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Show 39 knowledge that Charlie and Sharon were not so very much older than himself. Also, listening selectively for sounds from inside the apartment, deciding whether they came up through walls or from the bathroom where the cats had their sandbox, had prevented him from investing himself in the box elders. The twelve-year-olds were gone when he glanced up to see what they were doing. There were some picnickers on the grass over near the drinking fountain, and in case they had seen him look up he didn't want them to think the kids' presence had bothered him, so he kept his gaze fixed on the bike racks where they had been, and gradually stared past it at the line of trees that marked the asphalt path leading to the aviary. You did not draw every leaf, and that was what made it hard. A woman was pushing a stroller up the path toward him and stopped to adjust the small child who was sitting tilted in it. It so happened that where she stopped put her directly in the shadow of the sycamore that hung over the restrooms and covered her and the baby with bright moving splotches of light. That was disagreeable, because he knew he would never have thought of that by himself. Something that obvious should have occurred to him-he had heard of negative space-but no: put him in front of a tree and he panicked. Give him a mass of foliage with infinite variations of thinness and density and all he could do was scramble it like an omelet. Not once in drawing a hundred trees had it occurred to him that apertures existed in the mass, each one opening a source of light that would have consequences on whatever object was beneath the tree. The sight was disagreeable also because he didn't know how you represented splotches of light with line. He uncapped his fountain pen, thinking he might seize a blank page and scratch a first impression onto it, but at the same time he knew perfectly well that he would hover so long before marking a clean page that the first impression would |
