Brilliant (2 page)

T  W  O

I suppose I was in shock, but I felt surprisingly calm. And happy. No, not happy. Relieved. I leaned against the headboard and lit another cigarette and had another chocolate and just looked around, knowing that for the first time in my life, I was in control of my life. The lightness was amazing. I was floating. It’s just me.

When the merger had been completed and Owen Brace had taken over, it took less than seventy-two hours to see how completely unworkable the arrangement was between him and Benjamin. The two men could scarcely bear the sight of one another. While not terribly far apart in age, when it came to vision and energy, Owen was waxing at fifty-four and Benjamin waning at sixty-five. The men were polar opposites.

Owen Brace, a self-made man, Irish-American, one of the most successful international takeover artists in the history of business, was a high-speed adrenaline addict and a notorious slash-and-burn specialist. The energy and power he exuded were so tangible, he seemed to suck all the oxygen from the air around him. Regardless of Benjamin’s jealous accusations that Brace was cheesy and common, both of which applied to a significant degree, he was also dashing and debonair. And dangerous. If he were a sportsman, I think he would have been a fencing master, but as far as I could tell, the only sport he loved was business. Oh, and sex. If he wasn’t on the phone or in a meeting, he was in a bed.

Well-born Sir Benjamin Ballantine, on the other hand, an Englishman through and through, was polite, patrician, a gentleman, duty-bound by his mother’s archaic Victorian upbringing. His low-key, amicable style that lured clients to Ballantine & Company, his self-deprecating sense of humor, and workmanlike talent on the auction floor had not withstood the test of time. They belonged to another world, dust was piled on their shoulders. He was unable to make the leap to accommodate what twenty-first-century customers required. His stubborn refusal to grow or adapt pushed him deeper and deeper into depression and dragged the company and its demoralized staff down with him.

The only thing that kept Owen and Benjamin from coming to blows was me: their senior executive assistant, caught literally in the middle of the
ancien
and
noveau régimes
. Fortunately for all of us, I’m more stable than most people. I can carry a lot on my broad shoulders.

Because I’d been with the firm for what was now decades, and become a mother figure to Benjamin (although I was significantly younger), it was justifiable to see why my loyalties had lain with him. But finally, my battle standard flagged. He robbed me of my sleep every night. I was exhausted. My tiredness grew in direct proportion to his tiresomeness. He’d become excruciating and infuriating, making me regret my pledge to his father—my late, beloved, deus ex machina, Sir Cramner Ballantine—that I would keep an eye on his aging, ineffectual son, not to let him stray off into troubled waters. Even more importantly, I’d sworn not to let him run Ballantine & Company into the ground, which, in spite of my efforts, he had. I was sick of the whole arrangement, unfulfilled by my obstinate loyalty.

I was still angry at Sir Cramner for dying, even if he had been ninety-two by the time he left. I missed him so deeply, I couldn’t seem to get the light turned back on in my life. He’d been gone for almost three years, but not a single day passed that I didn’t think about him, and how much I still loved him. I wanted him to come back to me, even if it was just long enough to kiss his sweet, laughing lips one more time.

But, as the days and months and years passed, and I didn’t seem to be getting any closer to my own demise, I knew I needed to get back on course. I was tired of being alone. There was no one to talk to.

I wanted to go to my little farm in Provence and lie in the sun, smell the lavender, listen to the bees. Have lunch with my friends. To spend the second half of my life with people who enjoyed the same things I did. But the problem is, with my past, it’s just not that simple.

T  H  R  E  E

My life began the afternoon of my eighteenth birthday when Sir Cramner Ballantine, then a dashing sixty-one, had his driver pull over and offer me a ride in a rainstorm as I made my soggy way, wobbling and weeping, down Carnaby Street in a silly little pink-and-champagne paisley minidress and high-heeled boots to which I was patently missuited, physically and emotionally. I wasn’t a Mary Quant–Carnaby Street thing. I was a chubby little farm girl—vastly more Hey-There-Georgy-Girl than Twiggy—from Oklahoma, for heaven’s sake, in Europe on a thirty-day, twenty-city, marathon tour from Oklahoma State University, which I attended on a geology scholarship studying absolutely nothing of any value, waiting for I knew not what to happen.

The realization that I’d made a serious and costly fashion mistake that had taken all my spending money for the rest of the trip had triggered something in me. It had plunged me into loneliness and despair, and forced me to admit certain things to myself. I was walking down a strange street in a strange city in a foreign country in a downpour having an epiphany, a nervous breakdown, a catharsis. My life was a dead end. I was a dead end. I was damaged goods—everything I’d said was true about myself was false. Everything. I was so desperate to fit in at college, I’d created an entire persona, a fleshed-out history, including a loving family who were tragically, (and conveniently), all killed in a house fire on our big dairy farm up near Cleo Springs.

“Maybe you remember reading about it,” I’d say to my sorority sisters. “Our whole farm burned to the ground. It was in all the papers—I was the only one to escape. It was horrible.”

“Oh, yes,” they’d answer sympathetically. “I do remember hearing about that—what a nightmare.”

They were just being kind, of course. They were nice girls from nice families. They couldn’t remember the fire—it never happened. But it also never would have occurred to them that someone as sweet, sweet as powdered sugar icing on a coconut cake, and plump, plump as a luscious plum, and unassuming as a choirgirl as I would make up such a gruesome story. They didn’t know they were talking to a world-class liar.

For starters, I wasn’t a farm girl. I was oil-field trash. I never knew my father, and my mother lived at the bottom of a Four Roses bottle in a grungy trailer, which was as squalid and perfume-drenched as you’d expect an Oklahoma oil-field-camp-follower whore’s trailer would be.

Only my cubbyhole of a bedroom was clean and neat, and I was the only one who could get in—there was a dead bolt on my door. I possessed the only key, not that there was anything worth stealing.

I was fifteen and a half when I had a baby. I gave it up to strangers without even peeking at its face. I didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. I didn’t even know who its father was. All I remember is lying in my bed at the Florence Crittenden Home—a series of charity- supported residences across the country where girls “in trouble” (as opposed to “troubled” girls, which I later became), went to have their babies and give them up—in Omaha, and crying for two days straight, feeling emptier than I’d ever imagined was possible.

I can pinpoint it to that exact time when my heart hardened into an impenetrable block of ice, impervious to anything but the most superficial scratch, leaving me able to shed an occasional tear at the melodrama of others’ lives, but otherwise permanently embedded in emotional permafrost. My heart had been hermetically sealed against deeper cuts.

Lying there in that clean, white bed, I realized nobody on the face of the earth knew who I was or where I was, and furthermore, nobody cared. I also somehow had the grace to understand I could look at that as either a tragedy or an opportunity.

I made the decision I was going to have a nice life. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, or how I was going to go about getting it. I only knew I had a bigger plan for myself than following in my mother’s footsteps. I wanted to make something of myself, to be somebody.

I left the Crittenden Home with a reference to the personnel manager at the May Company department store in Tulsa and within a few weeks I’d begun to make a fairly decent living as a salesgirl in Men’s Accessories. I supplemented those earnings by shoplifting.

After a while, I was able to move from the boardinghouse to my own little studio apartment. I’d stand in front of my bathroom mirror for hours, listening to the Beatles and the Supremes on the radio and trying every single beauty tip in
Seventeen
magazines—I bought tweezers, pumice stones, razors, every eye shadow color on earth, pale lipsticks and nail polish and hair falls. I spent a fortune on my skin. But, because I was a big girl—I think I was born carrying an extra twenty-five pounds—I never had the courage or confidence to wear any of this glamour in public. In spite of what people would say about how pretty I was, I saw myself as fat and unattractive and concentrated on being wallpaper. In a sad sort of way, that’s what let me excel at my avocation because, unfortunately for us, large girls are basically invisible if we want to be, which most of us do. Or did. Things are different now.

Twice, I got caught and locked up overnight in juvenile detention. In those days, juvenile detention in Oklahoma more resembled foster care and the “cell” they held me in was actually a bedroom in the judge’s house with bars on the window and a lock on the door. The house always smelled of Lysol and bacon grease, and the food tasted the same way. The judge’s cook, who sang hymns and praised Jesus all day long, brought my trays resentfully. She looked down on me as white trash, a soul not worth saving, and I guess she was probably right, except it certainly wasn’t a very Christian way for her to act.

The arrests didn’t deter me. I simply became more careful as I continued to steal. I pawned all the goods for cash and for my sixteenth birthday, bought myself a little yellow Corvair convertible. I never saw my mother again.

I became very skilled at disguise and sleight of hand, which I practiced diligently every night with marbles, which are harder to manipulate than quarters because they’re round and slippery. They’re also about the same size as many pieces of jewelry.

On Wednesdays, my day off from the May Company, I dressed in my other “work” clothes. My favorite was the green plaid skirt, white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, green cardigan sweater, and saddle shoes that were the uniform of Tulsa Country Day School. Sometimes I’d braid my hair, or put on a pair of thick glasses, perch a little beret on my head, and wait nearby whatever shop I’d reconnoitered.

The multistate chain of Mallory’s Jewelry Stores had the nicest merchandise and were the easiest and most satisfying to rob. I had applied for a job as a stock girl with Mr. Homer Mallory, who had a Confederate flag behind his desk and a picture of John F. Kennedy on his wall. At the end of the brief interview he told me what an asset I’d be to Mallory’s and I’d hear from him when the next opening occurred. But I was no more than out of his office and out of what he believed to be earshot, when I heard him say to his secretary, “Can you imagine putting a girl like that in front of our customers? She’s got no class. We’d go out of business.” It gave them both a good laugh. I wanted to crawl under a rock. This unnecessary cruelty by a redneck, two-faced, overweight ignoramus with boils and body odor launched and justified my crusade. To be sure, my code of ethics became more defined and refined as time went on. But at that point, robbing Mr. Mallory made me feel I was doing something worthwhile and commendable. I was exacting restitution, claiming costly revenge on behalf of all downtrodden people everywhere.

So, I’d hang around near a Mallory’s and as soon as a well-dressed man or woman approached the entrance, I’d drop into their wake and slouch in after them. The clerk always assumed I was the daughter, a pathetic, hangdog girl with a defeated attitude, bad skin, and a thyroid condition. I could drop earrings, charms, lavalieres, brooches, rings, watches, and bracelets into my overgrown bosom quicker than greased lightning, and then I’d say something like, “I’m going outside for some air,” and the clerk would say, “That’s fine, dear. Would you like a soda?” “No, thank you,” I’d say. And then the customer would think I was the clerk’s daughter, and I’d be back home in my tidy little apartment before anyone figured out what was what.

Well, I wasn’t quite as clever as I thought. On what was going to be my biggest caper—the Mother’s Day sale at Homer Mallory’s newest store, his pride and joy in Oklahoma City—I was spotted by a sharp-eyed clerk who’d worked for one of my previous targets. She recognized me and went into the back room and called the police before I was even all the way through the front door. I was apprehended and since, by then, my rap sheet was pretty extensive, I was incarcerated for twelve miserable months in a different sort of girl’s “home.” One for “troubled” girls, with sturdy bars on the windows, where I gave as good as I got. I could scratch an eye, pull out a handful of hair, and throw a punch with the best of them. But, truthfully? I took no pride in that. Any knucklehead can learn to hit.

My dream for a good life, to make something worthwhile of myself, had been seriously derailed, and I’d look around the lunchroom, and think, Is this really how you want your life to be? Is this really what you, personally, want to be: a second-rate, petty thief? Are these the kinds of people you want to associate with: common criminals? No. I was special. I had taste and was getting what I thought was class. I was a jewel thief—these girls stole hubcaps. I was smart and pretty and as strong as steel. All these girls wanted was to get married and have babies and have someone take care of them, even if they did get slapped around by their husbands every now and then. I decided that would never be my life. My life would be great, comfortable, rich. And furthermore, I’d get it by, and for, myself.

I would become the greatest jewel thief in the history of the world. I had the big picture, but the nuts and bolts still eluded me, until one Saturday night.

Saturday night at the Girls Home was movie night. They’d escort us all into the auditorium and show some boring movie no one watched, we’d all just sit and talk and smoke through the whole thing. But one night, they showed
Pillow Talk
. Everybody else thought it was stupid, but for me it was transforming. Doris Day was everything I wanted to be: She was beautiful. She had beautiful clothes and a beautiful apartment and rich men after her. But more than that: She worked! She was self-sustaining. Self-sufficient. She had a great attitude and never lost her bearings. Doris became my heroine, my role model, my beacon in the dark. She gave me hope and showed me the possibilities of what life could be. That was it. I would become like Doris Day. I made a solemn pledge that as soon as I got out of the reformatory, I’d work smarter.

Incredibly, it never occurred to me to reform.

When my sentence was up, because I’d been a juvenile, my records were sealed and a private scholarship fund volunteered to pay my college tuition—regular attendance was part of my probation requirement.

“We’re giving you the opportunity to turn your life around, Miss Keswick,” the scholarship lady told me.

“I certainly appreciate it. I won’t let you down,” I said, and I meant it. But I hated college. It was horrible. As far as I was concerned, I was still doing time. I was bored out of my mind. I was meant for something more than this: I had goals and aspirations. But with no one but a distant Doris up there on the big screen to guide me, it was hard to find my way.