Paint Your Wife (26 page)

‘Hold it there. Who told you about Ophelia?'

‘Alice. She got it from Frances. I don't think she will mind me telling you that.'

‘Fine. I don't know anyone called Ophelia.'

Alma turned his head to look at me hard for an uncomfortably long few seconds. Once
that side of my face had turned red he looked away, satisfied.

‘I've known you for too long, Harry,' he started to say. But I stopped him.

‘I can't believe how out of hand this has got. Look, I don't know anyone by the name
of Ophelia. I do not know of anyone called that in this community. Who the hell would
call anyone Ophelia?'

‘Frances has an idea it's that black woman you had that thing with in London.'

‘There was no “thing” as you put it. There was nothing.'

‘As you wish. As I started out saying, just tell me if it's none of my business and
I'll shut up.'

‘Fine,' I said.

For the next minute we listened to the stones flying up at the chassis. Alma stared
out his side window and I stared out mine. Finally I couldn't stand it any longer.

‘It's pure imagination. The whole thing is. It was a dream I had. I've already had
this out with Frances. I can't believe she spoke to Alice about it. We talked and
I explained and put her mind at ease and now she's happy.'

Alma still had his head in the side window.

‘Alice is upset,' he said at last. ‘She was the one who asked me to speak to you.'

‘Now you have and now you know, and now it's over. A misunderstanding in about three
different directions at last count.'

‘As you wish.'

At the Eliots' I was in no mood to draw. I couldn't sit still and concentrate. Alma's
instruction didn't sink in. I could hardly hear him for all the other stuff going
on in my head. It upset me that Ophelia was everyone's business, it was essentially
a private matter. For all the trouble it was giving me I might as well have accepted
Ophelia's invitation. I should have played out the whole ritualistic dance to the
end, and at least have the satisfaction of doing what apparently everyone back here
at home had assumed to have happened. The facts were less spectacular. I remember
I had put my beer down in the dark—her flashing white mouth and some delicious tropical
smear of perfume—and Ophelia reaching for my hand and missing. Instead it brushed
across the top of my trousers and as a kind of automatic reaction I found myself
reaching for my beer again. What had been heating up suddenly turned down to cordial,
and within minutes, as it now seemed, there was a puzzling withdrawal of interest
before she upped and left with that glass held before her.

‘You're not drawing,' Alma said at one point.

Violet broke out of her pose and stared at me.

‘Is something wrong?'

‘No,' said Alma. ‘He's got other stuff on his mind.'

A few minutes later the twins woke—much earlier than Violet had planned. She had
put them down only an hour before. Now she was nervously apologetic. I thought she
must be worried that she wouldn't get her money. She tried putting
them to sleep
again. But when she tiptoed back to the front of the house and resumed her pose it
wasn't the same—there was the tilt of concentration in her eyes, her head angled,
cocked, for the small tinny voices floating up the hallway. Progressively they grew
louder, whimpering, nagging, screeching, persistent, until at last Violet jumped
up to attend them. She tiptoed back and within a minute they had started up again.
We tried to ignore it; it was hard to think that it wasn't malice —they were just
babies after all—but the bawling was intolerable and in the end Alma looked up and
shook his head. Violet disappeared and this time the triumphant twins turned up with
their black eyes glowing over their young mother's shoulders.

She put them down on the carpet and tried resuming her former pose. But the twins
kept going; they kept rolling up against our feet. One of the twins, Jackson, I think
it was, began pulling on Alma's trouser leg and in the end he put down his pencil
with a sigh of exasperation and said, ‘It's not working, sweetheart.'

Violet gave a hateful look to her babies who were sabotaging her potential earnings.
She thought maybe they would go back down if they could stay up a while and tire
themselves.

‘Up to you, Harry', Alma said.

I glanced at my watch.

Poor Violet. The wheels in her mind must have been spinning for her to come up with
an idea that would prevent the loss of chargeable time because before I could reply
she got our attention with, ‘This isn't the first time I've been asked to model.'

Alma closed his eyes. I gave the far wall a doubtful look.

‘It's true,' she said.

It was in a town far from here. She didn't say where, exactly, but at the same time
it was a town resonantly familiar once she spoke of its plans for a commemorative
coin. This was an example of the kind of civic pride we had once gone in for. She
said a search was launched to find the face that would be minted on the side of the
coin. For a short time she had thought it would be her own.

Everything she said spoke of the ideal face radiating hope but not in a beggarly
way. It would be in profile because a profile offers a certain decisiveness. That's
the thing about the profile. It isn't just a face laid on its side like a lily pad.
The line from the corner of the eye to the point of the nose indicates where the
future lies. And this is what people would get in their hot little hands.

What happened was this. Violet happened to be standing on the porch to her house
when a man in a van came to an abrupt halt—a squeal of rubber on tarseal, a forward
jog of the chassis as the driver's face turned in the side window. It was like he
had been looking for her all this while. Violet thought he must be a courier in search
of an address. No one, she said, ever came to their house in such a deliberate fashion.
He hadn't even parked his van properly—she could still hear the engine idling.

She assumed he was after directions. So she looked up at the clouds and counted to
three; when she dared to look again she saw he had come no closer but had stopped
at the edge of the dry lawn to look at her, as though he was checking that his initial
impression was right. He shifted his head to the side, squinting, a squeeze of judgment
in his face because he had been travelling at forty k's when he had seen her, this
barefoot waif in the light and shadow of her parents' porch.

Violet's arms were stiff at her sides. The man's stare made her feel awkward. She
pulled down the hem of her skirt and experienced that annoying rise of butterflies
in her tummy, which was what she felt like when she entered rooms in which people
were already seated and acquainted.

The annoying thing was, she said, the thing that would get her offside with her father
in
the
first place, was this idea that she had deliberately sought the man's attention,
as
if
by raising an eyelid she could bring traffic to a halt. As if in spite of
herself
and
whatever else her intentions might be, she could detach a man from his
van,
and
even—or especially in a neighbourhood as scruffy as hers—have him leave
his
senses
behind him where he'd left the engine of his van running. Even the neighbour's
dog
sat
up. The clouds seemed to drift down for a closer look. She told her father
all
she'd
done was come out for air. He seemed to think her face was a lure and that
her
cast
had been perfect to catch that wily trout in a passing van. But in fact—as
she
told
her father—she had been thinking she would cross the road and see if the
neighbour's
dog
was dead. She had stood on the porch a full five minutes and it hadn't
moved
a
whisker of hair. She didn't want to touch it though in case it was; she didn't
want
to
touch death. Three weeks earlier there had been a death in the street and
she
had
stood at a distance watching the ambulance people pass the body up through
the
back
doors of the ambulance parked next to the green recycling bins and bulging
black
rubbish
bags. These were her random thoughts when her father asked her what
the
hell
she had in mind standing out on the porch if she wasn't looking to lure
a
man—if
she wasn't some suburban siren operating from her porch.

And who the devil was this passing ship, so called? As it happened, breathing calmly
and outwardly at the thought now, she wasn't sure what she would do. The day wasn't
as inviting as she had hoped it would be. The sky was too blue; it made the windows
appear dull and witless. They made her wonder at what moment, precisely, did the
man along the road decide to drive his car into the garage and close and bolt the
doors and engineer the exhaust pipe up through the floorboards of a car she had seen
pass up and down this same street with groceries, sometimes the man's wife aboard,
observant always of the speed limit. Days like this made you ache to be elsewhere.

She was still to discover that elsewhere. She was no longer at school, but not yet
at work. There was a home, but a home with so little space, so little air of her
own. She had come outside to the porch to escape the whine of her baby siblings.
Some days their sounds drilled into her brain. Some days her mother lay like a sow,
the faces of her tiny brothers panting and suckling and sometimes turning their faces
to their older sister standing in the door. They could look so knowing, so alert
to the circumstances they had arrived to; almost as though they knew that if they
didn't get this attention now they would get nothing later. Some days were so unbearably
alike that she wished she could just draw her curtains and default on them.

She didn't say any of this to her father. He would say she was spoilt. Maybe slap
her and call her ugly names as he was prone to do when he worked himself up. Maybe
she was disporting herself like a common slut? Why else would a total stranger bowl
up with his visiting card and leave a van running?

It was about now that she noticed his camera. About now she brightened. And this
despite what her father would later
scoff at—any old jackrabbit with a camera. Some
seducer! Her father would walk to the window and point out to the street. ‘Out there,
you say? Out there our friend pulled up and offered you the rainbow?'

She recalled his keen oval face; an honest face, she remembered thinking at the
time. A clever face spinning out words, entreaties.
Coin. Visage. Profile. Opportunity.
Fame.
The words linking to form a rope with which he could, the man said, with her
blessing haul her out of this world of burnt lawns and finger-smudged windows. If
she would take hold of this rope he was offering she would find herself catapulted—that's
what he'd said, catapulted! And that's when she began to laugh, which was okay because
the man laughed with her and said, ‘Hell I know what I must sound like.'

She remembered the clipboard with the ballpoint attached by string. He needed her
signature, which she gladly gave. And when she handed back the clipboard he nodded
back in the direction of the house to ask if Mum was home. In that direction came
the noise of toilets flushing, doors closing. She said her mother wouldn't mind which
was true up to a point as far as raffles or lotteries were concerned. The man's offer
seemed to sit squarely in the lottery basket.

Now that he had her signature he fell back to examining the house. His face was not
quite as friendly as before. He said, ‘We'll take that picture, shall we?'

She stared back at the lens and on the edge of hearing babies were calling and crying.
The man told her to stop looking so cross, then she heard a click and then another.
‘Hold it there,' he said. ‘Just like that. Good…Good.'
Click. Click. Click.
He raised
his head, smiled, lofted his eyes past her to the house
and hurriedly rolled on more
film. This was definitely one of the strangest things to happen to her. She'd left
the house to get some air and now look what was happening. She was having her photo
taken.

‘We're almost there,' he told her. ‘Almost. Hold it. Hold it… Yup. That is gorgeous.'
Click. Click. Click.
Still with his eye attached to the camera the man had asked,
‘What's your favourite side? Sunny side or the other?' She didn't know what he meant
by the other until he explained, ‘Your deep secretive side, honey bunch. The side
that no one gets to see. That piece of you that lies out of bounds. That part which
each of us takes to the grave more or less intact.' He swung the camera up to his
face and once more asked if Mum was around. He took his face away from the lens and
poked at the dials. She realised she was being given the chance to lie if she wished.
Presented with that option something pushed her to say that her mother was in there
but she was tied up. He received the news thoughtfully and appeared to make a snap
decision there and then. He reached inside his pocket and handed her his business
card. He told her he really thought she was a good shot. He said, ‘I hope you realise
it's not every day that you get your face minted on to the side of a coin. It could
change your life, Violet. Think of all the places you'd end up! In people's deep
pockets. In their hands. Set on velvet cushions. Life is short, gorgeous. It's over
in a blink. If you're not going to climb Everest this isn't a bad option…' She was
thinking as he spoke, thinking that what he said made sense, thinking that she would
like to…'

‘Costs twenty-five bucks to enter and I need the signature of your parents, one or
the other,' and as he glanced back towards the house he thought to add, ‘or a guardian.'