"Perhaps not."
"And you forget what you're so fond of talking about Wenny."
"What?"
"The gorgeousness of matter. That's your pet phrase."
Taste of veal with tomato and peppers, savor of frizzled olive oil, little seeds mashed between the front teeth into a prickly faint aroma, and wine, the cool curve of the glass against my lips, the tang of it like rainy sunsets. I could sit here imagining it and never drink, imagining Nan's lips... He picked up the glass and drank off the goldcolored wine at a gulp so that it choked him. He coughed and spluttered into his napkin.
"I follow you there, if you include the idea of material pleasures being purged of their grossness, by reason, fitness, as Nan says. So made the raw material of beauty," Fanshaw was saying. Wenny coughed and spluttered into his napkin.
"Drink a little water," Fanshaw added.
"More Orvieto, you mean," said Wenny hoarsely. "By the way, is Orvieto in Tuscany?"
"No, in Umbria, I think; that's where the great Signorelli frescos of the last judgment are, that strange dry hideously violent piece of macabre."
"Gee, I'd like to see them."