Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/150

 Moss and olive plush, amber and garnet brocade. Secondhand store relics of dismantled Brick Street homes. Delacroix colors.

"Hey, where are you?"

He answered hastily, embarrassed she might think him in the toilet.

"Well, for heaven's sake, I didn't recognize you." She took him by the hand and led him into the studio. "Come here where I can see. How different you look. Why, you're almost as young as me. I feel I really know you now."

He stood, defenseless, naked, as she continued her probing. She ran her fingers over the modeling of his face. He doesn't look as serious, less artistic. While he isn't exactly handsome, he's like a boy even though he's a big man. His chin is rounder than with a beard. He has nice skin too.

"My goodness," she said.

She was exaggerating. How could a short half-frame of hair make a difference? What the hell—I can always grow it back when she's gone. Shouldn't have done it, she makes me feel a kid.

By late afternoon the sunset rays were, for once, clear of dust particles and a damp soapy cleanliness permeated the transformed clubroom. Clem stood in the doorway studying the wall varnished by the late apricot glow. The lush Delacroix red, green, and amber hangings and the messy couch made it a Paris studio, or rather an altar to the Aphrodite peering elusively from each vaguely Laurencin, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, Modigliani, Picasso, Pascin, and even Derain canvas. Goddess of Love who had drawn from him these expressions of his admiration for these masters and who, in so doing, had freed him from their influence.

Two things were missing. He ran upstairs, three at a time, and staggered down with his easel, placing it in a corner. The second he could not supply—the old curved symbol of painting, the palette with its hole for the thumb, would have been a finishing touch. He regretted having given up using such a palette for the piece of clinical porcelain proclaiming him a scientific modern. In substitution he placed a bouquet of brushes on the mantelpiece.

"Well, I guess that's that," Lucy said, in critical contentment.

She leaned against the mantelpiece, left leg crossed over right. A vine with its root growing from the floor at the base of her right heel, hair tied to the top of her head to keep it out of the way as she worked, an escaped strand corkscrewing down her cheek. Clem turned to speak but could not. That tinted opalesque column with 138