The wood fire in the old stove next to the gas range baked the round lids red hot. Cadmium orange and vermilion with a black background. But how to get that semi-translucence.
"Off to work, Ma."
Work, ruminated Mrs. Brush, pouring boiling water into the agate dishpan—work there wasn't even a nice magazine cover or a calendar to show for.
The blue-white drifts are wonderful, thought Clem, exhilarated, as he walked to the streetcar. If he was a kid he could go bellyplop or pitch snowballs or slide, but snow wasn't good to paint. Zinc-white or maybe blanc d'argent and blue shadows. Kind of a painting Ma would like, not the slushy-lined grey snow of Paris that Utrillo or Van Gogh painted. He almost slipped on the slide the kids had made, lucky he had his cane. Utrillo now, or Van Gogh. Who could feel like painting a clapboard and brick Nebraska street? Grey, bluegrey, brown and black shapeless forms with grey-ochre expressionless faces. Scarecrow pants distinguished male from potato-bag female, and love was a crime. Not crime passionelle as in Paris, no passion or pleasure here, just grubby crime. Long grim cornhusk faces, parched and leathered by prairie winds. In Paris each black window was a tantalizing mask for Maupassant life within moldy interiors. The sensuous malodorous water-closet odor of Paris. The only mystery in all Congress was Lucy, a dewy elusive mystery he still could not capture and set into any of the styles of the Paris painters, or Italian masters. One of these days he would settle on a style and then dealers and critics and people would say—that is a Brush Lucy, as they now said a Picasso Fernande, or a Renoir Gabrielle.
The blue in the clear eyes of children, forget-me-not blue, larkspur blue, lake blue, sky or sea blue, or the assortment of blues in tubes, never quite matched the hue of those candid eyes with enormous black pupils focused on him as he told her of Paris and the house of Raymond Figente in New York.
Lucy unwittingly had been responsible for a new doubt in his mind. She had brought a copy of Mode to show him something which puzzled her, a color reproduction of a Picasso cubist painting for which she demanded explanation. The ready-made key he knew by heart obviously would mean nothing to a fifteen-year-old girl, if she really was fifteen as she said. He tried to simplify the explanation but made no impression.
"Well, it doesn't look like a woman to me. You mean he doesn't care if I can see the woman?"
