Mistral's Daughter (9 page)

"No, no, I'm teasing
you.
 
But did you have dinner?"
 
"Oh."

"What is it?"

"I just remembered where
I had dinner." "And?"

"It was with a
woman...
 
a rich American art collector
of sorts who invited me to that Surrealist madhouse."

"In that case she has
serious reason for complaint."
 
Maggy raised her wineglass, gravely leaning forward and gesturing to Mistral
to raise his glass to hers.
 
"To the
lady, let's drink to the lady who began the evening with Monsieur Mistral.
 
Who knows with whom she will end it?
 
I wish her good fortune."

"Good fortune,"
said Mistral, touching her glass with his.
 
And all he drank all memory of Kate Browning disappeared.
 
Nothing existed outside of this still, dim
corner of a fragrant little garden, this space that seemed to have been dreamed
into an existence far from the real world, a space in which the music of
Maggy's voice, impudent, low and as free as running water, insulated him from
his former life; a space in which his familiar plot of garden seemed to be
newly created, as fresh-minted, secret and hidden as if it were the floor of a
rain forest.

He felt his will, his
reliable, intractable will, slipping away from him like a heavy garment he had
worn for too long.
 
He felt ten years
younger, he found himself aware of the warm touch of the April air and the lush
whisper of the tall grass and the sweet scent of the lilacs and the harsh taste
of the wine.
 
Maggy was a lovely
shock.
 
He hadn't been prepared for
her.
 
He hadn't expected her.
 
What was she doing here?
 
He drank again and the question dissolved,
not in wine, because he hadn't had much wine, but in the night of her.

Without any light but that of
the single candle, she decorated the night.
 
Her skin reflected the moon when she moved.
 
The flame of the candle kindled an answering
spark in the green of her eyes, a spark so alive that it made the April moon,
tucked among the trees, look insignificant and far away.
 
The sound of her voice seemed to be arousing
him to feelings of confused mutiny...
 
against what he could not have said.

Almost reluctantly, as if
obeying an order, he yielded to an unfamiliar yet irresistible command.
 
He flung himself on the grass and took
Maggy's bare feet in his hands, rubbing gently.

"Poor feet
—
they're cold," he murmured.

She didn't answer.
 
The touch of his hands, big, flexible, powerful,
the heat and the slight roughness of his skin, made her shudder with an emotion
she didn't understand.
 
She flung back
her head and it seemed to her that the haze of stars was humming.

Now his lips were on the
soles of her feet, tentative, questioning, barely brushing the skin. She
caught her breath, afraid to move, spellbound by the sensations that shot from
her feet to the very roots of her hair, piercingly urgent sensations that were
like a foreign language, heard for the first time and, mysteriously, under stood.
 
She bit her lips as
his tongue touched
the arch of her foot, outlining, exploring, bolder each second.
 
She moaned out loud as she felt his teeth
graze her heel, and she tried feebly to pull her feet out of his grasp, but he
only
tightened his hold.
 
She felt
her knees falling apart under the Japanese silk as his tongue ran up the calf
of one leg then up the other, finding that soft, private curve behind her
knees.

"Stop it," she
gasped. "Please."

Mistral stood up, a huge
figure in the dark, and gathered her in his arms.
 
He looked at her with a frown of
concentration.

"Stop?
 
Are you sure?"
 
He kissed her lips fleetingly and drew back
so that he could see her face.
 
"Ah,
not so sure, not completely
 
sure,"
he sighed and kissed her mouth, its succulence both carnal and innocent, slowly
kissed those lips that stood out from her pale face like an opulent flower.

Maggy's confusion and sudden
alarm disappeared under his kisses.
 
She
laughed, not just with pleasure, but with a new note in her voice, the outlaw
that had always lived within her rising to the surface.
 
Her lips became an outlaw's lips, her hands
an outlaw's hands as she caressed his powerful neck, and reached up for his
curly head to pull it down to her again.
 
She wriggled out of his arms, finding her feet, and boldly pressed all
her long length against his body.
 
They
stood together for a long, long moment, growing together like two tall trees,
swaying slightly as their lips parted, then almost immobile as they strained
together, seeking a knowledge beyond knowledge.
 
With a grunt of need, Mistral parted the heavy silk kimono, mad to touch
the body he knew only through his eyes, mad to feel her skin, to hold her
breasts in his hands, to learn the tight buds of her nipples with his
fingertips.
 
She spoke in a trance.
 
"Not here
—
inside."
 
Stumbling, unbuttoning his shirt as he
walked, he followed her to his bedroom, to that wide bed under the window
through which moonlight fell on the sheets.
 
In seconds he stood naked, erect, magnificent.

"Let me look," she commanded
in such a tone of urgent curiosity that he stood still while she approached,
all her coltishness gone as she delicately ran her fingers over his shoulders
and his chest and down to his waist, lingering over the unfamiliar shapes and
textures, the sinewy muscles of his arms, the astonishingly hard points of
nipples that hid in the springy hair in his chest.
 
Only when she had satisfied herself, when his
body was no longer completely strange to her, did she untie the sash of the
kimono and let it fall
to the floor.
 
She lay down on the bed, waiting for him.

At last, Maggy thought, at
last.
 
She didn't submit to his hands,
rite
encouraged them. Arching and stretching like a cat she played with
him, holding her breasts in her hands and offering them to his mouth, letting
him raven on them until, with a swift, lithe movement she withdrew and flung
herself at his chest, her lips seeking his nipples.
 
Imitating him, she sucked on them until he
almost screamed and held her off, unable to endure the excitement. "Ah, so
two can't play at that game?" she murmured and soon she had her answer, as
with unsteady hands, he parted her legs and bent over her, kneeling on the bed,
his hot open mouth questing between her thighs, his tongue flickering.
 
A vast silence seemed to envelop them.
 
Maggy found herself immobile, rigid, almost
without breath, as she waited, all playfulness gone.

Still kneeling, sitting on
his heels, holding her waist in both hands, Mistral launched himself into her
body.
 
She was so moist that he was able
to advance several inches before he reached the harrier.
 
He persisted, not understanding, and got no
farther.

"What ... ?" he
murmured, heat consuming him as he looked down at the darkness of the triangle
where they were joined.
 
He tried again,
without success.
 
Now, the spell of
inaction broken, Maggy gathered herself up with all her courage and pressed
forward, willing herself to open to him.
 
Every muscle in her long, strong legs was tensed, her toes were pointed,
her hands clutched the mattress and her back arched as she raised her pelvis
upward, his jutting, hot spur of flesh the only focus in the universe.
 
There was a flash of pain but she ignored it,
launching herself anew, met halfway by his mighty thrust.
 
Suddenly he was inside of her, suddenly the
spear, point and shaft and hilt, now a heavy fullness of mortal flesh, was
encompassed by her body and they lay still, panting like two gladiators evenly
matched who pause to salute each other before renewing the struggle.

"I didn't know," he
whispered, his astonishment so great that it had only commonplace words.

"I didn't tell you.
Would it have made a difference?"

"No, no." Now they
lay on their sides, looking into each other's eyes.
 
One of Mistral's arms supported her shoulders
and, with his tree hand, he gently probed the damp tangle of her pubic hair,
finding the tender flesh he sought, and caressed it stealthily, steadily,
without stopping, even when she begged, until she cried out in bewildered joy.
 
Only then did he take his own serious
pleasure, but still carefully, with an unaccustomed caution, that added to the
swelling, rising fever that shocked him with its power when at last he burst
into her as potent as a great bull.

5

The
first time Julien Mistral painted Maggy, the first time he went after the
shadow between her breasts, the first time he dipped his brush, unthinkingly,
into vermilion and painted that shadow, he heard a cosmic "Ah ha!"
rock his brain.
 
Stunned, almost knocked
off his feet, he saw, he saw as he had never seen before, he saw with his
entrails as he ravished the canvas, his brush flying almost out of control, his
fingers numb with discovery, the temperature of his body rising so that he had
to tear off his shirt, his impatience to follow his vision so great that
finally he dropped his brushes and squeezed paint onto the canvas directly from
the tubes.

He was painting at last as he
had always known he could paint, without inhibition, without calculation, with
freedom so vast that it was as if the walls and the ceiling of the studio had
been knocked away and he was standing under the blue, open sky.

Fascinated, Maggy watched
him, as she lay motionless on a heap of green pillows, not daring to move
until, long after an hour had passed, he finally stopped his attack on the
canvas and dropped at her side, radiant, bathed in sweat.

In a gesture he had never
dreamed of before he wiped his paint-smeared hands on her pubic hair, branding
her with smears of green and Titian red as if she were another kind of
canvas.
 
He tore open his pants, without
taking them off, and plunged into her violently, grinding her down on the
pillows with his big, hot, wet body until he found a huge release that he met
with a sound that was a roar a triumph.

Weeks passed while Mistral
painted Maggy.
 
He knew that something
about the way light interacted with her flesh had been
the inspiration
for his breakthrough.
 
It was not only a
technical matter, a phenomenon that could be explained by the translucent
whiteness of her skin or the way her hair broke into shafts of fire or the fact
that his imagination was prepared, why he did not know and did not ask, to
seize on her particular physical qualities and use them to make the leap
forward.
 
It was also his spiritual
conviction that light poured out from the inside of her body, emanating
from
it,
so that when he painted her the very canvas became a source of
light. Maggy knew that something surpassingly important had happened to him but
when she asked him about it the few words he found were not enough.
 
Since the experience was not an intellectual
one, it escaped words, and Mistral felt a superstitious awe that prevented him
from wanting to talk about it.

After that first night in
April it was the one perfect spring of Maggy's life.
 
It was the spring by which all other springs
would be judged and found wanting, and while Maggy lived it she also
watched
herself living it.
 
She knew, in the part
of her brain that felt no emotion, that only recorded and filed memory, that
this was her age of gold.
 
She knew, with
the knowledge born in all women, that
nothing as glorious ever lasted
forever, and yet, as day followed day, she never looked ahead, never considered
the future, never asked herself what would happen tomorrow. Each day was
enough, round and full and as complete as an apple of the sun.

For Mistral, too, it was a
time of surpassing joy, but before he was a man he was a painter, and his
happiness sprang more from the work he was doing than from Maggy herself.

It never occurred to Julien
Mistral, following the night of the Surrealist ball, that Maggy had a life that
could prevent her from posing solely for him seven days a week.
 
He took all her time as his right, expecting
her to hold her pose for abnormally long periods since he was tireless and
never stopped until she was in such muscle pain that she had to beg for a
rest.
 
He assumed, with a selfishness so
total that it was regal, that she was entirely content to leave her own life
behind, to abandon her room and share his studio, to forsake her circle of
friends, to go without normal diversions, to give up any vestige of personal
freedom. When he dropped his brushes it was only
natural that she be
there waiting to relieve the nervous tension of creation by opening her body to
his hungry, violent lovemaking.

Maggy questioned none of his
careless convictions. She offered herself
to him on every level with
simple generosity, as if she were a held filled with tall, blowing flowers,
that grew only to be gathered at his pleasure.

Hour after hour, she gladly
endured the concentration of his gaze,
knowing that he wasn't thinking
of her or even seeing her as Muggy. Her love asked nothing for itself but the
satisfac-tion of watching him work. He was a man consumed, a man filled with so
high a passion for creation that she thought of it as holy. The two months
during which Mistral painted the seven pictures of Maggy, the series that later
came to be called simply
La Rouquinne
, "The Redhead," were
months that soon would become isolated from all that Maggy or Mistral knew of
ordinary life.
 
They would become as
legendary, to each of them, as if they had once been joined together in some
heroic adventure never before attempted by man.
 
The series became a milestone in the history of art, but neither of
them was ever to discuss it.

By the end of May of 1926,
Mistral felt sure enough of his new powers to attack other subjects.
 
When he had finished the seventh portrait of
Maggy he abandoned his concentration on the nude as suddenly as he had
begun.
 
Now he turned to still life.
 
His neglected garden, heavy with June
flowers; each corner of his junk-filled studio, bright with tatters as a flea
market; a vase of purple and white asters; a melon split in half-all these objects
presented themselves to his freshly inspired vision as if he had never seen
them before.
 
They lived, as surely as
Maggy lived.
 
Light fell on them and they
breathed it in.
 
The world was new.

Mistral never painted except
from life, and, as his mind danced he changed forever the way people would
focus their eyes.
 
With the rhythm of a
bandit, with the bravura of a pirate, he let loose that sense of play he had
not been in touch with since childhood. He plundered the secret clearings of
his spirit, opening them to sun and air and wind, using his brushes as if they
were a trumpet on which he could blow his way to the gates of heaven.

Maggy's disappearance with
Mistral from the life of the
quartier
had provoked a storm of gossip
and, when Mistral released her from posing for him, her reappearance was a
cause for more questions.

"Of course," Paula
said, "you did it all in the name of love?"

"Paula!" Maggy
said, shocked. "You don't expect me to ask him for money!"

"No, unfortunately, I
don't suppose I can. God, what fools women are."

"But you just don't
understand," Maggy said mildly. She was ;' too happy to get angry.

"On the contrary. I
understand perfectly and I disapprove to., tally. It's
la folie
furieuse
—
only
to be expected
—
but don't think I'm going to
congratulate you.
 
I thought you'd
learned to be a professional."

"As for that
—
you old cynic
—
Julien has given me my favorite picture
—
the
largest and the best of them all and the one I love more than any other
—
the first one he ever painted of me, on the green cushions."

"Wonderful!
 
Months of work and you own a painting by an
artist for whose work there is no demand!
 
Oh, Maggy, I never thought you'd end up a painter's maid of all work.
 
That's for other girls, not for you,"
Paula scolded, too upset to hide her feelings. "And now that he's finished
painting you for the moment, now, that you have time to go back to work where
you get paid, I suppose you give him the money you make posing for
others?"

"That's just not
fair," Maggy protested. "Julien is working like a demon and he hasn't
a sou
—
naturally I'm pitching in and paying for things
—
it's
only natural, but just until he begins to sell, Paula."

"Tell me this, what does
Julien Mistral do for you besides paint you and permit you to share his
bed?"

"Oh!" Maggy could
hardly believe that Paula could have misunderstood so utterly the nature of
the ties that bound her to Mistral.

"'Oh,' says the
goose," Paula echoed her severely. "And who cooks the meals and who
cleans the studio and who takes the dirty laundry to be washed
—
or
perhaps, heaven forbid, washes it herself
—
and who makes sure there's
enough wine and goes out for the morning croissant and brews the coffee and
makes that much-used bed?
 
Does Monsieur
Mistral do all this in return for the money you bring home?"

"Paula, how ridiculous
you can be.
 
Of course he doesn't have
time to do those things.
 
Why, I hardly
have time myself
—
I just buy something at the
charcuterie
and we
have a picnic
–
"

"Not another word!"
Paula said.
 
It was worse than she
suspected.
 
The women she had known, and
there were many of them, who lived with painters, had, with almost no
exceptions, finished badly.
 
Painters,
even bad painters, had the egos of giant babies.
 
Monstrous infants, each was the center of his
own universe and ether people existed in orbit around him only to gratify his
needs.

Sometimes, when Paula was in
a charitable mood, she conceded that the struggle to be recognized as a painter
in a world in which, in her private opinion, the greatest work had already been
done, was so great that
only
a man with an enormous ego could possibly
take himself seriously enough to persist. Perhaps
without
those egos
they would have to give up and become bank clerks.
 
Perhaps their ego was all that stood between
them and utter panic.
 
But she didn't
give a damn what kept them painting when, to her wisely unexpressed way of
thinking, one trip to the Louvre would compel them all to cut their wrists in
despair.
 
She didn't have a sou's worth
of sympathy to spare for them when a woman's fate was concerned.
 
Sometimes, for one had to be fair, sometimes
a painter married his model and sometimes a painter and his wife even stayed
married, like good old Monet, who painted gardens and lily pads because his
wife
threatened to leave him if he brought a model into the house, but that was
long ago.

Paula had no illusions about
Mistral.
 
She didn't trust such careless,
indisputable beauty in a man.
 
It was
disquieting and indecent.
 
Beauty, she
told herself, should be reserved for women who had need of it in dealing with
the world.
 
Why, even she, Paula Deslandes,
who didn't like Mistral, had found herself staring at him in the street when he
passed like a highwayman, wondering what it would be like to lie warm and
sticky after love, in the fierce protection of that huge, well-muscled body;
even she had caught herself thinking that if she were still young she would
tame him, that arrogant swaggerer who had, to her sure knowledge, fallen into
short seasons of passion with a dozen girls around Montparnasse.
 
No, this man was not a potential husband for
anyone.
 
And as a lover
—
oh, why
couldn't Maggy have found a less selfish man?

La
vie bohème,
thought
Paula with a sinking heart, has never been more than a poet's pea-green fantasy
and here was her Maggy, her own dear Maggy, still innocent, thinking that she
was living it.

"Never mind," Paula
said, pulling herself out of her reverie.
 
"I lost fifty francs at liar's dice last night and I'm suspicious
of human nature, particularly my own. Pay no attention."

"I
hadn't," Maggy answered truthfully.

Had
Paula known more about Julien Mistral she might have understood him better but
she would have been no less concerned about Maggy's love for him.

The
painter had been born and raised in Versailles, an only child.
 
If both of his parents had been at home while
he was growing up, he might have been drawn into a normal family atmosphere but
his childhood had been oddly barren, empty of laughter.

His
father, an engineer, a builder of bridges in the service of the French
government, was away much, if not quite all, of every year, working in the
Colonies, and his mother seemed quite content with this arrangement.
 
She would probably have accepted any way of
life
that left her alone to pursue the needlework that was her only real
interest.
 
She embroidered magnificent
ecclesiastical garments with a passion that had nothing to do with religion
although she might well have been happier as a nun.
 
Without a piece of embroidery in her hands
she quickly grew restless, plaintive and eventually angry.