“Oh, sure, I expected that,” Ferguson said dryly. “Well, you don’t get her phone number out of me, not till after this picture’s finished, if that’s what you’re—”
“No, I mean it. It hit me like a flash when I first lifted the sacking. Now I’ve lost it again. Like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue and can’t bring it out. Where the devil have I seen those ice-cold eyes before and that warm, kissable mouth? What’s her name?”
“Christine Bell.”
“I don’t know her by name, at any rate. Have you ever used her before? Maybe I’ve seen her on some of your covers.”
“No, she’s brand-new. I’m just breaking her in, so you haven’t.”
“There’s just enough familiarity about the eyes and mouth to tease my memory. There isn’t enough about the whole head in general, the hair for instance, to help me place her definitely. Damn it, Ferg, I know I’ve seen that girl somewhere before!”
Ferguson dropped the protective sacking over the canvas once more, somewhat like a jealous hen guarding its chick. They both moved away.
But Corey came back to the subject again later, just before he left, as though it had lain uppermost in his mind all the while. “I won’t get any sleep now until I get straightened out on that.” He went out, casting troubled backward glances at the covered canvas to the very last, until the door had closed after him.
She winced delicately as Ferguson notched the arrow into the bowstring, fitted the integrated weapon into the formalized pose of her hands. “Wasn’t that horrible, the way that snapped through my fingers yesterday? I almost hate to touch it, after that!”
He laughed good-naturedly. “It wasn’t horrible, but it sure could have been — if my neck had been two inches farther back, where it belonged and where it had been a minute before! What saved me was I happened to bend my head toward the canvas just then to concentrate on a detail I was working on. I felt this streak of air shoot past the nape of my neck and the next thing I knew the arrow was wobbling in the wooden frame between two of the skylight panes over there.”
“But it could have killed you, couldn’t it?” she lamented, wide-eyed.
“If it had happened to hit me in the right place — the jugular vein or dead center to the heart — I suppose so. But it didn’t, so why worry about it?”
“But wouldn’t it be better if I used one with a guard, a protective knob on the end of it?”
“No, no, I’m nothing if not realistic; I go flat when I fake things, even such a simple thing as an arrowhead. Don’t be nervous now. It was just one of those hundred-to-one shots. Most likely you were unconsciously pulling it tighter and tighter as the tension of posing grew on you, and then without realizing it you let your muscles relax to try to ease them, and the damn thing sprang! Just remember not to pull it all the way back. Pull it only enough so that the bowstring isn’t relaxed, forms a straight line to the arrow cleft; that’s all you’ve got to do.”
When they had taken time out and the cigarette package had passed between them on the fly, as a hand cloth does between gymnasts, she remarked, “Strange that you should become a painter.”
“Why?”
“You always think of them as sort of gentle people. At least, I always did until now.”
“I am gentle. What makes you think I’m not?”
She murmured, so low he could barely hear her, “Maybe you are now. You weren’t always so gentle.”
Then afterward, when she was back on the stand, bow stretched toward him in shooting position, she said: “Ferguson, you bring happiness to many people. Did you ever — bring death to anyone?”
His brush halted in mid-air, but he didn’t turn to look at her. He stared before him as though seeing something in the past. “Yes, I have,” he said in a subdued voice. His head inclined a little. Then he straightened it, went ahead retouching. “Don’t talk to me while I’m working,” he reminded her evenly.
She didn’t, any more after that. There wasn’t a sound in the studio, and scarcely a motion. Only two things moved: the long slender stem of the paintbrush between his deft fingers; the retreating steel-tipped head of the arrow as it slipped slowly back upon the shaft to the position of uttermost tension the cord was capable of. A third thing there was that moved: a shadow played back and forth across the hollow of her left arm, as the white flesh contracted, as the tendons below it strained. Only those three things were not still, in the vibrant, supercharged silence.
Then suddenly there was a rain of jovial blows against the studio door, and a bevy of voices called, “Come on, Ferg, let us in. Union hours, you know!”
The arrowhead edged unnoticeably forward again, past the staff, as the strain was let out of the cord, degree by degree. She exhaled in such a peculiar, exhausted way that he turned to ask: “Matter, can’t you take it?”
She shrugged, threw him a glazed smile, “Sure, but... too bad we couldn’t have finished it, while we were at it.”
She had never dressed under such difficulties before. The dressing-room door had no lock, and after the first inadvertent discovery that she was in there, they kept purposely trying to break in on her every few minutes, to tease her. Even Ferguson added his voice to the good-natured clamor. “Come on out, Diana, don’t be modest — you’re among friends.”
Once the critical moment of transition from the leopard kilt to nothing to her own underthings was safely past, the worst was over. She effected this by wedging herself against the door — it opened inward — and blocking it with her body while she struggled into her things. Every moment or two it flounced against her, forcing her forward a little; then she would flatten it behind her again and go ahead with her dressing. She had never put on stockings that way before; it was an acrobatic feat.
Judging from the sounds going on in the studio proper, the party was no temporary intrusion. It was going to be an all-night affair, one of those snowball things that kept rolling up more people as it went along. Twice already the outer door had stormed open and new voices had come screaming in. “So this is where you are! I went looking for you at Mario’s and when you weren’t there—”
Once she heard Ferguson at the phone bawling his lungs out above the bedlam: “Hello, Tony? Send over some one-gallon jugs of Spanish red. That monthly hurricane has just hit here again. Yeah, you know the one.”
There were shrieks of protest. “What that man makes on commercials alone, and the best he can offer us is Spanish red!”
“Champagne! Champagne! Champagne, or we’ll all go home!”
“All right, go home!”
“Just for that we won’t! Ble-e-eh!”
Dressed, she stroked the side of her own face uncertainly, looked around. There was no other way out of here than through the studio. She turned, opened the door narrowly and peered out. They were already thick as bees out there — or seemed to be, the restless way they kept moiling around. Somebody had brought in some sort of stringed instrument — as bohemians, they evidently wanted no part of mechanical music — and was plucking vigorously if not too expertly at it. A girl was dancing on the model’s platform.
She watched her chance, and when the line of escape from dressing room to studio door was least populous, she slipped out, threaded her way diagonally across that comer of the vast room and tried to make her exit unobserved — or at least unquestioned.
It was an attempt that was foredoomed to failure. Somebody shouted, “Look, Diana!” There was a concerted rush over toward her, and she was swept into their midst as if by a maelstrom. They were unhampered by conventional formality.
“How beautiful! Oh, just look, how beautiful!”