Tom could see Nelly’s choices as parody, as a defensive flaunting of caricature. There was playfulness in her imagery; and something sad. It was also kitsch. By that time he was half in love with Nelly Zhang. Anything that seemed to diminish her was painful to him.
An empty easel was a miniature gallows at one end of her studio. Tom’s gaze took in a large-screen Mac on a workstation, portfolios leaning against a wall, a pear made from solid green glass. Nelly’s painting overalls hung from a hook by the window. There were tall rolls of canvas under a table, and offcuts on top of a cupboard. Music he didn’t recognise was playing on a paint-splattered boombox. Nelly hummed along for a few discordant bars. She was incapable of holding a tune.
Long benches displayed tubes of paint, bottles of medium and thinner, jars of brushes. Tom wandered around the room, noticing things, touching them. Nelly showed him the spectacles of different magnification that she wore for detailed work. There were shelves stacked with folders and fi le boxes. Oddments in a milk crate: rags, a hammer, a pair of pliers, empty jars. A sheet of glass that served Nelly as a palette: ‘It’s easy to scrape clean.’
A notebook lay open by the computer. The collision between photography and painting, read Tom. Their circular conversation. And below this: There are now more photographs in the world than bricks.
These jottings were the remains of ideas, said Nelly. She was only just starting to feel her way towards her next show.
‘I need fallow time. Dreaming time.’ Then she said,‘Scary time. When you doubt you’ll ever be able to do it again.’
Tom told her that Renoir, reproached for doing everything but settle down to paint, had answered that a roaring fi re requires the gathering of a great deal of wood. He saw that this pleased Nelly, although she didn’t remark on it.
With the evidence of making all about him, he remembered something he had heard her say to Yelena about an artist’s muscles retaining the memory of the gestures required to lay paint on canvas.‘It can become automatic. Like you don’t notice your wrist turning a certain way, producing this effortless brushwork. That’s when you start repeating yourself. Competency: it’s the enemy of art.’
A page torn raggedly from a magazine was blu-tacked to the far wall. Tom moved closer: Goya’s ambiguous dog, poised between extinction and deliverance, gazing over the rim of the world.
‘That’s a painting I can hardly bear to look at,’ he said.
Nelly was standing near him, close enough for him to smell her scalp. She was not entirely appetising: her hands were often grubby; her red parka was grimed about the pockets. All Tom’s Indian fastidiousness rose against her musk, even as he was stirred.
When he sought to represent her to himself, there came into his mind the image of a great city: anomalous, layered, not exempt from reproach; magnifi cent.
The realisation of what she meant to him came about like this. One morning, he was conducting a seminar in a room where a row of interior windows opened onto a corridor. The lights were on against the darkness of the day, and Tom caught sight of himself in a window as he listened to a student read her paper. The glass was deceptive, a distortion in the pane or a trick of the light endowing his reflection with a vague double. In both incarnations the middle fingers of his left hand rested lightly on his upper lip. It was one of Nelly’s poses. He recognised her in him at once.
What was more, he was familiar with the symptom. The mimicry of those he wished to impress was a reflex with him. Certain distinctive gestures or turns of phrase, the pronunciation he gave to some words, a habit of leaving his cuffs unbuttoned, a dislike of salads that combined lettuce and tomato, an idiosyncratic way of looping his capital Ks: these, and other traits that identified him, were old borrowings. Imitation is the trace of a compulsion to consume another; it proceeds by assimilation and regurgitation. For a split second the windowpane held enemies, gurus, lovers, a neurotic procession winding back to Tom’s childhood. Nelly now had her place in that diaphanous parade.
Tom glimpsed, at unwelcome moments, something clenched within him: a hard pellet of suspicion. In this he knew himself his mother’s son. Like Iris, he calculated and judged; fi ngered the world to assess its worth. His father, by contrast, had been on good terms with life, greeting it with interest and pleasure. In the ease with which Nelly laughed, Tom caught an echo of Arthur Loxley’s readiness to be charmed by the great extempore adventure of existence.
Nelly was endlessly forbearing, tolerant of the dull, the deluded, the earnest, the video artist who steered all conversations to his gall bladder meridian. Vulnerability provokes one of two responses: the impulse to protect or the desire to crush. Tom could see-it was plain as sunlight-the sweetness that ran in her depths.
Yet he was driven also to remark the ambiguities eddying her surface. One of them concerned money. Tom learned- from Yelena, from Brendon, from others he met at the Preserve-that Nelly sold steadily. Museums across the country sought her out for projects and collected her work. The fl ood of talent and ambition that characterised the group was not without a resentful undertow. Now and then, in the detailing of Nelly’s good fortune, Tom detected a sidelong envy: she was someone her peers kept tabs on.
Running counter to this narrative of success was Nelly’s perennial consciousness of money. She was thrifty in ways uncommon in her cosseted generation, a single bag yielding two or even three cups of tea, meagre leftovers scraped together and refrigerated. Once, when Yelena was preparing a meal for them at her house, Nelly helped by chopping zucchini. Tom saw her slice off a stem, then trim the scanty flesh from around it that anyone else would have discarded.
Nelly taught painting at a visual arts college one day a week. It was reliable, coveted, ill-paid work. She frequented op shops, coaxed Yelena into cutting her hair, stored money away in envelopes marked Gas, Rent, Electricity, rode her bike to save on fares.
Tom watched her going about the Preserve hitting switches, grumbling that her tenants were wasteful with lights and heating. This regard for the conservation of resources might have been deemed admirable. But something in his gaze caught her attention. ‘Haven’t you heard? We Chinese invented cheap.’ It was as stagy as a pirouette. But Tom feared stumbling on an essential, submerged narrowness beneath the pose.
He glimpsed calculation in her friendship with Posner, who served Nelly in ways well beyond the commercial. She had a key to the dealer’s house, a five-minute walk up the hill; a room was set aside there for her use. Posner would lend her his car, take her out for meals and films, buy her books. The digital camera she now used for preparatory images was a present from him. When she needed root canal work on a molar, it was Posner who paid.
At times, Nelly seemed to want only to appease the dealer. Posner would be delivering himself of an opinion, and Nelly would murmur, ‘Exactly. That’s like, just so exactly right’; her dutiful, daughterly manner at these moments approaching caricature. On other occasions she was offhand with Posner, barely acknowledging his presence; and then it was he who was deferential, who cajoled while his eyes remained watchful. It was as if each possessed something the other wanted and feared would be withheld. Knowledge lapped between them, and need, and tenderness. They might have been conspirators or siblings. They had that air of mutual reliance tinged with resentment that tells of consanguinity or crime.
Yelena’s work was included in a group show in Fitzroy. Afterwards, in a bar, a curator said, ‘The thing is, Nelly’s slow. Too long between shows.’ His fleshy, egg-shaped skull was adorned here and there with feathery stubs. He had the soft, greedy air of a baby bird: beak wide, waiting.