OCR Text |
Show 194 only one painting, working from two charcoal sketches rather than from the l i f e (she would not s i t longer than a few minutes at a time). The result of his labors had so embarrassed him that he had hidden the canvas on the farthest rack he could f i nd in the storage closet, i t s face to the wall, and stacked in front of i t five or six dusty unclaimed canvases that had been kicking around for years. Morbid fascination had driven him back to look at i t every few months, late at night, while he was s t i l l in school, and then he had forgotten about i t . Simon had doubtless browsed through the storage closet, claiming anything that had not been moved for a year and bearing i t home to bathe, re-stretch, re-size, and paint lambent flowers and rocks on. It was exemplary t h r i f t , and just possibly Simon did not know whose canvas i t was that lay softening in his bathtub. "Well, now you can t e l l her we saw i t , " said Gloriana. "So we d i d , " said Lorin, whose heart could not help aching a l i t t l e as he looked at his a r t i f a c t in i t s last hours on earth. They returned to the l i v i n g room and sat down on the floor next to the bookcase, someone having preempted his sofa cushion. Gloriana s t i l l held the plastic glass he had handed her, though now i t was empty. " I didn't think i t was very good," she said, dropping her voice. "Did you?" "That's why he's stripping i t to use over again," he said. His mind was already charred with fantasies, but a new one briefly licked over i t s surface l i k e a flame. In this one his poor ravaged nude did not scrape clean but survived in patches scrubbed as hard and smooth as glass at different points on the canvas, here a ripple of shadow where a thigh had curved, there a g l i n t of the comb that had held her hair back, elsewhere the marbled white of an eye, a thick yellow toenail, one leg of |