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Show 161 in church, visiting the service where the grown-ups were, with h.is Sundayschool class and staring at the art over the altar and assuming God had painted it. Hunt was drawing even then - at seven, eight, nine, whenever - fascinated with studying his own hands as they made figures from nothing, made a shape. Hunt remembered being in the church and trying to imagine God's invisible hand paint Christ's image, painting the light radiating from the Hunt-had-assumed-then- brain of Christ. Hunt had tried to imagine that invisible hand moving. By midnight three of the elevator paintings had been completed. Leah slept quietly in their bed. The glass door to the deck outside their room was open and a cooling late-summer evening wind swept gently, evenly into the room calming it. Hunt undressed. He walked out, naked, onto the balcony-deck. He could see the lights of the city. Phoenix, Arizona! He could see blinking everywhere, whitish blue and green, lights only, no buildings. And he could see the vague shapes of encircling mountains. He liked it here, dry skin against wrought iron railing, the taste of the night all so different from New England. Jesus: He'd finished three sizable canvasses in a single day! Maybe he was a genius. He climbed into bed, stirred Leah, wrapped her, shaped her with his arms. "I'm a sleepy girl," Leah said. But it was not a night that Hunt could contain his spill of energy. Two years before, in New Hampshire, the chill and brittle pines against the ragged moonlit sky had almost demanded that they make love, driven them. Here in Phoenix, there seemed no necessity. The dark, the air, the distant gemlike stars all seemed bemused and casual. For Leah particularly. But still, she answered. She was there: wife, presence. |