U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [214]
-123-watercolors of Mexicans and Indian penitentes. She went around the house ordering meals, attending to housekeep-ing, irritated by the stupidity of servantgirls, making out laundry lists.
The only man she met there who made her seem alive
was José O'Riely. He was a Spaniard in spite of his Irish name, a slender young man with a tobaccocolored face and dark green eyes, who had somehow gotten married to a stout Mexican woman who brought out a new squal ing brown infant every nine months. He was a painter and lived by doing odd carpenter jobs and sometimes posing as a model. Eveline got to talk to him one day when he was painting the garage doors and asked him to pose for her. He kept looking at the pastel she was doing of him and tel ing her it was wretched, until she broke down and cried. He apologized in his stiff English and said she must not be upset, that she had talent and that he'd teach her to draw himself. He took her down to his house, an untidy little shack in the Mexican part of town, where he intro-duced her to Lola, his wife, who looked at her with scared suspicious black eyes, and showed her his paintings, big retablos painted on plaster that looked like Italian primi-tives. "You see I paint martires," he said, "but not Chris-tian. I paint the martires of the working class under ex-ploitation. Lola does not understand. She want me to paint rich ladies like you and make plenty money. Which you think is best?" Eveline flushed; she didn't like being classed with the rich ladies. But the pictures thril ed her and she said she would advertise them among her friends; she de-cided she'd discovered a genius. O'Riely was grateful and wouldn't take any money for posing or criticizing her paintings after that, instead he sometimes borrowed smal sums as a friend. Even before he started making love to her, she decided that this time it must be a real affair. She'd go crazy if something didn't happen to her soon.
-124-The main difficulty was finding somewhere they could go. Her studio was right back of the house and there was the danger that her father or mother or friends coming to cal might break in on them any time. Then too Santa Fé
was a smal place and people were already noticing how often he went to her studio. One night when the Hutchins' chauffeur was away, they climbed up to his room above the garage. It was pitch black there and smel ed of old pipes and soiled clothes. Eveline was terrified to find she'd lost control of her own self; it was like going under ether. He was surprised to find she was a virgin and was very kind and gentle, almost apologetic. But she felt none of the ecstasy she had ex-pected lying in his arms on the chauffeur's bed; it was almost as if it had al happened before. Afterwards they lay on the bed talking a long time in low intimate voices. His manner had changed; he treated her gravely and indulgently, like a child. He said he hated things to be se-cret and sordid like that, it was brutalizing to them both. He would find a place where they could meet in the open, in the sun and air, not like criminals this way. He wanted to draw her, the beautiful slenderness of her body would be the inspiration of his painting and her lovely little round breasts. Then he looked her over careful y to see if her dress looked mussed and told her to run over to the house and go to bed; and to take precautions if she didn't want to have a baby, though he would be proud to have her bear a child of his, particularly as she was rich enough to sup-port it. The idea horrified her and she felt it was coarse and unfeeling of him to talk about it lightly that way. They met al that winter a couple of times a week in a little deserted cabin that lay off the trail in the basin of a smal stony ca