A Tangled Web

by Judith Michael

  But I can’t share his bed and go on as his wife . . .

  “I’ll be away for a couple of weeks,” he said as Stephanie remained silent. “I hate to leave you, but I have to see some of my people in a few places and I’ll be on the move the whole time; otherwise I’d take you with me.”

  Relief swept through her and she looked down so he would not see it in her eyes. “Your export and import people?”

  “Yes.”

  “And will they help you solve your problems?”

  “I expect to have all the information I need after I talk to them. You’ll be all right, won’t you? You have Madame Besset and you seem to be close to Jacqueline; and you can finish the house while I’m gone. Surprise me. You can give me a tour when I get back.”

  Two weeks, Stephanie thought; two whole weeks. He’ll work out whatever is wrong, and when he comes back, I’ll tell him I’m leaving. And in the meantime I’ll find a place to live. Because I have to do that. I’ll be with Léon, but I have to be by myself, too.

  Maybe, if I’m alone, I can concentrate and put things together and remember. Laura. Mrs. Thirkell. Penny. Garth.

  She repeated the names to herself. They meant nothing. No faces came with them, no voices or conversations, no clasping of hands or sharing of smiles. Laura. Mrs. Thirkell. Penny. Garth.

  Nothing.

  But I will remember, she thought. Robert thinks I will; Léon thinks I will. One day it will all come back.

  “—worried about my being gone?” Max was asking. “If you’re really upset I can try to break it into shorter trips and be home in between.”

  “No, I’m not worried; I’ll be fine. And I will finish the house; I think I can do it in two weeks. I need to find curtains for the bedroom; I think sailcloth . . .” And they talked about the house, and the orders Max wanted her to give the maintenance man and the gardener, and how she should forward his mail to the Marseilles office, and a dozen other topics, and buried in their conversation was the fact that both of them had decided that day not to tell the other what was most urgent to each of them. And in protecting each other by keeping silent, they were perhaps closer than at any time since Stephanie had awakened in the hospital and Max had told her he was her husband.

  Stephanie held that closeness to her when he left the next day. He had bent over the bed to kiss her goodbye before the sky was fully light, telling her he loved her and would miss her and would call every evening. “Take care of yourself,” she had said, and when he saw the worry in her eyes, he bent down and kissed her again, and then took his suitcase and was gone.

  Stephanie and Madame Besset conferred on what they would need in the house for the next two weeks, she gave Max’s instructions to the maintenance man and the gardener, and then she went to work early, and when the telephone rang she picked it up on the first ring.

  “May I see you this afternoon?” Léon asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be outside at one. Or earlier, if you can.”

  “No, Jacqueline expects me to work until one.”

  And exactly at one he was outside the shop in his small car. “I want you to see my studio. And I’ve prepared a feast for you. Will you come with me or follow me in your car?”

  “I’ll follow you.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “As much as we want.”

  “As much . . . Max is away?”

  “Yes.”

  He touched her hand, then waited while she went to her car, and in a few minutes they had left Cavaillon behind. They drove on narrow, curving roads past neat fields of melon and potato plants and stubby grapevines sprouting new leaves; past stretches of pale green wild grass slashed by brilliant swaths of orange-red poppies. Here and there painters wearing broad-brimmed straw hats sat in folding chairs before large canvases. Their arms were stretched straight out, extended by brushes that swirled, dabbed, swooped across the canvas to create visions of vivid poppies against a backdrop of green-black trees that marked the corners of farmers’ fields and, on the horizon, the softly rounded hills and terra-cotta hill towns of the Vaucluse.

  Oh, it is so beautiful, Stephanie thought, as if she had never seen the valley before. In the stillness of the fields that drowsed beneath a blue-white summer sky she felt herself moving soundlessly, without volition, dreamlike, suspended above the earth. The landscape floated past her, and the heat and molten light and piercing color of the poppies were inside her and enveloping her at the same time. She was part of everything, she took everything into her, and as she watched the back of Léon’s head as he drove, she felt how wonderful and wondrous it was to be alive.

  Léon turned onto a road that climbed above the valley floor, and she recognized the way to Goult, where she and Max had had dinner. But before they reached the center of the tiny medieval town, Léon turned onto an even narrower road and then, sharply, into a driveway barely wide enough for the car, walled on both sides by an impenetrable mass of trees and bushes and vines.

  Once inside the wild tangle of that natural wall, Stephanie drew in her breath at the riot of color in flower gardens that seemed to have sprung up naturally but were in fact planned by an artist for harmony and scale. And tucked among them were small patches of herbs, vegetables, and salad greens: tall spires of frisée, feathery mizuna, white-flowered arugula, red oak leaf, pea vines, fronds of fennel. Sectioned by flagstone walks, the gardens filled every inch between the roadside hedge and the house.

  Stephanie parked behind Léon and stood beside him, looking up at the house. It was built of rough-hewn weathered stone and was perfectly square, two stories high, with windows evenly spaced and three chimneys in the sloping tile roof. A child’s drawing, Stephanie thought with amusement, and wondered briefly where she had seen a child’s drawing of a house. But she let it go as Léon took her hand and led her to the heavy wooden door. “The studio is in back, but I want you to see the house first.”

  They walked into a central hall that cut through the house to the back door. Square, high-ceilinged rooms opened off either side of the hall, with polished stone floors, fringed Moroccan rugs, and couches and chairs of leather or intricately patterned wool. Huge paintings hung on the walls, abstracts by Tàpies and Rothko, a great blue horse by Rothenberg, drawings by de Kooning and Morisot. “My favorites,” Léon said. “I don’t hang my own work in my house.”

  They went through the back door to another building, a smaller version of the house, set amid more gardens and shaded by cypress trees. Léon unlocked the door and stood aside for Stephanie to go ahead of him. He stayed back, watching her as she stood in the center of the room beneath a twenty-foot ceiling. Under a hard bright light from a north-facing glass wall, there was color everywhere: canvases covered with an explosion of colors in slashing angles and flowing curves that spilled over into a confusion of paint-spattered chairs, tables, ladders, easels, high stools, and benches. Fluorescent fixtures hung from the ceiling, two potted tree geraniums covered with blooms stood near the window, a radio played Mozart, an arm- chair and daybed were covered with fabrics designed by Claire Goddard. Rolls of canvas stood in a corner near a coat tree missing an arm, a coffeepot stood on a small sink, and the tables were buried beneath books, thumbed and tattered magazines, pots of brushes and pencils, and stacks of sketch pads.

  And on all the walls, tacked close together, were pictures of Stephanie.

  Stunned, she turned in place, seeing herself repeated in charcoal sketches of a few swift lines, in washes of watercolor, in the bolder lines of crayon, in pencil, in pastel. She was sitting on the rocks at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and in the forest at Saint-Saturnin; she was pensively drinking coffee at an outdoor café, lighting a lamp at Jacqueline en Provence, reading a book, daydreaming beside an open window. But most of the pictures were portraits, her face filling the canvas in full view, in profile, or turning away, the painter desperately trying to stop her before she escaped.

  And always, in the curve of her mouth, the angle o
f her head, the shadow in her eyes, there was a sadness, a sense of loss underlying every other mood that Léon had caught. “Even when I smile,” Stephanie said wonderingly, and looked back at him. “Is that true? It’s always there?”

  “So far. Sometimes more strongly than others.”

  Their eyes met across the studio and she wondered that he saw so deeply into her. He had not moved since she walked into the room and she realized how great was his capacity for stillness. She recalled it from their picnic at Saint-Saturnin: he settled into place, observing and reflecting, his imagination transforming what he saw, creating paintings in his mind so that, when he stood before a canvas, it was as if he played it all out, like a fisherman with his line.

  “How do you see that in me? No one else sees it: Robert, Max, Jacqueline . . .”

  “Perhaps I look more closely because I love you.”

  “But you see more than most people, in everything.”

  He smiled. “You’re right; there’s more to it than love.” He closed the door and walked into the studio, absently picking up a tube of paint and replacing it in its rack. “The first law of painting—I’m sure writers would say the same thing about their work—is to take in everything unfiltered, without thinking about order or even meaning. The important thing is to concentrate and absorb. When we’re young we hear only our own voice and we pay our most ardent attention to what touches us; many people never get beyond that, no matter how old they are. But anyone who wants to create must learn to see and hear more than the obvious and the personal. It’s like sitting by a lake and suddenly seeing a trout break the water and leap up to catch an insect. When it leaps, you realize you’ve been seeing ripples all along—faint, but enough to let you know the trout was there. So you train your eye and you concentrate, and after a while, under calm surfaces you see other worlds, parallel to the visible one, and far more complex.” He gave a rueful laugh. “I’m sorry; I’m sounding pompous.”

  “You sound like a man who thinks about what he does and understands it and loves it.”

  “In this case, with these drawings, I love you. I’ve been waking up at night and drawing you, and drawing you while I eat and walk in the woods, and when I’m supposed to be working on two paintings I’ve promised my gallery in Paris by the first of September. I found great joy in it, perhaps because I imagined you were thinking of me all those times I reached for chalk and pencil and paint.”

  “Yes.”

  Stephanie moved closer to the paintings and studied each one, walking slowly around the room. And suddenly she found herself before an oil painting, the only one in the collection, and it was of two of her.

  “My two Sabrinas,” Léon said, standing beside her.

  In the painting, two women, identical except for their dress, faced each other, faintly smiling, so absorbed in each other that they had shut out the rest of the world. The light slanted across them at such an angle that one Sabrina was in sunlight while the other was in shadow.

  Stephanie gazed at the painting for a long, silent time. She felt strangely happy, almost buoyant, held fast by the two women; she did not want to walk away from them. “It’s very strange,” she said at last. “I know I’ve seen this before. But that can’t be, can it?”

  “No. I painted it yesterday and last night. Perhaps you dreamed there were two of you? The Sabrina you can’t remember and the Sabrina you are today?”

  “I suppose . . . That must be it; what else could it be? Léon, I want to buy this. May I?”

  “You will not buy it, what are you thinking? It’s yours, all of these are yours. You need not ask; take what you wish.”

  “Thank you. Just this one. It makes me feel at home. That’s where I’ll hang it: in my own place.”

  “Your own place?”

  Still looking at the painting, Stephanie said, “I’m going to find a place to live in Cavaillon. I can’t live with Max anymore.”

  Léon drew in his breath. He turned her to him. “You’re sure? You must not leave him because it is what I want.”

  “You didn’t tell me you wanted it.”

  “No, of course not; how could I do that? I thought of it all weekend, but I knew it had to come from you. And you must be very sure, because you’ve lived with him and you feel loyal to him.”

  “But I don’t want to spend my life with him. I want to spend it with you.”

  He studied her face, then sighed as if he had been holding his breath, and he kissed her, his mouth opening hers as his arms tightened. Stephanie felt their bodies fit together, shift and nestle in small adjustments until there was no space between them. She felt again the heat she had felt in the car, the dreamlike suspension, the brilliant colors exploding soundlessly around her. Heat and light and colors were all inside her and enclosing her; she was open to everything, part of the hugeness of life. Her arms were around Léon, her hand on the back of his head as they kissed, and suddenly a fleeting image came, of a white hospital room and a fog of nothingness. But it vanished as soon as it had come: there was no room for it in what surged through her now: the unfathomable vivid wonder of loving and of being alive.

  “We could delay lunch,” Léon murmured.

  “Yes. Later.”

  They moved together to the daybed in the corner and lay on it and took off each other’s clothes, Stephanie’s gauze skirt over bare legs and her sheer cotton blouse with a deep V neck, and Léon’s duck pants and short-sleeved shirt. “Thank God for summer,” he said, “so little, and so easily removed.”

  Stephanie laughed with the joy of their bodies touching. This time, with hours before them, they explored each other, tasted each other, learned the outlines of each other’s body. Léon’s hands, a painter’s hands, moved over her body as if he were discovering and revealing her at the same time. And Stephanie’s hands, which had learned to identify the carvings of antique furniture and jewelry by touch as well as by sight, curved around the muscles and bones and hollows of Léon’s body, memorizing him, making him hers.

  In the wash of white light that poured through the glass wall, every angle of their bodies was accentuated, every pore, every fine hair, every pale vein that pulsed beneath their touch. “This is what I am doing when I draw you,” Léon murmured, his mouth moving down Stephanie’s body from her lips to her throat to her breasts. “I am kissing you and whispering to you and feeling the silk of your skin under my brush, and then”—he moved to lie on her—“I am inside you and you are pulling me deeper, making me one with you . . .”

  A low laugh rippled in Stephanie’s throat. “You can’t do all that and go on drawing.”

  “No. Which is why I am not drawing now.”

  “I love you,” Stephanie said, and touched his face. And then their bodies moved together and spoke for them, and they were silent.

  * * *

  Max and Robert sat in the small motorboat, sharing sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. They could not make out each other’s face in the faint light from the distant shore, but they talked casually, like good friends. The intense heat of the early evening had eased, and they sat back, in shirtsleeves and chino pants, breathing deeply of the fresh sea air.

  “Thank you for being here,” Robert said. “I would have asked someone else, but my friend got sick so late, the time was getting short—”

  “It’s all right, Robert. You needed help and you knew I’d be here.”

  “But you were on your way home.”

  “I’ll still go tonight; you know that. As soon as we’ve finished, we’ll all drive back.”

  “It’s not difficult, you know, but it always goes more smoothly with two. So I do thank you, and so will Jana when she gets here; it is a great favor to both of us. Sabrina will be glad to see you; this has been a long trip, has it not?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “A long time away from her.”

  “Too long. It’s the damnedest thing: I think I go a little crazy without her. After a few days it gets hard to eat and sleep. I don
’t understand it; I act like a smitten adolescent.” He heard himself with surprise. It must be the darkness, he thought; otherwise I’d never have said that. But this is almost like talking to myself. And Robert is never judgmental. “Anyway, I won’t leave her again. We may even go away.”

  “You mean take a trip? No, that was not in your voice. What did you mean, Max?”

  Max considered telling him, then decided against it. He had changed some of his plans and made new ones in the two weeks just ended, so it was impossible that Denton or anyone else would know them, but still, the fewer who had any information at all—even including Robert—the safer he would feel. “I meant a trip. We haven’t traveled together. Is that the freighter?”

  “Ah. Yes. On time.”

  They watched through binoculars as the freighter from Chile made its slow way toward them. “Five minutes,” Robert said. “Ten at the most.”

  Max heard the tremor in his voice. “Why are you nervous? You just said it wasn’t difficult. And you’ve done it often enough; it ought to be as simple as a game of croquet.”

  “My friend, croquet is filled with snares for the unwary.”

  “But you’re not unwary.”

  “No. And I’m not usually this nervous. I suppose it’s because she’s so small, almost like a child, and so I think of her as a child, as vulnerable as a child.”

  “Robert, she’s been teaching peasants how to fight for their rights in a country that tears people like her to pieces; she wanted to go there and you wouldn’t have sent her if you’d thought she was as vulnerable as a child.”

  “I know. But still, so small, in such a harsh world . . .”

  “Which she thinks she can make better.”

  “She is making it better. She knows that; they all do, all the young people who go off so bravely to wherever there is injustice. They all come from privileged families; have I told you that? They are wealthy, well educated, accustomed to luxury and the indulgences of a world that admires and rewards wealth more than poverty. But they find their way to me because they need something more, something they can point to and say, ‘I did this and in my own small way I made the world a better place.’ ”