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Show 436 apricot-colored sky behind the bathtub had come from the last evening he had spent in his parents' back yard after his father's funeral and before flying back to Los Angeles. He had made a quick watercolor sketch of it while the relatives came and went in the yard and the house and Stephen watched him. He had not worried too much about the shape of the clouds or the slit across the surface caused by the telephone wires or the grotesque hieroglyphs of birds against the clouds; he had just concentrated on catching the saturation of the orange and pink as nearly as he could, and committing it to memory. He had put all these together in the small oil study and had been surprised at how well the parts had seized onto each other and cohered. He made a point of coming back, the last night of his exhibit, to see what the owner of his painting looked like when he came to pick it up. It proved to be a pleasant elderly man in a black overcoat and pointed brown Italian shoes, who told Lorin, when Shirley introduced them, how pleased he was to meet him and how impressed he had been with his exhibition last year in Laguna Beach. Lorin had never been to Laguna Beach, much less had an exhibition there, but he did not want to embarrass the old gentleman, so he smiled vaguely past his shoulder and offered his hand one last time. He did feel he owed an explanation to Shirley, whom he could feel looking at him, but that could wait. |