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Show 221 female sexuality smacks you, but then lets you rest in it. Anyhow, your eyes are drawn away from her nakedness to the green broach between her breasts, dime-store jewelry but of a green color as vivid and alive as a holly leaf. Then all those roses enveloping her. The corner of a bed, the weight of it anchoring her. There is a felt tension between her and the bed as she leans to the left away from it as if in rejection of all that a bed represents, sex and love, birth and death, rest and illness, nightmares and dreams of horses. She's not actually leaning, yet the linear and vertical distortions are such that she seems to be leaning, leaning away while she is held fast to it as securely as if by an invisible wire running from the bed up to her shoulder. Everybody seemed a little subdued and maybe awed by it. "A little too much?" said Miles, in a voice still damned pleased by what he had done. "I like 'em big," said Ben. "I was just wondering why Kate doesn't shave under her arms." We laughed and felt better. Miles had made coffee and we sat around talking. He had restored the hair in her armpits, he said, to make her look more natural, but somehow I could not connect the painting with Kate. She sat there in a blue wool sweater and a grey wool skirt and sipped coffee; the woman in the painting dominated us all. Her feet, legs, thighs and hips have all been enlarged, thickened, the skin slightly coarsened, the belly muscles slightly loosened. Though the straightforward stance of the legs is firm and strong, there is also something lead-heavy in it, something stolid, without grace. The waist already has something more graceful though, something w e bending and slim, and from there on up the figure gets progressively lighter, more fluid, younger. Her breasts are firm and rounded, breasts unused but fully ready for use, nipples delicately colored rather than bruised by sucking. The arms are perfect, irresistible arms, sinuous, |