rounded limbs and pointed breasts no longer was the child Tanagra with enormous almond-shaped eyes who stood gazing into Cheever's window. An Ingres "Odalisque." Why does it take me so long to learn? What a dope never to have seen her in her essence, art and woman united. Only now I begin to understand the thing all great painters get. To think I never asked her to pose nude. Congress, I guess. Would she have? Don't think she'd have let Congress stop her. Congress sure turns you into a hymn singer. Suppose it does—nothing wrong in that. That's what I must get in my new style of painting after she's left, that kind of austerity, purity.
"I suppose you'll have to be getting home for supper," he said tonelessly.
The sun had gone and the paintings became simplified patterns of light and dark in the fading light, strange without their colors. Exciting new shapes appeared and he wanted to rush and repaint each one in its exoticism but was afraid to move for fear they would disappear from sight, Lucy with them.
"I told Mother I might be late. Why don't we sit and talk? I'm not hungry, are you?"
They sat on squeaky wicker chairs facing each other across the diagonal of the room in the manner of callers awaiting a hostess to put them at ease. The nonsense and raillery of their former camaraderie seemed futile now to Clem, the everpresent oppressive thought of her leaving sharpened his sense of loss.
"It feels good to sit. I didn't realize I was tired, did you?" Lucy leaned back and clasped her hands over her head. It was the right thing to have said because now Clem leaned back too and put his left foot up over his knee, and began to tap the other foot in erratic rhythm. That means he's thinking about us.
She laughed suddenly and he grinned back sheepishly as though she had read his thoughts. She became serious. "I wish I knew some of your friends in New York. We don't know anybody except Miss Klemper, my dancing teacher—when she comes, that is."
"Well, she'll show you around." He'd be damned if he'd turn her over to someone else, especially Raymond Figente who knew everyone. If she had to leave him to study dancing then let her study. Perhaps things wouldn't be easy and she'd be back.
Lucy was saying, "Well of course I'll be busy working but it'd be nice to know someone you know. It wouldn't make you seem so far away. I'm going to miss you."
"Are you?"
