Carriage Trade (52 page)

He reached out and drew her to him and kissed her on the lips, gently at first and then with a fiercer urgency, and she felt herself giving in to him—at first pleasantly, agreeably, and then with an urgency of her own which was quite unexpected as she returned his deep kisses, longingly, passionately, and finally with an abandon coupled with discipline and, oh, yes, determination.

“I nearly died when I thought you might marry David Belknap,” he said.

“Oh, never … him.…”

“I've waited for this so long, Miranda. So long … so long … years and years.” He drew her to him again, and one hand moved slowly, expertly, beneath the shoulder of her dress, and as she pressed against him she felt the thrilling shape of his erection.

“What about … Nino's chicken … pineapple rice?” she whispered.

“In the oven … on warm. That can wait. This can't.”

“Oh, Tommy, I feel so—” she began.

“I want you so, Miranda. I want to marry you.”

“Oh, yes. Let me quickly run into the bathroom.” She leapt up.

She had had a wild idea for their lovemaking. She would dash to the medicine cabinet where he kept his condoms, snatch one from the packet, run back out to him, and toss it to him playfully, saying, “Let's see how you look in one of these!”

In the bathroom she pulled the medicine cabinet door open. Nino's housecleaning efforts had not extended to the medicine cabinet, but that hardly mattered now, and her hand flew out for the packet of condoms.

But then her hand stopped in midair. On a shelf in the cabinet was something she had never seen there before. It was a spray bottle of Equipage, Smitty's perfume.

She closed the cabinet door with a gasp.

Then she stood for several minutes at the sink, her fingers gripping the beveled rim of the countertop, her cheek pressed against the cool surface of the mirror, feeling ill—no, not ill, confused and exhausted.

From a distance, she heard him calling to her. “Miranda?”

“Coming.” It was barely a whisper.

Returning, she detoured through his bedroom and picked up the largest of the boxes, the one he said contained everything that was important. It weighed easily twenty pounds, maybe more.

When she entered the room, she saw that he had removed his smoking jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and loosened his tie, ready for action. Seeing her with the heavy carton in her arms, his face looked stricken, and the right corner of his lip began to twitch violently.

“I thought we ought to start with you explaining Tarkington's bookkeeping system to me,” she said.

“Take the box home with you,” he said angrily. “Figure the system out for yourself.”

Then he muttered something under his breath.

“What did you say?” she asked him.

He said nothing, but she had heard him:
“Cock teaser!”

26

For the next few hours, with her convertible top still down, she drove randomly through the night neighborhoods of the North Shore, up one winding lane and down another, discovering pockets of civilization she never knew were there. Through picture windows, television sets flickered. In dining rooms, families sat at dinner. She passed what had to be a pair of lovers in a parked car. She paused to watch a touch football game in a lighted field behind a school. Everywhere the world seemed ordered, planned, sequential, and organized according to human rules as she struggled to compose her own cascading thoughts. At a McDonald's drive-through window she ordered a Big Mac and fries. Tommy's chicken adobo had gone uneaten, and she ate her burger in the parking lot, using the big carton on the passenger seat beside her as a table. Finally, she saw that her gas gauge was close to empty, and she headed homeward toward the farm.

At the entrance, she pressed the five-digit code, and the electric gate swung slowly open, then closed behind her, and she drove up the long gravel drive past the rhododendron hedges. The night had grown chilly, but she needed the fresh air to be able to think clearly, and her head was full of thoughts and plans. Thoughts had to match with plans. She looked at her watch. It was eleven o'clock.

The big house was dark, but the entrance lights had been left on for her, and she parked in the circle, turning off her headlights and ignition. Then she let herself out of the car, lifted the heavy box from the seat, lugged it up the front steps and across the terrace to the front door, and let herself in with her key. With the box in her anus, she tiptoed up the carpeted steps to her room, where Margaret, as promised, had turned down her bed for her. She placed the box in the bottom of one of the two walk-in closets and closed the door. She would go through its contents later.

There was a sliver of light under her mother's door, so she went down the hall and knocked.

“Is that you, Miranda? Come in, darling,” her mother's voice said.

Connie was sitting up in bed propped by many pillows, reading a paperback. “I thought I heard your car in the drive,” she said. She folded down the corner of a page to mark her place and laid the book aside. “Well, how was your dinner with Tommy?” she asked.

“Interesting,” Miranda said. “Not a festive occasion, exactly, but interesting. Mostly we talked store business.”

“The store, the store,” her mother said wearily, reaching for a cigarette. “Your father was getting a little tired of Tommy, you know. I don't know what the matter was, but for the last six months of his life or so, he'd frown whenever Tommy's name came up. Your father had become less than satisfied with Tommy's performance. The blush was off the rose.”

She sat at the foot of her mother's big canopy bed, her hand on one of the ribbon-twisted bedposts. There was something about her mother's appearance tonight that was different, and she couldn't immediately put her finger on what it was. Then suddenly she knew. “Why isn't your hair up in rollers?” she asked. “You don't even look as though you've creamed your face!”

“Oh, I've quit all that,” she said with a smile. “It was such a bloody nuisance.”

“Your Dead Sea mud pack? Your mask?”

“That damn mud pack! It stank, and the rollers meant I had to sleep in one position, on my back, all night long. I hated it. I'd wake up in the morning with a stiff neck. In order to sleep, I had to take a Seconal. Then it was two Seconals. I was afraid of becoming addicted to Seconal, so I decided to quit all that nonsense. It's much more pleasant to read myself to sleep.”

Miranda had always regarded her mother's elaborate beauty routines with a queer mixture of amusement and derision. Then why was she all at once dismayed to hear they were being abandoned? “Mother, don't you want to stay looking beautiful?” she said.

“I've decided it's time I looked my age,” she said. “Why not? When your father was alive, perhaps there was a reason for all that silly business. Now there just isn't any. I've also decided to let my hair go to its natural color. Look.” She lifted a strand of hair. “You can already see where the gray's beginning to come in.”

Miranda reached out and covered her mother's hand with her own. “Oh, Mother, I don't want you to get
old
!
”
she cried.

“It's a situation we all have to face, Miranda,” she said. “Fortunately, you've got a long time before you have to deal with it.”

“Let me just put some night cream on your face!”

“No!” she said with a laugh. “I threw most of the greasy stuff away. It got all over the bed linen. Please, Miranda, I'm quite content to let my face do whatever it decides to do.”

Miranda felt tears standing in her eyes, and still she did not understand why these revelations of her mother's had managed to upset her so. Had she worshiped Connie's beauty too?

“I'll promise you one thing,” her mother said. “I won't let myself get fat. I've got enough vanity left not to let that happen. Now let's talk about something more interesting than your mother's face and figure.”

With that, a blue Persian cat leapt onto the bed and made its way purposefully across the bedclothes. “What in the world is
that
?” Miranda cried.

“Isn't he beautiful? His name is Bicha. I've always loved cats, and always wanted one, but your father was allergic to them. Bicha, meet Miranda. This is Miranda's house too, at least part of the time.”

Miranda held out her fingertips to let the cat sniff them, which it proceeded to do, daintily, gingerly. Then she rubbed the cat's throat and felt its purr box come to life. “I think Bicha likes me,” she said.

“Of course he does. Cats are marvelous. Sometimes I think cats hold the key to everything. All they need is a little stroking, and everything else they take care of for themselves.”

Bicha spread himself out across the bedclothes, his forepaws folded beneath him. He looked first at her mother, then at Miranda, yawned, and blinked.

The two women sat in silence for a moment, admiring Bicha.

“Mother, I've been thinking,” Miranda said.

“Yes?”

“About Smitty.”

“Yes?” There was no change of tone in her voice.

“The other night you said you felt sorry for her.”

“Yes. I do.” In the same tone.

“I said I disagreed. I said I thought Smitty got exactly what she deserved. But I've been thinking about what you said, and I've decided you were right. I feel sorry for her too. I think we should both feel sorry for her. She's got no job. She's got no money. Obviously, the curatorship Daddy wanted for her isn't going to work out. She's got no family that she's close to. She's got no”—cautiously, now—“man in her life anymore.”

“All this is true, Miranda.” No change in tone.

“She hasn't got much of anything, has she? I feel we've sort of let her get washed overboard and left her to sink or swim.”

“Yes, I feel the same way,” her mother said.

“I wonder whether we shouldn't try to toss her some sort of life jacket.”

Her mother sighed. “There are a lot of women out there like Smitty,” she said. “She's got good looks, but not the best. She's got a good mind, but not the best. She was elected to the National Honor Society in high school, but just barely. Women like that—I pity them. If they don't find the right man by the time they're thirty, they're doomed. Doomed to revising the facts about themselves and blaming other people for their plight. Then, by the time they reach about age thirty-five, they panic. How old is Smitty now?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Yes. You see? The onset of the panic age. You might want to remember this bit of motherly wisdom, Miranda, in contemplating the next decade of your own life. But what kind of life jacket could we toss to Smitty?”

“We could offer to give her back her old job at the store. She loved the job, and she was awfully good at what she did. She was a damned good buyer. The figures from her department were among the best in the store.”

“But the store's going to be sold, Miranda,” her mother said.

Miranda bit her lip. “It hasn't been sold yet,” she said.

“What's Continental up to, anyway? Why do they keep extending their deadline?”

“Because they're having trouble collecting the voting shares necessary to buy us out,” she said. “And our employee shareholders are turning out to be surprisingly loyal. They don't want to sell because they don't want the store to change.”

“You mean they're afraid they'll lose their jobs.”

“That too, of course. But I'd also hate to see them lose their jobs. Wouldn't you?”

“Oh, yes, of course, but—”

“I haven't agreed to sell my shares yet. And neither have you.”

“No, but only because Jake Kohlberg hasn't given me the green light. He says he doesn't like the way this particular deal smells. He doesn't like the two-tiered aspect of it, whatever that means. He thinks a better offer might be coming down the road. Some Canadians. But where are these better offers? Where are these Canadians? If we hold off on the Continental offer for too long, the whole deal could fall apart and we'd have to go out, hat in hand, begging for another purchaser. That wouldn't be good for us, would it? Still, I have to wait until Jake tells me what to do.” She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray.

“Why?”

“Because I've always taken Jake's advice. He's always advised your father and me very well, over the years. Anyway, the store is going to have to be sold to somebody, sooner or later.”

“Why?”

“Jake says so.”

“Why? Do we need the money, Mother?”

“We very well may! Jake says your father didn't leave his affairs in quite as good shape as he might have. He's still waiting for some figures.”

Miranda thought, Jake says, Jake says, Jake says. It was always the same. But she said, “I want to run the store, Mother.”

“Oh, Miranda! You're not still talking that foolishness, are you?”

“I can do it. I know I can. I want to keep Tarkington's in the family. Wouldn't Daddy have wanted that?”

“He wanted the store for Blazer, but Blazer didn't want it. He didn't want it for you. He was very old-fashioned, very Old World, in his ideas about women. He thought a woman's place was in the home.”

Or at his feet, Miranda thought, but she didn't say it. Instead she said, “Are you afraid I'd run the place into the ground and land us both in the poorhouse?”

“No, it's not that, Miranda. I'm thinking of your future. I'd like to see you married, having children. I'd like to have some grandchildren in my old age, and you're my only chance for that!”

“I've already turned down one—no, two—proposals of marriage, Mother. So I like to think I'm marriageable.”

“Married to the right man, of course.”

She thought, Not like the man you married, Mother. She said, “I have no intention of becoming a spinster.”