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Show 390 He thought further. The still-life he had done in Yvonne's house had been a misery from the hour he had begun gathering its parts to the moment he had stuffed it, still wet and unfinished, into his loaded car and driven out of her life. His handful of canvases that had hung in the Coach and Seven, among them the large non-representational one that had drawn Gloriana's attention, were testaments to hours spent swallowing back the yellow froth that boiled up from his stomach. In the dark chambers of his heart he knew he had been relieved to see his nude decomposing in Simon's bathtub, where no one would see it again and know he had done it. His Christlike self-portrait, lacking its crown of thorns, had been a torment to draw. He could not think of one picture he had created in joy and not one hour of happiness spent in creating one. He could feel his heart beating. He was eating corn chips faster, and presently his fingers touched only the oily inside surface of the empty package. He wiped them on the towel and wadded the bag and sat up on the edge of the bed. His feet smeared patterns in the dust on the floor as he moved them back and forth in his agitation. His sketchbooks, reams of paper with his marks on them, had been compendiums of toil performed through pain and hatred. The yards of canvas he had covered with still-lifes, landscapes, figures, faces, stone buildings, apricot sunsets, had mocked him as he had covered them and they mocked them now, the ones that had survived, rolled up and stuffed into a corner under his table for beetles to crawl into and die. He stood up and walked to the window that faced the street and looked down. The iron fence that enclosed the weed-filled yard was still there. The concrete steps leading down to the sidewalk had not reversed themselves. Grass still grew from the same crack in the sidewalk. Cars swept past on Ocean Park in both directions, |