She liked me to sit with her and think up names for her creations: Lava Sunset; Wheat Flung; Emanations; Weather World. I had a knack for it and enjoyed drinking my beer and approaching the task as if solving a problem. I could think on them for hours and have the peace of trivial conversation: ‘What do you reckon, Tilda? Cloud Quill? What about Sky Halidom?’ I admit I got out the dictionary sometimes.
If the greeting was an argument-greeting it was a one-sided argument—it didn’t include me at all. It took place behind her closed studio door and was with Vincent. I would knock. We would exchange hellos, then I left her to her quarrelling: ‘Your paintings were fucking magnificent, Vincent. Pure fucking marvels. Mine are pure fucking shit. Totally fucked pieces of shit.’
I’d put my ear to the door and she’d be kicking over a chair to emphasise her exasperation. Paint cans would fly. They sound like glass smashing when all up-ended. Pallet knives make no noise when hitting canvas, but clatter if booted across floorboards. I touched balustrade wood that she would keep on at Vincent long enough for me to tiptoe upstairs, change from my good clothes into running rags and slip out the back door for two hours of pounding the forest path.
Three paths, actually. The first took me uphill past the sundial at Ringo Point. I always got a laugh there: the graffiti was mostly Tyler 4 Zoe and Cory fux fags, but someone had defaced the sundial with texta—north and south had been changed around. Beside it someone had scratched I’M LOST. Santa.
I ran across Ringo Point to an outcrop of flat rock handy for a minute of push-ups. The sky is pulled down so low to the horizon there it sweeps over your head, over your eyes like a hat brim. A third track bends east of the ridge and cuts through thick scrub and ironbarks. Even if rain blows through, the ground still crunches with dryness. The only colour not grey or black is when lemony wattles bloom in October. This is the hurdle track. This is where you can’t blink in summer or you’ll jog onto a snake. They curl like long turds in a sun-drugged state. Up go their heads once they sense you. It’s either hurdle or get a bite on your ankle. There are little ones called flicks but little or not it’s best to hurdle them, just in case.
Two hours on my running route and I wanted to applaud myself for having a heart that can keep going that long. When I arrived through the back gate I celebrated by stripping to my underwear and turning the hose on. I champagned water over me like a podium victory, which Tilda hated. It was the sight of me grinning and gulping and spitting. It was the pleasure I was taking in snorting spray and moaning as the coolness covered me.
‘Do you have to do that?’ she complained.
‘Do what?’
‘Show yourself off.’
‘I’m not showing myself off.’
‘What do you call it then? You’re saying, “Look at my athletic physique.”’
‘I look athletic?’ I patted my stomach to check. Yes, there were muscular corrugations. Yes, I was athletic, firm across the chest, no loose meat on my thighs. On sunny nights, nights of long dusk, my trim reflection lit up on the kitchen window glass. I turned and twisted to admire myself in the rays. I walked around the house with no shirt on, hoping for a stray breeze.
‘Put a shirt on.’ Tilda covered her eyes as if I was unsightly. ‘You trying to rub my nose in it?’
‘I’m not rubbing your nose in anything.’
‘You look very striking. There, I’ve complimented you. Now, please, a shirt.’
Be guilty about being healthy—this was the undertone; if you can’t be sick with me then at least keep your health and your fitness concealed. I liked feeling well on the inside and out. Of all the things to be guilty about, to be ashamed of!
Yet I obliged and put on a shirt. I changed my running time from after work to during. I parked the Commodore at whatever farm the Wheatman took me to and I ran once I’d interviewed my subject. ‘Jack,’ I’d say—or Wayne or Neville. ‘I’m going to stretch my legs. Running helps me compose an article better.’
‘Is that so?’ they’d say, scratching the hatband rash on their foreheads. ‘Wouldn’t know m’self. Never wrote more than a cheque.’
I kept it up for one winter. Winter meant only light sweating mostly confined to my underarms. Wimmera winters last barely two months, though. By August the full sun is back. Car air-conditioning will dry your shirt if on high fan but the smell of heavy sweating stays with you and pongs the interior. I couldn’t walk in to the office and reek. No one likes those sort of people, the office stinker. So I resumed my forest route, resumed my hosing, my snorting. If I wanted to take my shirt off I would take my shirt off. What life have you got if you can’t take your shirt off in your home, your own private premises? I rehearsed those very words in preparation for Tilda: ‘In my own house I should be free to do as I want.’ There was nothing more obvious than this truth to me.
It was not an obvious truth to Tilda. ‘If that’s the way you feel then do as you want, leave your shirt off.’ She said it quietly and meekly, as if I was bullying her. It’s a clever way to trump you, meekness. It makes you back off a fraction, as if you’ve overstepped the mark.
‘All I’m saying is, in my own home I should be able to go shirtless, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘It’s my home, remember. My money bought it.’
I backed off another fraction, then did some trumping myself: ‘Well, technically, if you want to get technical, yes, it’s your home. If I want to get technical I could say it’s my job that brings in most of our income.’
‘I have no desire to get technical. We are married and we share things. I was just hoping you would wear a shirt to consider me.’
I put a shirt on. But I made sure I played a sarcastic game of ‘Please, Madam Tilda’ when about to take a hot bath. ‘Please, Madam Tilda, may I remove my shirt? May I remove my pants too, so I can wash properly?’
From this point on we didn’t congress again, ever. We serviced each other, never kissing with tongues. It was quick servicing and I used old girlfriends like Caroline summoned to memory to arouse me and get it done. In bed I was allowed to take my shirt off—bed meant the night dark blotted me out. Our genitals touched but not much more of us. She hardly laid her hands on my back. She must have found the feel of it intimidating—its new drum skin and sinew span. Perhaps she used old boyfriends to pique her mood. I didn’t care. I was finished with jealousy.
Chapter 60
Tilda’s jealousy was just getting into full swing. I liked it at first. I came to fear it—felt condemned by it, imprisoned.
I had begun treating Tilda like a fan: I was the important one and her job was simply to adore me. This went to my head. I started running with my shirt off for any eyes that were interested. (You can tell when curtains are being spied through—the parting flicks shut when you wave.) I kept thinking what a waste it was: Scintilla was my audience, windows with only biddies looking. When I panted in through the back gate Tilda stomped up the gravel path to have her say. ‘Are you trying to provoke me? Are you trying to advertise yourself like some half-naked ape?’