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Show 163 canyon roads leading down to a vast basin of lights. They fed him (and whatever friends he brought with him), and he in turn listened as his mother tore her heart over his younger sister who had either run away or been picked up in a knife fight at her high school or (once) gotten pregnant. Simon's mother had herself played bobby-soxer roles in a few movies before sacrificing her career for her family, a fact she mentioned all the time. He never stayed long before fleeing back to his own apartment in the Village, but it was a stable relationship all the same, and he was content to be dependent. He had made an honest attempt once to fly the nest, and had gotten as far as New York and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he had stayed three months before deciding he did not care for it. He had then taken a job, still in Brooklyn, as a Good Humor man, and within a week decided he did not care for that, parked his truck in the middle of a residential intersection and walked away, leaving the freezer door open to the swarm of soiled children that materialized from steps and alleys and from behind parked cars. Back in Los Angeles he felt better, and though he did not really care for Los Angeles either he was content to drift at UCLA as an art major as long as they would let him, which was already longer than he had expected they would. He was highly thought of in the art department, but the university rules said he had to take and pass other courses of study as well, and since he did not care for other courses of study he would sooner or later, he knew, be invited to leave the art department too. That would be all right, because in his bones he did not really care for painting. It tormented Lorin that someone that shiftless could enflaae all his doubts. You would not know, to look at a wall of Simon's canvases, that the planet had continued to orbit the sun after the period of Monet's late |