Sunflowers (6 page)

“Rachel’s a good girl, Madame,” Françoise said, sliding an arm around my shoulders. “She made a mistake, that’s all. She won’t do it again.” She squeezed me to get me to talk, but I couldn’t speak.

Madame Virginie looked from her to me, and her face went back to its normal color. “Then you best not dally with that foreigner any more, unless he pays a fair price. You have to earn your keep. Do you hear me?”

I wanted to walk out the door, go someplace, anyplace, maybe to the yellow house and beg Vincent to take me in. He couldn’t support me, though, Françoise was right about that, and going to Pauline in Saint-Rémy or Tante Ludovine in Avignon was out of the question. No, I had to stay at Madame Virginie’s until I saved enough money to get my name off the police register and make an honest living. What choice did I have?

“Do you hear me?” Madame repeated.

Françoise gave me another nudge, and I forced myself to look submissively at the floor and apologize. That evening, as I entertained yet another soldier, yet another farmer to “earn my keep,” I closed my eyes and saw Vincent’s face.

CHAPTER SIX

A Starry Night by the Rhône

I often think that the night is more alive and richly colored than the day.

—Vincent to Theo, Arles, September 1888

F

irst it was little things. At luncheon, Madame Virginie called Minette to sit next to her, the place that used to be mine, while I was banished to the other end of the table. I stayed behind and helped the cook clean the kitchen while everyone else left for the market and monthly trip to the apothecary. Then it became clear: I was on Madame’s list. “Where do you think you’re going?” she’d demand if I went anywhere near the front door, so there was no chance of slipping out to see Vincent. “How many customers did you have last night?” she’d ask each morning, even though she made sure the other girls had more than I did. Jacqui tried her best to make things worse, taunting me under her breath, sneaking into my room to steal my hair ribbons or use my perfume without asking. Oh, I would have liked to talk back to Madame, give a piece of my mind to Jacqui, but I didn’t. Françoise understood. She quietly made sure I got new hair ribbons and gave me encouraging smiles whenever she passed me. “Madame’ll get over it,” she whispered. “Keep being a good girl.”

One night, when Madame Virginie was safely in her parlor and everybody but me was upstairs with a customer, Raoul brought me a message at the bar. “
Monsieur le peintre
is outside and asks for you.”

Vincent stood on the sidewalk under the lantern, wearing his work clothes—even his straw hat. He had a pipe in his mouth, artist’s box in his hand, canvas and easel strapped to his back. “It’s time to try a night picture by the river,” he said. “Would you like to come with me?”

I glanced back inside. “I can’t. Madame Virginie threatened to throw me out after I got back last time.”

An angry spark leaped into Vincent’s eyes. “What did she say?”

“That I couldn’t go off with you anymore and lose a night’s business.”

“I can give you some money—”

“I don’t want to take your money.” I thought about the little box in my bureau. If I got caught, I could give her a few of my own francs. “Wait a minute,” I told him and pulled Raoul aside. “If Madame Virginie asks, I’m with a customer. There’s a franc in it for you.” He agreed with a grin and a
“Oui, Mademoiselle.”

“Let’s go,” I said to Vincent, “but let’s hurry before someone sees me.” We rounded the corner toward the city gate and the Place Lamartine, but instead of crossing the garden in the direction of the yellow house, he steered us toward the river. The burden on his back was making him hunch over, and I asked, “Would you like me to carry something?”

“No, thank you.” He smiled at me as we passed under a streetlight. “I look like a porcupine, but I’m used to it.”

The Place Lamartine ended at the edge of the Rhône in a high sloping wall, built some years before to protect the city from floods. Vincent unfolded his easel and secured a canvas so the breeze wouldn’t blow it off. “You don’t want to go to the riverbank?” I asked, peering down a stairway to the stony shore below. I could take off my shoes and stockings and dip my toes in the water.

“Too dark down there,” he said. “Better vantage point from up here.”

From where we stood at the bend of the river, you could see all the lights of Arles and the bridge linking the city to the suburb of Trinquetaille. A full moon flooded the southern sky with light and drowned out the stars, but you found them if you turned to the north, a carpet of them twinkling like diamonds. Most nights, pimps and whores wandered the embankment, or fishermen wanting a late-night catch, but not tonight. We were alone with the stars.

Vincent pulled a palette from the box he’d brought, then rummaged among his tubes of paint. “I’m sorry you got in trouble with your
patronne
because of me.”

“It’s not your fault,” I sighed. “I’m the one who stayed out without permission.”

“I wish”—he paused with a paint tube in each hand and a frown on his face—“I wish I could help you in some way.”

“Don’t you worry about me, I’ll be fine.” I tipped back my head and tried to count the stars in their silvery-gold brilliance. I didn’t want to think about Madame Virginie or the
maison de tolérance
, I wanted to think of nothing but being right there, right then. The wind off the water made me shiver; in my haste to leave I’d forgotten my shawl. Vincent saw me tremble and came to drape his jacket over my shoulders. A gentle scent of paint and pipe smoke drifted around me. His scent.

After squeezing blues, greens, and yellows onto his palette and using a small knife to blend the colors, Vincent picked up his brushes and started to paint. It was dim, but the moon cast enough light so he could work. I sat on the wall and dangled my feet, peering again down to the riverbank. I could make out a coal barge, anchored and waiting to be unloaded the next morning, somebody probably sleeping on deck to keep away thieves. The river paid no attention as it made its dogged and determined way south.

“Have you ever seen the sea?” I asked Vincent.

He had a paintbrush in his mouth and spoke around the handle. “Many times in Holland. There’s a fishing village called Scheveningen near where I lived in The Hague. I did some seascape studies there a few times, and we used to take the children to the beach.”

We. He and Sien. Had he carried Sien’s little girl on his shoulders across the sand, kissed Sien as they walked barefoot through the waves? I kicked my heel against the stone wall. “Have you been to the sea here?”

“Once, for several days at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Back in the spring.”

“What’s it like?”

“Beautiful. The Mediterranean changes color every second, from green to violet to blue, then the next moment it’s taken on a tinge of pink or gray. Very fine effects. I’ve wanted to go back but”—he cleared his throat—“that takes money.”

We fell silent then, Vincent busy with his painting, me chasing images of the little family at Scheveningen from my mind. I turned from the river to watch him as he worked. Sometimes he stopped to look up and around, tilting his head and muttering under his breath. Once or twice he laid down his things altogether and held up his hands in a kind of frame, screening off what he wanted to see before smiling and taking up his brush again. His hand was graceful as it swept from palette to canvas, here with small dashes of paint, there with long swooping strokes. Once he took a tube of yellow color and squirted little blobs right on the picture.

“There, you see, Rachel,” he said, “it’s not enough to put white dots on the canvas. Some stars are citron-yellow, others pink, while others have a blue forget-me-not glow. They aren’t all the same.” He sighed and gazed at the sky. “The stars make me dream, like when I look at a map and dream about the places I’ve never been to. Just as we take the train to Tarascon or Paris, we take death to reach the stars, and there we’ll live forever. Ah, to feel the infinite high and clear above you, then life is almost enchanted after all.”

It was easy to believe in dreams, there by the Rhône on such a night. The stars seemed to hold ancient secrets as they hovered and winked above our heads, secrets only they knew and that we could but guess. Was someone up there watching, looking after us, as I’d always been taught and almost always believed? Had that someone brought Vincent to me? My eyes returned to him—brush held aloft, contemplating the picture with furrowed brow—and I thanked the stars that exactly that had come to pass.

He happened to glance over at me in the same second. “What is it? You have the most extraordinary look on your face right now.”

“I was thinking about how much I love you.”

Astonishment flickered across his face. He stared at me for a moment, then turned back to his canvas and tapped his brush on the palette with a soft “Oh.”

The water lapped. The wind blew. I waited, but Vincent said nothing, only painted. I pulled up my knees and hugged them without another word, tears pooling in my eyes. I couldn’t look at him anymore and turned to the river instead.

“Come and see,” he said gently after a while. That was all:
Come and see
. Wiping my eyes on the sleeve of his jacket, I slid off the wall to stand beside him, not touching him, not speaking, trying vainly to pretend I hadn’t spoken in the first place.

The painting pulsed with energy and movement, the gaslights of Arles golden beacons under the midnight sky. Restless reflections shimmered and shone in the restless waters, stars blooming above like flowers, constellations unfurling across the horizon. Empty boats rocked against the shore, and on the riverbank he’d painted a pair of lovers strolling arm in arm where in real life no one stood. The woman had a blue dress like mine, and the man wore blue too. With a yellow straw hat.

Vincent turned to me, and on his face was, as he put it, the most extraordinary look. “How do you call the stars in Provençal?”

“
L’estelan
,” I murmured.

“
L’estelan
,” he repeated, then took my chin in his fingers and kissed me. It was the slightest brush of the lips—as soft as the breeze on my face—but the sweetest kiss, more loving in its tenderness than any words he could have spoken. Words were not necessary. His eyes told me, his kiss told me what I wanted to know. So did his painting.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Studio of the South

If I set up a studio and refuge right at the gates of the south, it’s not such a crazy scheme
.

—Vincent to Theo, Arles, September 1888

V

incent showered me with little attentions after that night by the river. Flowers he picked on his walks, novels with tattered yellow covers—one visit he surprised me with a bird’s nest he found lying in an orchard. “I kept over a dozen nests in my studio at Nuenen,” he said shyly when he handed it to me. “Birds are artists in their own right, no?” Jacqui, sitting at the next table with a customer, erupted into giggles overhearing him, but I ignored her and kissed him thank-you in front of everybody. I didn’t care what she thought, I didn’t care what anyone thought. The flowers watched over me from the vase on my bureau, and the bird’s nest earned a place of honor on my windowsill.

The yellow house became my refuge, the nest where I flew when I was free. Vincent and I shared suppers I cooked on my evenings off. We chatted by the fire, satisfied each other in the blue-walled bedroom. Some nights I imagined what it would be like to stay forever, not leaving in the morning for the Rue du Bout d’Arles, giving myself to no one but him. Some nights I dared to think what it would mean to bear his child, have a family together like he’d had with Sien. Then dawn would come, he’d rise from the bed to go to the studio, and my fancies would fade with the moonlight.

Some days I joined him on his painting trips. I sat with him in the Place Lamartine when he painted a picture of the house; I walked with him to the vineyards outside town when he wanted to paint the grape harvesters. With my hair up and face hidden under a parasol, no one took any notice of me, although Vincent was ogled by the curious everywhere we went. He talked to me as he worked, telling me the names of the colors he used and why he arranged the picture a certain way. “There, you see, Rachel”—he’d always begin—“if I painted all the trees that stand in front of my house, you couldn’t see my house. Bless me, look at that sky! Pure cobalt. A fine effect.”

Madame Virginie had become too distracted to notice how much time I spent with Vincent. One of the girls, Claudette—who’d been at the
maison
for two years and ought to have known better—got herself arrested for soliciting outside the
quartier reservé
, down by the Place du Forum. The police came to the brothel to investigate, and Madame feared she’d lose her license. Then word came that old Louis Farce, Madame Virginie’s biggest rival, remodeled his place up the street with gilt mirrors and heavy red curtains, and was trying to steal our customers. Among all this, I was one of the good girls again, and as long as I brought money in, Madame couldn’t care less what I did or with whom.

The question of taking Vincent’s money troubled me as the weeks passed. One night at the
maison
, when I perched on his lap clad in my chemise and he reached into his pocket for three francs, I folded his fingers over the coins and shook my head. “I don’t want you buying me like the others.”

“I’m helping you,” he said, “so that one day you can leave this place. I’d help you more if I could. Please, I want you to have it.”

I thought about this. “Only when you visit me here, not when I visit your house. And two francs, not three. I’ll kiss you for nothing.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” he teased and tucked a coin back in his pocket.

Oh, those were happy days as summer drew to a close and autumn made its unhurried way to Provence. Then the mistral arrived.

A fierce north wind that swept through the Rhône valley on its way to the sea, the mistral appeared any time of year but was ruthless during the autumn and winter months. The locals called it
le vent du fada
, “the idiot wind,” because a mistral that howled through the streets and beat at the windows had the power to bring even the sanest soul close to lunacy. The wise stayed home and the weakest took to their beds, afflicted with headache brought by the wind’s force. Even Vincent, who always thought painting more important than weather, accepted defeat when the mistral blew its hardest and worked indoors.

The banging of the window shutters startled me from a deep sleep one night near the end of October, and the shutters didn’t stop banging for six days. The girls were bored silly with our business down to a trickle, and Madame Virginie stomped around the
maison
cursing the mistral instead of old Louis. I heard nothing from Vincent, so once the winds died, I crossed the Place Lamartine to find him.

A testy “
Oui, oui, j’arrive
” filtered from the hall before the door flew open. “Rachel!” The irritated frown on Vincent’s face became a weak smile, but even that couldn’t disguise his haggard appearance.

“Vincent, are you all right?” I asked in alarm. “Have you been ill?”

“I’ve had a queer turn, but I’m fine now. I’ve been working too hard, that’s all, and with that devil of a wind wailing all night, I couldn’t sleep.”

I bustled past him into the kitchen, tossing my shawl over the banister on the way. “Have you been eating like you should?” Stained cups surrounded the empty coffeepot on the table, the stewpot stood abandoned on the stove. I lifted the lid to find a congealed mass of…something…that looked like it’d been there a while.

“I ran out of money,” he said from the doorway. “Theo’s latest letter didn’t arrive until today. Anyway, I didn’t feel like eating.”

“Why didn’t you send a note? I could have taken care of you.”

“It’s nothing. Sometimes this happens when I work too hard, then I have a long sleep and I feel better. I slept sixteen hours straight after the winds stopped, and I had some soup earlier at the Restaurant Vénissat.”

“Vincent…”

“Rachel, please. You mustn’t worry.” The irritated frown briefly returned, then his face brightened. “Come upstairs, I want to show you what I’ve been doing. I’ve nearly finished decorating the second bedroom.”

I followed him with a heavy sigh, then stopped with a gasp in the doorway of the second bedroom. It was smaller than his own, but he’d lavished it with attention, the bed sturdy walnut and expensive-looking, the chest of drawers with fine brass fittings. The sunflowers—
my
sunflowers—hung proudly over the bed, and a second sunflower picture too, with a blue background instead of yellow. “I didn’t know you’d painted two,” I said, walking up to them and longing again to touch.

“I have two more downstairs. They make a fine effect, no?”

On the opposite wall hung four paintings of the Place Lamartine garden—four! I’d only seen the first one. The second showed the place where he’d found me sleeping, the cedar bush under a bright blue sky, small figures dawdling along the path. The third, another corner of the garden where the path curved beside a tall fir tree and a pair of lovers held hands. A pair of lovers appeared in the fourth painting too, strolling among cypresses as a glowing moon watched them from a sunset pink sky. Their faces were featureless, but the man wore a yellow hat.

“I ran out of money because of the frames,” Vincent said as I stared at the pictures. “But it was worth it.”

I wasn’t listening. “It’s us,” I whispered. “You painted us.”

The room was for me, I knew it was. He was going to ask me to share his life in the yellow house. Share his life as Sien had shared his life, but this time it’d work, together we’d
make
it work. Maybe he’d already explained everything to Theo and his family. I could leave Madame Virginie’s and be with him always. We’d take care of each other and be so happy….

“Do you like the room?” Vincent asked.

I tried not to let my excitement show, but “yes” hovered on my lips. “I love it.”

“Good. I think Gauguin will like it too.”

My “yes” faded away. “Who?”

“Paul Gauguin—a painter, a great painter.” Vincent walked to one of the paintings and straightened the frame. “Theo has arranged for him to live here. We’ve been negotiating for months, but he’s agreed to come, and he’ll arrive next week.”

Negotiating for
months?
I turned so he couldn’t see my tears and marched toward the stairs. “Rachel!” he called. “Where are you going?”

“Leave me alone!”

“No, wait! Tell me what’s wrong!” He hurried downstairs behind me and reached for my arm as my fingers brushed the doorknob.

I jerked myself free and whirled to face him. “You’re ashamed of me. You’re ashamed of being with me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t told your brother about me, have you? All those letters I see you writing, not one word about me, right? You say such lovely things, you act like you care for me—”

He tried again to reach for my hand, but I shrank against the door.

“Rachel, I
do
care for you, what is all this?”

“—and the room—I thought the room was for me.”

His eyes were wide and puzzled. “For you?”

“The paintings! The sunflowers, our garden…I thought you’d ask me to live with you. What a fool I was. They were right, everybody was right!”

“What do you mean—who’s right?”

I wiped my cheeks with my sleeve. “Everybody thinks you’re using me.”

“That’s not true, I swear it’s not true. Please, don’t go.”

My other hand was still on the doorknob.

“Don’t go,” he repeated. “I beg you. Come into the studio, and let’s talk about this.”

Only the pleading in his voice made me stay. I followed him into the studio and waited while he calmly circled the room and closed the windowpanes. It felt like all his pictures were staring at me. “No, I haven’t told Theo about you,” he began. “It’s not the time, not yet. You have to understand, he’s not likely to approve, and it’s best if I—”

I didn’t let him finish. “You’re ashamed of me. Just like you were ashamed of Sien.”

He yanked the last window shut with a
bang!
that made the others rattle. “Don’t you talk to me about Sien! You know nothing about what I went through with her!”

“I know what you told me! You said you kept your relationship with her a secret. It’s because you were ashamed of her!”

“I knew my family would make me leave her!”

“You didn’t leave her because of your family, you left her because of your painting!”

It was like I had slapped him. His face blanched, and he picked up a rag from the worktable to mop his forehead. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and sad. “Yes, I was concerned Theo would cut me off, but everything had already fallen apart by then. My work was one thing among many.”

My voice was quiet now too. “You left her, Vincent, and someday you’ll leave me.”

Realization dawned in his eyes. “Is that what you think? Is that what this is all about?”

“You won’t tell me you love me, although I know you do.” I flung my hand toward the starry night over the Rhône. “Look at the couples you paint—you won’t even give them real faces. You’re ashamed of me because I’m a whore.” I collapsed into a chair and hid my face in my hands.

He rushed to kneel before me. “I’m the last man in the world to think such a thing. Surely you must know that by now.”

“Then why won’t—”

“My dear girl,” he said wearily, “if you only knew.” He opened his palm so I could see his scar. “When I told Kee how much I loved her and wanted to marry her, do you know what she said? ‘No, never, never,’ and she left town to escape me. All my life that’s how it’s been. I’ve been rejected, laughed at, my heart’s been broken more times than I care to remember. By the time I came here, I resigned myself to thinking I’d never—I didn’t expect any of this.”

“Didn’t expect what? Me?”

He turned from me to glance at his paintings. “It’s like…it’s like the wheatfields. Right now in the plains of La Crau the farmers are tilling the soil and sowing the seeds. They’ll take root, brave the winter, then the wheat will grow and ripen to the harvest. But it doesn’t happen right away. The farmer has to be patient and have faith, let things happen in their own time.” He gazed into my eyes and wrapped my hands in his. “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

He looked so lost. Like the youth he must have been in Holland, not the man he was in Arles. A wave of tenderness swept over me, and I pulled my hands free to run my fingers down his cheek. “You have nothing to fear, Vincent. You know that I would never—”

“I do know, but you must be patient with me,
chérie
. When the time is right…” He touched my cheek in return, then tugged me to my feet. “As for you thinking I’m leaving…I want to establish an artists’ colony here, an
atelier du midi
, a studio of the south. I’ve dreamed of it since I left Paris, and now it will happen. First Gauguin will come, then others in the spring if we can lure them.” He shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“But why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “Why hide it?”

“I didn’t know for certain Gauguin was coming until the other day.” He handed me the rag from his worktable. “It’ll be splendid to have another painter to discuss ideas with. I think you’ll like him, he’s quite sociable.”

I dabbed at my eyes and blew my nose. “Have you known him a long time?”

“I met him briefly in Paris, but right now he’s in Brittany with another friend of ours. I have a self-portrait he painted and sent to me. It says more about him than I ever could.” Vincent fetched a canvas from the corner and propped it on the chair.

One look and I didn’t trust the man in the picture. With his reddened complexion and shifty eyes, Gauguin looked like a drunken sailor, the type of
mec
who thought he was something with his upturned moustache and affected goatee. The type of man who thought a girl should fall all over him but would treat her like his hired plaything once he got her upstairs.

“I see despair in this portrait,” Vincent said from behind my shoulder, “a man who is ill and tormented, a prisoner. Someone who needs peace and calm as much as I did when I first came south. Arles will do him good.”