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Show 112 he was too preoccupied to concentrate. He was using too much palette knife and creating a patchy surface that was meant to keep the eye from penetrating further and seeing his failure to solve problems of line. His last six or eight canvases looked like something you saw in motel rooms. A couple of them were hanging in the Coach and Seven-one was a huge interior of a cathedral that was largely guesswork, the other was a potted snake plant set in a white enameled pitcher-and Noel and Paul had been polite about them but he could tell they wished he would take them down. That was another thing. His partners had seemed just a tiny bit patronizing toward him lately and it was starting to get on his nerves. Noel in particular seemed to enjoy implying around other people that Lorin was out of his depth and had missed his vocation by not majoring in sociology or something in college. Paul was less annoying in that respect, and Lorin had to admit he didn't think Paul consciously patronized him, but Paul had gone ethnic during his last year at UCLA-he had started calling himself Pavel and wished other people would too-and believed that your work, if it was any good, welled up from the pain of your cultural memory-traces, like his did, and he clearly thought Lorin didn't have any. That was the other thing. That was the sore point. Lorin had roots as interesting as Paul's, but they embarrassed him. He hated telling people where he was from because they always asked if he was Mormon and he didn't know how to answer them any more. Even the word itself made him uncomfortable. Sometimes he said he was an ancestral Mormon, but then they looked at him oddly and he had to explain that what he meant was a cultural Mormon, or even an ethnic Mormon, ha ha. By that time they had usually lost interest. Outside of Utah no one except another Mormon cared very much whether you were a Mormon or not. He supposed he still was one in some sense. He had not |