Mistral's Daughter (45 page)

"What about your
mother?
 
She's not going to like this, is
she?"

"Oh, she'll
understand," Teddy said slowly. "I have the feeling that she'll
understand better than anyone."

In a French city of medium
size the best restaurant in town is often characterized by a straightforward
lack of decor that announces clearly that here everything is focused on great
food.

The restaurant Hiely in
Avignon was located in one large but unassuming rectangular room, plainly
paneled in wood, its comfortably large tables spread with plain yellow cloths,
its plain parquet floor highly polished.
 
On a center table stood a whole smoked ham surrounded by bowls of fresh
fruit, and platters of cooked lobsters and bottles of wine reclining in
individual baskets. However, there was no other display, the windows were
undraped, there were no flowers on the tables and the unupholstered wooden
chairs stood around the table in a dignified and reasonable manner that
indicated that this place was devoted to gastronomy with a philosophy of total
concentration.

As Julien Mistral and Teddy
Lunel sat facing each other at a quiet table in a window alcove Teddy wondered
why nobody had ever warned her that love at first sight would strike her dumb.
Veteran of thousands of first dinners she had never found herself so at a loss
for speech.
 
They had already said so
much to each other, in front of other people and protected from its
consequences by the fact that they were in public, even though unheard, that
now that they were finally alone together she was tongue-tied, reduced to a few
banal words about the food.

Julien Mistral, who had never
hesitated to make his opinions
known, a man to whom shyness was the most
unfamiliar of states, found himself almost as silent as Teddy.
 
A lamentable performance, he told
himself.
 
He was choking with things that
had to be said but he too scarcely managed to push his food around on his
plate.
 
Where to start?
 
Not at the beginning because this had started
a long time ago; yesterday seemed another era of his life.
 
He couldn't begin in the middle because this
strangely solemn, awkward dinner
was
the middle.
 
They didn't know each other after all, yet he
could see no future for them that was not a continuation.
 
The necessary presence of this woman must
never be withdrawn from him.

To Teddy the rather ordinary
lamplight in the room seemed to tremble as much as her hands as she tried to
make a show of eating.
 
She found herself
singularly unwilling to use any of her easily summoned arsenal of allure.
 
She wanted only to touch Mistral, to hold
him.
 
She had no impulse to flirt because
they had gone beyond flirtation the instant that they had admitted to each
other that neither of them had slept the night before.

Mistral's face, that famous
face, so much more beautiful than she had ever imagined, was grave.
 
He didn't try to joke, he seemed to be
thinking, and the inconsequential comments she might have used to bridge this
moment stuck to her lips before they were spoken.
 
The questions that she wanted to ask him were
either unimportant or too important.
 
There was no middle ground.
 
Teddy
had to know everything about Julien Mistral from the day he been born
—
his life was dense, complicated, foreign
—
yet something informed her
that only the thinnest of veils separated them from knowing each other better
than either of them had ever known anyone.

When the meal was almost over
Teddy looked up from her wineglass and confronted Mistral's gaze, dropping even
the pretense of speech.
 
One single tear,
of some emotion she didn't dare to name, ran slowly down her check.
 
He touched it with his finger, let it be
absorbed by his skin, and around them there fell a web of confused, hesitant
joy that was so fine and fierce that he was freed to talk to her at last.

"Last week," he
said, "I was sure I'd never feel young again.
 
I looked up at the sky that I used to love
and the sunlight was glaring through a thin layer of clouds and the light had a
flat skin of utter hopelessness.
 
I told
myself that it was the human condition and that all that was wrong with me was
that I'd had the ego to think that the human condition could never apply to
me."

"And now?" Teddy
asked gravely.

"l feel as if I had
never been young before, never known what it was, as if all the years of my
youth were spent in a kind of emptiness.
 
I thought it was being alive because I couldn't envision anything
better.
 
I wasn't unhappy
—
I
worked and I lived like any other man and I didn't ask myself questions because
I was painting and I've always believed that was the only thing I wanted.
 
I can't tell you that I missed you then
because I didn't know you existed.
 
It's
only now that I understand how incomplete I was."

"But during half of your
life I didn't exist."
 
She smiled
gently as she spoke.

"Does that seem even
remotely possible to you?
 
I know it's
true, but I can't make myself
feel
it."

"We should have been
born on the same day," Teddy cried passionately.
 
We should have grown up together!
 
You could always have been with me
—
oh, I've been waiting for you
forever
.
 
Those hours in which I felt unhappy and only half a person
—
oh,
so many hours
—
it was because you weren't there.
 
I was afraid this could never happen to
me," she said, liberated by a great wind of gladness.
 
"I never expected to be a girl like
this."

"And I," Julien
Mistral said incredulously, "I never expected to be
a man like this
...
 
it is so...
 
thorough
...
 
it makes me
understand other men, men who give up everything for a woman, men I used to be
so scornful of
—
it makes me feel...
 
human
, just like everyone else.

"Is that a blow?"
Teddy said, her laugh a promise.

"It would have been
until yesterday.
 
Now it is such an
extraordinary...
 
relief
..."
 
Even as he spoke he listened to himself and
marveled.
 
He had never talked to any
woman like this, never dreamed it was possible, never known that these words
could come to his lips, never imagined himself swept up by an emotion that
clearly announced itself as the most important feeling he had ever experienced,
a rapture.

"I can't survive
you."
 
His declaration was a mixture
of wonder and certainty.

"You don't have
to."

"You will not leave
me."
 
It was an elated command, not
question.

"How could I?"
Teddy asked.
 
Her entire face was
illuminated by such an unconditional declaration of love that it was as if she
taken her heart and was holding it in her eyes for him to see.

"You could not."

Together they laughed like
pagan gods.
 
In the space of five phrases
they had agreed to banish the outside world, they swept away all the problems
they would face, resolved, even as they saw the consequences, for neither of
them was so simple as to imagine that they would be allowed to escape, that
nothing could stop them.
 
Chaos had been
accepted, madness
—
that
folie à deux
that , overcomes lovers
—
was to be their daily bread.

"Come with me now,"
Mistral said.

"Where?"
 
For an instant Mistral looked blank.
 
He thought of the Hotel Europe, once the
magnificent residence of a nobleman of the sixteenth century, built around a
courtyard with splashing fountains.
 
It
had been turned into a hotel a century before.
 
At this time of year they would have empty rooms.
 
Tomorrow he would make arrangements,
permanent ones, but for tonight the Europe would harbor them as it had so often
welcomed lovers in this profound sensuous city where the papal court had known
many joyous sinners.

"Just come," he
said to Teddy. "I'll take care of you, don't you know that?"

She flushed with a new kind
of happiness.
 
None of the men in her
life had seemed to know that she wanted to be told what to do, even to be
ordered to do it.
 
Melvin almost
understood...
 
thought of him drifted
into her memory and then was extinguished utterly.

She stood up and walked
across the restaurant with him, not noticing that dozens of Frenchmen had paid
her the ultimate honor of ceasing to eat or drink so that they could look at
her undistracted.

Irrevocable
.
 
The word beat in her mind as Julien Mistral
entered her for the first time.
Irrevocable
. Once inside the door of the
hotel room they had fallen on the bed together without a second's hesitation,
their madness of desire too severe to leave time for any conventional,
ritualistic approach to each other.
 
Almost fully dressed they made love with a clumsiness, an urgency that
was final and necessary. It had to be done quickly, their pact to seal this
act.

Only when, it was over did he
undress her and take off his own clothes and make her lie quietly on the
pillows while he touched her softly with his long hands, felt her as slowly and
delicately and deliberately as if he were blind and could know her only from
his fingertips.

Now Teddy delighted in being
docile, taking a rare pleasure in not moaning or moving, as if he had ordered
her to be still and wait.
 
Now that she
belonged to him they had all the time in the world.
 
She let him move his hands back and forth
with infinite care, never quite reaching that tender flesh that lay between her
legs, until she burned too hotly to endure it any longer.
 
She rose up and covered his body with her
own, discovering him as urgent as a boy.

Irrevocable
. He moved
powerfully within her as he filled her in a way in which she had never been
filled before.
 
She clasped him deep
within her, every one of her senses expanding until she knew that she had
floated free beyond her own boundaries, that she had dissolved and he had
dissolved and that together they had formed one being.
 
Forever, she thought.
 
Forever
.

19

Even in the middle of winter
a particular gaiety always rules in Avignon.
 
As Teddy hurried down the rue Joseph Vernet to the hairdresser she was
bundled up warmly against the brisk, dry cold that covered the South of
France.
 
But a festive sun shone out of a
clear sky on to all the ancient stones of the town, stones of silver, stones
like brown sugar, stones the gold of champagne, stones of rose and soft faded
purple.
 
Rue Joseph Vernet, curving and
narrow, was as chic as a small street of Paris, bordered by townhouses whose
ground floors were converted into
salons de coiffures
, flower shops,
antique stores, and elegant little clothing boutiques.
 
Teddy had a Friday morning appointment to get
her hair done, the only fixed appointment in any of her weeks, for Teddy Lunel
and Julien Mistral had made a life together that existed outside of ordinary
time.

From the first night they
spent together they had not once been parted.
 
He had never returned to
La Tourrello
, he had abandoned it as if
his house, his studio, his wife and his child were but a single worn-out sock,
and they had lived together in a condition of astonished happiness that, in the
last four months, had isolated them from the realities of everyday
existence.
 
They were so untouched by
ordinary considerations that together they were like one sailing ship, lifted
by a keen and steady wind, endlessly headed toward a rosy island.

After their first days at the
Hotel Europe they had discovered a big apartment for rent inside the medieval
walls of this queenly city with its opulent Tuscan light, its hundred bell
towers, its history of pageantry and jubilation stretching from the days when
seven popes had held lavish court, taking under their protection
—
for a
price
—
those who did not feel safe outside the borders of the
town:
 
Jews, smugglers, escaped prisoners
and, Teddy imagined, many other lovers like themselves.
 
Avignon, lively, prosperous, laughing within
its golden ramparts, contained everything to make life delightful, she thought,
as she lay back and felt the expert hands of the shampoo assistant brush out
her hair.