Mistral's Daughter (73 page)

"She
and Darcy bought a place in the country and she's absolutely blissfully busy
doing all the things she never had time for before.
 
Magali loves her life
—
she only comes
in to the agency three days a week now
—
she feels enough confidence in
me so that finally she can live for herself a little...
 
heaven knows she deserves it," Fauve
said thoughtfully.

They
were walking down the crowded, narrow Via Margutta in the direction of the
Spanish Steps, blindly passing by dozens of art galleries, when suddenly Eric
steered Fauve through a pair of double doors in an old and badly kept
building.
 
Inside there was a spacious
courtyard and, at the rear of the courtyard, there was the verdant plunge of
the Pincio Hill that descended steeply, covered in thick, plumy foliage, all
the way down into the heart of Rome.

"This
is it...
 
no fixed destination," he
said and looked at her for her reaction to his surprise. On his face she saw
that special rare quality of trustworthiness that had first struck her in the
Salle des Fêtes at Uzès and suddenly the years that had separated them dissolved,
faded, disappeared as if they had never existed.
 
She faced him and looked him in the eye.

"Why
didn't you answer my last letter?" Fauve demanded, finally able to ask
the question she hadn't been able to put out of her mind.

"But
I did!
 
You were the one who stopped
writing."

"That's
just not possible."

"
I
know
I wrote you last," Eric insisted.

"
I
know I did
."

"We
can't both be right," Eric said.
 

"We
can't both be wrong either!"

"Perhaps
we're both
—
both right, both wrong?" he suggested.
 
"I thought
—
I thought that my
letters were too petty, that you'd grown in such a different direction from me
that you'd just lost interest in what I had to say."

"I
thought my letters were too dull compared to your life.
 
All I could tell you about was the Beaux-Arts
and the army.
 
I cherished your
letters...
 
I kept every one.
 
I have them at home in my desk."

"I
decided that you must have fallen in love...
 
and you just didn't want to write me about it," Fauve said in a
muffled voice.

"I
imagined that every man in New York was after you."

"Oh,
they were.
 
In fact they still are.
 
Half of them anyway.
 
I beat them off with sticks."

"And
that you were probably involved with somebody...
 
in love with somebody."

"I
wasn't."

"Not
even a little bit?"

"What
I call love doesn't come in little bits.
 
But you... in almost six years?"

"Oh,
I tried.
 
I tried all the traditional
specifics against a broken heart, hard work, drink and other women.
 
But they didn't help."

"What
broken heart?" she demanded, her eyes the color of a rising river mist at
the end of a perfect spring day.

"Mine.
 
I never fell out of love with you and you
never came back to me.
 
So it
broke."

"Oh,
my darling."
 
Fauve rocked against
him, the world wheeling around her in a vast, giddy, glorious circle.
"How far is your hotel?"

"Five
minutes if..."

"But
the traffic
—
nothing's moving."

"...
if we walk.
 
Three minutes if we
run."

It
was a big bed with a mattress that sloped into a cozy valley in the center, and
rose around them in soft, billowing puffs.
 
It was like being lost in a warm snowbank, Fauve thought, as they lay so
intertwined that she didn't know where her body stopped and his began.
 
Her mind drifted through layers of feeling
and emotion.
 
So much had happened to her
in the last hours that she was drunk, dazed and ripe and plump with discovery.
 
Details were all mixed together; the
astonishing silkiness of the hair under Eric's arms, the pang of acute modesty
she'd felt when he'd faced her for the first time in his nakedness, the
breathless quiet minutes when he'd suckled at her nipples and she'd looked down
at the top of his dark head and knew that she had never experienced true
tenderness before, and then the moment at which tenderness had shifted to a
specific wanting so transcendent that it abolished tenderness; the burst of
pure passion in which the two halves of the secret they had first shared in a
little car on a road in Félice had finally been joined into a many-petaled
flowering of surpassing joy
—
past and present mingled; they were
waltzing together to the sound of a village orchestra, they were sheltered by
the branches of an old pear tree in a walled garden, they were lying in that
pellucid, honeyed, red-gold warmth that only the time-gilded bricks and stucco
of Rome can distill from the sun.
 
His
eyelids moved, fluttering under her lips.

"I'm
not asleep," he said, "just closed my eyes for a minute."

"Never,
ever in my whole life have I been so exactly where I want to be," Fauve
thought and then realized that she had said it out loud.

"Rome?"
he muttered into her neck.

"This
bed.
 
The world is this bed.
 
I never want to leave it."

"Ah,
love, you don't have to.
 
I'll keep you
here forever.
 
I'll bring you lovely food
and wonderful things to drink and once in a while I'll change the sheets even
though they smell so good from the two of us loving each other that I won't
want to...
 
I'll never let you go.
 
I should have made you marry me when you were
sixteen."

"You
are a dreamer
—
to think that," she sighed.

"No,
it didn't have to be a dream.
 
I could
have made it happen if I'd had any sense, any foresight."
 
Eric slid out from under her arm and propped
his head up on his hand and looked down at her seriously.
 
"You don't know how many times I
replayed the scene at the station in my head.
 
Instead of taking you to the station I should have driven you straight
home to my parents' house and taken care of you until you were getting over
that strange, terrible state you were in, and afterward we could have been
married and all these years wouldn't have been wasted.
 
But I was too young to know what to do and
like a childish, helpless idiot I let you leave.
 
I've never forgiven myself."

"But,
Eric!" Fauve sat up laughing, teasing
—
her small, tender nipples
half covered by the veil of her hair.
 
"That's just like babes in the woods covering each other up in
autumn leaves. We were just kids
—
kids don't get married and go to live
in a small cottage by a waterfall
—
you didn't really imagine all that,
did you?"

He
looked down and didn't respond.

"Why,
I could no more have gotten married then!" Fauve continued. "I
didn't know anything, I didn't have any experience, I hadn't learned what it's
like to make a living, to run a business
—
I would never have been
satisfied to be a child bride...
 
you're,
you're just joking, aren't you?" She scoffed at him, but there was a
question in her voice.

With
his finger Eric traced the high, rounded little apples that jumped into being
high in her cheeks when she smiled
—
the pommettes, that curved sweet
shape that he had remembered so often.
 
A
silence fell between them, a waiting silence like that in an audience between
the end of one movement of a piano sonata and the beginning of the next
movement, a silence tense with awareness that somebody who doesn't know the
music might think that the piece had ended and applaud at the wrong time.

"Of
course I was joking," he answered her finally.
 
"Soldiers have some very wild fantasies
in the middle of the night and that was the least lurid of mine.
 
I had too much common sense and so did you
—
even then."

"Ah,
darling, sometimes I wish I didn't have so much common sense.
 
I get so tired of being grounded in
reality.
 
Have you ever read books by all
those people who keep on and on about how you should live your life as if each
day was going to be your last?
 
I think
they're just a bunch of sadists, promoting universal dissatisfaction."

"I
wonder what the world would be like if everyone really did live as if there
would be no tomorrow?" Eric asked.

"I
can't speak for other people, but if there wasn't going to be a tomorrow for
me, I know what I'd do."

"What?"
Eric asked.

"I'll
show you," she said and slid back down into the valley of the mattress and
imprisoned his strong shoulders in her slim arms, and bent her head so that her
lips fell directly on the warm skin between his collarbones where a pulse beat
strongly.
 
"I'll show you
exactly...
 
I won't leave anything
out..."

Outside
the sun withdrew slowly but neither Fauve nor Eric paid attention.
 
It wasn't until a light was turned on in a
window in a room across the courtyard of Eric's hotel that Fauve sat up with a
violent start.
 
"Oh, my God, what time
is it?"

Eric
reached to the bed table and looked at his watch. "About ten to six."

"Oh,
no. Oh, no."
 
She jumped out of the
bed and ran to the. bathroom, turned on the light and faced herself in the
mirror.
 
She was bedazzled, rosy,
disheveled.
 
"Oh, no!
 
They'd only have to take one look at me to
know where and how I've spent the afternoon," she cried, panic in her
voice.
 
"I have to take a shower and
put on fresh makeup and do something about my hair and even then they'll be
able to guess.
 
Eric, when does the
Vatican close?
 
Do you have any
idea?
 
Oh, I don't know where to
start!
 
What a mess!"

"Wait
a minute, darling.
 
Don't go crazy, let's
just think."

"Think?
 
Who has time to think?
 
I just have to get back to the Grand as fast
as possible and pray that they're there waiting for me.
 
What if they're not?" Fauve raced around
the bathroom stark naked, trying to adjust the strange shower, looking
frantically and unsuccessfully through her handbag for a small hairbrush,
splashing cold water on her burning face, turning around in circles, her wits
scattered, appalled by the way she'd let the time get away from her.

"Darling,
you're hyperventilating.
 
And you're
freezing, you're covered with gooseflesh." Eric trapped her inside of a
quilt, wrapped it around her, picked her up and carried her, kicking, and
protesting, back to the bed.
 
"Now
shut up and let me telephone.
 
Did you
say the Grand?" He spoke to the hotel's phone operator in rapid Italian.

"But,
what on earth am I going to say?
 
Hang
up, for God's sake.
 
I have to figure
this out." She tried to wrestle the phone out of his hand but he held her
down with one arm.

"La
Signorina
Ivy Columbo,
per
favore,"
he said.

"No!
 
Not Ivy.
 
She's the smartest one.
 
Call...
 
call Bambi Two."
 

Eric
paid no attention.
 
"Hello, Miss
Columbo?
 
This is Eric Avigdor,
yes...
 
how was the Vatican?
 
Inspirational?
 
I suspected that it might be.
 
Fauve?
 
She's resting on a bench and she asked me to call and check in with you.
 
No, she's all right but she's feeling faint
—
it's a combination of jet lag and claustrophobia
—
we just got out of
the Catacombs
—
yes, the Catacombs of St. Callisto...
 
all the way outside of Rome on the Via Appia
Antica.
 
Miles and miles...
 
it's all my fault, I'm afraid.
 
It was my idea
—
I'd forgotten how
dark and narrow they are and once you get down inside you have to stay with the
guide or you could get lost and never find your way out
—
the visit
goes on and on
—
but the Catacombs can't be missed if you're interested
in early Christian martyrs...
 
you didn't
know Fauve cared?
 
She doesn't
—
it's one of my hobbies
—
I'm afraid I was very selfish.
 
The thing is, my car seems to have broken
down and this is the rush hour and the gas station attendant wants to close up
—
that's where I'm calling from
—
so I just don't know when we'll be
back.
 
Very late I'm afraid
—
impossible to say when.
 
She's upset
about abandoning you...
 
no problem?
 
Oh, you're all going to have room service and
an early bedtime?
 
You're absolutely
right
—
it's the smartest thing to do. Everybody's exhausted?
 
Well, why don't you put the 'Do Not Disturb'
sign on all your doors when you finish dinner and I'll tell Fauve not to
worry."