It was the thing she liked least about these weekends, she thought, as she carefully put away her riding clothes, the obligatory dinner with the assembled guests, the obligatory conversations, the obligatory princess image her hostess expected from her, exacted from her actually. Kiki often wondered why she disliked it so, why she endured it only to help sell her work. “I would adore to be a princess,” she said, shaking her head at Daisy severely. She’d never been able to explain, not even to Kiki, what she could barely begin to work out for herself, that she felt, in some deep way, like an impostor in the persona of Princess Daisy Valensky, as if she had no right to the title. Granted, titles were out of date in the modern world, except for those few countries still ruled by monarchs, but many people in many other countries still used them without the malaise she felt.
As Daisy lowered herself into her hot bath, she realized, because of the sudden shock of comfort she experienced from the embrace of the water, that she was sad, with a familiar sadness which overcame her from time to time, a sadness against which she battled without understanding its origin. She had periods of depression that she could see coming like the first hint of a sea fog dimming the light, a tendril drawn across the back of her mind that soon turned the furnishings of her life into dismal heaps. In such a mood, if she were home, she would creep under all the blankets she could find, thrust her feet into heavy wool socks and lie shivering for hours, wondering why the future held no delight, trying to imagine a situation, a place, a happening which could tempt her back to reality. She would hold Theseus close, ruffling him over and over, and cuddling him tightly.
Whenever she tried to trap this despairing sadness, lay it bare and examine it, Daisy was immediately caught up in a web of unwelcome questions that no one left alive could answer for her.
What if, for instance, she had two parents like most people? What if her mother, like other women who are separated from their husbands, had managed to explain to Daisy, when she was a child, why they lived hidden in Big Sur, seeing no strangers, having no contact with the outside world? Even if the explanation hadn’t made too much sense it might have satisfied her for a while, until she was old enough to understand. What if her father had ever told her why he could only spend such a short time with her and had to leave so abruptly, year after year, keeping her in constant fear that he’d never return, in spite of the letters he sent her? What if her mother—that all-too-vague memory of absolute security and love—hadn’t gone without a farewell, vanishing into the sea on a sunny afternoon? What if her father had allowed Dani to stay with her instead of imposing a rigorous, hermetic seal of silence on her very existence? And what if Stash hadn’t died when she was fifteen; what if he were still alive, protecting her by his very existence? What if Ram had been a real older brother, concerned and kind, someone to whom she could go with her problems, instead of the sick madman only she and Anabel knew he was?
Daisy got out of the tub and started to dress. As she brushed her hair she looked at Kiki’s fake emeralds that lay on the dressing table. The necklace and bracelets would be perfection loaded onto the green tweed jacket with its ruffled lapels, but the earrings would be wasted, hidden by her hair. She found some hairpins and twisted them through the great oval pendant drops, rimmed with rhinestones. She was wearing her hair down naturally this evening, after having kept it braided all day, and the gorgeous, heavy, silver-gilt stuff, in which she deftly fastened the earrings, fell in little ripples. Her Schiaparelli trouser suit made her look like a young Robin Hood, a Robin Hood who’d gone all the way to Paris to rob the rich, and, as she finished dressing, she stared at herself in the mirror as firmly as if she were dealing with a skittish horse and said out loud, “Daisy Valensky, it’s no good wondering ‘what if?’ What is—is!”
Patrick Shannon recognized Daisy as the girl he’d seen riding that morning only from the set of her head as she entered the drawing room. Otherwise he would have thought she was a new arrival, since he had not seen her at either breakfast or lunch. As she entered the room, in which the other guests were already assembled, a small piece of time seemed to be frozen, a split second in which the hum of conversation hesitated, fragmented and then resumed.
Daisy knew no one in the room, and Topsy guided her around, making introductions. As she approached Patrick, he thought, so that’s who she is, he might have guessed. Although he spent no time at all keeping up with celebrity news, like everyone else he had been aware of Daisy’s existence. He could vaguely remember the cover of her as a baby in Life when he’d been a teenager.
They shook hands with perfunctory smiles, Daisy preoccupied with remembering all the new names—these people were her possible future customers—and Shannon trying to fit her into a slot. He was a man who liked to place new people immediately, get a fix on them, so that he knew where they stood in relation to him. He had already dismissed the Horse People as utterly unimportant in his scheme of things, tagged Vanessa and Robin Valarian as people he would never do business with and become convinced that Ham Short was a man with whom he could work profitably and well—he liked his style. As Daisy turned to be introduced to the Dempseys, he thought, another butterfly, pampered, petted, indulged, flattered and vain. The lesson of his ex-wife had been well learned … he knew the type.
At dinner his judgment was confirmed as he listened to the conversation between Daisy, who was seated on his right, and Dave Hemming and Charlie Dempsey.
“I’ll never forget seeing your father playing in a high goal tournament in Monterey in the thirties,” Charlie Dempsey said to Daisy. “I don’t remember the exact year but he was playing at three with Eric Pedley from Santa Barbara playing one, Tommy Hitchcock at two and Winston Guest at four—greatest team ever mounted in my opinion.”
“Nonsense, Charlie,” Dave Hemming interrupted from across the table. “The greatest team ever mounted was Guest, Cecil Smith, and Pedley, with Hitchcock at three—with all due respect to Stash.”
“I’m sure you’re both right,” Daisy smiled. “But nobody, not even Cecil Smith, could ride like my father.” She had grown accustomed to these conversations in the last few years. Almost every Horse Person over fifty had his own memories of her father, and she liked to hear them discuss him … it brought him back for a moment, even though they were talking of memories of very long ago, before she’d been born.
While the familiar argument went on, Daisy turned to Shannon.
“Are you a polo aficionado, Mr. Shannon?” she asked politely.
“I don’t know a thing about it,” he answered.
“That’s refreshing.”
He thought she was mocking him. “And what do you do, Princess Valensky, when you’re not arbitrating arcane disputes about a game that took place forty-five years ago?”
“Oh—this and that. I’m sketching young Cindy this weekend, on her pony.”
“For fun?”
“More or less.” Daisy considered it necessary at all times to hide the true commercial nature of her presence at these house parties. The fact that she was there to make money she had to have, the fact that she spent the evening carefully and casually finding out if any of her fellow guests had children who might be prospective subjects for her, the fact that she was doing nothing more or less than commission hunting, was best concealed by the mask of the dilettante. Her profession was well served by word of mouth rather than self-advertisement
“Do you hunt in the neighborhood, Mr. Shannon?”
“Hunt? Here? No.” My God, Patrick thought After one month of riding school how could anyone expect him to be jumping fences?
“Then where do you hunt?” Daisy continued, confidently.
“I don’t hunt at all,” Patrick said shortly.
“But of course you do—or did—no? Oh, then why have you given it up?”
Shannon looked for malice in her eyes and found nothing but the gleam of candlelight on black velvet The flames, the chrysanthemums on the table, the reflections from the heavy silver
and Irish cut glass—all had become accomplices in illuminating her beauty which met and outmatched every brightness in the room. But he thought he heard a sardonic note in her amused interrogation.
“I assure you that I don’t hunt, have never hunted and have no intention of ever hunting,” he answered her with a coldly reined-in courtesy.
“But … your boots …” Daisy murmured, confused.
“What about them?” he snapped.
“Nothing,” she said hastily.
“No—I insist. What about my boots?” Now he was certain that she was making fun of him.
“Well, only … oh, it’s not important, really, it’s just silly of me to have noticed …” Daisy babbled, trying to avoid his eyes.
“The boots?” Patrick asked, implacably.
Now Daisy got angry. If this man was going to treat her like a witness in a murder trial, she’d jolly well speak up.
“Mr. Shannon, your boots are black with brown tops. Only a Servant of the Hunt, that is a Hunt official, like a Whipper-in or the Master of the Hounds or the Master of the Hunt himself is entitled to wear boots like that. If you don’t hunt, your boots should be one solid color.”
“The devil!”
“Someone should have told you,” she hastened to add.
“Aren’t you saying that it’s one of the things which everyone is expected to know?”
“It’s really not important,” Daisy answered as coolly as possible.
“You mean it’s not the ‘done thing’?” he said, stingingly, venting his fury at Chuck Byers who had given him the boots without an explanation.
“It’s unheard of,” she said, her temper rising.
“Then why hasn’t anyone else said anything—I’ve been out riding all day,” he accused her in a hard voice.
“They assumed, as I did, that you hunted. It’s as simple as that.”
“I don’t ride well enough for any rational person to imagine that I hunt,” he replied furiously.
“Then perhaps they were being tactful, perhaps they guessed that you’d get upset and they didn’t want to risk your mighty wrath? Why get angry at me, Mr. Shannon? I didn’t sell you those boots.” Daisy turned to Charlie Dempsey and started to talk polo to him.
Patrick Shannon was left simmering in the suspicion that all of the people he’d ridden with today must have been curious about his boots and been too polite to question him—and, no doubt, had been laughing at him behind his back.
Shannon did not enjoy feeling like a horse’s ass.
16
There was only one private room in the Valarians’ apartment, only one room which had never been photographed in the course of Robin’s never-ending redecorations, which totally renewed the look of their Park Avenue duplex every two years. This was the room in which they spent their rare time together, in which they indulged in a cherished ritual before dressing to go out or to entertain at home as they did virtually every night of the week. Each evening at six o’clock Robin and Vanessa met in their private room which had walls and floors covered in thick carpeting the color of vicuna and a domed copper ceiling, from which warm light, glowing from hidden recesses, spread over the many orchids that grew in hanging baskets. In the center of the room, which was otherwise entirely empty, was a carpeted platform on which rested a gigantic oval hot tub—a tub as large as most ordinary bathrooms—made of black fiberglass. Six inches deeper than tubs generally are, it had four adjustable water jets of brushed chrome that created whirlpools of water that could reach 110 degrees. Naked in the soothing water, their marvelously taut, superbly kept bodies glimmering, they lay and sipped cold, dry white wine, gossiping about their days and their doings. There they reaffirmed the deep bonds which held them together.
Like many married homosexual couples they formed a stronger, more solid and durable relationship than almost any of the heterosexual couples they knew. There is no team so committed to their joint and individual successes as the homosexual husband happily married to a lesbian wife, no love match as tight and protective and close-knit. Together they received immense benefits they could never have obtained outside of marriage, the most important of which was that protection from being single which leads, in the case of any attractive male or female over thirty, to lively speculation about their sexual preferences on the part of almost everybody who meets them. Together they formed that unit, “the married couple,” that is far more easily absorbed into social life anywhere than any single homosexual or a homosexual couple of the same sex: they provided their hostesses with that most desirable addition to any party, a perfectly matched pair.
Together they made a traditional, infinitely secure home for each other, in which Robin was free to indulge his talent for creating resplendently baroque surroundings and ever more sumptuous flower arrangements. It was he who found and trained perfect servants, and Vanessa who planned the exquisitely thought-out parties she had used so effectively to promote Robin’s career. Finally, since they had no jealousy of each other, as lovers might have, each was free to indulge his sexual tastes with the added pleasure of knowing that the other was eagerly waiting to hear about it, to advise, to assist, to smooth the path, even to entrap, and if necessary, to comfort and console.
Their marriage gave them an entrée into the mainstream of the establishment of society and wealth which would not have been possible on the same level had they remained single. As “the Valarians” they dined at the White House, sailed on the largest yachts, stayed in the most historic English and Irish country houses, an impeccable couple, above scandal, if not entirely above rumor—but who paid attention to rumors in these days?
As “the Valarians” they were forever free of the taint of the homosexual; as a married couple they moved with impunity in the widest world of celebrity, while, in their own inner circle, they were not only recognized as brilliantly successful deceivers, but applauded for their cleverness in finding each other and using each other so well. They had understood the secret, so rarely brought out in its raw and naked state; the fact that among the successful of the world, there is no gender—there is only success or lack of success. The only important question is: are you or are you not one of us?
Homosexual married couples come in a variety of combinations: the bisexual husband, the kind Robin always called “a Jazz-Tango,” who in the first years of marriage occasionally enjoyed his wife and almost always produced astonishingly beautiful children; the true homosexual man and the wife who is terrified of sex of any kind; and the lesbian with the passive, almost neuter husband. The Valarians were of the variety that most certainly has the best stories to tell each other, since Robin was as active sexually as his wife.
Robin Valarian truly loved Vanessa and she truly loved him, both with anxious tenderness. If he had a cold she brought him vitamin C every hour and watched while he swallowed it. If she had a tiring day, he would rub her back for an hour until she purred with relaxation and then he’d go into the kitchen, tell the cook exactly what to put on a tray and bring it in himself, settling her among the cushions on the bed and insisting that she eat The life they had made together was a living, growing, deeply rooted thing, totally dependent on their joint contributions. Vanessa often quoted Rilke: “The love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and border and salute each other.”
Beyond love, they were each other’s best friends. Robin admired her nerve, her savage pursuit of what she wanted and he was particularly grateful for her role in his career. She had so much style, which leapt out directly from her personality, that she imparted it to his merely fashionable clothes. His abilities as a designer were limited: he knew how to make women look pretty and feminine—he specialized in cocktail and dinner dresses, leaning heavily on the allure of ruffles and the rustle of taffeta, but never in his life had he had an original design idea. Yet, year after year, rich women all over the country bought Robin Valarian’s expensive couture clothes. This came about only partly because of the exceptionally frie
ndly way in which he was treated by the fashion press, whose members enjoyed being included in the parties given by this most exclusive of couples. Essentially his clothes sold because Vanessa was so frequently photographed wearing his dresses with her swaggering, devil-be-damned flair, surrounded by people of taste and status, that “a Valarian” had come to mean a safely pretty dress in which an upper-class woman could feel almost as if she were Vanessa Valarian herself, rising to the challenge of being dashingly, ruthlessly, clashingly chic.
Their duplex reflected the strength of their bond. It was not cupidity that made them load every table with precious bibelots, but the nesting instinct gone wild, castle building on a domestic scale. Every object they chose and bought together reaffirmed their commitment, a set of Pyrex mixing bowls as strongly as a costly silver mermaid fashioned by Tony Duquette. There was to them a sacredness about their table linen, their silver and china such as only newlyweds know. Long before it became fashionable for a man to be interested in domestic detail, Robin Valarian prided himself on his abilities as a homemaker. Unlike the goddess of interior design, Sister Parish, whose two watchwords were luxury and discipline, the Valarians believed in luxury and luxury. Every one of their down pillows was piped, or tasseled, every lampshade lined in pink silk, every curtain double-lined, looped and caparisoned, every wall rich with at least twelve costly coats of lacquer, when it wasn’t covered with rare fabric, every sofa overstuffed and oversized and totally comfortable, so that their guests felt as comforted and cocooned as if they were babies in their cribs, an illusion which caused them to gossip more freely than they ever did in less cushioned settings. The Valarians never gave a party at which at least one reputation was not made and another reputation ruined.
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