Mistral's Daughter (70 page)

But
until that day she would do absolutely nothing to disturb the status quo.
 
She could not possibly get divorced as long
as her social position depended on the charm and friendships of her husband
and the magic of her employer's name.
 
She still needed to be Madame Phillipe Dalmas, the best friend of Jean
François Albin
—
no amount of orchids in cachepots could keep her on
the invitation lists if she were without those protections.
 
She could triumph as a single woman only as a
rich single woman.
 
She would wait.
 
Christ, how much longer could that old man
live?

29

Fauve
stretched.
 
Oh, it felt so good.
 
Stretching, she thought sleepily, was right
up there with eating and listening to music and kissing.
 
Thank God nobody was too poor to
stretch.
 
She yawned.
 
A great yawn was almost as good as a great
stretch.
 
She ,yawned and stretched at
the same time.
 
No, they lost something
in combination.
 
With so many agreeable
sensations going she couldn't concentrate properly.

She
rolled over in bed and reached for Ben to tell him about it but he wasn't
there.
 
She opened her eyes and looked
around the dark bedroom, an unfamiliar place since this was the first time she
had awakened in his apartment.
 
Was it
still night?
 
Where could he have gone
to?
 
She waited awhile, almost falling
asleep again, but when he didn't appear she slid out of bed, groped her way
toward the windows and opened the curtains.

The
thin, grudging sunlight of a March morning in New York made her flinch.
 
Small clouds, high above the city, looked
crunchy and little fingers of cold air seeped in from the edges of the windowpanes.
 
She dove back into bed and considered her
alternatives.
 
She could call out and
he'd come running from wherever he was.
 
She could go back to sleep or she could try to find something to wear,
since she was naked, and go brush her teeth.
 
Teeth first, she decided, picking the bedspread off the floor and
draping herself in it, since there didn't seem to be any of her clothes in the
room.

In
the bathroom she found a note impaled on a tube of toothpaste.

Darling,

I've just gone out to buy some stuff for
breakfast.
 
I'll be back as soon as I
can.
     
I love you.

    
Ben

Now
that is thoughtful, she told herself, as she looked around for a
toothbrush.
 
A really magnificent
breakfast
—
a regal, voluptuous, erotic breakfast
—
was the only
way to start Sunday morning in New York.
 
More important, it proved that he hadn't expected her to be here this
morning or he would have stocked his fridge the day before.
 
As she failed to discover any toothbrush
other than Ben Litchfield's, she noted that he obviously didn't take the
presence of a lady for granted or he would have had a spare.
 
Well, a soggy and secondhand toothbrush was
better than nothing.
 
She took a quick
shower, dried herself on one of his slightly damp towels and put on the clean
but rather threadbare terry robe he'd left hanging on the hook of the bathroom
door.
 
Definitely a bachelor
establishment.

Fauve
padded out into the living room and knew immediately that there was no one in
the kitchen making something marvelous.
 
The room was not just empty, it had such a glacial impersonality that
she was sure the decorator who had decorated Ben's office had done the
apartment too.
 
It had the same Barcelona
chairs
—
did anyone ever have more than that predictable pair or was
there a law against it?
—
and identical glass and chrome coffee tables.
The rug, like the chairs, was obviously expensive and carefully coordinated
with the tweedy draperies, but the unlovable plants looked as if they'd been
chosen for their ability to survive under neglect, and the lithographs on the
walls betrayed no indication of personal taste.

The
only sign of humanity in Ben's living room were the copies of the Sunday
New
York Times
and
Sunday News
that he had stopped to pick up at the
stand at Fifty-eighth and Madison last night before they came back.
 
She looked at the eviscerated papers lying
all over the coffee table and rejected the idea of picking them up.
 
Somehow they didn't fit into her cheerful
mood. Her body felt tender all over and well used, as indeed it had been.
 
How much good news could she reasonably
expect to find in the
Times
anyway?
 
Certainly nothing that was fit to print, she reflected, and tried to
curl up on the unsensuous couch.

Why
did bachelors invariably own furniture that was stuffed with foam rubber?
 
Should she go into the kitchen, wherever it
was, and hunt around for a teabag?
 
No,
she'd wait for Ben to come back.
 
After
last night, a lonely cup of tea seemed an unworthy way to begin this lovely,
lazy Sunday...
 
this necessarily brief
Sunday as he knew, since she had to leave for Rome later in the afternoon with
the five girls Valentino had chosen to show his clothes on the runway at the
opening of his spring collection.
 
They'd
all be gone for two weeks, on to Milan and Paris after Rome.

Without
success, Fauve attempted to snuggle into a bouncy pile of foam rubber cushions.
Benjamin Franklin Litchfield, where are you?
 
Last night had been the first time she'd spent the entire night with
him, or with anybody for that matter, Fauve thought, considering the brief
list of her lovers.
 
She knew it was
unfashionable but there had only been two besides Ben.

Fauve
supposed, when she had time to think about it, which was seldom, that the way
she had lived was odd for the liberated 1970s.
 
Although she worked long and hard and late at her job and had
established her financial independence in a way that many other girls of her
age had not, she'd been content to live at home until two years ago.
 
She'd been pursued by many men, but, for at
least three years after her last visit to Provence, Fauve had been too haunted
by the memory of Eric Avigdor to respond to anyone else.

Finally
there had come a time when mere letters hadn't been able to sustain that
love.
 
Eric had had to do two obligatory
years of military service after he graduated from the Beaux-Arts, and that had
stood in the way of any opportunity for him to visit her in the United
States.
 
She had taken brief vacations
but they'd never come at a period when he was free.

After
a while Fauve began to sense that both of them were being unrealistic about
their intention to meet again.
 
As the
years went by those brief weeks together, when she was sixteen, became more
fragmented as they receded further and further into memory.
 
Certain moments were fixed, so vivid and
clear in memory that she could scarcely bear to examine them, but the
connective tissue between those moments faded.
 
She couldn't call back the whole fabric of an entire day with Eric, only
bits and pieces.

Had
they not been equal to their feelings, she had asked herself sadly, or had they
simply misunderstood the strength of those feelings?
 
Surely he too must have gone through the same
dimming of the past?

Fauve
immersed herself in the world of modeling, and eventually it became
increasingly difficult to write to Eric.
 
She would re-read her letters and ask herself how he could possibly be
interested in the tradition-breaking action of high-fashion Lauren Hutton
agreeing to pose for Avedon in nothing more than a black lace bra, a pair of
black bikini underpants and a prankish hat?
 
How could it matter to him that the major decision of her week had been
to promote one girl from the Central Board to the Big Board?
 
There was no way to adequately explain to him
that it was important,
 
because once a
model made this crucial career move she couldn't go backward and if the move
proved to be unsuccessful or premature, her career would be largely destroyed.

The
details that filled her days, the preoccupations that seemed so crucial,
because they concerned people she liked and because they had true business and
personal repercussions, dwindled down to such triviality when she put them down
on paper that she tore up five letters for each one that she finally sent.

If
it hadn’t been for the surprise of Magali’s marriage, Fauve guessed, she’d
probably still be living at home, happily joining Magali and Darcy for dinner
several times a week.
 
She’d been so
comfortable and happy there that nothing could have pushed her out of the
apartment except her determination to give them a chance to be alone together.
 
Magali had protested that it was ridiculous
to treat them like honeymooners, but Fauve had known her instinct and timing
were right.

She’d
found a cozy little duplex for herself in a narrow, old-fashioned brownstone in
the East Seventies, near Third Avenue, and there, just before she turned
twenty, she’d had her first love affair.
 
And her second.
 
Neither of them
had been a particularly fulfilling experience, Fauve admitted to herself.
 
Something, some essential element, had been
missing, and if she had to put a name on it, damn it, there was only one word
she could think of
—
romance.

Was
she being absurdly nostalgic, was she looking for something that could only
happen once in a lifetime?
 
The physical
experiences had been satisfactory, the men had both been intelligent and
amusing, but that other dimension, that blithe thread of melody, that sense of
poetry underlining the most ordinary undertaking, that transformation of the
world, that she had once known sitting in a little car on a road near Félice
surrounded by sheep, no, it hadn't happened.

Fauve
had never let either of her two lovers spend the whole night with her although
there was no question that her bed was big enough for two, that four-poster
with billowing draperies of rosebud-sprigged gauze, so long that they trailed
on the flowered, Victorian rug.
 
It was
just that she couldn't imagine waking up with either of them
—
waking up
with someone seemed more intimate than making love in some ways.

Last
night she had thought, as she fell asleep, that waking up with Ben Litchfield
might be a revelation.
 
Romance had
seemed to be in the air, not quite close enough to capture, but definitely lurking,
waiting to happen.
 
He had tried to speak
of marriage but she hadn't let him
—
it was the wrong time.
 
She had felt as if she were listening to an
orchestra tune up, an uncoordinated assortment of sounds that promised the
arrival of music.

Right
now, Fauve thought, conscious that her feet were freezing, she'd settle for
food and let romance go wherever it went when it wasn't operating.
 
Country farm sausage
—
the small,
spicy kind, all brown and crisp
—
with pancakes, dripping with maple
syrup, for instance.
 
Perhaps that was
what Ben was bringing back?
 
Or waffles
with melted butter and strawberry jam? Maybe he'd gone out for a brioche and
croissants and thin slices of sugar-cured Virginia ham or even a Pepperidge
Farm coffee cake, ready to heat, the kind with the lovely, sticky white icing
and raisins?
 
Or had he simply gotten
stuck waiting on line to buy bagels?
 
Pumpernickel bagels with sweet butter and slices of sturgeon, juicy
white sturgeon from the Great Lakes?
 
Oh,
Lord, she wasn't asking for much
—
she didn't expect eggs Benedict with
extra Hollandaise sauce; she wasn't insisting on a tall, frosty glass of
freshly squeezed orange juice without the pulp; she only needed breakfast, not
brunch, for God's sake, brunch with tender crepes stuffed with chicken and
covered with mushroom sauce or even...
 
even oyster stew.

Fauve
tucked her legs under her in the lotus position for warmth and in the hope that
it might lead to meditation and that meditation would stop her from thinking
about food.
 
No matter what, she didn't
intend to go poking about in the kitchen and spoil his surprise.

She
had heard a great deal about Ben Litchfield before she started to go out with him,
for his staff was full of wistful editors who yearned for him without
success.
 
She had observed him closely
for signs that he took women for granted but found no sign of it in his
courtship.
 
He had a prickly mind, quirky
and questioning and he understood her shop talk and her late hours.
 
She liked his edges.
 
He had an insistent energy and she felt at
ease with his preoccupations, accustomed as she had become to the world of
publishing through Darcy.
 
Ben Litchfield
had pursued her steadily and singlemindedly for a long time before she finally
allowed him to make love to her several months ago.
 
He was a most...
 
comforting...
 
lover, Fauve thought, searching for precisely the right word.
 
She felt secure with him, safe and quiet and
warm and... comfortable.