Carriage Trade (57 page)

Our conversation at lunch was rather formal too. “We're very pleased with the figures in your department, Miss Smith,” he said to me.

“Please call me Smitty,” I said. “Everybody does.”

“Then you must call me Si,” he said.

“It will be hard not to call you Mr. Si,” I said, “the way everyone else in the store does.”

“That will also do,” he said with a little smile.

I mentioned the problem of Mrs. Minskoff's line of jewelry.

He frowned. “I know what you mean,” he said. “The Minskoffs are old family friends, and I was trying to do Mrs. Minskoff a little favor. But I agree with you. I'm trying to get Mrs. Minskoff into the luggage business.” He smiled again. “You may have noticed that Tarkington's does
not
have a luggage department,” he said.

Lunch had started with a wonderful cold fennel soup. Now we were into the next course: a fluffy omelet, filled with crabmeat, and fresh baby asparagus.

“We've only had one other saleswoman at the store who could sell as well as you do,” he said at one point. “Her name was Alice Markham.”

“I don't believe I know her,” I said.

“No, she left a long time ago,” he said.

Later, I found out that Alice Markham had also been his first wife. Sometimes I got the impression that he missed her. Well, after a few years of living with Miss Perfect Connie, who wouldn't! Sometimes I wondered whether I reminded him of her—or at least of the way she was when she was my age.

“When Delafield and Du Bois moved out, I thought we might have a little difficulty establishing our own jewelry department,” he said. “But you've done wonders for us, Smitty.”

“Sometimes, when Tommy shows me my weekly figures, they even surprise me!” I said.

After lunch, he said, “I've got some work to do at my desk, and Billings has to run a few errands before he can drive you back to the city. Would you like to have a swim in the pool?”

“I'd love that,” I said.

“There are suits in all sizes in the pool house dressing room,” he said. “I may join you a little later.” And he showed me where the pool and pool house were.

I guess I've always dreamed of a life of luxury—a big house like that, a pool and pool house, lawns, terraces, gardens with raked-gravel walks, a private lake—and I found myself very quickly feeling right at home at Flying Horse Farm. It was what I'd always dreamed of.

I think that was something else Si and I had in common. We were both born poor. Oh, I don't come from abject poverty, the way he did. My father is a podiatrist in Eastchester, but he's always been a very disappointed man. He hates his life. He wanted to be a real doctor, but there wasn't enough money for medical school, so he had to settle for podiatry. My mother works as his receptionist, and there were too many of us kids—I have four sisters and three brothers—and there was never enough money for any of the finer things in life.

As a kid, I used to ride my bike all the way out into the nicer part of Scarsdale, along those winding, wooded streets and lanes lined with big shade trees. I'd look at all the big houses—mansions, really—with their long drives and rhododendron hedges and big cars parked out front, and I'd wonder what it was like to live like that. I'd see maids in uniforms accepting deliveries, chauffeurs picking up and dropping off children from private school, and gardeners raking long gravel driveways. It was like another world.

Even as a kid, I decided the only way I could ever have any of those things was to find a man who would marry me and take care of me.

But Flying Horse Farm was grander than anything in Westchester. I decided that afternoon that the only place I really wanted to live was
there
. And I could have, too, if it hadn't been for Connie.

Anyway, I found a suit that fit me in the pool house, and changed into it, and went out to the pool to practice my dives—I was a champion diver in high school, did I tell you that?—thinking all these thoughts.

There was a particularly tricky dive I'd been working on at the gym I was going to, a back jackknife with a full twist, and I'd been having trouble with my heels flipping backward as I entered the water. I decided to work on that one.

So there I was, practicing my back jackknifes, and I pulled myself up out of the water and was squeezing the water out of my hair when I looked up and saw him standing there on the pool house steps in a red robe, with a big black dog wagging its tail beside him. I had no idea how long he'd been standing there. He came down the steps to where I was sitting on the edge of the pool.

He was smiling a rather strange smile. “I've been enjoying watching you dive,” he said. “You're a beautiful diver, Smitty.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I still haven't got that damned back jackknife quite right.”

“Another talent I didn't know you had,” he said. “My son's a diver too. On the Yale team.” This was the first time I knew he had a son. “You have a beautiful body,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. My body is one of the few things I'm really proud of, because I do think I'm in pretty good shape and I'm always exercising. I scrambled up the ladder again to the board, walked out to the end, turned, stood on my tiptoes, and tried the dive again. I made one of my better entries into the water.

When I came to the surface, he had moved closer to the pool's edge. “How was that?” I asked. “Did that look better? It felt better to me.”

“Beautiful,” he said. Then he said, “I was going to swim some laps.”

“Then you don't want me working on the board at the same time,” I said, and started to pull myself out of the water again.

“Maybe you'd like to swim laps with me,” he said.

“Well, I'm not a real fast swimmer,” I said.

“I'll let you set the pace.”

“Okay,” I said.

He was still smiling. “There's only one thing,” he said.

“What's that?”

“I swim in the nude.”

“Then I'll just go back into the house and wait for—”

“Don't go,” he said, and he stepped toward me, and that was when he dropped his robe. It fell in a heap around his ankles.

Now picture this. From where I was sitting at the edge of the pool, his—you know, his
thing
—was right at the level of my face, and I must say I had never seen anything quite like it. He had a thing like a—well, I don't want to sound common, but he was hung like a horse. I never knew they came as big as that. “It wants to kiss you,” he said, and pressed it against my face.

Then he whispered something that was—well, you know, kind of sweet and kind of dirty at the same time, and pulled me to my feet, and the next thing I knew he was carrying me—he was very strong—carrying me, with my legs wrapped around his hips, his thing pressing hard against me through my swimsuit, up the steps and into the pool house and into one of the bedrooms there, onto a big big water bed, and I was being made love to in a way—in a way I'd never thought possible before, literally seeing stars. I don't know if you'll want this for your book, but among his other talents, the late Silas Tarkington was a superb sexual athlete, despite his age. Perhaps, I thought, that first time he was extra randy because he'd spent so many long years having to endure Connie's frigidity. But I soon discovered that he was always like that. Being older than me, he had learned from experience how to please a woman—to the utmost. “Diana,” he whispered. “Diana, goddess of the hunt!”

Why am I telling you all this? I'm telling you things I've never told another living soul. Perhaps because it gives me so much pleasure to remember the pleasure he and I had together.…

When it was over, I was in tears. Partly they were tears of joy, but they were also tears of guilt. “We shouldn't have done this,” I said. “I don't want to be a home-wrecker.”

“My home is already wrecked,” he said.

I giggled. “I feel like I've just lost my virginity,” I said.

“I feel like I've just lost mine too,” he said. Then he said, “Will you spend the weekend?”

“What about the servants?” During lunch, the place had seemed to be swarming with them.

“I've given them all the weekend off.”

So Billings wasn't just out running a few little errands. He was gone for the weekend. All this had been planned in advance, but I didn't care. Already, I think, I had fallen in love with him. Head over heels in love. It didn't matter at all that he was a much older man.

“I didn't bring any clothes,” I said.

He laughed. “You won't be wearing many clothes.”

“I didn't even bring my toothbrush.”

“All the guest bedrooms are stocked with new toothbrushes.”

“Should I?”

“I want you all to myself,” he said. “Diana—goddess of the hunt!”

“I love you,” I sobbed, and we were in each other's arms once more, making love all over again, and that second time was when I felt that sudden explosion inside me and knew I had finally, and for the first time in my life—at age twenty-six—had what my girlfriends and I had talked about and were never quite sure we knew what it was, and what I'd read about—an orgasm!

For the next day and a half, it seemed as though we did nothing but make love. We swam in the pool and made love in the pool house. We walked in the gardens and made love on a garden bench. We played tennis on the grass court—we played naked; there was no one to see us for miles!—and then made love on the grass. That night, we sent out for pizza and then made love on Connie's big canopy bed with the red ribbons on it.

That was the best place for me, making love in her bed, though I turned all the fashion photos of her that were on her dresser against the wall, so I wouldn't feel she was watching us.

After that last lovemaking of the day, he went down the hall to his own room to sleep. He said he felt more comfortable sleeping there, and I didn't mind. I was too happy to mind. I liked being all alone in Connie's bedroom, pretending that I was the famous Mrs. Consuelo Tarkington and that everything she had was mine.

I wasn't sleepy. I tried on her rings and bracelets and necklaces. I tried on her nighties and underwear. I tried on her shoes and her dresses. She had this big refrigerated closet, just for her furs, and I tried them all on too. I splashed myself with her Shalimar perfume. Why shouldn't I make believe that everything she owned belonged to me? I asked myself. I'd given her husband more pleasure than she'd ever given him in her lifetime. I deserved her possessions more than she did.

And of course the next morning Si came into my room—it was my room by then—and we made love again.

Around six o'clock that Sunday afternoon Si became terribly nervous. She was due in on a flight to Kennedy at nine o'clock that night. He was going to drive me back to town, drop me off at my place, and spend the night at the apartment over the store. But she was going to go directly to the farm—to unload all her Paris purchases, I suppose—and he was terribly nervous that she might find some scrap of evidence that I'd been there. He began going through the house, room by room, seeing that everything was in the same perfect order that she'd left it in, and I helped him.

We put all the sheets and towels that we'd used through the washer and the drier and saw that they were ironed and folded and stacked just so. We put fresh linen on her bed. She liked a deep reverse on her top sheet, he explained, so that the fold occurred at
exactly one and a half inches
above the top of her big “cTb” embroidered monogram. That had to be measured with a ruler, because if it was off by so much as a fraction of an inch she would have a fit. The swimsuit I had borrowed had to be dried and folded and put back in the pool house exactly where I had found it, or she would smell a rat. The box our pizza had been delivered in had to be burned in the incinerator. Even the toothbrush that I'd borrowed from one of the guest bathrooms had to be burned and replaced with one of the exact same color. Have you seen Connie's collection of designer toothbrushes? She actually has them! As eight o'clock approached, he was in an absolute panic that some tiny detail we'd overlooked might catch her eye and strike her as the least bit off.

All this frenzied activity in preparation for Miss Refrigerator's homecoming annoyed me. It was beginning to make me mad. It upset me to see my lover polishing the bathroom fixtures and emptying wastebaskets. He seemed actually terrified of this woman. What kind of basis was that for a marriage? I asked myself. Terror? I could feel my Irish temper coming on, but I managed to hold my tongue.

Finally, at about eight-fifteen, he announced that everything we needed to do was done. We turned out all the proper lights, and left the proper ones on for her, and we went out to get into the car. He was taking the station wagon because the Rolls was too conspicuous and he didn't want any of his neighbors—Tommy Bonham was one, incidentally, though he lived four miles away—to see us driving away together and recognize us.

I was about to get into the car when I said, “Let me go back, darling, and give the place a final once-over, just to make sure there's nothing out of place,” and he said okay.

Now I'm not exactly proud of what I did next, but I promised to be honest with you, so I'll tell you.

I went back into the house and upstairs to her bedroom. I stepped out of the panties I was wearing, turned back the coverlet of her bed, and stuffed the panties deep down between the sheets. Then I sprayed her pillowcases with a good, heavy spritz of my Equipage before folding the coverlet back in place. Then I went into her bathroom and wiped my lipstick on a couple of her white, perfectly ironed, monogrammed Porthault hand towels. Then I went downstairs again and joined him in the car.

“Everything in perfect order?” he asked me.