OCR Text |
Show STARTING It wasn't the right moment, really, but Todd's basketball had been on the roof since Sunday and so Hunt, at dawn, pulled himself onto the flat gravel and stood up in space - unsteady, in a new day, in the sweep of a rimless and infinite landscape. "Jesus Christ!" he said and felt reduced. Leah was at a conference in Aspen. Todd was with her, visiting a friend. Sean was flying home from private school in Massachusetts. And Hunt's father was with him, coming West for a summer visit. This World is too large, Hunt thought. It's too vast a Universe. No wonder, for a while, I was painting only avocadoes. Hunt had fallen down a ravine wall when he was twelve, mountain climbing with his father. Even earlier, he-had fallen from a second story porch onto a patio. And in his 30s, he had just fallen, somehow, into his closet. That was the worst: stiches on his head, a scratched cornea. And then, because he couldn't see with his scratched cornea, he had fallen down a flight of stairs and fractured his ankle. "Falling apart," Leah had joked. Hunt wondered when he might be through falling. He looked at the sky. He was forty-two years old, without his family, standing on a roof in Tucson at dawn in only his trunks, having just swum thirty laps. And he was retrieving a basketball. What was the meaning of that? Hunt had once had a friend who talked with passion about Revolution. But Hunt had never done a political painting. |