by Leonardo continues on the instant one looks away and in memory one has seen it come and go.
Two russet pears lay on the table, waiting to be eaten, and seeing how they lay, touching like contented lovers, he could not help but paint them. For three days he built up their richness, his brush loving the compliant canvas until they were all but the real pears which he then ate.
The next day revealed an aspect he had missed in the intensity of painting. The pears had no individual life of their own, only the literalness of their model. He remembered the fruit had had, because of its colors, a Pompeian fresco aspect, an idea worth improvisation. He prepared a canvas with the translucent color of pear flesh and let it dry to a receptive state. His plan was to exaggerate the pears' planes with thick strokes of ochre and terra cotta to accent the Pompeian resemblance. His hand refused and contrarily brushed in high key the simple form. Desperately with a brush point he set in black and sepia cuneiform a record of the salient weights and characteristics and, depressed, put the canvas aside.
The next day he looked to see where he had failed. To his amazement the pears had become the essence of what he had seen at his first impulse to paint then. It was curious, he thought when calmer, how a new language had come to him. A language which seemed always to have been waiting to speak all this time.
Chapter 26
FROM KASHMIR TO LUCY
Tuesday morning the chink of Vida's coffee cup awakened Lucy. She had not seen Vida since Sunday. When she returned from Simone's Vida was not home and she had pretended to be asleep when Vida came in; to talk about Simone would be a betrayal. Simone had had too much gin, which made anyone do unhappy things, especially if unhappy. It was right not to talk about Simone but it was wrong not to have phoned Vida about staying to dinner. On Monday night Vida had been asleep when she returned from the show.
