"I want to tell you how much I enjoyed your singing. I thought it was very interesting. I've heard so much about what you do but I couldn't imagine it and I was surprised when you came on in that beautiful burnt-orange dress because I thought, from your painting, you always wore black velvet."
Simone put down her glass and arched her fine penciled brows as she listened to this voice, so like a child's reciting a lesson in politeness. At mention of the black velvet dress, which she had not worn since Brussels, her hand jerked, toppling the champagne glass, and its sound against the cuticle scissors crashed in her ears. With a short gasp of anguish she brushed the broken glass into the jumble of makeup paraphernalia, telegrams, and cards cluttering the table.
Figente was now certain she had taken narcotic. The feverish brilliance in her tortoise-shell eyes and the frenetically audible exclamations of impatience, excessive in relation to minute irritations, as that of the fallen glass, were obvious symptoms of her super-sensitized nerves. More than that, it was the elaborately sensuous slowness with which she was more and more performing each gesture and uttering each word. He had always discounted as envy the rumors brought from Paris, the first by that yokel painter Clem something, later Cynski, that Vermillion had been distracted from work because of her avidity. It might explain why Vermillion hedged about showing his work. Perhaps there was none. The boy hardly could wait to rush back to her tonight, and to a drug addict. The least he could do for Vermillion was to scare hell out of her.
"Vermillion brought me a print of his drawing of you one day when Lucy was posing for me as Leda, and we spoke of you," he said, and leaned back to enjoy the effect. That would get her, he thought, to be told that Vermillion, who she and everyone knew was almost pathologically secretive about his private life, would speak of her at all to a younger woman.
"Don't forget the swan!" Lucy chimed in with a lightsome trill.
"Indeed!" Each needle-prick letter in the word came from her small sharp teeth as Simone grasped a bottle near at hand to steady herself. A wild desire to push them all out swept through her but that would require rising to her feet, and the outrage and desolation of Paul's betrayal—speaking of her to this empty little nothing—had paralyzed her. If she swayed unsteadily they would think her drunk. Moreover, it would be unclever, however wounded, to reveal oneself as vulnerable. She splashed the wine into a tumbler, drank it, and then set the tumbler down with exaggerated carefulness, defying
