Princess Daisy

by Judith Krantz

  “Absolutely. You’re not utterly devoid of a sense of values. That’s what I tell people when I defend you. They say that Daisy Valensky is nothing but a hard-working drone who never has any fun, and I defend you. I say that for all they know you may have fun sometimes—they shouldn’t judge by appearances.”

  “You really are a shit, North,” Daisy said, in a lilting voice.

  “I knew you were shining me on.”

  “Why don’t you fire me?” Daisy suggested.

  “I’m too lazy. And anyway I am a shit, sort of. I mean, I’m not your ordinary good-natured slob.”

  “You’re not even an ordinary bad-natured slob.”

  “No use trying to provoke me … you said to be philosophical so I’m being philosophical.”

  “How long can this last?”

  “Go with the flow, Daisy.”

  “That’s my line,” Daisy said possessively.

  “I’m a creative borrower,” North loftily proclaimed.

  “Get your own line,” Daisy insisted.

  “That’s stingy. You must be hungry. Should we eat?”

  “I didn’t have lunch,” said Daisy plaintively.

  “Why not?”

  “I was too busy finding out about the strike.” She looked at him virtuously.

  “Which strike?” wondered North.

  “We should eat.”

  “That’s my line,” said North. “But I’ll let you have it I’m feeling generous. Where shall we go?”

  “We can stay and eat here,” Daisy suggested.

  “Thank God. I can’t get up. Waiter, bring us everything.”

  “Everything, Signor?”

  “Everything.” North gestured broadly.

  “Certainly, Signor.” The waiter appreciated the signor’s dilemma. How could he order sensibly in the presence of such glorious, fresh, young beauty? How could he even eat? Still, they must be properly nourished. To begin, naturally the famous filetto Carpaccio and then the green tagliarni gratinati, the noodles blended so suavely with cream and cheese and after, perhaps the calves liver in tiny strips alla veneziana served of course with polenta and for dessert—he would wait to decide on their dessert until after they had started on the liver. Sometimes tourists skipped dessert

  “Thank you so much for a lovely evening,” said Daisy in a small, precise voice, outside the door to her room at the Gritti Palace.

  “Ah … I enjoyed it too,” North answered. “That’s the right response, isn’t it?” He willed her to look directly at him, to meet his gaze, but she kept her eyes demurely downcast

  “No, you should have said that you hoped you’d see me again and asked if you might telephone when we get back to the city.”

  “Can I?”

  “May I,” Daisy corrected him.

  “May I come in?” asked North.

  “No, you may call me.”

  “But I said, ‘May I come in?’ ” North repeated.

  “Oh, well, yes, in that case do call.”

  Impatiently, he put one finger under her chin and tipped her head up toward him, but she lowered her lids and continued to avoid his glance. “There’s a phone strike—so how can I call you?” North asked.

  “True. But you could knock on my door,” Daisy said, vamping for time.

  “I said, ‘May I come in?’ ” he repeated urgently.

  “Why?”

  “Just because …” His face had lost its sharpness in the dim light of the corridor. His stance retained its swagger, his toughness still proclaimed itself in the set of his shoulders, but the familiar North air of indomitable willfulness, of battle readiness had softened, as if the moonlight had begun to wash it away.

  “Oh, well … in that case … I guess so,” Daisy said, opening the door with her key.

  “It’s only reasonable,” he assured her.

  “Reasonable?”

  “Stop questioning everything I say.”

  “Stop telling me what to do,” Daisy countered.

  “Right.” North took her in his arms and bent down to her lips. “From now on I’ll order you.”

  “How will I know the difference?” Daisy asked in a panic, leaning away from him.

  “You’ll figure it out”

  “Wait!”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure that this is a good idea.”

  “I’m the one who has the ideas … and this is a natural.” He picked her up and carried her to the bed as wide as a barge. “You, Daisy, are the detail person—I’m involved in the larger creative effort.” He kissed her, holding her head between both of his hands.

  “North?” she said, pushing herself up on the pillows.

  “Huh?” he answered, busily coaxing the crystal straps from her shoulders.

  “Is this a mistake?”

  “I don’t think so, but we have to make it to find out … oh, oh you never told me you tasted so good.”

  “You never asked.”

  “My mistake.”

  There was awe in his voice as he murmured, “Where have you been hiding all these years?” a note Daisy had never heard from this man whose terse, rapid commands had been the whip that drove her on. He, who had always crackled with combative directions, touched the tips of her breasts as carefully and reverently as an archaeologist, amazed and moved by the discovery of a long buried statue of Venus. His sharp features were blunted by the light reflected from the Grand Canal, and through her half-closed eyes she searched for the harsh and contained fire of the man she knew. But all his hard edges seemed to have melted as he was transformed into a tender, laughing, unknown lover, who covered her with long, sweet, almost thoughtful kisses as he slid his hands down to her waist and took possession of the warm, supple curve where her hips began and pulled her closer to him so that they lay face to face.

  “May I?” he murmured, waiting until she nodded before he undressed her and then took off his own clothes and stood looking down at her with a smile of revelation on his lips, his naked body finer than she would have imagined it … and now she knew that she had imagined it, perhaps since she had first seen him. The turmoil of this sudden knowledge made her pull him down to her and finally dare to kiss his pointed nose and his eyes and his ears and his cheeks, all the surfaces she had watched so anxiously for years, trying to anticipate his orders, always tense with the necessity of keeping up with his frenzied pace, of being ready to supply whatever he needed. Abruptly, in their nakedness, they were equal, and under her lips there was only a warmth and this new, dear proximity. In a rush of prodigious pleasure Daisy thought, but he likes me, he approves of me, I’m a human being to him, he must truly care. She opened her arms wide with surprise and flung them around his neck, pressing herself close, as close as possible, trying to keep him there in the compass of her arms so that he wouldn’t change back to the North she had known. Little by little she became convinced that this unknown lover would not vanish. As he sensed Daisy gradually yielding up her fears and her hesitations North’s caresses became more firm and more insistent. He allowed himself to learn her body an inch at a time and when all protest, all holding back was long past, he parted her willing thighs, but before he entered her, he whispered again, “May I?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “Still no change?” North asked the hall porter.

  “No, Signor, I regret, nothing is happening, but we have learned that these strikes do not end as quickly as they begin. However, they do not occur often, a major strike like this, most positively, I assure you.”

  “Well, that’s show biz,” North smiled, his lean body relaxed. “Did you notice where Miss Valensky went? She’s not in her room.”

  “Ah, the principessa, yes, she just left, Signor. She said she had to pay a boy who was waiting with a gypsy rowboat. At least that’s what I think she said. Perhaps it was a gypsy boy. In any case, I offered to do it for her but she insisted.”

  “My God!” North’s mouth quivered with laughter. “She really had one
lined up … I should have known.”

  “Signor?”

  “Nothing. I’ll go find her.” He walked quickly toward the entrance to the hotel and bumped into Daisy who was hurrying back in.

  “You weren’t trying to escape, were you?” he asked.

  “Merely cutting off the last route to civilization.”

  “I overslept,” he told her.

  “So I noticed. You’re very interesting to watch when you sleep. You don’t look at all the way you do when you’re awake.”

  “How do I look?” he asked, warily.

  “It’s how you don’t look—no turbulence, no truculence, no irascibility, no sound and fury, no invulnerability, no …”

  “You’re taking advantage of me,” he said, trying to cut her off.

  “Oh, I hope so! I’ve always wanted to—it’s been one of my heart’s desires. In matters of this sort I find that it’s always best to be the first one awake.”

  “How much do you know about matters of this sort?” he barked.

  “I don’t know you nearly well enough to tell you,” she said airily, smiling at him at the same time with an insolent light in her eyes. He seized her by the scruff of the neck, to the discreet delight of the entire lobby staff, and dragged her over to a window.

  “Let me get a look at you, damn you. How can I see into your eyes when they’re so black?”

  “You can’t possibly,” she said triumphantly, her dark gold eyebrows forming a straight line. “But as for you, you poor, transparent, red-headed, blue-eyed man, I can look right straight into your brain and out the other side!”

  “Bullshit. Nobody looks into my brain.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “Not before breakfast,” he said hastily. “Anyway, haven’t you got better things to think about? Do you realize you haven’t done any sightseeing yet, outside of Harry’s Bar?”

  “And the ceiling of Room Fifteen, at the Gritti Palace … dimly,” she added with a reminiscent grin that made him shake her again.

  “Let’s grab breakfast and go walking.”

  “I’ve had breakfast, but I’ll watch you eat,” Daisy announced graciously.

  “Why do I have this strange feeling that you think you’re smarter than I am?” North grumbled.

  “That’s the sort of question you must search your soul to answer.” Daisy laughed.

  “See, you’re doing it again!”

  Daisy and North felt as if the fabric of the world had been whisked aside and another, alternative world presented in a sumptuously tarnished cornucopia of untoreseen pleasures, as if, during the march of centuries, Venice had been waiting confidently just for them. They found themselves miraculously stripped of those defensive postures that had passed for character, and turned into wondering children. Everyone, from the shopkeepers to the cats in the narrow calles, was an accomplice, locked willingly together into this sea-bound relic, this most sensuous city on earth. Their sense of life, strong, blood-hot and buoyant, had never been so focused on each individual moment as it was in this generously proffered world in which the familiar concepts of time and space and light had all been washed by the patient sorcery of centuries into something better than either of them had ever known.

  A dark church, illuminated in an unexpected corner by a masterpiece, a wicker table at a café, an arched bridge over a canal, a barking dog, the rose-orange-lavender façades of faded, still-regal palazzos, the regular tolling of the bells in the Campanile at dusk, a hamburger of Florentine beef, the Viennese waltzes played at Quadri’s, or the glimpse of a courtyard garden in which old roses still bloomed in the Campo San Barnaba, all mingled together in one blissful dream as they walked and ate and talked and made love, waking each morning with the fear that the strike might be over, a fear immediately banished by the sight of the Grand Canal on which only private boats and market barges could be seen.

  Making love with North had finally taught Daisy what it meant to truly desire a man and be fulfilled physically by him. But, as the nights passed, drugged with pleasure, Daisy realized that in a way he seemed to be unaware of, she was still holding back. That caged thing in her heart that begged to be liberated, that thing that craved and yearned to be dissolved, to achieve a release beyond the physical, still held tight, taut and unbending even when they were closest to each other. She ached for it—whatever it was—to burst into flame within her, and still it remained solidly locked behind bars of reserve. North, she thought, had yielded up to her his cantankerous, difficult and abrupt exterior and brought forth moments of incandescence, yet, try as she would, Daisy still knew him, as she had always known him, as an opponent, beloved now, but an opponent, even during these days carved out of time.

  Was it North’s essential nature, his essential apartness that did not yet permit her to sense the full merging with another that she had always sought? She asked herself what it was in him or in her that wouldn’t permit her to surrender to absolute intimacy. Just as Daisy had somehow felt an impostor when she was being treated as a princess, she wondered if she and North were, in some way, impostors when they treated each other as lovers? Perhaps, she told herself, it was just too soon, perhaps the leap they had made had been too quick, jumping from a working relationship of many years to becoming lovers after only a few hours of unexpected flirtation.

  Daisy was troubled by something indefinable in the new way they acted with each other, something that rang with a note of the illusory, the temporary, something that might be dissipated by a minor incident. As she drifted off to sleep she thought that perhaps it was always this way at first. Perhaps, later, there would be more. But if there were not more, was this enough?

  Yet, as one day followed another, Daisy felt herself like a field of flowers on a summer afternoon, buzzing and humming with the busy sound of happiness. She wondered what she and North were creating together. Was it just a few days in another time frame? She had known him so well in his movements of command, and of watchfulness, known his favorite words and catch phrases, his gestures and expressions. Now she knew him as the first man who taught her body true passion. But what did they know of each other on a more profound level, a level of deep and continuous connection? Did he want that knowledge? Did she?

  In their conversations there was a hint of expectation, of restless waiting, as during the chatter that precedes the raising of the curtain at the theater. Yet, it was clear to her that the time hadn’t come to speak of any of her closely kept secrets … perhaps it would come tomorrow, or the day after … or never. Perhaps it should not be something she longed for, perhaps these secrets were meant to stay hidden—she didn’t know. She couldn’t judge, and present joys prevented her from giving the subject more than a thought or two, before sleeping.

  It always seemed, in their private weather, to be either the first best day of spring, that day on which people finally realize that spring really is in the air, or else that day just before they say with a disappointed sigh, “Oh, but it’s summer already.” They were living an idyll trembling on the brink of becoming—Daisy couldn’t complete the idea, nor could she share it with North. The fragility, the evanescence of passion had become evident to her almost as soon as she first experienced it.

  There were, during that week, an infinite number of harmonies in her beauty. Venice inspired her to meet its fantasy with her own, to finally wear the Norman Hartnell dress designed during the last years of the twenties, a dress that she had never quite dared to put on in New York, a “picture frock” as it had been called, with a pink chiffon bodice under an orchid taffeta surplice above a skirt of pale blue taffeta with a hem thickly bordered with hand-painted flowers. During the day in her sailor pants and rugby shirts, she weighted her wrists with barbaric bracelets, bought for three dollars, but at night her hair was entwined with fresh flowers.

  As the sun, constantly reflected from the water, turned North’s freckles darker and his blue eyes bluer, it tinted Daisy’s warm color with a light copper glaze that contrasted
so strongly with her hair that people openly pointed to her in the streets.

  Although Daisy and North ate lunch in any convenient trattoria during their daytime rambles, they always had dinner at Harry’s Bar, which instantly becomes a club to anyone who has been there twice. There were other tourists, of course, but they were far outnumbered by true Venetians who, since 1931, have stopped by Harry’s at least once a day to find out what is new in the world, that, to them, is simply and entirely Venice, Venetians who possessed a cool lacquered elegance which belongs to an ancient race who have learned that everything must be treated as a surface.

  One night, a week after they had arrived, Daisy spilled the salt on the pink tablecloth. Both she and North reached for it and simultaneously flung a pinch over their shoulders.

  “You realize that’s just superstition?” North asked.

  “Of course. It’s not as if anything bad would happen if we didn’t.” They both knocked on the wood of their chairs quickly and automatically.

  “A pure atavism,” North assured her.

  “A primitive ritual,” Daisy agreed.

  “If there isn’t any wood around, you’re allowed to knock on your head—it counts,” he offered. “Or use mine.”

  “Oh, I know. But you mustn’t wait longer than three seconds.”

  “I walk under ladders,” North said, with the air of one who knows more than he tells.

  “I never even think about broken mirrors,” Daisy countered. “Or hats on the bed or whistling in dressing rooms or black cats.”

  “Only salt and wood?” he asked skeptically.

  “And wishing on the first star at night. You can wish on the new moon too, but only if you happen to see it over your left shoulder without planning to.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s a very important one,” Daisy said wisely, tweaking a lock of his red hair. “And you can wish on a plane, too, if you really think it’s a star, but only as long as you’re in a car moving in the same direction as the plane.”

  “I’ll remember that,” North said with rue in his voice, the wistfulness of falling leaves, a sad, autumnal tone he’d never used before.