It was only three and she was debating how to spend the remainder of the afternoon and wishing there was someone to talk to when she spied Paul Vermillion. She waved her gloves, hoping he would see her. He did and waited as she had signaled she was coming out.
For weeks Vermillion had slept only fitfully. Mind, eyes, and hand accepted only the release of work to discover new potentialities in the evolution of a personal form begun with the drawing of the city and the painting of the pears. The electric pulsations of the city were catalytic in charging his vision, but he was more and more depressed by the difficulty of earning enough to buy the time in which to develop his images without rushing. The pressure to keep alive had brought into being another school of painting in which hasty incomplete canvases were offered as abstract, subconscious, unconscious—what you will—expressions. A dodge readily accepted these days when unresolved arrangement or resolved derangement was fanatically held to be the painter's prerogative. The hell with that dodge, he thought.
He awakened one morning with fever, chills, and a racking cough. He telephoned his employer that he was ill, and putting on a muffler, overcoat, and hat to supplement the tepid radiator, congratulated himself on wangling a few days in which to paint.
On the third day the weather conspired to taunt him, the sun playing hide and seek in cloudy skies. Finally he threw down his brush, helpless against the exasperating fluctuations of light. The telephone rang, and he did not answer as it might be Simone. What if she took it into her head to come and see whether he really was out, as she had done in Paris too often? She had been wonderful at first. A Sorbonne of love. Enchanting in the beginning when she'd bring the old broken-hinged lunch basket and they'd eat in the Tuileries. Then she had to act the wife-formula and it went sour. It was hard now to remember the fine feeling when he was first with Simone. Its image now wasn't it. Now gives the moment of then a dimension, it is another individual looking at two other fellows in perspective.
It was three, and a walk in the Park might unwind him. It might even snow. New York was an autumn and winter city. Hell in summer. Paris was best in late spring. The suggested proposal that he act as buyer in Europe for that fellow going into art supply importing on a big scale might be a solution to pay passage over in the spring. It sure was cheaper living there.
