Mistral's Daughter (66 page)

Fauve
had immersed herself in work with an efficiency and a diligence that had amazed
Maggy, and during those first two years she was given an opportunity to learn
every job in the agency.
 
By the time
Fauve was nineteen, in the spring of 1972, Maggy grew accustomed to being able
to count on Fauve to make decisions she had never allowed anyone else to make
but herself.
 
In action Fauve was crisp,
forceful and effective in a way that demonstrated a solidity greater than her
years.

It
was then that Maggy dared to take a vacation, her first in a long time, and
when she and Darcy returned from two weeks in London she found her agency
flourishing and Fauve secure and serene.
 
Maggy was invaded by elation, a giddy feeling, an intoxication of
relief, glorious relief, that lightened her limbs and made her thirst for
activities she hadn't allowed herself much time for in all those years since
she'd started her own business, those years in which she'd supported herself and
her daughter, vowing never again to be weak and foolish enough to depend on a
man for anything but affection, and even to do without that if necessary.

She
gave herself permission to sleep deliciously late in the morning, arriving at
the office only two hours before it was time to go out to lunch with a friend,
where she sat talking until the middle of the afternoon as heedlessly as if she
had been doing it all of her life.
 
She
threw away all her hats and gloves
—
what were they doing in her
wardrobe?
 
She had her hair restyled and
even changed its color, from the determined auburn that was appropriate for her
office persona, to a softer color, artfully blended with titian and light brown
into which a few stray strands of silver were allowed to wander as if by
mistake.
 
Maggy spent many hours shopping
for new, less tailored clothes and she hired Susie Frankfort to give her grand,
almost too dignified, apartment a whimsical and original charm.
 
Oh, but it was bliss to begin to lay down the
burden she had carried alone for so long, Maggy thought, but why had no one
noticed?
 
Everyone treated her just as
they always had, she realized with increasing pique.
 
She had been The Boss, that old reliable, a
workhorse with business on her mind for so long that people saw her only in
that light. She didn't expect them to act as if she had just been elected Queen
of the May but surely someone might have noticed!

One
night, late in that spring season that was like a rebirth, Maggy and Darcy went
out to dinner.
 
At "21," the
headwaiter, Walter Weiss, led them to their table, the same table at which they
had sat that first time they had been there together in 1931 when it had been
the best speakeasy in New York.

Darcy,
as was his unalterable, almost sacred habit of forty-two years, sat at table 7
in the first section of the bar, to the left of the entrance and in the center
of the side wall. It was a prime, strategic, highly visible and much coveted
banquette to which many other powerful men had aspired in vain.

Any
table in the first two sections of the bar was utterly desirable, for
"21" was the only dining place in New York that had retained the
glory and the glamour of its legend, the only restaurant whose imperial status
remained undiminished as it rode out the decades with the steadiness of a great
ocean liner on which nothing could possibly go wrong; a world unto itself as no
other restaurant in the United States has ever succeeded in being or ever will
be again.
 
The assurance of always being
led to a certain specific and distinguished table in the bar at "21"
was something mere money had never been able to buy, a symbol more valued than
a membership in the most exclusive club or a seat on the most important board
of directors since it signified a high and continued place in the power
structure of the country. Darcy's lien on table 7 was part of the innermost
organization of his life, and he sighed in visible contentment as they settled
down on the banquette.

"Why,"
complained Maggy, "do we
always
have to sit in this bar?
 
Do you realize that we've never eaten in the
main dining room upstairs?"
 
Darcy
looked as astonished as if he'd found table 7 occupied by a rock star.
 
"I understand," Maggy continued
with a wistful air that verged on petulance, "that it's very agreeable upstairs.
 
I hear it's less noisy and more
spacious.
 
Onassis always eats there and
Dr. Armand Hammer and Mrs. Douglas MacArthur and Nelson Rockefeller...
 
and we're always stuck down here.
 
It does seem too bad."

"But
you've never wanted to eat upstairs, you've never even seen it as far as I
know."
 
Darcy was outraged.
 
The upstairs was all right, he supposed,
solid and corporate and formal, but a man with any juice left in his bones
would always prefer to eat in the bar, in which he fancied he could still feel
and hear and smell those great days of Prohibition, when Jack and Charlie's
served the best booze in town.

"That's
no reason for you to make such assumptions," Maggy said plaintively.
 
She plucked disdainfully at the distinctively
checked red-and-white tablecloth.
 
"On the tables upstairs there's lovely plain white linen, the heavy
old-fashioned kind, all slippery and starched, at least that's what Lally
said.
 
And there are flowers on the
tables instead of these ugly red match holders." She sighed with the
resigned sadness of a penniless little girl pressing her nose against a candy
store window and pensively adjusted the bow of the navy blouse that went with
her new, dashingly nautical, white Adolfo suit.

"Damn
it, if you're so unhappy here, why the hell didn't you tell me sooner!"
Darcy said furiously. "Let's go upstairs...
 
come on."

"Oh,
no, it's too much trouble.
 
It was just a
thought, something that wandered through my mind," Maggy murmured.
 
"Anyway I'm not exactly unhappy here,
I'm just restless."
 
She sipped the
glass of champagne from the bottle of Bollinger Brut 1947 the waiter had opened
as soon as he saw Maggy and Darcy sit down at the table at which they dined two
or three times a week.
 
"I wonder
what tequila tastes like," she said in a forlorn, diminished voice.

"I'll
order you some," Darcy snorted, raising his eyebrows.

"Oh,
no, never mind, don't bother, I don't really care, it was just a passing
fancy."
 
She looked pitifully sorry
for herself as she rejected the mere idea of tequila.
 
"Champagne is quite good enough for
me...
 
or so you've always
assumed...
 
just pay no attention."

"What
the devil is this all about actually?" Darcy asked, twisting around so
that he faced her as she sat, as upright and slender as she had ever been and
in so many infuriating ways as unexaminable a siren as she'd been on the first
night he'd taken her here and looked into her great eyes of that color that was
still just as much green as it was gold, and wondered who the hell was Maggy
Lunel?

"I'm
tired..." she almost whispered.

"We'll
go home," he said, alarmed.
 
Maggy
was never tired unless she was sick.

"I'm
tired of your thinking that I'm not open to new experiences, I'm tired of
being treated as if any change in routine would be unwelcome," she
murmured.
 
"I'm tired of...
 
of...
 
your lack of attention, Darcy.
 
You take me for granted," she said, broodingly.

"What
absolute rot!"

"So
you deny it, do you?"
 
Suddenly she
quivered with energy.
 
Her words came
pouring out.
 
"I thought you would, an
insensitive, thoughtless, unromantic man like you...
 
a woman might as well go out for dinner with
her old uncle...
 
her grandfather...
 
her great-grandfather."

"What!"
he roared.

"Don't
shout at me!
 
Just how long has it been
since the last time you asked me to marry you?"
 
Her face was flushed with accusation and
indignation.

"How
long?
 
As long as it's been since I
decided to stop making a goddamned fool out of myself!
 
That's how long..." he sputtered, with
the injustice of her words.

"You
haven't answered my question."
 
She
was implacable.
 
"Fifteen years
—
no, I think I asked you on Valentine's Day once, about a dozen years ago, like
an utter ass.
 
Yes
—
I remember it
now...
 
you seemed particularly loving
that night and I just gave it another shot, just like poor, bloody, old
faithful that I am, even though I knew perfectly well that there wasn't a
chance.
 
You'd think I'd have
learned."

"Ah
ha!" Maggy's anger was triumphant.
 
"So now I know why you kept asking.
 
Because you were safe and it cost you absolutely nothing to make the
gesture.
 
I've always thought so, I
always knew you were just like the others, I've always seen through your
act.
 
I've had quite enough of this
neglect, thank you!
 
I despise your low
tactics and I don't intend to put up with them for another minute.
 
It's shameful, a disgrace!"

"You...
 
you...
 
ungrateful bitch!"

"Is
that a proposal?" she demanded, eyes flashing fury.

"Absolutely
not!"

"So!
 
When it comes down to it you're unwilling to
make a commitment, aren't you?
 
Too big a
decision, isn't it?" she sneered.
 
"Okay, Darcy, you have exactly one minute to get your priorities
straight."

"Is
that a proposal?"

"Only
a man who lacked gallantry to his very soul would ask a woman to answer such a
question.
 
How dare you?"

"Captain!"
Darcy beckoned him over.
 
"We're
moving upstairs for dinner.
 
Send up two
double tequilas on the rocks.
 
Madame and
I have some arrangements to make and there's just too damn much noise in this
saloon."

And
so, Maggy remembered, they had been married two years ago, and high time too as
Lally Longbridge had said, taking all the credit as usual.
 
She was still standing in front of the
mirror, almost in a trance, when Darcy came in, dressed to go to Fauve's
birthday party.
 
As she looked at their
double reflection she felt a little, irrepressible jump of blithesome
joy.
 
How right she had been to marry
this man.

Darcy
ate another tiny potato stuffed with fresh caviar and dotted with sour cream
and decided that Henry McIheeny, that bon vivant who had once said,
"Caviar should never be served with cocktails. You have to be seated to
enjoy it," had been entirely too pompous.
 
He took another and popped it into his mouth, making the most of a
momentary lull at the top of the staircase where he and Maggy stood greeting
their guests while behind them the party was approaching that moment at which
it could be said to be in orbit.
 
Yet
where
was Fauve?

Polly
Mellen, of
Vogue,
who knew more about putting the absolutely right
model in the absolutely right dress
—
and most important of all
—
in absolutely the right
way,
was there, with most of her staff members,
and so was Tony Mazzola, who had been editor-in-chief of
Harper's Bazaar
forever,
accompanied by his upper echelon, and so was Tom Hogan of Clairol and Estée
Lauder with her entire family and Gilbert Shawn, president of Warshaw, the
catalog producers and perhaps the most prolific employer of models in the
world, and to Darcy's utter astonishment, so were Eileen and Jerry Ford, whose
model agency had been Maggy's chief
—
and formidable
—
competition since the late 1940s.

The
fact that Maggy had invited her only major rival was the most significant
indication that the woman he had loved for so long had truly changed, Darcy
mused.
 
Three years ago, if he had been
asked whether it was more likely that Maggy would marry him or that she'd ask
the Fords to a party, he would have picked marriage, as impossible as it had
then seemed.
 
The competition between the
two agencies had escalated with the years and with the steady raise in the
hourly rates paid to the models.

Maggy's
income, before expenses, on the fees earned by her girls, came to close to two
million dollars a year and the Fords were not far behind.
 
Each agency had, among its several hundred
models, a group of a half-dozen or so top models, who would, while earning more
than almost any man in America, always be called "girls" and never
"women."
 
These girls were
property, as real as if each of them were a fully rented office building whose
tenants always paid their rent on time.