Mistral's Daughter (22 page)

She sat up bravely for it was
entirely too late now to act the coward, and forced a smile onto her lips.
 
Was that her neck, that endlessly long, white
thing
?
 
Were those her
ears, those poor little pink projections?
 
Now Antoine wet her head and took up a razor that
glittered
relentlessly as he gradually shaped her hair into a shining cap, as short as
that of an English public school-boy, the extreme Eton cut which only the most
beautiful women could wear.
 
It was
combed straight back, parted precisely on one side, and in front of each
exposed ear the cap came to a sleek point on her cheek.
 
At her nape her hair was shingled so that the
fine shape of her whole skull was clearly seen.
 
Maggy's large yellow-green eyes, not so far apart, looked twice as big
as they ever had and her sharp, fiercely curved cheekbones now had competition
in the totally revealed, long, pliant column of her neck.

She threw off the cloth that
covered her and stood up, gazing into the mirror, turning this way and that so
that she could see herself from each side and from the back.
 
There was a hushed silence from the crowd of
onlookers.
 
Even Antoine himself said
nothing as Maggy anxiously looked at the new personage who faced her in the
mirrors.

She felt faint.
 
Her head seemed quite separate from her shoulders,
as if it had been detached and allowed to fly upward like a balloon.
 
The woman in the mirror was bold; the woman
in the mirror was older than Maggy and absolutely in command of herself; the
woman in the mirror was supremely chic even though she was wearing Maggy's suit
and Maggy's deplorable shoes. Her head, that sleek, superbly cropped head, so
bright that it looked painted on, a magnificent red punctuation mark, dominated
the room.

Maggy stood
expressionless.
 
Paula held her breath.
 
Slowly Maggy moved closer and closer to the
mirror, her eyes never leaving it.
 
The
images she saw grew huge and she looked at it questioningly until her eyes
merged and her nose touched the mirror.
 
She remained there a second, misting the mirror with her breath and
then, with a decisive motion, she kissed the mirror with her big, delicious
mouth.

"Ah!"
all
the watchers breathed in relief.
 

"Madame is content"
Antoine stated with an air of proprietorship.

"Madame is
enchanted!" Maggy seized the astonished Pole, squeezed him hard and
pressed a kiss on his ear.
 
"Madame
is to be addressed as Monsieur from now on."
 
She took the carna-tion that was pinned to
her jacket and put it behind Antoine's ear.
 
"From one Monsieur to another, I love you," she told him.

Perry Kilkullen did not know
the first thing about keeping a woman.
 
It all sounded so easy, the phrase fell so naturally off the tongue;
men, after all, had been keeping women for thousands of years, Perry reassured
himself.
 
The ancient Greeks and Romans
had kept women or young boys, depending on their tastes.
 
Perhaps both?
 
Who knew?
 
The history of any
country
was filled with legendary kept women and the ranks of the
aristocracy were eventually filled with their children.
 
How did the various Louises do it
—
XIV, XV and XVI?
 
How on earth did they
make the
arrangements
?

Feeling more American than he
had for years in Paris, slightly abashed but infinitely determined, he went to
a real-estate agent.
 
A place to live had
to be the first step for a Kilkullen, as for a Louis.
 
Or did they just slip the lady into a set of
spare rooms at the palace

"In what quarter does
Monsieur desire to live?
 
How many
reception rooms does Monsieur require?
 
How many bedrooms?
 
And how many
will there be in staff?
 
Does Monsieur
wish a house or a flat?"

"Look, I simply won't
know until I see it.
  
Just show me the
very best of what you've got."

He inspected a dozen houses
and apartments in the fashionable parts of the Right Bank and rejected them all
for one reason or another.
 
He didn't
include Maggy on these expeditions because he wanted it to be a surprise.
 
Finally, on the avenue Vélasquez he walked
into a vast, second-floor flat that opened directly onto the noble, green,
lopsided rectangle of the Parc Monceau.
 
As if he were a person with perfect pitch hearing the right chord, Perry
felt at home in the empty rooms.

He took her there that
evening at twilight and led her through the apartment.
 
She was struck dumb as he proudly displayed
chamber after chamber.

"Oh, my God!" Maggy
burst out at last.

"Don't you like
it?" Perry asked anxiously.

"Have you counted the
rooms?" she asked on a wild note.

"No, not exactly.
 
It seemed okay to me."

"There are
eleven
rooms,
and at least two dozen closets.
 
Heaven
knows
how many baths and that's not counting the kitchen and the
pantries and laundry room or the servants' rooms you said are up in the
attic," she quavered.

"Is that too big?"
he couldn't help sounding dejected.

"Anything more than two
rooms is too big as far as I'm concerned.
 
And one of them should have a bathtub in it."

"But...
 
but, you said you dreamed of being kept in
style."

"Oh, Perry," she
cried, huddling close to him, "I'm so
scared
!
 
I know what I said but that was a fantasy and
this is reality.
 
I just want to go back
to the Left Bank and find a tiny room in a tiny hotel and get into bed and pull
up the covers over my head and not come
out!
 
Ever!"

Perry pulled her close to him
and stroked her as firmly and as gently as if she were a large, terrified animal.
 
He realized, as he held her, that he had
grown up among rich New York women who had always expected that one day they
would rule large establishments; women who had been in training all of their
lives to move effortlessly, with quiet authority, through rooms far larger and
more numerous than these on the Parc Monceau.
 
But what did Maggy, his wonderful girl, his first, his only love, know
of such things?
 
It only made her more
precious to him that she was reduced to terror by an eleven-room apartment,
this girl who had had the courage to run away from home at seventeen, who took
risks by nature, who was still at heart almost a tomboy.

"Look," he
whispered to her, as if he were talking to a child, "if you want to, we'll
keep living in hotels, don't worry.
 
But
why not give this place a chance?
 
It
isn't as if you have to move in tomorrow, darling.
 
It'll take time to furnish and then, when
it's finished, if you have even the slightest doubt, if you still feel it's too
big, I'll simply get rid of it.
 
What do
you say to that?"
 
As he spoke he
knew how desperately he wanted to make a real home for Maggy, not in a hotel,
but here, in this lovely space, where they could be together permanently, just
the two of them.

Maggy's voice was muffled
because her head was pressed to his vest.

"How many months will
it take?" she asked suspiciously.

"Oh, a long time,"
Perry assured her, "a very long time."
 
He wondered how people actually
 
did furnish apartments.
 
His wife and his mother-in-law and his mother
had all been in a feminine tizzy for a while before his wedding, so long ago,
and he supposed that it was apartment stuff that they were rushing around about
but he hadn't paid any attention.
 
Apartments, to men of his generation, came furnished, new of course, but
somehow to a chap's taste.
 
All that just
got taken care of
—
was that not one of the things women spent their
time on?

During the next six months it
seemed to Maggy that she learned an amazing number of new things every
day.
 
First there was English.
 
She had determined to learn English because
it wasn't fair, it seemed to her, for Perry always to be at the disadvantage
when they talked together, and anyway, no matter where they went, whether it
was to the Bal Tabarin to watch the cancan, or to dine at Maxim's or to
Frederick's for pressed duck, all around her she heard English spoken and it
was infuriating not to understand the jokes.

The buying power of the
American dollar was so high that Paris was filled with expatriates living well
on fifteen dollars a week.
 
They
intrigued Maggy with their carelessness, their rambunctious gaiety, their way
of irreverently throwing themselves on Paris, as if it were the world's biggest
playpen.
 
Who but Americans would play
tennis inside Josephine Baker's nightclub with paper rackets and balls?
 
Who but Americans could sit in with the
musicians at Bricktop's and make such wild jazz as she'd never heard
before?
 
Not speaking English in 1926 in
Paris was to miss the best party given in history.

Every morning, right after
breakfast, Maggy took an English lesson from the earnest Bostonian wife of an
American writer who couldn't seem to finish his novel.
 
One of the first expressions Maggy learned
was "writer's block" and, for the rest of her life, whenever she
heard those words they would bring back the expensively draped, pale blue
satin sitting room of her suite at the Lotti.

Perry had engaged Jean Michel
Frank, the most talked about of the decorator-designers of the day
—
the
leader of the practitioners of
Les Arts Decoratifs
—
to work on
the apartment, and while he went about his business, Maggy went about hers.

"Do you have any idea,
Paula," she asked querulously, "how hard
a kept woman has to
work?
 
It's a job and a half.
 
Why, you can't
leave the house in the
morning if you're not in a suit from O’Rosen or Chanel, you don't dare show
yourself in the afternoon unless
you're in Patou, you can't just drink a
cocktail, you have to dress for it, in something from Molyneux with tiny
shoulder straps and a handkerchief-pointed hemline..."

"I hope you're not
complaining," Paula said severely. "Every
métier
has
its price."

"Being kept seems to
amount to spending one percent of your time naked in bed and changing your
clothes the other ninety-nine percent," Maggy said thoughtfully.
 
"Aren't there any
métiers
that
allow you to wear the same thing from morning till night?
 
And the hats, Paula
—
a different one
for each outfit and three fittings on each hat, all that fuss over the tilt of
a brim or the width of a ribbon
—
who would have guessed it?"

"I could have warned
you," Paula said knowingly, "but I was afraid you'd back out of the
whole thing while you still had time."

"It's too late
now," Maggy said, restored to her high spirits.

"Interview a
butler?" she said incredulously.

"The apartment will be
furnished next month," Perry replied reasonably.
 
"We have to have a staff, and a staff
means a butler
—
he can help you with the rest of the interviews."

"How would I know what
to ask him?" Maggy huffed in indignation. "What do I know of the
care and feeding of cigars, of the intimate love life of cases of wine, the
protocol of announcing dinner or of the right way to polish silver?
 
Or of the wrong way either, for that
matter?
 
If you want a butler, you must
find him yourself and that goes for all the other 'staff' as well.
 
I'm not sure yet that I'll ever move
in."

"You haven't even been
to see what's going on
—
aren't you curious?"

"No," Maggy
lied.
 
She found herself wondering at odd
moments of every day just what Monsieur Frank was up to, but she didn't want to
be drawn into the process because as soon as she expressed a taste or a
preference it would be as good as agreeing to live in that enormous, deeply
alarming, oppressively grand apartment Perry had bought.
 
Hotel life, even in the high style of the
Lotti, had something enchantingly harum-scarum about it.
 
The elevators were crammed with amorous
couples
who couldn't possibly
be married, the lobby echoed with
music and laughter, the maids were always ready to chat for a moment and as for
the dignified concierges, they pored over the racing form with her every day.