Now she was to be awarded a Master's degree in art history. For her it was an eventless day without ceremony. It was a normal day of putting up new wallpaper in one bedroom and then cleaning up to help Hispanic Betty with dinner but interrupting the latter task from incompetence and the need to drive the boys to little league practice. Even until now there were no cards or special letters sent to her, and this was as she liked it. She did not need anyone to congratulate her because she did not feel that there was anything to be praised for. She might have learned the history of art but she had lost the sense of herself as an artist. The cracks of her damp coldness had been filled as complacently as a warm moss. In family there was no discontent with the world and within these heavenly cellars all else seemed musty and art the specious delusions of crack addicts. Heretofore most of her paintings had such a still contemplative depth within the glint of the eyes of prostitutes and street people who could pull down lightning; movement had the fading lines of ripples in a pond; hard movements belied the simple pleasures; pallid colors delineated the richness of form in a world of vanquished color; friendship was portrayed with discomfited and inexplicable sense of betrayal; people were stoic mannequins straining about in contorted action and exhibiting eyes of consternation at being in ceremony and societal roles that were not what they had imagined them to be; Antarctica was a resplendent distant background in contrast to the war ravaged Middle East with its oil wells ablaze; and in stores where customers headed for scanners with an incessant array of things, these people were as blue as waves, curled and dashing as foaming breakers, in movement seemingly happy but in practice discontent. Sometimes the dominant colors were tawny but pert, ruddy and pale, and recalcitrant but with lament. Often her protagonists possessed the ideal curves of Raphael paintings and her antagonists had the angled linear depth of El Greco portraits or of distant cars. Her protagonists had a resistance against the social instinct; but she had succumbed to its truth like an insect to the light of a lamp. She was flitting from one specious light bulb to that of another: now not able to contemplate and finding sitting still to paint a torturous sensory deprivation; and now with endorphins and dopamines uncorked, she was oozing in the unbearable lightness of being. Chapter Thirty-Two