to do anything else with, like walking with her in the early morning after the show. She had made Paris come alive, given him extra keys to the city. She had educated him with her flashes illuminating nuances of social behavior when they went to restaurants, races, theatre, or an occasional vernissage.
Then she began taking back the keys one by one. The detective routine. Accusations. Sudden appearances at his work place to check up. The introduction of that commiserating talk about differences in age, her future aloneness because he was sure to leave her. It was that repetitious existence in a purgatorial future that finally had made him aware of their difference in age, not the twelve years. When they were first together he hadn't given a thought to her age. But, as her performance depressingly repeated itself, despite his reassurances he began to feel that being with her was like painting the same picture over and over again. He discovered he could not abide tragedy queen self-pity. Who the hell except Wagner could live with an Isolde! He remembered the line of a wag, asked during a Tristan intermission how he liked the performance. "Not a dry seat in the house!" Being with her he would wonder, wondered still, if she were conscious of her performance, or whether this acting in front of a lover as if he weren't there had become second nature. In which case there was something to be said for one-act plays. Each a different plot, short, and to the point. Not a three-year melodrama, in which he was the villain as well as hero. He was a villain at that, fulfilling the prophecy she had insisted on making come true.
It was a myth that in love you know another human being. He undoubtedly was as incomprehensible to her as she to him. Yet their bodies knew how to talk to one another. Apart from that, did anyone truly love another, get beyond self-love, see the other human being save in the mirror of one's own image? Sometimes he did seem to reach her with an image he had painted, as she had reached into him with her song. Perhaps the only communicative speech was made by artists in whatever the form. Then why couldn't she comprehend that it would require years of painting for him to become a painter? She had thought Degas an imbecile when told how collectors of Degas's paintings chained them with locks to walls because he always was removing them, seeing something he wished to add. It had been the worst possible illustration to make to her. Simone, who never changed an intonation in singing a song, who hated and feared growth and wanted time to stand still at the same point in their relationship. What she wanted of a man, of him, was
