Polly’s look had turned beady. “Is that meant to be a joke?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” I mumbled, and hung my head.
“Well, it’s not funny.” She sniffed again. “So, it’s me, or a rat, one as good as the other.” I made to protest but she wasn’t in the mood to listen. “I suppose you’ve given him a name?” she said. “And I suppose you talk to him, tell him stories? Do you tell him about me, about us? God, you’re pathetic.” She plucked up the child and cradled her almost violently against her breast. “And germs all over the place, too,” she said. “Rats go everywhere, up the legs of chairs, on the table, especially if you feed them — which you’re mad to do, by the way.”
I could hardly keep from smiling, though I was afraid she would hit me if I didn’t. For all that they made me cross, I relished these brief bouts of domestic badinage that Polly and I used to engage in — or that she engaged in, while I stood by indulgently, aglow with a kind of proprietorial fondness, as if I had fashioned her myself out of some originally coarse but precious primordial clay. I am, as you may guess from all I have to say on the subject passim, an enthusiastic advocate of the ordinary. Take this moment in the kitchen, with Polly and me standing among the gauzy shades of my childhood. The sky in the window was clouded yet all inside here was quick with a mercurial light that picked out the polished curves and sharp corners of things and gave to them a muted, steady shine: the handle of a knife on the table, the teapot’s spout, a nicely rounded brass doorknob. The wintry air in the room was redolent of unremembered things, but there was, too, a quality of urgency, of immanence, a sense of momentous events in the offing. I had stood here as a boy, beside this same table, before this same window, in the same metallic light, dreaming of the unimaginable, illimitable state that was to come, which was the future, the future that for me, now, was the present and soon would fall away and become the past. How was it possible, that I had been there then and was here now? And yet it was so. This is the mundane and unaccountable conjuring trick wrought by time. And Polly, my Polly, in the midst of it all.
“I want to paint you,” I said, or blurted, rather.
She looked at me askance. “Paint me?” she said, widening her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I say: I want to paint you.” My heart was thudding in the most alarming way, really thudding, like a big bass drum.
“Oh, yes?” she said. “With two noses and a foot sticking out of my ear?”
I ignored this travesty of my style. “No,” I said, “I want to paint your portrait — a portrait of you as you are.”
She was still regarding me with sceptical amusement. “But you only paint things,” she said, “not people, and even when you do you make them look like things.”
This, too, I let pass, though it wasn’t without a certain point, a certain sharp point, whether she was fully aware of it or not, another instance of the fact that true insights come from the most unexpected quarters. The truth is, what I wanted, what I was angling for, with this urgent talk of painting and portraits, was for her to take her clothes off, right now, right here, in this chilly kitchen, or better still for her to let me do it, to peel her like an egg and look and look and look at her, naked, in what was literally the cold light of day. Don’t mistake me. I had not been seized by lust, at least not by lust in the usual sense, which is a different class of a thing altogether from desire, in my opinion. I’ve always found women most interesting, most fascinating, most, yes, desirable, precisely when the circumstances in which I encounter them are least appropriate or promising. It’s a matter to me of unfailing amazement and awe that under the dowdiest of clothes — that shapeless jumper, the drab skirt, those characterless shoes — there is concealed something as intricate, abundant and mysterious as the body of a woman. It is for me one of the secular miracles — is there any other kind? — that women are as they are. I don’t speak here of their minds, their intellects, their sensibilities, and for this I’ll be shouted at, I know, but I don’t care. It’s the visible, the tactile, graspable fact of womanly flesh, draped so snugly over its cage of bone — that’s what I’m talking about. The body thinks and has its own eloquence, and a woman’s body has more to say than that of any other creature, infinitely more, to my ear, at any rate, or to my eye. That’s the reason I wanted Polly to be rid of her clothes and for me to look at her, no, to listen to her, rapt and rapturously undone, I mean listen to her corporeal self, if such a thing could be possible. Looking and listening, listening and looking, these, for one such as I, are the intensest ways of touching, of caressing, of possessing.
Well, why, you will ask, in your sensible way, did I not invite Polly to step into one of the bedrooms, even the dank and musty one at the back of the house that I used to share with my brothers when I was a lad, and have her undress there, as surely she would have done, willingly, if our recent history together was anything to go by? That only shows how little you understand me and what I have been saying, not just here but all along. Don’t you see? What concerns me is not things as they are, but as they offer themselves up to being expressed. The expressing is all — and oh, such expressing.
Polly had been gazing at me with a perplexed frown, and now she started, and gave herself a shake, as though she were coming out of a trance. “What are we talking about?” she said, in the fluting, tremulous voice she had been speaking in since she arrived, of so high a register that it kept seeming she might topple over and fall off of herself. “I’m here to find out from you why you ran away, and you’re babbling about painting a portrait of me. You must be mad, or must think I am.” I lowered my eyes, displaying dumb contrition, but she was not to be so easily placated. “Well?” she demanded. She hitched the child higher on her hip — she has a way of flaunting that daughter of hers like a weapon, or as a shield that could be turned into a weapon — and waited, fiercely glaring, for me to account for myself. If her eyes were some more vivid shade than grey I would say they blazed. Still I stood mute. She had every right to be cross with me — she had every right to be furious — but all the same I didn’t know what to say to her, any more than I had known what to say to her suffering husband that other day when he came blundering up the stairs to the studio and poured out all his woes. How could I unravel the complex web of reasons for my going, since I was hopelessly tangled up in them myself? “I know you stopped being in love with me,” she said, with an intensified quiver in her voice, at once sorrowful and accusing, “but to run away like that, without so much as a word — I wouldn’t have believed even you could be so cruel.” She was looking at me with a kind of wounded pleading, and when I still said nothing, only stood there with my head hanging, she bit her lip and gave a cut-off, gulping sob and sat down suddenly on one of the kitchen chairs, plonking the child on to her lap.