Wife On Demand

by Alexandra Sellers

  At five years old, Jude had been comforted. But the formula did not work for him now, because the anger was his own. His father’s explanation had left out of the reckoning the male storm.

  The maelstrom. That was what he felt, that he was in the grip of emotions that battered him unmercifully and drew him down to a place inside himself that he did not want to go.

  When he saw her paintings of him, of that time when he had loved her and known that there would never be anyone else for him, his rage had almost consumed him. He looked at what she had painted in his eyes and knew that she had painted the truth. He had looked at her like that, with the need to possess her tearing at him even when he was too weak from lovemaking to move. He had had tunnel vision then, he had seen nothing but her. When he sat and she painted him, he could have told her afterwards every move, every brushstroke. When paint had spattered onto her fingers he had been jealous of its nearness to her. He had been jealous of the brush she held.

  In prison, once, they had offered him potter’s clay to work with. He had put his hands on it, a pound of clay, had begun to knead it as instructed, and he had thought of her, of Hope, of how his hands had moulded her, how his eyes had caressed her... he had lifted his hands from the clay then, and never touched it again.

  The paintings reminded him that his first response to her, when they had met, had been hostility. Long before they met he had thought her a little rich girl who had jerked her father around, frivolous, who knew nothing about what was of value in life. On that first night he had taken a kind of perverse pleasure in the sight of her tanned skin, her expensive hair, the air of pampered kitten, because it had proven what he believed. He had enjoyed the thought that he would teach her a lesson one day.

  But his hostility had not lasted. Long before that day he had gone to sit for her he had understood what the roots of hostility were. She became a physical and mental torment to him. He had waited for her to understand the truth, and with every sharp verbal exchange, he had fought the urge to say to her—I could show you what the root of this is, I could set you on fire and we would never stop burning. But he had not been sure of the ground. He had warned himself that it might be dislike all the way to the root in her, and steeled himself for her rejection when the day came—as he knew it would—that he could wait no longer.

  Not until he had seen her face as she stared at his aroused flesh had he known for sure. He remembered the exultation, the exaltation, when he had known it, when he had put her hand on him and she had cried out with the first surprise of passion....

  The pictures that came after, those he knew by looking had been painted when he was locked away from her, had reminded him of his own longing—before, when he was in the detention centre, when he had still trusted her and the not being able to touch her had been brutality. He had seen the hurt in her eyes when he asked her not to come there, but it had been impossible to explain that he could bear what he was going through as long as he was not reminded of it. An hour with her tore at him, made his life unbearable for twenty-four hours, till he had deadened himself again and could forget there was any life other than the one he led.

  The paintings told him that she had suffered too, though for long months past he had told himself that she had not. That what he had experienced with her had been a fiction from beginning to end. That she was heartless and always had been.

  He was sorry for her suffering, but it didn’t change anything. Time would not run back. He could not love her again.

  “Jude, do you mind?” she asked him.

  He stared at her. “Mind what?”

  “The show. Everybody seeing those paintings of you. People buying them and having them on their walls.”

  He smiled grimly at her. “Hope,” he said, almost gently, “they are not paintings of me.”

  She only looked at him, round-eyed, like a frightened cat.

  “The man you painted then is dead. I don’t care who looks at a dead man, or hangs his picture on their walls. I’m grateful that your artistic talent is going to bring in some money—it’s more than I can do.”

  Hope bowed her head. “Yes, I see. How stupid of me to think that you would care. Of course it all means nothing to you now. Just like the song—‘we shared a moment out of time, but now it’s over.”’

  “Just like that,” he said. “I’m glad you understand.”

  When she looked up at him now, her eyes were blank, her thoughts hidden from him. “Then perhaps you won’t object to my ‘rounding out the cycle’ as Daniel put it. Will you sit for me again?”

  He shrugged. “Why not? I don’t suppose you’ll need me nude this time, will you? You’ve already stripped me down past my skin.” His voice was harsh. He did not know why he said it. He did not care about this one way or the other. If he did nothing but sit for her for a year it would change nothing. “No need to go repeat yourself.”

  “That’s right,” she said levelly. “Clothes will be an interesting novelty.”

  Chapter 13

  “If you’re interested and you have the time to take it on, I’d expect to give you a free hand with the design. You’ll be down as our associate architect; it will be a Whalley and Sutton project. And as I said, we can execute the working drawings for you. But you’ll have full approval. We’ll share fees, of course.”

  Jude, wearing a new business suit, sat still in the plushly comfortable visitor’s chair and stared out the wall of windows behind Rex Sutton’s head. It was a luxurious corner office giving a fabulous view over the lake on one side and another high-rise on the other.

  Rex Sutton could pick up and put down associate architects like pocket change. He did not need Jude Daniels.

  Jude’s eyes left the sparkling water of the lake and focused on the man who had never liked him. “Why are you doing this, Rex?” he asked quietly.

  The architect frowned and looked down at his desk. “Well, I would have thought that was obvious.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Jude—” The older man scratched his eyebrow and snorted irritably. His suit, shirt and shoes were custom made. He breathed wealth. “Hal Thompson, maverick that he was, was one of my oldest friends. We were in the same class at architectural college. You are now married to his daughter, whom I have watched grow up. Hope was close to my own daughters before she went off to Europe a few years ago. And quite apart from all that, disliking a young man because he’s abrasive and doesn’t know enough to keep disagreements with his fellow architects within the profession is a very different matter from being happy to watch such a promising career take a nosedive for all the wrong reasons. And that’s different again from standing back and doing nothing while an injustice is perpetrated by the courts of the land. Now, I didn’t want to have to say all that, and I’d prefer it if you forgot I did. Will you accept the commission?”

  Jude felt an unfamiliar mixture of shame and humility. Shame because he would not have believed Rex Sutton capable of such generosity. Humility because he had to scrape to the bottom of his soul for the answering generosity that would allow him to accept it.

  “Yes, I accept it,” he said. He looked at Hal Thompson’s friend again. “Thank you, Rex.”

  When they had discussed the details, Rex said, “My wife tells me we’ve received an invitation to Hope’s preview at the Village Gallery next month.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, that’s very good news. We’ll be there, of course. Perhaps you remember Linda collects in a small way. She’s very much looking forward to it. She says she hasn’t seen anything Hope’s painted since high school. No doubt she’ll find one or two that she likes.”

  “We’ll be very glad to see you,” said Jude.

  “When did you last see Rex Sutton?” he asked Hope that evening over the dinner table.

  “At Dad’s funeral. Why?”

  “You haven’t talked to him or his wife lately?”

  “I sent them an invitation to the show and Linda called to congratu
late me. She’s always been kind to me and thought of herself as my substitute mother. Why?”

  He told her about his meeting with Rex Sutton that day. Hope exclaimed with jubilant excitement.

  “Oh, isn’t that good of him! I’m so glad he didn’t just offer you a job in his office! You wouldn’t have liked that, would you?”

  “Not very much. So you were expecting something like this?”

  “No, not really. I mean, I figured they’d keep an eye out for us...but I certainly didn’t expect anything so dramatic as this. I thought maybe a word in people’s ears, something like that.”

  “Did you ask for his help?”

  Hope shook her head emphatically. “Bút Linda asked how we were doing and I suppose she had a chat with Rex afterwards. I told her you would be opening the office again and were trying to sublet some of the space—you know, just in case they knew of someone.”

  “Rex has agreed that Whalley and Sutton will do the working drawings. That means I don’t have to put out money hiring draughtsmen.”

  She could not read him. His voice was level, revealing no emotion. “It really is great news,” she tried “It must be a huge relief to get back into it all with a project like this.” She knew that he had feared a future limited to office renovations and home extensions. But this immediately put him back into his own league. A small but important building was just Jude’s thing. And to be Associate Architect on a Whalley and Sutton project would be a very loud message in the highly political world of architecture.

  Jude was watching her. “Rex as good as told me that Linda is going to buy one of your paintings, though she hasn’t seen anything you’ve done since high school.”

  Hope jumped happily in her chair. “Is she? Oh, that’s nice of her! Well, they have always been very kind to me. I shouldn’t really be surprised by all this. They did call a lot after Dad died, but I just cut off from everyone.”

  Jude looked curiously at her. “This wouldn’t offend you, Hope?”

  “Offend me? What is there to offend me?”

  “That she is going to buy a painting not on its merits but because she is your friend, to help you out.”

  Silence fell between them as she looked at Jude and understood. As though she had just crested a hill, the outlines of his character and personality were laid out before her for the first time. Hope propped her chin on her hands, still watching him.

  “Jude, what a lonely life you must have led,” she said softly.

  He returned her gaze impassively.

  “Friends are friends, Jude. They don’t wait around for you to prove yourself. If you need help, they give it. And it doesn’t mean you’re less of a person. Or less of an artist, or architect. It just means they care about you and they’re helping.”

  “I had to accept,” he said. “It would have been an act of madness to turn it down.”

  “Yes, I agree.”

  “But this is a handout from the architectural establishment that I have always challenged.”

  She understood his dilemma perhaps more clearly than he did. One of the things that Jude had always challenged in the architectural establishment was the way it closed ranks to protect its members. Most of the architects who disliked him, Rex included, disliked him primarily on the grounds that Jude went public with his disagreements. He attacked other architects’ buildings in the press. Now—just at the moment when he was most vulnerable, when they could have moved in and finished him off, or simply left him to go under—at the hands of one of the most respected and successful architects in the city, that establishment had instead chosen to close ranks around Jude himself.

  So, she understood, he was suffering on two fronts. First, he was experiencing the psychic confusion of someone whose world view has been toppled in a sudden, dramatic moment. And second, he feared that accepting Rex Sutton’s gesture would rob him of his teeth. Would he now become a tame member of the profession out of gratitude? Was this the end of Jude Daniels, the man?

  “You know, my father always disagreed with Rex about you. Dad said that any profession like architecture only kept fresh if someone like you happened along now and then to stir things. He said the profession should be grateful that nature occasionally threw up a maverick.

  “If Rex is helping you now, it’s not an attempt to clip your wings, Jude. He didn’t have to do that, did he? You were already pretty effectively clipped. All he had to do was leave you alone.”

  She saw the truth of what she said sink in.

  “So my guess is that this is Rex’s nod to my father.” Hope blinked as unbidden tears came to her eyes. “He’s helping you back to your feet because Dad believed that you were a necessary phenomenon, and he’s going to let Dad have that. Rex knows that once you’re on your feet you’ll start swinging again.”

  He digested that. “So you wouldn’t expect me to change because I accepted help from your father’s friend?”

  She laughed. “To be honest, if it were me, I’d put a moratorium on slashing up Rex himself in print for a couple of years. But it would still be no holds barred on everybody else. But I’m a woman, and I suppose men would look at it from a completely different perspective. Maybe you have to get at Rex on his very next building just to prove you’re still independent.”

  His face subtly softened, as if some part of him were relaxing for the first time. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I have to go to such an extreme. In any case, I have never criticized Rex very much. He’s a good architect.”

  This was the kind of discussion they had never engaged in in the past. They had met only along one facet of their characters. The fact that they could now talk like this brought her closer to him, made her more vulnerable. But it did not seem to affect his attitude to her. Hope knew she might be setting herself up for bitter heartache, but she could not resist the temptation of the discovery of Jude’s character, even though it entailed the risk of revealing her own.

  Life was not easy for Jude. The hard facade with which he had always dealt with the world was being dismantled, not by opposition, but by kindness. In the past he had asked no quarter, had given none. Opposition, if it affected him at all, had only made him stronger.

  The architectural community had been shocked and appalled at Jude Daniels’ conviction. In spite of their sometimes violent dislike of him, very few had really believed that Jude Daniels had gone ahead and put up a building knowing that it was unstable. Those who had followed the trial had assumed that he would be acquitted: to experts the evidence incontrovertibly pointed towards his innocence, and even those who would have loved to see Jude Daniels nailed to the wall for some dereliction could not be comfortable watching a man of integrity destroyed in such a way. Slowly, over the time of his trial and imprisonment, this view had spread through the profession and solidified.

  So he came out of prison determined to prove his innocence, only to discover that for most people, his innocence was taken for granted.

  He had two close friends from university days. Both had visited him regularly in prison. He had not been exactly surprised that they stuck by him; nevertheless, the gratitude he had experienced because of it had always worked to counter the prison-induced hardening of his character. So in spite of his bitterness, there had always been a crack in the facade. It was through that crack that kindness could now enter.

  Whatever else happened, he was determined not to allow Hope to enter. Jude struggled to treat her politely and distantly, because when he shouted at her, when he expressed the sense of betrayal he had felt, when she explained the world to him in different colours than he had been used to seeing, he could feel the crack widening. It was best when he presented her with the blank wall of his indifference.

  This task was hardest at the times when she painted him. They needed the money a successful show would bring in, and Daniel Johnson had been clear about what the show needed. Jude was artist enough to understand the necessity for the cycle to be completed. If he had still been in prison,
then an “unfinished cycle” would have been appropriate. But he was free. They were married. She needed something to reflect that.

  So he sat for her. It was August again, and the month was as usual hot and muggy. For the first painting, Hope set an armchair in front of the patio doors leading onto the roof terrace. He sat there, facing out while she faced him. Later, she would put him on the terrace and paint him from behind, inside the room.

  Wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, he sat for her in the evenings, in the hours before sunset. It was a dangerous time of day. Birds sang of summer, insects chirruped, wind gently stirred the leaves of the trees that enclosed the terrace in green, and blew in over his face, reminding him that he was free. For a year past, he seemed never to have felt the wind. Now it blew as if for him alone.

  He remembered this room. It had been her bedroom a year ago. Once they had made love here, he could not remember the how or the why. She had brought fresh grapes up from the kitchen, cold from the fridge and beaded with water. He could remember the sight of them in the bowl, how their sensual beauty had almost hurt him.

  Everything had had the power to touch him then, to move him. All his life he had been defended, closed. He had learned to protect himself very early. But she had stripped him bare for the first time in his life; he had had no defences against her. He had been as open as a child at the breast, drawing pure pleasure from her.

  Watching her now, intent with concentration as her eyes flicked back and forth between him and the canvas, he had to fight against the thought of those other times, against the sense memory this stirred in his blood. He remembered the post-coital heaviness of his limbs with an immediacy that seemed to mock the sharpness of sexual need that he now felt.