Mistral's Daughter (84 page)

Naturally
he was as busy as she was, Fauve explained to herself.
 
It was not by design that they had met so
seldom.
 
No, not by design perhaps, but
couldn't he have made more time for her?
 
Couldn't he have, damn it, been a little more desperate to see her?
 
Nine months ago that man had wanted her to
leave everything that made up her world and marry him.
 
Now, his father and mother, for God's sake,
treated her with more loving kindness than he did.
 
To hell with Eric Avigdor!
 
Let him spend his life nipping at the heels
of hod carriers, she thought scornfully, as she opened the front door of
La
Tourrello
with a key picked from that heavy ring that had become as
familiar and unremarkable as her lipstick.

Fauve
wandered around the salon of
La Tourrello
checking to make sure that
Lucette had emptied all the ashtrays and removed all the wineglasses from the
table where, yesterday, with Adrien Avigdor and Jean Perrin and varied
gentlemen from the Amsterdam museum, she had toasted the departure of the
Cavaillon
series.
 
The salon looked too neat, with
all the pillows plumped up, all the surfaces of the tables clear.
 
She hadn't bothered to buy any flowers for
the house since she wasn't living in it.
 
It felt like an office on Sunday, a place that wasn't meant to be opened
up and lived in, Fauve decided, and retreated to the kitchen, where she
discovered the leftovers from yesterday's big celebration lunch neatly put away
in the refrigerator.
 
Cold chicken, a
half of a liver pate, cheeses, the last bottle of white wine, still almost
full.

As
she set the food out on the kitchen table, she decided to start to diet
seriously tomorrow. In a week, by the time she got back to New York, she'd have
lost the five pounds she must have gained.
 
She'd be home before the Christmas decorations were put up in the stores
on Fifth Avenue, home for all the parties, home for the first big snow of the
season.
 
No, Fauve corrected herself, the
decorations were already in place; they appeared before Thanksgiving.
 
The first snow had come a week ago, Maggy had
told her the last time they'd talked, so now it must be already covered with
grime; black flakes falling on white snow from the solid gray New York
skies.
 
Off duty taxis; puddles of slush
at every street corner so wide that you had to wade right through them to crowd
into an overheated bus if it didn't rush right past your stop; the constant
wail of sirens as if the city were perpetually on fire somewhere or other
—
but parties, perhaps a welcome-home party, the annual Lunel Christmas party,
dancing at Doubles where she had a membership, the Horowitz concert for which
Melvin had written he had tickets, the Avedon exhibition, Bobby Short at the
Café Carlyle and Baryshnikov and bagels:
 
Where else but in New York?

Fauve
looked for the tomatoes Lucette had brought in yesterday.
 
Good, there were enough left for a salad with
the chicken.
 
Or perhaps she'd only eat
the tomatoes and fruit when it was time for lunch.
 
It wouldn't do to return to the agency an
ounce heavier than she'd left it...
 
the
models would be only too delighted to jump on her for the lack of discipline
she preached to them.
 
Somehow it was all
right for the personnel of the agency to be as cozily plump as they liked, but
Maggy and Fauve Lunel were supposed to be model thin.

Fauve's
mind fell into a reverie in which the treats of Provence were mixed and
jumbled; the
tapenade,
that relish made of black olives that was spread
on bread like butter; the stars that fell so low to earth through the night sky
that a walk after dinner felt like flight; the café in Félice where she could
sit watching the whole village pass by, knowing more people by name every day;
the color of the light, the color of the sky, the color of the stones
—
the color of the light, the light.
 
Sighing, she blew her hair out of her eyes and resolutely turned her
mind to the problem of
La Tourrello.

She
could rent it as she had first planned, or sell it.
 
Jean Perrin had assured her that either choice
would present no problems; there was an enormous demand for properties all over
the South of France and the luxuriously appointed home of Julien Mistral would
command a huge price.
 
It was as famous
as it was unique, with its marvelously restored buildings, its swimming pool,
its central heating, its comfortable bathrooms.
 
She would rather sell it outright, Fauve
realized suddenly.
 
The apricot trees,
the vines, the asparagus fields, the olive groves
—
all the fertile land
of
La Tourrello
was in a shameful condition of neglect.
 
How could she trust a tenant to oversee the
work that had to be done?
 
No one who
merely rented a house would want to make the effort that was necessary to bring
the domain back to its former productivity.
 
On the other hand, anyone who bought the property would do so with the
knowledge that the farm would bring in a steady and substantial income when it
was again worked as it should be.

Yes,
the ideal buyer would be a rich family man from somewhere in the sunless north
of Europe, a man who had always wanted wide abundant hectares in Provence
—
didn't everybody dream of just that?
—
who would hire a local farmer and
his wife to come and live here full-time, a man who would be able to spend his
summers in Provence, and to fly down from Munich or Copenhagen or Brussels for
the sun in the winter, two weeks at Christmas, a week at Easter; bringing the
children of course; perhaps in a private plane that could land at the airport
outside of Avignon.
 
They could keep a
car at the airport and be at
La Tourrello
within a half-hour after
landing.

Fauve
thoughtfully provided herself with the pear and the apple she'd bought on the
road, as she walked through the rooms of La
Tourrello,
imagining herself
the wife of the prospective buyer.
 
She'd
keep a few of the gleaming wooden antique chests and tables, she decided, but
she'd change the carpets and the draperies and get rid of all the upholstered
pieces
—
the place was
underfurnished
.
 
The house cried out for bigger couches,
deeper chairs, less pointedly simple fabrics
—
it needed color, it
needed warmth, it needed, above all,
things
.
 
Strange, she had never minded the artful
austerity of the decor before, but then she had always thought of it as Kate's
house and it had suited Kate.
 
Well, it
didn't suit her
—
still, who knew
—
perhaps it would be perfect,
just as it stood, for the wife of that rich Belgian?
 
She was almost certain it would be a
Belgian.
 
They endured some of the worst
winters in Europe.

Her
own bedroom in the tower?
 
It would
probably become a guest room, unless they had a teenaged daughter who fancied
it for herself.
 
Fauve hoped that they
would have a daughter, someone who would lie on the bed and dream with her eyes
wide open.

What
would happen to the studio?
 
Fauve asked,
as she found herself in front of its doors. Perhaps they'd use it as a game
room, even put in a ping-pong table?
 
Yesterday, she had been too busy making the final arrangements with the
people from Amsterdam to lock up the studio herself after the
Cavaillon
series
had been carried out, so Jean Perrin had done it and given her the key before
he left.

She
had never seen the studio empty of paintings, she realized, as she hesitated
outside the doors.
 
Did she want to go
in?
 
Did she need to go in?
 
Did she dare to go in?

She
told herself not to be absurd and unlocked the studio.
 
The room she had always thought of as huge,
vast, enormous
—
was just an ordinary size.
 
A big studio, to be sure, but with Mistral's
paintings gone, not that intimidating after all.
 
A human size.
 
Fauve understood that it was because the walls were bare.
 
Her father's work had always opened up into
another dimension; no matter what its subject it had led the eye beyond the
borders of the canvas.
 
Now there were
just the walls and the high ceiling and the glass and the beams.
 
The only reminders that Mistral had worked
there were the worktable, the ladder and the easel with the blank canvas on it.

She
put her pear and apple, both still uneaten, down on the least paint-stained
corner of the worktable and automatically, without a thought, she set about
gathering up the many brushes that lay scattered about.
 
It had always been her special task after a
day's work, picking up these brushes and cleaning them in the sink in the small
room off the side of the studio where Mistral kept his painting supplies.
 
Her father had always cared for his own
brushes as meticulously as any good craftsman.
 
In spite of the disorder there always was in his studio he started the
day's work with clean brushes, and when he taught Fauve how to paint he had
also taught her how to tidy up after herself.

She
saw that it wouldn't be an easy or quick task.
 
Both of her hands were filled with the brushes that he had put down on
the last night he had ever painted, flung down hastily, she realized as she
looked at them in dismay.
 
They were
matted, caked, stiffened with dried paint. Probably they should just be thrown
out.
 
It would be more work than she had
realized to bring any life back to these mistreated tools.
 
Yet Fauve found herself moving toward the
sink on which stood the covered jars of turpentine and thinner.

Slowly,
lovingly, painstakingly she began the slow job of cleaning Julien Mistral's
brushes. Finally she left all but one, which hadn't been used, to soak
overnight.
 
She went back out to the
worktable with the clean, single brush and stood irresolutely in front of the
blank canvas, her mind blank, her hands still.
 
She lingered there, with nothing left to decide, with no thought of what
she intended to do next, until she found herself gliding backward in time, as,
caught in a slow tumble of memory, she felt Julien Mistral's large hand cover
her own, she felt it press down, communicating power to her, guiding her
fingers as he had done so many times after the first day, that day when she was
eight years old.
 
She heard him give her
those familiar orders. "
Regard
," she heard his voice say to
her. "Do you see, Fauve?
Regard
, always
regard
. You must
learn to see."

And
she did see, in a moment of complete definition, what she was going to do.
 
It was more than just a knowing, it was a
sudden admission of a long denied but total need, pure and assertive, without
any complications, an absolute order.

Try
.
 
She was a
painter.
 
She had always been a painter.
 
She had rejected the painter in herself when
she had rejected her father but now...
 
now...
 
all she was sure of was
that she must try.
 
Walls had been torn
down, doors had been flung open, a vast open meadow lay before her, a meadow
she could not cross without risk, a meadow that, once crossed, would lead her
into changes unguessed at, into tasks and trials she could only begin to
imagine.
 
But she had to try.

Fauve
knew that she was at the very beginning of a long voyage of discovery, an
adventure that beckoned her on irresistibly.
 
On the other side of the meadow was a mystery, an unknown world that
must be explored.
 
She felt full of
marvelously imprudent impulses, eager to meet the mystery, ready to dare, ready
to try, ready to change.

A
pulse that had never stopped beating quickened in Fauve's wrists and
fingers.
 
Powers and faculties that she
had suppressed and turned away from began pushing themselves forward and upward
with the power of young buds opening in the spring sun.

She
would have to begin over again.
 
Not at
the beginning, but nevertheless, again.
 
She must have lost technique, facility, ease-the machinery of an artist
had probably rusted like the Tin Woodsman of Oz, left out in the rain.
 
Paint and she would have to become intimate
once more.
 
But she'd known the language
before...
 
it wasn't all that easy to
forget, particularly since she had never lost that nervous habit that made her
hand pick up any available pen or pencil and draw lines on paper.