Small World (7 page)

‘Be that as it may. She put them up for several months. I came home from school one holiday and there they were, ensconced like exiled royalty in the house. I was severely instructed by my mother to ignore Mrs. Hardesty’s heavy hand on the brandy bottle, and to suffer what Mother termed “Dolly’s high spirits”.’ ‘Be a good Boy Scout?’ Lucy put in.

Nick smiled at her. He would have been happy to abandon this particular reminiscence, but Lucy pursued it.

‘Don’t keep me in suspense. Tell me what Dolly got up to. Give me a weapon, for Christ’s sake, for the next time she tells me I’m letting her grandchildren grow up like savages.’

There was a silence, and then Nick confessed in a funereal tone. ‘Besides being a miserable spoiled brat, she cock-teased every male in the place, including my poor stepfather, who was by then a doddering seventy-year-old.’

Lucy whistled. That’s the kind of weapon that might backfire on me. I guess I won’t use it. You, too?’

‘What? Oh, yes. I was barely pubescent though.’

‘Hardly got a rise out of you?’ Lucy poked wickedly.

‘You’re cute tonight.’ Nick paused. ‘Funny thing. She stopped it all of a sudden, just like that. Went all demure schoolgirl. I suppose Mother must have stepped on her.’

‘But I thought you said your mother wouldn’t have noticed.’ ‘Oh, she always notices. She just doesn’t recognize the idea of sin, or a person who’s deliberately bad. No, it’s all a matter of

manners to her. I don’t doubt she thought Dolly had been badly raised and that it was only good manners on her part to straighten the little beast out. She tried anyway.’

Lucy shuddered. ‘Dolly has gorgeous manners. When I first met her, I thought, how marvelous. A real lady, in this day and age. Then I found out she uses her manners to suit herself.’ Then she jumped to another subject. ‘Did you know Harrison?’

‘Your Harrison?’

Lucy nodded, almost shyly, as if she had never claimed possession of her dead husband before.

Nick shook his head. ‘I remember him, barely, as a small boy. I was not an age to be interested in other people’s offspring. I’m sorry. I can’t say I ever knew him as a grown-up.’

‘He didn’t ever grow up.’ Lucy’s tone was flippant but bitter. ‘Lived and died a boy. He really wasn’t much like Dolly, except he wanted his own way no matter what the cost. We’re all that way, a little, aren’t we?’

She was obviously pained. As much as Nick wanted her to talk about the things that were important to her, it was obviously too much for her at this instant. He didn’t answer her, pretending to concentrate on changing lanes, leaving the interstate highway.

‘How much work do you have to do for Dolly now?’ he asked at last.

‘The end is in sight.’ There was a calm satisfaction in her voice. She had recovered herself. ‘There’s some accessories to do, china and whatnot, and I’m trying to locate some French scenic wallpaper so that I can do over the Diplomatic Reception room the way she wants it. And she told me today she thought the model of the grounds that your people at the Dalton worked up was wretched-looking.’ Lucy cast an apologetic glance his way.

‘I admit it was a slap-up job.’

‘She wants me to do that, the grounds.’

‘Do you really want to? It sounds like a hell of a lot of work.’ ‘No. I’d like to do something else with my life besides work for Dolly. It’s bad enough being tied to her through the kids. I’ve got other customers if I want them, that I’ve put off to do her dollhouse. I’ll probably never have another project this big, that’s all.’

It was soothing to talk about the work itself, Nick thought. And foolish to venture away from that narrow path. He was going to do it anyway.

‘Has Dolly expressed her anxiety that you’re going to run off

and marry me and then retire before she has what she wants from you?’ he asked genially.

‘No. But she shouldn’t worry.’ Lucy looked straight at him, her face expressionless.

‘I can’t imagine you not working,’ Nick plunged ahead, willfully ignoring the sense of Lucy’s answer.

They were in city streets now, where the light and dark fanned over Lucy’s features.

‘She thinks I’m going to steal you away, or that someone is going to steal her dollhouse. Little does she know,’ Nick continued distantly, ‘the Dalton is tighter than a tick right now. Besides, I’ve never heard of anyone ever stealing a dollhouse.’

He didn’t have to add:
And you’re locked up tight too.
An uncomfortable silence fell between them that was only eased by the wine at dinner. They left the restaurant in a mildly tiddly state.

He stopped the car on the comer of a quiet tree-lined Georgetown street. Lucy, curled up on the seat beside him and loose from the wine, reacted slowly.

He seized her right wrist, wrapped in the gold chains of her evening bag. ‘Let’s see what’s in your purse,’ he demanded.

Color flared in her cheeks. She struggled a little, laughing, and protested, ‘No.’

He released her and sat back. ‘Come on. ’ He held out his hands. She thrust the purse at him.

‘Fine thing,’ he scolded mildly, ‘when I can’t take you to a nice restaurant without you stealing the ruffles off the lamb chops and the doily off the candy tray.’

‘I might be able to use them. They just throw them out,’ she insisted.

‘You don’t even know what you’re going to do with them?’

‘Make something.’

‘You don’t know. And they weren’t even our lamb chops.’

He gave her back the handbag and started the car again.

‘You’re a goddamn magpie, Lucy. Would you like to go to my house for a while?’

She had curled up against him again and closed her eyes.

‘I’ll let you have the egg cartons I’ve saved,’ he offered.

She smothered an attack of giggles.

‘My old tea bag tags?’

Lucy laughed out loud. Nick bent to plant a quick kiss on the top of her head.

‘Let’s go,’ she whispered.

Dolly Hardesty
Douglas paced her living room. She felt like an exile. There was no comfort tonight in the familiar objects. Her mother watched from the portrait above the fireplace, the focus of the room. The blaze of her mother’s hair was the only strong color in the cream, silver, and blue room. Dolly stared at it, for once seeing not the dreaming beauty that she loved but the ghost, locked into her own fantasies, that Leighton Sartoris had painted twenty-five years ago.

She turned her back on it to look out over the city again. Manhattan was its ordinarily spectacular light sculpture. It had rarely before failed to delight her. It usually made her feel like the queen of it all, sitting on her steel and glass mountaintop. But tonight she was dispossessed, unable to feel any connection with it.

She emptied a full ashtray in a small silver-reed basket, just for something to do. She tried to think of someone in the city that she knew. It was very painful to acknowledge, abruptly, that there wasn’t anybody anymore. Not that she’d want to see. She lit a new cigarette. Very likely there was no one down there in Sin City who knew her either, or cared to.

At the discreet little bar, she poured herself a glass of ginger ale. She had never cared for drink stronger than wine, a taste or lack of it that may very well have preserved her from the alcoholism that destroyed her mother. Her only real vice, she thought, was. the cigarettes. She looked at the one between her fingers with distaste. Her father had always held that smoking was unladylike and had warred thirty-five years with her mother on the subject.

Her earliest memories were of her mother, furtively smoking in the nursery, as she read Dolly a nighttime fairy tale. Dolly, old enough to talk at two and a half, also had been old enough to keep a secret when her mother made it a game. Daddy had never come into the baby’s room; he was always in his office downstairs, of an evening.

Since then she had done a lot of things in her life, of which her father would not have approved. Not that she was a frigging saint

now. She had had no lovers for three years. Except herself. She didn’t count masturbation as a sin, or even a bad habit. It was wonderful for the complexion and gave the day a good start, and screw her old man, anyway. A typical male, when all was said and done.

If she loved anything it was the dollhouse. It had filled all the little blanks in her life very nicely, thank you. Three years of satisfaction. Not many love affairs yielded that, or for that long. Never mind marriage. The very thought of Harry Douglas, may the bastard burn in hell, gave her the shudders.

She’d look a pretty sight, at her age, anyway, putting herself on the market-against the young women with their fresh bodies. Look at Nick Weiler, not that much younger than herself, chasing after her daughter-in-law, a woman with two children, and silly Lucy young enough to be Nick’s daughter. Almost. Not that she was jealous of him; Lucy was welcome to him. And he to Lucy. He was, finally, too cold a fish for her. She always had the sensation that he was thinking ahead of her, and that what he was thinking wasn’t very complimentary. Just like his father, that old reptile Sartoris.

To be fair, Nick had his attractions. Dorothy sat down with her ginger ale and cigarette and blew smoke thoughtfully at her mother’s portrait. It was perfectly predictable, Nick going all soft in the head and hard in the pants for a woman like Lucy. Middle-aged folly, and naturally a girl who was the exact antithesis of Nick’s other women. Wouldn’t she like to know what Lucy knew about
them.
Not much,if she knew her Nick. He wasapast master of discretion when it served his interests, and it invariably did.

She drained her glass and stubbed out the cigarette. Time for a visit to the dollhouse room. She dreaded it, but it would be good for her lazy soul.

It seemed horribly empty, even if it wasn’t. There were the boxrooms and the other dollhouses she owned, beautifully displayed. And the great empty space in the middle of it where her Doll’s White House belonged.

Goddamn Nick Weiler for talking her out of it. Reluctant to enter into the emptiness of the room, she leaned against the doorpost. It was ludicrous, her twitching around the apartment, working on a case of lung cancer, and speculating on other people’s sex lives, like some filthy old woman. All because Nick had convinced her she should share her dollhouse with the world. Snared her in her own pride. She ought to call Lucy and have a little girltalk with her about Nick. Puncture his balloon.

She dialed the nearest phone with almost steady fingers. A wasted effort, for old Novick answered. In his shaky old man’s voice, he told her that Lucy was out. He didn’t need to tell her with whom.

Her throat closed with sudden rage. The two of them, sucking off her, trying to take her dollhouse away from her. Screwing their little brains out. Her fingers itched to take out their eyes. She threw herself onto her big empty bed and pounded the pillows until she was out of breath. In the lee of her rage, listening to herself pant, she began to giggle. Be generous, she told herself. How did that song go?
What the world needs now . . .

So nice someone was having fun. She groped for her cigarettes. Sooner or later, it would be her turn to have fun again.

Leyna looked terrific. She knew it. The make-up girl looked at her critically and nodded in approval, but it was just ritual. Leyna waved flawless fingertips at the director and stepped confidently to the mark on the floor. She and Roddie huddled briefly over the script. Roddie loved directing Leyna. She never used notes or the teleprompter and never missed a beat.

Leyna straightened herself to her full height of six feet and three inches, plus four inches of stiletto heel. She relaxed her shoulders and moved her head fractionally, so that her long hair splayed around over her collar. A survey had revealed that male viewers fantasized about her hair. She never forgot it.

Time,
signaled by the red light; she gazed directly into the camera.

‘It may look like cake-eating in the middle of a revolution, but Washington has never been gayer, more socially giddy, never more glittery and gossipy,’ she began. ‘Perhaps people, even in the highest government circles, need such outlets in some kind of direct proportion to the press of the world and national concerns.

‘One of the ways that official Washington has been exorcising its daily crises is here,’ and the camera closed its eye on her, opening another one outside, ‘in the nineteenth-century Dalton Institute, once known as the Penny Museum.’ She knew the audience, hearing her voice, was seeing the exterior of the Dalton, lit up like a birthday cake in the night, its entrance portico aswarm with elegantly clad officialdom. The camera blinked and returned to her.

‘What’s here that’s so amusing?’ Leyna addressed her audience as if eye to eye with it over plump pillows on her bed. ‘An exhibition of dollhouses,’ she confided.

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A new eye, another camera, high in the upper stories of the hall, scanned the hall, taking the coiffed, gowned, tuxedoed, and tailored embodiment of democracy, making merry among villages of dollhouses. Leyna’s voice, light and a little throaty, continued. The camera found her again, as if by accident, a beautiful woman in a slim floor-length dress of faintly shimmering navy blue, separated from the glittering assemblage only by the fact of a microphone, instead of a champagne glass, in her hand.