"No. The seated woman is only his starting point. He takes the figure and breaks it into related forms. That's what he's interested in: discovery—and realization—of forms."
Lucy laughed. "Well, I hope you don't make my form look like that. Do you like that picture?"
For the first time since the day in front of Cheever's window Clem was annoyed with Lucy. Damn her, why did she have to be so literal! Of course he liked Picasso, he was no old-hat academician. And then, her bringing a subject to a personal angle. Women always did.
After disappointing forays into the realm of lovemaking Clem had concluded an artist should not marry. Yet he longed for the security of a love which would bolster his spirit. On the verge of marriage several times, something always had gone wrong, leaving him bewildered about the lack women seemed to discover. Women baffled him as much as the living lines of a Degas or a Lautrec nude. After the last relationship, a broken engagement to an American girl on a fling in Paris who left him for an Italian sculptor, he salved his hurt sporadically with a model who did for him, and others, in the traditional Bohemian manner.
Back in Congress his mother, thinking it would make him settle down and do something useful, had pointed out several available girls, but Clem had put marriage from his mind. He derived a guilty pleasure in picturing the scene if he told his mother about the women he had made love to. At least, he thought, it would put an end to her making him feel like a kid.
It was Lucy's first Christmas involving more shopping than a Christmas card for teacher, another for Aunt Mabel, and a present from the dime store for Mother.
"My goodness, from something Vida said I think she's going to give me a present—does that mean I have to buy her one?"
"I guess so, Pussy, and we'll have to give Mabel one."
"Oh boy, our New York money!"
There the matter rested while Aunt Mabel vied with Twelfth Street in seeing how many kinds of fancy cookies she could bake, not counting Stollen and fruit cake. At last, when crocks and tins were crammed with a supply which would last until Easter, the street conceded defeat because of a foreign confection of ground walnuts, honey, and poppy seeds wrapped in thinner than tissue layers of
