Prochownik's Dream (7 page)

•

He sat with his back to the gum tree and examined her pencil case. The seams were hand-stitched and it was held closed by a row of four large wooden buttons that might have come from a woman's expensive overcoat. One of Marina's mother's old coats. A camelhair coat that women of her style used to wear. A coat his own mother would admire but would never put on her own back, even if it were a gift. Not a coat he would have included among his featureless mob. The pencil case was a thing that a woman who had learned to sew as a girl might make if she were thinking back to her schooldays. It was an article intimate to Marina's hand, suggesting to him the image of a domestic moment in that grand house, Marina sitting in a deep armchair by the fireside sewing and dreaming, the black rain of Mount Macedon streaking the windows, the dog asleep on the hearth rug at her feet.

He laid the case open across his outstretched legs and tested the feel of an ink pen between his fingers. But the pen was not right and he put it back. He touched the pencils, the broken pieces of pastel, her sooty stubs of charcoal. Everything in Marina's pencil case was toned to a smoky hue by powdered charcoal. He picked out a thick stub of soft pencil and fitted it to the grip of his left thumb and two fingers, the pads of his fingers in contact with the lead, something at once familiar and potent in the feel of it. He set the open pencil case aside on the grass and took up her drawing block. He flipped it open, his thumb smudging the page of her abandoned study of trees.

He turned to a clean sheet and sat holding the stub poised over the pad for a long moment, his knees raised, his eyes narrowed, examining the rising curve of Marina's thigh beneath the folds of her summer dress, the swelling line of her hip and midriff, the turned obliqueness of her shoulder, his eyes lingering on the dimple behind her knee. He braced his shoulders against the tree and, without looking at the pad, his eye following the line of Marina's form, he inscribed a series of lines on the page with the soft pencil stub, the nail of his forefinger touching the paper lightly, his guide, steadying the line, keeping his hand obedient to his eye . . . After a few minutes he looked at what he had done, holding it up and squinting at it, then he bent close and began working on the suggestion of form, giving it volume.

•

As the summer afternoon slipped by, Toni scrubbed out his drawing repeatedly and reinscribed it, his eye returning again and again to Marina's sleeping form in the drifting shadows of the wattle. The knuckles of his fingers scuffing the paper, working his line into a softground
chiaroscuro
, establishing the volume of her form that would permit the expression of the alluring dimple, the substance and structure that would coax the tension of ligament, muscle and bone behind her knee to emerge. He was not a draughtsman of light but of shadow. He scrubbed out with the side of his hand, his familiarity with the drawing increasing with each erasure, the line of Marina's bare toes, the curve of her instep . . . It was elusive, exhausting and exhilarating, and he was lost in his task.
The more you look
the deeper the mystery
. His father . . .

The two magpies delicately removed the remains of the picnic item by item.

Marina woke, suddenly. She rolled over and sat up, turning and looking at him.

The magpies ran away, looking back over their shoulders in alarm.

On Marina's cheek a red mark, like a birthmark, where she had been lying on her hat. A spike of sweaty hair sticking out sideways from behind her ear. Her broken dream in her eyes.

He flipped her sketching block closed.

She frowned. ‘Did you say something?' Her gaze went to the block in his hands. ‘You've been drawing me! What time is it?'

He looked at his watch. ‘Shit!'

‘You forgot Nada!'

‘Christ! It's after four!'

‘I've got my mobile.' She searched in her bag, took out her phone, and handed it to him.

It was picked up on the first ring. ‘Welcome to Greco Travel. Tanya Bacovic speaking. How can I help you?'

‘Hi Tanya, It's Toni.'

‘She's not here, Toni. The kinder called. She's gone to pick Nada up.'

‘How was she?'

‘Yeah. You know? Not so good, eh? They called her out of a client conference.'

‘Shit!'

‘Yeah.' The young woman laughed nervously.

‘Thanks, Tanya. See you.'

‘No worries, Toni.'

He handed the phone back to Marina. ‘Teresa's picking her up.'

‘That's okay, isn't it?'

‘How could I have forgotten her?'

She was watching him. ‘Can I see your drawing?'

He was shocked at himself. ‘I've never forgotten her before.'

‘It's all right, isn't it? Teresa's picking her up. Let me see what you've done.'

He handed the sketching block to her. The act of drawing her had excited and disturbed him. He knew already that what he had achieved on the page was an offer, an authentic mark. He waited now for Marina to confirm it. The drawing was a beginning. It was an offer of work.

She said admiringly, ‘No one draws like this anymore.'

He leaned down and reached for the wine bottle. He held the empty bottle up to the sun, squinting through the green sunburst in the glass. ‘Teresa's going to kill me.' He set the empty bottle on the grass and straightened.

Marina held the drawing at arm's length. ‘I can't believe you haven't done any drawing for four years. It makes me so happy to see this, Toni. Suddenly there's something definite to be happy about. For the first time since Sydney I feel as if coming back is really going to work out. Don't look so grim. Teresa will forgive you. She'll be glad you're drawing again. That's the main thing, isn't it?'

He saw how she was seeing herself as the sleeping woman in the transformed shadows of his mind's eye. Confusing the erotic illusion on the page with her own reality. His wishful seeing beguiling her. ‘You were dreaming,' he said. ‘You kept jumping. You don't mind, then?'

‘Mind?' she said emphatically. ‘Of course I don't mind. God, it's wonderful.' She was silent, looking at his drawing. ‘Today is the first time I've relaxed properly for months. For years. it feels like! You can't remember what I was dreaming, I suppose? Can you? I can never remember my dreams.' She looked at the drawing again. ‘I'd love to keep this. Can I?'

He hesitated, his eyes going possessively to the sketching block in her hands. ‘Sure.' He waved his hand. ‘It's yours.'

‘No,' she said and held it out to him. ‘No. You don't want to let it go. I can see that. You did it for yourself, not for me. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked.'

He took the sketching block from her. It was his reference. He needed it. He examined it. He was thinking of his father. Those first crushing days of his bereavement. His blind grief. The uncharted life without his father that had stretched ahead of him. The emptiness when he had attempted to return to work, the enervating sense of futility draining him. He looked up from the drawing. With the drawing in his hands he was beginning to feel whole again.

She said seriously, ‘What made you do it?'

‘I was just filling in time.'

‘I don't believe that.'

He considered her. ‘Let's say I'm glad to have you around. Let's say Melbourne's a more interesting place with you and Robert in it. Is that better?'

She looked at him levelly. ‘Yes. That's much better. I like that. Just filling in time has never been you, Toni.'

He was still reading her, his eye awakened, tracking her, following the line of her shoulder as if his eye had a will of its own, noting the slightly double-jointed backward angle of her elbow where she was resting her weight on her hand, the invitation to exaggerate, to rearrange her likeness, to imagine her . . .

She laughed, self-conscious with his scrutiny. She reached down and straightened her dress. ‘I must look a fright.'

He watched her bend and put on her sandal. The curve of her back a unique trajectory describing who she was, her history coded in the way she moved, the way she had grown, the woman she had become. Bits of grass and small twigs were sticking to the back of her grey dress, as if she had been rolling in the summer grass with her lover. She had felt herself welcomed home by his drawing.

She kneeled on the grass, her hands resting on her thighs, and said regretfully, ‘I suppose we really do have to go. What a shame today has to end.' She put the orange key float and her sunglasses in her hat and set about gathering the remains of their picnic, packing the things away neatly into the basket one by one.

He did not offer to help her.

She put her shoulder bag on top of the plates and the cups and bottle and she smoothed the tea towel over the packed basket. When she had done this she got up off her knees and stood picking the leaves and grass from her dress. ‘When you're young you think you can do this sort of thing whenever you like,' she said. ‘Then when you're older you realise days like this are never to be repeated. You realise
this
is what beauty is. Something that catches you off-guard and is gone almost before you've had time to see it.' She stepped across and stood beside him. ‘It has been our special day,' she said. ‘Hasn't it?'

They waited for something to settle between them.

‘We'll come out here again,' he said.

‘No. It will never be the same. How could it be? Today you did your first real drawing since the death of your father.'

It was true. He saw the shadowed uncertainty that was in her eyes now and which had not been there before. Something of sadness or reflection, or perhaps discontent. A ghostly offset from those old purple half-moons of her youthful afternoon migraines. The indelible mark of her concealed history.

He reached to take the basket from her and they walked together through the trees. She did not take his arm this time; sensing, maybe, that the gesture might no longer have the simple neutrality it had possessed for them earlier.

four

Teresa's Honda was not out the front of the house in its usual place. As he was crossing the courtyard the sun went in and he looked up. The storm front of an approaching southerly change divided the sky from horizon to horizon. When he opened the door of the studio the humid stench of the old clothes hit him. He went in and put on the light. Setting Marina's sketching pad on Nada's table beside her drawing, he bent and took hold of one of the timber racks by the base and dragged it out of the tangled pile of clothes, as if he were dragging a body out of a bomb site. He dumped the rack in the doorway and went back for another. He worked steadily, sweat soon running down his cheeks, his T-shirt sticking to his back, the light dimming and brightening, thunder rippling across the city.

He made a pile of the clothes and racks in the doorway, as if he were building a barricade. He was working his way back through time, down through four years of dismantled installations, clearing his way towards the plan press against the wall at the back of the studio.

The storm broke over the city, a gust of cold wind from the Southern Ocean whipping through the studio and clearing out the smell, snatching Nada's drawing from the table. He retrieved the drawing and weighted it with Marina's sketchbook. The barricade of old clothes in the doorway was soaked in moments by the downpour. The rain thundering on the tin roof. He tossed the clothes and racks behind him now without caring where they fell.

He was down to the last of the old garments when he stopped. He realised, suddenly, that he was looking at his father's old Sunday suit. He read the display sign that was still attached to the rack:
Moniek Prochownik's Outsize Sunday Suit
. He lifted the rack tenderly and stood it upright in front of him.

He might have been helping a fallen man back to his feet, brushing at the jacket as if he'd had a hand in the man's fall. This was it then, the resistant, unremembered element of the installations that had been holding him back. With care, he removed the jacket from the rack and pressed the dark serge to his face. His dad was still there; faint, elusive, but there, the deep familiarity of his father's smell lingering in the tight weave of the material: the telephone call that afternoon four years ago telling him bluntly that his father had died on the moulding line at the Dunlop plant. In his blind grief he had got hold of his dad's old Sunday suit and hung it on a rack out in the middle of that great empty space of Andy's gallery. What had he intended by the gesture? To deny the loss of his father? He was not sure. But that was it, and his dead father became his first installation; the old suit standing out there on its own like Everyman. A man's defeat exposed mercilessly in death for the world to see. A power in that old suit, something more real than reality. His dad's workmates from the plant had come to stand and look at it, silent, awkward and abashed. His older brother, Roy, the only one who did not flinch to see it there. When he took his mother along she told him,
Your father would not have wanted this, Antoni.

He held the suit jacket out in front of him, moved by the memory of his father, then he slipped his arms through the sleeves and put it on over his T-shirt. The jacket fitted him. It had been a size too big for his dad. The other kids' dads wearing T-shirts and jeans at weekends, and his dad dressed in a three-piece suit that was too big for him. The terrible sense of his dad's vulnerability in that suit. His oddity and isolation. His own agony, longing for his dad to be like the other fathers and at the same time loving him for not being like them. He looked down at himself and tugged at the lapels, just the way his dad used to tug at them, the little smile his dad would give him, a secret between them with this sign, the gods of fire and vengeance placated once again. His father's morbid fear that his nightmares might once again invade the day.