Princess Daisy (41 page)

“Would you wear them, for me? Without panties? All day long, all evening, all day tomorrow? So I can look at you and think of just how I could be touching you under your clothes … so you can look at me and see me thinking?”

“Oh!”

“Will your?”

“Yes, God, yes!”

As the members of the Shorts’ house party gathered for drinks before lunch, Robin Valarian approached his wife and put his arm around her.

“Did you have a good ride, my angel?” she asked him, tilting up her proud nose and widening her Oriental eyes.

“Marvelous—it’s really a shame you’ve become afraid of horses, my poor pet. You used to ride so well. And you, was the hunting good?”

“Superb, quite simply superb.”

“I hoped it would be. I almost envy you.”

Daisy lunched with Cindy and her sisters in their playroom and then spent the afternoon sketching the little girl on her pony. The younger girls, who were seven and five, equestrians both, watched respectfully for a while and finally, bored, wandered off. After she’d worked until Cindy would pose no longer, Daisy indulged in the great gift the weekends with the Horse People could provide: a solitary ride accompanied only by Theseus. These hours alone, galloping, free, abandoned, mindlessly happy, as if she moved in a wind of vernal delight, were a luxury she could never have afforded otherwise, and she’d become adept at snatching them when she could, without taking time she could have used for work. Reluctantly, in the last afternoon light, she trotted back to the stables and went to her room to bathe and dress for dinner.

It was the thing she liked least about these weekends, she thought, as she carefully put away her riding clothes, the obligatory dinner with the assembled guests, the obligatory conversations, the obligatory princess image her hostess expected from her,
exacted
from her actually. Kiki often wondered why she disliked it so, why she endured it only to help sell her work. “I would adore to be a princess,” she said, shaking her head at Daisy severely. She’d never been able to explain, not even to Kiki, what she could barely begin to work out for herself, that she felt, in some deep way, like an impostor in the persona of Princess Daisy Valensky, as if she had no right to the title. Granted, titles were out of date in the modern world, except for those few countries still ruled by monarchs, but
many people in many other countries still used them without the malaise she felt.

As Daisy lowered herself into her hot bath, she realized, because of the sudden shock of comfort she experienced from the embrace of the water, that she was sad, with a familiar sadness which overcame her from time to time, a sadness against which she battled without understanding its origin. She had periods of depression that she could see coming like the first hint of a sea fog dimming the light, a tendril drawn across the back of her mind that soon turned the furnishings of her life into dismal heaps. In such a mood, if she were home, she would creep under all the blankets she could find, thrust her feet into heavy wool socks and lie shivering for hours, wondering why the future held no delight, trying to imagine a situation, a place, a happening which could tempt her back to reality. She would hold Theseus close, ruffling him over and over, and cuddling him tightly.

Whenever she tried to trap this despairing sadness, lay it bare and examine it, Daisy was immediately caught up in a web of unwelcome questions that no one left alive could answer for her.

What if, for instance, she had two parents like most people? What if her mother, like other women who are separated from their husbands, had managed to explain to Daisy, when she was a child, why they lived hidden in Big Sur, seeing no strangers, having no contact with the outside world? Even if the explanation hadn’t made too much sense it might have satisfied her for a while, until she was old enough to understand. What if her father had ever told her
why
he could only spend such a short time with her and had to leave so abruptly, year after year, keeping her in constant fear that he’d never return, in spite of the letters he sent her? What if her mother—that all-too-vague memory of absolute security and love—hadn’t gone without a farewell, vanishing into the sea on a sunny afternoon? What if her father had allowed Dani to stay with her instead of imposing a rigorous, hermetic seal of silence on her very existence? And what if Stash hadn’t died when she was fifteen; what if he were still alive, protecting her by his very existence? What if Ram had been a real older brother, concerned and kind, someone to whom she could go with her problems, instead of the sick madman only she and Anabel knew he was?

Daisy got out of the tub and started to dress. As she brushed her hair she looked at Kiki’s fake emeralds that lay on the dressing table. The necklace and bracelets would be perfection loaded onto the green tweed jacket with its ruffled lapels, but the earrings would be wasted, hidden by her hair. She found some hairpins and twisted them through the great oval pendant drops, rimmed with rhinestones. She was wearing her hair down naturally this evening, after having kept it braided all day, and the gorgeous, heavy, silver-gilt stuff, in which she deftly fastened the earrings, fell in little ripples. Her Schiaparelli trouser suit made her look like a young Robin Hood, a Robin Hood who’d gone all the way to Paris to rob the rich, and, as she finished dressing, she stared at herself in the mirror as firmly as if she were dealing with a skittish horse and said out loud, “Daisy Valensky, it’s no good wondering ‘what if?’ What is—
is!
”

Patrick Shannon recognized Daisy as the girl he’d seen riding that morning only from the set of her head as she entered the drawing room. Otherwise he would have thought she was a new arrival, since he had not seen her at either breakfast or lunch. As she entered the room, in which the other guests were already assembled, a small piece of time seemed to be frozen, a split second in which the hum of conversation hesitated, fragmented and then resumed.

Daisy knew no one in the room, and Topsy guided her around, making introductions. As she approached Patrick, he thought, so that’s who she is, he might have guessed. Although he spent no time at all keeping up with celebrity news, like everyone else he had been aware of Daisy’s existence. He could vaguely remember the cover of her as a baby in
Life
when he’d been a teenager.

They shook hands with perfunctory smiles, Daisy preoccupied with remembering all the new names—these people were her possible future customers—and Shannon trying to fit her into a slot. He was a man who liked to place new people immediately, get a fix on them, so that he knew where they stood in relation to him. He had already dismissed the Horse People as utterly unimportant in his scheme of things, tagged Vanessa and Robin Valarian as people he would never do business with and become convinced that Ham Short was a man with whom he could work profitably and well—he liked his style. As Daisy turned to be introduced to the Dempseys, he thought,
another butterfly, pampered, petted, indulged, flattered and vain. The lesson of his ex-wife had been well learned … he knew the type.

At dinner his judgment was confirmed as he listened to the conversation between Daisy, who was seated on his right, and Dave Hemming and Charlie Dempsey.

“I’ll never forget seeing your father playing in a high goal tournament in Monterey in the thirties,” Charlie Dempsey said to Daisy. “I don’t remember the exact year but he was playing at three with Eric Pedley from Santa Barbara playing one, Tommy Hitchcock at two and Winston Guest at four—greatest team ever mounted in my opinion.”

“Nonsense, Charlie,” Dave Hemming interrupted from across the table. “The greatest team ever mounted was Guest,
Cecil Smith
, and Pedley, with Hitchcock at three—with all due respect to Stash.”

“I’m sure you’re both right,” Daisy smiled. “But nobody, not even Cecil Smith, could ride like my father.” She had grown accustomed to these conversations in the last few years. Almost every Horse Person over fifty had his own memories of her father, and she liked to hear them discuss him … it brought him back for a moment, even though they were talking of memories of very long ago, before she’d been born.

While the familiar argument went on, Daisy turned to Shannon.

“Are you a polo aficionado, Mr. Shannon?” she asked politely.

“I don’t know a thing about it,” he answered.

“That’s refreshing.”

He thought she was mocking him. “And what do you do, Princess Valensky, when you’re not arbitrating arcane disputes about a game that took place forty-five years ago?”

“Oh—this and that. I’m sketching young Cindy this weekend, on her pony.”

“For fun?”

“More or less.” Daisy considered it necessary at all times to hide the true commercial nature of her presence at these house parties. The fact that she was there to make money she had to have, the fact that she spent the evening carefully and casually finding out if any of her fellow guests had children who might be prospective subjects for her, the fact that she was doing nothing more or less than
commission hunting, was best concealed by the mask of the dilettante. Her profession was well served by word of mouth rather than self-advertisement

“Do you hunt in the neighborhood, Mr. Shannon?”

“Hunt? Here? No.” My God, Patrick thought After one month of riding school how could anyone expect him to be jumping fences?

“Then where
do
you hunt?” Daisy continued, confidently.

“I don’t hunt at all,” Patrick said shortly.

“But of course you do—or did—no? Oh, then why have you given it up?”

Shannon looked for malice in her eyes and found nothing but the gleam of candlelight on black velvet The flames, the chrysanthemums on the table, the reflections from the heavy silver and Irish cut glass—all had become accomplices in illuminating her beauty which met and outmatched every brightness in the room. But he thought he heard a sardonic note in her amused interrogation.

“I assure you that I don’t hunt, have never hunted and have no intention of ever hunting,” he answered her with a coldly reined-in courtesy.

“But … your boots …” Daisy murmured, confused.

“What about them?” he snapped.

“Nothing,” she said hastily.

“No—I insist. What about my boots?” Now he was certain that she was making fun of him.

“Well, only … oh, it’s not important, really, it’s just silly of me to have noticed …” Daisy babbled, trying to avoid his eyes.

“The boots?” Patrick asked, implacably.

Now Daisy got angry. If this man was going to treat her like a witness in a murder trial, she’d jolly well speak up.

“Mr. Shannon, your boots are black with brown tops. Only a Servant of the Hunt, that is a Hunt official, like a Whipper-in or the Master of the Hounds or the Master of the Hunt himself is
entitled
to wear boots like that. If you don’t hunt, your boots should be one solid color.”

“The devil!”

“Someone should have told you,” she hastened to add.

“Aren’t you saying that it’s one of the things which everyone is expected to know?”

“It’s really not important,” Daisy answered as coolly as possible.

“You mean it’s not the ‘done thing’?” he said, stingingly, venting his fury at Chuck Byers who had given him the boots without an explanation.

“It’s unheard of,” she said, her temper rising.

“Then why hasn’t anyone else said anything—I’ve been out riding all day,” he accused her in a hard voice.

“They assumed, as I did, that you hunted. It’s as simple as that.”

“I don’t ride well enough for any rational person to imagine that I hunt,” he replied furiously.

“Then perhaps they were being tactful, perhaps they guessed that you’d get upset and they didn’t want to risk your mighty wrath? Why get angry at me, Mr. Shannon? I didn’t sell you those boots.” Daisy turned to Charlie Dempsey and started to talk polo to him.

Patrick Shannon was left simmering in the suspicion that all of the people he’d ridden with today must have been curious about his boots and been too polite to question him—and, no doubt, had been laughing at him behind his back.

Shannon did not enjoy feeling like a horse’s ass.

16

T
here was only one private room in the Valarians’ apartment, only one room which had never been photographed in the course of Robin’s never-ending redecorations, which totally renewed the look of their Park Avenue duplex every two years. This was the room in which they spent their rare time together, in which they indulged in a cherished ritual before dressing to go out or to entertain at home as they did virtually every night of the week. Each evening at six o’clock Robin and Vanessa met in their private room which had walls and floors covered in thick carpeting the color of vicuna and a domed copper ceiling, from which warm light, glowing from hidden recesses, spread over the many orchids that grew in hanging baskets. In the center of the room, which was otherwise entirely empty, was a carpeted platform on which rested a gigantic oval hot tub—a tub as large as most ordinary bathrooms—made of black fiberglass. Six inches deeper than tubs generally are, it had four adjustable water jets of brushed chrome that created whirlpools of water that could reach 110 degrees. Naked in the soothing water, their marvelously taut, superbly kept bodies glimmering, they lay and sipped cold, dry white wine, gossiping about their days and their doings. There they reaffirmed the deep bonds which held them together.

Like many married homosexual couples they formed a stronger, more solid and durable relationship than almost any of the heterosexual couples they knew. There is no team so committed to their joint and individual successes as the homosexual husband happily married to a lesbian wife, no love match as tight and protective and close-knit.
Together they received immense benefits they could never have obtained outside of marriage, the most important of which was that protection from being single which leads, in the case of any attractive male or female over thirty, to lively speculation about their sexual preferences on the part of almost everybody who meets them. Together they formed that unit, “the married couple,” that is far more easily absorbed into social life anywhere than any single homosexual or a homosexual couple of the same sex: they provided their hostesses with that most desirable addition to any party, a perfectly matched pair.