Mistral's Daughter (17 page)

"The good life,"
Perry echoed, "yes, my beloved, I promise."

8

He isn't working," Kate
said as she sat with Avigdor in a café.
 
"He hasn't even been able to pick up a
brush since the
vernissage."
  
The dealer stiffened.
 
An artist who doesn't paint regularly, as if
he were going to an office, may prove as bad an investment as a vein of gold
that dwindles into rock.

"It's that damned
girl.
 
She never came back, did
she?"

"It wasn't that at
all," Kate snapped.
 
"Naturally
he was furious after she kicked up such a stupid fuss
—
that revolting
little scene she made was disgraceful
—
but he's hardly the type to pine
away over a woman.
 
He doesn't need her
as a model anymore and I gather
they'd only been together a few months
—
not enough to make a man like him stop work.
 
She's essentially unimportant."

"As you say."
Avigdor, in agreeing, reserved his thoughts.
 
Could an unimportant girl have been the inspiration for such impassioned
work?
 
But something forbidding about the
smooth-ness of Kate's high forehead, an icy note in her voice, told him not to
speculate further, at least not out loud.

"I have a theory that
it's some sort of letdown
—
postpartum blues.
 
The
vernissage
was such a high
point that afterward there had to be a reaction.
 
I've been feeling a bit...
 
flat...
 
myself so I can imagine how it must have affected him."

"Has he even tried to
paint?" Avigdor asked.

"Yes.
 
That's the thing that worries me most.
 
It's been two weeks now and he stands in
front of his easel and just looks at it, hour after hour, day after day, while
the paint dries on his palette. Every time I drop in I see him there with
nothing on the canvas.
 
Then, at night,
he gets reeling drunk on red wine
—
he never did that before.
 
And he won't talk about it.
 
Adrien, he looks...
frightened
—
that's
the only word I can think of to describe his eyes.
 
It's almost as if he's in some sort of
private panic...
 
I just don't understand
it."

"He's got to get away
for a while, see something besides his studio
walls.
 
He isn't the first artist to be unable to
lift a brush after big success."

"I've been suggesting
that he should take a trip somewhere."

"And?"

"He says he's not in the
mood.
 
He says he's not the kind of man
who takes vacations.
 
He says he hasn't
done a decent minute's work in months and he has to keep at it until it begins
to come again."
 

"Shall I talk to
him?"

"I wish you would,
Adrien.
 
He thinks you did a good job on
the exhibition."

"Thanks," Adrien
said dryly. He'd
made
the man into the sensation of the
season.
 
But if dealers expected normal
gratitude from artists they'd go to bed every night severely disappointed. Any
dealer who was in business for gratitude should abandon his gallery and become
a breeder of dogs, nice big slobbery ones.

Two days later, early one
morning in mid-October, Mistral left for Provence.
 
The night before while they were having a
farewell drink, as if it were an afterthought, Kate had offered to drive him
down.

"I only know Paris and a
little of Normandy.
 
I'd like to see Aix
and Avignon myself but I don't like traveling alone...
 
and you wouldn't have to take the
train..."

Mistral was affronted.
 
"You take too much for granted,
Kate.
 
Do you think I want you driving me
all over the place?"

"You drive...
 
I don't care," Kate said, exasperated.

"I don't know how
—
how typically American to think that I would, as if I had a car."

"I'll teach you in half
an hour as soon as we get into the country.
 
There's nothing to it."

As soon as they had passed
Fontainebleau, Kate turned off the main road and, after the briefest of
demonstrations and instructions, turned the Talbot two-seater sports car over
to Mistral.
 
She knew that he possessed
instantaneous reflexes, that his reactions were as fast as if he were in
danger, and that his concentration on anything visual was prodigious.
 
She was curious to see what he would make of
this challenge.
 
Without giving him a
word of guidance she watched his big, exceptionally elongated hands with their
finely articulated fingers deal deftly with the wheel and the shift.

He mastered the machine in
ten minutes and they turned back to the main road and sped toward Saulieu,
going southwest along an almost deserted route at ninety kilometers an hour.

Kate sat silently, relaxed
and warm in her beautifully cut
brown-and-rust tweeds, wearing soft
leather gloves and a felt
cloche.
  
They drove through the countryside of the
flat
département
of the Yonne, between endless rows of plane
trees bordering fields from which the last wheat had almost all been
gathered.
 
It was the kind of fall day
that contains no touch of melancholy, the kind of day on which some tantalizing
promise lies almost visible in the depth of the sky and the snap of the air,
particularly when the traveler's destination is south.

In Avallon they had a quick
lunch and continued on their wordless, swift flight until the destination she
had planned for that night lay behind them. Mistral seemed to have fallen into
a trance of motion in which thought or memory played no part.

From time to time Kate looked
at his profile and noted that his mouth, normally held in a commanding,
peremptory line, had relaxed.
 
She
couldn't see his expression because his eyes were deeply hooded, but nothing
about the set of his imperious head invited conversation.

"How far are we
going?" Kate finally asked as the afternoon drew on and she began to feel
the chill of evening in the open car in spite of her heavy suit and sweater.

"Until we get to Lyon,
where the Saline joins the Rhône.
 
Long
ago it was a sacred place. For me it's the true beginning of Provence; although
any Provençal would say it's too far north. No stopping until Lyon."

"That's almost two
hundred kilometers," Kate protested.

"Yes, but it's all
downhill," Mistral assured her.
 
"South is always downhill."

In Lyon they found a small
hotel, ate excellently for little money and went to their rooms windburned and
exhausted.
 
The next day they followed the
majestic Rhône, that quickly moving and unpredictable river that has been
venerated for millennia, driving through villages whose names followed each
other like a great wine list, a prodigious pathway of vineyards, one more
precious than the next, from Lyon to Valence to Orange and finally to Avignon.
There they crossed the river to Villeneuve-les-Avignon, where they stopped at
last almost at midnight, at a
pension
Mistral hid visited once before,
during a vacation trip while he was still at the Beaux-Arts.

Madame Blé had bought her
pension
from a gentleman farmer.
 
The
original building had been a cardinal's palace and then a priory from
1333 until the Revolution, when it had returned to secular use.
 
Yet it still basked in an atmosphere of utter
peace.
 
It was built in a
U-shape
around a courtyard where the mossy marble columns of the former cloister stood
sentinel in the dark garden.
 
This ancient
priory had nothing of the monastic about it, nothing ecclesiastical.
 
Its warm tranquillity was that of a refuge
from the world, but not from the fruits or the joys of the earth.
 
The center of the courtyard was punctuated by
a flight of steps that descended into a wine cellar as old as Cardinal Arnaud
de Via's palace, and this was the
true heart of the building.

"I've got to find some
sort of guidebook to this area," Kate said the next morning after a late
breakfast.

"Why?"

"We've been traveling so
fast I feel utterly disoriented.
 
I don't
know what's to the east or to the west of this place but I do know it's
terribly historic and I don't like feeling ignorant."

"Historic?" Mistral
lifted his heavy eyebrows in feigned surprise.

"Oh, for heaven's sakes,
Julien
—
full of ruins, churches, museums, all sorts of things we
should see.
 
Stop looking so amazed.
 
What's wrong with my wanting to know?
 
We've driven damn near the whole way from
Paris to the Mediterranean in two days and I want to know why you picked this
one particular place to stop in, out of all the rest of France."

"And will a book tell
you that?"

"Well...
 
why not?
 
We can't just wander around without knowing."

"We can't?"

"Obviously it's
possible, but that way we're sure to miss things," she said tartly.
      

"You could have ten
guidebooks and ten years in which to
follow them and you'd still miss something
marvelous right under your very American nose.
 
Why don't you relax and look around.
 
"That's what I came to do
—
just look around."

Kate abandoned the
discussion.
 
Although her fundamental
sense of order was put out of joint by the idea of drifting about without some
authority to refer to, she didn't want to argue with
him about anything.

All the rest of the day and
the following one they wandered around Villeneuve-les-Avignon on foot,
exploring the city that had grown up during the fourteenth century when the
pope moved from Rome to Avignon.
 
Church
dignitaries had settled in Villeneuve and created a bustling city with a great
monastery and magnificent fort, a city that had now retreated into a few sleepy
fragrant squares and several narrow, arcaded streets where the last
stones
of episcopal palaces could still be distinguished.

On the third day, they headed
east past Avignon itself and took the road that led to the market town of Apt
and bisected the Apt basin, a rich fruitful valley that lay cupped between two
mountain ranges some six miles apart.
 
Far away to the north lay the Monts de Vaucluse and, to the south,
almost bordering the road, was the Montagne du Lubéron.
 
It was this side of the Lubéron,
Le Versan
Nord
, that had captivated Mistral on his previous visit.
 
He had never forgotten those fantastically
eroded limestone cliffs, on which sparse vegetation clung as fiercely as did
the huddled villages that
perched a thousand feet above the main route,
apparently unreachable until Mistral found the thread of narrow dirt road that
led to each one of them:
 
Maubec,
Oppède-le-Vieux, Félice, Ménerbes, Lacoste and Bonnieux.

In prehistory man had lived
where these fortified hill villages
 
now
stood, each one of them nearly invisible from the road along which enemies had
so often come marching in the past.
 
For
hundreds of years they had endured bloody battles against tyranny from the
north, these tiny, sleepy villages with streets as steep as stepladders, whose houses
tumbled close together, soft gray and softer ocher, mantled with vines,
splashed with the fluttering, mythological silver of olive groves and the deep
coral of the flowers of the vine called "Fairy's Fingers."
 
From these villages, at night, rose a mist,
peopled, it was said, by the ghosts of the former inhabitants, Protestant
dissenters who were mercilessly slaughtered by their countrymen in the Wars of
Religion.
 
These now peaceful villages
were the homes of shopkeepers and craftsmen whose trade came from the many
small, prosperous farms of the Apt basin.

Mistral was widely
excited.
 
He had no sooner climbed up to
the white marble ruins of the chateau fortress in Oppède-le-Vieux, where he
would see, from that steep vantage point, some particularly enticing farm that
lay down below and he'd hurry down the precipitous path he and Kate had just
climbed, dragging her protestingly behind him, to throw himself back into the
car and drive back to the rolling, richly cultivated valley searching for the
farmhouse he had spied from above.