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Show PAINTING THE NEIGHBORS It was all in a new season and a new place for Hunt and Leah. The cold, scarring winter in New Hampshire - the hovering divorce, the self-reprisals, all the ice, the dark, the frozen birds, rifled deer - all had given way, west 2000 miles, in an Arizona light. And the two were touching again; they were warmed. Hunt had calmed. Leah had opened. Hunt could see - and his painting, his work, its life, had returned like an amnesiac's memory: sudden, rich. Three immediate canvases -- with a strange, windfall swiftness - sold; checks came on three consecutive days, from Hunt's Soho gallery in New York, and overnight literally, their new season, new life, gelled in a new Tucson suburban house - one with glass everywhere, and a patio and a pool. Hunt gave each of their boys a hundred dollars and the two, Sean and Todd, chipped in and bought a tapedeck and a backgammon set; so their summer days became ones of music, of the quiet click of game pieces and of chlorinated sun. "I love my children!" Hunt announced. Certain truths were constant. "Thank God for them." He was a man, awkward always with his enthusiasms. "Thank God for you, too," he said to Leah, touching her clumsily on one cheek with paint-soiled fingertips. "Thank God for people!" Leah said, relieved at Hunt's trashing of his painful series of black avocados. "Hey, that's Uncle Chuck!" Todd pointed to a new canvas, ready to be crated and shipped. |