Small World (3 page)

Roger didn’t give the man in the car more than a once-over, long enough to identify him as the government’s energy chief, a pompous pipe-smoking asshole of the first magnitude who had been, not so long ago, Roger’s unknowing boss. What Roger was nvach more interested in was the way the lady’s blouse gaped open i> she bent into the limo, thrusting a microphone at Secretary Potato Brains. The blouse was white against her dark suit jacket ind threatened to slide off her shell-pink booby at the next second.

The secretary was having a good look, a view Roger envied - ightily. Roger’s thumb drifted over the glossy image of her re:ailike pretty and settled there. He closed his eyes. His thumb r ?Ued ever so gently in a circle. He had never touched a real one.

Roger?’ his mother asked.

He’d opened his eyes and sat up straight. The couch protested te shifting weight.

Yes?’ he’d answered, trying to sound bright and asexual.

'Would you like a brownie?’

’Sure.’

She’d gone away, her head full of brownies. Roger smiled after her genially, drawing his stomach down into its proper place, thinking how truly wonderful it was that mothers couldn’t read

minds.

He’d turned back to the magazine. The photography was top--tch, practically 3D. She was such a big girl, too big to be a model ?r a dancer, and hard as a rock. There was a picture of her jogging iround the mall in Washington. Roger had been there a long time -go on a high school class trip. He didn’t remember much beyond rcmbing water-filled balloons out the hotel windows (because of being drunk the whole time), but he had a soft spot for the place and could recognize some of the buildings. The public buildings rose behind Leyna Shaw’s lithe figure and for once she seemed in scale. reduced to something he could hold in his hand.

He’d read the article avidly. Like all the articles in
VIP,
it was a reek and a promise. Only the photographs were meaty.

He’d meandered through the magazine. There’d been an article r-n a homosexual fashion show that unaccountably disturbed him. Another piece concerned an old crock painter who lived on an sland off the coast of Maine. The name caught on Roger’s mind ike a burr on linen. There was nothing to interest him in articles :c a rock singer, a famous seal, or the case of the comatose teenager whose divorcing parents were engaged in a custody

battle over who would get the kid and the respirator. Then, the last-page gossip column to skim, and the teaser in the box at the bottom. Roger came to a dead halt.

YOU CAN TAKE DOLLY AWAY FROM THE WHITE HOUSE BUT

YOU CAN’T TAKE THE WHITE HOUSE AWAY FROM DOLLY

The nation fell in love with Mike Hardesty’s little princess when she was a sprite of a tomboy blossoming into a rosebud of a girl. We watched her grow up, break some hearts, and marry Harrison Douglas, the son of her father’s oldest ally, in a storybook wedding.

Twenty-five years later, Dolly’s been everywhere, has everything. But it hasn’t all been good times. Her mother died shortly after Mike Hardesty’s ouster from office. Dolly was widowed by Harrison Douglas’s suicide twelve years ago. Their one son, Harrison III, was killed in a tragic flying accident four years ago. The loss of his grandson bore heavily on the embittered ex-president, and Dolly lost her beloved daddy within the year.

So what does a still-beautiful, wealthy woman do with the prospect of long life, unlimited options, and no one to share them with? Unpredictable Dolly, and her .son’s widow, Lucy Douglas, involved themselves in a new hobby that became not only therapy for their shattered lives, but a business and a way of life.

Next week,
VIP
invites you to peek into
DOLLY’S WORLD,
and explore the burgeoning miniatures craze.

2.22.80    
—VIPreviews, VIP

The smell of fresh, hot brownies had invaded Roger’s trancelike state. He’d looked up at his mother, standing over him with a plate of brownies, her forehead wrinkled with worry.

‘Is everything all right?’ she’d asked.

Roger had suspected she was getting ready to feel his forehead for a fever. He
was
hot. He had snatched a brownie off the plate and stuffed it into his mouth.

‘Yeah. Fine,’ he had mumbled around the brownie. ‘Hunky-dory.’

Roger’s mother had put the plate down next to him. She had crossed her arms over her formidable bosom. At least Roger was eating. He couldn’t be very sick, could he? She had smiled her blessings on her boy.

The next issue had been in the stores. The cover was Dolly Hardesty Douglas’s prize dollhouse. Roger could hardly read the

article, his hands had shaken so with excitement.

Apparently Mike Hardesty’s daughter never completely left the White House behind her. For the past several years, Dolly has given substantial time, energy, and money to the restoration of the scale model of the White House that was a gift to her when her father was still president.

‘I was thirteen,’ she laughs. ‘I thought I was too old for dollhouses.’

So the well-intentioned gift of Leonard Jakobs, a black janitor who worked thirty years in the executive mansion, went unappreciated and forgotten for some twenty years.

It was after the deaths of her son and father that Dolly stumbled over the age-worn dollhouse among her father’s effects. It was natural to take it immediately to her son’s widow (Lucy), who was already acquiring a reputation as a miniaturist.

‘At first I thought I’d have Lucy fix it up for Laurie, my granddaughter,’ Dolly confesses, ‘and then I fell in love with it. Laurie’s too little for it, anyway.’

The dollhouse is a spooky look-a-like for the real executive mansion, and it’s been almost as expensive to furnish as the real, one-hundred-times-larger original.

Lucy Douglas estimates shyly that her mother-in-law has spent one hundred thousand dollars on the restoration of her dollhouse. That kind of money would buy little Laurie a lot of slightly less spectacular dollhouses. Mrs. Douglas, raising Laurie, seven, and Zachary, four, her children by Dolly’s son Harrison, says her relationship with her mother-in-law is on a firm and fair business footing. She charges Dolly exactly what she charges other customers for similar work, while admitting that she took on little other work during the period she worked on Dolly’s White House. Experts in the field regard her as one of the two or three best miniaturists in the United States; one knowledgeable collector who prefers to remain anonymous states that, if anything, Lucy Douglas undercharged for her services.

‘Dolly Hardesty got a hell of a bargain. That dollhouse is worth a quarter of a million today because of Lucy Douglas’s signature,’ the collector maintains.

Still, Lucy Douglas has apparently acquired an unexpected profit on the deal; when Dolly’s restored White House came to the attention of Nicholas Weiler, the director of the Dalton Institute, as he was assembling an exhibition of dollhouses, Dolly brought her daughter-in-law and Weiler together. The rumor in Washington is that Lucy may soon retire Weiler from his long-running position as D.C.’s second-most-eligible bachelor, after the president.

2.29.80    —
VIPersonalities, VIP

* * *

The spread had been lavishly illustrated with pictures of the dollhouse, which was full of the choice doodads that Lucy Douglas made. The close-ups had made the items look very real and very plush—much nicer than the trading-stamp furniture in Roger’s mother’s living room. The photos of Dolly Hardesty Douglas and the talented Lucy had not been hard to take. Dolly was older than Roger had remembered but was still a wickedly good-looking woman. And Lucy—well, that Weiler guy was getting a nice handful. He had turned out to be, in the part of the story that mentioned the exhibition at the Dalton Institute, a predictably pretty aristocrat who probably had a superlong tongue from licking the cream off his whiskers. His sweat glands had probably atrophied from disuse.

It had been more fun looking at the women. Roger had relaxed, letting the magazine spread over his belly like a small roof. He’d begun to see possibilities.

. . . Sartoris has attained the stature of a legend among the locals, people not easy to impress. Isolated on his one hundred and ten acres of island, eleven miles from Margarite (pronounced Mar-gar-right) Port, he survives essentially unaffected by the squeeze between the rising cost of fuel and heating oil and the marginal incomes available from the traditional local economy, based on lobstering, fishing, and farming. The crunch is gradually emptying the coastal islands of their residents who simply cannot afford to live on their ancestral land anymore.

The locals credit the sheer hard work of Sartoris’s back-to-the-land existence, the sixties’ chimera of self-sufficiency that he has lived since he moved onto the island in the forties, for the painter’s good health and advanced age.

‘Blame Ethelyn,’ Sartoris jokes, referring to his housekeeper-companion of many years, Ethelyn Blood.

Mrs. Blood, a Margarite Port woman and the widow of a local lobsterman, comes back quickly: ‘Blame the devil,’ she says, ‘who figures he’s got his share of old cusses, and the good Lord, who wants to make a saint out of me.’

2.22.80    —
VIPersonalities, VIP

The old man saw possibilities. He nudged the bit of broken glass with his toe. The sun caught it. It flared green. The old man sipped noisily at a glass of cold tea.

The telephone jangled. He swore at it and stared at the sand

under his bare feet, and at the bit of broken glass. The telephone, deaf to his curse, rang again.

‘Ethelyn!' he roared. ‘Ethelyn!’

There was silence from the house. The telephone gave him another Bronx cheer.

‘What’s she doing?’ he muttered. He shuffled through the open French doors into his bedroom, grabbing the telephone just after the fifth ring.

‘Hello-oh?’ he asked.

The caller asked if he were Leighton Sartoris. The old man couldn’t tell if he was speaking to a man or a woman; the voice was blurred by static on the line. How did they get the number?

‘Yes, I am. What do you want?’ he answered angrily.

The caller stated he was Somebody-or-Other calling from
VIP
magazine, and did Mr. Sartoris have any comment on the theft of his painting,
Princess Dolly,
from a California museum.

Sartoris cackled with delight. ‘First I heard of it,’he said. ‘Good riddance.’

He dropped the receiver into its cradle. Bundling the telephone into the pillowcase, he kicked it under the bed. He knew now where the fellow had gotten the number. Bastards probably had it on file. It had been a great mistake allowing that nosy woman from that miserable gossip sheet onto the island. He wished he didn’t know why he had allowed it; it might be easier to think he was getting senile rather than that he was doing foolish things for sentimental reasons.

Picking up his glass of tea, he shuffled outside again. There was a comfortable tussock of grass nearby and he sat down to stare at the green glass. An ancient gray tomcat emerged through the bedroom door and curled up next to him. Idly, he began to knead the back of the beast’s neck.

It was amusing to think of that particular picture being spirited away from some bloody museum by an enterprising Yank thief. It took him, a little unwillingly, back to painting it, the way everything wanted to take him backward now.

It had been his eleventh year on the island. He had seemed more of a guest then, still on sufferance in a strange country. When the presidential party, summering south of Margarite Port in the more fashionable Hurd’s Reach, invited him to dinner, he went, telling himself it would be rude not to.

But it wasn’t that at all. He had just turned sixty and knew he had lost something. During the winter, he had begun to drink more—-out of boredom and, he told himself, to ward off the chill. By summer, he had seemed to himself to be a balloon at the end of an insecure tether, floating in an alcoholic ether. There was a terrible urge to escape, and a terrible panic that he might just do that, at long last. So he had asked to paint that silly wicked girl (who agreed out of depthless vanity), knowing that the habit of years would reassert itself; he would stay sober for as long as it took to do it right.

And he had. But the summer, relentlessly hot, had turned hotter in the light of the humid young flesh he had masochistically displayed before him. He worked madly, with the scent of gin, like ice, in his nostrils.

Young Dorothy had reclined half in and half out of a patch of shade in a hollow of sand, just out of sight of her bodyguards, lurking in a grove of pine trees where the sea breeze occasionally stirred. Stripped to a pair of baggy shorts, Sartoris had stood in full sun, the broad brim of his old hat shading his face, and the easel protected from the glare by a strange rigging of umbrellas. She had chitter-chattered like a monkey all the six weeks, and it was all clever and nasty, but at least she had kept her body still. He had never spoken to her; there was nothing they could not say to each other with their eyes.

The afternoon it was finished she had held her tongue for once. Her eyes were busy, as always, speculative, and somehow furtive, and her tongue was forever peeking out between her lips, exposing itself. Her body was glossy, beaded with sweat, and her small greedy hands made a slicking sound as they passed over her breasts. He had watched, in a glaze of sweat, as she made love to herself. At the end, her body had arched, seeking its self-release, and she had laughed. It had been a child’s pleased hoot, and so much more sweet and rotten than the low-throated murmur of a woman’s pleasure.