Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  8

  From the moment Thomas spotted her on the platform, he knew that even one more day away would have been more time apart than their young marriage might bear. She was dressed for the summer heat; this was the way he liked her best, white shirt, a skirt that blew in the wind. Take away the slightly mannish jacket, the straw boater worn at a cocky angle, and she’d look just as she had back at the Retreat, the Diana of the orchards. But this was no farm girl or farm wife awaiting her rough-hewn husband back from the day’s market; the woman greeting him was a parisienne through and through. She had heard the private song of Paris and had made it her own. She was waving without self-consciousness. Welcome home! her wave said. I have a cab waiting! Other people greeting passengers were more reserved; a few of them seemed to be focusing on Beal more than anyone they were meeting. Nothing about her betrayed any doubt, any change in her heart; to Thomas, she was acting as if her life were simple, but that was a problem. Her life wasn’t simple: their marriage was balanced upon miracle and illusion. That’s what he had always understood. He was astonished by the miracle, haunted by the illusion, but aware, always aware, that anything could tip the balance.

  He waved back, but his hand felt unconnected to his arm, a thing going through its own motions. It had been only six weeks, but the person returning was not the person who had left; it was as if he had been unfaithful to her, or as if he expected a different person to be meeting him. He did not overestimate the change; he did not think he had suddenly become a Frenchman of the Midi, even if he had adopted some of the swagger. That morning, without giving it a second’s thought, he had tied his cravat in the Midi manner, loose around his collar, as if it could double as a handkerchief or a rag if needed. But Thomas did believe, had always believed, that just as a man and a woman fall mysteriously, uniquely in love with each other, so can a person find a place where he could be uniquely and completely himself. And he knew he had found that place.

  “Thomas,” she called as he approached. They had not yet taken to using any endearing terms for each other. He stifled the hollow feeling and reached out his arms; they embraced. Her body against his felt right; the soft sensation of her breasts put his body to rest. He lingered there, telling himself that all was well, really, this is Beal and all should be well.

  “Look at you,” she said, drawing away. Thomas wasn’t sure what she meant; she was the one with the new clothes; she was the one with a radiant smile. “You’re so dark,” she said, putting her hand on his cheek as if to compare hues and then letting it drop down to his neck and chest.

  “The sun is very bright in”—he wasn’t sure what to call it—“in the South.”

  “Almost Africa,” she said.

  “Well, almost Spain, maybe.”

  “Yes. That’s what I meant.”

  “I feel I have been gone a long time,” he said. “You look beautiful. More beautiful than I remembered. Different.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she answered. “Do you like my hat?” It was a boater, with a narrower brim than a man’s hat, and it was black.

  “It’s perfect for you.” He glanced around: the other women in their billowy sleeves and fussy ruffs and flowered hats all looked like overdressed dolls next to her.

  She took his arm, and they walked up the platform, with the porter following. When they came out into the sunlight, Thomas had to blink, and for the fraction of a second that his eyes were shut, the landscape of his new home, the garrigue, seemed imprinted on his eyelids. When he opened them, the cityscape surprised him, as if it had been misplaced.

  The porter located their cab, and when they were inside and settled, he said, “I don’t know where to begin.” She had her hand in his, waiting. What was different about her, he suddenly realized, was that she looked older. He had never noticed the change, but he saw now that in the past six months, the teenage childishness of her face was gone. “It’s like we have to start all over.”

  “Oh now, shush with all that,” she said, but he was not going to shush.

  “It’s like those years when I was in Philadelphia,” he said, “and all I had of you were the words on my own letters. As if I had invented you.”

  “You’re making me nervous, Thomas. You’ve been gone for so long and I have missed you every day and now I have you back and you’re talking about Philadelphia.” The word Philadelphia had long meant trouble for them. “I’m sorry I didn’t write back more,” she said. She was apologizing for both times, then and now.

  “It was okay. I was hard to reach,” he said. But he wasn’t that hard to reach. He hadn’t expected long replies, but he had wondered whether, after her winter of scribbling in her notepads, she’d want to express herself to him in writing more. Apparently not.

  “You’ll tell me all about what you have found,” she said.

  “Oh, yes. But what about you? Has Arthur been helping you?”

  “I haven’t seen that much of Arthur. He was in one of those moods of his for a good while.”

  Thomas wasn’t sure why, but he wished she hadn’t said that. “And Mother Lucy?”

  “Of course. She has kept her eye on me,” she answered, but then she put her finger to his mouth. “All was fine when you were gone. Céleste was ill for a few weeks, and I took over her place at the front desk for some of it. It was fun. Everyone was very nice to me. The girls now call me Tante Beal. Mme Vigny is a little nicer when you aren’t around. I don’t think she likes happy couples.”

  “I’d sort of forgotten about Mme Vigny. Not my favorite thought.”

  “Well, you won’t have to worry about her this afternoon,” she said with a wink. “I’ve given her the afternoon off.”

  Thomas heard that with a thump; when he moved to the idea of making love, all the tensions and uncertainties of these minutes fueled a surge of desire that drowned him. He paid the cabbie and waited impatiently as the concierge made three trips up to the flat with his luggage. The rooms were bright in the afternoon sun. They went immediately to the bedroom and undressed, and in the midday heat, for the first time, they lay on the bed without any covering, so freely naked. In his ardor he was slightly surprised when she held him off from entering the first time, then was intoxicated to discover that she wanted to embrace more, kiss more, touch more, and that she even pulled away the second time in order to prolong each sensation. Her desire seemed to redouble, to match his own, and when at last neither of them could delay a second more, his relief felt as if weeks of doubt were flowing out of his body. For several minutes they lay side by side, a little out of breath.

  “I met a couple that own the vineyard next door,” he said finally. “I think you’ll like them. They have three, I mean almost three, children.”

  “She’s expecting?” she asked.

  He reached down and patted her naked, taut abdomen. “I have been wondering when that will happen for us.”

  She removed his hand. “Not yet. That I know of.”

  “Tell me about you. Tell me everything you have been doing since I have been gone.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m boring. I’m not the one who has been traveling. Let’s get up. I want to take my farmer husband for a walk in the city.” She got to her feet and walked over to the washstand and leaned forward to inspect something on her face in the mirror. She had one foot cocked behind the other heel, and the way she had her arm out for support he couldn’t see her breasts, just this simple pose, the line from her shoulders down to her buttocks and then to the back of her calves. It was like one of those paintings she liked, something new and scandalous because it was so intimate and unforced, but he couldn’t remember the title, Le bain maybe. “Stop looking at me,” she said, pleased to be looked at.

  “Has Arthur finished your portrait?” he asked.

  “No. It just sits in his room under a wrap. He’s very downhearted over it.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  She reached for her drawers and pulled them on. “I was worried about him. No one
had seen him for days. It’s not as if I hadn’t been there many times.” He still hadn’t moved from the bed, was still uncovered. The brown of his lower arms made his pasty white chest look comical. “You’re not disapproving of that, I hope. It was your idea to have him watch out for me, but in the end, I was watching out for him. It’s sort of the same thing, isn’t it?”

  “Of course,” he said. Nothing in his recent life seemed more extraneous than the visits to the Latin Quarter, the Académie Julien, the American artists and their dreams. “All those painters. I understand them even less, now that I have been away.”

  “Arthur is different.”

  “Yes. But our saying that might not cheer him up.”

  She nodded. “And Stanley’s different, really. It seems that he’s the one of them who knows what he is trying to do. I guess I feel we’re sort of moving on from them. But they were good to us, taking us in the way they did.”

  “Of course,” he said. “That’s what I was thinking.” As she was pulling on her underclothes and beginning to appear the stylish and proper lady who met him at the station, the thought of what that proper lady had just been doing aroused him again. She was buttoning her shirt. She glanced over, and she stopped, dropped the clothes in a pool around her feet, and came back to the bed.

  This time it was Thomas who got up first. “Now I am hungry,” he said. “Perhaps we can get an early dinner.”

  The light had begun to take on a little color, but the day was still hot; they walked along the shady side of the avenue Bosquet. Blazes of yellow sun were beginning to dress the buildings in patches. All seemed restful, even to Thomas; carriages still rumbled by, and there was enough odor of sewage and manure to offend the nostrils of the country dweller, but the scene was gay and bright. She took his arm, and in this familiar neighborhood there was no one new left to gawk at them; instead, two ladies greeted Beal and an elderly gentleman tipped his hat. “That’s M. Tallent,” she said. “He and his wife live in the building with the white marble stoop. He reminds me of Colonel Murphy.”

  They settled in at the café by the river, and Thomas negotiated a meal for them, even though the kitchen was closed for the afternoon. With his French so recently acquired, he knew his accent had probably been bent by almost six weeks in the Midi, and he liked the confusion on the waiter’s face. “The paysans speak a different language in the South,” he said once they were alone. “That’s what Languedoc means—the ‘language of Oc.’ It’s not hard to learn, I think.”

  “I guess I’ll have to learn everything all over again,” she said. For the first time, there was a tartness in her tone.

  “No, you won’t. The old language is dying out.”

  “Hmmm,” she said.

  He patted her hand. “Do you want me to tell you about St. Adelelmus?”

  “Of course,” she said. The smile was brave; Thomas almost welcomed the wariness of it, as if it meant that after the forced gaiety of their greeting and the mindless passions of their lovemaking, they were getting to the heart of it.

  He did his best: the bastide, the brook, the terrace and the fig trees, the winding road to the village. The Mediterranean, just a few miles, really, from St. Adelelmus. He described Narbonne, with its broad promenade along the canal and restaurants that were the equal of Paris, and Sète, where yachtsmen and fishermen tied up alongside each other and young couples took boat rides in the basin. He told her what M. Fauberge had said, that they might face resistance because they were outsiders, but for no other reason. He told her what Léonie Milhaud had said, that she would do everything to make Beal comfortable.

  “You sound very excited,” she said. “I’m glad. You deserve this, Thomas.”

  “But what do you think? How does it sound to you?”

  “It doesn’t matter what it sounds like to me. You are my husband.”

  “But it does matter, to me. You’re happy here.”

  “No one ever said we were going to stay here. Was that ever a plan? Us in Paris, France?”

  “You’re not really answering my question.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you are asking. I’ll follow you to this place, this farm. You can’t ask for anything more than that.”

  “No. Of course not,” he said. He tried to take a bite of his trout.

  “When do we leave?”

  “In a few weeks. As long as it takes to put everything to rights here. There’s no reason to rush, but I’d want us to be settled in time for the harvest.”

  “Yes. Of course. Les vendanges.”

  Thomas was surprised to hear her use this French word; he wondered where she got it. One might have said récolte, but when it came to wine, the generic would not do. The word settled upon them, the one word more than any other that described the life they came from and the life they seemed to be heading toward. The harvest, the récolte, the vendanges: in any language it spoke of the brutal regularity of farming, the ancient clock. But there was also a strange, festive joy in this final accounting of a year’s worth of toil and worry. On the Retreat, when the pickers, whole families at a time, began to arrive, all schedules and routines fell by the wayside. Even when the year had been bad, when frost had wiped out most of the peaches, when the yellows had killed half the trees, the harvest was the way to put the bad luck behind them and hope for better next year.

  * * *

  The next day, Thomas went over to the Quarter to find Arthur. The cardplayers were there as always, but the faces in the Café Badequin were mostly new, this year’s crop of aspiring artists affecting last year’s routines. They seemed younger, more frivolous, more like mere tourists, though Thomas knew this was unfair. None of them had seen Arthur in the past few days. Most of them seemed to know who Thomas was, who Beal was; a couple of them mentioned Stanley’s pastels, and what surprised him was the evident regard—awe might not be too strong a word—they held for little Stanley Dean from Pittsburgh. Thomas had seen very little of him since Beal began to sit for Arthur, but apparently he had sold something, or something had been accepted into an exhibition. If Arthur had been, as Beal said, in more of his darker moods lately, this might well be the cause.

  Thomas had never been to Arthur’s room. He hadn’t wanted to see the place where Beal was sitting for him, in that intimacy of light and paint, though Céleste had always been there with her. Céleste liked Arthur, which was for Thomas the first indication that one day they might be friends. In years to come, Thomas would see that Arthur loved young people, that a manner that seemed surly and unpleasant to adults came across as gruff to children, which they loved in return. Still, as Thomas climbed the stairs, he did not like the thought that Beal had been there, in this slum. When Arthur let him in, without much welcome, Thomas saw the room for what it was: a painter’s studio, quite in order, spare, filled with sun. It could have smelled better, but the air in the streets in this district wasn’t much better.

  The first thing he noticed was the easel, with a cloth over it.

  “So. You’re back,” said Arthur. “I was wondering.”

  “It took longer than I thought.”

  “But you did it?”

  “Yes. I am now a vigneron, as they say.”

  Arthur looked at him through this new lens, skeptically at first. “You look good,” he said finally. “You look like your real self.”

  “Not that you had ever seen my real self, but that’s what painters are supposed to do. To see below the surface? Right?”

  “Right,” Arthur said. He was standing at his food cabinet, eating a piece of bread and ham. “I’d offer you some—” he said, waving it.

  “Uh. That’s fine.”

  “I figured.” He crunched through the rest of his meal. “Beal did fine,” he said. “Nothing to report.”

  “She said she hadn’t seen much of you. She said you’d not been all that well, and I guess you don’t look that well to me either.”

  “You’re seeing my real self.”

  “I am not. I do
n’t accept that.”

  Arthur shrugged. “Summer in Paris is not a great place to be, I’ll tell you. All the real painters are long gone.”

  “I have just agreed with Beal that we will be leaving quite soon. It’s going to be hard for her.”

  “Well,” said Arthur. “You’ve asked a lot of her, if I can say so.”

  This was similar to an odd phrase she’d used yesterday; it was as if she and Arthur had agreed that this term described everything about her plight. “Is that what she said to you?”

  “No. I mean, maybe. Maybe in so many words. But she’s not complaining, is she? Not to me—about you, about your life. That’s just the way it seems to me. She’s barely twenty years old—that’s the part of this, of her, that amazes me. Look how far she has come. But she still has a lot to figure out, is all I mean.”

  Thomas had been standing, but as they were talking, he’d been backing toward the single chair, and now that he was in front of it, he sat. He looked up and saw the stretcher of the canvas on the easel. “Let me see the portrait,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It isn’t finished.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Arthur had not moved away from his kitchen cabinet. To look Thomas in the face, he had to lean around the easel, and it occurred to Thomas that this was exactly where Beal had sat—if indeed, she had been seated—and this was the vision she had of Arthur, his peering—leering—around the edge of the frame. Thomas could not imagine this as a pleasant experience; he could feel the brushstrokes, like insects palpitating on his face. Arthur shrugged, wiped his hands on a dish towel, and got on his hands and knees to rotate the easel by the base. When it was facing Thomas, he stood up and, without any ceremony, certainly without any flourish, withdrew the cloth.

  She was standing, and her body was turned three-quarters away; Thomas could see that Arthur had not missed her beautiful broad shoulders or the suggestion of her strength. What the ladies of Paris did with their corsets and bustles, Beal did in her skin. Arthur had let her body, in all its features, glow through the folds of cloth; there was more of the shape and cleft of her buttocks than would be allowed out in the world. Thomas did not love the image of Arthur making such a meticulous likeness of Beal’s rear end. Her head was turned back almost directly at the viewer, and the fingertips and thumb of her right hand could be seen cupping her shoulder. Her left arm hung down at her side, like a frame around her body. Arthur had lavished attention on the places where her dark forearm peeked through the slits at her cuff. Maybe her posture seemed a little contorted and awkward, and maybe that was a flaw or maybe it was the point—that she was heading away from the viewer but had turned herself around somewhat uncomfortably to confront whoever or whatever was scrutinizing her. Her eyes glowed; Arthur had made them uncomfortably bright.