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Show 143 three and a half, taller than wide, with a sensation of a vast ethereal plain floating in an ice-blue void through which unhappy things crept, though you never quite saw them. A range of low rolling hills lay across the bottom, and above it a billow of incandescent haze burst across half the visible space, white at the center and shading off into increasingly severe greens and blues, the bottom of the mass a solid deadly blue. A violet cortex of some kind arced over the billow like a braided monochromatic rainbow and over that an arc of jagged teeth, the only feature with a hard edge, and over that a deep endless blue in which a white sun hung like a cold chip. He had titled it "Despair," because as he had told Paul, he despaired of figuring out how he had gotten it, ha ha. It had been the result of overpainting, whiting-out, glazing here and there with a dilute mixture of color and turpentine, letting the soup run and seep into the patches of scraped canvas, where it had spread and feathered, and it had been several paintings before becoming this one, all of them representational. One of them had been a study of two derelicts slouched on a bench in Pershing Square, and another had been a profile of Yvonne sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, in a leotard and white leg-warmers. It was only after he had tried to convert it to an interior of a greenhouse, with the white sky visible through the roof and dominating the plants that he realized he had been gradually draining any subject-matter at all from it and the painting was the better for it. All that remained of any of the originals was a large scar that had been on the forehead of one of the derelicts, and that scar was now a small, disturbing shape that hung, stark and white, against the dark underside of the billow, lower right, just over the hills. He made a last pleasantry to Helen and Brock, who wished he would go away, and then walked up behind her. "Don't look it straight in the eye. It |