Mistral's Daughter (69 page)

This
would have been followed by gradual social oblivion, until they would have
found themselves as far outside of authentic society as those members of Café
Society who buy tickets to every big charity ball and overtip the headwaiter at
the Relais Plaza to get a table near the bar, all to bask in the delusion that
they have established themselves in Paris, when actually they have simply been
permitted to fill up a little unused space.

What
do they
do?
those people who aren't invited to the right parties, Nadine
wondered, her entire body stiffened with scorn and contempt.
 
How could they endure their lives when they
had to live outside the only world that mattered?
 
Didn't they know how low they were, how
little they counted, how abject their position?
 
Didn't they realize that they inhabited a wasteland as empty and as void
of meaning as outer space?
 
As she
watched them, the outsiders, ordering splendid gowns at Albin's, she was
repeatedly struck by the incomprehensible fact that these clothes were being
bought to be worn nowhere.
 
The dinners
they were asked to were beneath contempt, their gala restaurant evenings were
despicable.
 
They existed only to make
Albin rich. She might even find them pathetic if they weren't so abhorrent to
her, if their inferiority did not make them, as far as she was concerned, less
than human.

Nadine
bent over the bill from Lenotre, the outstanding caterer of Paris.
 
Since she and Phillipe had no staff except
for a cleaning woman, Lenotre's bill was the largest she had to pay. Every
three months they gave a "cocktail," astutely planned to occur just
before an important first night or a big ball, so that people were content to
serve themselves from a superb buffet of hors d'oeuvres, knowing that they
would eat again later in the evening.
 
As
Nadine wrote the enormous check she thought that nothing would be more stupid
than to employ a second-rate caterer.
 
Better a Lenotre-cocktail than a seated dinner of less quality, she
assured herself, yet remembering with a pang of envy so pure that it felt like
a cold wind, the recent wedding anniversary celebration they had' been invited
to by the Duchess de La Rochefoucauld. Jeanne-Marie had asked a hundred and
forty people for a seated dinner and another two hundred were invited to come
and dance afterward.
 
The only way you could
tell that the hostess was half-American was in her witty choice of food:
Virginia ham and potato salad among all the other delicacies
—
ah, to be
so enormously, unimaginably secure that you could serve such food to King
Umberto of Italy and Prince Charles of Luxembourg, Nadine thought, still rigid
with envy.
 
Jeanne-Marie was the luckiest
woman
—
did she know how lucky she was?
 
Did she appreciate it?

Nadine
pulled herself away from her reverie, reminding herself that she was far more
exacting, more careful, more selective in her choice of guests than the busy
Duchess who gave so many parties that she received people Nadine would never
ask to her home.
 
No, Nadine Dalmas's
little cocktails had become famous for their relentless exclusion of anyone
not absolutely of the first quality.

Frequently
she and Phillipe accepted invitations from people whose social rank was ever so
slightly dubious, simply so that she could fail to invite them.
 
They were always so ridiculously hurt,
expecting no doubt that a cocktail had to become a catch-all for all sorts of
people, believing that reciprocity was due them.
 
There was no question that her formula was
right.
 
Four cocktails a year for only
the best people gave a hostess an infinitely greater allure than if she gave
dozens of sumptuous but less discriminating dinners.
 
And it was so very much cheaper.

Who
would dream that they were not rich?
 
The
best florist, the best caterer, the best clubs short of the Jockey
—
 
Phillipe's family, though good, did not
entitle him to belong to the jockey. Here were the bills from the Polo Club and
the Golf de St. Cloud.
 
Phillipe had
belonged to them as a bachelor, one of his few expenses in that period of his
life, and to have dropped them was unthinkable.
 
His bill for rented polo ponies in the last two months, during which he
played on the Aga Khan's team, was over four thousand francs, she noted, but it
was acceptable to rent your ponies if you played well and at least it wasn't as
expensive as his heavy gambling losses during the winter when the Polo was
filled with gin-rummy players.

Nadine
wrote out the checks as quickly as she could to finish the chore, and as she
wrote, she meditated on the things for which they didn't have to pay.
 
These bills, no matter how high, represented
only a tiny percentage of the scale on which they lived.
 
Nadine's enormous wardrobe constantly
renewed, was made entirely by the House of Jean François Albin; the apartment
cost them nothing, they traveled in their friends' private jets, skied from their
chalets in Haute Savoie or St. Moritz, sailed on their yachts in the Aegean,
spent weeks in the private palaces of St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Porto-Cervo and
Bavaria.
 
She had charge accounts at the
Relais Plaza and Maxim's for lunches, again paid by the House of Albin; and, of
course, they dined out every night during the season in Paris.

Nadine
spent little cash and only where it would be noticed.
 
At Édouard and Frédéric, the-most in-vogue of
the hairdressers of Paris, where she went on an almost daily basis, she tipped
lavishly.

The
man who kept her blond, the boy who shampooed her hair, the man who blew it
dry, the woman who did her nails and toenails
—
they would always be
the first to gossip.
 
If a princess or a
Greek shipowner's wife could afford to be stingy, plain Madame Dalmas could
not.

Plain
Madame Dalmas.
 
Nadine left her desk and
prowled around her salon.
 
Why, she
thought, and wondered why she even bothered to ask herself the bitter question
once again, why had she ever married a poor man?
 
Why hadn't her mother prevented her?
 
Why had she been allowed to commit the folly
of a lifetime?
 
Dazzled as she had been,
surely someone could have, should have stopped her.
 
And not just a poor man but an ineffectual
ass as well who had put together only a few of his nebulous deals in the seven
years of their marriage?

She
must have loved him once, incredible as that now seemed to her.
 
But what else could explain how she had spent
the money her mother had left her when she died?
 
Kate had died of cancer four years earlier,
leaving far more money than she had told Nadine to expect.
 
Apparently she had owned some paintings that
she'd been able to sell at a vast profit.
 
In any case, the money was gone now.
 
Nadine had become a partner in Phillipe's dream, his stupid determination
to have a home in the country.
 
Half of
her inheritance had been spent on buying a château in Normandy.
 
Since then he had refused to give it up
although they had never had the means to restore it properly, and make it
livable.
 
He'd yearned for a home of his
own far too long, he insisted, and anyway, soon they'd have all the money in
the world.

Love
for Phillipe.
 
It must have existed or
why had she allowed him to invest the rest of her mother's legacy?
 
There had been enough to buy a partnership in
a new nightclub that was intended to rival Castel's, with its membership of
three thousand.
 
Jean Castel turned away
hundreds of customers each night, so obviously another boîte was necessary.

Together,
as Phillipe and his other partner believed, they knew everybody who mattered in
that rarefied circle of the children of the night, those famous bored people,
so bored that even their fame bored them, permanently displaced people who
began at eleven each evening to look for a substitute for sleep.
 
What they had failed to realize was that
those people neither wanted, needed nor welcomed any place to go other than
their own, dear, familiar Castel's on the rue Princesse.
 
After a year Phillipe had had to abandon the
horribly expensive undertaking at a total loss.

Yes,
she must have loved him or else she was as criminally lacking in judgment as he
had been.
 
After the failure of the nightclub,
Phillipe acted as if it had been her fault.
 
He grew petulant and sulky with disappointment, punishing Nadine for not
being able to provide him with fresh funds.
 
He became too lazy to charm her any longer.

Was
there any sourness to compare to that of living with a man who had nothing but
charm when he let his charm drop away as if he were a fat woman releasing
herself from a tight corset? Yet, should the phone ring, he sprang into charm
even as he answered it.
 
She could watch
him at a party as dispassionately as if he were behind glass, observe how he
was responded to by men and women both, this man who asked irresistible
questions, who bestowed the most imaginative flattery, who listened with art
and when he spoke of himself, did so modestly and only with humor.
 
A coat of charm encased him like a matador's
suit of lights.
 
Every one of his tricks
was nauseatingly familiar to her.
 
Even
his good looks were repellent.
 
She
cared so little about him that she was indifferent to his affairs.
 
Fortunately he had the good taste to confine
them to women of riches and power who were unfailingly hospitable.
 
It was the only thing he did with any
cleverness.

Nadine
stacked the envelopes in which she had put the checks and carried them into her
bedroom.
 
She would take them to Albin's
to be sent off on Monday.
 
Why buy stamps
when her secretary would put them in the mail?
 
She opened the three sets of doors on one wall of her bedroom and
appraised her wardrobe.
 
A million
francs' worth of clothes, shoes, hats, furs, lingerie; every single item but
the lingerie made to measure, all at a cost to her of only dry cleaning and her
pride.

It
had been years since she realized she hated Jean François Albin.
 
She didn't know when it had started, the
recognition that she was no more than a glorified, dressed-up nursemaid to a
whining, weak, utterly self-centered, frequently cruel little boy who had one
single talent that the world accepted as enormously valuable.
 
His best friend, his muse!

What
a farce it was, a farce they both still played out; Nadine, because she could
not afford to lose the free clothes and the prestige the association gave her;
Albin, because once his brief enchantment with her had run its usual hectic and
always disillusioning course, found that chic, superior Nadine Mistral had
become useful to him.
 
He now required
her to take his neurasthenic Afghans to the vet, fire and hire his domestics,
write his thank-you notes, lunch with the most tedious and wealthy of his
customers, get rid of any overnight lovers who gave themselves pretensions,
buy his hashish, and be at his service twenty-four hours a day.

Tonight
Nadine would have to push and wheedle him through his own birthday party to
which he insisted he wouldn't go after she had spent weeks planning it.
 
Too many lobsters, he had complained, too
many duchesses.
 
Why had she not arranged
something amusing, a picnic, for example, with sauerkraut and pickled pig's
feet and lots of cheap red wine?
 
Why had
she been so conventional, so bourgeois?
 
Nadine had laughed and told him to remember that red wine made him sick,
but she was jagged with outrage.
 
He was
intolerable, she loathed the very sound of his voice, yet her job with Albin
represented the only regular source of income that the enviable Dalmases
possessed.
 
It was only enough to meet a
few of their needs, not quite enough to cover the florist's bill she had just
paid.
 
Since the time the nightclub
venture had failed they had lived almost entirely on money Nadine borrowed
from Étienne Delage, Mistral's dealer.
 
She hated going to him because each time she did she felt more in his
power, but who else would lend her money against the day her father died?

Nadine
flung herself down on her bed and lost herself in her eternally comforting
daydream. He would die.
 
She would
inherit.
 
The estate must be worth...
 
so much...
 
so much!
 
She couldn't imagine how
much.
 
Of course she couldn't sell so
quickly that she depressed the market but she would realize at least many
millions of francs at once, enough to pay all her bills, enough to provide her
with every franc she could spend.
 
She
would leave Albin at the worst possible moment, crippling him emotionally right
before a collection when he was most vulnerable.
 
She would throw Phillipe out in a manner so
humiliating that he could never discuss it with any of his friends.
 
She would buy a vast private house on the
Left Bank
—
on the rue de Lille perhaps
—
and have it decorated
by Didier Aaron with classical refinement that owed nothing, absolutely nothing
to mere fashion.
 
And she would begin her
life.
 
Nadine Mistral the great heiress
would take her
own
rightful place in the heart of the inner circle of
Parisian society.