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THUS I BECAME a sketch doctor. Every Friday night, the girls and I would go to the movies. We would walk home, playing our parts. When we reached the Glynns’ house, the three of us would let ourselves in through the front door. In the hallway, we would say good night and part. The girls would go upstairs to bed, and I would go into Andy’s studio. I had a key.
In the studio, I would turn the lights on, put some water to boil on a hot plate so that I could make the tea I would need to imitate the stains and blotches on the students’ drawings, and I would get to work. Andy would have stacked all the week’s sketches on a small table at the left of the easel where I worked. At the right side of the easel was a similar small table, empty. I would work for hours, alone in the studio with nothing but the sound of my pencil or the scraping of my stool, until the pile of sketches at my left hand had been replaced by a pile of sketches on my right.
When I finished, sometimes in the flat gray light of the dawn, I went to sleep on a cot, in the studio.
From the first, working alone, in the night, with the twins just up the stairs, I found it difficult to keep my mind on my work, and from the first, I wondered about the honesty and propriety of what I was doing, and from the first, I seemed to hear sounds elsewhere in the house throughout the night, and the light seemed to shift and fade and brighten and shift and fade again, as if someone were walking through the house with a candle, and from the first, I suspected that I could see a third model represented in the drawings, not Margot or Martha, but a dark-haired girl.
[to be continued]
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