After he’d gone she half wished she’d made him stay. Her body tingled all over the way it used to when Dirk put his arms around her and she wanted terribly to know what making love was like. She took a cold bath and went to bed. When she woke up and saw Freddy again she’d decide whether she was in love with him. But the next morning she got a telegram calling her home. Dad was seriously ill with diabetes. Freddy put her on the train. She’d expected that the parting would carry her off her feet, but it didn’t somehow.
Dr. Hutchins got better and Eveline took him down to Santa Fé to recuperate. Her mother was sick most of the time too, and as Margaret and Adelaide were both married and George had gotten a job abroad with Hoover’s Belgian Relief, it seemed to be up to her to take care of the old people. She spent a dreamy unhappy year in spite of the great skeleton landscape and horsebacktrips and working at watercolors of Mexicans and Indian penitentes. She went around the house ordering meals, attending to housekeeping, irritated by the stupidity of servantgirls, making out laundry lists.
The only man she met there who made her seem alive was José O’Riely. He was a Spaniard in spite of his Irish name, a slender young man with a tobaccocolored face and dark green eyes, who had somehow gotten married to a stout Mexican woman who brought out a new squalling brown infant every nine months. He was a painter and lived by doing odd carpenter jobs and sometimes posing as a model. Eveline got to talk to him one day when he was painting the garage doors and asked him to pose for her. He kept looking at the pastel she was doing of him and telling her it was wretched, until she broke down and cried. He apologized in his stiff English and said she must not be upset, that she had talent and that he’d teach her to draw himself. He took her down to his house, an untidy little shack in the Mexican part of town, where he introduced her to Lola, his wife, who looked at her with scared suspicious black eyes, and showed her his paintings, big retablos painted on plaster that looked like Italian primitives. “You see I paint martires,” he said, “but not Christian. I paint the martires of the working class under exploitation. Lola does not understand. She want me to paint rich ladies like you and make plenty money. Which you think is best?” Eveline flushed; she didn’t like being classed with the rich ladies. But the pictures thrilled her and she said she would advertise them among her friends; she decided she’d discovered a genius.
O’Riely was grateful and wouldn’t take any money for posing or criticizing her paintings after that, instead he sometimes borrowed small sums as a friend. Even before he started making love to her, she decided that this time it must be a real affair. She’d go crazy if something didn’t happen to her soon.
The main difficulty was finding somewhere they could go. Her studio was right back of the house and there was the danger that her father or mother or friends coming to call might break in on them any time. Then too Santa Fé was a small place and people were already noticing how often he went to her studio.
One night when the Hutchins’ chauffeur was away, they climbed up to his room above the garage. It was pitch black there and smelled of old pipes and soiled clothes. Eveline was terrified to find she’d lost control of her own self; it was like going under ether. He was surprised to find she was a virgin and was very kind and gentle, almost apologetic. But she felt none of the ecstasy she had expected lying in his arms on the chauffeur’s bed; it was almost as if it had all happened before. Afterwards they lay on the bed talking a long time in low intimate voices. His manner had changed; he treated her gravely and indulgently, like a child. He said he hated things to be secret and sordid like that, it was brutalizing to them both. He would find a place where they could meet in the open, in the sun and air, not like criminals this way. He wanted to draw her, the beautiful slenderness of her body would be the inspiration of his painting and her lovely little round breasts. Then he looked her over carefully to see if her dress looked mussed and told her to run over to the house and go to bed; and to take precautions if she didn’t want to have a baby, though he would be proud to have her bear a child of his, particularly as she was rich enough to support it. The idea horrified her and she felt it was coarse and unfeeling of him to talk about it lightly that way.
They met all that winter a couple of times a week in a little deserted cabin that lay off the trail in the basin of a small stony cañon back of the town. She would ride over and he would walk by a different road. They called it their desert island. Then one day Lola looked in his portfolios and found hundreds of drawings of the same naked girl; she came up to the Hutchins’ house shaking and screaming with the hair streaming down her face, looking for Eveline and crying that she was going to kill her. Dr. Hutchins was thunderstruck; but though she was terribly frightened inside, Eveline managed to keep cool and tell her father that she had let O’Riely do drawings of her but that there’d been nothing else between them, and that his wife was a stupid ignorant Mexican and couldn’t imagine a man and a woman being alone in a studio together without thinking something disgusting. Although he scolded her for being so imprudent Dad believed her and they managed to keep the whole thing from Mother, but she only managed to see Pepe once more after that. He shrugged his shoulders and said what could he do, he couldn’t abandon his wife and children to starve, poor as he was he had to live with them, and a man had to have a woman to work for him and cook; he couldn’t live on romantic lifeclasses, he had to eat, and Lola was a good woman but stupid and untidy and had made him promise not to see Eveline again. Eveline turned on her heel and left him before he was through talking. She was glad she had a horse she could jump on and ride away.
The Camera Eye (31)
a matrass covered with something from Vantine’s makes a divan in the ladyphotographer’s studio we sit on the divan and on cushions on the floor and the longnecked English actor reads the Song of Songs in rhythms
and the ladyphotographer in breastplates and silk bloomers dances the Song of Songs in rhythms
the little girl in pink is a classical dancer with panpipes but the hennahaired ladyphotographer dances the Song of Songs in rhythms with winking bellybutton and clash of breastplates in more oriental style
stay muh with flahgons comfort muh with ahpples
for I am sick of loeuve
his left hand is under muh head and his rahght hand doth embrace muh
the semiretired actress who lived upstairs let out a yell and then another Burglars secondstory men Good god she’s being attacked we men run up the stairs poor woman she’s in hysterics Its the wrong flat the stairs are full of dicks outside they’re backing up the waggon All right men on one side girls on the other what the hell kind of place is this anyway? Dicks coming in all the windows dicks coming out of the kitchenette
the hennahaired ladyphotographer holds them at bay draped in a portière waving the telephone Is this Mr. Wickersham’s office? District Attorney trying experience a few friends a little dance recital in the most brutal manner prominent actress upstairs in hysterics allright officer talk to the District Attorney he’ll tell you who I am who our friends are
Dicks slink away waggon jangles to another street the English actor is speaking Only by the greatest control I kept muh temper the swine I’m terrible when I’m aroused terrible