“Daddy says running a store like ours is like putting on a piece of theater.”
“Yeah, right, and what’s a piece of theater? Pretense. Make-believe. Lies. Phoniness. You don’t think a piece of theater is anything like life, do you? And Tarkington’s isn’t even good theater, if you ask me. It’s more like Hollywood, like an old Joan Crawford movie. Its more like television, that tells you if you’ll just buy a Cadillac your neighbors will think you’re John D. Rockefeller. Or if you’ll try our deodorant you can have a date with Robert Redford. I’ll tell you what the store is really like. It’s like Chicago. Ever been to Chicago?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Chicago is the phoniest city in the world. All along the lakefront are these big mansions and apartment buildings with doormen in fancy uniforms. But walk two blocks inland from the lake and you’re in Scuzbagsville—cheap bars, flophouses, and porno shops. Chicago is all facade. Behind the facade, Tarkington’s is just a tarted-up version of the shmattes business.”
“Shmattes?” She giggled again. “Another S-word. What does shmattes mean?”
“Rags. Junk. Trash. That’s what all the family lies and secrets are designed to protect: the fact that the old man’s in the rag business. Secrets on top of secrets, lies on top of lies. Nobody even knows the old man’s age, for Chrissake. No, we gotta keep the old man’s age a secret to protect the image.”
“He says age is a boring, unimportant statistic.”
“Sure—so nobody will know how old he is. Or where he was born, or who his parents were. That might hurt the old image, right? Image! It’s all done for image, for illusion. It’s all done with mirrors, so step right up, folks, and see the little lady sawed in half onstage. That’s about how real he is. Everything about the old man is phony, Miranda. Silas Tarkington isn’t even his real name. He was Solomon Tarcher before he changed it. My mom told me that.”
She remembered her mother’s words: Or shall I call you Sol?
“And look at the phonies he surrounds himself with—men like Tommy Bonham.”
“Is he a phony?”
“The only thing he likes about Bonham is that he looks good. More facade. Bonham looks good, so he’s good at buttering up the ladies.”
“Blazer,” she asked him, “is my mother a phony too?”
He hesitated. “I’ve got no quarrel with your mom,” he said. “I like her, actually. But she’s his shill, his beard, his showpiece, his flagship customer. She’s the Tarkington’s woman. But I’ll say this for her, she doesn’t seem to mind letting herself be used like that, to display the merchandise. That was one reason—one of the main reasons—why the old man divorced my mom and married yours. After I was born, Mom got a little heavy. She didn’t look good in designer dresses anymore. So the old man traded in a size twelve for a size eight, and got a ten-years’-newer model in the bargain. I once heard your mom say that when she was pregnant with you she only gained eight ounces. Can you imagine that? Eight ounces! No wonder you were such a shrimpy little thing when you were born.”
She laughed. “Shrimpy? Was I?”
“I remember when they first showed you to me in your whatchamacallit—bassinet. You were only yea big.” He stretched out his hand. “I could have held you in the palm of one hand. You were even shrimpy-colored. Pink.”
She was enjoying this immensely. “Tell me what else you remember,” she said.
“I guess you don’t remember the old man before he had his face lifted, do you?”
She looked at him, amazed. “I didn’t know he’d had his face lifted!” she said.
“Oh, yeah. It must have been around nineteenseventy. It changed his looks completely. My mom thought it was a big joke. ‘Now that he’s bought himself a new young wife, he’s bought himself a new young face to go with her,’ she said. More phoniness.”
“You think that? That he bought her?”
“That was my mom talking. Remember, she was very bitter.”
“It made him look younger, I suppose.”
“Not just that. It made him look completely different. He used to have a small mustache. After the facelift, that went. His nose was smaller. His eyes were bigger. He used to have dark hair. After the facelift, he decided that silver hair looked better with the new young face. For contrast, you see. New young face but older hair. But silver with a blond rinse thrown in so the hair didn’t look too old. Facade again. When I first saw him after the facelift, I didn’t even recognize him. That’s how much it changed him. The only thing it couldn’t change was his voice. It wasn’t until he spoke to me that I knew who he was!”
They sat in silence for a moment or two. “Secrets,” she said. “There’s a little fat old lady who lives on West End Avenue.”
“Huh?” he said. “Who dat?”
She told him then of the odd experience the year before, and of its even odder aftermath.
He shrugged. “Probably one of the old man’s old girlfriends that he’s paying off,” he said.
“You mean, blackmail?”
“Just a guess. But you won’t get him to tell you who she is.” He wagged his finger at her. “That’s a secret, Mandy! That’s for him to know and you to find out. To hell with it. It’s just more lies, more phoniness. Who gives a damn? Let him have his secrets.”
There was another little silence, and then she said, “What are you going to do after you graduate from Yale?”
“Do? Probably nothing.”
“But you can’t just do nothing.”
“Why not? That was one thing my mother got out of him. A nice little trust fund that’ll be mine when I’m twenty-one.”
“But still, you can’t just do nothing, Blazer.”
“Well, I’m sure as hell not going to work for his phony store,” he said. “I’m not going into the shmattes business, that’s for sure.”
“I think he’d like it if you did.”
“Well, I’m not. And what about you? What are you going to do when you grow up?”
“I am grown up!” she said. “But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do when I’m even more grown up! I’m going to be the queen of the circus and marry the man on the flying trapeze. I’m going to be Miranda, the daughter of Prospero, the Grand Duke of Milan! That’s who I’m named after, you know—Miranda in The Tempest. I’m going to create a tempest of my own, and not in a teapot! I’m going to be a star! ‘Here she comes,’ they’re going to say. ‘There she goes!’ I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet, but I’m going to do it, wait and see. I may go to work at Tarkington’s, but if I do I’m going to end up running the store—you wait and see!”
“Just watch out for the phonies,” he said.
There was another, longer silence. Then she said, “Blazer, is everything phony for you? Do you think I’m a phony too?”
He grinned. “Of course not. You’re not a phony. You’re too young to be a phony. You’re just a kid. Phoniness happens later.”
“I’m not a kid! I’m a young woman, in case you haven’t noticed.” She hesitated. “But, sometimes—sometimes I feel so strange.”
“Strange? How strange?”
“Like right now. I feel strange. Not knowing if I’ll ever be able to do all the things I want to do.”
“Hey,” he said. “Just a minute ago you were the daughter of Prospero, the Duke of Milan! The world at your feet.”
“I know,” she said, and her tone was wistful.
“Hey,” he said again. “I bet I know what you need. You need a neck and shoulder rub. My mom says I give great neck and shoulder rubs, and she always feels better afterward. Want me to give you one of my famous rubs?”
“All right,” she said.
“Turn around.”
She turned her back to him, and he began to massage her neck and shoulder muscles with his long, strong fingers.
“Let me tell you your future,” he said. “You shall have towers. Towers and minarets and spires and palace gates, forests, shores, and islands, gems and pearls
and scepters and all the emperor’s diamonds, and everything brilliant in King Oberon’s bright diadem. For you, I foresee temples and mosques and fountains, fountains and waterfalls and tapestries and flowers and little thornless roses, rings on your fingers and bells on your toes—”
“Blazer,” she interrupted him, “have you ever been in love?”
“Oh, yes,” he said easily.
“What’s it feel like?”
“Not much fun. Kind of like an ache in the pit of your gut.”
“I think I’m in love,” she said.
“Tell me about this guy,” he said, still kneading her shoulders and the back of her neck.
“Well, for one thing, he’s older than me.”
“Hmm,” he said, rubbing her back more slowly. “What else?”
“He’s tall. And he’s dark. And handsome.”
“What else?”
“He’s—” But she couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.
He withdrew his hands. “Back rub’s over,” he said. “Feel better now?” He stood up and stretched. With his arms above his head, he appeared to be nine feet tall. She thought he had a beautiful body. “Well, I don’t much like the sound of this guy,” he said. “I think something better will come along. If you ask me, you’re just in love with the idea of being in love. I think I’ll go for a swim. Care to join me?”
“Okay,” she said, and she also rose.
He reached for the old duckbill cap he often wore, and put it on his head with the bill in the back, the way he liked to wear it, and she followed him across the footbridge.
“Blazer,” she began.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know how to say this, but I like you—very much.”
“Yeah, you’re a good kid, Mandy,” he said, and she felt as though her heart were breaking. There were tears in her eyes, but since she was walking behind him he could not see them.
When they got to the pool, their father was swimming his laps, up and down, and Blackamoor, his Labrador, who was just a big puppy then, was swimming beside him, while the television set, placed on the pool’s flagstone coping, broadcast the news.
Now, in her office at the store, Miranda is thinking of Blazer, who in the end did not even get his trust fund and now has been disinherited in his father’s will “for reasons he will understand.” Poor Blazer. Will he ever forgive his father? On an impulse—not that she has anything in particular to say to him except hello and to ask how he’s doing—she picks up her phone and dials his number. After several rings, she hears, “You’ve reached the number of Blazer T. You got my machine, but you ain’t got me. I’m either out or I’m fast asleep. So leave your name when you hear the beep. You may want to leave a message too. If you just hang up, well, then, fuck you!”
“Blazer,” she says. “It’s me, Miranda. I’m at the office. Please give me a call when you get a chance.”
Not many blocks away, Moses Minskoff is also on the telephone. “Listen, Albert,” he is saying, “this Bonham character seems like he’s dragging his heels a little.… Sure we need him, so I’m suggesting you sweeten the deal. Offer him an employment contract. Offer him three hundred big ones for the next five years. Hell, with that kind of a deal, he won’t even have to come into the office.… What’s that add up to for you? Just a mil and a half over five years, and that’s peanuts, Albert, compared to what you’re going to walk off with. Peanuts. Shall I relay that offer to him? … No, to hell with the girl. She’ll do what her old lady tells her.”
In the end, it had not been a ponytail that precipitated the final break with his father. It had been a T-shirt. Or perhaps you could say it was a bikini.
The ponytail disappeared at Yale when Blazer Tarkington took up diving. “A diver looks dumb bouncing on a diving board with a ponytail flopping up and down behind him,” his coach had told him. “Also, it can affect your scores. No matter how clean an entry you make into the water, a judge will knock off two points if the entry’s attached to a lot of hair.” So the ponytail had been sheared off. Begrudgingly.
Several years earlier, Blazer’s father had realized that something was happening to the city of New York—and to the world at large—when he had seen a young woman skating down Fifth Avenue, the city’s most fashionable thoroughfare, on roller skates, wearing a Walkman shoulder pack, earphones, and a bikini. Silas Tarkington had returned to his office and immediately called a meeting of his staff and announced that, no matter how far the standards of the world might have fallen, the store must never lower its own rigid standards.
He had often lectured on the value of what he called “the intimidation factor” to a store like Tarkington’s. Human beings actually enjoyed being a little bit intimidated, a little frightened, a little apprehensive, he argued. Fear was a positive, exciting emotion. Fear stirred the adrenal glands. How else did one account for the popularity of horror novels and horror movies? Some retail establishments had lost their power to intimidate. A prime example of this was Tiffany & Company. Years ago, Tiffany’s had been an intimidating store to shop in. But then had come Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the popular novel and film, and now Tiffany’s was nothing more than a Manhattan tourist attraction where crowds came to browse and admire the merchandise but not to buy. Cartier’s, by contrast, had maintained its ability to daunt the shopper, and probably the most intimidating Manhattan merchant of all was Harry Winston. No one passed through Winston’s grand and fearsomely gilded gates unless he or she had a serious jewelry purchase in mind. The girl in the bikini on roller blades would never have dared to enter Winston’s. On the intimidation scale, Silas Tarkington saw his store as somewhere between Cartier and Winston.
Silas often compared his store with the Ritz Hotel in Paris, a hostelry that was always deliriously intimidating. The Ritz was a small hotel, with less than a hundred rooms. Tarkington’s was a small specialty store of less than twenty departments. Was there ever a more intimidating stretch of real estate than the Ritz’s arcade of display cases that ran from the lobby on the Place Vendome to the rear entrance on the rue Cambon, where goods from all the most expensive shops in Paris were trapped behind gleaming glass? Silas Tarkington wanted the aisles in his store to have the same awe-inspiring feel as the Ritz arcade. If you’re not our type of shopper, he wanted his store to say, you really should not be here. He also admired the way the Ritz staff treated its guests—warm and cordial to the people the hotel knew, but aloof and just a touch condescending to strangers and people who did not look as though they belonged there. He urged his staff to try to emulate that Ritz attitude, a delicate balance between coziness and hauteur.
At that meeting, he had announced that the store would adopt an unwritten dress code for its clientele. Anyone who did not “look right” or was not “dressed right” would be shown to the door, politely but firmly.
The young man in the reversed duckbill cap, granny glasses, T-shirt, and jeans approached the Fifth Avenue entrance to the store, but James, the doorman blocked his path. “Deliveries through the side door, around the corner,” James said. Indeed, the young man did look like a delivery boy and was carrying a fat manila envelope under one arm.
“Wait a minute, fella,” Blazer said. “Don’t you realize who I am?”
This immediately posed an agonizing dilemma for poor James because he did indeed now recognize the owner’s son. But, at the same time, he had been given strict instructions that men in T-shirts were not to be admitted to the store. “We have a rule against T-shirts on the selling floors, Mr. Tarkington,” he murmured. “So would you mind—?” He glanced nervously toward the corner and the service entrance.
“What the hell! You mean I gotta go in my old man’s store like I’m a goddamned delivery boy?”
“If it’s your father you’ve come to see, Mr. Tarkington,” James said, “he’s not in the store at the moment. He left about half an hour ago, saying he’d be back around two.”
“That’s okay. I just want to leave this e
nvelope on his desk.”
“Perhaps I could take it up for you, then,” James suggested.
“No, I want to take it up myself. I need to write him a note when I get up there. It’s important.” He patted the manila envelope. “These are important legal papers, damn it!”
“Well, let me see what I can do,” James said, and he pressed the button by his station that connected him with Tommy Bonham’s office. “Mr. Tarkington, Junior, is downstairs, sir,” he said. “I wonder if I could ask you to come down, sir.” Turning to Blazer, he said, “Mr. Bonham will be right down.”
And so Blazer waited, fuming, on the sidewalk.
Presently Tommy appeared through the door and immediately grasped the situation. He took Blazer by the arm and said, “Let me take you down the street, Blazer, and buy you a cup of coffee.”
In the coffee shop, the two of them settled in a booth, and Tommy said, “Have you had lunch? Would you like a sandwich? They do a good Reuben here. Good burgers, too.”
“Nah. Just coffee’s fine. Black.”
“Blazer,” Tommy began easily, “lots of places have dress codes. All the best restaurants in New York require jackets and ties on men, and some will not even permit blue jeans.”
“I don’t go to phony restaurants like that.”
“Well, phony or not, don’t you think restaurants have the right to enforce a dress code?”
“We’re not talking about a restaurant, damn it.”
“Let me put it to you another way. Suppose you were taking a date to the Yale Prom—”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead at the Yale Prom!”
“Then let me put it still another way. Suppose you were invited to a dinner dance, or a friend’s wedding, and the invitation said ‘black tie.’ How would you—?”
“I wouldn’t go!”
“Suppose this is your best friend’s wedding. He has asked you to be his best man. The wedding is to be black tie.”
“I still wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t accept.”
“If he’s your best friend, wouldn’t he be hurt if you turned down the honor of being his best man?”
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