Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/281

 what would happen if I listened to music that way? Maybe I would get an idea. I would like to do something nice for Simone to prove I'm her friend. But what? She knows what love is but she's unhappy. That doesn't seem to make sense. I never thought that you could be in love and not be loved back. I've never felt like that about any man, not even Carly whom I liked best. Maybe I'm better off not being in love. One thing is sure, I'll never be in love except with a man. The other way is like a dead-end street. Going nowhere fast. Several times I thought she wanted to ask me something. That's a funny thing, you can talk and talk with people and never say what you want to even if you try. The words won't come. Even with your best friend. You guess about them and they guess about you, it's a kind of double talk in which no one says what they are thinking. I would like to have a long talk with Vermillion and see if I can find out what he's really like. I'd hate to be in love with him though. He strikes me as a very self-centered man. I don't get it about him and Simone. They say Hindus know all about love. Ranna, Master of dance, Master of love. Not bad! I don't seem very serious, but I am. What I want most is to be an artist of the dance, that's why I'm going to Ranna's Tuesday.

London, Paris, any European city could be painted in oils. Not New York. New York had to be drawn, emerging from washes of its depths. It was a throwback to Doric Greece and Egypt despite its Gothic towers. Its pyramided body lay as an obelisk-horned Sphinx clawing the river and bay with its many docks. A new many-pawed multi-horned God. Save that New York was the least mysterious of the world's great cities. Perhaps it was the revealing light that did it.

Vermillion looked at his New York on a large thick sheet of rough water color paper thumbtacked to the wall. From two massive darks where the city disappeared within its core it emerged in a code of nervous black dashes and dots made by a sputtering quill pen into a single monument, scintillating in its complex grandeur against the white paper which was the sunlight.

I've hit it this time, but can I go back to the beginning and do it freshly or better or will it become a formula? How difficult to retain that flashing moment when landscape, figure, flower or fruit, real or fancied, revealed its essence. A moment when growth and movement halts at the acme of its perfection, as a reaching hand drawn Rh