Mistral's Daughter by Judith Krantz

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 rejectedevery
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