Mistral's Daughter (19 page)

"Julien...
 
"Kate gasped.
 
"Undress me."

"No, Kate."

"Julien ...
please."

"If you want me...
 
undress me," he demanded, flinging
himself back on
the quilt and kicking off his shoes and lying quite
still.
 
Kate looked at the splendid man
who offered himself to her in such a maddening way and in a sudden, resolute
fury of determination,, with trembling fingers, ignoring her
self-consciousness, she threw herself at the buttons of his shirt, almost
ripping them open.
 
He helped her to ease
his arms out of his sleeves and she scarcely paused to run her hands greedily
down over his chest before she attacked his belt buckle.
 
But then she reached the buttons of his fly
and she became conscious of the great hard outline of his penis straining under
the cloth.
 
She was seized by a sudden
inability to continue and her hands fell to her sides.
 
"You...
 
Julien...
 
you
do it,"
she implored.

"Lost your nerve,
Kate?" he taunted her, watching her carefully even though every impulse in
his body was urging him to throw her on the bed and take her just as she was,
her hair wet at the roots' with the sweat of lust, her lips bruised, her fists
clenched.

"No!
 
Damn you!"
 
she responded violently and took a deep
breath before setting herself the task of opening his fly, revealing him
rearing and naked, for he wore nothing under his corduroy trousers.
 
Mistral was breathing as rapidly as she while
Kate forced herself to unbutton each button.
 
When she had reached the last one he ripped off his trousers in one
swift movement and threw her back on the bed.
 
"Good, Kate, good...
 
you
were patient..." he
grunted as, with experienced fingers, he began
to take off her clothes,
finding, as he had expected, that her breasts
and hips were small,
her waist slender and her blond pubic hair
as fine as that of a young
girl's.

Soon they were both entirely
naked and Kate lay on the bed in such a posture of modesty restrained by sheer
willpower that Mistral
had difficulty in not laughing at her.
"Lovely Kate," he murmured as he grasped her slim body and hugged
it, covering as much of her flesh with his own as he could.
 
He held her, quietly warming her with his
nakedness until he felt her begin to relax against him.
 
Had she been another female he would already
have entered her, but
Kate, this unsensual, inexperienced woman
presented him with a
challenge he had no wish to resist. She wanted
him
—
oh, yes, but she wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible,
without losing herself, and that was something he had no intention of
permitting.

Eventually, when her body
felt as warm as his own, he began to trace her backbone with his fingertips
while he continued to hold her locked tightly against him.
 
He caressed her almost boyishly trim buttocks
with a rapid movement and when she immediately grew tense, he muttered,
"Patience, patience, Kate," and withdrew his fingers to the small of
her back.
 
Each time his hand returned to
her buttocks he lingered there for a second longer until finally he felt her
pressing them against his hands, offering themselves.
 
"Patience . . patience," he
repeated, taking an altogether new pleasure in this leisurely arousal, he who
had never bothered to gauge so carefully the state of readiness of any woman,
he who had never explored the delicious, self-inflicted pain of holding himself
back when release was there for the taking.
 
With one arm he held Kate immobile as he finally probed between her
buttocks, finding her astonishingly ready, although, as his fingers parted her,
she jerked away in a halfhearted protest.
 
Now he grew merciless as his long fingers advanced further between her
slim thighs and found the precise spot he was seeking.
 
His middle finger became as agile, as
delicate as the tip of a tongue as he returned again and again to the attack,
now pressing softly and moving slowly, now darting quickly and purposefully,
all his lust centered on that one fingertip and the flesh it was awakening
with such cleverness.

"Julien...
 
my God...
 
stop!" Kate cried out, but he answered only "Patience,"
and soon he felt her gathering herself together in an unmistakable clenching and
hardening of her pelvic muscles.
 
More
rapidly, ever more rapidly his finger flickered until finally, he felt her
shuddering and leaping, out of control, her shriek of release smothered against
his neck.
 
His fingers didn’t leave her
until the last spasm had left her body.
 
She lay back, drained but wide-eyed.
  
"You see what patience will earn, Kate?" Mistral whispered to
her but she didn’t nod or smile but looked at him gravely.

"That’s never happened
to me before," she whispered.

"Then our experiment is
half a success
—
now, it’s my turn, Kate," Julien answered and gave
himself up to his own fierce mastery of her willing, open, pliant body.

Later, Kate, like someone
coming out of a trance, began to cover his hands with fluttering kisses of
gratitude.
 
It was a long while before
she realized that Mistral was sleeping deeply.

9

K ate Browning was in
torment.
 
Every night for the next week,
after Mistral fell away from her and went to sleep she lay awake, her sleekly
fashioned body echoing with a passion she had never known existed, for she had
always been too cautious before.
 
The
thoughts of the pleasures Mistral had taught her so quickly pierced through her
entrails like honeyed arrows that she would never want to pluck from her
body.
 
She put her fingers between her
legs, to that tender kernel of flesh that was so unfamiliar to her touch.
 
It was still alive, still ready to quiver
again. All day long she had felt it distended, burning, aching for his hands
and his lips.
 
At meals she watched those
hands tear bread and cut meat and found, to her mortified surprise, that she
was rubbing her thighs together under the table.
 
She moaned aloud at the sight of his mouth,
so firm now, soon to be so hot and soft on her skin.
 
Her nipples were sore yet she rubbed them
stealthily across Mistral's arm.

The foundation of her life
shifted and she felt heavy with inevitability.
 
Her mind could not rest, probing Mistral's inner inaccessibility.
 
How could she dare to swim, to just float
along, in this mindless rapture when the man himself did not
belong
to
her?
 
The only moments when Kate felt
certain that Julien's full attention was on her was during the actual act of
love.
 
But even in those moments he had
never once wholly
given
himself to her, never once betrayed a need of
her, never once said that he loved her.
 
Was he holding back, as she was, she wondered, or was she simply a
female body in a bed?

"Je t'aime bien,
Kate," he
said
—
that careless phrase with that careful nuance, that
"bien"
that turned the word "love" into
"
like.
"
 
She was desperate to hear
him say the simple,
necessary
words, "Je
t'aime,"
but
until he did she would not say those words to him.
 
Yet every day she realized that she was
falling deeper and deeper in love.
 
Mistral
had become the only prize the whole wide world had to offer her.
 
There was an insatiable, ruthless
completeness about her feelings that included everything she knew about him;
all the difficulties he presented; all the faults clearly observed in him; the
women he had had before she met him. They didn't matter. Nothing mattered
except an avid, addictive obsession that would accept nothing less than
possession.

Kate was a woman of enormous
strength, proud, devious and subtle, yet her nerves were pulled so tightly by
the strain of concealing her emotions that she wept, lying there next to the
superb body of the man who slept without thought of her.
 
But after she wept she stayed awake and
scrutinized the situation with the cold, far-sighted intelligence that no fire
could extinguish.

Frustration was alien to
Kate's deepest nature.
 
She did not and
never had believed that there was anything she couldn't have if she really
wanted it.

During the second week in
Provence, Mistral decided to drive west to Nîmes, that mellow city that had
been declining with delicious serenity since the reign of Hadrian.
 
There he and Kate went walking in the park,
climbing up the many steep stone steps that finally led to the base of the Tour
Magne, the ruin of a Roman
watchtower that looked out over a vast panorama.
 
They lay on the grass, agreeably tired,
observing the few citizens of Nîmes who had sought out this high, cool place,
from which, almost two thousand years ago, Roman soldiers had been able to see
for a hundred kilo
meters.
 
After
a long silence, Mistral spoke.

"I couldn't, I wouldn't
begin, or even dream of beginning to paint this view.
 
It's too complete, too vast, it answers every
question I might ask of it, it has no need of man."

"You haven't found
anything...
 
anything you feel like
painting, in Provence?" Kate asked carefully.
 
This was the first time he had mentioned
painting since they had left Paris.
 
She
had obeyed his unspoken rule of silence on the subject.

"No," he said.
 
No, he thought, no, I haven't
wanted
to
paint
—
that's what terrifies me the most.
 
Not to want, not to need to paint
—
I've
never known such emptiness!
 
That young
couple on the bench over
there, their hands are almost touching
—
they're not seeing the view,
they've probably grown up on it, probably
their mothers brought them here for years and years to play
—
and today
they've realized that the other is
another,
a mystery, that strangest of
things, another human being.
 
Once...
 
once I could have painted
their hands
not quite touching, painted those hands a dozen times, ten
dozen times and never come to the end of what they make me feel, those four
hands that don't quite touch, that don't yet dare to touch, that
will
touch
—
and perhaps
—
who knows?
—
change the world.
 
But I don't
want
to paint those
hands...
 
I don't
have
to paint
them. And if I'm not a painter,
why am I alive?

"I suppose,"
ventured Kate, "that this country has been painted too often?
 
Everything's so
—
picturesque...
 
that it doesn't interest you?"

"Something like that,
yes," Mistral answered briefly.
 
The
last time I was here, he thought, I wouldn't walk around a corner without my
sketchbook, I was wild with excitement, nothing looked as if anyone had ever
laid eyes on it before
—
much less painted it
—
all Provence was
calling me until I thought I'd go as mad as Van Gogh.
 
"Picturesque" my ass. You can't
understand, Kate, and I can't explain.
 
"Picturesque" will do as well as any other explanation but the
fact is that I've lost it,
lost it,
and even Provence hasn't brought it
back.

"Come on, Kate," he
said abruptly, getting up. "This grass is still wet."

More and more often during
the next week Mistral turned the car in the direction of Félice, the village
that lay on the north flank of the Lubéron, east of Ménerbes and west of
Lacoste. Félice held an attraction with which he became more and more obsessed
as the urge to paint refused to return:
 
the game of boules.

In the single café of the
town every man who could walk and belonged to the village gathered each evening
and each noon to have a
pastis
or two. Now, in autumn, their ranks were
swelled by many farmers, who were making the most of this short, leisurely time
of the year after the crops were in and before the hunting season opened.
 
After a few rounds the men all wandered off
to the flat, shady ground behind the café and played endless games of boules,
that bowling game which is the equivalent, throughout the South of France, of
soccer, bicycle racing and billiards put together, a game so complicated that
its rules cover three pages of tiny print
.
      

One
of the farmers, a young man named Josephe Bernard, had looked Mistral up and
down the second time he and Kate had gone to the café.

"Do
you play boules?" he asked finally.

"I'm
just a tourist," Mistral said to excuse himself.

"No
matter. Would you like to try?"

In
spite of the rules, boules is basically so simple that Mistral was able to
acquit himself honorably with a minimum of instruction.
 
His coordination and eye were so well
developed that although he had never held one of the steel balls before, within
an hour he was making a respectable showing and on that first day he managed to
knock away the boule of another man from its position close to the target,
delighting his sponsor who invited him to be part of the game any time he was
in the neighborhood.

Mistral
had returned often, charmed by the high drama of the game, which involved
endless arguments, filled with wit, insults, laughter and shrewdness, as well
as the never-failing pleasure throwing a ball, that one skill all men love to
use.

Kate
watched from the sidelines, amazed at Mistral's ability to lose himself in a
game that she found infinitely boring.
 
But while he played she was able to look at him without his realizing
it.
 
How easily he fell into the manners
of the boules players, she thought.
 
He
threw his arm into the air as widely as they did, argued as earnestly, laughed
as loudly, played without noticing the passage of time, and every day his
command of his boule grew greater.

"You're
sure you're not from this country?" Josephe Bernard asked his new friend.
"Provence must be in your blood...
 
and in your name.
 
Mistral
—
that's 'master wind' in Provençal.
 
I
have some
cousins named Mistral from over near Mérindol, on the south
side
of the mountain...
 
perhaps
we're related?"

"Maybe
I am but I can't prove it.
 
I don't know
where my great-grandparents came from.
 
I
wish I did, but my family's all dead and while they were alive I never listened
—
never bothered to ask."

"Most
strangers, if they try to throw a boule, they make fools of themselves.
 
It only
looks easy.
 
If you practiced for a few more weeks
you
could be on my team.
 
There's a
tournament the last Saturday in November."

Mistral
threw his arm around the young farmer's shoulders and ordered a round of drinks
for everyone in the café.
 
He knew how
much
such an offer meant from a man to whom each boules tournament was
a matter that would be discussed with an intensity of interest for years to
come.

"I
wish I could, Josephe, but I have to work for a living." But how, Mistral
wondered, am I going to go back to work?
 
Boules had let him forget for a few hours, boules had let him stop
trying to find someone whom he could blame for the fire that had gone out:
 
Avigdor because he was a dealer and all he
wanted was product to sell; Kate because she had caused the exhibition to
happen and before the exhibition he had been painting as simply as he breathed;
Maggy because she was a fool and a child and the only woman who had ever left
him; the exhibition itself because it opened his eyes to the cupidity of
collectors who buy in a minute what it takes a man months of labor to create,
collectors who don't respect, don't understand, but just open their purses and
purchase a piece of him
—
he realized that none of them was to blame but
still he circled them in his mind, trying to find the culprit.

"We
have to work too," Josephe replied, "but there's always time for
boules
—
if not, why bother to work?"

Besides
the café and the game, Félice held another lure.
 
Below the village in the valley not too far
from the main road, Mistral had discovered a deserted
mas
.
 
One day, spurred only by idle interest, he
had followed a deeply rutted path that wound up and around a low knoll covered
by an orchard of precious live oaks, the only trees at whose roots truffles
grow. The shade of the orchard opened into an avenue of excited, pointed,
green-black cypress beyond which stood a high wall surrounding a
mas
.

Mistral
parked the Talbot on the strip of meadow that lay between the cypress and the
walls of the house, a sunny, dry stretch of tiny yellow thistles and wild
grasses.
 
Tall, broad, double doors
barred them from seeing inside.
 
There
was a silence, laced, as always, by the sound of the cicadas, a dry but
pleasant crackle that was so much a part of the countryside that it was a part
of the silence itself.
 
None of the
familiar sounds of a farm rose from behind the walls that surrounded the
buildings; no dogs yapped, there were no kitchen noises nor the calling of
children.
 
Honeysuckle, growing thickly
and curling over the walls, released an intense sweetness that was almost as
tangible as if it were visible; a swarm
of red and orange butterflies hung above the meadow
like a Chinese kite and a sleepy, swarming hum indicated that here was a
paradise of bees.

Together Mistral and Kate
walked around trying to peer inside, but the walls were surrounded at their
base by wicked brambles and the tendrils of honeysuckle grew up into the air
just above Mistral's head.