Mistral's Daughter (60 page)

"Couldn't you tell him
all this and make him understand?"

"I don't think I could
get more than halfway through the first sentence.
 
You've never heard him argue, or rather
pontificate.
 
And even if he heard me out
and managed to understand what I
 
was
saying, working there in that studio isn’t possible.
 
It casts such a spell that you can't imagine
seeing things in any other way than his.
 
It overwhelms my own imagination, such as it is.
 
But I do have to pose for him, there's no way
out."

Eric sat down at her
feet.
 
"What does that mean as far
as time is concerned?"

"He wanted to work for a
few hours in the morning and a few after lunch but I said that I could only sit
for him in the mornings.
 
He said that we
had only six weeks left, that mornings wouldn't be enough, but, I
insisted.
 
I feel torn in two, Eric.
 
I've never felt disloyal before, and now I
feel disloyal to both of you."

"Not so.
 
You're being loyal to both of us.
 
Darling, darling Fauve, don't torment
yourself.
 
I know how much of your time
I've been taking and I can't blame your father.
 
We still have the afternoons and evenings.
 
Look, I was saving this for later but you need
to be cheered up."
 
Eric took out an
old, leather-bound book from his knapsack and gave it to Fauve.

"Believe it or not my
mother gave it to me just yesterday.
 
She
finally remembered that she had it put away somewhere
—
it was published
in 1934 and when my grandmother died, it was in her house.
 
Apparently no one in the family ever bothered
to read it."

"Histoire des Juifs
d'Avignon et du Comtat Venaissin
by Armand Mossé" Fauve read the title of
the book in a voice that rose in excitement.
 
"That's it! That's got to have it all!
 
The Comtat includes all the countryside
around here.
 
Oh, how terrific!
 
Have you started it yet?"

"No, I thought we'd read
it together, but now that we don't have as much time, you take it and read it
whenever you get a chance.
 
Maybe you can
read while you're posing."

"Not with my father, I
don't
—
no distractions, no eye movements, I hardly dare swallow."
Fauve leaned down and took the book in her arms and cradled it against her
breasts.
 
"I'll take good care of
it, I promise.
 
I wonder how far back it
goes?"

"I took a look at the
first page and apparently Jews were being exiled from Rome and moving to France
when Tiberius was Emperor
—
somewhere about twenty years after Christ
—
so if it's antiquity you're looking for, it's there."

"Oh
—
I had
expected something a little more contemporary."

"A Jewish
Gone With
the Wind?"

"Well
—
why not,
after all?"

Fauve stood by the model
stand in the shocking pink minidress she had worn the night she met Eric at
Uzés.
 
Since she couldn't be with him
while she was posing, at least she could wear what she'd had on the first time
she'd seen him.
 
She felt a need to be in
some sort of contact with him at every moment of the day.

Now that she had resigned
herself to the morning hours of posing, she found that they were welcome in a
way she hadn't expected.
 
They gave her
time to really think about Eric that she hadn't had before.
 
They'd spent almost every day of the summer
together and when she came home she was too muddled with the slow, sweet
momentum of his kisses to have any rational thoughts except an almost
vertiginous astonishment that such happiness could exist.
 
What a world of wonders in which an Eric
could be alive, wandering around loose just as if he were like other people, a
world in which he would love her. The amazement of it was so great that it was
undecipherable, it changed everything, it turned all her past years into a
far-off country that she had sailed away from without a backward glance.

She thought of the firm
symmetry of his skull under her fingers when she ran her hands through that
brown hair that was so clean and so thick that it resisted her fingers.
 
She could actually feel the solid roundness
of the bone in the tips of her fingers.
 
She stood in her ballet slippers, her feet at right angles to each
other, her weight resting on one leg, the other one slightly bent, her hands
turned outward and her arms hanging loosely behind her back.
 
It was a pose that Mistral had chosen as a
tribute to Degas, saying that her pink skirt was shorter than any tutu and
might even have brought a smile to the mouth of that vile-tempered, great old
man.

To Fauve, posing patiently,
the image of a small triangular scar on Eric's face, just below his right eye,
the souvenir of a fall when he was five, was more real to her than the sound of
Mistral's footsteps as he stepped backward from the easel.

On her lips she could feel
how smooth the warm skin was when she kissed Eric at the edge of his ear and
then, lowering her lips a quarter-inch at a time, kissed him lightly and softly
down the side of his closely shaven cheek and along his jaw and finally,
slowly, reached her lips up to his longing mouth.

He'd said that she had the
softest lips in the world but Fauve told him that she couldn't make any similar
comparisons because none of the other men she'd kissed in her life had had
memorable lips.
 
She smiled, remembering
how he'd drawn back when she said that and demanded to know just how many men
she had kissed before.
 
A few, she'd
answered, only a few, just a few, a miserable, pathetic few, knowing that
nothing could be more calculated to infuriate him.
 
She was unable to keep from making him
jealous, because he was four years older than she was and, of course, she
understood, although he never referred to it, that he must be experienced and
she was not.

He was so infernally
protective of her sixteen years, Fauve thought, frowning, unaware that Mistral
was noticing every change of expression on her face.
 
She wished fiercely now that she had lied to
Eric when he'd asked her age.
 
If only
she'd said she was eighteen!
 
With her
height she could have made him believe it, especially since he had no way to
compare her to an American eighteen and guess the truth.
 
But he knew she was just barely out of her
fifteenth year and he had a gallant, idealistic determination not to take
advantage of her.

Last night they'd had an
early dinner at a good, inexpensive little Italian restaurant called La Mamma
in Villeneuve-les-Avignon, and afterward they had gone exploring in the garden
of LePrieuré, not the formal rose garden bordered by santolina and ancient
urns trailing geraniums, but the hidden cutting garden, in which grew the fresh
flowers that were placed in the guest rooms every day.

Because all the personnel of
the hotel were concentrated on the busy arrival of the evening's guests for the
restaurant, they'd been able to duck unseen through the garage and the boiler
room of the hotel and emerge into the walled cutting garden, a paradise of
blooms all bordered by those little hollow, elfin, red objects called Chinese
lanterns.

They had wandered there
—
arms laced tightly around each other's waist, and finally come to rest leaning
up against an old, overgrown, unpruned pear tree that stood in the far reaches
of the garden.

Fauve and Eric were entirely
alone and protected from sight by the branches of the tree and Fauve had flung
herself on Eric, thrusting herself against him and rubbing up and down.
 
She didn't care if she was awkward or clumsy
or aggressive, whatever she didn't know about making love she could learn, she
would learn, but he pushed her away, first gently and then with determination,
holding her at arm's length.

No, he'd said, it was clearly
impossible and she had to realize it herself.
 
If he let her go on like that it must lead further and then even further
and then they wouldn't be able to stop, wouldn't want to stop, didn't she
understand?
 
She was too young, it
wouldn't be right, wouldn't be fair...
 
Fauve sighed deeply, wondering if he was right, suspecting that perhaps
he was, but oh, how she wanted him.

"Fauve!
 
I can't work if you're going to make one
grimace after another!
 
Now will you try
to keep your face quiet for a minute or shall we stop?"

Fauve blew her hair off her
forehead with an exaggerated moue.
 
"I'm not making a grimace, I'm thinking.
 
Do you want to paint a picture of a mindless
doll or a thinking woman?"

"Hal
 
You make a point, even if it's a bit
premature.
 
All right, let's take a
break."

Fauve stepped out of her pose
and uncoiled her body like a long piece of rope and stretched every joint.
 
Then she walked over to the planter's chair
in the corner of the studio and sat down, picking up the old book Eric had
given her, and, within a few seconds, she was engrossed.

Mistral knew far too much
about the book.
 
When they had started on
the painting she had brought it with her and, during every break, she had
returned to it, often pausing to read bits and pieces of it out loud to him.
 
Finally, exasperated, he had told her that it
broke his concentration to listen to her, that it was bad enough for a painter
to have to give the model a rest every so often without being forced to absorb
a history lesson in addition.

 
"Well," she'd said mildly, "all
right, but this is incredible stuff.
 
I'll tell you about it later," and she'd gone back to her
reading.
 
Only last year, whenever it was
time for her break, they'd talked about their painting, or she'd amused him
with stories about those two friends of hers, Pomme and Épinette, who were,
impossible though it seemed, the granddaughters of two of the members of his
original boules team from the café in the village.

Sometimes, he remembered
bitterly, they'd go to sit in the sun just outside the studio and discuss the
status of the Union Sportif of Félice, the feisty soccer team that was engaged
in a protracted and perpetual struggle with the other soccer teams of the
neighboring villages.
 
Often, in those
precious minutes, he'd explained to her why art was the only thing worth doing
in a world of chaos, the only thing that had any possibility of enduring.
 
History, he had told her, was merely stories
of what people think happened or want you to believe happened.
 
History can't be trusted.

And now, there she was,
obliviously plunged into history as if it were a revelation of an immutable
truth.
 
What would he give to have his
daughter back again, to have the Fauve of last year in the place of this
self-described "thinking woman"?
 
Almost anything, Mistral thought, almost anything, but what was there
that he had to give that a girl of sixteen could want?

"Ready to
continue?" he asked.

"Oh...
 
sure.
 
But, Father, would you mind terribly if we stopped a half-hour early
today? Eric's parents are spending a few days in Aix for the music festival and
they've invited us down to lunch at the Vendôme
—
it's an
hour-and-a-half trip and I don't want to be late.
 
Is that all right, just for today?"

What could he say?
 
Could he insist that she stay?
 
That she make the time up tomorrow? This
wasn't the first time the sitting had been cut short for one reason or
another.
 
To be fair, he told himself
frowningly, it wasn't the first time he'd realized that in order to pose for
him she was giving up some excursion that required an early start and a late
return.
 
When he painted her during all
those other summers, their time together had been filled with a deep communion,
the melody of which he only fully appreciated now that it had disappeared, to
be replaced by duty and an abstracted fondness.

"Of course, Fauve, go
ahead.
 
We can stop now if you
like."

"Oh, Father! You're a
darling!
 
Thank you!"
 
Released, she gave him a quick hug and
bounded out of the studio not even thinking to conceal her sense of relief.

Yet, he noticed, his jaw set
in a grim, tight anger, a line of pain and hurt pride, she hadn't forgotten to
take that miserable book with her.