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
She watched him eat in silence for a while. ‘It’s like something has hatched in you.’
He looked up at her, chewing.
‘You’re like a man in a trance. Like a man in love, if you ask me.’
He ate the scrambled eggs.
‘I’m wondering if you’re going to stay like this? Or are you going to turn back into the Toni Powlett I married? I have to say this. I have to say something.’
‘I’m still the same person,’ he said. He looked at her and smiled.
‘So what is it now?’ she asked. ‘I can see you’re going to tell me something.’
‘I’ve decided to show as Prochownik.’ He pronounced it softly, Pro-shov-nik.
‘So you’re telling me you’re changing your name?’
‘Not for everything. Just for my work.’ He wanted to hear himself telling her in full. ‘From now on, I’m the painter Prochownik,’ he said, and he felt the rightness of it going right down into the root of his being.
‘Just for the painting?’ she said doubtfully.
‘Just for the painting.’
‘It was her idea, wasn’t it?’
‘It was my own idea.’
She stared at him. ‘So if I said I’m talking to a stranger through a glass door it wouldn’t be so far from the truth?’ She waited and, when he did not react, she made an exasperated sound and got up and went over to where her bag was sitting on the lounge. She took out her cigarettes and lit up.
He stopped eating.
She came back and sat down again, taking the smoke into her lungs then letting it out slowly, lifting her chin towards the ceiling and closing her eyes.
‘You’ve taken up smoking again?’
‘You noticed!’ She waved the smoke away from his food. ‘Do you think you can live with someone for years and share everything with them and have their child and still be a stranger to them?’
‘You haven’t smoked since you were pregnant with Nada. What about the new baby? Are you going to be smoking while you’re pregnant?’
‘We’re having a new baby? Listen! I’m trying to talk to you. Are you and me strangers? That’s what I’m asking you.’
‘You’re exaggerating things.’
‘I’m lying in our bed on my own while you’re down there painting and this feeling comes over me that I should face the truth. The truth is, things are falling apart for us, Toni. That’s the truth.’
He pushed the plate away and drank the last of the coffee. ‘Things are changing for us. That’s true. But they’re not falling apart. Change is always difficult.’
‘Listen to him! Change is always difficult! What is this, the wisdom of the male? There’s more coffee. You want some?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Am I making this up?’
He reached across the table for her hand but she pulled it away.
‘No! Don’t grab me. Look at me! You have to talk to me.’
He looked at her.
‘Are you having an affair with her?’
‘With who?’
‘With her! With her! With Marina-fucking-Golding! Who the fuck else do you think I fucking mean? With her! Jesus Christ!’
‘Take it easy.’
‘Are you?’
‘Don’t shout, you’ll wake Nada! No. Definitely no. Of course not. It’s crazy to even think it.’
‘You used to want sex every night.’
‘And you often didn’t want it.’
‘That’s different.’
‘It’s not different.’
‘It’s different!’
He would not argue with her. When pushed, Teresa did not back down. She did not know how to back down. He had learnt early in their relationship that backing down was not a possibility for Teresa. She had that in common with his brother. Once they were stirred up, those two just went for it. It was something in their natures. He was not going to fight her. In a fight with Teresa he knew he would lose because she was prepared to go the extreme and he was not prepared to go to the extreme.
The last enchantment of his work had gone.
Across the road the party was reaching full throttle, the bass thumping of t
he sub woofers penetrating the walls of the house, penetrating the walls of his chest, causing his heart to doubt its own rhythm. He was exhausted. He pushed his chair back and stood. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
She got up. ‘You’re not sleeping down there tonight? I never know if you’re sleeping down there or coming over.’
He put his arm around her and held her.
She stubbed out her cigarette in his empty coffee cup.
‘You want me to stop doing this?’ he asked.
‘You don’t mean that!’
If she asked him to give up the project, would he give it up? Giving up the project would be giving up his art. That was the truth. How to live without it? What else could he do? Get a real job? Doing what? Become his father and work on the Dunlop moulding line? Only Dunlop had long since gone from Port Melbourne, the vast manufacturing plant replaced by expensive city apartments. His dad would not know the place today. His dad would be even more a stranger there today than he had been then. The lines of weary blackened migrant workers had disappeared from Port Melbourne’s streets long ago. It was another age now. Another place. History had swallowed the lives and the dreams of those men and left no trace of them.
Teresa rested her head on his shoulder. ‘I married an artist. I know what I did. I’ve always secretly dreaded the day you’d become successful.’
They went across the room and he switched off the light. They went down the passage and got into bed and held each other.
‘Don’t ever just suddenly quit, will you?’ she said.
‘Shh! Go to sleep.’
She relaxed against him. ‘I need you here in our bed with me. When I’m here alone, the night disfigures everything.’
fourteen
Someone was banging on the window and yelling. He was coming out of a deep sleep with the feeling that it must be the people from the party across the road, who had reached the fighting stage and had come over to have it out with him, over whatever it was he had done to provoke them, something he could not fathom. He opened his eyes. It was daylight. Teresa’s side of the bed was empty. The banging on the window and the yelling was renewed. He got up and went over and pulled the blind aside. On the verandah, Andy play-acted a shocked expression at him, holding his wrist out and pointing to his watch.
