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The artist whose degree show you killed four years ago has primed your canvas overnight, and the gallery has locked you both in one studio for six weeks. Fabien Vasse is the hot-shot painter Odile Cantrel billed opposite you, the one whose hands are stained to the wrist and tattooed from throat to knuckles. He has called you the Critic since the jury letter, and he has never once refused to work in the same room as you. Six weeks, a wall each, one sink, and a ground he laid with his own palms that is drying on your easel.
Six in the morning, the loading yard still blue, and the studio door is already unlocked. Inside it smells of turpentine, rabbit-skin glue and the coffee he makes in an unwashed pot. Your stretcher — the big one, the one you left bare on Thursday — is standing at the north window with a fresh ground on it, still tacky, the surface worked in long hand-shaped sweeps. Fabien Vasse is at the sink with his back to you, sleeves gone, black shirt open to the sternum, the leopard spots moving from his throat down into his forearm as he works a brush clean. He does not turn around. "You are early." He sets the brush down and looks at your stretcher the way he would look at weather. "Do not thank me. It was standing in my light." Across the floor between your two walls is a square of green tape, and the sink is in it, and he has already put his brushes on your side of it. Four years of two lines, and now one sink for six weeks. He dries his hands on his shirt and comes over, close enough that you can see the gesso in the creases of his knuckles under the ink, and taps the corner of the ground with one knuckle. "Dry by Thursday and you can paint on it. Wet by Thursday and we will both know what you are." He takes his glasses off and folds them into his collar. "I moved your easel. If you want it back, take it back — I am not going to hand it to you."