The Philosopher's Wife

The painter was not lonely. He was alone but never lonely.

He felt nothing as complicated or as fierce as lonely, so he would lead you to believe. The painter craved silence. Not the silence of quietness, but the silence of something nearer to loneliness. For in a city as big as this one aural silence did not exist. The painter’s craving was for the silence of separation. A silence that is only found through solitude.

He would often walk up the busy high road and suddenly stop, his gaze lifting as if he had heard someone call his name from a distance. He wasn’t looking for anything though; his eyes would wander across tops of people’s heads, off into the distance, at a secret something far ahead. And as people bubbled up around him he would enjoy that perfect detachment, that solitude.

The painter lived a simple life. However, achieving that level of simplicity had involved careful planning. First, the painter was to live alone, which meant finding a flat small enough that he could afford the rent. Next, the painter was to slowly dissolve friendships. This was best done over time, so that the absence was hardly noticed by either party. This turned out to be one of the simplest processes. For, although friendships take a lot of work to cultivate, they can take a matter of days, sometimes seconds, to destroy.

The painter had one friend, however, and this was the philosopher. The philosopher surrounded himself with people, and was as obsessively preoccupied with other people and their lives as much as the painter was naïve to them. The two men would meet in a greasy spoon each week, always at the same table. The philosopher had a wife who ritually counted calories, and in a futile act of rebellion the philosopher would order the greasiest, most unhealthy thing on the menu whenever he eat without her. On this occasion the painter’s stomach was cramped with whiskey from the night before and he ordered toast and coffee.

When the philosopher’s plate arrived the painter’s stomach buckled violently. He pushed his own plate of toast away from him and took a sip of coffee. They sat in silence whilst the philosopher ate. When he had finished there was a puddle of egg yolk left in the middle of the plate. The philosopher did not like to talk and eat at the same time, and would impose this rule always, even in restaurants. As his wife had so little interest in eating, this was not a problem, as they rarely had the misfortune to visit restaurants. The philosopher began to speak. The painter watched the philosopher’s face as he spoke; wandered along the contours of his skin as if it were terrain, the imagined land of an ordinance survey map. Swelling and folding, creasing and stretching. Across the cheekbone, rising with the nose, knotting itself into creases between the eyebrows, the smooth surface of the forehead.

*

Outside, the breeze stiffened suddenly. The sky was a pale grey, a nothing sort of colour, the philosopher said. The painter looked up and saw pink and pale yellow, blots of indigo like spilled ink, the swelling cloud of blue as a loaded brush blots water. A rook flew overhead, a quick dart of black. It cawed a ripe, round-sounding call. The painter shook the philosophers hand and they separated, one heading north, the other south.

When he got home the painter thought about the philosopher’s wife. She was a wiry creature, so self-consciously tall that she had developed a slight stoop, craning her shoulders up and her neck forwards. She had huge wild eyes, harassed with episodic panic, and yet her manner was soft and calm. Her hands were what struck the painter. Slender and gentle, with a way of clutching and moving that he could not begin to explain, even with paint. He had watched these hands move many times; stir tea, draw curtains, smooth folds of skirt, brush away wisps of hair.

The painter had modified his flat for its exact use. It consisted of just two rooms; a living space and a bathroom. The kitchen was at one end of the main room, with a pointless waist-height wall jutting out from one side to provide division between kitchen and living space. However, the kitchen was quite large and the painter had pulled his bed, a low double camping cot, to one side of it. On the waist-height wall he had balanced a bookshelf, the weight of books stabilising it. This newly devised kitchen area, with his bed at one side and the bathroom just next door, was a practical adjustment. It left the living space empty. The painter used this space as his studio. The space was in shambolic order. The carpet had been ripped up to reveal the floorboards, riddled with ancient woodworm and blackened at the edges of the room. The painter had taken to storing things under the loose boards. Beneath one was his bottle of whiskey and glass – a beautiful cut-glass tumbler stolen from an antique aunt. At the other end of the room, beneath another, were his paints, stored in a big rusting tin with a hinged lid and latch. The painter did not like to sleep in the same room as his paintings. In the morning he would find the portraits watching him as he woke, with accusing expressions. And as he did not agree with sleeping with other people in the room, each night he would crawl into his bed in the kitchen, away from their view. Here, the fridge would click and hum him to sleep.

Today, the painter was tired. He tuned the radio and sat on his bed. Soon he was sleeping, dreaming in great nonsensical loops. The philosopher’s wife creased paper into aeroplanes. Folding and scoring the edges, holding them delicately from underneath and letting them float away. Folding and scoring.

When the painted woke he had the sensation of having had the same dream all night long and felt great relief from the escape. His head echoed with the memory of the philosopher’s wife, her hands pleating paper. He stood to shake away the last cobweb-like strings of sleep. He made coffee, ate toast and turned off the radio, which had been playing all night. The quiet was welcome. He moved without thinking, taping a giant piece of canvas to one wall of the studio. He removed his tin from beneath the floorboard and chose his brushes. He started with a giant decorating brush, streaking washes of colour across the blank space. He began to mix paint and measured turpentine into an old baked bean can.

*

The philosopher’s wife looked back at him. The painter sipped whiskey from the other side of the room. It was her, although another version. With smaller, calmer eyes and wider hips, perhaps. Only, the hands were not right. He could not get the hands, so he had blanked them out with a wash of grey. Giving the impression of blurring, like a black and white photograph with the hands in motion. The painter sipped some more whiskey. His head swam. He moved across the room and pressed himself onto the canvas. The philosopher’s wife looked at him with her wide stare. The tips of their noses touched. The painter ran a finger across the damp paint of her cheek.

In the morning the painter stood naked in the kitchen looking across the room at the philosopher’s wife taped against the wall. He called the philosopher and arranged to meet, but not in the usual place, he said. The philosopher suggested a bar. It was Saturday afternoon but the music in the bar was already too loud for the painter’s liking. It seeped into every surface, a dull buzzing tune. He told the philosopher, who replied that the music was a peripheral entity in the room and should neither be ignored or enjoyed. The painter made a low noise that meant he disagreed and they took up a table as far from the speakers as possible. The bar was empty apart from the staff. One idly buffed glasses while the other leant over a crossword.

The philosopher taught aesthetics at a university nearby. He nodded as a fellow lecturer wandered in with a broadsheet clamped under his arm. The fellow lecturer ordered some coffee and sat at the other end of the room. The philosopher announced that his wife had stopped eating white foodstuffs. The painter asked why, to which the philosopher regaled the conversation word for word. White foodstuffs had no nutritional value and so she was only to eat coloured food from now on, and of course, never after seven pm. The painter thought about this for a while. He asked what she had given up. Pasta, rice, bread, potatoes, milk, flour, wensleydale, gouda, feta, cottage and cream cheese, cauliflower, some kinds of cabbages, butter beans, cooked fish, the white of an egg, the philosopher said. She has taped a list to the kitchen wall, he said, and another to the inside of the fridge. The painter imagined that the philosopher’s wife must be very unhappy. Or very bored. He said nothing. So I asked her, said the philosopher, if one administered food colouring to a meal, would she eat it? The philosopher paused and rubbed his nose. But, he said, she saw this as a jibe and now insists that we eat our meals separately. So, he continued, I eat first, at the kitchen table and she eats after me at six fifteen, whilst on the phone, to her mother, usually. The painter watched as disgust crept into the philosopher’s expression. Whilst talking, the painter asked. Yes, the philosopher pulled his ear lobe and declared that it was time for a proper drink.

At home the painter thought again about the philosopher’s wife and poured himself a large glass of milk. He didn’t drink the milk, instead he sat it on the floor in front of the painting and took out his whiskey from beneath the floorboard. He swayed in the middle of the room, contemplating the painting. The smudges of her hands, the lay of her hair and those eyes, bright and staring. It was all wrong, he said. He imagined the colour of her nipples, the tight, strained surface of her stomach, the heat between her legs. He rinsed his brushes and painted away her clothes.

She stood, unashamed, perfectly naked. The painter took off his clothes and faced her. Her hands hung invisible at her sides.

In the morning the painter stumbled for water at the sink. He drank a pint and re-filled the glass. He gazed out of the window, spotting a bruise coloured cloud in the distance. It was a momentary colour. He was fascinated by clouds for this reason. A cloud’s colour may only exist for a manner of seconds before its movement rearranges the shades, or the shadow of another cloud might fall across it, becoming heavier with colour, or it may begin to fold in on itself, changing its entire structure in a moment. A long time ago, the painter had only painted clouds. For a whole year he would visit his favourite park and find the flattest, most exposed point, where he would set up an easel and paint the skyline across the tips of the trees, paying particular attention to each individual cloud. Sometimes, just like this morning, he would glance out and notice the depth of grey in a cloud heavy with rain, and have an impulse to paint. Only, this morning he was distracted.

Across the room the philosopher’s wife was still naked. His stomach concertinaed. He pulled on an old painting shirt and some jersey running trousers, which he had never run in. He put a pot of coffee on the stove and lit the gas. He set about cleaning his brushes. He always cleaned them twice, once after use and again before. He decided that the philosopher’s wife would wear something simple, grey perhaps. A dress made of clouds, different shades of grey, different weights of rain. There was a knock at the door. He crossed the room and opened it a crack. He didn’t have a spy-hole and kept the chain on when answering unsolicited visitors. The philosopher’s wife blinked at him.

‘Can I come in?’ She asked.
‘No’, he said. ‘I mean, I’m afraid you can’t.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said plainly, ‘I need a lighter, can you find me one?’
The painter unlatched the chain and the door swung open. He went to a cabinet at one end of the studio and rummaged in the top drawer, producing a lighter with the name of a restaurant blazed across it. The philosopher’s wife thanked him and moved across the room to take it from his hand. She turned and leaned against the cabinet, lighting her cigarette. She gave him the packet. She looked up, sweeping the wall opposite with her gaze as she blew out smoke. After a while she said, ‘I don’t look like that.’

The painter lit a cigarette and rubbed his face as if he were washing it. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said.
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
There was a long pause, both bodies smoked, twisting awkwardly in their static positions. Finally, the philosophers wife walked across the room, letting out a loud, deliberate sigh. ‘Ridiculous man.’
‘Yes, I know.’ The painter said.
‘Not you, my husband. Your coffee is boiling.’

They drank coffee standing in the kitchen. The philosophers wife moved delicately round the edge of the room opening cupboards and examining postcards the painter had pinned to his fridge door. The painter gazed out of the window, up above the rooftops and the frozen fingers of the sycamores, up into the clouds. He wanted to ask her about the white foodstuffs.
‘You know I would do it if you asked,’ she said suddenly, breaking a silence that was heavier than he’d noticed. He questioned her.
‘Sit for you. You can’t keep that’, she motioned at the painting. ‘It’s not true, it’s not me.’ She set her coffee down and carefully began unbuttoning her blouse.