"Lucy? Vermillion. It's a beautiful afternoon—how about a picnic?"
She came alive.
"That's just what I need."
"I'll come in fifteen minutes."
At the foot of a chestnut tree in the woods she kicked off her slippers, rolled off her stockings, and, holding out her legs, flexed her arches. My feet still ache, don't let on.
His eyes clouded to keep him from following the line beyond the pink ring left by her garters. Her first two toes were the same length, flattened, hard-tipped; from standing on them probably. A small platform, base of the plumb line of balance beginning at the neck. Perhaps the builders of Chartres had been ballet dancers, therefore the incredible balance of stone on stone. An ugly bruise marred each big toe at the instep. Some ballet exercise, no doubt.
She glanced at him sidelong and drew her feet under her. Maybe he thought her too bold. She felt safe and unsafe, which didn't make sense. She didn't want him to think her forward. Or ask about the blisters.
The little stream burbled around a rock disturbing its peace. The sky was blue crepe de Chine.
"I guess butterflies are the same all over," she said, grasping for one. "I feel like that picture in the Louvre, you know the artists and models on a picnic. Tell me, do you walk around making drawings of people and things?"
"Sometimes—but mostly I take a good look. Occasionally something happens to what I see in my memory, and it remembers only what I should have seen. The trouble is the eye can see too much. Then something behind the eye cuts most of the excess away, or forgets what isn't necessary. Sometimes the part you don't try to remember, that you don't think is important, is all you do remember. It becomes the clue, as if what goes in one eye comes out the other entirely different."
"You mean that's what happens when you look at someone?"
"Not always." lie smiled. "Sometimes you prefer to see something in a certain manner. My difficulty is that my memory doesn't always cooperate with my intentions."
"You sound like those 'now you see it, now you don't' vaudeville magicians."
