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Show 104 him if he would prefer a bite on the nose before or after she had torn all the clothes off his body and taken advantage of him. He surprised her one day at work and found the ash tray on her desk filled with lipstick-smeared stubs. Normally she smoked only at parties, and then only if there was guitar music on the record player. Their sex life had turned a corner too. She no longer bothered with preliminaries. She thrashed in bed, she bit and clawed, she cried out hoarsely for him to love her at the very moment that he was doing the best he could, she came violently and wept with pleasure afterward. Sometimes she didn't come at all, and he was sick with fear. He guessed the nature of the faceless horror standing in the shadows at the edges of his life, but he could not bring himself to ask her if there were something she wanted to tell him. It was the last thing in the world he wanted her to do. If she had volunteered the information he would have run from the room with his hands over his ears, singing at the top of his voice. * * * * * * There were other grievances. Both of his partners had more canvases hanging in the Coach and Seven than he did, but he intended to do something about that. Paul was ahead of him by three, Noel by four. He intended to take his time, so that it didn't look as though he were trying to catch up, but he was going to produce five canvases that would break their hearts in secret and he was going to pretend that the effort had cost him nothing. The letters he was getting from his parents made him feel bad, but that was a worry he would have to deal with later. If he had learned nothing else he had learned that you worked out your own salvation with the means that were unique to yourself, and that art always spoke through particulars. |