41
WE DIDN’T GO to the movies the following Friday. We had a falling-out instead. It began when I told Margot and Martha that I just had too much work to do.
Martha ran her fingers over my lips and asked, “Why not ignore the drawings tonight and spend the evening with the originals?”
“Oh, don’t bother being cute,” said Margot. “He’s not interested in us. He wants the mystery girl, the dream girl, the one who doesn’t exist.”
“Is that true, Peter?” asked Martha.
“No,” I said. “It’s not—”
Margot cut me off. “Oh, please,” she said. “At least don’t lie about it.”
“It’s just that I have to get my work done.”
“No, no, no,” said Margot, puckering her lips with each “no” and moving her head slowly from side to side. “That’s not what it is. This is what it is: you’ve gone nuts.”
Martha laughed and said, to Margot, not to me, “Maybe it’s Our Father’s influence.”
“Of course!” said Margot. “That’s it! The two of them—a couple of loonies—in there searching for the perfect pickle.”
“The archetypal artichoke,” said Martha, giggling.
“The ideal idea,” said Margot.
“Very funny,” I said.
Martha was overcome by a fit of giggling.
“Go ahead, Peter,” said Margot. “Lock yourself in the booby hatch. It’s where you belong.”
“I guess it is,” I said. I put my hand on the door handle.
“Wait, wait!” said Martha, struggling to overcome her giggles. “I want to say one more thing.”
“Yes?”
She said, “I just hope you learn a lesson from this, Peter.”
“A lesson?”
“Yes.” She threw her arm around Margot and struck a pose and said, “Two birds in the hand are worth one in the bush.”
The two of them ran, laughing, up the stairs, and I let myself into the studio.
There was Andy, holding a drawing in his hands.
“Peter!” he said. “What are you doing here? No movie tonight?”
“No—I—I thought I’d get an early start. I’m falling behind, and I don’t want to have to rush the work.”
“Well, your timing is perfect. You’ve come at exactly the right moment! Look!”
He held the drawing up for me to look at. It was a drawing of an apple.
“It’s my first success,” he said. “It’s an ideal, my first ideal, a drawing of the ideal apple. What do you think?”
I looked at it but found that I had nothing at all to say about it.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Of course not!” said Andy. “You don’t know what to think of it, and you don’t know what to say about it, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s because there is no worm—so to speak. That’s the beauty of the ideal versions of things—you don’t have to say anything about them. They are what they are, and that is the sum of their being. That’s the point of them, the whole point. There’s nothing remarkable about them, so no remarks are necessary.”
“I guess,” I said.
“Amazing,” he said, admiring the drawing. “Simply amazing. If you put this apple in a bowl with a bunch of actual apples and invited my students to pick one apple from the bowl, this is the one they’d pick. You know what this is, don’t you?”
“The ideal apple,” I said.
He winked and grinned and said, “This is the apple of their eye.” He chuckled. “The apple of their eye,” he repeated, studying the drawing. “The apple of their mind’s eye.”
I began fussing around, getting ready to work, dragging a stool in front of the easel and so on.
“Well,” said Andy, “I’ll leave you to your work. I want to show this to Rosetta. See you in the morning.”
He left, muttering, “The apple of their mind’s eye,” and I set to work.
[to be continued]
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