even the tourismo night-time "O Sole Mio-ers" couldn't compete with her tragedy queening because that afternoon on the Lido steamer he had remarked on the resemblance of a girl to a Caravaggio. In Brussels that last night the spiral of her recurrent hysterics finally left him apathetically thinking she resembled a decollete Boldini who somehow had got herself trampled in the gutter. She had walked from theatre to hotel in drenching rain, her black velvet gown sodden. The hennaed forelock, her trademark, hung lank and wet, exposing a curling-tong scar—she was always burning herself—and dripping mascara fringed her cheeks. In the hotel room become the classic stage of the Comédie Française she was a Medean fury unwilling to accept his limit to the times he could revive initial excitement in hearing her re-sing "Ma Douce Annette." Its nuances fascinated audiences but the song had come to mean to him her accusing eyes searching him out in his designated seat. She was insatiable not only for lovemaking, which was wonderful with her, but to be loved to the exclusion of everything. She had become jealous even of his absorption in painting. A devouring envelopment and he had no wish to return to the fashionable psychoanalytic womb. He'd run from Brussels as if breaking out of jail. During their first fine months there had been no hint of interference in his way of living and working. Then insidious hints became open nagging insistence that he stop his foolishness and become a man of her world.
"Look at Van Dongen, you can easily become more successful."
"You look at him," he had said, his irritation with himself encompassing her because unknowingly she was confirming his doubts in the Louvre earlier that day that perhaps all he was capable of was shallow facility. She had thought his resistance modesty. Try to explain to her it was vanity, the wish to achieve in painting a personal image worthy to be placed alongside the least Degas. Try to explain that you hadn't yet made a painting which satisfied you, and along with that obsession was the pull toward applause and easy living a fashionable formula could get for you. How explain it to anyone when as you said it to yourself it sounded so damned pretentious! You always knew in paint when you had succumbed to facility, tormented because you weren't getting the image across from your vision past the unwilling hand to the unwilling canvas.
A twisted scrap of paper caught his eye. Its form suggested a figure with an arm reaching out, foreshortened in Tiepolo perspective. The flowing life line. From the scrap of paper flowed a river of images shaped by time present. The living forms seemed to have been
