He spread his fingers. "Pretty? And shouldn't it he fig?"
His hand breathed up and down with Lucy's belly, the celebrated "tactile touch," he thought.
"Mr. Klug is correct," Vent was saying, "Tchaikovsky belongs to the romantic 19th century. Oh, I don't deny he is a great composer—but today we have freed ourselves of romanticism to create the pure, to express our time unsentimentally. The modern artist is hard-boiled to all that romantic slop."
"Is it the era you are expressing or your own sentimental expression of an era?" asked Vermillion. "What's so shameful about being sentimental—it's part of man's nature, or it wouldn't be everpresent. What's hard-boiledness but another form of sentimentality. Look how the hard-boiled writers in Paris slop over when they write of themselves or their girls—those girls who become more gallant as they move from one guy to another. Perhaps they are gallant at that, making the rounds. I see I've wandered from music—but not from the point which is that in expressing any era it is man who is of significance—and without those gadgets of obscurity masking as profundity."
"You're prejudiced against dissonance because your ear is not attuned to it," said Vent truculently.
"Be good enough to lend me my own ear. Do you say Mozart didn't achieve pure music because he was unaware of your contemporary gadgets, fire sirens and egg beaters? I've no prejudice against dissonance—but to the boys who use noisemakers as blinds for incapacity to compose. Those noises, dating themselves as they're made, compare in painting to an air brush or nailing and pasting things on a board. Sure an experiment in any form is legitimate, but an experiment isn't inevitably art. And don't tell me art is not necessarily agreeable. It is not necessarily disagreeable. Art is an affirmation. Sure, much of the meaning of life is obscure. But while I'm alive I'm not going to play dead. It's an artist's job to make art, not mine as the spectator to look for meanings in obscurities."
"Maybe you're just lazy, like me. Why don't you lie down too?" invited Lucy, who thought Vermillion was straying too far afield. His voice vibrated into her through his fingertips.
A barrage of vexed looks failed to reach their impervious target. Ilona Klemper's eyebrows rose to a pained inverted V. As usual, she thought, Lucy was not content unless the center of masculine attention.
"Must you be frivolous, Lucy?" she chided peevishly. "What I
