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Show 127 he could grin over. Lorin turned over to see if Yvonne was awake by any chance, but she hadn't moved. He had thought they might set things right if she were, but it could wait until tomorrow. What he liked about the story was that it suggested your ass was covered even if it was scarlet with guilt. * * * * * * He had not fooled himself by that resolution of his materials. In the morning, after he had driven Yvonne to work in cold silence, he returned to his porch with the coffee pot which he plugged into a suspended light socket, and faced the pile of odds and ends in the chair. He studied it for a few minutes and then lifted a blank canvas onto his easel. He pressed the cold surface with his thumb to satisfy himself it was taut and drumlike. He bought his canvas by the bolt, unbleached, from Sears, and stretched and sized it himself, using a white latex that dried to an uneven crust and pulled the fabric tight, leaving the surface a mass of pits and scars from which unforeseen textures would evolve. Holding a pencil lightly between his thumb and three fingers he began to trace configurations across the surface, feeling with the ends of his fingers the attrition of his soft lead down to the wood-here a coil of repose from the statue, here the strain of opposition in the basket weave, here the narrowing hiatuses between frets from the lute, and the heartbreak of the tuning head snapped back suddenly. The eggshell fragility of one of the pink stones counterpointed the ellipse of the jar's open mouth-he had decided to make it lidless-and the deadly curve of the cane flung itself around white air at the lower left corner of his canvas. As always, he felt confidence begin to gather in his fingers' ends as the vibrations of the pencil across the rough surface warmed them. He deliberately did not draw the objects in the arrangement |