A Tangled Web (45 page)

He saw the fear in her eyes and backed off from what he had planned to say. She was already confused about this name that had popped up. And who the hell was Garth? Max Stuyvesant and Sabrina Longworth had moved in the same social circles in London and nowhere in those circles was there anyone named Garth. Well, probably someone from her childhood. He wondered if it was a good sign or a bad one that she would retrieve a memory from that far back. Did that mean less chance or more that she would remember everything? But it had been eight months; surely if amnesia lasted this long, it was unlikely—

“Max, tell me what is happening!”

“Nothing that you have to worry about.” He filled their wineglasses and made his voice casual, almost indifferent. He'd have to prepare her: lay some groundwork. He could wait a couple of weeks before telling her they were leaving Cavaillon, and he would use that time to make sure everything was organized for him to operate from another place. “I told you, I can manage it. We don't have to talk about it today; it can wait.”

“What can wait?”

“Talking about what we're going to do. It's not urgent; I want you to forget I said anything.”

“I don't forget anymore. And if you're in trouble I should know about it.”

“I'm not in trouble.”

“You said something might be wrong.”

“Well, it might be. But nothing has happened that you need to know about or worry about.” He took her hand between his. “I'm touched by your concern. It means a great deal to me.”

I've fallen in love with someone else. I'm leaving you.

She looked away, trying to find a way to begin.

You think, because I'm worried about you, I must love you. But I don't. I'm concerned because you've been good to me and I don't want you to be in danger, but I don't
love you. I love someone else and I want to be with him, so I'm leaving you.

She could not say it. If Max was in trouble or in danger she would not walk out on him. And there had been something in his voice today that she had not heard before, something in his face she had not seen, just a flicker, but it was so startling to see even that tiny flare of anxiety in Max's eyes and to hear it in his voice that she could not say she was leaving, or even let him know that she was thinking about it.

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 of 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?”