Mistral's Daughter (44 page)

"Stage wait," Berry
muttered sympathetically.
 
It was odd to
see Teddy visibly nervous. She'd treated Picasso and Matisse as if they'd been
old beaux from dancing school days.

"How are my
eyebrows?" Teddy asked.
 
The style
of 1952 demanded heavy, arched and strongly emphasized eyebrows placed halfway
between anyone's normal brows and the forehead. No model, not even Teddy, could
depart from this cosmetic convention, but unlike other models, Teddy had
refused to shave or pluck her own light red eyebrows.
 
She had covered them with makeup and penciled
false brows above them, a delicate, painstaking process
that took at
least a half-hour to do perfectly.

"Still on," Berry
reassured her.

"I have this awful
feeling that they're slipping."

"Don't worry, I'd tell
you if they were."

The tall doors of the studio
opened and Julien Mistral walked slowly toward them along the side of the
swimming pool wiping his hands on a paint-stained rag that he stuffed in the
pocket of his corduroy pants.
 
Kate introduced
him to Marietta Norton and then she asked the fashion editor to introduce her
colleagues.
 
Marietta, flustered by
Mistral's martial bearing, by his unmistakable look of a man who would prefer
to be elsewhere, presented them as quickly as possible, using only their first
names.
 
When Mistral took Teddy's hand he
looked at her a shade more closely than he looked at the others.

"Come into the
studio," he said in French.
 
"Let's get this over with.

They understood him.
 
Berry had finishing school French; Marietta,
Paris Collection French; Teddy, her mother's French and Bill Hatfield,
photographer's French.

Inside the great space of the
studio they all fell silent.
 
Here
reigned a kind of sublime disorder that made the mess of Picasso's studio seem
almost banal.

Only Bill, cursing to himself
at the need to choose between looking at the paintings and taking his pictures
before the sun dimmed, was unable to move.
 
The others simply stood as speechlessly shy as schoolchildren, not
daring to venture a word because anything they said would sound inadequate as
they gazed from one big canvas to another.
 
Each canvas was a meditation on a world in which the commonplace became
a marvel, each a meditation on a human vision that could articulate the
commonplace so that it was perceived for the first time.

Finally Bill picked his spot.
"Come on, Teddy," he said, grabbing her arm.
 
"Go stand over there next to him and
make like you're having fun."
 
Mistral was waiting impatiently in front of his easel, on which stood an
empty canvas.

Gathering all her
professionalism about her, Teddy walked over to him, the skirts of her Swan
Queen dress swaying as she moved so tightly in her ballet slippers.
 
He was so tall that she had to stretch her
neck the full length of its supple ivory arch to look up at him.
 
She had never felt so small next to any man,
Teddy realized, as she tilted her finely cut chin, her head pulled backward by
the heavy mass of her hair.
 
Her
changeable eyes were an unnameable color that held in it the bewitchment of a
thousand twilights.
 
Her smile was an
adventure.

Mistral took her chin in his
hand and turned it to one side and then to the other, expression-lessly.
 
His blue eyes, blazing twin conflagrations,
scanned her face.
 
He pulled the rag on
which he'd wiped his hands out of his pocket.
 
It smelled of turpentine, Teddy had just time enough to think, before
she realized that he was holding her head firmly in one big hand and wiping off
her eyebrows with the other.
 
In unison,
Marietta squawked, Berry shrieked, Bill cursed and Sam hooted.

"That's better.
 
You use too much paint," Mistral said so
that only Teddy heard him.
 
"Just
like your mother."
 
He smiled for
the first time.
 
"But you are a
thousand times more beautiful."

After the furor had quieted
down, everyone from
Mode
went back to the room in which Teddy had
changed and Marietta Norton inspected the damage.
 
She told them all to wait while she went to
straighten things out.
 
She found Kate
with the cook.
 
"Madame Mistral, we
have a problem," she said grimly.

"Oh, no
—
is
there anything I can do?"

"Monsieur Mistral has,
unfortunately, removed my model's eyebrows."

"What!"

"They were penciled on
and he wiped them off.
 
He also seems to
have messed up the makeup base on her forehead.
 
It's going to take her at least an hour to match the top of her face to
the bottom
—
by that time the light will be too low for color
pictures."

"But why on earth ...
?" Kate was furious with him.
 
How
could he be such a boor
—
and after all her careful arrangements?

"I haven't the slightest
idea
—
an artistic decision no doubt
—
 
the fact is that it puts us in a devil of a
spot
—
we have four pages left to fill, and nothing to fill them
with."

"I can't tell you how
sorry
—
 
I can't imagine what he
thought he was up to.
 
Look, I wouldn't
dream of disappointing you, not after you came all this way
—
I'll go
and talk to him.
 
If he could give you
some time tomorrow morning, would that work out or do you have to be somewhere
else?"

"We're not going
anywhere," Marietta said grimly.

"Let me give you a gin
and tonic and get this sorted out."

"Don't bother with the
tonic," Marietta said with a sigh relief.
 
She understood Kate Mistral's kind of woman.
 
They we both equally professional.
 
She'd get her four pages and that was the only
thing that mattered.

The next day, after
breakfast, as they drove back to
La Tourrello
Teddy was more confused
than she had ever been in her life.
 
That
moment, that brief moment when Julien Mistral had held her chin in his hand,
was embedded in her mind as if she'd been shot between the eyes and the bullet
had lodged there.
 
He hadn't said another
word to her
—
bedlam had taken over
—
but she thought about
nothing else since it had happened.
 
It
was as if her life were a film and when Julien Mistral had touched her the
director had yelled "Cut."
 
Until she saw him again the screen must remain blank, waiting.

As soon as Teddy saw Mistral
frowning impatiently at the invasion of their troop into his studio, she knew
that he had been waiting for her as eagerly as if she had been waiting for him.
There could be no doubt about such passionate certainty.
 
She walked over to the easel, holding her
breath.
 
He put out his hand and she took
it and their hands clasped each other tightly without moving for a long second
until they both remembered that they were supposed to be giving the
conventional handshake greeting of France.

"Bonjour, Mademoiselle
Lunel.
 
Did you sleep well?"

"Bonjour, Monsieur
Mistral.
 
I didn't sleep."

"Nor did I."

"Teddy," Bill
Hatfield said, "turn a bit
—
we can't see the dress."
 
I must touch his face, thought Teddy, as she
moved a few inches to her right.
 
I must
put my hands on either side of his head and feel the place at his temples where
his hair starts to grow and the skin looks so smooth.

"Chin down a
little," Bill called, "as if you're looking at the canvas."

I want to kiss his eyes.
 
I want to feel his eyelids with my lips,
Teddy thought, as she stared blankly at the canvas.

"Teddy, could we have a
little more animation?" Bill asked.

I want to put my lips on his
chest where his shirt is unbuttoned at the neck.
 
I want to unbutton his shirt and lay my head
on his chest and then button the shirt up again so that I'm inside it.
 
I want to breathe with his breathing, I want
my heart to beat with his heart.

"Teddy, back to me,
please
—
I'm getting a rear view of the dress again."

I want to make his mouth grow
sweet.
 
I want to feel him laugh under my
mouth, I want to beg him for kisses, I want him to beg me for kisses.

"Damn it,
Teddy."
 
Bill was more surprised
than impatient, Teddy never needed this kind of direction.

"He is not happy, your
photographer," Mistral said quietly.

"His happiness does not
concern me."

"But he won't stop until
he has the photographs he wants."

"No, you're right."

"And the sooner he stops
the sooner we can talk."
 

"What are we going to
talk about?"

"Teddy!
 
You know I can't get anything with your lips
moving for Christ's sake!"

"What are we going to
talk about?" she repeated.

"The rest of our
lives."

"I'm leaving for New
York tomorrow."

"You will stay here with
me."

"Can that be true?"

"You know it is
true."

"Look, guys, Monsieur
Mistral I mean, this isn't working.
 
What
if you both went over to the table in the middle of the room and you show Teddy
your palette?" Bill said with exaggerated calm.

"Where can we
talk?" she asked.

"At the Hiely Restaurant
in Avignon, at eight-thirty tonight. Understood?"

"Understood."
 
Teddy gave Bill a smile that he spent the
rest of his life wishing he'd captured on film and began to go through her
poses as automatically as a well-trained animal, her head tipped so that she
could look at Julien Mistral without meeting his eyes, because if she met his
eyes she would not be able to stand up.
 
All these years, she thought, all these long years of dreaming and
dreaming and falling and falling through the dream to this place, this minute.
No one has ever been real before.
 
No one
else will ever be real again.

As soon as Teddy put herself
seriously to work Bill Hatfield was able to get his photographs quickly.
 
Kate Mistral, who returned from Félice just
as they finished, asked them all to stay for lunch but Marietta had to refuse
because she was afraid of missing the afternoon train for Paris, and all their
luggage still had to be collected back at Le Prieuré.

"Are you all
packed?" Berry asked over her shoulder.
 
Teddy was lying on the bed in the comfortable room they had shared, with
its walls covered in pale yellow fabric printed in a tiny Provençal flower design.

"I'm staying."

"Please, Teddy, you know
that I have no sense of humor about anything to do with arrangements."

"I'm not going back with
you."

"Did you see my
list?
 
I've got all the suitcases, but
oh, God, I can't find the
list
.
 
Why are you just lying there?"

"You weren't listening
—
I'm staying on in Provence...
 
for a
while.
 
I've never seen any place I like
as much as this."

"But you can't just do
that!"

"Why not?" Teddy's
voice was calm yet it was filled with a kind of feverish necessity, and there
was a bright flare of pink under her cheekbones.
 
Berry looked at her anxiously.

"Are you sick?
 
Don't you feel well enough to make the
trip?"

"Of course not.
 
It's a whim...
 
don't you ever have whims, Berry?"

"Certainly not.
 
I won't be able to have them for a dozen
years.
 
Well, okay
—
so
stay...
 
I've found that list
—
God must have listened.
 
Your return
ticket's right here
—
I'll put it on the bureau.
 
You could have mentioned it earlier, that's
all."

"I didn't know
earlier," Teddy said in a voice from a dream.
 
"I'll send the agency a cable so they'll
have the news before you get home."