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Show 165 people besides Lorin had noticed it, that Simon never chose human subjects for his paintings. It was just possible that he could not do them. There was a story that when barely pubescent Simon had been seduced by the girl who came in twice a week to clean, that a long and squalid intrigue had followed, that his mother had one day surprised them and threatened the girl with a butcher knife, that Simon had not offered to share the blame and had discovered, by the time order had been restored to the family, that he did not much care for sex. Whether the story was true or not, it did seem that Simon had at most a minimal sex drive. He did not, for instance, even talk bawdy. He had his circle of friends, of course, and some of them were female, but his indifference seemed equally balanced between them. Likewise he had his narrow range of interests and pleasures, which besides chess and driving his antiquated MG up and down the coast highway included primarily music. Simon hosted marathon listening parties where friends would come over in small groups beginning early in the morning and come and go all during the day and continue into the night, tiptoeing and nodding to each other as they passed in the doorway, because no one talked at Simon's listening parties, nor did anyone, once settled on the floor or on the couch or one of the chairs, move except to change the record so the host didn't have to. A characteristic marathon began with the B-minor Mass and ended with the German Requiem, and the collective testimony of friends who came and went at different intervals and compared impressions was that Simon had not moved the whole time, but lay on the floor, a sofa cushion under his head, his only sign of animation the twitching of his closed eyelids as his eyes darted back and forth behind them. He also liked Greek pastry. But he lived his untidy life, as far as Lorin could tell, without reference to the pleasures of the flesh. There was something unhealthy about that. |