I woke early the following morning, took my tablet like a good girl, and began work on Ken’s obituary. I could have left it to someone else, but this final act of rendering Ken’s art into words seemed naturally to belong to me. The ninth wave. The one that purportedly reaches the farthest on to the shore.
The morning has always been my best writing time, and the words were waiting for me. I was summoning terms like ‘career-defining’ and ‘important conceptual turn’, but I had always mapped Ken’s early career using the private co-ordinates of our relationship, so by the time I poured my third cup of coffee I was also thinking about — no, feeling — the first time we met. It was at a mutual friend’s place, at one of those house parties that went on forever, and where you either had to keep an eye on the bottle that you brought or find a better one. Same with partners. I looked up from the ice-filled sink when my friend introduced ‘Ken Black, Painter’ to ‘Leila Whittaker, Novelist’, with the almost-satirical capitalisation implied, and I added ‘barely’, about myself, while holding a dripping beer bottle aloft. On learning my name, Ken started to sing the Eric Clapton song, which many people did, but I always pretended that it had never happened before. Besides, Ken was famous. More well-known than me, anyway. He had been exhibited. And he was sexy. It was during that brief period in the early ’90s when men wore their hair long, and his looked cleaner than most, so I left the boy with whom I had arrived in the backyard, sitting at the base of the Hills Hoist and smoking a joint and crapping on about Kierkegaard, and went home with Ken Black.
I had not really known much about oral sex until I met Ken. I mean, I knew that people did it, and, indeed, a few of my boyfriends at university had done it to me, but not so … flamboyantly is the word that I’m looking for, I think. And with such immediate effect. After my orgasm, I lay back in some sort of triumph (his or mine, I’m not sure) and commented that he’d really delivered on the ‘got me on my knees’ part of the song.
‘Let me paint you like that,’ he had answered.
Not a request, but a directive, as I remember it.
I pressed my legs together, feeling suddenly exposed, while I thought about it. I was hardly the origin of the world, and he was no Courbet, even though he was in his realist phase. Of course, we didn’t know, then, that it was a phase. We thought it was his style. Representational, with a skew, something to make the viewer feel as if they had been tipped a little off-balance, like the sight of a crooked frame against a white wall.
And then, in the way of young people, I just never really left. I went back to my share house in Brunswick a few days later and already felt like a visitor. I carried books — beginning with my Virginia Woolfs, of course — and clothes between the two places in Ken’s old Volkswagen, and then only in one direction, and then I gave notice to the people who had, up until that time, been my closest friends. I barely saw them after that — and we haven’t been in touch for years — but in my callow youthfulness I didn’t care. I was suddenly in Ken’s crowd, among his friends from art school, including slender, languid, mysterious Anita, and a much younger and thinner and cleanly shaven Giorgio, looking like he’d stepped from an advertisement for Italian motorbikes, and cronies from their posh private school on the Peninsula, all alcohol and cocaine and sprawled-out vowels. And I was having great sex, so much of it and so varied. I was also discovering that marijuana did not produce the hammering hangovers of cheap red wine. I was with an artist, who promised to become a name. We were living in a posh apartment that looked out over the Parliament buildings and the city gardens, and was paid for, miraculously and uncomplainingly, by Ken’s parents. His moments of anger, of sullenness, seemed a small price to pay. Negligible, really. How easily I seemed to slip into that world of parties and money and ease, even before Ken’s art had any commercial success, although, behind my usually drunken or drug-fucked gaiety, I feared that they could all smell that I had more than a whiff of the suburbs about me.
But I had my small claims, too. My first novel had been published the previous year, to no one’s notice at all, but I had loved the sight of it in the window of the bookshop across the laneway from Pellegrini’s, with all the other books, asserting its miraculous existence. Veins like Rivers, I had called it. I hated the cover, but was powerless to say so.
At my desk in the house that Ken built, I wondered if I should trace his sudden plunge into the abstract back to the influence of these early days of our relationship, when we were having sex and laughing and talking so much. To my ascendance in his life. Ken had never been keen to articulate any hypotheses about his creative trajectory, but at least he could support my theories when he was alive. Now that he was dead, I only had my failing memory, and failed understanding, and the corroborating evidence of other equally fragile and partial sensibilities to fall back on. It added to my responsibilities, and I already had so many of those.
All I knew, as I flicked through the Manifesto, looking for a citation to include in the word-limited space of the obituary, is that, almost overnight, Ken was all about form. He painted Melbourne Morning, the work from which I have always dated his abstract turn, feverishly, day and night, at the window overlooking the intersection. The screech of trams turning from Collins Street onto Spring Street punctuated our days in that apartment, but Ken was an almost entirely visual man. He would remember the sight of those trams, not the sound, if he were still capable of memory. He painted them from the top, from our view, as rectangles, but freed from their tracks and overhead cables.
Any observer of my obituary-writing that day would have quickly tired of watching me typing, and then deleting, and then typing again. But thankfully, I laboured alone and unseen. I walked about the room, picking up objects that might trigger a memory, rifling through stacks of papers. I found an envelope containing a press photograph of Ken and me, which was curling and ripped at its softening edges. Why is that yellowing so depressing? It makes it seem that anyone depicted in that fading frame is already passé — that they have had their time, and probably didn’t use it well enough. I feel the same dispiriting way about my ageing paperbacks. My hair is very short in the photo, so it must have been taken when Otis was a baby. We are sitting together in the backseat of Giorgio’s vintage Holden sedan. It always was such a comfortable, and in some ways, comforting car. The smell of the leather as it heated up brought back the cars of my childhood, and rare days at the beach, Marian and I jiggling our legs on the hot leather seats, our sunburn already blistering on the drive home, David on Mum’s lap in the front seat.
Ken is smiling at the photographer, a cigarette hanging from one side of his mouth. I am staring straight ahead, my jaw squared by my gritted teeth. It is the profile of a deeply unhappy woman, and perhaps the journalist wondered if my mood was the product of a moment or a general condition, because the caption read ‘Melbourne art world’s smiling assassin, and his literary accomplice’. That is one of the most insightful things that has ever been written about us.
—
Even as I wrote, I knew that the obituary would be folded into the canon, and that it would be assessed as authoritative because of our relationship, the long marriage that had survived against all odds. I wanted to capture the man, the husband, and the father who spent hours drawing with his sons, taking their art seriously, and who, when they were babies, would look at them with a tenderness close to longing when they fell asleep at my breast. Who would tell me sometimes that he had chosen well for them, that I was their light. I was looking for this Ken, that he kept hidden, that perhaps only I saw, and intermittently, but I kept encountering the trickster, the artist, the descender to the underworld of his unfathomable unconscious. And the smell of oil paint and turpentine, although I would never include a detail so hackneyed in a public account. And the more elusive traces of Ken himself. The strange, decaying smell of his studio, like something was rotting in there, and the way his canvases always smelt like stale cigarette smoke. As if his very breath had settled on them.
Diving, Falling can be found here.