Mistral's Daughter (31 page)

Jason Darcy was still far
from convinced that Maggy Lunel
was what she said she was, not
because anything she'd told him was
impossible but because there
was something about her that was so unique in his own experience that it made
him suspicious.

Maggy Lunel was not behaving
normally.
 
There was nothing
in
her manner, in her eyes or her words that indicated that she
was
trying to attract him, and this, to Darcy, was incredible. He knew, as well
—
or better
—
than anyone else that he was one of the most eligible men in
the United States.
 
He had everything:
first of
all, at only twenty-nine, he had accumulated enough influence
to make him eligible if he'd been a gnome.
 
In addition he was unattached and rich, which would have made him
eligible if he'd
been a werewolf.
 
But he was neither gnome nor werewolf, he was a man who admitted, each
time he looked in the mirror, that he was handsome, an accident of genetics to
be sure but not to be despised.

Why
then,
how
then, could this woman sit here drinking his champagne while she interrogated
him about the Powers
Agency as
if he were a conduit of
information and nothing more?

Perhaps she was in love?
 
That was the only reasonable
explanation.
 
And yet she had come to the
party alone. A fury to
know more about Maggy stirred in him, as she
seemed to engrave a pattern on
the air with a gesture of her eloquent
hands.
 
"And where is this
famous chicken hash?" she suddenly asked him.
 
"And why is my glass empty?
 
Shall we go dancing?"
 
She was matter-of-fact, not provocative, he
noted with fresh wonderment, but her vividness was a triumph.
  
)

"What about Lally's
scavenger hunt?"
        

"But it's a ridiculous
and boring American custom
—
isn't that what you think?"

"Where would you like to
go?
 
The St. Regis Roof, the Embassy, the
Cotton Club?"
          

"Le Jockey," Maggy
murmured.

"The jockey?" he
said puzzled.

"Did I say that?
 
Never mind, it's been closed for years.
 
Let's go up
to Harlem."

Adrien Avigdor was sure of
his ground.
 
Since Julien Mistral had
gone to live in Félice
five years ago, since that improbable
marriage to
Kate Browning, the man had had three sell-out, one-man shows
in Paris, each one a greater triumph than the one of the year before.

Now, in the spring of 1931,
it was time for him to show in New York.
 
His production of paintings was small, or,
to be precise, he
painted a great deal and showed very little.
 
Mistral exercised to the
full
the legal
position possessed by every French artist to obtain, by writing a simple phrase
on the back of a painting
—
ne pas à vendre
—
the
right to withhold from sale any canvas or even to prohibit the exhibition
of the canvas, although he was under contract to Avigdor for all he agreed to
actually sell.

Each year, four months before
the planned exhibition, Avigdor drove down to Provence and spent a draining,
difficult week living at
La Tourrello
and arguing with Mistral about his
new work.
 
Once in 1928, Mistral had not
been satisfied with a single painting and there had been no show in the autumn
of that year, Avigdor remembered gloomily.
 
Mistral destroyed the work he didn't like in an annual bonfire, capering
around and feeding canvas after canvas into the flames like a devil out of
Hieronymus Bosch, a man who heartlessly, gleefully, invited Avigdor to watch as
hundreds of thousands
of francs of marvelous painting turned into oily
smoke.

"That's in case I should
fall down dead, Adrien, and you got your hands on
stuff I never meant
anybody to see
—
who would make sure that you wouldn't sell them, eh?"
 
He was as suspicious as
the peasants
he lived among and trusted no one except Kate.
 
And he trusted her only so far.
 
Obviously not far enough to believe that she would obey the prohibitions
he scrawled in large letters on the backs of hundreds of paintings.

It was agony for Avigdor to
watch Mistral's mountainous bonfires but there was a miserable measure of
satisfaction to be derived from
the fact that while he never had
any extra Mistrals left to sell when an exhibition was over, no other dealer in
Paris ever had so much as a single one.
 
As far as Avigdor knew, no collector who had ever bought a Mistral had
resold it.
 
Mistral himself always
retained
his favorites.

The
man's prices had mounted far beyond anything Adrien planned because of the
scarcity of his available work.
 
But,
after all,
Avigdor mused, there were only thirty-six Vermeers in
existence, so perhaps Mistral knew what he was doing?

In
any case, artists should not be allowed to marry rich women, it gave them too
much freedom.
 
No matter; Mistral had
finally agreed to a New York show of new work and of selections from his output
since 1926.
 
Various American collectors
were lending canvases so the show would be a large one.
 
Many art critics from American newspapers and
magazines were already in busy contact with Avigdor.
 
Vanity Fair
had commissioned a
long
article on him
and Man Ray had gone to Félice to photograph Mistral in
his studio.
 
Mark Nathen, whose gallery
was one of the best in New York, was planning a
vernissage
that would
attract all of artistic and social
New York.
 
The show would be one of the major events of
the spring of 1931 since everybody in the small, inbred world of art was
extraordinarily curious to see the work of this man, who lived like a hermit
stuck away in the Lubéron, indifferent to his gathering
fame,
his
growing legend.

"Before
dinner I thought we might drop into the opening
of the new show at
Nathen's," Darcy proposed to Maggy on the phone.

"What
show?" she asked idly.
 
She had no
time to keep up with the wide-ranging cultural life of the city.

"Mistral
—
the French painter
—
you must have heard of him.

She
held the telephone in one hand, and with the other she steadied herself against
the mantelpiece, feeling the cruel beat of her heart knock against her breasts.
 
The shock of Mistral's name, spoken so
unexpectedly, had made her mind a blank of ice.
 
Her stomach contracted in fear.
 
Why fear? she wondered.
 
Automatically said, "Yes, I know who he is, but I don't feel up to
going tonight."

"Maggy,
what's the matter?"

"I'm
just so tired I can't move, too tired to dress...
 
I think I’m catching cold."

"I'm
very, very disappointed," he said gravely.

"I
am too."

In
the three weeks since
he had met Maggy, Darcy had asked her out
far more frequently than she had been willing to go.
 
Each time he saw her he grew increasingly
baffled by her deep reserve, her gentle but obstinate refusal to speak of
herself.
 
She
seemed to have told
him all she was ever going to tell him on the night of
the scavenger
hunt.
 
She always insisted on meeting him
at a speakeasy or a restaurant.
 
She
never offered him
any hospitality, and when he left
her at
the elevator of her apartment house
—
for she didn't ask him
to
come up
—
Maggy shook hands briskly, not even coming close enough for him
to risk a brief kiss.

In
his limousine, she sat far away from him, her hands folded tightly in her lap,
she danced with a tension in her body that imposed a delicate but insistent
formality that turned a song like "The Night Was Made for Love" into
a satire.
 
Was she frigid, was she
frightened, was she suffering from some damn French neurosis he hadn't heard
of?
 
Did it have something to do with
her being a widow?

Darcy
thought about her in obsessive curiosity, for her widowhood and the existence
of Teddy were two
of the few details of her life that she had let
escape.
 
He examined the little he knew
about her with as much fascination as if it were a piece of a map that would
lead to buried treasure, but she remained tart, aloof, serenely and
mysteriously unknowable.
 
What was worse,
damn it to hell, was that she was as untouchable as a princess in a tower.
 
Every now and then, as he talked to her, he
had the almost unendurable suspicion that something he had said was making her
go through a polite agony of suppressed laughter, but he'd never actually
caught her at it. What colossal nerve she had!

"Look,
I'll call you tomorrow, but take care of yourself, don't get sick. Will you go
to bed early?" he asked anxiously.

"Yes,"
she agreed tonelessly, "I will, I promise."

As
Jason Darcy wandered disconsolately into the Nathen Gallery he found he was
reassuring himself that, at the very minimum, Maggy Lunel must like
him.
 
Darcy, sought after, hard-to-get, powerful
proud Darcy, started to review his virtues to balance the fact that he had
never even been allowed to come close to her lips.
 
Then quickly, like a man touching his tie to
make sure that it's properly centered, he told himself how preposterous he was,
piling one worldly asset on top of another, listing his magazines, his well-staffed
household, his Harvard summa cum laude, his youth, his health, his desk piled
high with invitations and solicitations from every part of the worlds that were
touched by his publications, as if to prove that he had enough value to be
allowed into the hidden garden of Maggy Lunel's private, guarded world.

He surveyed the crowd in the
Nathen Gallery, surprised at the broad cross section of New York he saw
there.
 
He knew a great
many
of the people and, as he listened to the moneyed hum of conversation he thought
that it sounded more like the Metropolitan Opera at intermission than an
artistic event.
 
He supposed that the
unusual number of society women he recognized and greeted were there because
the show had been organized as a benefit for the
Children's Hospital; it
was rare to find the Whitneys, the Ochses, the Kilkullens, the Gimbels, the
Jays, the Rutherfords and the Vanderbilts all mixed up with the most famous
faces of Greenwich Village and Southampton.

Then as Darcy began to look
at the pictures, his mild interest at the composition of the crowd vanished in
an instant.
 
He had the sudden sensation
of being picked up by a pair of great strong hands and set down under a new
horizon.
 
Each painting was like a step
along a pathway into another world, an alternate world, a better
world.
 
Reasoning, deliberation, logic,
time, and space itself all dissolved into an unqualified radiance, a splendor
of paint that had the texture of a living, breathing substance.

And yet, Darcy asked himself,
stunned, what has the man chosen to paint after all?
 
A cafe table and chairs under an orange
awning, a stand of poplars quivering in the heat, a market basket filled with
bread, radishes and a bunch of dahlias, a woman bending down in a garden in the
morning
—
the simplest of subject matter, nothing that had not been
painted by a thousand painters before Mistral.

Yet the emotion of the artist
as he looked at his subjects had merged with the images he put on canvas that a
transparency was created, through which a bridge was flung from the world in
which Mistral
felt
to the world in which the spectator
lived
, so
that for
an essential moment, Darcy existed with Mistral's eyes, Darcy
entered into Mistral's vision.

Wondering, amazed, buoyant
with the blooming of his senses, feeling as if he had left New York and walked
into open, sunlit cloud-dappled country, Darcy went through the big gallery not
noticing, as he entered the far room, that it was unusually crowded and filled
with buzzing conversation.

Maggy
! He shivered
violently, the hair rose on his neck rose as he confronted the big canvases of
Maggy on every wall, naked and so utterly abandoned as she offered the glory of
her flesh, exposed, shameless, happier than he had ever dreamed she could be, available
to every eye, Maggy, more erotic, more violently and generously sensual
than
any woman he had ever seen in paint or in the flesh.