Mistral's Daughter (39 page)

She shrugged.
 
There must still be artists' models, poor
souls, but those of her girls who posed for lingerie photographs made double
the money of those who worked only in fashion although they paid dearly for it
in a loss of status.
 
Her top girls even
refused to pose in nightgowns and peignoirs.
 
At least no budding Julien Mistral of a photographer could ever order
Teddy to drop
her
knickers.
 
In
that there was some comfort.

Maggy pondered the question
of the photographer to whom Teddy should be sent for her test shots.
 
Normally she no longer concerned herself with
this sort of decision.
 
She had twenty-two
employees and among them there were six who could have settled the matter with
one phone call.
 
Maggy knew, of course,
that she was being overprotective, but these pictures were crucial. If they
were disappointing, Teddy's future as a model would vanish.
 
If they were good they would be used for
Teddy's first "composite", a glossy 8 X 10 collage of photographs
that would be her calling card, passport and temporary identity papers until
she had painstakingly, over months, built up a portfolio of a variety of
pictures, her "book" that she would carry everywhere so that it could
be shown to magazine editors, advertising agencies and photographers.
 
Suddenly Maggy, who was in the habit of
hardening her heart toward the ambitions, hopes and dreams of a thousand girls
a year, Maggy, who never took the model's point of view until she had the
pictures to look at that would speak louder than any human voice, found herself
as eager to get the pictures right as if she were trying to break into the
business herself.
 
She imagined herself
flipping through Teddy's test shots, imagined herself weighing and considering
Teddy's merits as against those of
—
oh, say, that great model, Sunny
Harnett, whose chin and nose were far too prominent for beauty, whose mouth was
entirely too wide, but who had a smile that swept you right into the page with
her, a smile of such pure piety that it was transferable to the reader; Sunny
Harnett, who projected a blond blast of Southampton chic, who looked as if she
were out-of-doors and dashing after a tennis ball even when she was sitting
down.
 
Did Teddy have any of that
energy?
 
Maggy, for all her expertise,
found that all she could really do to help Teddy in a practical way was to work
on her rudimentary makeup which was fine for college but not remotely right for
photography.

Coffin, Toni Frisell, Horst,
Rawlings, Bill Helburn, Milton Greene, Jimmy Abbé, Roger Prigent
—
she
could ask a favor like this of any of these top photographers, but even as
Maggy ran their names over in her head she knew that she was not going to be
able to resist asking one of the three photographers she considered the most
gifted in the world:
 
Avedon, Falk and
Penn. But it was collection time in Paris and this particular season Avedon,
whose star had risen so rapidly in the past few years, was there for
Bazaar
,
and Penn was in Paris for
Vogue
. So Falk it would be because Maggy
couldn't endure this suspense, even if Teddy could.

It was like being in a
tumbrel on the way to the guillotine, Teddy thought, or standing on the edge of
the high diving board looking down into the ring of fire in the water
below.
 
She stood, frozen with
self-consciousness outside a converted coachhouse that housed Falk's studio
between Lexington and Third Avenue.
 
It
was after five on a Friday evening and the street was crowded with people
rushing away from their jobs, the weekend beckoning.

It was football weather,
Teddy realized, as she shivered in the breeze, and she should be hundreds of
miles away, dressing for a date
—
oh, Dunster, Leverett, Winthrop and
Eliot!
 
She mumbled an incantation of the
names of the fabled Harvard residence houses on the Charles River
—
that's where she should be!
 
Instead she
was primped and polished, brushed and painted and dressed in new clothes, up
from her shoes and out from her skin, as perfect as her mother had been able to
make her.
 
She had never looked better
and she knew it, but the knowledge didn't help.

Her eyelashes were covered in
unfamiliar mascara, her, skin in powder, base and rouge, artfully applied, and
her hair had just been done at Elizabeth Arden.
 
Maggy had turned Teddy out in the flawless, adult elegance of Dior's
"New Look," choosing a tightly fitted, double-breasted, gray flannel
suit with black velvet lapels.
 
The
jacket was nipped in savagely at the waist, the hips exaggerated rounded by a
buckrum lining above a slim skirt that stopped a few inches above her
ankles.
 
Teddy wore high-heeled black
antelope pumps, a small black velvet hat with a veil that reached below her
nose, and pale gray kid gloves.
 
Under
her expensive new blouse, in spite of the antiperspirant that she had
frantically applied three times since the morning, she was beginning to sweat
from nerves.
 
She jabbed at the
doorbell.
 
Maybe action would keep her
dry.

Falk had agreed to take the
test shots of the new girl from Lunel so long as she came after he was finished
shooting for the week.
 
If Dora Mazlin,
Maggy's chief booker, hadn't called to beg this personal favor from Falk's
secretary he would never have been bothered to make the time, but his secretary
owed Dora that favor for help in past emergencies.
 
Every photographer, even those in Falk’s
position, sometimes needed a top model in five minutes and Dora was the
pipeline.

The door was opened, to
Teddy's ring, by a small cheerful woman.

"You're the new girl
from Lunel, right?
 
Come on in."

Teddy looked around the
reception room.
 
There was a general air
of casual comfort but nothing about the room was exceptional, except the
photographs on the walls.
 
"May I look?"
she asked the secretary, because she was too nervous to sit still.

"Sure, go ahead."

Teddy walked from one photo
to another, growing more tense with each second.
 
She had always paid a fraction more attention
to fashion photographs than other girls her age, but these pictures were like
certain dreams that reveal a world that is similar to the real world, but
mystically heightened, more significant, filled with a magic power.
 
She recognized many of the faces; most of the
models were from Lunel, but surely none of the girls she was familiar with had
ever been quite so interesting.
 
The
camera's eye had caught a millisecond of a revelation of personality.
 
Behind the patterns of beautiful features
Teddy could sense the intimate
self
of each model.
 
These were not merely fashion photographs,
they were fully realized portraits of women thinking their most personal
thoughts.
 

"Listen," the
secretary said suddenly. "If I hang around any longer I'm going to be late
for my date. The phone isn't going to ring again today so I'm leaving. Will you
tell him I'll see him Monday morning bright and early?" She grabbed her
coat, and rushed out the door with a brisk wave, slamming it behind her.

Teddy sat down on the edge of
a chair in the empty reception room.
 
Beyond an open door she could see a slice of studio, brilliantly lit.
For twenty, quite nearly unendurable minutes, nothing at all happened.
 
The coachhouse was quiet with that special
late-Friday-afternoon hush that says so clearly that work is over for the week.
 
Could there be a mistake?
 
Could she be alone here? Teddy wondered at
last.

Finally, hesitating at every
step, Teddy got up stiffly and ventured slowly into the studio, stopping a few
feet on the other side of the door.
 
She
tried to peel off the tight gloves that seemed to be stuck to her hands.
 
There was no place to sit, nothing in the
room but an intense, waiting blaze of lights, a camera on a tripod and a sheet
of virgin white paper that stretched right across one wall and was spread out
on the floor.
 
Sweat, yes, definitely
more sweat, she thought in horror, trickled down her sides under her new waist
cincher.
 
She realized that she wasn't
breathing and drew in two deep breaths.

"Is anybody at
home?" she quavered in a small voice.
 
There was no answer.
 
Suddenly the
door to the darkroom was flung open and a man popped out, holding a sheet of
paper in his hand and looking at it.
 
He
gave her a glance. "I'll be right with you," he said, frowning at
the paper. Then he looked up again and dropped the wet photograph.
 
He peered at her from the other side of the
sea of white paper.

"Red?"

Teddy jumped and squinted but
she couldn't see him clearly.

"
Red!
"

The expression on Teddy's
face changed and grew as complicated as the moment before a spring storm.
 
She stepped firmly on the unspotted paper and
took a big stride forward, shielding her eyes.

"Only one person has
ever called me Red and that's a son of a bitch rat-fink who took me to seven
movies, taught me how to French kiss and then dropped me without a word of
explanation."

"Red...
 
I can explain."

"
Ah ha!
"
 
Galvanized, her nervous anxiety forgotten,
Teddy took five swift steps forward and grabbed his shirt.
 
"I cried my eyes out for you, you louse!
 
I thought I was a total failure for months, I
pretended to my mother that I was fed up with you, I told your cousin that
you'd tried to get fresh... why didn't you ever call, Melvin Allenberg?"

"Were you really
sorry?" he asked.

"Oh, what a shit you
turned out to be!
 
Now you want to
revel
in
how awful I felt.
 
That
stinks!
 
Anyway, what are you doing here?

"Working late."

"So, you talked your way
into a photographer's studio after all... the black sheep of the
Allenbergs...
 
I'll bet your mother's
still upset?"

"She's made an
adjustment."

"Where's Falk?
 
I've been here a half-hour," Teddy said
imperiously.

"I'm Falk."

"Bullshit."

"Do you see anybody else
here?"

"Prove it."

Melvin Allenberg began to
laugh.
 
"Oh, God, Red, you do
change."
 
Teddy hadn't loosened her
grip on his shirt and now she tried to shake him, but try as she would he was
impossible to budge.
 
Solid as a small
bear, he roared with laughter at her effort, making her so angry that tears
came into her eyes.
 
He reached, and
forced her arms down at her sides and pinned them there.

"Come on
upstairs...
 
I live over the store.
 
I'll show you all the
evidence that
you want."

He released Teddy and quickly
walked out of the studio into the
reception room.
 
She followed, beginning to believe him
because of the way he moved.
 
There was,
in the casual sureness of his tread, that unmistakable modulation that reveals
proprietorship, and when she climbed the stairs behind him and saw the large
room that seemed to have been made out of the entire second floor of the
coachhouse, she knew instantly that he was in his own home.
 
The room fit Melvin Allenberg.
 
It was messy and warm and crowded everywhere
with enormous blow-ups of photographs of beautiful women, some of them on the
walls, some on the floor, others piled in corners.
 
Dozens of books lay open, a desk was piled
three feet high with magazines and the big low couches and armchairs were all
covered in dark green tufted leather.

"Drink?" he asked,
going over to a tray covered with bottles and glasses that stood on top of an
old seachest.

"Scotch on the rocks,
but it won't improve your case, Melvin Allenberg."

"Melvin Falk
Allenberg."

Teddy narrowed her eyes
without comment, in a way that let him know that he was on strict
probation.
 
He poured two drinks and sat
down on a chair by the couch, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees and his
hands folded under his chin.
 
He looked
at Teddy quietly for a while. "Take off your hat," he said finally.

"What?" She was
outraged.

"Take off your
hat...
 
I don't like that veil, I can't
really see you."