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Show 129 until it wrote a letter, or surprised him at the end of some distant telephone. Regret. Hunt stood and stared at his nude rendering of Paula Schoefield. He had tried to find Reality, somehow, gelled in her privacy. Instead, now, he only heard her voice, speaking to him from the other side of her locked sewing room door: ". . . It's thin . . . It's hollow . . . It's like a skeleton, I know . . . But it's the only body I've got." Regret. Hunt yearned to go beyond himself, his . . . he supposed, 'Realism.' "But now you've made a mockery of it -- for the world!" Not mockery. He had tried to negotiate. No: You'd seemed like a child, he'd said; a child on a birthday -- just opening, just unwrapping the gift of herself, her flesh. "A child! Oh, God!" he had heard her moan. "A child!" He had used words like beauty, sweet privacy, softness, delicacy, fragility; he had wanted to touch her, the way the image of her had touched him. But it only seemed, one more time, that in his attempt to give, flowers became burrs. Regret: My old companion! Then, as he'd left the Schoefields', Rex had said - thanking Hunt for his attempt - "You know -- if I could be at your end of the brush . . . if I had the ability . . . to be the painter, not just the painted . . . then I probably . . . would barely need to dress myself at all. I've been thinking: ... if I could just be at your end of the brush ..." And he asked if Hunt might give him art lessons. Regret, then, hovered. Nothing really lifted, or fell. And the summer |
