Mistral's Daughter (41 page)

From the time that she had
been a little girl Berry Banning had saved every copy of
Vogue
and
Mode
and
Bazaar
and, recently
Charm
and
Glamour
and
Mademoiselle
as well, and studied their pages as if they were her one and only prayer
book and she were a
cloistered nun:

It had never occurred to her
that how a woman dressed could be a legitimate expression of the woman's own
personality that depended on her point of view toward life.
 
Fashion to Berry was a
law
and the
happiest of beings were those, like herself, who were rich enough to live under
this law, who could dedicate themselves carrying out every subtle shading of
its marvelously inconstant dictates.
 
She
never stopped trying to be worthy of high fashion.
 
She spent hours peering unhappily at herself
in a full-length mirror, unsuccessfully practicing the frozen and eternally
quizzical expressions of remote self-love that appeared on the pages of the
magazines, as if the models were asking "Will I do?" and then giving
themselves the secret answer "Of course." Every dress she owned was
exactly as
Mode
said it should be; a triumph of architecture,
constructed as carefully as a bridge, insistently feminine, creating
tiny-waisted, low-cut, full-skirted line that looked natural unless you were
trapped inside it.

But alas, Berry Banning had
rich-girl hair, brown-brown and without direction, the kind of hair that only
looked good drawn and bundled under a tiara.
 
Worse,
she had rich-girl limbs, formed by the genes of
generations of athletic Bannings, and she was too sturdy for the almost
Victorian paper-doll elegance of the New Look.
 
And worst of all, she had stubbornly rich-girl features, good but plain,
pleasant enough but too straightforward to lend themselves to change through
the use of cosmetics.

She always looked the same,
Berry thought, with familiar despair, no matter what she did. She kept her eyes
away from Teddy, who sat only one row in front of her.
 
It was going to be bad enough having
to
look at her for ten whole working days.
 
She had often worked with Teddy before, although only for a day at a
time in various New York studios, and she was familiar with the hideous sick
headache that she always developed after such a day when she came home and
confronted her own face in the mirror.

It wasn't, she told herself
scrupulously, that she envied Teddy exactly, nor that she was jealous of her
—
as a matter of fact she genuinely liked her
—
but simply that it just
didn't seem
fair
that two girls of the same age could both have the same
things on their faces, like eyes and noses and lips, and yet with such utterly
different results.
 
It was as if Teddy
belonged to an absolutely different form of life.
 
What must it be like for her to wake up in
the morning and catch sight of herself in the mirror
—
that face
—
and know it was hers?
 
Oh, where was the
stewardess with her martini?

Sam Newman, Bill Hatfield's
assistant, was watching Berry Banning without seeming to. Christ, but he
loved
her kind of woman!
 
Nice, full breasts,
great legs, long and tan from the summer, the kind of laugh that rang with
self-assurance that was bred in the bone, a laugh as rich as she was.
 
There was, in his large experience, no fuck
so satisfactory as a rich girl
—
they just seemed to enjoy it more,
probably because it didn't really count when they were making it with the
assistant instead of with the photographer himself, so they just let themselves
go and had fun. He'd had rich girls from the staff of every fashion book in the
business, and from the fashion departments of all the women's magazines too
and he'd take them over models any day, and he'd had models aplenty, although,
of course, never the likes of Teddy Lunel.

Rich girls were much less
neurotic than models, for one thing; less worried about getting to sleep on
time; they enjoyed their food more; held their liquor better; often insisted on
paying the check because they knew perfectly well how little he made, and they
felt guilty because none of them had to live on their salaries.
 
Oh, but he liked their immaculate underwear,
and their good shoes and their clean, unfussed hair and their strong passionate
bodies, developed by years of swimming lessons and skiing lessons and riding
lessons.
 
One day he'd have his own
studio and he'd marry a nice plain,
grateful
rich girl and have a bunch
of rich kids.
 
Meanwhile, where the hell
was the stewardess with his martini?

Teddy put down her book, sat
back and closed her eyes.
 
She had her
mind filled with the loud noise of the aircraft, those familiar racketing
vibrations that still gave her a great splurging sense freedom, although she'd
made this flight to Europe more than dozen times since she started
modeling.
 
On one level she felt as if
she were still working in New York, her mind filled with drifting thoughts of
the details that constituted the sum of her life.

There were the taxis, as many
as ten or twelve in a day.
 
Half the
cabdrivers in Manhattan knew her for a big tipper and could recognize her
silhouette as she dashed out of a building to the curb, always in a tearing
hurry, weighed down by her huge Lederer bag, and they stopped in an instant
when she gave her traffic-piercing whistle.
 
Inside the taxi, her magnifying mirror clutched firmly between her
knees, she applied different makeup or put on a pair of eyelashes on the way
from one job to another.
 
If she had an
extra minute she tried to organize the handbag out of which she lived.
 
Certainly it could do everything but give
milk, full as it was with her bulging cosmetic case, her hairpieces, her three
kinds of bras, her collection of slips to wear under any kind of dress, her own
assortment of scarves, gloves and jewelry for those advertising sittings where
there was no accessory editor, her three pairs of shoes of different style and
heel height for the occasions when no had thought to get shoes in her size.

Of course for a job like this
location trip she had only to travel with a lipstick and her own clothes because
Marietta and Berry provided everything else, but the ordinary working day
always held at least one emergency.
 
As
the sun touched her face through the window of the plane Teddy remembered a
trip to Nassau with Mirheline Swift, the superb Swiss model, and John Rawlings
the photographer.
 
He had bet the two of
them that if they could list the contents of their bags without looking he
would give them each a hundred dollars in cash and, as a handicap, he allowed
them each to forgot thirty items.
 
They'd
both lost by a mile.

She sighed and tried to
forget the routine of her life but the sun through her eyelids only made her
think of the lights of a studio.
 
Whenever she looked in a mirror it was to make a routine inspection of
the texture of a serviceable fabric.
 
Her
face was no more than a machine she owned, a machine that had only a certain,
limited life span.

Had she danced too late at
the St. Regis Roof last night?
 
If so,
tonight it must be bed at nine, no matter what she had planned.
 
Nobody would keep paying seventy dollars an
hour for Teddy Lunel if there was even the faintest hint of fatigue under her
eyes.

Did anyone who envied a
professional beauty ever think about the cost of maintaining the façade; the
hours of upkeep, the ringing of the alarm at six-thirty every morning, the cold
hamburgers that had to be eaten on the run for their power to keep her standing
on her weary legs as long as ten hours a day?
 
It was the exhaustion that finally got to you, the exhaustion that made
you wait without too much fear for that first wrinkle.
 
If a model's father had died, if she was
going through a divorce, or if she had just discovered she was pregnant when
she shouldn't be, she still had to be fully there for the camera.
 
Only the camera mattered.
 
Did anyone fully understand, besides another
model, that there could be no narcissism in a business that demanded total
concentration on what the photographer wanted from you, allied to a total lack
of self-consciousness, so that you forgot yourself for hours as you gave it to
him, moving constantly as you poured out pure energy?
 
It was almost like dance when it went well
but good God in heaven,
it was so endlessly boring
.

Still, it bought
freedom.
 
Her weekly paycheck had been
almost three thousand dollars for several years now, she had moved from her
little apartment where she had first been safe from Maggy's scrutiny, to an
elegant set of rooms on East Sixty-third Street and, if she kept in training,
there was no reason why she shouldn't work at this rate for another three or
four years, or maybe more, depending on how well the face held up.

But was that what she wanted
?
 
When had she signed on for this?
 
Teddy had celebrated her twenty-fourth
birthday last spring and as far as she knew there wasn't a girl with whom she'd
been at college who wasn't married by now and didn't have at least one
child.
 
She didn't want that, Teddy
thought, or rather, not exactly that, not a bunch of kids in the suburbs.
 
But she didn't want to end up like her mother
either, still consumed by her business, beginning to feel just a trifle
threatened by some of the new agencies that had opened in the late 1940s, like
the Fords and Frances Gill and Plaza 5.

As the sound of the motors
changed and settled down Teddy wished that she were making this long trip
alone.
 
Lately there seemed never to be a
time to just sit and look up at the sky and dream.
 
Day tumbled after day, completely filled,
crowded with obligations and appointments. Each evening after she came home
from her last booking she'd phone the agency and find out what she would be
doing during every hour tomorrow.

Then, if she wasn't so tired
that she needed to go to bed early, she'd hurry to bathe and dress and go out
to the Stork Club or "21", or L'Aiglon or Voisin for dinner with any
of the twenty men she could summon at the last minute.
 
There hadn't been anybody she wanted to make
love to, for, oh, two months or more, she thought with dismay.
 
Why were men all so alike?

This summer she had spent
weekend after weekend in Connecticut or out on Long Island where all the house
parties seemed, in the end, to be the same.
 
Teddy didn't miss spending those summer weekends in the city, although
they could have their social charm
—
ah, but only if you were in love
and the city seemed have been emptied just for you.
 
Or rather, only if you
thought
you
were in love, Teddy reflected sadly.
 
She
had almost believed she was in love a few times in her life but it had never
come true, not even with Melvin, her darling Melvin whom she still loved but
with whom she had never been in love no matter how hard she had tried to be.

It had lasted for an entire
year and there was no friend more dear, no lover more tender, but Melvin had
never fit her dream, although he had come achingly close, so close that when he
realized that his kind of love and her kind of love were never going to lock
together he had been so desperately unhappy that they had had to part.

Every time she had been
seriously involved with a man, Teddy thought, there had come a moment when she
realized that she was like a stranger in a foreign country who tries to pay in
an unacceptable currency.
 
The coins of
her emotions, on which she planned to live, turned out to be worthless.
 
She could search her pockets, empty her
wallet, as if she were in a nightmare, but she could never seem to find the
right amount of...
 
oh, of whatever it
took to be in love really and truly.
 
Her
deepest fear, so buried that she failed to articulate it, was that something in
her, some incurable emptiness, had already doomed her to inspire love but never
to feel it.

Teddy's most excessive
fantasies had all been fulfilled many times over.
 
She'd had everything the world of high
fashion could offer, more adulation and attention in eight average working
hours than any bride on her wedding day.
 
But more and more often she felt the surfacing of a long neglected but
unappeased child in her, a timid little girl who wanted to be taken care of,
who craved some vaguely seen but all-powerful man on whom she could depend. Teddy
snorted at her own absurdity.
 
She made
more money than almost any man she knew... but recently a lot of her days had
felt like one long, dreary, late Sunday afternoon.

She stood up abruptly,
smoothing down the white capeskin jacket cut exactly like a man's button-down
shirt that she wore over gray flannel slacks.
 
She surveyed the next rows of the first-class cabin of the Constellation
and shook her head severely at her traveling companions.
 
"I guess all you people just don't give
a damn," she said, "but I'd like to know what the hell has happened
to my Martini?
 
I'm going to find that
stewardess.
 
Does anybody want anything
while I'm on my feet?"