Sunflowers

by Sheramy Bundrick

  “How long can you stay?” I asked.

  Roulin replied, “I told Dr. Rey we wouldn’t be but an hour or two, so we should move along. Vincent, you must say something if you start to feel tired.”

  Vincent waved his hand impatiently. “I’m fine. I just want to see my paintings.”

  I took his arm so he could lean on me while we walked. At first he did a little, and at first his footsteps were slow, but when we reached the Place Lamartine, any weakness vanished. His pace quickened, and I felt my spirits rising together with his as we crossed the garden and neared the yellow house. Under the gray skies it appeared yellower than usual, as if putting on its best face to welcome him home.

  Vincent shifted from foot to foot as Roulin fumbled in his pockets for the key. “Patience, my friend,” Roulin chuckled. “The charwoman put everything back in order. She worked hard to get the house ready for you.”

  “I’ll make sure she’s paid extra for cleaning up the mess I made,” Vincent said. I tried not to think about what that mess had been.

  When Roulin pushed open the door, Vincent broke from my grasp and bolted through the hallway into the studio. “He’s been worrying over his pictures ever since he started feeling better,” Roulin told me in a low voice as we gave him a moment alone. “When it comes to his painting, il est doux comme un agneau.” Sweet as a lamb.

  “You haven’t told him about that article, have you, Monsieur Roulin?” I asked.

  Roulin looked offended. “I’m no fool, Mademoiselle Rachel.”

  Vincent was pulling canvases from stacks in the corner and setting them around the walls: touching each one, crooning under his breath to them like a father gone too long from his children. “Right where I left them, safe and sound,” he told us with shining eyes. “I wish I could start something today. I can’t wait to feel a brush in my hand again.”

  I was astonished how the paintings had multiplied since my last visit. Sowers under setting suns, the portrait of Madame Ginoux, another vineyard painting…so many of them. Not all were his, though. One stack in the corner he didn’t touch, and I could tell from the look of them they were Gauguin’s. He must have forgotten them in his haste to leave.

  Vincent started dragging his worktable to the empty space where Gauguin’s easel had been. “Careful,” Roulin said and went to help. “Look, Mademoiselle Rachel, Vincent painted my whole family.”

  “Kept me busy on the rainy days,” Vincent said and scooped paint tubes from the floor.

  Vincent hadn’t painted one picture of each member of the Roulin family: he’d painted multiple pictures of all of them. Joseph Roulin again in his postman’s uniform, Madame Roulin plump and serene by a window, three pictures of Camille, and in two paintings beyond, Armand, once looking shyly away, once looking confident in his best hat and yellow jacket. The unfinished painting on Vincent’s easel—the one he must have worked on before his illness—showed Madame Roulin in a green dress against a flowery background, rocking an unseen cradle by a cord.

  “Still need to finish the hands,” Vincent muttered as he passed the easel, “and the top layer on the skirt. Oh, I wish I could work today.”

  He’d painted chubby Marcelle most of all, twice in the arms of her maman, three times by herself. If our baby had lived, I thought as I stared at one of the pictures, he would have painted us. The doting mother against that yellow background would have been me, the child our son or daughter, wiggling and reaching for Papa while Papa tried to paint. “Hold the pose, little one,” Vincent would have said with a fond laugh. When he finished the portrait, he would have hung it in a special place, maybe in the kitchen, where I could have seen it while I nursed the baby by the fire. Instead Marcelle stared from the canvas with accusing eyes, and the proud, motherly face belonged to somebody else.

  Monsieur Roulin thought me fascinated. “Didn’t he do a splendid job with my little girl? You’ve seen how he adores Marcelle.”

  “I had to work fast for that study,” Vincent said, “because at first she didn’t like posing. A child has the infinite in its eyes, n’est-ce pas?”

  I couldn’t bear any more. I disappeared into the kitchen to light the stove and make coffee, glad to escape the painted gazes of la famille Roulin. I heard Vincent and Roulin talking more about the pictures, Vincent delivering a spirited lecture about modern portraiture that boomed through the house and lasted until they followed me.

  “Et voilà, ma pipe!” Vincent said happily as he retrieved pipe and tobacco pouch from the mantelpiece. He clenched the pipe in his teeth to fill the bowl with tobacco, lit a match from the stove, and closed his eyes to savor the first puff. “God, I’ve missed this. Dr. Rey won’t let me smoke in the hospital.”

  “When can you come home for good?” I asked as I poured the coffee.

  “In a few days, if I’m up to it. Then I’m to go to the hospital to have the dressing changed on my ear every two days until the wound is completely healed.” Vincent frowned to himself and stared at the table, then abruptly announced, “I want to see my room.”

  “Would you like me to come with you?” I asked, and he nodded. Roulin stayed behind to drink his coffee and smoke his own pipe.

  Vincent’s bedroom looked as pure and untouched as on the day he’d moved into the yellow house. The charwoman had cleaned the bedding, scrubbed the floor, and laid all his things in a row on his dressing table. Including his razor. That’s what he must have used, I realized as I caught sight of it, and I shuddered.

  “I remember nothing after the fight with Gauguin,” Vincent said as he walked around the room, brushing his fingers against his things. “All I know is what the doctor told me I did, and I have no idea why.” His voice fell to almost a whisper. “You must have been so frightened when…it was wrong of me to scare you like that.”

  “I was frightened for you more than anything else,” I said and touched his shoulder. “You have no reason to be sorry.”

  He opened the window shutters for light and air, and we both smiled at the sounds of chattering laughter and clattering carriages floating up from the Place Lamartine. He started to talk softly about what he’d do when he came home, how the weather would soon be fine again, how he’d paint in the orchards outside town, when suddenly a panicked look crossed his face. He ran to the other bedroom and flung open the door. “He didn’t take them,” he breathed.

  I hurried to stand beside him. “Who didn’t take what?”

  “Gauguin didn’t take the sunflowers.” Vincent opened the shutters and examined each piece of furniture, each painting as if taking an inventory. The charwoman had cleaned here too. No trace of Paul Gauguin remained.

  “Why did you think he would?”

  “He wanted them,” Vincent said simply and latched the shutters tight to keep out the mistral. Then he turned to me. “What was wrong in the studio, while we were talking about the baby’s portrait?”

  So he’d noticed after all. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “The look on your face, the way you rushed to the kitchen—I know there’s something, ma petite. Please tell me.”

  “There’s nothing,” I insisted. He studied my face until I cast my eyes to the floor. “What were you doing at old Louis’ place?” I asked.

  “What? When?”

  “Before you got sick. I saw you go inside.”

  He thought for a minute, then smiled. “Oh, that. Gauguin was trying to get Louis to pose for us. I tagged along for a drink.”

  “Only a drink?”

  His answering look was steady. “Only a drink.”

  I smiled back at him. “We should go before Monsieur Roulin wonders what we’re doing up here.” That made him laugh out loud, and it was so good to hear the sound that I forgot all about old Louis, all about Marcelle Roulin.

  “Rachel,” Vincent said shyly as we crossed the landing, “I meant what I said in the hospital.”

  I stopped and peered up at him from under my eyelashes. “And what was that?”

  “I
love you,” he murmured, flushing pink.

  “How do you say it in Dutch?”

  “Ik hou van je.”

  “T’ame, moun amour,” I told him in Provençal. He seized me round the waist and kissed me, a searching kiss that revived every night we spent together. He tasted of tobacco, of coffee—he tasted like home, and for the first time in far too long, I felt no sadness, no fear.

  We were backing toward the bedroom door when a gruff cough from the hallway below startled us apart. “We need to get to the hospital, Vincent,” Roulin called. I tucked my hair back into my chignon, Vincent straightened his clothes, and we sheepishly walked downstairs.

  Vincent took a last turn around the studio and grabbed his sketchbook and pencils to keep him occupied in the hospital. He sighed as he locked the door of the yellow house and gave the key back to Roulin for safekeeping. “I’ll write Theo and tell him all’s well with the house,” he said. “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done.” Roulin proclaimed it was his pleasure, and we began our walk to the Rue du Bout d’Arles. “By the way,” Vincent asked, “have you written my mother and sister Willemien? I’ll write them myself soon, but I don’t want them to know what happened. You haven’t told them, have you?”

  “No, I’ve only written your brother.” Roulin was lying to protect Vincent’s feelings. A few days earlier he’d said he was passing news to Mademoiselle van Gogh.

  “Good, I wouldn’t want them to worry. It’s bad enough Theo came for nothing.”

  “He hardly came for nothing,” I broke in. “Vincent, you could have died!”

  “But I didn’t die,” he said calmly, and added to himself, “I need to write Gauguin too.”

  “What for?” I demanded.

  “To ask him to be discreet in talking about what happened, and to let him know I still consider him a friend.”

  “Humph—I don’t know why!”

  Vincent’s voice was weary. “Rachel, please.” I kept quiet but seethed inside at the thought of Gauguin. I wanted to snatch up his paintings and hurl them into the Rhône to rot. Had he once thought about Vincent after he fled to Paris? Bothered to find out whether Vincent lived or died?

  I gave Vincent a last embrace when we reached the maison, whispering, “Come home soon.” He nodded, too overcome with emotion to speak. Françoise came to join me in the doorway, and together we watched as Vincent and Roulin continued down the street toward the hospital.

  A familiar envelope, my name written in a familiar scrawl, appeared at Madame Virginie’s a few days later. No words accompanied the sketch of the house inside. No words were needed.

  The door opened before I raised my hand to knock. “I watched for you through the window,” Vincent said and kissed me on each cheek.

  “When did you get back?” I asked as I followed him into the studio. The scent of turpentine, slight and faded earlier that week, was strong once more.

  “Yesterday afternoon. It was wonderful to sleep in my own bed, even better to get back to work. I’m beginning with a still life to accustom myself to painting again.” He gestured toward a carefully arranged collection of objects on the table: empty wine bottle, onions on a plate, a book, letter, candle, stick of sealing wax, and his pipe and tobacco pouch. “I’ll stop soon for a break. Have a seat.”

  It was hard to believe that as sick as he’d been, as near to death as he’d been, he could stand there painting as if nothing had happened. Aside from being thinner and having the bandage around his head, he seemed no different than before. He seemed to be the Vincent I’d known back in the summer, before Gauguin had come. “And you’re feeling fine?” I asked. “Not too tired, not too weak?”

  He shrugged. “Perfectly fine. It was an artist’s fit, nothing more.”

  “Artist’s fit? What does that—”

  “A temporary overexcitement, Dr. Rey says.”

  I watched him for a moment. His hand moved the same way it always had; his expression as he studied the canvas was the same as always too. “What does he say you need to do now?”

  “Rest, take walks outdoors, eat well, don’t work too hard. No drinking except a glass of wine with supper. And”—he turned to me with a pained look on his face—“no women.”

  “Oh. For how long?”

  He stabbed at the canvas with his brush. “Until he says I can, I don’t know, a few weeks? Too long, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I suppose he’s right,” I said. “It’s too soon.”

  “Easy for him to say. He doesn’t have you waiting for him.”

  “It’s more important for you to get well. We have all the time in the world.” I walked closer to the easel and peered at the painting. “What do all these things mean?”

  He ignored my question, setting down his brushes and palette to take my face in his hands. “Mon Dieu, I want to kiss you so much right now.”

  “Kissing is rather indispensable,” I murmured with a giggle, “otherwise serious disorders might result.”

  A knock at the front door interrupted us a few minutes later, and I pulled away to answer it as Vincent groaned in annoyance. I stifled another giggle at finding staid Dr. Rey, who removed his hat and said politely, “Bonjour, Mademoiselle. Is Vincent here?”

  “He’s working in the studio, this way. May I take your hat and coat?”

  “Yes, thank you.” He coughed. “Pardon me, Mademoiselle, but you have paint on your cheek.” I wiped away Vincent’s fingerprints and wondered if the doctor had seen us misbehaving through the window. At least the paint was only on my face.

  Dr. Rey’s eyes widened when we entered the studio and he saw all the paintings. “Bonjour, Docteur,” Vincent said. “Welcome to my home.”

  “Bonjour, Vincent, I’ve come to ensure you are satisfactorily settled. I am pleased to see you working”—the doctor’s brow furrowed as he considered the objects on the table—“but mind you don’t work too hard.”

  “I’m taking things slowly, I promise. Would you like to see my paintings?”

  Vincent toured the doctor around the studio, his voice growing more animated with every canvas he pulled out to show. The doctor seemed out of place with his fine suit, and I noticed he was careful not to brush against anything and spoil it with paint. From his bland expression I couldn’t tell whether he liked Vincent’s work, until his face lit up at one of the pictures. “That’s one of my favorites,” I said when he bent to take a closer look at the starry night over the Rhône.

  Dr. Rey smiled at me for the first time. “You have exquisite taste, Mademoiselle. I can almost hear the water lapping.”

  “I was there when he painted it.”

  “Look at this one,” Vincent broke in, producing the canvas with the night café.

  “I’m sorry to say it, but I’m not sure I like that one,” Dr. Rey said.

  Vincent beamed with satisfaction before launching into an explanation of complementary colors. The doctor listened attentively, nodding his head and asking questions, and my already good opinion of him soared even higher. “I’ve often thought I should try my hand at painting,” he mused, his eyes returning to the starry night.

  Vincent shook his head. “A man of your means should turn collector, not painter, although even to do that, you have to train your eye.” He chose a print from a pile on a chair and handed it to Dr. Rey.

  “A surgeon! That’s a fine picture.”

  “Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp. The original is in The Hague, where I used to live. I’ll have my brother send a new print for you as a gift.” Dr. Rey thanked him, and Vincent added, “I’d be honored if you’d allow me to paint your portrait, also as a gift.”

  The doctor paused so briefly that Vincent in his eagerness might not have noticed, but I did. “I wouldn’t want you to work too hard.”

  “I could use the practice after my illness. Why don’t you come back later in the week and sit for me?”

  “I could come Sunday after church,” the doctor said, still sounding d
oubtful. He gave a little bow in my direction. “Mademoiselle, I hope you will be joining us. Although I admit I’ll be nervous, having my picture painted.”

  Vincent waved his hand. “It’ll be fine. You spend your days cutting up people and peering inside them, now I shall peer inside you.”

  “I look forward to it. And now I must return to the hospital. Au revoir, Mademoiselle.”

  I smiled and handed Dr. Rey his hat and coat. “Au revoir, Docteur. Thank you for all your help.” Vincent followed him into the hall, where I heard their voices, low and indistinct.

  Vincent made a face when he came back into the studio. “He reminded me that I’m supposed to ‘exercise restraint with women’ for a while.” His eyes narrowed. “Why do I think the good doctor would like to abandon restraint with you?” When I laughed and said he was being ridiculous, Vincent insisted, “I saw how he looked at you.”

  I had seen it too, but it didn’t worry me. “I think we need to change the subject, that’s what I think. You work on your painting, and I’ll make some supper.”

  “Supper’s a poor substitute for what I really want,” he grumbled and snatched up his paintbrushes.

  By the time I’d gone shopping and cooked our meal, Vincent’s new painting was nearly finished, and his grouchy spell had passed like a summer shower. I sighed happily as I made the stew and rearranged the kitchen to my satisfaction, brushing my hand over the dishes and utensils the way Vincent had done with the things in his bedroom and studio. I was glad to see his hearty appetite when I served supper; I’d spent extra for good beef. “I had a letter from Johanna,” he said as we ate.

  It took me a moment to remember who she was. “Theo’s fiancée?”

  He nodded. “A very kind letter, just a few lines. She seems charming and intelligent. And desperate for me to like her.”

  “That’s not surprising,” I said. “She’s marrying your brother. I’m sure she’d like to be friends.” How much did she know about Vincent’s illness, I wondered. “Do you approve of the match now?” I asked cautiously.