In a last exasperated appeal for her to apply for work at the school before it opened, he reminded her that the boys wouldn't be there to teach any longer so she would need to do something with herself. Ruminating would never succeed; but an external activity like painting that was so outwardly self-absorbing might be used to subtly reiterate to them who she was as if an action or a set of actions were the summation of a being. By painting she could only thwart the aspirations of others by making them realize that her own selfish agenda came before theirs. Such an appearance would make her outwardly narcissistic and impregnable in their perspectives. For otherwise they could take her apart piece by piece the way souvenir hunters chipped off Teotihuac‡n or walked off with the Petrified Forest. He would perceive the less concrete images in her paintings to be feral, and yet he would remain taciturn, scowling but leaving her to be herself. Maybe there would be some of these bedtime reminders, although not so many as now. Now there were these continual reminders of suits to have cleaned, grocery items for his palate and pallet (colors for his mouth that she would be vile and immoral to ignore) and reminders of what their boys needed, the agenda of pleasure for these little monkeys whom she was meant to chauffeur from place to place (a karate class for one, a baseball practice for another, a friend's birthday party for one, a jean and shirt buying extravaganza for both). But now, she would not paint for she did not need it to support and pull herself back as if she were the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Her foundation, she told herself, was not as tenuous as this. And even though she was a true woman for him, catering to family matters and allowing herself to be his whore (he asking her questions about men she slept with so that it would excite him enough to maximize his pleasure when impaling within her) she told herself that she could do it without needing art as a crutch. She was a true woman as he liked it and yet had her own sense of being fully Gabriele within her own head. Painting would merely be a prop of a weak feminist. Yes, she could have told him that she had her art, that focus of the realm of ideas that had been her vocation before he moved in with her, and he would have scowled discreetly, never criticizing its odd feral qualities directly. But she would not have believed herself to be an artist anyhow since expressions were being effaced in each new day of life's mundane inconsequentiality.