He stood up, butted the fresh fag, and walked across the room to the drawing desk where he did his layouts.
"The best thing to do is simply show you," he said. I sighed and dragged my chair over and sat to one side of him. He pulled out a layout pad, opened his pastels and arranged them deliberately beside it. I wondered how he could show me his love-troubles this way, unless it was by diagrams.
"Nothing happens," he said, waving a pastel stick under my nose, "until I've used the three basic colors and signed the illo. If there isn't a balance of the three basics it's no good. That's why I arranged the pastels that way."
He naturally assumed I knew what he was talking about. It meant nothing more to me than a freak technique he'd developed. That signature business sounded—neurotic.
Now this part of my story is important. Until he finished that sketch I was the normal, practical guy I was telling you about. Nothing fizzed on me unless it added up to four and I could feel the two and two of it. A buck was a buck, a girl was a girl—
His grey pastel flew over the paper and as usual I marvelled at how these guys could do it. Like the saying goes, all I can draw is flies and rubber checks, and frequently a blank. I've seen a lot of artists do their stuff, but none of them come up to Willy. You've seen his illos in most of the big slicks—you know, the guy and gal in all angles on the yellow beach under a pink sky, and the story title reads "When Will You Come Back, Dearest?", or the cola series on the back cover where the girl swigs and the guy gawks at her bathing suit, that sort of stuff. The fat accounts, they all came running for Willy. With him on the payroll the agency could have made a fortune.
I was considering ways to broach this subject so it would tie in with the poor guy's dilemma when he started working the third color into the sketch. Naturally it was a dame; he could draw them with his eyes shut. The third color went into the bathing suit. He smudged chalk on his finger and touched the sketch with quick strokes, moulding the form, and what a form. I leaned forward, and half stood over his chair, marvelling at the way he did it. Then, applying a dough rubber to pick out highlights and stray smudges, he leaned back and reached for a pencil. Noticing how tensed he was, I sank back into my chair and lit a cigarette.
"There," he whispered, his hand poised with the pencil at the bottom left-hand corner.
"So now what gives?" I asked. "Is she the—"