Mistral's Daughter (4 page)

Instinctively Mistral reacted
against her beauty.
 
He was accustomed
to the easily proffered nakedness of the professional model who wore her skin
as casually as an old dress.
 
Nakedness
to him had value only because painting the nude body was an intensely serious
business.
 
Maggy, who stood as resolute
as Joan of Arc at the 10 stake, seemed instantly, furiously erotic. As he
realized that she had aroused him, he became angry in self-defense.

"What the hell do you
think this is
—
the Folies Bergère?
 
Since when does a model pose in her knickers and shoes?
 
Eh?"
 
He glared at Maggy.
 
She kicked
off her shoes and began to undo the buttons that held her knickers together at
the waist.
 
A tear of humiliation and
rage slipped out of each eye.

"Now what?
 
A striptease?
 
Is this a whorehouse?
 
Is that
what you think I hired you for?" Mistral shouted.
 
"Enough, don’t bother!"

"It's all right,"
Maggy muttered, her head bowed.
 
A button
resisted her fingers and she struggled with it.

"Out!" ordered
Mistral. "I said enough.
 
I can't
paint a model who is embarrassed.
 
You're
absurd, ridiculous!
 
You should never
have come.
 
You've wasted my time, damn
it. Out!"
 
He gestured to her as
angrily as he might have chased away a cat who had walked over a freshly
painted canvas, sending her rushing back into th bedroom with the kimono
bundled around her like a blanket.

"Fool, fool, fool!"
Maggy lashed at herself as she scurried, fully dressed, out of Mistral's
studio.
 
She had not dared to look at him
again before she left, but if she had she would have seen him staring at the
chair by the window, the image of her naked body imprinted on his unwilling
mind.

3

    
S
haking and furious with herself, Maggy fled in the direction of the
Luxembourg Gardens and almost fell onto the first empty chair she could find,
indifferent to the scampering world of children at play.
 
In the space of the last half-hour the dream
that had ruled her for four years had turned into such a stinging misery of
failure that she wrapped her arms protectively around herself and bowed her
head in shame.

A young mother sat down next
to Maggy and busied herself with tending her baby.
 
Her feelings of importance and pride communicated
themselves to Maggy even through her own emotions.
 
She raised her head and gazed about her at a
dappled world in which the old sunned themselves as the young ran about intent
on their games.
 
Her heart began to lift
when a small boy tottered over to her and laid a big rubber ball in her
lap.
 
She unlocked her arms and rolled it
along the path for him.
 
He brought it
back, as hopefully as a dog with a stick, and soon she found herself the center
of a group of children who were attracted by the novelty of a grownup who
would condescend to play with them, so unlike their own mothers whose words
were a litany of French childhood: "Don't touch; shake hands nicely; don't
get dirty; don't run too fast; take that out of your mouth."

Maggy played for an hour,
escaping into a world of simple games that carried the flavor of her early
schooldays when she had been a hoyden, a tomboy with a fan of wild hair that
flew in the wind like
the wings of a big bird, the
only
girl in school who could throw a stone better than any of the boys,
catch any ball, climb any wall.

Soon after the last child had
been dragged home for the midday meal, Maggy, too, left the park.
 
Hunger drove her back to the Carrefour Vavin
but every restaurant she passed was full.
 
It was just after noon and on the terraces of Le Dome and La Rotonde
there wasn't an empty chair to be found.
 
Waiters whisked about adding extra chairs and tables so that the terraces
sprawled out almost to the edge of the pavement, but there was no place for the
uninitiated to sit, since no one was fool enough to leave a front-row seat at
the most exciting theater in the world.

Maggy stopped at a street
vendor and bought one red carnation and pinned it to her blouse. Her spirits
rose abruptly and she turned, head high, into the Select, hoping that the
smaller café might have room for her inside.
 
She zigzagged sharply left at the door to avoid the crowd of men
standing in front of the long bar and discovered a tiny empty table in the far
corner of the room, next to the big, lace-curtained window, sheltered and inconspicuous.

Thriftily, she ordered only a
cheese sandwich and a lemonade, staring at the crowd of rowdy, roaring,
bizarrely dressed, carefree people packed in together behind the little wooden
bar tables as if they intended to spend the day.
 
The sound of raucous, high-pitched
conversa-tion, swelling like a river in spring, mounted around her.
 
As the room grew smokier she caught snatches
of French spoken in a dozen different accents, for this was the era in which
foreign artists dominated Montparnasse; the days of Picasso, Chagall, Soutine,
Zadkine, and Kisling; the years of de Chirico and Brancusi and Mondrian, of
Diego Rivera and Foujita.
 
French
artists, like Léger and Matisse, were in the minority as Americans, Germans,
Scandinavians and Russians flocked to the
quartier.

Happy in her anonymity,
feeling invisible because she knew no one, Maggy didn't notice the interested
glances that were directed at her.
 
Here
at last was the exotic spectacle she had expected to find.
 
This was the life Constantine Moreau, her
high school art teacher, had talked about.
 
A failed artist, he had filled his pupils' minds with high-flown tales
of the cultural life of Montparnasse, stuffing their heads with half-accurate
stories of parties to which he had never been invited and feuds in which he had
never been involved.
 
What he lacked in
teaching ability he had made up for in the passion
he felt for the life
of the artist, in the aching exile he conveyed as he made real the violently
pigmented, tempestuous drama of a Paris to which he had so vainly yearned to
belong.
 
It was Moreau who had given Maggy's
imagination the home it had been seeking, Moreau who made a bohemian life in
Montparnasse her ever-present fantasy, he who had assured her that Renoir
himself would have wanted to paint her even if she were taller than most of the
other women in the world.
 
She gazed,
almost open-mouthed in wonder, at the display of deliberate eccentricity inside
the Select.
 
This is what heaven must be
like, she thought.
 
If only she were part
of it.

"Well, my little one, so
you're the new girl, no?
 
Let me offer
you a drink."

Maggy turned, startled.
 
She hadn't even noticed a woman who sat at
the next table, inspecting her closely from the outrageous orange of her hair
to the remarkable and almost equally outrageous boldness of her features.

"Well, are you or aren't
you?" the woman asked.

"Oh, I'm new, that's for
sure," Maggy said, startled, looking around at the stranger.
 
She must be over forty, Maggy thought, and
yet still so rosily pretty, even though she was more than just plump, like one
of the luscious girls Fragonard painted, who had grown middle-aged and fat.

"I am Paula
Deslandes," the woman announced, with an air of importance. "And
you?"

"Maggy Lunel."

"Maggy Lunel," she
repeated slowly, as if she were tasting the name.
 
Her shortsighted eyes, the warm brown of an
expensive cigar, peered intently at Maggy.
 
"Not bad. It has a certain charm, a certain dash, a brio
—
perhaps it will do.
 
In any case it has
the essential two syllables and since there isn't another Maggy working in the
quartier,
that I know of, and I know everything there is to know, I approve, in
principle, for the moment anyway."

"What luck for me.
 
And if I hadn't met with your approval?"

"Tiens, tiens!
She sits up and
barks."
 
Paula's smile, which had
the power to banish all despondence, broadened.
 
"You're cheeky for a provincial."

"A provincial!"
Maggy exploded.
 
"That's the second
time in one day.
 
Oh, it's too
much!" Although she had never known a Parisian other than Moreau, she
understood that the provincial is a matter of constant superior amusement to
anyone who has the sovereign luck to be born in Paris.

"But it jumps right out,
my poor little pigeon," Paula said without apology.
 
"Never mind. Ninety-nine percent of the
people in the
quartier
are provincial.
 
But I
—
I am the exception." She was intensely proud of
herself, this child of the streets of Montparnasse, a "flower of the
pavement" as she liked to say with a romantic sigh, the daughter of a
framemaker who had been brought up within a few hundred feet of the Carrefour
Vavin.
 
All Paula Deslandes knew or ever
wanted to know of nature was contained within the walls of the Luxembourg
Gardens, all she knew of mankind, and she was steeped in the subject like a
cherry at the bottom of a bottle of old brandy, she had learned during the thousands
of hours she had spent posing in the studios of painters or seated in a cafe.
 
Paula
represented, in her round,
abundant and buxom form, the embodiment of the passion for gossip, endless
gossip, that was embedded so deeply in the artistic life of Montparnasse.

Meeting Maggy put Paula into
the highest category of the only three moods she permitted herself.
 
She rated her emotional temperature every
morning and never admitted to a mood that was not good, better or superb.
 
Superb had long been reserved for an addition
to her list of lovers
—
there were and would always be men who
appreciated a woman who embodied that classic trio of pleasures: fair, fat and
forty.
 
Recently she had found that
uncovering a fresh item of news before anyone else in the
quartier
had
wind of it was able to make her feel a mood that deserved the designation of superb,
and Maggy promised a great feast of novelty.

Every Monday, when her
restaurant, La Pomme d'Or, was closed, Paula treated herself to a tour of her
village of Montparnasse, knitting together the many threads of gossip to which
she had been privy during the busy week.
 
Each night she presided over the dinners of artists and art collectors
from all over the world who had made her restaurant so profitable.
 
Paula Deslandes was a natural, untutored
historian, who could easily put stray bits and pieces of information together
so that they formed a coherent social fabric.

"Well then, Maggy Lunel
—
so it didn't go well this morning with Mistral, eh?"

"Oh!" Maggy cried.
"How could you possibly know anything about that?
 
You've never even seen me before!"

"The word travels fast
in this little corner of Paris," Paula answered smugly.

"But ... who told
you?"

"Vava.
 
He dropped in on Mistral right after that big
bastard threw you out, poor thing, and being Vava, naturally he couldn't wait
to spread the story.
 
He's an old woman,
I always say."

"Oh, no!" Maggy
hammered on her new skirt with both fists, punishing her bold pink knees. She
felt drenched in a blush, once more intolerably shamed, shown up again as a
childish little prude from the country.

"It's not
important," Paula said urgently. "You mustn't take it seriously
—
 
everyone has to start somewhere."

But Maggy had stopped paying
attention.
 
Two women and three men had
just taken complacent possession of a table in the center of the room.
 
One of the women was Kiki de Montparnasse,
who stared openly at her, elbowed her friends and pointed toward Maggy and
Paula.
 
Her male companions fixed Maggy
with their eyes and raised their hats to her with satiric politeness while the
women giggled.

"That one again!
 
Just what I needed," Maggy muttered
angrily. "What has Kiki to do with you?" Paula asked.

"She insulted me this
morning when she passed me in the street."

"Ah. Did she
indeed?" Paula murmured.

"I don't find it
amusing," Maggy said, not liking Paula's thoughtful tone.

"Nor do I, I assure
you.
 
I find it fascinating...
 
that bitch is too condescending to bother to
insult just anyone...
 
so she's noticed
you already...
 
Well, I have to grant her
an eye."

"So you know her,
too?"

"Yes. I know her.
 
Let's get out of here.
 
There is a bad odor suddenly in this
cafe.
 
I'm inviting you to a real
lunch.
 
Come on
—
Last night I
won three hundred francs at poker, took them off Zborowski and God knows that
dealer can afford it.
 
Stop looking at
that slut and her riffraff.
 
Pretend they
don't exist.
 
We're going to Dominique's
for a
chachlik.
Sound good?"

"Chachlik?
 
What is it?
 
Something to eat I hope
—
I'm starving I'm always
starving." Maggy stood up quickly, desperate to leave, unfolding to her
full five feet nine inches.
 
Paula's eyes
squinted as she looked up.

"My God, how much will it
take to fill you up? Never mind, come along, it's crowded there but they'll
find a place for us." Paula herded Maggy out of the Select as briskly as a
terrier, never glancing at the table of Kiki's
friends who watched them
maliciously until
they reached the door.

Around the corner, halfway
down the rue Bréa, the two women turned in at an inconspicu-ous door that
seemed to lead to a charcuterie.
 
But
beyond the display cases, filled with selections of cold
Russian hors
d'oeuvres, was a small, low-ceilinged, red-walled room with marble counters and
high stools.

Once they were perched before
a counter and Paula had ordered for both of them, she returned to her
questioning of Maggy.
 
"Tell me all
about yourself.
 
Mind you.
 
I'll know if you leave something out."