Sunflowers by Sheramy Bundrick Read Free Book Online Page A

awning a white-aproned waiter bustled among the tables. A finer establishment than the cafés of the Place Lamartine, the sort of place where filles de maison dared not go.
    Vincent had been standing silent in the doorway, but he came to join me. “I’ve wanted to try a starry sky for some time,” he said. “In the dark I may take a blue for a green, a blue-lilac for a pink-lilac, but I can fix it in the studio if need be. Soon I’ll try a night painting by the river.”
    “They look so happy.”
    “Who?”
    “The people in the painting. You can tell they’re happy from the way they’re sitting. Not like in the night café. It’s two different worlds.” I nodded toward the painting of the Café de la Gare.
    “You’re very perceptive,” Vincent said.
    “It’s not hard to see things if you only look.”
    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