Prochownik's Dream

by Alex Miller

  ‘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.’

  Teresa said with a kind of resolute sadness, ‘Whenever we’re making love these days I feel you thinking about her.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘It’s what I feel.’

  ‘Why don’t we go out and have a meal? You’re right. We need time together to sort this out.’

  She sat abruptly on his painting stool and held her head in her hands. ‘Jesus! I’m fucking exhausted with all this. I feel as if I’m going to scream or burst. There’s a pipe in me that’s going to explode if I don’t let it out. I know if I let go and start screaming I won’t be able to stop. I’m scared. I never felt like this before.’ She lifted her head and looked up at him. ‘I’m frightened. I’m living the nightmare of not being able to get yourself out of a small space that gets smaller the harder you struggle to get out of it. Everything seems to go calm and normal, then this stuff starts up again. I know what I saw when I came through the door just now. I know what I saw. I can’t take this stuff any more. My head’s full of it. I don’t know what to believe anymore. I can’t talk to you. I can’t talk to Mum. Mum would have a fit. There’s no one to talk to. I talked to your brother. I talked to Roy. I trust Roy, but I can’t tell him what I’m thinking. You don’t talk to me anymore. You talk to her. I hear you in my head talking to her day and night.’

  He stood beside her, his hand to her shoulder. She was trembling.

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ She stood up suddenly, pushing him aside, not violent now but determined, wiping at her eyes. ‘Don’t touch me. Please! I need a minute.’ She stood looking around the studio. ‘I don’t want to overreact.’ She registered the shrouded easel next to her and flipped up the drop sheet. She reached and pulled the sheet all the way off the painting and stood looking at it in silence. The image of Marina naked on the cane chaise, lying on her stomach.

  A stillness settled over the studio.

  The distant rushing of traffic along High Street like the sound of an industrial fluid injecting into a pressure vessel . . .

  Teresa gave a strangled cry and snatched the painting from the easel, driving it to the floor and dropping on it with one knee, as if she expected to punch through the canvas. But the expensive Belgian linen held and did not rip. There was the delicate aroma of cedar as the stretcher splintered, the sharp crack of the fine-grained wood opening up under Teresa’s weight. But the close weave of the linen resisted her. Teresa was panting and letting out moans, wrestling with the canvas as if she had a grip on the flesh-and-blood Marina at last, making contact with her demon.

  Toni grabbed at her from behind but she elbowed him in the eye. The blow was hard, vicious and without restraint. He cried out and backed off, his hands pressed to the pulse of agony in his eye. He moved in again more cautiously, ready this time. He was remembering the playground. He got her in a headlock, pushing her over and bending her double, tears streaming from his eye.

  She snatched at his testicles, getting a grip and ripping at him through his pants.

  He howled with pain and released her, stumbling back and going down.

  She struggled to her feet and snatched the red lamp from its bracket and smashed down at him.

  He saw her eyes above him through the gleaming bracket of the lamp, his vision blurred through the pain, the big lamp coming down. She made a low sound of deep physical effort as she smashed at him with the heavy red lamp base. He held his crotch with his left hand and fended off the blow of the lamp with his right arm. If the weighted lamp base hit him on the head he was a dead man. It struck his lifted forearm and he cried out, the pain flashing into his shoulder. Teresa lifted the lamp and brought it down again. It struck him on the shoulder this time and he yelled again. He knew, suddenly, that she was going to kill him. He saw, calmly, beyond this moment to the appalling aftermath, watching the red lamp arcing elegantly through the air above his head . . . At the third blow he managed to grab the lamp by its shank. He ripped it violently out of her hands and got one arm around her. She was strong but he was stronger now. He had found the strength of desperation; Roy telling him years ago, Every fight is a fight for your life, Toni. He wrestled her to the floor, ripping her arm up behind her back and forcing her face into the twisted image of naked Marina, the wet oil paint smearing onto her hair and her suit jacket, the close familiar stench of it in his nostrils. He heard himself laugh hysterically. His heart was thundering . . .

  He held her, pinning her to the floor, her fierce eye staring up at him like a feral cat in a trap, not Teresa now but this other woman, her mouth open, drool coming out of the side of her lips, her mad eye looking up sideways at him, primed to go berserk the instant he let the pressure off, a run of sweat and snot oozing out of her nostrils, a pink strea
k of blood. He wondered, suddenly, if he had hit her. He realised he was crying. He would swear he had not hit her. He had never hit anyone. He was not a violent man. He was pinning his wife to the floor and twisting her arm behind her back like a mad rapist or a killer, but he knew he was not a violent man. His heart was racing out of control. He dragged in several gulps of air. When he spoke it was with the unfamiliar voice of a stranger. ‘I’ll let you up if you promise not to destroy my picture!’ The insane comedy of it! Let her destroy the picture! The two of them like school kids wrestling on the floor. I’ll let you up if you promise . . .

  She did not answer.

  She was not speaking to him.

  ‘Promise!’ he pleaded. It was the only language he knew.

  Her eye wide and fierce, waiting her chance. If he let her up, she would make no mistake this time.

  He could hear children’s voices in the lane outside. Kids coming home from school rattling a stick along the tin of someone’s shed and yelling to each other. Normality just beyond the wall . . .

  The tension went out of Teresa. She closed her eyes and a shudder went through her.

  He eased his grip.

  She did not move.

  He released her and got to his feet.

  She lay on the floor on her side, like the victim of a road accident, her suit and blouse smeared with the viscous medium of the paint, her pantyhose torn. She was sucking great gulps of air and sobbing noisily.

  He stood over her, appalled. He bent and touched her arm. ‘Get up!’ he urged her gently. ‘Please, darling!’ He tried to help her. She did not resist but she was a dead weight, and he could not raise her with his one good arm. He crouched beside her, a terrible fear and remorse in him. Minutes went by and her terrible sobbing gradually subsided. Eventually she struggled into a sitting position, wiping at her face with the sleeve of her jacket, then examining her sleeve, like a kid who had been in a fight in the schoolyard.

  He stood waiting.

  Slowly she got to her feet. Carefully she straightened her clothes, wiping uselessly at the paint stains on her skirt. She did not look at him.

  He moved to help her and she turned on him viciously. ‘I’ll burn all this! All of it!’

  He stood and watched her leave the studio.

  She made her way across the courtyard. She was weeping. That was the word for it; a weeping woman. She went into the house and closed the door behind her. She did not look back. He was trembling, the pain throbbing deeply in his chest, his hand numb and tight. Why hadn’t he just let her rip the painting apart? Why had he stepped in? He said aloud to the empty studio, ‘No one’s dead. No one is dead.’ It seemed a forlorn consolation. He examined his arm, extending his fingers and grimacing, the numbness spreading, the pain burning in his shoulder and his chest. Thank god Nada wasn’t here to see us! He sat on the stool, bent over, cradling his arm as if it were his wounded child.

  twenty

  He lifted a corner of the broken stretcher with his left hand, carefully unfolding the canvas then flattening it against the floor with his foot. In the peculiar stillness of the studio, he stood gazing down at the damaged painting. The paint was slewed and creamed across Marina’s likeness, streaked across her features and twisted into a vivid carmine and yellow candy spiral down her back. The thing she was lying on no longer resembled a genteel chaise longue from leisurely afternoons of tea and toast in the conservatory at Plovers, but appeared to be some kind of shiny metallic contraption, a trolley, its purpose institutional and sinister. The woman on the trolley might have been eviscerated through the back, her organs brutally exposed to a hard clear light without cast shadows. It was an image from the internal narrative. Was she on the butcher’s slab? Or in the mortuary? Perhaps interrogators had finished with her? Was that her story? Maybe they had thrown her out of a building, or had torn her apart in a frenzy of senseless cruelty and madness, driven by an obscure need for revenge. But as to who had done this to her, or what the motive for it may have been, the painting offered no clue.

  Whatever the story of this twisted and broken woman, the viewer must be led to ask from what experience such a violated depiction of the human body had arisen. Her Raphael mouth was stretched into a thin wire grin, the expression in her eyes ironic and doleful, a last resistance of the human spirit lingering after the body had been broken. The leering naked woman was not a corpse, but gazed out of the painting with her one good eye, accusing and interrogating. His painting had become a Rorschach ink blot; an invitation to associate, to see whatever his unconscious predisposed him to see, himself mirrored in the thing perceived . . . He stood looking at his broken picture thinking of his father’s Sunday suit, seeing the old black three-piece not as it was now, behind him in the corner of his studio, his mute witness, but hanging off its rack alone in the emptiness of Andy’s space; the beautiful, poignant thing that worn-out old suit became after his father’s death. It had ceased to be what it started out being, and had become a new thing, a thing more durable than its old self, its story deep in the weave, deep in the smell of his father’s sweat, its story not in the violence and the suffering of his father’s childhood, a story about which his father had kept silent, but the story of his father’s enduring love. His father’s old suit had become a sign of the way all men falter and break at the end, but do not abandon love. An object attracting the speculations of mind and memory. The claim standing over his life after his death: the artist Moniek Prochownik, The one who made us believe.

  He turned around and looked at the suit in the corner. Nada’s drawing of him with flaming hair looking out above it. He turned from his father’s suit and looked at the picture on the floor again. It could no longer be mistaken for an erotic nude. It was no longer the banal image dictated to his expectations, but had become something else, something he could not have seen or foreseen. Despite his conscious intention, it had become an interior portrait, something closer to the question of living flesh. Chance is not random, his father had claimed. Chance is personal. Each of us has our own kind of accident.

  The pain in his arm was a hot tide moving into his bowels. He had begun to feel dizzy and nauseous. He sat bent over on the stool, nursing his arm, waiting for the nausea to pass. After a couple of minutes he gave a groan and got to his feet. He had to do something. What was Teresa doing? Was she still in the house, or had she gone to her mother’s? Or to Gina’s to pick up Nada? They had never been convinced by him, now they would be appalled. Or was she waiting for him to come out, the carving knife in her hand, ready to plunge it into his belly and finish the job? He could still see the insanity in her eyes as she swung the lamp over his head. Was the situation going to get worse yet or had the peak of it passed? How could he tell? Carefully he moved the red lamp aside with his foot and stepped across to the window. He lifted the sheet and looked over towards the house. There was no movement in the kitchen. The house was uninhabited. He knew it. He was too alone with what had happened. He needed to talk to someone. He took the telephone from the wall bracket and dialled his brother’s number. Roy knew about this kind of thing. Roy had dealt with it. Violence had been Roy’s home territory. Roy was the one among them who would not panic at the sight of blood. Hadn’t they always turned to Roy whenever one of them had been threatened? Call Roy, he’ll know what to do.

  Roy picked up and said hello.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Toni asked shakily.

  ‘Sitting at my window watching traffic,’ Roy said. ‘Why, what are you doing?’

  ‘I had a fight with Teresa.’

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I think I might have a broken arm.’

  There was a silence while Roy took in the seriousness of the situation. ‘Is Terry okay?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t kill her if that’s what you’re thinking. Physically she’s fine.’ Remembering the man Roy had killed all those years ago, not meaning to kill him, only to fight him, to warn him off, to force him to cease his senseless persecution of
their father—but the man’s heel catching the concrete kerb of the yard out the front of the flats as he backed away from Roy’s fierce advance. Roy’s fist taking him in the throat and the man going down. The crack of his skull on the concrete like the crack of the cedar stretcher. So easy. And it was all over. Everything changed. Their lives were silenced for years.

  ‘Did you hit her?’ Roy asked, no change in his tone.

  ‘No. I don’t think so. No! I’m sure I didn’t hit her. I wrestled her to the ground but I didn’t hit her.’ It was a fine distinction—wrestled, but did not strike his wife with a closed fist. Did the law recognise the significance of such a distinction? In the end, the law had not acknowledged Roy’s lack of intention to kill. ‘She was hitting me with the lamp,’ Toni explained. ‘She could have killed me. I had to do something. She says she’s going to burn my work.’ His story sounded melodramatic and exaggerated and as if he were talking about someone else.

  ‘You can never tell what people will do when they’re hurting badly enough,’ Roy said. He spoke as if he were making a general observation about people’s behaviour. ‘They step out of themselves. You want me to come over? I could talk to her.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s here. What do you reckon?’

  ‘Maybe you should ring your mate Andy and get him to come over there and take your pictures to his place for safekeeping. That’ll be one problem off your mind. Then see someone about your arm.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Call me back if you want me to come over and talk to Terry.’ When Toni did not say anything, Roy said, ‘Give her a bit of space. She’s going to need some space from you. Terry’s not a woman to lay down and take it.’

  ‘I know. I know that.’ Toni was silent. ‘Don’t you want to know what the fight was about?’