Carriage Trade (11 page)

“Caracas. Is that in Ohio?”

“Venezuela. South America.” Her alibi.

Larceny, she thinks. Grand theft. Zip to ten years in the state pen. Prettyboy Bonham would like to see her in jail. Next to seeing her dead, he would like to see her in jail.

And yet, she thinks as Oliver moves away, would she ever feel the same about this ring as she would if he had actually slipped it on her finger, the way he had promised to do? That would always be missing, that one final gesture. Missing that final gesture means a lot. The promise cannot be real without that final gesture. And, worst of all, worse than knowing that the final gesture never came, will never come, is knowing that it was her own damn fault.

“Yes, you really blew it this time, Smitty old girl,” she tells herself. “You really blew it this time, didn't you? You blew your last chance.” Once again, she feels dizzy.

“Someday that Irish temper of yours is going to get you into big trouble, young lady—
big
trouble,” her mother used to say when she was growing up, when she would sob and curse and kick the stairs whenever she didn't get her way. Locked in the kitchen as a result of some infraction she can't remember, she had hurled all her mother's best china out of the cabinets, smashing it, piece by piece, on the tile floor, and then stamping on it with her feet until the Wedgwood looked like drifts of snow. “Oh, you rotten, rotten little girl, you worthless little girl!” her mother had screamed, chasing her through the rooms with her younger brother's baseball bat. “You're worthless! I'm going to kill you, you worthless little girl!”

And so, that day, their last time together, when she could have reasoned with him, could have tried to calm him down, instead she lost her Irish temper and then—

Slowly she removes the ring from her finger, places it back in its little pocket, slides the drawer closed, and locks the cabinet. For a moment, she rests her hands on the cabinet, and her reflection in the glass is moonlike, disembodied, unreal. Perhaps my mother should have killed me, she thinks. Perhaps that is what I deserved.

And so she makes her way out of the store, waves good night to Oliver as she passes him, and, ringless, leaves by the side door, knowing she will never be certain whether she left the ring behind because she is essentially an honest woman or was just afraid of getting caught.

On the street, she joins the crowd of pedestrians moving uptown. If you saw her, you would think this was just another attractive, well-dressed young woman with something weighing heavily on her mind. The Valiums are wearing off.

She makes a decision. Tomorrow morning, when the store opens, she will march into Prettyboy's office and resign. She will not give Prettyboy the satisfaction of firing her—or terminating her, as they say nowadays.

There are other good jobs in this city, she thinks. There are other nice places to live, and there are even other cities; she is sick of New York, sick to death of it, and New York didn't keep its promise to her.

There are also other men, men who will keep their promises. There are plenty of other men. You'd think Si Tarkington was the last man on earth, for God's sake! She's still young, still has her looks, her figure. She'll find someone.

Suddenly, instead of despair, her world is bright with expectation, hope, and a crimson thing called courage. She thinks of Scarlett O'Hara. Tomorrow is another day.

At the corner, she raises her arm to flag a taxi, just another bright young Manhattan career woman in a hurry.

“Hi, Smitty!” someone calls to her.

“Hi!”

She has always hated the name Smitty, which was given to her in high school, and has stuck, and now will probably never become unstuck. When they made love, he called her Diana, repeating it over and over, “Diana … Diana … my goddess of the hunt.…”

A taxi pulls over to the curb.

6

Peter Turner, struggling freelance writer, sits in his ninth-floor apartment at the Dakota, thinking.

The Dakota is considered a rather grand New York address, but Peter Turner's apartment is far from grand. The grand apartments are on the floors below, particularly those facing south, over the breadth of West 72nd Street, and those facing east, overlooking Central Park. The grand apartments of the Dakota are owned by celebrities of the magnitude of Lauren Bacall, Yoko Ono Lennon, and Roberta Flack. Peter's apartment is in the upper northwest corner of the building, tucked under a gabled, crenellated dormer window, and his only view is of the unadorned brick wall of the building next door.

The top two floors of the Dakota, on one of which Peter Turner lives, were once a warren of tiny servants' rooms, from the days when people kept servants. Out of these rooms, small apartments were patched together in somewhat haphazard fashion, like Peter's. The top two floors of the Dakota are where the gays live, and many little old ladies. Bicycles are parked outside apartment doors as often as wheelchairs, along the narrow corridors that link these residences in a pattern graspable only to those who live there. Peter Turner is not gay, though he lives alone, and though he has had admiring glances cast in his direction by certain neighbors. Not that Peter Turner is all that good-looking, though most would say he is not bad-looking, either. His face is composed of many planes and angles. “Your face is all corners,” a former girlfriend once said to him. But he has one feature he is secretly very proud of: a thick, curly mop of black hair. Someone once told him that if a man can keep his hair past the age of twenty-five, he need never fear baldness. Peter Turner passed that watershed year three years ago, heaved a sigh of relief, and stopped worrying about it.

Now he is thinking about Blazer Tarkington. He would not be interested in Silas Tarkington's story if it hadn't been for Blazer. If it hadn't been for Blazer, he wouldn't have thought twice about it, wouldn't have given it the time of day.

Peter Turner and Blazer Tarkington were in the same class at Yale, and for a couple of years they both lived at Calhoun College. Peter had no idea why the guy was called Blazer. He assumed it might have something to do with the blazer jackets they all wore when they got dressed up. Every Yale man worth his salt owned a blazer, and it had to be dark blue, double-breasted, with solid brass buttons, preferably antique. The best blazers were custom made by Morty Sills. These jobs were made with real buttonholes on the sleeves that you could button and unbutton. So if you had a blue blazer with, say, a bright red silk lining, you could unbutton the sleeves and roll up the cuffs to show off the lining, and that was considered a real
Yale
look and you were ready for the tables down at Mory's. No breast-pocket insignia, please. That was taboo.

But the thing was, Peter doesn't think he ever saw Blazer Tarkington wearing a blazer. He was always kind of a scruffy dresser—T-shirts with hostile messages printed on them, torn jeans, dirty sneakers, that sort of thing. There was also a dirty old cap he sometimes wore, a duckbill type, and he always wore it backward. That was very un-Yale, that cap. Sometimes he also wore wire-rimmed granny glasses. Peter used to think Blazer was trying to look like John Lennon. He was built kind of like Lennon, tall and lanky. You'd never have guessed he was a rich man's son. For one thing, he never seemed to have any money. Sometimes Peter and his friends would ask Blazer to join them for a few beers, but he would just pull the insides of his pockets out, which was his nonverbal way of saying he was broke.

He wasn't unpopular at Yale, exactly. But he wasn't exactly popular, either. He was always kind of a loner, never seemed to want to be friendly, never seemed to want to get into a conversation. Blazer never had any real close friends at college. He wasn't
un
friendly, just aloof, as though he had some kind of private chip on his shoulder. He went out for boxing and made the team, which was unusual for a skinny guy, and Peter always thought boxing was a good choice. It helped him work off the hostilities he seemed to have.

He was into a lot of other things at New Haven. He worked on the
Record
as a photographer. He sang baritone in the glee club. He was a pretty good outfielder for the junior varsity baseball team. But you couldn't really call these
social
activities. Boxing, taking photos for the
Record
, singing baritone, playing outfielder—these weren't activities that required much social contact, or interaction, with other team members. At Yale, Peter tended to think of Blazer as an outfielder, always somewhere out in left field. Later on, after his classmates had all more or less gotten used to him and his antisocial ways, many of them decided that Blazer Tarkington was just a bit peculiar.

Peter was born and raised in Wisconsin, so he had never heard of Tarkington's store and the name meant nothing to him when he got to New Haven. Then, in the fall of their sophomore year, Blazer's stepmother arrived on campus. Peter never forgot that afternoon. It was the first hint he'd had that there was money in the picture.

He happened to be standing in the quad when Consuelo Tarkington's Rolls-Royce pulled up to the curb. Her driver, in a gray uniform and cap, hopped out of the car and opened the back door for her. First a long slender leg appeared. Then a gloved hand, holding a long cigarette holder with a lighted cigarette in it. Then the whole woman herself emerged and stood there. Just stood there.

It was not just that she was beautiful. She most certainly was—an icy blond beauty, with perfect white skin and cool blue eyes. Her hair, done in what in those days was called a bouffant style, was almost the color of her cigarette smoke. She was about Peter's own mother's age, so it would not be accurate to say that he found this woman beautiful in terms of being desirable or sexy. And it was not just that she was elegantly dressed, which she certainly was, though he can't really remember what she was wearing, except that it was something dark. It was simply the way she stood there. He'd never before seen a woman whose very posture could transmit such a sense of self-possession and self-command. She seemed to have complete authority over herself. Everything about this woman seemed so
sure
. Then she stepped from the curb onto the sidewalk, and there was certainty in the way she moved, too. Though he was standing at least fifty feet away from her, Peter swore he could smell her perfume in the autumn air. He recognized, for the first time, that hers was the assurance and self-confidence of money, and he knew all at once, with a pang of self-realization, that he would never be that rich.

“Come, Miranda,” he heard her say, and even her voice was moneyed. Then her daughter stepped from the car.

None of his classmates had known that Blazer Tarkington had a sister—a half sister, as it turned out. She was no more than thirteen or fourteen at the time, and certainly no Yale man would expect himself to be magnetized by a fourteen-year-old kid. But this was no ordinary fourteen-year-old. She was not as tall as her mother, nor as fashionably thin, and she was darker. But everything about this girl seemed to glow. She shone. Her mother's beauty was snowy, alpine, but this girl's beauty was crackling, fiery. The sunlight caught her ponytailed chestnut hair and made it gleam like polished copper. She glanced in Peter's direction, registering no particular interest in the boy she saw, and her huge eyes were the color of apple cider warmed by a hot poker. Mrs. Tarkington took her daughter's arm, and they moved together across the grass under the few remaining English elms that still graced the campus, toward the entrance to Calhoun.

The Rolls alone would have been enough to attract its share of stares from bystanders. But as Peter looked around he saw that everyone in the vicinity—women with books spread out on the grass, men on their way to classes or the gym—had stopped what they were doing. Every pair of eyes, male and female, was following those breathtaking two. Then they disappeared inside the entrance, and the earth began turning on its axis once again.

It was in Blazer's sophomore year that he took up diving. Peter would see him exercising on the trampoline in the gym and practicing his dives at the pool. Soon he was developing the long, smooth arm and leg muscles of a diver, and by winter he had made the team. By junior year, he was something of a star. But, again, diving is something of a loner's sport, since one spends most of one's time beyond communication, in silent concentration on the board or under water. Blazer was maturing into a nice-looking fellow, who would have been better-looking if he smiled, which he rarely did. Everything he did he threw himself into with a land of single-minded purposefulness and seriousness, humorlessly determined to be the best at whatever it was he undertook. He tackled his studies with the same furious determination and got excellent grades. But still he was not an easy person to get to know, and some of his classmates, having seen his younger sister—who went, they learned, to Ethel Walker, not that far away—would have liked to get to know him better.

So that was how he entered his junior year—always polite but distant, a semi-hero of his class who refused to act like one or to join the gang.

Still, everyone expected that Blazer Tarkington would be tapped for one of the all-male senior societies, Scroll & Key, if not the big one, Skull & Bones. After all, coeducation notwithstanding, Yale was still a man's school. Males still called all the important shots at New Haven; women were merely tolerated. And Blazer certainly qualified for membership in one of the elite clubs. He'd won his letter in three sports: boxing, baseball, and as a diver on the swimming team. He'd been made photo editor of the
Record
. In his senior year, he'd gone out for the debating team—another lonely, pugilistic sort of activity—and made a name for himself there. He'd earned fine grades. All these considerations are supposedly given weight by the various tap committees in their top-secret deliberations. Then there was his father's money. That sort of thing wasn't supposed to be a factor in the selection process but it nearly always was, a big one. So Peter had assumed that Blazer would be a shoo-in for either Key or Bones, the perfect well-rounded Yale man.