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Show 40 be gone, and anyway the woman had stood up and resumed pushing the stroller and was out from inside the shadow, and anyway all he would have done would be to create a skin disease all over her face and bare arms. He put the cap back on his pen and held the pen between his teeth while he turned pages looking for more things that would make him feel better. There was a stone lintel over the doorway of an ancient apartment building near the hot springs swimming pool. That was all right. He had gotten the grainy chipped edges of the chisel marks all right. There was a fluted lampshade that he had drawn in the living room of Melanie's parents' house, and an embarrassing profile of Melanie herself that he had refused to let her see. There was the bumper and grill of Mr. Monson's MG which he had drawn in the school parking lot behind the cafeteria while everyone else had been watching a fight. That one wasn't too bad. There was a nice glint of sunlight bursting from a projection on the bumper. Another page seemed to explode in a spray of toothpicks, and he was not sure anyone but himself would know it to be a board fence against which a Negro was leaning, next to a weed-filled vacant lot. He had drawn it while sitting in his car, parked across the street from the Union Pacific depot, worried the whole time that the Negro would see him and come over and lean on his window sill and put his head inside the car. He had worked much too fast. That was always a mistake. Nothing cohered when you worked too fast. On the other hand-he flipped back to an earlier page-he had spared no pains in his profile of Melanie, and had even once or twice ordered her to keep her head still and stop looking at him. He had concentrated on every detail, the long smooth sweep of her page-boy and the small break in the surface where it touched her shoulder, the startling little flip at the end of her nose, the curl of amusement in the corner of her mouth, and the result had looked |
