Sunflowers (4 page)

He tilted his head to study me, and I sensed he was seeing something—in me—that he hadn’t noticed before. He took my hand and drew me across the room. “Come, I want to show you something.”

There it was. The painting I’d been waiting weeks to see, propped against a windowsill, framed in the afternoon light. The sunflowers.

Blazing sunflowers that should have looked forlorn and sad, plucked from the earth where they’d grown, trapped inside an earthenware jug. But they didn’t. They writhed with life, the yellow so passionate, so untamed—oh, I wanted to touch that painting. I wanted to run my fingers over the canvas and savor its texture, every peak and valley of paint, every swirl and dash. Caress every line, every curve where his hand had been, trace the blue letters of his name.

I thought I knew this man who talked with me and made love with me, but I didn’t. I knew his body and something of his mind, nothing of his soul. Here was his soul, here, and here; in every painting in this room he’d left pieces of his spirit.
Soun béu esperit
, his beautiful spirit, as we say in Provençal. This was no ordinary vase of flowers. The sunflowers were his voice, and for the first time since the day we met, I started to truly listen. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I murmured. “It’s more beautiful than I could have imagined. All of it, more than I could have dreamed.”

His hand was gentle on my shoulder, his voice soft in my ear. “You don’t know what it means to me, for you to say that.”

I threw my arms around him and buried my face in his chest, wanting suddenly to touch him as I longed to touch the painting. He was surprised but returned my embrace, and his lips brushed my hair, his fingers my spine. I closed my eyes to relish the rising and falling of his breath, and we stood in silence until embarrassment overcame me and I pulled away. “Shall we get to work?” I asked, my voice pitched too high, and I bent to gather paint tubes so he couldn’t see my face.

Bit by bit, Vincent’s ramshackle house began to look like a home. While he brought the rest of his things from the Café de la Gare and arranged them upstairs, I tried to work my artistry in the kitchen: blue enamel coffeepot and saltcellar on the table, mismatched dishes in the cupboard, tobacco box on the mantel. Vincent had a new stove—“on credit,” he said with a roll of his eyes—and the sink had a pump for running cold water, more than I had expected to find. I set two chairs by the fireplace, where he could read and smoke his pipe in the evenings; I nipped to the garden for zinnias to tuck in a jug on the windowsill, and attacked the floor tiles with a soapy brush, pleased to see them gleam red instead of a dull, dusty gray.

There was nothing to eat in the cupboards, so I stepped out to buy vegetables and herbs for a
soupe au pistou
and some fresh bread. It was the strangest feeling going to the grocery shop next door with a basket on my arm and an apron around my waist, hair done up like I was somebody’s wife instead of a
fille
from the Rue du Bout d’Arles. “
Bonjour
, Madame,” I said to the grocer, who was sweeping her threshold when I approached. She smiled in a friendly way and helped me with my purchases, but she must have wondered who I was and what brought me to Vincent’s.

I lit the fire in the stove and started supper when I returned, humming to myself as I chopped vegetables and pounded herbs. Like any Provençal girl, I started learning from Maman before I was tall enough to reach the stewpot, and like any Provençal woman, Maman had a way with herbs and spices, which she passed on to me. In no time the pungent aromas of basil and garlic challenged the smell of turpentine, and in no time, Vincent was lured downstairs. “You’re cooking for me?” he asked.

I smiled as I gave the soup a leisurely stir. “You should have a good supper on your first night. How do you like your new kitchen?”

“
Mon Dieu
, you’ve worked a miracle.” He frowned at the glistening red tiles. “But you didn’t have to clean the floor,
ma petite
, I could have done that.”

“I wanted everything to be perfect,” I replied, then turned back to the stewpot to hide my blush.
Ma petite
. He’d called me his little one. He’d never done that before.

He lured me away from the stove to see his bedroom. It was too small to put much in it, so he’d filled it with color: blue walls, red blanket on the wooden bed, cheerful paintings and prints. In the corner stood a plain table instead of a washstand, and above it hung a mirror for shaving. He’d tacked pegs behind the bed for his clothes, including his yellow straw hat, and squeezed a chest of drawers next to the fireplace. He’d brought up two rush-seated chairs even though they made for a tight fit, and he’d put two pillows on the bed, like he didn’t expect to sleep alone.

I walked to the wide-open shutters to lean on the sill. Some of the men strolling through the Place Lamartine garden were probably on their way to visit their mistresses or have a beer at a café, while their wives hurried home, baskets overflowing with food for supper. Friends called to one another, children laughed during their games, and in the distance whistled the afternoon train arriving from Marseille. So many stories beyond this window. Every morning Vincent could watch the dawn awaken the city, and every night, he’d see the stars from where he lay.

“You should have seen how it looked before,” he said. “A rat wouldn’t have slept here. Things cost more than I expected, but I wanted good, solid country beds, something durable that will last.” He nodded toward a closed door. “The other bedroom is through there, but I’ll work on that another day.”

As he kept puttering around his bedroom, I finished supper. Bread sliced, table set, soup hot. Wiping my hands on my apron, I called up from the hallway, “
À table!
”

The stairs creaked under Vincent’s feet as he descended. “Smells good,” he said, catching me round the waist before plunking himself down at the table. “You should see what happens when I try to cook.”

“Does it taste like paint?” I teased as I brought over a pair of bowls, and he laughed the musical laugh of a completely contented man. He ate two helpings of my
soupe au pistou
, and I was so glad he liked it that I pretended not to notice his gleeful slurping and the dribbles in his beard. After we finished eating I made coffee in the pert blue coffeepot—he told me he’d painted a picture of his coffeepot, he’d been so proud to buy it—and we talked at the table until the sun had nearly lowered. He helped wash the dishes and put things away, then, cheeks rosy with embarrassment, he asked if I’d mend his painting trousers.

I had to smile at this grown man of thirty-five who desperately needed a woman looking after him. He lit a fire in the kitchen fireplace so I could have good light while I worked, then dropped the trousers into my lap together with a battered red lacquer teabox and a muttered “There should be a needle and thread inside.”

I opened the box to find a collection of yarn balls, each wound with a pair, trio, or quartet of colors. “Are you taking up knitting?”

“No,” he said, kneeling before me and taking a ball of yarn from my hand. “When I lived in Nuenen, I was fascinated by the weavers who worked there, because they took ordinary wool and turned it into wonderful paintings of cloth. I thought, what better way to experiment with color combinations than to use wool yarn?”

I picked up another. “You have red and green in this one, like in the night café picture.”

“Precisely, and this one has mostly yellow and violet, the second complementary color pair. Blue and orange make the third, and you can find that…” His face shone like an eager schoolboy’s as he dug for another ball of yarn, and I watched him instead of the wool in his hand. He caught my eye and said, “You think it’s strange, don’t you?”

“I think it’s wonderful.” I took the yarn from him to put back in the box, then touched his cheek, his whiskers bristly under my fingers. The firelight turned his hair to copper flame, his eyes to deep blue, almost black.

The logs in the fireplace rearranged themselves with a flurry of sparks, and we both jumped. This time he was the one to pull away, retreating to his chair and a book as I set to work on his trousers. He’d tried to mend the holes in the knees himself but had made a mess of it, so I ripped out his clumsy stitches and started afresh. I couldn’t make the trousers look new—that
would
be a miracle—but at least they’d look better. When I’d almost finished I peeked at him: brow furrowed, he appeared lost in his reading. “Vincent?” I said quietly.

He didn’t look up. “Yes?”

“You once asked me where I came from, and I wouldn’t tell you. I’d like to now.”

He looked up at that, then closed his book and leaned forward.

“I grew up in a village not far from here called Saint-Rémy,” I began. “My papa was the schoolteacher, and my family lived in a house just outside town. Next door, on his family’s farm, lived a boy named Philippe.”

Things nobody else knew, not Françoise, not Madame Virginie, poured from my mouth as if I’d been confessing in church. Names I hadn’t said aloud in months, moments I tried to forget. Through it all Vincent said little, only regarded me with serious eyes.

“You said you loved me.”

Philippe clears his throat. “If I marry you, Father will disown me, and I’ll lose everything.”

“All because of your mother!” I cry
.

“Because you and I sinned,” he corrects me. “Because we shouldn’t have done what we did in the barn that night.”

“You didn’t think it sinful at the time. If she hadn’t seen us—” I shudder to remember Philippe hastily pulling up his trousers, the blood spots on my white nightdress, his mother’s face pale and shocked under the moon
.

“Rachel, it’s over. I’m sorry.”

He turns to leave, but I grab his arm. “Philippe, I love you. If you don’t marry me, my sister will send me away. She says I can’t be around her family anymore, she says I’m—”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, then he’s gone
.

I don’t wait for Pauline to throw me out. Tante Ludovine in Avignon, that’s what she threatened, pious Tante Ludovine, with her rustly black dresses and constant talk of hellfire. I pack my valise and hurry to the railway station, taking only what I think I’ll need, the money Papa left me when he died, and a few mementoes of happier days. Someplace else, there must be someplace else. When the train reaches Tarascon, I walk inside the station and read the names on the chalkboard
.

Arles. I’ll go to Arles
.

“That’s why you didn’t like my painting of the night café,” Vincent said pensively when I finished. “It reminded you of what happened and how Mademoiselle Françoise found you.”

I looked at my hands, folded in my lap and still clutching his mended trousers. I’d stopped my story at the Café de la Gare and hadn’t told him what happened next. When Françoise brought me to the
maison
, Madame Virginie gripped my chin in her plump fingers and said, “Sweet-looking, nice manners, good figure, good teeth. They’ll like you, you’ll make us both good money.” She complimented Françoise, “Excellent choice,” as if I’d been a dress, a bonnet, or cut of meat from the butcher’s.

“I’m so ashamed, even now,” I said to Vincent. “How could I have been such a fool?”

Vincent shook his head. “The young man was the fool. He behaved like the worst kind of cad, using a chaste girl of good family then abandoning her.”

“But I seduced him, I tried to trap him into marrying me. I loved him, and I thought—”

“A man of honor would have gently but firmly refused until marriage, rather than take advantage of your innocence.” Vincent came to kneel before me again and held out his left hand. A pink scar lingered there that I’d never noticed, among the calluses on his palm. “Love makes us do desperate things, Rachel. That day”—he nodded at the scar—“I thought holding my hand in a candle flame would prove me worthy of a lady’s affections. I was wrong.”

A chill crawled through me at the thought of Vincent hurting himself that way. I traced the mark with my fingers, as if I could mend it and make it disappear. “Who was she?”

He stared at the fire, and his answer was a whisper. “Her name was Kee.” He looked back at me and smiled a little. “What happened wasn’t your fault. You sought only to love and be loved. That’s no sin. And someday…” He stopped himself as the clock in the hall chimed nine times.
Ting-ting, ting-ting
.

“I should be going,” I said, handing Vincent his trousers and the teabox.

He stood when I did. “Don’t go. Stay with me.”

I thought of the two pillows, two chairs in the bedroom. “I could stay long enough to try out that new bed, I suppose”—I winked at him—“but then I really…”

“Stay the whole night.”

“Madame Virginie would be so angry. It might be busy—”

“I can give you four francs, that should satisfy her. Please.”

More than anything, I wanted to stay. “
D’accord
,” I finally agreed. “I will.”

Being with him that night, joining my body to his, felt different from all those times at Madame Virginie’s. No stomping of soldiers’ boots in the corridor to distract us, no girlish giggles through the walls, just his breath and mine mingling in the dark. Only afterward, when he’d relit the candle and was digging in his bureau to lend me a nightshirt, did I think about what came next. I’d never slept next to a man before. The customers always went home, he always went home, and I slept alone with nobody to bother me. To sleep in Vincent’s bed seemed such an intimate thing to do, and I felt more nervous than I ever had around him.

He pulled on his long drawers, climbed back into bed, and looked at me expectantly. “What is it?” he asked.

How silly I must have looked, standing there naked and holding his nightshirt. “Nothing,” I said and tugged the nightshirt over my head. It was too long and had a few holes in it—perhaps I’d fix them one day—but at least it was clean. I plaited my hair with shaking fingers, then blew out the candle and climbed into bed. I chose to lay near the edge, facing away into the room’s center, but he inched close to fold me in his arms and nestle against my back. The rhythm of his breathing told me he fell asleep almost at once, while I stared into the dark, my mind too unsettled for rest.