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Show 106 There was a tarnished silver comb-and-brush set with the name "Evan" engraved on the backs that Yvonne had fallen in love with in a dusty antique shop in Hollywood and bought in spite of Lorin's sullen heartburn (he hated shopping with her); there was a cane-backed chair he had purchased at a discount house on Olympic Boulevard, chiefly because of Yvonne's insistence that it was awful as well as badly made, and indeed it was already unravelling along both arms. There was a blue goblet full of varnished seeds, the unstrung lute and the little statue of the nursing mother, and because these suggested a kind of theme a black walnut cane that could function as a shepherd's crook. He kept a basket of thin, smooth stones that Yvonne had collected and cherished; their delicate pinks and blues created a counterstatement to the harsher metallic undertone of blue in the grey stoneware jug that he also decided to keep. The jug had a yellow ideogram baked into it that he thought was garish, but he was not obliged to duplicate it. Finally he kept a matched set of tiny books bound in red leather, with titles and fleurs-de- lis stamped in gold on the spines. He hesitated over a battered copper coffee pot but decided not to use it because he had taken it from one of the art department supply rooms at UCLA a couple of years ago and someone might recognize it in the painting and ask him to return it. A lot of their customers were from the university. He spread a dark green paisley cloth, spotted with paint, over the chair, exposing part of the curved back with its corkscrew of unravelling straw, and then set about arranging the smaller objects in its lap. The blue goblet didn't stand out especially well from the backdrop-he should have foreseen that-but its load of seeds glowed an odd kind of blue amber, and the driblet of seeds he arranged carefully next to the base stood out like tiny points of light. The comb and brush stood out very well, and |
