Mistral's Daughter (74 page)

"Wake-up
calls!" Fauve hissed at him.

"Don't
forget to tell the operator when to wake you tomorrow...
 
no, don't rely on travel alarm clocks, they
never work.
 
Right, I'll tell her.
 
Good night, Miss Columbo
—
what?
Ivy?... good night, Ivy.
 
Thank you for
being so sensible.
 
Fauve will be
relieved."
 
He hung up the phone.

"Catacombs!"
Fauve said.
 
"There's no way she
believed you."

"I
thought I was very convincing."

"You
were
—
I didn't know you could lie so well
—
but who on earth
would be so absurd as to go visit Catacombs on a marvelous early spring
afternoon in Rome?"

"The
same sort of people who'd go to the Vatican."

"Oh."

"I
believe it's what's called a Mexican standoff," Eric said tenderly,
relaxing the arm that had pinioned her to the bed.

"And
what's that?"

"It
just means that nobody has the advantage, a stalemate."

"You
mean I've lost my moral authority?"

"You're
merely holding it in abeyance.
 
Tomorrow
you can put on that impressively severe jacket and your sensible shoes and
round up your little flock..."

"But
what do you suppose they're really up to?
 
Did you believe her?"

"Why
not?
 
She did sound tired."

"Ivy?
 
No way...
 
she's probably tap dancing around the room," Fauve said grimly.

"I'm
positive about the room service," Eric said, kissing her neck, and ending
the discussion. How else could he have heard the distinctive sound of a champagne
cork popping in Ivy's room?

The
next morning Fauve was sitting in the lobby of the Grand reading the Daily
American with the angelic and faintly put-upon air of someone who has been
waiting patiently when the models drifted out of the elevator on time, and, as
she was deeply relieved to see, obviously refreshed.
 
She accompanied them to Valentino's, where
they were to stay until evening being fitted into the clothes for Thursday's
collection.

The
day was, she thought, inevitably perfect, although March in Rome can be wet and
cold. Already the outdoor cafés were filling up, the smell of espresso spiked
the soft air, trees thrust their blooming branches from behind every wall,
there seemed to be a flower stall, banked high with blossoms, on every street
corner.
 
Fauve bought hundreds of tiny,
pungent, dark-red carnations, filling both her arms and her shoulder bag with
as many as she could carry.
 
Her heart
was full of an unruly, intoxicating tenderness.
 
She felt like a pink balloon, filled with helium,
that had been released into the turquoise sky, its string dancing gaily in the
breeze.
 
Why did she have so many
flowers, she wondered for a minute, coming back to earth, and remembered that
she was on her way to visit the three Lunel models who had been working in Rome
for the past six weeks.
 
She found them
in high spirits and she gave them each a heap of carnations and a hasty kiss
before she was finally free to dash away to meet Eric.

Until
it was time to pick up Ivy and company at Valentino's the day was hers, to
spend with Eric
—
time outside of time, time that had no connection to
real life, time to be grasped and lived minute by minute, not touched by any
thought of tomorrow.
 
It was only
Wednesday morning and she didn't have to fly to Florence until Thursday night
—
it was an eternity if she just thought of it as a string of miraculous moments,
each complete in itself.

As
they ate lunch in a little restaurant near the Forum, Eric couldn't stop gazing
at Fauve. She looked fifteen, her face bare of makeup except for mascara and
her hair brushed out so that its brightness had become a vermilion cloud.
 
She wore a soft turtleneck sweater the color
of pistachio ice cream and off-white corduroy trousers that she had stuffed
into low, honey-colored boots.
 
With the
bright blue cotton poncho she carried, and her shoulder bag, she looked ready
for the first day of school, he thought, his heart so nearly unmanageable with
love that he felt witless.
 
After lunch
they walked to the Forum and paid their entrance fees at that little ticket
booth that is so extraordinarily ordinary, as if a mere ticket is all that is
needed to travel backward into history.

"I
came here the last time too," Fauve said, "the day after the Vatican,
and I promised myself I'd always return if ever I was in Rome again.
 
You don't mind, do you?
 
There's not much here for an architect, I'm
afraid."

"Broken
columns, a couple of arches, some headless statues?" Eric said, looking
about.
 
"A wilderness of fragments
—
everything tumbling over everything else, the debris of centuries fallen in on
top of each other, and the whole lot covered with ivy and vines and holly
—
plenty here for an archeologist anyway." He laughed.
 
"What draws you to it?"

"It's
the only place I found in Rome that seemed to give me a real feeling of how old
the city is.
 
Everywhere else the
monuments are so kept up and restored that I lose that sense of the past
—
but here...
 
well, there's so little left
that I can dream, I can just surrender to its mood and let my imagination
loose."

Fauve
and Eric picked their way upward under the cypresses toward the crest of the
Palatine Hill, where once the monarchs of all the known world had their
palaces.
 
No other tourists and certainly
no Romans were anywhere in sight.

"This
must be the most peaceful place in Rome," Fauve said in a low voice.
 
The poetic hush of the Forum delighted
her.
 
There was something almost
supernatural that came from being in possession of this mysteriously abandoned
space where once crowds from all over the Roman Empire had jostled each other
for room to see the fortunate citizens as they walked by in their
splendor.
 
She felt a thrilling sense of
vainglory, as if she were stepping over millennia in seven-league boots.
 
She picked a spray of dark green acanthus
leaves and studied its classic form.
 
She
wished she knew how to make it into a wreath, she thought, looking up at
Eric.
 
She imagined that some young Roman
consul, returning to report on conditions on the edge of the Empire, might have
had the same look of adventure and strength that was stamped on Eric's blunt,
bronzed features.
 
His head demanded a
garland.

They
reached the top of the hill and climbed up the steep steps into the greenness
of the small, overgrown boxwood garden that was all that remained of the
once-great hanging gardens of the Farnese.

"How
I love it here!" Fauve exclaimed.
 
"Doesn't it smell marvelous?
 
What is that smell?"

"The
boxwood
—
or is it the centuries?" Eric asked, looking down over
the entire littered Forum spread beneath them.

"I
feel more alive here than anywhere in Rome," Fauve said in a wondering
voice.
 
"Even the ghosts are
friendly."

"Yes...
 
I feel it too...
 
how did you know?"

"It
was like that the last time...
 
I was
sure you'd feel the same way."
 
They
sat down on a stone bench and fell silent, enriched and comforted by the
tangible vibrations of a past that had disappeared, yet would never die.

Eric
was the first to break the silence.
 
"Tell me about your painting...
 
you haven't said a word about it yet."

"I
don't paint anymore
—
I haven't since the summer I met you."

"You
let it go?" he said in astonishment.
 
"How could that happen...
 
how was it
possible
when it meant so much to you?"

"Eric,
darling," Fauve said in a voice that struck him by its deep note of
puzzled regret, "don't ask me about it...
 
I can't really explain, not even to myself.
 
Tell me more about you.
 
This conference thing, what's it all
about?"

"It's
thrilling, Fauve.
 
Really truly
important."
 
He got up from the
bench and walked back and forth on the gravel path, gesturing vigorously with
his large, beautifully shaped hands as he spoke, his eyes full of fervor.
 
"Do you remember all those hideous
apartment buildings they put up outside the industrialized zone of Cortine on
the outskirts of Avignon?"

"How
could I forget them?
 
They were the only
ugly thing in the landscape."

"And
they didn't
have
to be!
 
The
conference is about humanizing low-cost housing, making it good instead of bad
for the same price
—
or less
—
than it costs now...
 
it's a question of design, of caring.
 
I'll never accept the idea that public
housing can't be beautiful...
 
and
neither do a lot of other architects from all over the world.
 
We're meeting to exchange ideas and
techniques."

"Is
that the only sort of buildings you're interested in?"

"Not
a bit
—
just the most necessary, I think, but not necessarily the most
fun.
 
My specialty is restoring old
farmhouses all over Provence.
 
You
wouldn't believe how many people manage to buy an old mas and then want to turn
it into a Tyrolean cottage or a Grecian villa.
 
I give them a comfortable house that works for modern life and still
doesn't ruin the beauty of the original. But my biggest excitement is when I
get a chance to build a new house.
 
There
I don't just copy an old mas
—
that would be easy, but where's the
challenge?
 
To design a new house for the
Provençal landscape, a modern house that gives the pleasure to the eye and
shelter to the body and respects the demands of the horizon and the hills
—
and the neighbors
—
ah, now there's an architect's dream!
 
I want to show them to you
—
will you
come and see some of my houses? Don't go back to New York after Paris
—
look, it's easy to plan..."

Fauve
drew back immediately from his impetuousness.
 
She held up her hand, warding him off.
 
"No plans!
 
The most I can go
into the future now is to figure out what we're going to do about those girls
of mine tonight.
 
I have the strong
impression that they have a hidden agenda.
 
I can't leave them unattended, but I can't bear to be away from you for
a minute."

"Why
don't I dig up some other architects?
 
We
can all go out to dinner together," Eric proposed.

"Architects?
 
Roman architects?"

"This
conference is like the Olympics, all nationalities are represented.
 
Lots of them like me are in Rome
already."

"Hmmm..."
Fauve considered deeply.
 
"Latins of
all kinds are absolutely out.
 
Swedes are
dubious
—
there's got to be some sort of reason why so many porno movies
have the word `Swedish' in their titles
—
Englishmen
—
Englishmen...
 
no, there's that ancient
French theory that no woman is as highly sexed as a supposedly frigid
Englishwoman.
 
What if it holds true for
Englishmen too?
 
I can't take that
risk."

"Finns,"
Eric suggested.
  
"Why don't we take
a chance on Finns?
 
They don't seem to
reproduce much."

That
night, after a dinner that would live in the annals of Lunel history, Fauve
made sure that all her charges were safely deposited in their rooms before she
slipped back to Eric's hotel. The big meadow of a bed, in which they had only
spent one night, welcomed them.
 
It had
already begun to take on a mythic quality, Eric thought, as he counted the
hours left to them.
 
So aware was he of
the passage of time that the texture of the sheets, the rolling terrain of the
mattress, the amber glow of the little bedside lamp seemed to have become as
much a part of the past as they were of the moment.
 
"There's only tonight," he said,
cradling her head between his hands.
 
"Tomorrow you can't be with me except while the collection is going
on and then you get on that infernal plane for Florence.
 
Why, oh why, do you have to leave Thursday
night?"