MINSKOFF (sighs, removes the unlighted cigar from between his clenched teeth, and balances it carefully on the counter’s edge): Hit an Exacta in the sixth at Belmont. Yeah, it’s been a pretty good week, all things considered. It ain’t gonna be long now before Honeychile and me can hang it all up and retire to the Bahamas.
Blackout
3
As she steps from the bright summer sunshine of the street into the seductively lighted Cafe Pierre, it takes a few moments for Miranda Tarkington’s eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. She removes her sunglasses, and then she sees him. As usual, a tall, sleek, and expensively put-together woman has stopped at his banquette to talk to him, and Miranda watches the two of them in animated conversation. Tommy Bonham, she often thinks, must know every woman in New York, or at least every important woman in New York, and of course this is all a part of being vice president and general manager of Tarkington’s. Even today, when the store is closed, Tommy is doing business. Miranda watches as Tommy rises and kisses the tall woman’s outstretched hand to bid her adieu and the tall woman returns to her own table.
“Who dat?” Miranda whispers as she slides into the banquette beside him. “Me think-um big-time rich squaw, huh?”
“Rich Texas broad,” he mutters out of the side of his mouth, still smiling in the direction of the departing woman’s back. “Came over to complain about the store being closed today. Can you believe it? Not a word about your father’s death. Just, When’s the store going to open? She needs an evening bag for a party tomorrow night. ‘Just a little clutch bag, but it’s got to be silver.’”
“Not one of our latchkey ladies?”
“Are you kidding? Broad’s a kleptomaniac. She likes it when I wait on her, but she doesn’t know it’s because I have to watch her like a hawk whenever she’s in the store.”
From across the room a redheaded woman in a red Ungaro suit and a pink blouse waves at them and blows an air kiss, mouthing the words, “Hello, darlings!”
Miranda blows an air kiss back, and Tommy smiles in the woman’s direction. When he smiles, he has three dimples—one on each cheek, and one on his chin.
“Mona Potter,” Miranda whispers. “This means we’ll be in her column tomorrow morning.”
“Bitch owes us fourteen thousand dollars,” Tommy mutters. “She thinks she can pay her bill with column mentions.”
“Poor Tommy,” Miranda says. “I’d like a Lillet,” she says to the waiter who has approached them.
“Certainly, Miss Tarkington,” he says, “and may I tell you how saddened we all were by the news of your father’s death? He often came in here, you know. We were all very fond of him.”
“Thank you,” Miranda says. “That’s very kind of you to say.”
“And of course everybody’s wondering—will Tarkington’s ever be the same? Can it ever be the same without him?”
“I think it’s safe to say that Tarkington’s will always be Tarkington’s,” she says. “Right, Tommy?”
“Absolutely.” He nods his head in agreement. “Well,” he says, after the waiter has departed, “how’d it go with the lawyers?”
“Oh, not very well, I’m afraid,” she says. “Blazer made a terrible scene. I knew damn well he would. Because Daddy made good on his threat. He didn’t leave Blazer a penny. I don’t know why Blazer even came this afternoon. In fact, I called him this morning, and I said to him, ‘Blaze, honey, please don’t come to this meeting this afternoon, ’cause I don’t think you’re going to like what you’re going to hear in Daddy’s will.’ But he said, ‘No, I want to have the last word with the old son-of-a-bitch.’”
“And so he did.”
“Of course, and he began shouting about—oh, you know, Daddy’s girlfriends and all that. And about Smitty. And Mother just sat there, looking beautiful, saying nothing, as though she had ice water in her veins. Can you understand it? I know I could never put up with a husband who was flagrantly unfaithful to me, and all the time! Could you? Could you put up with a wife who was unfaithful to you all the time?”
He smiles. “Since I’ve never had a wife, I can’t say,” he says.
“That’s probably why you’ve never had a wife. To spare yourself that aggravation.”
He merely lowers his eyes and stirs the olive, on its toothpick, in his martini.
“But Mother—she seems just as unconcerned about Daddy’s womanizing now that he’s dead as she was when he was alive. Maybe someday you can explain my mother to me, Tomcat.”
“I think,” he says carefully, “that your mother’s a very brave woman, Mandy.”
“Very brave or very stupid. Or maybe brave and stupid are the same damn thing.” She flips her chestnut ponytail with her left hand. “Anyway, I’ve stopped worrying about what my mother’s feelings are. But poor Blazer, on the other hand—”
“Mandy,” he says, “maybe I shouldn’t say this, but don’t you think Blazer had it coming to him? He treated his father like shit, and your father wasn’t a man who liked to be treated like shit.”
“Oh, I know, I know. And particularly after that last big row of theirs. But still—”
“He threatened your father, Mandy. He tried to—”
“I know, I know. But I think what hurt Blazer most of all was not being mentioned in the obituary this morning. It was like reading that he didn’t exist.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know how that happened,” he says. “I gave The Times all that information. Want me to see if I can get the paper to print a correction, mentioning that Silas R. Tarkington, Junior, was inadvertently omitted from the obit? They’re pretty good at doing things like that for us.”
“No. No, I don’t think so. That would be like rubbing salt in his wounds. Like saying, ‘Oh, and we forgot to mention that he also had this son.’ No, the harm’s been done.”
“If Blazer had ever tried to make anything of himself, it might have been different. But face it, Mandy, your half brother’s a bum.”
She nods mutely, in agreement. “Still, he was always nice to me when I was growing up. And—in fact—it turns out that at the last minute Daddy was planning to rewrite his will.”
“Really?” he says, looking at her, interested. “How do you know that?”
“Jake Kohlberg told us so. He was apparently planning to reinstate Blazer in some way and make some other major changes. But then he—died—and it was too late.… Thank you,” she whispers to the waiter as he places her glass of Lillet in front of her.
“What sort of—major changes?”
“I don’t know. After Blazer went storming out, I asked Jake if we could see a copy of the new will he’d been drafting, but he wouldn’t show it to us. ‘Lawyer-client confidentiality,’ he said. ‘But I’m his daughter!’ I said. ‘And I’m his lawyer,’ he said. Stupid lawyers.”
“Hmm,” he says.
“Anyway, he left you his emerald pinky ring. I thought that was sweet of him. It’s a good emerald, even though you-know-who picked it out for him.”
“Smitty.”
“Who else?”
“Smitty knows her stones. Anyway, I’m touched that he’d leave that to me, Mandy. Of course I could never wear it. It was like his signature. It was his ring. It will always be his ring.”
“I suppose so, yes.” She sips her Lillet.
“And what about the art collection?”
“That was something of a shocker, too. Mother gets to keep up to twenty paintings for her lifetime. The rest go to the museum—but only if you-know-who is made special curator of the collection.”
“Smitty again.”
“How’d you guess? That was a little callous of him, don’t you think, putting Mother and Smitty in the same paragraph of the will? But again, Mother was cool as a cucumber when she heard. Didn’t blink one mascaraed eyelash.”
“Callous? I’m not so sure, Mandy. It could be his way of giving Smitty a new job. Getting her out of the store—for your sake.”
“Really? You think so?�
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“That’s the way his mind worked. He’s left you and your mother a major share of the store’s ownership. And I don’t think Smitty is one of your favorite people.”
“Really? You noticed that? Well, aren’t you smart, Mr. Tomcat. I loathe Smitty!”
“But you have to admit she’s been a good jewelry buyer. Her department’s figures have been among the best in the store.”
“Unless he let her pad them—among her other special perks.”
“No. She never padded any figures. No figures were ever padded.”
“You mean those are her real boobs? Anyway, it’s nice to hear you speak of her in the past tense.”
He winks at her, and she smiles back at him.
“Actually,” she says, “I don’t know why I resent Smitty so. It’s not as though she was the first of Daddy’s girlfriends, and she probably wouldn’t have been his last. It was just that—”
“That she was getting to be a little too important to him. In a way, it may be good that he died when he did, before he did something—foolish.”
“You mean, like—”
“She told me she was going to marry him.”
Miranda stares at him, but his eyes, as he sips his cocktail, wander away from hers.
Whenever Miranda looks at Tommy Bonham, she has never failed to be struck by his extraordinary good looks. “Heck, I was just a little Hoosier hick from Indiana,” she has often heard him say. “Until Si Tarkington plucked me out of a cornfield when I was a kid of twenty-three, on a hunch that I might have some ability, brought me into the store, and taught me everything I know about retailing.”
Well, that makes a charming story, but Miranda knows enough about Tommy’s background to know that it isn’t entirely true. What would her boulevardier father have been doing in Indiana? And in a cornfield, no less? No. Tommy may have come from Indiana, but after graduating from Bloomington, where he’d been a theater major, he’d brought himself to New York, hoping to find work as an actor. In New York, Miranda supposes, Tommy’s good looks and—she imagines—his sexuality stood him in good stead. His first job at the store was as a salesman in the shoe department. But he rose fast, very fast—thanks, no doubt, to his good looks.
In his mid-forties, Tommy still has those good looks and that smoldering whiff of sexuality that is as lingering as his Giorgio cologne. But all traces of an Indiana cornfield have vanished, or been banished, by now, except perhaps in his slightly windblown blond hair, his deeply pigmented blue eyes, and that trio of dimples when he smiles. Otherwise, he suggests a cornfield about as much as a polished George III candlestick does. He has a burnished look, a finished look, the look of something designed and crafted with great care. She has heard Tommy Bonham described as “too good-looking,” but if he gets away with such good looks it is mainly because he seems to be so utterly unaware of them.
Miranda Tarkington has known plenty of handsome men—men who are handsome and know it—men whose eyes, when they enter a room, seem to travel on automatic pilot to the nearest mirror. But Tommy’s eyes never do this. They travel to the nearest woman and seem to tell her immediately that she is looking her best. Tommy is not the “Dahling, you look mahvelous” type. His eyes say that for him. This is also the double secret of her mother’s famous beauty. She appears to be completely unconscious of her looks. And when her azure eyes fix on the person she is talking to, that person suddenly feels that he or she is the most interesting, important, and desirable creature in the universe.
It is Tommy’s good looks, Miranda often thinks, that have made him ideally suited for working in what is essentially a woman’s store. Tommy’s looks, she is certain, were what made her father elevate him to his second in command. In fact, all her father’s employees were chosen for their looks, Smitty included. Form over substance, any day. Miranda herself would never have been allowed to work in the store if she hadn’t been pretty. And it is interesting that Silas Tarkington should have chosen a man who could have been his wife’s fraternal twin to be his right-hand man. “I have always loved to be surrounded by beautiful things,” her father once said. Miranda sometimes wonders: What did—but it should be what does, since she is still alive—Alice Tarkington, who is Blazer’s mother, look like? Miranda doesn’t know. She has never met her, and naturally there are no pictures of her father’s first wife. But Alice must be, or must have once been, a beauty, Miranda thinks.
Like her father, Tommy Bonham has his special ladies whom he always takes care of. When he spots one of Tommy’s special ladies alighting in front of the store from a taxi or a limousine, James, the doorman, presses a special button by his station. This causes a buzzer to sound in Tommy’s office. Then James steps forward, tips his cap, greets the woman by name—he is nearly as good at names as Tommy is—and offers her his hand to help her from her car. Meanwhile, Tommy is bounding down four flights of stairs—he doesn’t wait for the elevator—to greet his client as she enters the store, rather like the concierge at a small, expensive European hotel greeting a longtime favored guest.
“Do you have anything to show me, Tommy?”
“As a matter of fact, we have several pretty new things,” he says, taking her arm, not intimately but just so.
Other men occasionally feel uncomfortable with men as handsome as Tommy Bonham. Perhaps he stirs in them unwelcome feelings of homoerotic lust. But women fall in love with the Tommy Bonhams of this world. Most of Tommy’s special ladies, Miranda long ago decided, are to some degree or other in love with him. Most rich men’s wives, she also decided, must endure very boring husbands. And so Tommy, being unmarried, is able to perform, for his special ladies, all sorts of little tasks that their husbands have no interest in, or are unwilling or unable to take on. In addition to helping them select the perfect pair of sandals for the perfect ball gown, he takes them to lunch. He suggests new things they might do with their hair. He helps them decorate their apartments, escorts them to charity balls, to opening nights at the theater, to the shows at the galleries along Fifty-seventh Street and upper Madison. He listens to, and sympathizes with, their various tales of bitterness and woe. All this, of course, has been good for business and the store, and Miranda has often wondered how far these relationships have gone. But Tommy is too smart, she thinks, to have let any of these relationships progress through any bedroom doors. And he has been careful to spread the largesse of his attractive company around, so his name has never been attached to any of his special ladies as that lady’s special walker or, as they say in England, laughing-man.
The comparison of Tarkington’s to a small European hotel is an apt one, and in her father’s monthly meetings with his staff he often said, “We must always remember to treat our clients as our guests.” For the store’s best clients, Tommy’s office will make hotel, restaurant, and airline reservations. It will make massage and even dental appointments. It will suggest lawyers for divorces, doctors for plastic surgery. Last year, Tommy even escorted one of his special ladies as she toured New England, shopping for a boarding school for her son.
When Miranda first met Tommy—it was at the farm in 1980, when she was just thirteen—she fell in love with him herself. She was down from Ethel Walker for the weekend, and he came for the weekend too, and she thought he was simply the most gorgeous hunk of man she had ever met. Encountering him the next morning by the pool, clad only in his white bikini, she had been so embarrassed that she had run into the pool house, pretending to hear the telephone ring, rather than spend time with him in that nearly nude state. She carried fantasies of him with her back to school. Then, of course, she fell in love again with someone else, then out of love again. Then in love again, and out of love, with still another boy. Half of her life, she sometimes thinks, has been spent falling crazily in and out of love, each time harder and more cruelly than the last. There was even a time when she was convinced that she was in love with Blazer, her own half brother, rationalizing that, while sex with one’s full brother was definitely t
aboo, sex with one’s half brother would only be half bad—not that anything of the sort came close to happening.
Once she confessed to Kathy Williams, who had been her best friend at Walker, that there were times, when she was with a boy, that she had felt land of an electric shock down there.
“You’re obviously a nymphomaniac,” Kathy had told her. Then Kathy had made a confession of her own. “I’m a lesbian,” she whispered. After that, Miranda never felt quite the same way about Kathy Williams. And she had also stopped signing the entries in her secret diary “M.T.T.,” which would become her stylish monogram when she married Blazer and became Miranda Tarkington Tarkington.
At school and college, she had taken her good grades for granted. After all, good grades were what her parents expected of her. Then, when she was twenty-one, a senior at Sarah Lawrence, and was handed a gold Phi Beta Kappa key, she suddenly discovered she was smart. Smart women with Phi Beta Kappa keys didn’t fall in love, she decided. They had careers.
She had always loved the store. It had been her private castle, and the precious items it displayed she pretended were her personal treasures. And so, though her father had initially disapproved, she had persuaded him to let her go to work at Tarkington’s. She had started, at her father’s insistence, in the mail room, at the bottom—“Where you’ll discover that running a store like this isn’t all glamour”—sorting and delivering the letters and memos, delivering the copies of The Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Women’s Wear Daily to the men on the executive floor, men like her father and her old crush Tommy Bonham, whose offices were in the older part of the building that had been the Van Degan house—big, walnut-paneled offices with high ceilings and tall windows facing Fifth Avenue and the park, offices that smelled of old wood and wax and leather—and to the less high-ups, the merchandise managers and buyers, whose offices were in the new L-shaped addition where, though efforts had been made to replicate the grandeur of the old building on the selling floors, the offices were often small, low-ceilinged, and windowless—and smelled new.
Carriage Trade Page 5