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Show 435 embarrass him, and he was not displeased with these. They were essentially exercises but they had a certain meretricious charm-a potted fern in a porcelain bucket, a fluted vase with long strands of ivy dripping out of it, that sort of thing. In fact it was one of these-a small canvas showing an old-fashioned bathtub standing free in a room without walls, only bare timbers, at the top of a flight of wooden stairs-that had actually sold. He had walked in one evening and seen the tag taped to the bottom of the frame, and had gone immediately back to the office, his heart pounding, to ask George or Shirley for details. The buyer was no one he had heard of, and a part of him felt sick at the thought that he would never see that bathtub and those exposed beams and that staircase again. It had been an exercise in displaced still-life. Each part of the study had had a model, but he had not grouped them together to paint them-in fact he could not have, and that was why he had chosen them. The bathtub was the short, deep kind you used to find in old houses in rural Utah, that stood free of the floor, supported by feet in the shape of birds' claws holding a ball. He had found it in the window of a plumbing and heating store in Inglewood one Sunday afternoon and had stood there drawing it carefully into his spiral pad while people passed him on the sidewalk, some of them stopping to look over his shoulder, which had driven him wild. The wooden stairs were in fact the basement stairs in Gloriana's house, which he had drawn a long time before and had kept, never knowing when he might use them; the room without walls was from the ground floor of a house on Pico that was being demolished to make room for a real-estate office; he had gotten there with his pad the last day the shell was standing, and had drawn furiously, while the wreckers had given him a bad time, standing in front of him striking silly poses and asking him to draw them if he was such a hot drawer. The |