Mistral's Daughter (11 page)

As she searched the kitchen
for four intact glasses Maggy felt a wave of heat rise from her throat to her
forehead.
 
Damn him for not telling
her.
 
That woman looked as if she had
just stepped off a yacht
—
so that was the American he'd ditched the
night of the ball.
 
He'd never said she
was young and good-looking.
 
And that marvelous
dress!
 
Oh, what a dress!
 
Why were they slumming?
 
Avigdor couldn't be her boyfriend
—
he
looked too simple to even know her
—
yet his name was familiar
somehow.
 
She found an almost full bottle
of red wine, settled on four glasses, unmatched, two chipped and two unchipped
glasses
—
to hell with being a scullery maid
—
and brought them
into the studio.

As Mistral poured the wine,
Kate kept up a flow of chatter, her voice with its level American drawl
charmingly at odds with the formal correctness of her French.
 
Adrien Avigdor looked around the studio,
Maggy noticed, with the inattentive eye of a man who was thinking about his
vegetables and wondering if it would rain before evening.
 
He seemed to scarcely listen to Kate yet, as
soon as she left a pause in her observations, he spoke directly to Mistral.

"I've seen the two
paintings Kate bought from you.
 
They
pleased me very much."

"That's what she wrote
me," Mistral replied in brusque dismissal, as if the compliment were
false.

And damn him again, Maggy
thought.
 
If this farmer is even possibly
a customer Julien could at least be courteous.
 
What does he expect us to use for money when I go to market?
 
The shopkeepers won't let me put food on
account the way he does his paints.
 
It's
my francs we spend.

"Would you mind if I
looked around?" Avigdor asked, his open
and guileless light blue
eyes beaming with frank good nature in his round face.
 
He had an air of trusting pleasantness, a
kind of decency and kindness that Maggy responded to in spite of her annoyance
at this surprise visit.

"Look, Avigdor,
dealers
like you don't just 'look around,'" Mistral said, suddenly vicious.
"You don't go visiting artists to kill time on a Saturday afternoon, not
unless it's to put something in your pocket, don't think I'm a fool.
 
Why, it's dealers like you who..,"

"Monsieur Mistral,
you're making a mistake," Avigdor interrupted mildly.
 
"Don't lump all dealers together, that's
really not at all fair of you, you know.
 
What about Zborowski
—
why, he finally got Modigliani's price up
to four hundred and fifty francs far a portrait, eh?
 
And who else would have been able to get that
American, Barnes, interested in Soutine?
 
And consider a few of the
decent middlemen of art. What about
Basler, and Couquiot a Francis Carco, the poet
—
you can't tell me that
they're all dishonest, now can you?"

"All right, there are
some, one or two maybe, exceptions
—
but as far as I'm concerned,
dealers, as a group, are common thieves, whoremasters and first-class
shits!"

Kate's calm, tinkling laugh
greeted his words. "Well said, Julien.
 
But as I wrote you, Adrien is another of the exceptions.
 
I wouldn't have presumed to bring him otherwise.
So may he have his look around?
 
And for
that matter, may I?
 
I haven't seen your
work it months."

"Go ahead, go ahead,
since you're here," Mistral grumbled, ungraciously.
 
"But don't expect me to stay around and
watch you.
 
I have a horror of people
saying the kinds of things they think they have to say when they look at
pictures.
 
I'll be out in the garden
until you've finished.
 
Come along,
Maggy.
 
And bring the bottle."`

Alone in the studio, Avigdor
started to walk around the room looking intently at the pictures on the wall.

"No, Adrien," Kate
said impatiently, "let's see the new work...
 
you can look at the rest later."
 
She started to pull at a large canvas that
was standing on the floor, tilted toward the wall, its front hidden.
 
"Help me with this."

Quickly, expertly, Avigdor
turned all the paintings Mistral had propped carelessly against the wall, so
that they faced into the room.
 
He didn't
stop to look at them as he placed them side by side.
 
He worked with the rapidity of a cat burglar,
fearing that Mistral would change his mind and come back into the studio at any
minute.
 
Finally all the canvases were
in place and he and Kate stood surrounded by them, each silently looking,
Avigdor panting from exertion, Kate trembling from excitement, and an emotion
she couldn't identify, an emotion that made her feel angry, furiously angry.

As his eyes went from one of
Mistral's paintings of Maggy to another, Adrien Avigdor thought that it was
like pressing himself naked on living flesh, like feasting, gorging, literally
eating youth.
 
He wanted to roll on the
canvases, he realized with amazement, he who trusted only his calm judgment, he
ached to throw himself down and roll all over them and kick up his heels with
spurting excitement.
 
The pictures of the
girl
—
ah, he could mount her!
 
They excited him far more than Maggy did in living flesh.

Finally, he tore himself away
from the seven large canvases and turned toward the still lifes. Looking at
them, he felt as if he were outdoors, lying in long, sweet grass, pagan,
blissful, innocent of everything but the flood of his senses.
 
As eager as a young dog after a bone, he
rushed from one canvas to another, unable to contemplate each one for more
than a few seconds because another beckoned out of the corner of his eye.

As Kate watched him, crystals
of triumph hardened within her.
 
Certain
as she had been of Mistral's genius, she had waited tensely for Avigdor's
reaction.
 
He was, in the opinion of many
people, the shrewdest of the avant-garde art dealers of the day.
 
In only one year his new gallery on the rue
de Seine had been the scene of a series of successful exhibitions of work by a
group of new artists who had not been widely exhibited before and he had created
a fast-moving market for his discoveries.

She turned her back on the
nudes.
 
There was something about them,
she thought, that utterly disgusted her, something sickening.
 
But the other work!
 
She was astounded by it. Mistral's earlier
work that still hung on the walls, and her own two paintings as well, all faded
in comparison with the new energy, the explosion of vitality that charged his
still lifes.
 
Here a single huge zinnia,
with its double circle of stiff pink petals, hovered against the sky, drawing
into itself the essence of every flower that ever grew.
 
Next to the zinnia, a big canvas showed a
corner of the studio, in which every object radiated a life force so powerful
that the canvas grew in mystery the longer she looked at it until, finally, it
blotted out its surroundings and she felt dizzy, mystified, overwhelmed.
 
Everywhere in the studio she felt as if there
were holes that had been punched into wonderment.

"So?" Kate said at
last to Avigdor in English, which he spoke well.
 
To her it would always be the language of
business and business was what she had brought him here for.

"I am indebted to you,
my dear," he said vaguely, as if in a dream turning back to the pictures
of Maggy on the green cushions.
 

"Adrien, pay
attention." Kate walked up to him and snapped her fingers under his
nose.
 
"I know the way you feel but
I didn't bring you here just to gape."

"My God, Kate, my knees
are weak, my eyeballs are popping.
 
I
feel as if I've been struck by lightning
—
give me a chance to recover,
I can almost smell thunder," Avigdor said with his countryman's open
smile.

"So," Kate pounced,
"you agree with me?"

"Without
reservation."

"Then what about the
one-man show?
 
You said you were totally
committed for the next year, that you had absolutely no way to fit in another
artist
—
what do you say now?"

"I have suddenly
discovered a new month in 1926
—
we will baptize it October."

"The opening show of the
season?" Kate's thin eyebrows flew upward.

"But naturally," he
said with the simplicity of a prosperous peasant discussing the price of beets.

"Naturally," Kate
echoed, breathless with the magnitude of her victory.
 
She had been buying from Avigdor since he
opened and her respect for his astuteness had grown as she watched him moving
from strength to strength in the risky waters of the art market.
 
Now, as she saw him make a decision with the
same swiftness and commitment with which she operated, she understood the man
better than she ever had.

How right had been the
calculation she had made to bring him here without even giving Julien a chance
to say he didn't want to see him.
 
Avigdor, like many dealers, bought outright the paintings he planned to
exhibit.
 
The difference between the
price that he paid for them, and the price that he sold them for, represented
not only the risk he took but his potential for profit.

He would, she knew, pay
Mistral the least he could get away with, in all due fairness, but that suited
her perfectly.
 
Mistral's financial
independence was the last thing she wanted.
 
A painter who can control his dealer needs no patroness, Kate thought,
and when the time came, as it soon would, for his prices to go up, she intended
to be the agent of that particular piece of good news.

They stood in a sudden
silence, conspiratorial yet with an edge of caution, each waiting for the other
to speak.
 
Finally Avigdor said,
"I'd better go and talk to him."

"Oh, no, Adrien."

"But, my dear Kate, one
thing must be understood.
 
This Mistral
of yours may be allergic to talk of money, as you told me, but unless I have
signed him to an exclusive contract we have nothing to discuss."

"Adrian, trust me.
 
Today isn't the right time to mention the
contract to him.
 
Today isn't the right
time to tell him
anything
except that three months from now you're going
to give him a one-man show.
 
I haven't been
wrong so far, have I?"

"Kate, I can't tell this
man that I'm going to go ahead and do everything I can to establish him unless
I have an absolute assurance that he's not going to leave me and go off to
another gallery someday," Avigdor said, with a firmness of a breeder
discussing the stud fee of a prize bull.

"You have my
assurance."

"Do you expect me to go
all-out on nothing but your promise?
 
What makes you so sure that you speak for him?"

"You just take my word
for it," Kate insisted, quietly.

Adrien considered her for a
moment.
 
He was not certain that he liked
Kate Browning but he admired her.
 
She
had a sureness of taste that was remarkable for someone not in the business,
and she had distinction.
 
Could Mistral,
that haughty, impatient, rude giant be under her influence?
 
There had been nothing in the way he greeted
her to indicate it, and yet...
 
and
yet...
 
it was impossible to doubt Kate,
as she spoke with such fine, clear determination.
 
It was a risk worth taking.
 
In fact he did not see how he could avoid
it.
 
The same instinct that had led
Avigdor to decide to open his season with the paintings of a man whose recent
work he had never seen until little more than an hour ago, told him that he
could not get to Mistral except through Kate.
 
He made a gesture of acceptance and turned toward the door to the
garden.

"Shall I tell him, Kate,
or will
you?"

"Adrien!
 
You
, of course.
 
It's your decision, your gallery."
 
Kate's precise mouth curved in delicate
mirth.

Oh, yes, Avigdor thought, she
was
clever.
 
A tiny shiver touched
his spine.
 
No wonder she had never
appealed to him physically.
 
He didn't
like women who were as clever as he.
 
Or
more clever.