by A L McCann
“What else do you know?” he asked, still lingering over the shape of her legs, the way she held a cigarette, the hint of a dimple, the purse of her lips.
“Not much. I know he’s in the theatre. I think he manages something. Not sure what.”
“Nothing else?” Paul asked sceptically.
“I ain’t going about biting the hand that feeds me, am I?” she said.
“He’s paid you?”
“‘Course he has. He said I’m to serve in the name of the art of the future.”
Paul tried to take this declaration in his stride, concealing his discomposure at the thought of her capacity to serve, and of Gines’s hand in the orchestration of their meeting. He was conscious of maintaining at least the fiction of the artist’s aloofness.
“All right then,” said Paul. “Have you modelled before?”
“I’d say we’re both new at this, wouldn’t you?” Roxanne said with a smirk. “Where do you want me?”
The varying hues of the woman’s skin worked their way into Paul’s vision as she undressed before him and, still shivering, sat back down on the couch, affecting an air of casualness as she lifted one stockinged leg towards her chest and stretched the other out across the Persian rug.
Paul felt the blood rushing into his penis as he fidgeted indecisively at the easel. He tried not to stare, acting as if he knew what he was doing, and endeavoured to push the fact of her nakedness from his mind. Finally he squirted some paint onto a palette and started dabbing at the blank canvas. He worked quickly, eager to be done with it. The play of shadow looked more like a series of greenish bruises on her mottled skin. His abrasive, reddish brushstrokes might have been scratch marks weaving through sallow flesh, circling around the tonal intensity of black vulva and florid purple lips dominating the centre of the image. Her limbs were like extended, sinewy knots or the gnarled branches of a dead tree twisting around her torso. He made her neck disproportionately long, extending it forward into an erect posture that highlighted her sharp chin and the unnerving symmetry of her clear, green eyes. Paul smoked as he painted, mixing greens and blues and reds into the flesh tones, barely paying attention to the background at all, which was little more than a mess of errant brushstrokes.
When he paused and Roxanne stood up to look at herself she was appalled. “My God, I don’t look nothing like that. You’ve turned me into a hag.”
“Don’t be stupid. I’ve turned you into the thing of flesh and bone that you are, not tried to hide you under a contrived, artificial surface.”
She looked again. “I’m hideous.”
“Call it what you want,” he said, enthused. “I could have painted you like a corpse. A smooth white surface with still, lifeless limbs. Would that have flattered you more?”
“I’m not sure about you,” she said, sitting down again. “You’re weird.” She smiled at the thought of it. “Do I really seem hideous to you?”
Paul’s head was buzzing. The heater had taken the chill from the room and Roxanne’s body gradually lost its reserve as she held herself in front of him, dissected by his maddened, increasingly frantic stare. He could channel his lust for her into the paint for only so long. Finally he put down his brushes. Roxanne rolled over onto her stomach and rested her head on her arms. He sat down beside her and stroked her back.
“Do you want it, then?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
She sat up and fondled his collar, running her forefinger along his jaw. On cue she leaned into him, sighing theatrically as he groped her buttocks, sliding her hands up inside his shirt, tossing her head back, losing herself in the performance. The urgency in her movements made Ondine seem so hesitant by comparison. Paul pushed his sister from his mind and threw himself at Roxanne. She stifled a laugh at his ineptitude and kept her mind firmly fixed on the quiver in her breathless gasping.
For the next month Paul worked feverishly, neglecting the Gallery School and avoiding Bannister, who sensed that the boy had ignored his advice and recklessly struck off on his own path. Paul kept Ondine away from the studio on the days when he’d arranged to see Roxanne, and treated his model with the freedom that came from the low esteem in which he held her. In four weeks he finished six canvases, each a full-body portrait in the same expressionist style, each with a crudely patched-up background of soft yellow or pearl white that was inconsequential to the violently arranged bodies in the foreground. Roxanne figured in three of these paintings. Other women from the Arcadia Club had posed for the remaining three. In consort with Gines he arranged an evening for a public showing in the Little Collins Street shopfront and placed advertisements in the Argus and the Age.
A few days before the appointed night, Bannister appeared blocking the narrow footpath as he knocked on the glass door and peered into the dark hallway that led to the studio. Paul was surprised, but let him in and nervously showed him through to the paintings, fully expecting the teacher’s disapproval.
Bannister paused and surveyed the room with its exotic, somewhat exhausted sense of opulence. The six canvases were pushed up against the wall. He glanced at them and shook his head.
“Paul, I’ve come to try to stop you.”
“What do you mean?” Paul pretended to be puzzled.
“If you make an exhibit of these, these works, you’ll be a laughing-stock.”
“A laughing-stock?” he replied with a callow puffing of the chest. “If I sell them for over a hundred pounds I promise you that no one will laugh.”
“And who’s going to pay that sort of money?” Bannister asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “Money like that just doesn’t materialise out of thin air.”
“Gines has assured me they’ll all sell.”
“And who in billy-o’s name is this Gines?”
“Clearly someone with a keen eye for the contemporary.”
“Please Paul. This is Melbourne, not a Henri Murger novel. The dreams of the artist have to be tempered by some harsh realities. What’s more, the public taste hasn’t even learnt to accommodate a Norman Lindsay. You’ll be lucky not to be charged with obscenity and dragged before the magistrate’s court.”
Bannister glanced around again at the naked limbs, the crimson pudenda visible underneath raised skirts, the abrasive, flushed features that reminded him of consumptives, and the sinister, serpent eyes of a wild, reptilian sensuality. For a moment he saw something he couldn’t quite describe. He couldn’t tell himself that these were accomplished paintings. On the contrary, he thought them vile and impure. But at the back of his mind was some half-formed sense of paint and flesh, a vision of intensity just beyond his reach.
“Paul, these barely get beyond the visual gimmicks of pornographic illustration, though with none of the poise and control. As for Gines, I’ve never seen the man before in my life, though he claims to know me from somewhere or other. I’d say the man is a charlatan, though God only knows what he’s playing at.”
The two men were quiet and Bannister knew his efforts were defeated.
The day before the exhibition opening Paul was so anxious that he didn’t sleep for a whole twenty-four hours. As his moment arrived he was both frantic and fatigued. Anna and Winton appeared early with Ondine, but almost immediately decided that they couldn’t be seen anywhere near such compromising images. They awkwardly withdrew, insisting that Ondine, who was also embarrassed for her brother, leave with them.
“I would like to stay. It’s so important to him,” she remonstrated, secretly confident that her mother and her stepfather wouldn’t be persuaded. She couldn’t quite admit it, but the canvases were insulting. She wondered whether her brother hated the women he had painted and wondered whether that was how he saw her as well.
“Come along, Ondine,” Winton said. “I’d drag Paul out as well if he weren’t the one responsible for these abominations. What on earth was the young man thinking?”
Anna was already on the street, careful not to look back through the plate-glass for fea
r of catching her son’s disappointment. A tremor of disgust ran through her. Once she had looked at Paul’s drawings and dismissed them as the innocent works of a child. Now his paintings made her think of Albert pushing her down and raking her body like a wild beast. Is that what men see? She caught her breath and stood there in the twilight, frozen in horror at the thought of the correspondence between the father and son. It was not mere nakedness that shocked her, it was the violence intimated by the brushstrokes. It was too awful to think about. They would have to get help for him. Charles would know of someone good. A doctor or an alienist who could talk Paul through his ghastly visions towards a healthier state of mind. She regained her composure as Winton led Ondine towards her. He took Anna’s hand, but ashamed of her son she couldn’t look into his eyes.
Paul was in such a stupor that he barely noticed them leaving or, at least, pretended that their presence was a matter of little consequence to him. Other people glided in, students from the Gallery School, faces that he recognised from Fasoli’s, and night-birds from the queer end of Bourke Street or the peepshows at the Eastern Market, all helping themselves to wine and champagne. Hamish was loyally slouched in a corner, happy that his lowly occupation at the hospital rendered him anonymous to the passers-by who gazed through the window or took a timid step or two into the exhibition only to withdraw in disgust. He’d watched Anna leave and realised that the whole exhibition was in such bad taste that it would be difficult for Paul to regain his family’s confidence.
The evening took on a delirious, dreamlike atmosphere. Paul felt unsure on his feet and as the tobacco smoke got the better of him he became faint. When Roxanne appeared, draped in a fur and made-up with a thick layer of rice powder, carmine cheeks and glistening red lips, he thanked his lucky stars that Ondine and his mother had left, and glimpsed for the first time, with a sense of shock that would grow more pronounced as the night wore on, what dissipated company he was keeping. Roxanne looked like a garish china doll.
“Hello there, handsome,” she said, embracing him. “Is my cunt famous yet?” She’d brought the three other models from the Arcadia Club with her. Maggie, Violet and Minuette, faded flowers miraculously resuscitated by the powers of night, mingled through the crowd, effortlessly holding its attention as they posed theatrically before their portraits.
“Not famous just yet,” said Paul gloomily.
Where the hell was Gines, he wondered. He’d expected him to magically appear, rescuing him from the ignominy into which he was fast sinking with the promise of a three-figure banknote for his trouble. The crowd seemed to swell around him. Young men, larrikins most probably, were now jostling past to admire the paintings. One almost stumbled right over him. Roxanne clung to the lapel of his jacket, pushing her breasts into him, while Paul almost had to prop himself up against her. Her skin gave off a poisonous, artificial scent that overwhelmed the room’s rank, asphyxiating mixture of sweat and smoke.
The gathering was getting rowdier and Paul cursed the second-rate throng of the colonies. He was staggered at the uncouth individuals, some no better dressed than swaggies or street urchins. The night dragged on and still there was no sign of Gines. In the studio Roxanne entertained her friends on the velvet-covered couch, holding court in front of a host of leering young men. Who are these people, Paul thought.
He was on the verge of throwing everyone out, which would probably have been impossible, when in through the front door walked Ralph Matthews. Paul shrank in front of the confident, unabashed step of his sister’s suitor. He wished he could say Ralph was a fool, but the casual detachment with which he made his way through the mêlée towards Paul, who knew he was looking haggard and tired in the glass by comparison, made a mockery of these wishes.
“Hello, Paul,” said Ralph, offering his hand.
“Come to find the Zeitgeist, have we?” said Paul, trying his best not to slur his words.
“I’d hoped to find your sister here, but on reflection,” he said looking around him with subdued amusement, “it’s not really a place for a decent young woman, is it?”
Paul was enraged. The room was spinning around him as if the alcohol he’d been steadily consuming had suddenly rushed from his stomach to his head, demolishing his sense of balance and proportion. He fell against Ralph, who picked him up and, with the help of Hamish who had just appeared from his corner, led him into the studio.
“Jesus,” Paul heard Ralph say on beholding Roxanne and her ilk sprawled about the room, half-hidden in the deep crimson shadows thrown off by the Venetian lamp. The scene before them – the dim lighting, the bloodstained darkness and the ghostly white of the women’s make-up – had the aura of a monstrous pantomime. Paul lifted himself up to attention and shook his head in his hands, hoping to regain his focus.
“What d’ya say?” Paul mumbled aggressively.
“Can you take care of him?” Ralph asked Hamish. “I guess I’m not wanted here.”
Before Hamish could answer he noticed Paul dribbling a viscous yellow liquid from his mouth and hurried him to the back door, where he vomited into the darkness of the alley. Hamish, hand under his stomach, eased him onto the cobblestones.
“Just leave me for a bit,” Paul said, on his knees. The cool night air had already revived him and he felt his stomach purge again, contracting into a short, violent spasm of anger that yielded nothing but a string of saliva tainted with bile.
“Doing some painting out there, are ya?” he heard a voice roar above the general din behind him. There was the sound of glass smashing and another roar of laughter mingling with the shriller giggling of a woman, maybe Roxanne, he couldn’t tell. In a moment of resolve Paul picked himself up and went back inside, determined to throw this horde of freeloaders onto the street.
“I’ve ruined my fucking life,” he said to Hamish, who was standing just inside the door.
“Don’t be absurd,” his friend said. “You want me to kick this lot out?”
But the crowd was already thinning of its own accord, as if the blister had burst and its poison were dissipating. The alcohol had run dry and the night-birds of the city had begun to move off in search of other pleasures. Ralph approached Paul again.
“Why don’t we just close up the front, eh?” he said calmly.
Paul couldn’t look into his eyes, but nodded despondently. He sat down beside Roxanne, who wrapped a leg around him and kissed him on the mouth, herself too drunk to taste the vomit on his breath. Paul hoped that Ralph wouldn’t reappear to accuse him with his good-natured, even-headed attitude. By the time Hamish returned to the studio, without Ralph, an exhausted silence had descended on the room. Besides Roxanne and Maggie, only Hamish and, of all people, old Les from Fasoli’s remained.
Paul was surprised that he hadn’t noticed him before. Les was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, lazily sucking on a bottle hidden in a brown paper bag. Maggie had taken to him and was stroking his rough, unshaven chin with a drowsy affection, both treacherous and condescending. The place looked as if it had just hosted a riot.
Paul dragged himself up and went to the basin, splashing some water on his pale face.
“Like a swig?” Les held the bottle towards him.
Paul took it without a word and choked back a mouthful of whisky, spluttering like a consumptive.
“That’s bloody good Scotch whisky, young fella,” Les said.
Paul fell back down next to Roxanne.
“I take it you ain’t sold a cracker, eh?” Les croaked from the floor.
“Leave off, Les,” said Roxanne, “we can’t all be fucking big-wigs.”
She’d noticed Paul’s depressed state and, with a degree of sympathy that surprised him, modulated her own mood accordingly.
“You know him?” Paul asked.
“‘Course. Don’t you know who that is? His eminence? How’s that, Les? One person in the city that don’t know ya.”
“Leave it off, ya cruel bitch,” Les said.
“Tha
t’s Christopher Leslie Collins,” Roxanne went on with pomp in her voice. “A genius forgotten by the twentieth century. Can’t afford to buy his own books back from the second-hand stalls. Lives on the charity of whores.”
“Leave off, ya cruel bitch,” he said again, this time in a cracked, lifeless monotone.
“The Life of Charles Whitehead,” said Hamish.
“Hurray. You read it, then?” Les said ironically.
“Heard of it,” Hamish corrected, feeling awkward and out of place.
“Well good for you, young man. Good for you.” Les’s voice tapered off into resignation.
“You’re a writer?” asked Paul.
“Was, mate. Now I’m a drunk.” He said this with a finality that suggested it would be futile to try to talk to him about his work.
Paul shuddered. The skeleton of a man in front of him, the wasted cheeks, and the sad eyes reddened with alcohol and the life of the streets, offered him a vision of the misery that now clawed at him out of the crimson half-light of the surrounding shambles.
“You feel like coming back to the Arcadia?” Roxanne said. “At least we’ll find something to drink there.”
“What else does the place have to recommend it?” Paul asked.
“Ya never been there?” Les said, perking up.
“No.”
“Never?” Les addressed Roxanne.
“I didn’t think he’d be the type, did I?” she protested.
“By God girl, take a look at his paintings.”
Paul’s interest was piqued. He was already feeling wretched and almost fancied a good dose of self-mortification as a way of completing his fall.
“All right then, let’s go,” Roxanne said.
“Where is this place?” Paul asked.
“Not far, just off Little Lon.”
The group roused itself. Les walked arm in arm with Maggie, who had almost fallen asleep on his shoulder. Roxanne draped herself around Paul and seemed to be both dragging him down and holding him up. Hamish reluctantly tagged along in the wake of this odd collection, determined that he’d keep watch over Paul until he was safely away from the underworld and back at St Vincent Place, which now seemed as remote as the surface of the earth to someone trapped at its sulphurous centre.
