Mr. Gwyn Read Online Free Page B

felt like touching them: he was convinced that they were warm .
    At that point he would have left, that was enough, but outside it was still pouring, and so Jasper Gwyn, without realizing that this would mark his life, began to look through a catalogue of the show: there were three, open, on a light wood table, the usual large, ridiculously weighty books. Jasper Gwyn observed that the titles of the paintings were the rather stupid type you might expect ( Man with Hands on His Lap ), and that next to each title was written the date of execution. He noticed that the painter had worked on them for years, twenty, more or less, and yet, apparently, nothing in his way of seeing things, or in his technique, had changed. He had simply continued to paint—as if it were a single action, but very extended. Jasper Gwyn wondered if the same thing had been true for him, in the twelve years when he was writing, and while he was searching for an answer he came to the book’s appendix, in which there were photographs taken while the painter was working, in his studio. Without realizing it he leaned over a little, to see better. He was struck by a photograph in which the painter was sitting placidly in a chair, turned toward the window, looking outside; nearby, a model whom Jasper Gwyn had just seen in one of the paintings on display in the gallery was lying nude on a couch, in a position not very different from the one in which she had been caught on the canvas. She, too, seemed to be gazing into emptiness.
    Jasper Gwyn saw in it a time he hadn’t expected, the passing of time. Like everyone, he imagined that that sort of thing happenedin the usual way, with the painter at the easel and the model in place, motionless, the two engaged in a pas de deux whose rules they knew—he could imagine the foolish chatter, meanwhile. But here it was different, because painter and model seemed, rather, to be waiting, and one would have said that each was waiting on his own account—and for something that wasn’t the painting. He thought that they were waiting to settle at the bottom of an enormous glass.

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    He turned the page and the photographs were similar. The models changed, but the situation was almost always the same. One time the painter was washing his hands, another he was walking barefoot, looking down. He was never painting. A very tall, angular model, with big, childlike ears, was sitting on the edge of a bed, grasping the headboard with one hand. There was no reason to think that they were talking—that they had ever talked to each other.
    Then Jasper Gwyn took the catalogue and looked for a place to sit. There were only two blue chairs, just in front of the table where a woman was working, amid papers and books. She must be the gallery manager, and Jasper Gwyn asked if he could sit there, or if it would bother her.
    â€œGo ahead,” said the woman.
    She was wearing bizarre reading glasses and when she touched things she did it with the caution of a woman who has manicured nails.
    Jasper Gwyn sat down, and although he was at a distance from the woman that made sense only in the light of a mutual desire toexchange a few words, he set the book on his lap and began looking again at those photographs as if he were alone, at home.
    The painter’s studio seemed empty and rundown, without a trace of conscious cleanliness, yet you had the impression of an unreal disorder, since there was nothing that could, if necessary, be put in order. Analogously, the nudity of the models seemed to be the result not of an absence of clothes but of a sort of original condition, existing before any modesty—or much later. One of the photographs showed a man of about sixty, with a carefully trimmed mustache, and white hair on his chest, who was sitting on a chair, drinking from a cup, maybe tea, his legs slightly spread, his feet placed slightly on edge on the cold floor. You would have said that he was absolutely unfit for