"Listen to the merry-go-round."
"Like a ride?"
"No thank you. I like to get somewhere when I ride. Makes me think of my first auto ride. I was ten and Mother took me to the State Fair—in Colorado—and for a nickel each we got a ride around a race track. I felt as if I'd been on a long trip somewhere, though I'd been on several trains before. Mother and I moved around a lot. Look at the silly ear-to-ear grin on that monkey. Know something? I've seen that grin on a lot of faces. Look, he's flirting with the fat little man with the cigar. They're 'ca-ra-zay,' as Bert Savoy says, about each other."
Her mimicking of the popular female impersonator dissolved his depression. No one could be less like Bert Savoy than Lucy Claudel in her femininity plus a kind of childlike playfulness. Simone had had her kind of playfulness too before she became her version of Camille. He hadn't felt this good in months.
"Do you do this often? I never thought of walking in the Park. I've only ridden through to the Casino or roundabout." She stopped, hoping he didn't think it the route with every man. "Those seals remind me of Figente's Brancusi!"
She had made the rounds, he thought. The observation about the seals was one you would have expected rather from her handsome friend Vida.
"Brancusi would be pleased. He tries to get the easy flow of nature's forms."
"You know him? What's he like?"
"Short, stocky, with long black whiskers."
"Oh, old!"
"Not that old—about forty-five."
"Tell me the truth, are all French artists as crazy as those things at Figente's? I can't tell one from another."
"No. And most of those works at Figente's aren't crazy. Orginals always seem to pick up leeches—copyists; that's why some of the paintings seem to look alike. Like in your show business when someone steals a routine. Take Chaplin's back kick flip. An imitator takes that flip and triples it, but perfectly as he may copy he doesn't convey that nose-thumbing yet somehow elegant gesture which is Chaplin's signature because it is personal to his experience. Originators know what they're trying to say, the copyist imitates the effects—and mistakes—as well. Picasso describes them as the lice in
