She was lying. I felt like an old fool just talking to her, though I had no designs. I would have been less of a cliché if I had had some designs. I would sound like less of one now if I admitted to having had designs, but I was what I was. As much as it pained me to admit, in a moment of reducing myself to an artistic expression, I resigned myself to a kind of Greenbergian complaint about surrealism, my present cliché being just that, surrealistic, that the picture fails because of an appeal to the anecdotal. An equally painful admission was that I believed, as much as I did not want to, that the medium was everything. Canvas and paint, that’s all there was, all there is. The medium there, in that museum, of my cliché, was two bodies. And sad as it made me, and excited as well, I knew that the two bodies would find each other. It wasn’t male fantasy; I was never confident enough for that. It was artistic prescience, if that makes any sense. Even if it doesn’t, that’s what it was.