MAJOR ARCANA: Part Two, Chapter 7

The Bounding Line

Major Arcana is a serialized novel for paid subscribers. For more details, both about the novel and about subscriber amenities, please see the Preface. Previous chapters are accessible (in reverse order) under the Major Arcana tag.

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PART TWO

Chapter 7. | The Bounding Line

He usually felt nothing for the female models, no more than a male doctor would ogle a pair of breasts beneath which a heart seizes and asphyxiates. Again like a doctor, he wanted to master with both his eye and his hand the organization of muscle and ligament, the texture of flesh—not to carve health into it, but to indite its healthy image onto the surface of the world. For this, the eye had to remain dispassionate and the hand steady; desire would cause the eye to roll or blur, would make the hand tremble helplessly, both eye and hand ravenous to close the distance between artist and model and thereby, inevitably, abolish art.