Why I Won't Be Going To Lunch Anymore. Douglas Atwill
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ever gave to her work, were among her dozen favorites in her entire oeuvre. She was not sure, herself, why she liked them so much better than the rest. Nowhere were these listed and to nobody had she ever told these foremost choices. He must have come up with these opinions on his own. This young man had said the magic words, and even if he were a scoundrel and a pretender, she would now have to see what he could do.
“Carlos, let’s see how I feel in the morning. I am tired now. Isabel will find you a guest room. We’ll talk more tomorrow.” She closed her eyes and the interview was over. Carlos left quietly.
The next day Isabel noticed a marked improvement in the Senora when she came into the bedroom. Her intuition had told her that there was a good quality in this young man who said he was a cousin but was not a cousin, something good for the Senora. If Isabel did not believe his cocked-up stories in broken Spanish, she did believe in omens and Carlos was a true omen. Isabel asked, “Would Senora take breakfast today?”
“Yes, Isabel. Some strong coffee. Eggs and sliced oranges, like before. And a muffin with the English marmalade.” Afterwards, Brompton spent a minute or two in front of the mirror. The white dress instead of the black one. Her hair, pure white, was long and abundant and still looked right just combed and knotted into a bun. Her face was wrinkled from so many years in the western sun, but her neck was firm and her chin without sags.
She considered with approval her legs, slim and well turned after all the years of standing at the easel. She thought if the deathbed was really calling for Brompton, it was getting an unusually well-preserved specimen. How fortunate death was.
She walked slowly into her studio and, from a chair, looked at the unfinished canvas on the easel. Now, after these many weeks, she saw it with a new eye and judged it a surprisingly good start. The long lines of the composition had life; they had those vibrations that came like voices, sometimes, and never on demand. Could she pick up the moment again and continue?
A great tired cloud overcame her previously excited thoughts. It would be too much work to get the energy level up again, up to a point where the brush flowed with paint like a long-distance runner. The paints on the table must be discarded, new ones and new brushes brought from the shuttered cabinets against the wall. Maybe this was all a bad idea. Go back to bed and say goodbye.
Carlos came in the other door. “You look unhappy.”
“I am. This will not work. Let’s not even try.”
“Sit down, please. I will clean up your paints and brushes. I won’t take twenty minutes.” Without her prompting, he went to the sidewall cupboards and selected brushes and paints. He discarded everything on the table and started arraying the tubes behind the marble slab Brompton used as an easel.
“Cool colors on the left,” Brompton said as Carlos was about to put them on the right.
Carlos then scraped the dried paint off the marble with a razor and washed it clean with turpentine. He placed the linseed oils, thinners and mediums behind the paints and looked at Brompton for approval.
She nodded. “There’s a brush you’ve thrown out that I want back. It has a chisel end, maybe an inch wide. I am sure it can be restored.”
He found it, heavily encrusted, and without comment, took it with him as left the studio.
Brompton had to admit now that the painting table was in order again, her spirits returned. Maybe Carlos would work out. Only as a studio aide, of course. She painted an hour that morning and there was a definite seam between where she left off weeks before and this new work. But Brompton thought the seam had validity. What was, was. She did not attempt to hide it, but continued on with her long vibrating lines, top to bottom. Here it was, a painting that documented her life with a validating division between work shut down and work regained.
The next day she painted for half an hour longer, with Carlos sitting quietly against the far studio wall. This was the studio that Brompton had kept secret from the world for half a century. It was rumored to be the ultimate in spare and elegant beauty, which art publications around the world yearned to photograph.
It had high ceilings of white beams, unadorned walls on three sides with high casement windows on the east. No memorabilia strewn about, only pristine whiteness on every surface. Even the easel had been painted white.
Her view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains was devoid of neighboring houses or roadways. It was a panorama unchanged in the forty years of her occupancy, unchanged since ancient times. The morning sun streamed in at an angle, lighting the wall opposite the easel wall.
Brompton had been zealously private all these years, never sharing her workspace. Now this young Carlos sat impassively in the corner of the studio while she painted. After the first few days of this arrangement, Brompton in her mind extended Carlos’s temporary visa and thought she would allow him to stay only until this painting was done. Perhaps for a week more at the most.
Carlos was a quick study with her preferences. He learned she wanted the marble palette to be clean each morning before she arrived. He washed the brushes each night, finishing with a soapy wash to rid all trace of the linseed oil, then a clear water rinse. Tubes were returned to their strict arrangement of violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, left to right, earth colors and whites on the far right.
One day Brompton asked Carlos, who was startled from his reverie against the wall. “Do you believe that beauty continues after death, Carlos?”
He was quick to respond. “Maybe that is the only true beauty.”
Brompton chuckled, “That is a very Zen approach to an answer. So you think that the beauty that survives death is the only true beauty?”
“Of course.”
“So how does beauty survive the buffeting of suffering, envy and greed that surround everything, especially after the creator of that beauty has gone?”
“True beauty has its own power and survives as long as someone thinks it exists,” Carlos said.
“I believe that, too.”
As the days went on, Brompton enjoyed the give and take of ideas from Carlos. They alternated the roles of the inquisitor, questioning the other as the neophyte. Sometimes they turned the qualities of life upside down and threw them like paper gliders back and forth. She finished the painting with the frontier in the middle of it and started another, this time including a mock frontier two-thirds the way across.
Her health grew imperceptibly better, evidenced only by the longer morning hours she could work in her studio. Carlos never left her side in the studio and many mornings there was only silence. She took long afternoon naps and was often too weak to have dinner.
He never asked a question first, waiting for Brompton to introduce a mental puzzle like a seminar professor announcing the subject of the day’s discussion. They spent a week on the nature of truth and several weeks on whether reality is, in fact, illusion. Brompton favored the role of the investigator while Carlos fell naturally into that of the Artful Dodger, slinking around an open response. Isabel often heard laughter from the studio as she passed by the closed door, a strange sound in her years with the Senora.
One day Brompton asked Carlos, “Why, in the scheme of things, is it that I have had so much more success than other painters?”
“You have accumulated merit in a former life. It now shows itself.”
“It’s not that I am better than the others? It’s just that I came with a large metaphysical bank account of merit, a spiritual inheritance?”
“Yes, you have enormously good karma from another life,” he said. “But you are, also, better than the others.”
Weeks grew into months and months finally into a year. Brompton painted six new paintings in that time, inching along. Isabel beamed a continuing consent of what she had conjured, bringing light lunches and, when Brompton felt well enough, spare evening meals for the two of them.
Isabel told others in the staff that the Senora had taken strength