232
JOYCE CAROL OATES
trance, while the man sketched her, half a dozen rapid sketches, the
surface of her face given up to him.
"Whe~
are you from?" the man
asked.
"Ohio. My husband lives in Ohio."
She wore no wedding band.
"Your wife - ," Anna began.
''Yes?''
"Is she here?"
"Not right now."
She was silent, ashamed. She had asked an improper question. But
the man did not seem to notice. He continued drawing her, bent over
the sketchpad. When Anna said $he had to go, he showed her the draw–
ings - one after another of her, Anna, recognizably Anna, a woman
in her early thirties, her
hair
sm<><,>th and flat across the top of her
head, tied behind by a scarf. "Take the one you like best," he said,
and she picked one of her with the dog in her lap, sitting very straight,
her brows and eyes clearly defined, her lips girlishly pursed, the dog
and her dress suggested by a few quick irregular lines.
"Lady with pet dog," the man said, smiling oddly.
She spent the rest of that day reading, nearer her cottage. It was
not really a cottage - it
was
'3.
two-story house, large and ungainly and
weathered. It was mixed up
in
her mind with her family, her own
childhood, and she glanced up from her book, perplexed, as
if
waiting
for one of her parents or her sister to come up
to
her. Then she thought
of the man with the red hair, the man with the blind child, the man with
the dog, and she could not concentrate on her reading. Someone–
probably her father - had marked a passage that must be important,
but she kept reading and rereading it :
We try to discover in things,
endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves
have cast upon them,· we are disiUusioned, and learn that they are in
themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed,
in
OUT
minds, to the association of certain itleas.
...
She thought again of the man on the beach. She lay the book aside
and thought of him: his eyes, his aloneness, his drawings of her.
They began seeing each other after that. He came to her front door
in the evening, without the child; he drove her into town for dinner.
She was shy and extremely pleased. The darkness of the expensive
res–
taurant released her; she heard herself chatter; she leaned forward and
seemed to be offering her face up to him, listening to him. He
talked
about his work on a Long Island newspaper and she seemed to
be
listening to him, as she stared at his face, arranging her own face into
