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was symmetrical, tidy, monotonous. One house could not be distinguished from
another, and gaping open garages exposed what was once concealed in attics;
broken bicycles, old newspapers, old trunks, empty bottles.
    The woman who was standing in the empty lot had
blurred her feminine contours in slacks, and a big loose sweater. But her
blonde hair was round and puffed like the hair of a doll.
    She stood motionless and became, for a moment,
part of the still life until a station wagon arrived and friends waved at her
as they slowed down in front of her. She ran swiftly towards them and helped
them open the back of the car and unload paintings and easels which they all
carried to the empty lot.
    Then the woman in slacks became intensely
active, placing and turning the paintings at an angle where the sunlight would
illumine rather than consume them.
    The paintings were all in sharp contrast to the
attenuated colors of Downey. Deep nocturnal blues and greens and purples, all
the velvet tones of the night.
    Cars began to stop and people came to look.
    One visitor said: “These trees have no
shadows.”
    Another visitor said: “The faces have no
wrinkles. They do not look real.”
    The crowd that had gathered was the same one who
came to the empty lot at Christmas to buy Christmas trees, or in the summer to
buy strawberries from the Japanese gardeners.
    “I have never seen a sea like this,” said
another spectator. The woman in slacks laughed and said: “A painting should
take you to a place you have never seen before. You don’t always want to look
at the same tree, the same sea, the same face every day, do you?”
    But that was exactly what the inhabitants of
Downey wanted to do. They did not want to uproot themselves. They were looking
for duplicates of Downey, a portrait of their grandmother, and of their
children.
    The painter laughed. They liked her laughter.
They ventured to buy a few of the smaller paintings, as if in diminutive sizes
they might not be so dangerous or change the climate of their living room.
    “I’m helping you to tell your house apart from
your neighbor’s,” said the painter.
    There was no wind. Between visitors the painter
and her friends sat on stools and smoked and talked among themselves. But one
capricious, solitary puff of wind lifted a strand of blonde hair away from the
painter’s face and revealed a strand of dark hair under the mesh of the wig.
But no one noticed or commented on it.
    The light grew dim. The painter and her friends
packed the remaining paintings and drove away.
    Back at her house by the sea, the painter
stacked her paintings against the wall. She went into her bedroom. When she
came out again the wig was gone, her long black hair fell over her shoulders,
and she wore a Mexican cotton dress in all the soft colors of a rainbow.
    It was Renate. The blonde wig lay on the bed,
with the slacks and the big sweater. And now she also had to make the paintings
look like her own art work again, which meant restituting to them the
fantasmagorical figures of her night dreams. The plain landscapes, the plain
seascapes, the plain figures were all transformed to what they were before the
Downey exhibit. The figures undulated, became bells, the bells rang over the
ocean, the trees waved in cadences, the sinuosities of the clouds were like the
scarves of Arab or Hindu women, veiling the storms. Animals never seen before, descendants
of the unicorn, offered their heads to be cajoled. The vegetative patience of
flowers was depicted like a group of twittering nuns, and it was the animals
who had the eyes of crystal gazers while people’s eyes seemed made of
stalactites. Explosions of the myth, talkative garrulous streets, debauched
winds, oracular moods of the sands, stasis of the rocks, attrition of stones,
acerose of leaves, excrescence of hours, sibylline women with a faculty for
osmosis, adolescence like cactus, the corrugations of age, the ulcerations of
love, people seeking to live two