“I had to wait for Theo’s latest letter.” He looked embarrassed, then reached into his pocket. “I passed an orchard this afternoon when I was out walking, and I brought you a fig.”
“Thank you.” We smiled at each other over our drinks, and I glanced at his hand on the table, spotted with red and blue paint. “Were you painting today?”
“I just finished a girl’s portrait. It took longer than it should have, nearly a week.”
“One of Leon Batailler’s filles?”
I sounded worse than sullen, I sounded prickly. I turned as red as the dried paint on Vincent’s fingers, but he seemed amused. “A girl of about twelve or thirteen, chaperoned by her mother. I saw her in the Place Lamartine garden, and I wanted to paint her because she reminded me of a character in a book I read. She was flattered and said yes at once.” He gave me a look under cocked eyebrows that made me flush deeper, then went on to describe the picture, the colors of the girl’s dress, the colors of the background. Malachite green, royal blue, Prussian blue…all of it a language as foreign to me as his native Dutch. “Everything is so colorful here,” he said. “Not like Paris, not like Holland, where everything is so gray.”
“Is it true you were a preacher in Holland?”
Again the cocked eyebrow, and his tone turned serious. “You’ve been talking to the good Monsieur Roulin. What else did he tell you?”
“Oh, nothing much,” I said, “only that you’ve moved around a lot and haven’t always been a painter.”
“It’s true, I haven’t always been a painter. I was an art dealer for several years in Holland, London, and Paris—”
“Like your brother?”
He pressed his lips together so tightly that they disappeared into his beard. “He’s better at it than I was. I became a schoolteacher for a while after that, then a preacher—in Belgium, not Holland—before the church sacked me. Then I became an artist.” On his fingers, he ticked off the names of places he’d lived—Brussels, Etten, The Hague, Drenthe, Nuenen, Antwerp, Paris—Paris alone being someplace I knew anything about. He pressed his lips together again when he said “Etten” and “Nuenen,” muttering that he’d lived with his parents there; “The Hague” he practically whispered while staring at the tabletop.
“Why aren’t you married?” I asked lightly. “Couldn’t you find some nice girl to settle down with, all those places you went?”
A shadow crossed his face. “What makes you so certain I’ve never been married?”
“I don’t know, I just thought—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend—”
“As it happens, you are correct. I’ve never been married.” He gulped his wine before pulling pipe and tobacco pouch from his pocket, and we sat awkwardly for some moments.
“Monsieur Roulin told me you painted his portrait,” I said at last.
Vincent’s face brightened. “An interesting subject, like something out of Daumier. Just the sort of thing I’ve wanted to do here.” He played with the pipe in his hands and gazed at his half-empty glass. “I would be honored, Rachel, if you came one day to see my work. I would be pleased to show you Monsieur Roulin’s portraits and other paintings besides. Tell you about them. That is, if it interests you.”
“It would interest me very much, but—” Men came to visit me, we had our time together, then they went home or wherever they came from. To go off with a man outside the maison would be more foolish than having him paint my picture. I tried to be gentle. “To go places with customers just isn’t done.”
“I see.” His tone had turned frosty.
“I’d say no to anyone who asked, Vincent. I have to.”
“They don’t own you.”
“I can’t lose my post. I have nowhere else to go.”
His hand crept to cover mine. “How long have you been here?” he asked, his voice thawing.
“Since January.”
“Are you from Arles? Where’s your family?” he asked then, and every part of me tensed. I’d asked him all manner of questions, but he hadn’t asked me anything like that until now. I told him I came from a village not far away, without saying the name, and I told him how my sister and her husband still lived there, how Maman died of consumption, Papa of the cholera. I told him with as few words as I could, hiding most of it and fighting to keep from saying, I’m alone. They left me and I’m all alone.
“I’m sorry,” Vincent said. “My own father died over three years ago. You were close to your papa?” When I nodded, he patted my hand and said again, “I’m sorry.”
If I spoke any more about it, I would cry, and I couldn’t let him see me cry. He’d take me in his arms and let me weep on his shoulder, and that’d be a terrible mistake. I pulled my hand away. “What will you be painting next?” I asked and forced a smile.
He tilted his head and smiled back. “I’d paint you if you’d let me, but since you won’t, I’m thinking of painting flowers—sunflowers. There’s a good patch of them near the public bathing-house, and I think they’d make a fine color effect.”
“Sunflowers,” I breathed. “Li viro-souleù.” Just saying the word cheered me. Fields of sunflowers had circled my village and my family’s house, so stately as they followed the sun with patient devotion, so beautiful I wanted to pick them all and keep them forever. “They wilt quickly without the sun to guide their way,” Maman explained when I brought home an armful, only to find them shriveled and bent the next morning.
Vincent was giving me an odd look. “‘Viro-souleù’?”
“Viro-souleù,” I corrected his pronunciation. “The Provençal word for sunflowers.”
“I can’t speak a word of Provençal,” he said with a sigh, “and it’s gotten me into trouble, because sometimes people can’t understand my French. I never end up with the right postage at the post office.”
I could imagine the pretend blank stares making him speak slowly for amusement’s sake, the smirks behind his back after he left. “Most people understand you, especially the younger ones, they’re just giving you a hard time. A lot of folks around here don’t care for foreigners, and that includes anybody who speaks French like a Parisian.”
“Perhaps if I learned to speak Provençal, folks would like me better, no?”
I ignored his teasing attempt to imitate my accent and pretended to consider this. “I suppose I could teach you. But you’ll need to visit more often if you’re to make any progress.”
“So speaks the village schoolteacher. Yes, ma’am.” He took my hand again and played with my fingers. “Might I suggest we commence my tutelage upstairs?”
“Let’s go, then,” I said, trying not to sound too eager. “Anen aro, Vincèns.” And that began a most entertaining lesson.
CHAPTER THREE
Le café de nuit
There are colors which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple, which complete each other like a man and woman.
—Vincent to his sister Willemien,
Arles, June 1888
J
uly passed pleasantly into August, August into September, as Vincent came to see me whenever he could afford it. I always knew when Theo had sent a new letter with new francs, for Vincent appeared unannounced, fingers streaked with new paints, the familiar gleam in his eyes. Those nights he bought extra drinks, which pleased Madame Virginie, and those nights I usually found an extra franc hidden someplace after he left—a franc he always denied giving me and refused to take back.
If it wasn’t busy, we talked over our wine, and he told me about his paintings. Everything about him changed when he spoke of his work—he came alive, prattling with a rat-a-tat rhythm and waving his hands until he almost spilled his drink. He tried to tempt me into posing or at least visiting his studio, and tempted I nearly was, many times. “You should see it,” he’d say as he described a portrait of an old cowherder or painting of oleanders in a jug. When I asked whether he’d painted the sunflowers, the sly answer was always the same. “Perhaps.”
“I’ve got an idea for a new study,” he said one September evening. “I’m going to paint the Café de la Gare.”
I wrinkled my nose. “That tacky place?”
“It’ll be a very modern subject. I want to paint it in the middle of night, when no one is around but the derelicts and vagabonds.”
The Café de la Gare, owned by Joseph and Marie Ginoux, was one of the cafés around the train station that stayed open all hours, a café de nuit. During the day it was nice enough, all sorts of folks gathering there for a drink or a meal, but under the gaslights in the wee hours, you’d find those who had no place to stay, or anybody who’d rather spend their francs on absinthe than on a bed. The habitués of the night café wiled away the hours drinking, smoking, shooting billiards, or staring into nothingness. I ought to know—once I’d been one of them.
“It’ll take two or three nights to get it right, I think,” Vincent continued. “I’ll sleep during the day and paint after dark.” He wound a lock of my hair around his thumb. “You could keep me company part of the time, if you want.” I didn’t answer, and he said, “All this time, and you will not see me outside this place. At least think about it.”
I did think about it, and the last night Vincent was painting at the café, curiosity got the better of me. The Café de la Gare wasn’t far, a brisk few minutes’ walk through Place Lamartine, but at that hour it was far enough. Pimps and pickpockets lurked in the mist rising from the river, along with drunken sailors and desperate whores, occasionally a gendarme whistling and swinging his nightstick. Even the public garden changed from a sunny, innocent spot to the sort of place where you heard moans and giggles in the bushes. As I passed by, a prostitute with missing teeth and a black eye called, “Half a franc, kitten, the mecs can’t do you like I can,” and I walked faster.
The café doors stood open on such a warm evening, and the eyes of the men slumped over the tables stalked me like hungry animals. One of them tried to get my attention, but I stuck my nose in the air and pretended not to see. Only the man with palette and paintbrushes interested me, the one frowning at his canvas, pipe hanging from his mouth.
“Rachel! You came!” Vincent exclaimed when he saw me. “Let me buy you a coffee.” He motioned for Monsieur Ginoux, his delight making me bashful. I waited for him to ask why I’d changed my mind, but he didn’t. When I asked if I could see his picture, he declared, “Of course, of course” and sprang up so I could sit in front of it.
I had imagined his paintings to be sweet and calm and gentle, like he was with me. Not sinister and brooding like this. Bright colors shouted from the canvas—red walls, green ceiling, yellow floor—yet the mood in his café scene was anything but bright. The clock in the background read ten minutes after midnight, and most customers had gone home. Empty chairs and mostly empty glasses said they’d been there, but only dregs of absinthe and the dregs of society remained. Faceless figures hunched over tables; a pimp chatted up a whore. The billiard table sat ready, but no one was playing. Monsieur Ginoux stood there instead, staring out from the painting, and the gaslamps overhead watched too like unblinking eyes. The gay pink bouquet on the sideboard struck the only note of innocence, the only note of hope.
“What are you playing at, Vincent?” Monsieur Ginoux had brought the coffee and was scowling over my shoulder. “You’ve made my place look like a—”
Vincent waved his hand good-naturedly. “I told you, you shouldn’t have made such a ruckus over being late with the rent. Don’t worry, it won’t sell, nobody will see it.”
Monsieur Ginoux muttered something under his breath in Provençal and went to the billiard table, where he grabbed the cue to stab at billiard balls. Clack! Vincent ignored him, and so did I—I couldn’t take my eyes from the painting. I saw myself in that room, as clearly as if Vincent had put me with the rest of the night crawlers: a frightened young woman whose money had run out, who couldn’t afford the simplest inn and was tired of fending off sour-breathed men offering centimes to lift her skirt. Who regretted she’d ever boarded the train to Arles and missed her papa so much it hurt. “I can help you,” Françoise had said when she’d found me there at the café. How could I have said no?
Vincent was watching my face, waiting for me to speak. “You got the mood of the place,” I said, trying to be nice.
“It’s not supposed to be a happy picture,” he said, and he actually sounded pleased. “I wanted to show that this café de nuit was a place where one could ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime. It’s so different here late at night, filled with the terrible passions of humanity.”
“The ceiling’s not green,” I said skeptically. “The walls aren’t as red as that either.” He’d made the walls in the painting crimson as blood, instead of a faded brick color that hid the dirt and smoke stains. “No wonder Monsieur Ginoux—”
“Red and green are what we call complementary colors,” Vincent interrupted, sounding like my papa teaching at school. “When juxtaposed, they vibrate and clash against each other, but ultimately they belong together and form a strange kind of harmony.”
I squinted at one of the figures sitting at a table, wearing a big yellow hat with a bit of red hair sticking out. “Is that man supposed to be you?”
Vincent smiled. “Do you want it to be me?”
“Maybe,” I replied with a wink.
Now his smile reached the crinkles around his eyes. “Let me sit for a second,” he said, then dabbed his brush in a smear of brown paint to sign “Vincent” and “le café de nuit” at the bottom of the picture, below the man in the yellow hat.
“Why ‘Vincent’? Why not your whole name?”
“Because no one can pronounce it.” He wiped his brushes and palette clean with a stained rag, shut everything in a wooden box, and yawned as he collapsed his easel. “Sorry, I’m not used to staying up this late. I was about to go to bed, but why don’t I walk you to the maison first? I’d invite you upstairs, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be good company.”
“You must be so tired. It’s silly for you to do that when you live right here.”
“There are rough characters about, and I don’t want you walking alone. Just let me put my things away.”
I agreed and waited for him by the door, still ignoring Monsieur Ginoux and the absinthe-sodden drunkards.
We didn’t speak as we walked across the square, through the garden and past the pond, where moonlight tickled the water. The toothless prostitute was sitting under a streetlamp now, and she called, “Found yourself a redhead, eh, kitten? You know what they say about redheads.” Vincent reached for my hand at her cackle. Such a liberty, to hold my hand—yes, I took his hand to lead him upstairs in the maison, but this made my heart race in a different way, made me wish we had further to go than the Rue du Bout d’Arles.
“Bonne nuit, Rachel,” Vincent said when we arrived at Madame Virginie’s doorstep.
“I want to pose for you,” I blurted.
He stared at me, eyes wide. “Truly?”
I nodded. “But you won’t make me look…you know…”
“Ugly?” He chuckled and took my chin in his fingers. I thought he might kiss me, but instead he turned my head to examine my profile. “The night café is one of the ugliest pictures I’ve done. It’s unfortunate you saw that one first. You—you I cannot make ugly. I only
hope I can paint you as I feel you.”
“Feel me?” My heart began to race again.
His reply was quiet. “You are extraordinary. Like something by Delacroix.”
“Is that good?”
“Delacroix was among the best.” He turned my head the other way, to look at the other side of my face, then let go of my chin. “Meet me at the Café de la Gare in two days, around nine in the morning. Then I shall take you to my studio.”
“I’ll be there,” I promised. “Bonne nuit, Vincent.” He gave me one of his awkward bows and, with a last stifled yawn, disappeared into the mist.
Someone must have seen us. At luncheon the next day Minette asked about my rendezvous, and everyone else stopped talking to listen. I tried to make it sound as if my meeting Vincent at the café had been an accident, and I tried to describe his painting, although I said nothing about agreeing to pose for him. “Sounds like he’s a lousy painter,” Jacqui sneered. “No wonder nobody wants his pictures.”
I shook my head. “No, he made it ugly on purpose. He wanted to show—”
“Ugly on purpose? What kind of fool would do that?”
I frowned at my plate and gave up. I could feel the other girls swapping glances around me, and I could read their thoughts: Of all the men who come to Madame Virginie’s, why did Rachel choose him?
Françoise pulled me aside after we cleared the table. “You must stop spending so much time with him. It’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” I scoffed. “Don’t be silly. He wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
“You know what I mean. You’re playing with fire.”
“You’re the one who told me to find some regulars.”
Her nostrils flared. “To have regulars is fine. To have someone special who brings you presents and treats you good, is fine. But once you start running around outside the maison, you invite all kinds of trouble. Do you see me going anywhere with Joseph? Or anybody else?”
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