the waterside meal had been cleared away and they sat with espressos, Carrie said, “I am almost afraid of the future, you know.”
Sam asked, “Afraid of going home, back to the States?”
“No. Fearful of changing what has become a pattern of the three of us together. How can that survive back home?”
Neil said, “Maybe it can.”
She replied, “How can it? Both of you in New York, art careers, fame. I will get all the pressure from my father to get married, to ‘settle down.’”
The two carafes of wine were taking hold as Sam said, “Since I love both of you I can’t image that we won’t be together always.”
Neil looked at Sam for a long time, then stood up to start their departure. They walked slowly up the hill to the house.
The next day Neil rose early, before the other two, and explored both sides of the town, choosing the beach just to the west of the harbor for their day of sun and water. He took an early swim as the sun was rising, the sea still cool from the night. It was clear and green, easily revealing the pebbly bottom at forty feet from shore. He swam quickly out far enough to see the harbor around the promontory rocks, then in a slow float came back to the shore. He ran up the carved steps in the beach cliff and up the road to Nicole’s house, still dripping.
“Get up. Get up. Paradise beckons not a quarter mile away.”
Carrie was up already and had made coffee. Sam was still asleep. She said, “Three weeks doing nothing. Swimming. Reading. No painting.”
“I can’t promise I won’t paint. I want to start on some edge-of-the-water scenes.”
“Maybe we should have come here first instead of Gordes.”
“No. Gordes gave us our summer’s project, however dry and hot it was. I’ll always be the thankful for that, those ochre colors and pale horizons. They’re imprinted on my mind now, part of my being. But I feel that somewhere on the Mediterranean could be a house, a cottage or a villa waiting for me. Not Nicole’s house, but somewhere else. Not for right now, but in a time after we get settled in New York.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I know it, deep within me.”
She said, “Do you think you lived here before, in another lifetime?”
“Reincarnation is such poppycock. However, it could explain why it resounds with me so solidly. Pacific and Atlantic shores do nothing for me, compared to this. The North Sea is too cold, the Caribbean too hot. The Mediterranean has the quality of being just right. Ten thousand years of civilization might say so, too. Why should one place exert such a deep personal attraction if your past was not in some way linked with it?”
After their late breakfast at one of the cafes on the quay, they provisioned Carrie’s basket with white wine and cheese, a loaf of bread, grapes and a kilo of ripe figs. Neil showed them the way to his newly discovered beach. Large granitic rocks protected both ends, no more than 100 feet apart and a low bluff made the back wall, with steps cut out of solid rock from the road above. Instead of sand, it had a beach of very small pebbles which felt cool on the feet. There was no surf, only a slight lapping of the water, and it was five minutes from their cottage. Cabasson-sur-Mer had been waiting for them, Neil thought, maybe for centuries.
Their first day there was idyllic from beginning to end. The beach was virtually empty all day, with only a short incursion by a group of boys cascading over the end rocks into the still waters, splashing, yelling, and laughing.
Carrie was a strong swimmer and went far out on her own, while Neil and Sam watched from their beach towels. She turned and waved back several times as she swam. Neil looked at Sam and asked, “Could you live a life here? Days and nights on Mare Nostrum? I think I could be very happy here.”
“I don’t think I could. I’m the city boy who understands subways and skyscrapers. New York. High-end galleries. Art museums. The world of art and artists that we’ve always talked about.”
“But what about in our off-time? Summers and holidays?”
“Maybe, but for a while there won’t be much off-time and no holidays. I grant you, it should appeal to me more since I’m Italian, and they all like the Mediterranean, but somehow it doesn’t. Maybe I’m not really Italian, a spawn from my mother’s Polish lover.”
“Sam, I want you in my life always.”
Sam turned and looked at Neil, aware that Neil’s talk had gone to deeper waters.
“Me, too. Why won’t I be there? You’re just as interested in New York as I am, maybe more so. What’s this suddenly about the Mediterranean?”
Neil didn’t respond directly, but said, “I can see you getting married, having a family. The famous artist with an adoring wife, flotilla of kids, news cameras flashing at the household artistic, the envy of every East Coast male. There wouldn’t be a place for me.”
“That is not even in the near future, much more like years down the line. We have the New York world of art to conquer, bud. Besides, even though you’re not big with the ladies, you could find a wife and have kids, too.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, Sam.”
“Maybe so.” He rolled over and put his hand on Neil’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, you’ll always be mine, Neil.” Sam knew what Neil wanted to hear, however faint the chances were.
The week inched along through days of water and sun, dinners on the harbor front and occasional meals at home in the garden of salad and fish in Nicole’s cottage. Neil started to paint a few hours each day, setting up his easel on the rocks above their beach. Sam and Carrie fell into the complete torpor of summer heat with long naps in the afternoon, late awakenings in the morning. If Neil got up and out early, the two others gave into the languor of the ancient coast.
4
Thirty-Two Thousand
In the rocks above the beach, if there were still alive a few of the provincial Roman gods, the ones who could grant a cloudless day and still waters for a shallow promise and a handful of wildflowers, they made themselves known that week. Each day broke with a golden peach light and progressed unsullied, cloudless and perfect until the sun, pomegranate red, dipped back into night behind the pines and villas on the far promontory. The exquisite torpor of a Mediterranean summer had trapped them entirely.
It was four in the afternoon in the middle of their second week at Cabasson. The days on the beach and evenings at the harbor cafes were too full for them, too touching on perfection to consider even so much as short venture along the coast to other beaches, other harbor villages. The two men became deeply tanned, but Carrie, despite her love of swimming, stayed out of the sun mostly, in the shade of an umbrella next her supine men.
Carrie noticed how deeply tactile Sam was. He made a point in conversation with Carrie by stroking her arm or pulling his knees against her side. She watched as he lay in the sun with arm over Neil’s chest or back. His favorite position was face-down on the towel, his head in an opposite direction from the others with one hand on Neil’s right foot and the other on Carrie’s left foot. If she moved ever so
