Neil unbolted his painting from the easel and folded the legs together, arranged the brushes and paints in the wooden case and closed it. He carried it all over to the shade of a nearby tree and propped the painting against the pack for viewing. The canvas was clearly his best of the summer, one of those where hand and mind worked together without conflict.
It was six hours since they started off from Gordes, the usual duration of their painting day. Neil worked faster than Sam, and was typically done when Sam needed another hour or so.
Sam had been the meteor of their academy years, earning highest marks in every pursuit and the admiration and envy of his fellow students. He was the one who would invade New York and have the critics at his feet, whimpering for more. The role of supporter and assistant came naturally to Neil; it was the enduring pattern of the relationship between the two men. Sam graciously allowed Neil to adore him, for which with equal grace Neil returned adoration. Offer the cheek, kiss the cheek. So this new twist of Neil’s work being better than Sam’s foretold a disturbing direction, a first blip on the balance of power between them. Beta male becoming alpha male, that was not supposed to happen.
The academy was a school for contemporary art where edgy, at the front-of-the-war, shells-dropping-around-you paintings were all that really mattered. Portrait painting, still-life, landscape or contra-jour compositions had no place there; it was as if they never even existed. Art schools at the time all downplayed the past, encouraging experiment and journeys into unknown lands.
The two men and Carrie spent many hours in the London museums, not always going straight to the modern wing. In secret, traitorous secret, they wondered what they were missing in the academy’s total avoidance of what went before. Carrie was particularly taken with the portrait painters of the past, Sargeant, Whistler, and Velasquez. Both Sam and Neil went again and again to the 19th Century landscapists and the Impressionists, wondering if they could actually paint something as striking as a Monet, a Constable or a Turner. In their final week at the academy at the wine bar in Soho they had taken as their own, Sam suggested they teach themselves plein air painting, and it called for a trip to the South of France before they returned to the States. Thirty paintings would be enough to see if they had the touch. If they failed, they would at least have a nice, late-summer bonfire.
Neither Sam nor Neil had money to spare. Neil’s family could well afford to send him more, but strongly believed they should not. In his undergraduate years, he drove a taxi and waited upon tables to pay the bills. There was a steel barrier between him and the family money, to be breeched only when Neil reached an inexact mature age. Early riches had spoiled other generations of Bronson men, turned them to drink and degradation, so the solution was simple: a very, very small allowance, regularly paid but never enlarged. If Bronsons did not starve in the streets, at least they would not be driving about in cloth-topped cars with adoring girls at their sides.
Sam’s Boston family, eleven strong, could barely afford to pay for heat each winter. What they lacked in comfort was made up for in love, siblings working to support the education of the younger ones. Sam, without rancor and with boundless vigor, worked for everything in undergraduate school, and the academy stepped in to recognize his great promise with full scholarship.
Neil and Sam had already paid for their passages home on an Italian ship, the bottom deck stateroom, right over the propellers. They expected without question that they would fall quickly into work in New York on their return, perhaps waiting tables again or working in art galleries. They would paint at night or any extra time squeezed between work schedules until some gallery took up their cause. That they would be discovered and taken up on high was never doubted
Carrie, the beneficiary from her grandmother of a large trust fund, offered to pay the way for all three of them to their summer idyll in France, but both Neil and Sam felt uncomfortable with that. So the men rented a small room over the Metropole while Carrie had a two-room suite in the Auberge de Gordes on the other side of the cathedral. The three of them met every evening in small cafes and bars, looking at what the men had painted, critiquing each canvas as they had learned in London.
Sam was finally finished with his thirtieth painting.
“Voila. We’ve done it,” he said.
They put together their easel packs and walked over to the road just at two o’clock. Carrie was seldom late.
2
Buying Wholesale
Her black convertible stopped next to the two men and they loaded their packs into the back seat. Neil sat up front next to Carrie, and Sam climbed over into the seat behind with the easels. Carrie was taller by an inch than either of the men, slim, dressed in jeans and a blue silk blouse. Her blonde hair showed in wisps around the patterned scarf on her head.
“Before we leave, let me see what you’ve painted,” she said.
Sam held his canvas up first. He had finished the foreground with a virtuoso zig-zag composition of grasses and native shrubs, taking the eye quickly back to highly worked details of the town on the horizon. Neil saw that his bold solution to the foreground had saved the painting from its commonplace beginning. Sam’s ever present competitive spirit soared when he viewed Neil’s work and it pushed him into a skillful solution. Neil was impressed, partly at the canvas itself and partly at the strength of the obsession that it evidenced.
“Now yours, Neil.”
He retrieved his canvas from the top of the easel pack in the back seat. It was wet, so he handled it gingerly. Quite a bit smaller than Sam’s painting, it nonetheless held the strength of design and color that Sam had seen earlier in the day. The town on the horizon was but a silhouette in dusty violet, no details such as windows and shadows whatsoever. It was, in fact, far less realistic than Sam’s rendition. The reverse of Sam’s, it brought the eye strongly forward, away from the horizon to the ably crafted rows of grasses, shadows and native plants. Neil’s palette was more daring, with the strong colors of the Fauves, an orange in the shadows, black in the outlines and a Chinese red in unexpected places.
Sam asked, “Well? Who wins?”
“You two always want me to choose. I love you both and think you’re both brilliant,” Carrie said. She was not about to start a battle between the two men. It amused Sam to bring them to the precipice of choice, but Carrie always avoided falling over it.
She changed the subject with, “Anyway, I have a dazzling plan. It involves all of your paintings and your future in New York this fall.” She started the engine, tightened the knot of her scarf and pulled back onto the road, quickly accelerating in the direction of Apt. Neither of the two men knew what to make of her statement, but without looking at one another, they thought better of asking for clarity at this time. Carrie proceeded on her own clock, and they knew it was futile to slow it down or speed it up.
Sam said, “So we’ll hear about this plan soon?”
“Soon.”
They drove in silence the rest of the way. The breeze was a welcome change from the still, hot afternoon. It had been many weeks since rain or a single cloud of any promise. The fields had dried to ochre yellow and sienna, interspersed with the dusty, gray foliage of the olive groves. Goats and sheep huddled together in the scant shade. The Vaucluse seemed to be waiting for the end of summer, silent and hot, with skies of a deep, chemical blue, no breeze stirring a single branch.
She drove into the village centre and found parking on a side street. They locked their easel-packs and canvases in the trunk and set off for the café.
She
