Since that time, the doors and windows had been kept shut. For months Vincent had lived in gloom and he had wanted it that way. The house echoed his distress, and should anyone happen to pass, Vincent was pleased that his home was so shrouded in ivy it appeared forbidding; no one would think to stop by. This past winter, the ivy froze, then broke into cold green shards so that the garden seemed littered with glass. The sunflowers that had always been kept in jars to dry fell to pieces, with petals falling onto tabletops and dusting the corners of every room. Vincent often didn’t rise from bed until the dark was settling. He lost weight. He drank. He sat in a metal chair on the stone patio at odd hours and smoked cigarettes, which he never would have done if William had been there. William, who had loved him completely, would have taken the cigarette from his hand and scolded him. How lucky they had been; how ruined he’d become.
They had deliberately kept to themselves, as people in love often do, but in the months since William’s death, the other inhabitants who had homes on the narrow, curving road at the edge of the village began to worry about their solitary neighbor. Vincent walked at night, along the cliffs, a haunted man. There was debris piling up outside his house and the mossy smell of rotting plants. The rambler roses had no buds and only black leaves, the lawn had gone to seed, the paper lanterns William strung along the deck, always so charming, had been shredded by the wind. An expat American down the lane was chosen to look in on Vincent, and was startled by the ghost of a man who faced him when he came calling. If the neighbor wasn’t mistaken, the handsome old man who peered out at him was someone who used to be famous.
“Do I know you?” the neighbor asked.
Vincent had disappeared from his music career, faking his death, in exchange for the freedom to love someone. He had been in hiding from the curse for so long, he’d never expected anyone to notice him or remember that once, long ago, he’d written a song whose words nearly everyone knew. It occurred to him that he’d become a grumpy old Frenchman.
“You don’t know me,” he said with a scowl, and then, as soon as the door had slammed closed, he packed up the house. He took the train to Paris the following morning, wearing his black coat and cap, a single suitcase in hand, going directly to his old friend Agnes Durant’s elegant house on Boulevard de la Madeleine. His song, “I Walk at Night,” recorded years ago, happened to be playing on the radio when he climbed into a taxi and Vincent was stunned by how moved he was by the sound of his own youth and innocence and by the depth of the love he had to give. His one regret in life was that he had not seen his family for all these years, his daughter Regina, now gone in a tragic accident, his granddaughters Sally and Gillian, and most especially his dear sisters, of whom he often dreamed. The time he and Franny and Jet had spent at 44 Greenwich Avenue in Manhattan was the landscape he walked through during his restless nights of tossing and turning in bed, and he remembered every street, Barrow and Bedford and Jones and Christopher. He remembered the first night he had spent with William, and how Franny was there for him when he was beaten in the street on the night of the Stonewall Uprising, ready to wrap her arms around him, and how Jet had stood in the garden beneath a lilac tree on the day that the boy she’d loved had died so young.
* * *
By this time, Vincent’s dear friend Agnes Durant was well over one hundred. Women in her family had lives that often spanned a century. Her great-great-grandmother, Catherine, who had left Paris for New York, was said to have lived to be a hundred and twenty, although people swore she didn’t look a day over eighty. As for Agnes, she had been a great friend to Vincent and William, the one to hatch the plan for Vincent to escape the curse by dying, officially at least, and becoming someone brand-new. Now, when he arrived, she greeted him at the door, gracious as she’d ever been. “Stay for as long as you’d like,” she declared.
On his very first night in Paris, Vincent left the house as soon as darkness fell, walking at night as always, finding his way past pink-tinged streetlights, through deserted parks where goats ate grass in the dark hollows. He was drawn to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, built by Napoleon in 1804, and went there to visit William’s grave, which was beside his own falsified monument, for although his own grave was empty, it was marked by a headstone upon which his name and the date when he had disappeared had been engraved. He made his way there easily, for he had always been a finder, able to locate what was missing or lost.