STILL LIFE
97
other end of the studio whose door she kept locked, handing him
the key when he had to use the toilet. The wall was thin and the
instrument noisy. He could hear the whistle and rush of her water,
and though he tried to be quiet, because of the plumbing the bowl
was always brimful and the pour of his stream embarrassed him. At
night, if there was need, although he was tempted to use the
sink,
he fished out the yellowed, sedimented pot under his bed; once or
twice, as he was using it in the thick of night, he had the impression
she was awake and listening.
They painted in their overcoats, Annamaria wearing a black
babushka, Fidelman a green wool hat pulled down over his frozen
ears. She kept a pan of hot coals at her feet and every so often lifted
a sandaled foot to toast it. The marble floor of the studio was sheer
thick ice; Fidelman wore two pairs of tennis socks his sister Bessie
had recently sent him from the States. Annamaria, a leftie, painted
with a paint-smeared leather glove on her hand, and theoretically his
easel had been arranged so that he couldn't see what she was doing
but he often sneaked looks at her work. The pittrice, to his surprise,
painted with flicks of her fingers and wrists, peering at her perform–
ance with almost closed eyes. He noticed she alternated still lifes
with huge lyric abstractions-massive whorls of red and gold explod–
ing in all directions, these built on, entwined with, and ultimately
concealing, a small black religious cross, her first two brush strokes
on every abstract canvas. Once when Fidelman gathered the nerve
to ask her why the cross, she answered it was the symbol that gave
the painting its meaning.
He was eager to know more but she was impatient. "Eh," she
shrugged, "who can explain ,art?"
Though her response to his various attempts to become better
acquainted were as a rule curt, and her voluntary attention to
him,
shorter still-she was able, apparently, to pretend he wasn't there–
Fidelman's feeling for Annamaria grew, and he was as unhappy in
love as he had ever been.
But he was patient, a persistent virtue, served her often in various
capacities, for instance carrying down four flights of stairs her two
bags of garbage after supper-the portinaia was crippled and the
portiere never around-sweeping the studio clean each morning, even
running to retrieve a brush or paint tube when she happened to drop
