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Show 148 it with an overlay of the original grey he had started with on the background- but it was hard to concentrate and all he did was give the orange more apertures between objects to fill and create a grey counterpart to the statue floating diagonally over the arm of the chair. He slapped through a second layer of orange keyed higher toward yellow around the head of the lute and found he had created a slanted exclamation point with a halo. He loaded a palette knife with burnt umber and wiped across the halo, starting from the tuning head and moving right, and found he had left a tire track, striated with crumbs of dried yellow caught in the mixture and dragged along. He assaulted the tire track with a thumb coated with white lead and watched sadly as the rich earth color turned to chalk stamped with whorls. He imagined her on her coffee break, panting and tearing off her clothes in the stockroom and lying down across unopened cartons of books while her lover stepped out of the shadows behind the time clock and crouched beside her, their two cups of coffee cooling side by side on an empty shelf. He imagined her in one of the rehearsal rooms at the university, naked as a sunbeam, sweat streaking her body as she quietly improvised, alone except for the lover at the piano, a dark brooding figure with horns who stroked the keys and controlled her moods by sudden chromatic shifts and tempo changes. Lorin never went with her to rehearsals. For that matter he never went to her performances either. He had gone once and seeing her in a leotard being handled by muscular men in tights had depressed him for days. He imagined her warm and dry from a brisk toweling after her shower this morning, strolling at ease in the sunlit back yard, hand in hand with the lover who had toweled her, the two of them laughing softly under the bedroom window behind which he, Lorin, lay asleep and deceived. He imagined her racing through the cemetery last night before he came home, laughing |