"You mean the 'boyish form' aspect?" Vermillion asked.
"You're a wicked boy!" said Figente, wiggling his rump back into his chair as Hal squealed.
Vermillion was nervous because of the delay. What was holding up Simone? His eyes ached with fragments of images in this fake French room, forms in a kind of anatomical chart of human behavior. Dressing, he had found a sketchbook with sketches of Simone in the tail pocket of the suit he had not worn since the last time he had been at a performance of hers. That was one thing about Paris, you could draw in public without attracting attention. Here memory would have to serve. He glanced at his watch and an elbow dug his ribs.
"Calm down," said Lucy, the Fragonard with the Byzantine eyes whose cool finger he could still feel tracing his palm. He sat taut with craving for Simone's success in the interminable minutes the musicians melted away.
Finally the lights dimmed, leaving only a pale flesh spotlight centered in the dark velvet stage where to the left stood the ebony convolute involute curve of a piano.
He heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the familiar figure of Jacques Vibert, Simone's pianist, take his place. A feeling of guilt gripped him for not having at least telephoned her welcome to the strange city. The hiss of expectation died down, broken only by fragments of hysterical feminine giggles. There were always those, he thought, and a tinkle of ice in a glass and clicking bracelets.
Then, after that second of total silence awaited by all experienced performers, from, as always, a far-right corner Simone appeared as if from space and moved forward slowly, a somnambulist in a sheath of copper taffeta polished as the pots of Chardin kitchens. A great bow on her hip hung into a trail of embers and the stilled room was filled by the crisp silken rustle, as of autumn leaves settling, as she reached the barrier of the footlights. He hoped it was a good omen that she had discarded her uniform of black velvet. Her thin ivory arms hung straight from her high narrow shoulders, and her reposed pale face, slightly tilted right, balanced the bronze coxcomb over her left eyebrow: she seemed, he thought, a burnished Phoenix risen from the muddy black-velvet-clad Simone last seen in Brussels. Standing there, she was the essence of the disillusioned poets of her era with their wryly triste allusions to the corruptions in the flesh which corrode the spirit. Around her spun a blue aura complementing her copper; and also, because he had had too much to drink,
