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.
“Go 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 to exchange 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 nakedness, to the point of avoiding it even in domestic or erotic intimacy, but there he was, in fact, perfectly naked, his penis lying sideways, rather large, and circumcised, and although it was undoubtedly grotesque it was also, at the same time, so inevitable that for a moment Jasper Gwyn was sure that man knew something that he didn’t.
Then he raised his head, looked around, and immediately found the portrait of the man with the mustache, a big one, hanging on the wall opposite: it was him, without the cup of tea, but in the same chair, naked, his feet placed slightly on edge on the cold floor. He seemed enormous, but above all he seemed to have arrived.
“Do you like it?” the gallery manager asked.
Jasper Gwyn was understanding something particular, which was to change the course of his days, and so he didn’t answer right away. He looked again at the photograph in the catalogue, then again at the painting on the wall—it was evident that something had happened, between the photo and the painting, something like a journey. Jasper Gwyn thought that it must have taken a lot of time, some sort of exile, and certainly the overcoming of many resistances. He didn’t have in mind any technical trick, nor did the skill of the painter seem important; only it occurred to him that patience had set a goal, and in the end what it had achieved was to take home the man with the mustache. It seemed to him a very beautiful act.