Still, he was willing to take
the time to go to the ball.
Kate
Browning might buy another painting soon, he thought, and God knows he could
use the money.
She was not unattractive
in her severely groomed, almost ascetically pretty, blond, and obviously
American way.
In the last months he'd
sold her two small canvases, which made her even more attractive to him than
perhaps she deserved
—
he liked a less austere type.
In any case, he would not,
could not skimp on his materials.
Mistral hurried out, rolling the Lefebvre-Foinet bill into a ball and
flipping it into the garden next door.
There was no artist so serious or so busy that he didn't go to costume
balls, not even Julien Mistral.
Were there more costume balls
in 1926 than there had been in 1925?
Or
would there be more in 1927?
No one
could be sure during those fine festive years for no one could keep track.
Every week there was another ball sponsored by a different group.
In this second week of April 1926, the
Russian artists had already given their
Bal Banal
and the
homosexual international had held their
Bal des Lopes
at Magic
City. When the Surrealists organized a
Bal Sans Raison
d'Être
to
celebrate nothing at all and everything at once, everyone agreed it was not to
be missed.
Just a year before, the
Surrealists had created a great scandal at a banquet given at the Closerie des
Lilas that ended in an attempted lynching only broken up by the police.
Freethinkers of the most doctrinaire kind,
they made a violent stand against the government, the military, the church, and
for full measure, against business as well, glorying in their nickname
"The Terror of the Boulevard Montparnasse."
When two of their number, Miró and Max Ernst,
created the decor for Diaghilev's
Ballet Russe
,
dozens of
Surrealists broke up the performance by blowing trumpets, making speeches and
attacking the spectators.
With their exciting
reputation who, with any pretense to position in the world of art or letters
or fashion, could possibly stay home that night?
"Surrealist or
not," Paula had announced a week earlier, "I'm going in what suits me
best, just as I always do."
"Not the Pompadour?
Not again!" asked Maggy. "You're
impossible
—
I'm tired of your costumes and you should be too."
"There is only one
reason to go to a costume ball," Paula said serenely.
"You go to show off whatever part of
your body the accident of living in this banal era has prevented you from
revealing in your everyday clothes.
I'm
not trying to be clever
—
I leave that for those with nothing special to
reveal, who don't have my magnificent white shoulders, my delicious pair of
breasts, my still small waist.
But
—
just for a change
—
I'm going as Du Barry, to make a little change from
the Pompadour, no?"
"So little that it's
unimportant. Again your wide pink taffeta skirts, the tight blue satin bodice,
a lace fichu, more lace at your wrists, your powdered wig and your beauty patch
—
you disgrace me!"
"Ah, I'm always
underestimated," Paula sighed. "Instead of the lace fichu I will wear
a stuffed python attached at my right shoulder, passing under my bare breasts
and fastened securely along my left shoulder until the tongue of the beast
licks my ear."
"Bare breasts?"
"But naturally
—
I thought I'd explained." "
Felicitations!
I'm proud of you."
"It's a small
effort.
Only the python to be borrowed,
and I'm set.
What about you?"
"I'm going as a bowl of
fruit."
"What a horror!
Lemons in your hair and a dress like an
apple?
Maggy, that's unworthy of
you."
"Wait and
see."
Maggy stirred her coffee and
lowered her lids over her eyes.
The
thick, straight sweep of her lashes, darkened with mascara, looked like two
long, spiky caterpillars on her cheeks.
"Who are you going with
—
Alain?"
"Alain and three of his
friends
—
four men to be precise."
"As always, safety in numbers, isn't that so?"
Maggy puffed out her lips and
blew at an imaginary hair as she did when she was embarrassed, a childish habit
she had often been teased for in the past.
Paula, as usual, was right.
Montparnasse was like an
overstocked sexual zoo.
Every possible
kind and variety and assortment of sexual partnership was to be found there in
examples by the dozens.
From the
domestic house hold of the heterosexual couple, to the most unrestrained cases
of fetishism, no aspect of Eros was foreign or antipathetical to the
quartier.
Everything was possible and
permitted.
In this atmosphere of
unbounded, and therefore frightening, permissiveness, Maggy had found herself,
from the beginning, more comfortable as a spectator than a participant.
She scolded herself as the months slipped
past, berating herself for virginity of which nobody but Paula suspected her,
but in spite of all the arguments she found in favor of having a lover, the
fact was that she remained a virgin although her eighteenth birthday was months
past.
Maggy concealed her state of
stubborn, unfashionable chastity from everyone.
Only Paula was not misled by her free and easy airs, the saucy
impertinence with which she treated her men, her laughing rejoinders to their
importuning, her casual nakedness.
Since
everyone assumed that she must have a lover, the fact that Maggy rejected
every
man's attention whenever it became serious, simply gave her the reputation of
being some fortunate man's faithful and secretive mistress.
It took Alain and his friends
all afternoon and evening to create Maggy's
trompe l'oeil
costume.
Her right breast was painted as a bunch of
pale green grapes, her left as a small melon of Cavaillon, the kind that is
served whole, with sweet wine in its cavity.
Her arms and shoulders became bunches of bananas, some ripe, some still
showing a hint of green, and a pineapple grew down under her breasts and over
her navel, its sharp leaves losing themselves in her pubic hair.
Each hip was a slice of pumpkin and her
thighs were stalks of rhubarb.
From her
knees to her feet she was entwined in painted grapevines and her armpits held
apples.
Her face was left unpainted
except for two honey bees on her forehead, her hair was held back by a garland
of flowers.
She had refused to bow to
the protests of the artists who insisted that the green chiffon scarf she
intended to wear as an improvised G-string was incompatible with the spirit of
the occasion.
The artists had constructed
an oval, wooden fruit bowl, six feet long, covered with silver paint, on which
they planned to carry Maggy at shoulder height.
Each of the four men wore painted sandwich boards, over black tights
and sweaters.
André represented a Brie,
Pierre an entire Camembert, Henri a slice of Roquefort and Alain half of a
Chevre...
each huge block of cheese
painted so realistically that they looked edible.
The four artists were part of a school of
Realist painters and their ensemble of cheese and fruit was meant as a protest
against the Surrealists and their distortions.
"Wait," Maggy
protested as they made a trial attempt to hoist the fruit bowl, "I need
something to do with my hands.
Can't I
carry a flower or something?"
"No, you'll ruin
it.
Just rest your head on one elbow and
lie absolutely still and don't, for the love of God, sweat.
Damn it, Maggy, why wouldn't you let us use
oils instead of water colors?"
"Because I don't intend
to spend tomorrow bathing in turpentine," Maggy answered. "As it is,
Alain, the silver paint feels a bit sticky.
I'm not sure it dried properly.
Didn't some king paint slaves with gold paint once?
I believe they died of it."
"Rumor, rumor.
Anyway it's only going to come off on your
ass, if at all.
Now let's
go
—
the ball started an hour ago.
Maggy, get
off there and walk with us.
When we get
to Bullier we'll put this miracle together."
"Just let me put on my
coat and shoes."
"Why bother
—
it's warm out," André protested. "But it's three streets away."
"Don't you dare smudge
anything," Pierre said anxiously.
"On second thought, I'm
taking a taxi
—
in a coat.
I'll
meet you there."
"Oh, the little
bourgeoise," André mocked.
Maggy advanced on the little
artist menacingly.
"Do you want to
die, mosquito? Strangled by two bananas? Take that back." "You
wouldn't get mad if it weren't true," he cried, dancing out of her reach.
"Hey, there's no time
for lovemaking," Alain shouted.
"If we get there too late everybody'll be too far gone to notice
us-onward!
Everybody to the barricades!"
Five hundred people were
jammed together at the Bullier by the time Maggy arrived.
In the crowd were Darius Milhaud, Satie and
Massine.
The Comtesse de Noailles was
there and so were Paul Poiret and Schiaparelli, joined by Picasso wearing his
picador's costume.
Gromaire had put on
the habit of a Spanish Jesuit to which he had added balloonlike woman's
underpants trimmed with rose
red ribbons
and Brancusi had gotten himself up as an Oriental prince with beads to his
knees and a Persian carpet around his shoulders.
Pascin, followed as always by his tame troop
of gypsies, jazz musicians and pretty girls, wore his usual black.
Astonished "Bravos"
sounded at the first sight of Maggy at the tip of the great staircase.
She made her entrance borne aloft and
perfectly balanced during the perilous descent.
One by one the musicians caught sight of Maggy through the smoke, and
with a toot and a blare and a blast of every instrument in the orchestra they
heralded her slow passage around the huge ballroom, lying motionless on the
silver platter.
Everywhere she passed
sections of the crowd stopped dancing to press around the group of Realists, applauding
and screaming their approval.
Maggy had
been so skillfully painted that only little by little did everyone realize
that, except for a wisp of chiffon, she was utterly naked, a realization that
only added to the roar of approbation.
"What on earth is
that?"
Kate Browning asked Mistral, from her vantage point at one
of the raised tables that circled the dance floor.
"A Realist manifesto," he
shrugged.
He had recognized Maggy as
soon as she appeared.
No one else in
Montparnasse had ever flaunted hair of such a flamboyant shade of orange, a
color he'd never forgotten.
But he could
scarcely reconcile the awkward, embarrassed girl who didn't know the first
thing about posing with this shamelessly revealed creature, lounging naked
before a thousand eyes, and laughing.
Laughing!
He had heard about her from
dozens of people as she became well known, he had often glimpsed her hurrying
about the streets from a distance, but they had never exchanged a word in the
eleven months that had passed since her first day as a model.
If he had been honest he might have admitted
to himself that he had avoided her, he might even have recognized that he was
ashamed of the manner in which he had chased her away
—
but such
thoughts were foreign to Mistral's attitude toward life.
Second thoughts about a silly girl?
No, life was too short, there was too much
work to do.
"Julien!
Do you know how to dance?"
Kate Browning asked in the quietly imperious
manner that she was unaware she possessed, although she was only twenty-three.
"Dance?
Of course I dance.
But not well.
I warn you."
"Well,
don't you
want
to dance?"
"In this mob?"
"Come on, I'm in the
mood," she said, not to be frustrated.
"What's that they're playing now?" he asked.