Mistral's Daughter (40 page)

"1 don't even know if
I'm staying," she said with what she hoped was a completely colorless
smile, a smile such as she had never given in her life, nor would ever be able
to give in the future.
 
She was restored
to the fine bravado that three years of unopposed tampering with malleable
masculine hearts had given her.
 
"I
don't even know yet if I'm going to let you take my test shots.
 
It all depends on the reason why you never
called me again.
 
I don't give a damn
that you're rich and famous, you bastard, just the way you said you'd be."

"I said that
we'd
be," he answered.

"You remember that?
 
After five years?"

"I remember
everything.
 
When we met you were
entering into your destructive phase.
 
Even though I was just nineteen I could see it coming, as sure as
sunrise, and I didn't want to be your first victim...
 
it was rough enough being your first
triumph.
 
So I bailed out when I knew
that one more date, one more of those wild kissing sessions standing up
outside of your front door, would finish me off, probably for life."
 
He fell silent, and then he added, "Needless
to say I was wrong." It was already far too late for self-preservation.

"Hmmm."
 
Teddy had heard this sort of declaration
before, in every variety of version, but there was an enduring patience and
kind of accepting calm about his statement that was more convincing than the
most passionate phrases.
 
He continued to
scrutinize her as she took off her hat with care and pushed her fingers
artfully through her hair, redistributing the carefully set waves until the
lamplight dodged through its bewilderment of reds.

Teddy
sipped her Scotch, which would always taste like danger, and returned his
steady gaze.
 
Melvin Allenberg had grown
up.
 
He still looked like a bird, with
his beaky nose and his big glasses, but his big bright eyes dominated his face
with an intelligence that was infused with the kind of energy that is the
essence of charm itself.
 
His was a
completed face:
 
years would only confirm
its shape, the firm chin, the broad brow, the curly halo of dark hair.
 
She’d never forgotten his mouth, the first
she'd ever kissed.
 
Cleverness and whimsy
were stamped as clearly on his well-formed lips as if he'd been a warlock.

"I
suppose..." she began, with something quivering on the corners of her own
mouth that showed that she was inclined to forgive him.
 
Then she stopped, stung by a sudden memory.
"And I'd been planning to ask you to the junior prom the very next time I
saw you.
 
Oh!
 
When I never heard from you again I was too
proud to call."

"What
about all those other guys you were dating?"

"I
decided not to ask any of them... so I didn't go.
 
I missed it," she replied sadly.

Abruptly
he got up, crossed the space between them, sat down on the couch, took her
firmly in his arms and kissed her mouth.
 

"Oh,
my sweet Red, my poor baby, I'm so sorry...
 
I should have called but what could I have said?
 
There was no way the explain...
 
I was too dumb to know the right words."
 
Tenderly he wiped her lipstick off with his
handkerchief and kissed her again.
 
In
his arms she felt him as solid as a tree, his lips were familiar.
 
Her lips had received thousands of kisses in
the last years but sensory memory retrieved his particular touch and taste and
warmth; yet he was so changed, different in a way she suddenly understood with
a leap of gladness.
 
He was a man and he
kissed like a man, not a boy.
 
Teddy
kicked off her shoes and lay back on the couch, her eyes open, looking at the
pink Tiepolo twilight on the ceiling.
 
She sighed deliciously and let him lift her hair off her neck and kiss
her behind the ears.
 
They'd never kissed
sitting down before, she thought, and childishly, willfully, she eluded him and
rubbed noses vigorously.

"Friends?"
he asked anxiously.

"I
forgive you.
 
Only for old times'
sake," Teddy growled crooningly.
 
He ran his hands over her smart jacket, a garment so stiffly interlined
and boned that it could stand up by itself.
 
"All those buttons," he complained, as he started to undo them
carefully, "between me and my girl."

The
attempted unbuttoning of any single button was like an instant alarm signal to
Teddy but she permitted it because the blouse under her jacket protected her
with yet another double row of tiny taffeta buttons.
 
Soon she lay on the couch in her elaborate
blouse and new skirt, floating and lifting and melting under the storm of his
kisses.
 
She gasped for breath.
 
This suddenness, this lack of prelude, of
courtship, this brevity; the realization that she was alone in the house with
him, not in a fraternity surrounded by a dozen kissing couples, was abruptly
dangerous until she looked at Melvin's face and relaxed again.
 
He'd taken his glasses off, and he looked so
dear and reassuring that she plunged back into the flood of his caresses,
enjoying the heady sense of power she always felt as whatever man who was
kissing her grew more and more excited, as the beat of his passion grew quicker
and the rhythm of his heart quickened.
 
But now Melvin did something that had never happened to her before in
three years of dedicated necking. He lifted her right off the couch, without
any preliminary warning, and he carried her with ease, across the big room and
through a door she hadn't noticed before, into what was his small bedroom.

"Melvin!"
she protested, kicking wildly. "Stop that!
 
What do think you're doing?
 
I
never lie down on boys' beds!"

"There's
always a first time, and I'm not a boy," he said, his voice muffled with
love but determined.
 
Teddy struggled to
heave herself up off the quilt but he was so strong that it was like fighting
against an undertow, and all the while he kept kissing wherever he could: her
fingertips, her chin, her hairline, her eyes, a skillful arsonist setting a
hundred tiny fires.
 
Many minutes later,
when she was blazing from head to toe, he started on the buttons of her blouse.
She protested feebly.
 
Her trusted iron
wall, beyond which no male could penetrate, seemed to have crumbled and Teddy
found herself without boundaries.

This just isn't happening,
she thought, as he took off her blouse and opened the waistband of her skirt
and slid it down over her feet.
 
When his
warm hands deftly unhooked her waist cincher and freed her breasts, when his
warm mouth bent to her nipples, those inviolate virgin nipples that had never
been touched in their nakedness, she thought, again, no, it isn't happening,
but soon, as he drew them up into tiny points of brilliant sensation with his
mouth, thought, maybe it is happening after all.
 
When she found Melvin Allenberg naked,
pressing every sturdy inch of his body along her own nakedness, when she felt
his penis, leaping like a fish, against her lower belly, she knew that it must
at last and absolutely be happening, and that, although unbelievingly, she was
ready.
 
Lying down they fit together as
if they were exactly the same height.
 
Melvin was supremely slow, quivering with control, exquisitely patient
but relentless. He took her inch by inch, took Teddy Lunel with a thoroughness
that banished all her habits of withholding, took her with a completeness that
left her without any secrets.
 
And, at
last, relieved of her baggage of rigid chastity, she lay next to him and was
glad and grateful.

17

One hundred and fifty Molyneux
spring dresses, each with its own pair of gloves painted to match.
 
Odd, the details that popped into her mind
whenever she was nervous, Marietta Norton thought, as the Lockheed Constellation
broke through the clouds and the sun blazed in
—
that must have been
back in 1933.

The senior fashion associate
of
Mode
took a breath of relief as the plane steadied.
 
She never admitted it to anyone but she was
terrified of flying and it had been a rough takeoff from Idlewild on this windy
September morning in 1952.
 
She thought
longingly of the days when editing a fashion magazine was still a fairly
civilized procedure, those years during which everyone took the
Normandie
to France for the collections: first class it had been, five days of pâté,
caviar, champagne and a chance to refresh the spirit.
 
But now she was expected to flop and lurch
back and forth through the horrid skies as if it were nothing special.

This trip for instance: to
France for next year's resort clothes that would be shown on twelve pages of
the January issue
—
it could have been done perfectly well out in the
Hamptons, in her opinion
—
after all, the clothes were all American
designs
—
but no, Darcy insisted on a full-scale production.
 
"Marietta," he had said in that
grand seigneur manner of his which never failed to annoy her, we've
consistently stayed ahead of
Vogue
and
Bazaar
because we're not
afraid to go all-out.
 
Vogue
is
shooting resort in Portugal, I hear, and you're going to France for
Mode
—
let's not discuss it further."
 
Marietta Norton shrugged.
 
It was an old argument between them and she
never won.

However, she knew that she
was the most experienced fashion editor in the business and Darcy appreciated
her in the only way she wanted to be acknowledged, by paying her generously, in
a field in which salaries were normally low.
 
God knows, after thirty years in fashion she was working only for the
money that had enabled her to send her four daughters to the best schools, not
for the joy of it.
 
The glamour was long
gone as far as she was concerned, as totally as Lanvin's evening jacket with
mufflike shoulders of silver fox and lunch for two for ten dollars at the
Colony and Cobina Wright's circus party and floor-length dresses for the races
in the afternoon and Mrs. Harrison Williams costumed in Winterhalter crinolines
as the Duchess of Wellington for the Chicago Opera Ball.

There had simply been too
many Paris collections, too many Christmas bathrobe pages shot in July, too
many jolting taxi trips down to Seventh Avenue, too many fattening lunches with
the manufacturers who advertised in
Mode,
too many days on which she had
to find the words to announce that fashion had turned yet another new leaf and
now women had to throw out the old and ring in the new, when Marietta Norton
herself didn't give a hoot in hell what she wore and, what was worse, looked
it, and knew she looked it.

Like many of the best fashion
editors Marietta Norton was unabashedly dowdy.
 
She had spent most of her life inspecting all the clothes of the Western
world and deciding which were the best of them; she had an instinct for choice
that, had it belonged to a young and slim and very rich woman, would have guaranteed
that woman a place on the Best Dressed List, but Marietta Norton never had the
time, interest or energy to waste on picking out things for herself.
 
Worse, she reflected, she was short and
plump, the kind of woman the English always said "looked like a cook"
although even the English didn't seem to have many cooks anymore.

Still, she counted on this
trip to produce resort pages that would make
Vogue's
Portugal stuff look
downright dull, if none of the bugs that plagued location trips came raging out
of the wood- work.

Bill Hatfield, the rangy,
flip photographer, was, for her money, one of the most tasteful boys in the
business.
 
Berry Banning, her assistant,
seemed unusually efficient so far, although the jury was still out on Berry
until they came back without incident to New York.
 
Often girls from her moneyed Locust Valley,
Bar Harbor, Spence-Chapin background didn't have what it took to succeed in the
magazine world.

The only detail that hadn't
been nailed down to Marietta's complete satisfaction was the model's
haircut.
 
She cast a baleful glance at
the back of Teddy's head.
 
The
incomparable Miss Lunel, damn her glorious eyes, had adamantly refused to let
her hair be cut in the new petaled chrysanthemum shape.
 
It was the coiffure of the decade, Marietta
was convinced of it, but when did Teddy Lunel ever do anything she didn't want
to do?

She had never had to
compromise from the very first day she started working, four years ago.
 
Like Norman Norell and Mainbocher, the two
star designers who had so much power that they allowed their clothes to be
photographed only on the condition that four entire pages were devoted to each
of them exclusively, Teddy Lunel was the only model alive who was never
photographed with another model.
 
Still,
it was probably better that way, Marietta thought, forgiving Teddy her
stubbornness about her hair, since even the greatest of the other models looked
—
well, perhaps "diminished" was the best way to put it, next
to Teddy.

This was the sixth time
Marietta had used Teddy for Europe.
 
Only
last spring they'd gone to Paris together for the Fall Collections and if
anybody had ever been as supremely, heartbreak-ingly beautiful as Teddy in
Balenciaga's hat of black tulle and roses, with the tulle spun out in the back
like sugar candy, she'd like very much to know about it because it would be a
bloody miracle.
 
And just where, she
wondered, was the stewardess with her martini?
 
New York to Paris, an eighteen-hour flight, with refueling stops at
Gander, in Iceland, God alone knew where, and again at Shannon, was at least an
eight-martini trip...
 
if only no one had
told her that the most dangerous moments were landing and takeoff she might’ve
been able to get by with only two or three.

Bill Hatfield didn't need a
drink although he'd ordered one anyway.
 
He'd been a Navy pilot in the war and he could get on any commercial
plane and fall asleep before takeoff and wake in time for landing
—
just
so long as he was carrying his three good-luck charms, the ones that kept the
plane up.
 
He was glad that Marietta, a
smart old broad if ever there was, had booked him for this trip.
 
Things were getting sticky back at the
studio.
 
Ann had finally moved out and if
she did as she had promised, was arranging for her lawyer to meet with his lawyer
about the divorce.
 
All well and
good.
 
But Monique planned to move in and
so did Elsa.
 
Had he really suggested it
to both of them?
 
They certainly seemed
to think so.
 
The only thing wrong with
being a fashion photographer was the models.
 
Great girls they were, he'd never met one he didn't like
—
 
that was the trouble.
 
He'd be out of danger for this trip at any
rate
—
he’d already had his waltz with Teddy Lunel...

Out of the corner of his eye
he watched her as she bent over a book.
 
It had been the most marvelous six months of his life, way back when
she'd stopped being Falk's steady girl, three years' ago, but with Teddy, when
it was over, it was fucking finished, stone cold dead, no embers, no remember
whens.
 
She didn't look back, that
one.
 
He wondered how many affairs she'd
had since him.
 
The mystique of sexual
promiscuity was like a velvet cape that she drew about herself with a smile
that could send a man straight to hell.
 
Still, he'd lived through it...
 
barely.

He thought of the other models
who might have been making this trip with the
Mode
bunch. There was Jean
Patchett, who eyebrows were drawn by a master calligrapher, whose little round
black beauty mark just above her right eye was the most famous beauty mark in
the history of photography.
 
Patchett's
look was sophistication pushed to its outer limits
—
wrong for the kind
of pictures he planned to take.
 
Dovima,
with her passionate face, her black hair and blue eyes, would have been a good
choice for ball gowns, but he couldn't quite see her for resort clothes. Lisa
Fonsegrieves, with her lunar loveliness, her porcelain princess face, that
witty tilted nose and curly blond hair
—
yes, she would have been
wonderful...
 
but still a shade less
perfect than Teddy.
 
The only other
possibility had been Suzy Parker.
 
You
just thought that no girl had ever been born more beautiful than Suzy...
 
until you looked at Teddy.

Strange how beauty divided
itself into levels.
 
There were hundred
and fifty models in New York who were the pick of the loveliest girls in all of
America and there were the half-dozen of those hundred and fifty who had broken
away from the pack and stood alone, each a superb champion with her own special
beauty, and
then
there was Teddy Lunel.
 
He had never heard a better description of her than one he remembered
reading in college,
 
"O thou art
fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars," a
line of Marlowe's that had somehow stayed with him, professional beauty watcher
that he had always been, even before he became a photographer.
 
You could add up all the parts but you still
couldn't express the mysterious harmony of her beauty without resorting to
poetry.

Bill Hatfield looked forward
to working with her although there would be none of the undercurrent of sexual
potential between them that there would certainly have been if he were working
with a model he hadn't slept with yet.

Teddy had the knack of never
looking the same that made his work an adventure in mutual creativity rather
than a technical process.
 
With each new
change of clothes, Teddy drew on the life of another woman, a woman who would
one day buy that particular dress and in it meet a man who would become the
great love of her life, a woman who would remember until she died just what she
had been wearing at that particular moment.
 
How the hell she did it he had never understood.
 
A sense of authentic existence, nothing less,
was what Teddy produced for the camera.
 
Still, that was, after all, what she got seventy bucks an hour for, more
than any model in the world.
 
And worth
every nickel.

Where, he wondered, was the
stewardess with his martini?
 
The nice
thing about flying commercial was that you could drink without worrying about
your coordination.
 
Landing on an
aircraft carrier with alcohol in your bloodstream had never been
recommended...
 
although it had been
done, and by him, now that he thought about it.

Berry Banning was too excited
to notice the bumpy air as they took off.
 
This was her most important assignment since she'd joined
Mode
three years ago.
 
She'd never been on a
European location trip before and her responsibilities were terrifying.
 
Marietta had decided the clothes, of course,
and they'd all been fitted on Teddy before they left, but Berry had been in
complete charge of every detail from that time on.

She had done all the
complicated, cross-indexed packing of twelve large suitcases so that each
outfit traveled with the wide range of choices of shoes, handbags, jewelry,
scarves, hats, nylon stockings and sunglasses that Marietta Norton demanded on
a fashion sitting.

Like Diana Vreeland of
Bazaar
and Babs Rawlings of
Vogue,
Marietta Norton approached each photograph
as if it were an art form.
 
Even when she
was planning to photograph only a single hat she would make sure that the model
was wearing perfume that complimented the mood of the hat, had on perfectly
fitting shoes, untouched white gloves and fresh stockings.
 
She could tie a scarf to convey a hundred
variations of style, with a flick of her wrist transforming any model from an
Apache to a Gainsborough.
 
She played
games with accessories like a theatrical set decorator, but God help her
assistant if Marietta didn't have enough choice.
 
Should even a single suitcase be lost... one
such slip, no matter if it was the porter's fault, and Berry would never be
trusted again.
 
Marietta Norton, whom she
worshipped, could unquestionably improvise
something because there had
never been a Marietta Norton location
trip that hadn't been successful,
but her own career would die before it had been properly born and there was
nothing in life that she wanted but a future in the world of fashion.