Princess Daisy (37 page)

“Excuse me, dog handler,” Luke said to her, “are you aware that your animal is on top of the caterer’s table, creating consternation and famine?”

“Don’t worry about that food,” Kiki said. “If you’re hungry, I’ll take you out to dinner. If you’re not hungry, we can go to my place and just talk.” Luke Hammerstein was sinewy and of medium height. He had green eyes which were both audacious and dreamy, insolent and kind. His eyelids were melancholy and his manner detached.

“Jesus,” said Luke. “Is that a pass?”

“You’d be wise to consider it as such. I don’t just kid around,” Kiki said, with open admiration in her umber eyes.

“But what about the dog?”

“Forget him—I was just babysitting him for a friend. Coming?” Kiki was still the diabolic tatterdemalion, the elfin gypsy she had been when she and Daisy met eight years ago, but now she was far more aggressive and self-assured. Her excesses were harmless, her frivolity and self-indulgence basically benign, but she avoided the serious moment as if even one might turn her into a pillar of salt. In all her unsheltered years she couldn’t remember meeting a man like Luke. She reached up and stroked his pointed, silky beard. What possibilities, what fantasies, what lubricious potentials it presented!

“Well …” Luke hesitated. All day long he’d seen Kiki on the set until she’d become part of the scenery, and suddenly, she had transformed herself into a peremptory female who seemed to have a specific intention regarding him and no problem about showing it. In fact, in the black pants tucked into the black boots and the severe black shirt Kiki had decided were right for her background role today, she seemed to him to be an apprentice highwayman, or rather, highwaywoman.

Every poll he’d read recently indicated that when women made the first approach it had a desirably erotic effect on men.

“Do I have a choice?” he wondered.

“Not really,” Kiki said in a voice of despotic allure.

“I guess I don’t at that … anyway, what do I have to lose?”

“Nothing you want to keep,” Kiki assured him with her low laugh which was as fresh and aphrodisiac as a puff of spring air. At a distance Daisy was trying to decide who was doing the most damage, Theseus or Kiki. From the look on Luke Hammerstein’s face, she decided it was too late to save him … anyway, he was a grown man and should be able to look out for himself … but she still might salvage enough from the caterer’s table to feed the crew who had worked long over their normal quitting hour and would be expecting their dinner, as well as their extra money. She collared Theseus with one practiced gesture, pulling him from his perch on top of the platters of roast beef, corned beef and ham.

“Christ, Daisy, don’t you have the sense to keep your hands off that wretched animal?” North said, as he passed by.

“Theseus, my own precious,” Daisy said, with a hand signal she’d taught him ten years ago, “go give your Uncle North a nice big kiss.”

Daisy had been invited to Middleburg, to Hamilton and Topsy Short’s, for the weekend following the Coca-Cola shoot. As she considered what to pack she realized how important it could be—
must be
—to her. Daisy needed money badly. The Horse People had been scattered all over the world the past summer and she hadn’t had a commission for a kid on a pony in months. Mrs. Short had hinted, in that dangling way in which certain rich, prospective patrons torment artists, that if the small sketch she had asked Daisy to do of her eldest daughter was satisfactory, she would consider commissioning an oil painting of all three of her children as a birthday present for her husband. That, Daisy calculated, would be at least a six-thousand-dollar job, although it would take several months to complete in what little spare time she had.

But there was no doubt about the utter necessity for earning some money. The quarterly payment for Danielle’s care was due in a month. The prices at Queen Anne’s School had gone up gradually, over the years, more than keeping up with the sums Daisy made through her painting as well as whatever was left over from her salary. Danielle’s continual care now cost Daisy almost twenty-three thousand dollars a year and she hadn’t been able to afford
to fly to England to see her twin in the past eight months. Although she still faithfully made drawings to send Dani, sometimes she had so much work that she had to substitute one of the postcards she bought at a store in SoHo called “Untitled Art Postcards,” postcards she knew Dani would like: the original illustrations from
Alice in Wonderland
, Odilon Redon butterflies, the carousel figure of an ostrich from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, three Edward Lear cartoons of Foss the Cat from Lear’s
Nonsense Songs and Stories
, the strange fairy painting by Anne Anderson which illustrated Charles Kingsley’s
The Water Babies
.

And now, just when she needed advice, Kiki wasn’t exactly being helpful. Ever since she’d met Luke Hammerstein yesterday she’d been acting as if she were a moonstruck female satyr.

“Kiki,” she’d objected, “I saw you coming on to Luke Hammerstein yesterday—you just can’t behave like that … it isn’t ladylike.”

“My dear Daisy,” Kiki answered loftily. “It worked and that’s what counts. And, in any case, your language shows the deplorable effect of association with that person you call Nick-the-Greek, if I may say so.”

“What does that mean, ‘worked’?” said Daisy suspiciously. “Where did the two of you go last night?”

“Out to dinner.” Kiki’s face was a circle of merriment and secret humor.

“And?”

“Princess Valensky, the fact that at the advanced age of almost twenty-four you only have had two unimportant love affairs with shy, undemanding, easily handled, and essentially passive men hardly makes you a person to consult on romantic matters. I’ll answer your question when there is more to report.”

During her years in New York, Daisy had, by dint of persuading herself that it was necessary to overcome her feelings about sexual involvement, allowed a few of her most persistent suitors to make love to her. She found that she could respond to them physically but not emotionally, and the relationships had not been important or lasting.

“I’ve had
three
love affairs,” Daisy said angrily. “And one was with your own cousin.”

“But did I describe the gentlemen properly?” Kiki demanded.

“You didn’t say that they were all very attractive.”

“I stand corrected. They were, but not my type. Now Luke Hammerstein on the other hand …”

“Spare me. KM, come on. Help me out I’ve only got an hour to pack. The car’s coming to take me out to the airport at six—the Shorts’ jet leaves promptly at seven. Now, what do you think I should wear on Saturday night? It’s that usual nonsense of ‘Don’t bother to dress, dear, because we’re only having sixty for dinner.’ In Middleburg they think dressing for dinner is ‘pretentious’ so they compromise—you know, silk blouses, long tweedy skirts, granny’s pearls, everything fabulously expensive and just the right amount of dowdiness. You know I don’t have that sort of drag—I wouldn’t even if I could afford it,” she said in a worried tone.

When she had first started spending weekends with the Horse People, Daisy had been forced to carve out a unique style for herself. She couldn’t possibly buy fashionable dinner clothes so she became an old-clothes aficionado, avoiding the antique-clothing boutiques with their exquisite garments which only a Bette Midler or a Streisand could afford; avoiding the almost-new shops which were crammed with last year’s couture clothes, already dated; and avoiding as well the flea markets at which only a miracle could uncover a garment in good condition.

Her buys, all came from London jumble sales in church halls that she found time to go to each time she visited Dani. There she specialized in unearthing English and French couture originals, preferably over forty years old, clothes that had been made in the great dressmaking decades of the twenties and thirties. She researched them after she brought them back in triumph, for nothing she owned had cost over thirty-five dollars.

Daisy led Kiki into the third bedroom of their apartment in which she kept her nonworking clothes hanging on a horizontal pipe which crossed one end of the room.

The two girls stood and contemplated the garments that hung there. “It wouldn’t be so hard if you only had regular clothes, like other people,” Kiki sighed.

“Ah … that … how right you are. But it’s simply too expensive and too dull, although I admit it would make life easier,” Daisy replied.

“The Vionnet?” Kiki suggested.

“Too dressy,” Daisy said regretfully, fingering the pale violet satin dress, cut on the bias and dating from 1926. “What do you think about the striped Lucien Lelong?”

“To be honest, I’ve never really liked it on you. Your essential wood nymphishness is not enhanced by zebra stripes, no matter how well done. How about the black velvet Chanel suit? It may be forty years old, but it looks as if it had been born yesterday,” Kiki answered.

“It’s not the right time of year for black velvet, especially in bluegrass country.”

“Wait,
wait
, I see those Dove tea pajamas—you said they were around 1925? Just look, Daisy, cyclamen brocade and green satin with a black satin jacket—it’s a smash!”

“They’re Locust Valley maybe or Saratoga, but definitely not Middleburg.”

“So that lets out the white satin pajama suit from Revillon too?”

“Afraid so. Oh, rot!”

Kiki carefully pushed the hangers aside, sighing wistfully over Daisy’s treasures—they were all too long for her, but she itched after them.

“Ah ha!” Daisy pounced. “How could I have forgotten? Schiaparelli to the rescue, as usual.” Triumphantly she held up an ensemble from the late 1930s when the daring Schiaparelli was doing clothes which were four decades ahead of their time. There was a jacket in lettuce green tweed touched with sequins at the lapels, worn with a pair of corduroy pants in a darker shade of green. “Just right, don’t you think?”

“It’s heaven—really a fuck-you number, as in ‘fuck you, Mrs. Short, I know it’s tweed and I know it’s sequins and I know you didn’t think they can be worn together, but now you do.’ ”

“In a nutshell. I really need this commission, so it’s important to look as if I didn’t.”

“Then you’d better take my fake emeralds again.”

“Emeralds with green sequins?”

“
Especially
with green sequins!”

15

O
f all the potential differences in human tastes, habits, interest and predilections, among the strongest is that which divides people who care about horses from people who don’t. People can love cats or dogs and not feel as if they exist on an entirely different plane from those who are indifferent to these animals, but Horse People not only do not care to understand people who don’t give a damn about horses, but the mere idea that such people exist—and are the vast majority—makes them wonder about the future of the human race. Horse People may be heads of state or professionally unemployed in their ordinary lives, but horses are their passion, as Jerusalem was the passion of a soldier in some ancient Crusade. The cult of the horse as their idol is as central to their lives as cocaine is to some and applause is to others. Perhaps not all of them know that the earliest work of art known to archaeology is a two-and-a-half-inch sculpture of a horse, made from the ivory tusk of a woolly mammoth, a masterpiece of supple grace which is thirty-two thousand years old—but this fact would seem only fitting and right to any Horse Person. It is only normal that the Cro-Magnon people of the Ice Age appreciated the horse twenty-five thousand years before the dawn of our civilization—normal and to be expected, since they believe that the horse is nature’s finest achievement, not excluding man.

“Stupid,
dumb
, moronic beast!” Patrick Shannon told his horse quietly. He didn’t want to be overheard. He was taking a private riding lesson in an outdoor ring at a stable in Peapack, New Jersey, only an hour and fifteen minutes
from Manhattan. During the last month his chauffeur had driven him out to the school every night, right after he finished his heavy schedule of work as president and chief operating officer of Supracorp, a two-billion-dollar corporation. This had meant giving up all social life and the after-work squash games at the University Club that were one of the only chances he ever had to release his tensions, a cherished respite that he had now abandoned, in favor of this enraging, ridiculous, humiliating pursuit of something at which he would never be really good. At thirty-eight, Patrick Shannon was a natural athlete who had a way with a ball, any ball … but growing up in an orphan asylum had given him lots of ability with balls and none, none whatsoever with horses. He hated the things! They drooled and they snorted and they huffed, they turned their heads and tried to nip at his legs with their ugly, big teeth, they reared like silly girls if they saw something they didn’t like, they walked sideways when they were supposed to go forward, they stopped to eat the grass when you hadn’t pulled on the reins and wouldn’t start when you kicked them.

They smelled good—that was all he would say for them. Horseshit was the best smelling shit he’d ever come across, oh, he’d grant them that.

The trail of events that had put Patrick Shannon on the back of a horse was clear. He had set his heart on acquiring for Supracorp another real-estate company, one solely owned by Hamilton Short Ham Short had suggested that Shannon come next month to spend a weekend in Middleburg, Virginia, while the wooing of his business was going on. Short, assuming that Shannon rode, had spoken of “a little hacking about.” Shannon, after committing himself to the weekend, had realized too late that he hadn’t said he didn’t ride. He didn’t know just how crazy Horse People were, but he certainly knew enough about them to guess that the only excuse they would find understandable for an able-bodied man who did not mount a horse was a broken leg. He assumed that many of them rode even with broken legs, and he was perfectly right. Horsemanship, from the moment he accepted Short’s invitation, became a challenge, which was next best to the thing he loved most—a risk.