by Alex Miller
‘Robert seems to have been liberated by his father’s death,’ she said. ‘It’s as if it’s all been resolved for him, and now he can get on with his life without having to deal with it any more. He seems happier.’ She looked across at Toni. ‘How do you mean, Theo gave you the key to it?’
‘I got down to the reality of it with Theo’s stuff. That painting there against the press, it’s me with Theo’s head. It’s where I got the male figure for The Other Family from. The idea was straight out of his youthful satyr with his own head. A straight lift. Theo’s idea, not mine. It wasn’t until I began to draw myself naked that I understood what I was doing.’ He stopped drawing. She was bending down, examining the picture. ‘Pose for me naked,’ he said.
She turned and looked at him over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think I should.’
‘Without you this picture’s nothing. Look at it! I’ve scraped you back fifty times. It’s hopeless. I can’t see you! I don’t know you! Without you it’s never going to be finished. This whole thing is still your portrait. The Marina Suite! Remember?’
She stood up and glanced towards the window. ‘What about Teresa?’
‘She’s at the office.’
‘I probably shouldn’t have come,’ she said. She stood looking at him uncertainly. ‘I wanted to see you.’
‘Pose for me,’ he said. ‘Stand there by the window against the light. Just for a few minutes.’ He began to draw her. ‘If you don’t pose for me, I’m not going to be ready for the island show.’
‘That’s blackmail.’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘Half an hour, then,’ she said.
‘Half an hour.’
‘Turn away while I get undressed.’
‘No. I need to see you moving. I need to see everything.’
She sighed and drew her T-shirt over her head and took her jeans and underwear off, placing the clothes on the pile of his father’s books. She stood naked against the light, looking at him, her arms hanging awkwardly at her sides. ‘I feel ridiculous standing here like this in front of you. Suppose Teresa comes home and sees me.’
‘She’ll kill us both.’ He was surprised and touched to see how old she looked in the hard light, without make-up or her clothes. ‘You’re beautiful.’ He drew rapidly.
‘Don’t say that. Please! I know I’m not beautiful. You don’t need to say things like that to me.’
‘You are beautiful to me,’ he said seriously.
‘You are to me, too.’
They both laughed helplessly.
‘What a ridiculous conversation to be having,’ she said.
‘Stay like that! Just the way you are. Your outline’s disappearing into the light on your right side and it’s sharp and beautifully cut on your left side.’ A minute later he said, ‘You can move if you want to. Turn around. Sit down. Whatever. I’ll tell you when to hold it.’
Suddenly they were working.
She stayed an hour and when she was leaving he went out to the car with her. ‘Will you come again tomorrow? Will Robert mind?’
‘No, of course he won’t mind.’ She smiled. ‘That was hell.’
‘It was brilliant. It’s like being let out of prison to be working again.’ He leaned down to the car window and they kissed, and she touched his hand quickly. He stood and watched her drive away, waiting until she turned at the end of the lane, then he went back inside. He lifted The Other Family down from the easel and picked up a new canvas, 74 x 100 cm. He set it on the horizontal and prepared a medium. He drew straight onto the canvas with the medium. He could see the finished work: Marina lying naked on her stomach on the cane chaise, her forearms resting on cushions, her chin on her hands; a woman alone in the privacy of her own thoughts. Not a girl. Not a young woman. Not a pale odalisque to tease the eye of the voyeur, but an older woman, naked and alone; an artist, vulnerable and preoccupied with the complexities of her own creativity and anxieties, the uncertainties of her life. It was the painting he had visualised that day at the auction rooms when he had first seen the cane chaise. It had surprised him. Like an unexpected visitor.
He worked quickly, with the energy of having abandoned caution.
While she had been posing for him she had told him, ‘I used to think that one day I’d go out on my own with Robert’s blessing. It was an event that stood in the future of our lives. My eventual independence always seemed to have been implied in his recognition of my work when I was his student. We both believed it would happen one day.’ She had fallen silent then, and when he had asked her why she had never gone out on her own, she said, ‘Eventually we just stopped talking about it and I began to see that my work was with him. That my work was our work.’
He decided to title his new picture Nymphe, as a homage to Theo. He was working again and didn’t care about anything else. There was, he suspected, something of Theo’s selfish freedom in his attitude now. He wasn’t altogether comfortable with this, but perhaps it was necessary. He could not work cautiously. That was not the way he could do it. Caution blocked his energies. He did not inspect Theo’s books. One was enough. When he finished work for the day, he pushed the carton into a corner and covered it with a cloth.
nineteen
For the rest of that week Marina came to the studio each afternoon and posed naked on the chaise. After they had finished work they went up to the house and he made coffee. He did not let her see the new painting but covered it with a drop sheet after each session. He was cleaning his hands on a rag and she was already dressed and sitting on the edge of the chaise fastening her sandal.
She smiled. ‘You look happy.’
‘I’ll finish it tomorrow.’
‘Then you won’t need me to pose for you again? Is that it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Our last session then?’ She sat looking at him. ‘It’s a little sad. What about the figure for The Other Family?’
‘I’ve got the information I need for it now. I’ll do it when I’m alone. I don’t think I’d be able to do it with you here.’
‘I’d get in the way of the fiction?’
‘Something like that.’
‘What will you do with this one? You can hardly put it in the show.’
He had not decided what he would do with the new painting. He doubted if he would ever be able to persuade Teresa of its innocence. He had not told her that Marina had been posing for him naked. He thought, however, that she might have guessed. It had just seemed too difficult a subject to be direct about. The evasion was all part of their new pact of silence. It made for enormous tensions between them and he hated it. But there didn’t seem to be an alternative. It would be over soon and then there would be no need for it. Perhaps he would remove the canvas from its stretcher when it was dry and put it away, lay it on its face in the bottom drawer of his plan press and conceal it under a pile of drawings, let it lie in the dark for years like his father’s pictures, until it no longer possessed the power to arouse jealousies and dangerous emotions and could be viewed for what it was, just another piece of art. He thought how much simpler it would have been if, instead of hazarding the human likeness, he had become a painter of still lifes like his father.
‘I can’t wait to see it,’ Marina said. She got off the chaise and looked around the studio. ‘I’ll always remember these days working together. It’s been wonderful.’ She fell silent. ‘Your dad’s old suit, Nada’s drawing, all your drawings and your private things. It’s very precious to me.’ She looked at him. ‘We’ve really got to know each other at last, haven’t we?’
He looked up from cleaning his brushes. ‘Time for coffee before you go?’
‘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 tab
le 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.’
