She has always had a special feeling for gems, and it is really only the precious ones that interest her. She has never been able to have much enthusiasm for semiprecious stones: the garnets, the tourmalines, the amethysts, turquoises, moonstones, opals, and the rest. But precious gemstones are quite another matter, and the sight of a nearly flawless, fiery diamond can induce in her an almost narcotic rush, a kind of adrenaline high.
Each stone—to her, at least—has its own distinct personality. An emerald, for instance, she sees as a man’s stone. Rubies and diamonds look cheap and vulgar on a man, and there is a reason why Tiffany has never offered a man’s diamond ring for sale. Tarkington’s doesn’t go quite that far, but when a man comes into the store looking for a diamond ring—or diamond studs or cuff links—Smitty’s salespeople try, as politely as they can, to discourage him, to steer him toward emeralds or some lesser green stone such as aquamarine or malachite: masculine stones.
Rubies are tarts’ stones, Smitty’s least favorite of the big four. She’s never met a woman wearing a ruby ring—or necklace, or ear clips—that she didn’t instantly dislike and consider a tart. Tarkington’s has its share of tart customers, of course—high-class tarts, to be sure, expensive tarts, but tarts just the same, or kept women. And when she sees such a woman sashay into her department, she will wink at her salesperson and slyly whisper, “Bring out the T.C.”—the Tart Collection.
When a woman asks to look at emeralds, Smitty tends to think: Dyke.
Sapphires? Well, they are sort of a problem. Smitty has looked at some gorgeous sapphires in her time, but to her a sapphire has always been an old lady’s stone. Old ladies with blue hair seem to be made for sapphires. There is a particularly lovely sapphire and diamond necklace in one of her cases right now, sold to her with documentation indicating that it once belonged to the Grand Duchess Tatiana of Russia—and it may have, though the vendor’s price was almost suspiciously low—that Smitty has always admired. But she reminded herself that she is too young for sapphires. “You’ll have plenty of time for sapphires, Smitty old girl,” she told herself. “Puh-len-ty of time.”
But diamonds—ah, diamonds are an altogether different story. They are ageless, forever young, pure, hard carbon, flash-formed in the volcanic bubbling of the young earth’s crust. A good diamond is as beautiful on the ring finger of a teenage bride as on a dowager’s lavaliere. In the glass case in front of her is the diamond he promised her: square-cut, 3.9 carats, finest gem quality, in a perfectly simple platinum setting. Using another key, she unlocks the cabinet, picks the ring out of its black velvet pocket, and slips it on the third finger of her left hand.
She could very easily turn, now, and walk out of the store wearing the ring. It was rightfully to have been hers. Oliver, even if he notices her walking out with an item from her own stock, would not question her. She has often borrowed items from stock before—for an important party, for instance, somewhere she might be recognized, photographed, written about. “Diana Smith, Tarkington’s savvy jewelry buyer, wearing a diamond butterfly in her hair,” Mona Potter might write. Si even encouraged this sort of thing. This sort of publicity did nothing but good for the store, and it cost Si absolutely nothing. He always encouraged his executives to look their absolute and most expensive best when they went out in public. It helped the store’s image. Longtime salesladies, whom Si trusted, were even allowed to borrow designer apparel from the store’s inventory. Smitty has done this too.
Right now, Smitty could go into her office and erase this item of her inventory from her computer’s memory and that would be the end of it.
Except …
Except for Tommy Bonham, of course. Tommy Bonham’s eyes always seem to be everywhere in the store. His memory itself is like a computer, and often even better, and if Tommy is about to take over, even temporarily, it is much too risky.
She has had her share of run-ins with Tommy Bonham in the past, and she is certain he doesn’t like her. It was Tommy, for instance, who persuaded Si to open the two suburban outlets, in Westchester and Morris counties. Smitty opposed the idea from the beginning. “It won’t work,” she told Si.
“Why not? Why won’t it work?”
“I’ll give you two reasons why it won’t work,” she said. “For one thing, your salespeople. Here in Manhattan, you have a supply of bright, attractive, well-bred, and well-spoken men and women who, for one reason or another, need jobs. These are people who learn to respect and care about the merchandise they sell. These are the kind of salespeople our clients expect—people with good manners and good taste. These are people who know how to write thank-you notes and who know that when a woman buys a fifteen-thousand-dollar dress she appreciates a thank-you note from the person who sold it to her. But who are you going to find in Westchester County? Wives of bankers and stockbrokers and lawyers and advertising executives who play golf and paddle tennis. They don’t need to work, and they’re not going to want to work for us. People of the sort who work for us in Manhattan aren’t going to want to commute to White Plains. We’re going to end up having to hire former cleaning ladies from Tuckahoe.
“That’s reason number one. Reason number two is that thirty percent of our clients are visitors from foreign countries. Is the wife of a Japanese businessman going to go to White Plains to shop? No way. Another thirty-five percent of our clients live in other parts of the country. Is a woman who’s in town from San Francisco going to get on a bus and go to New Jersey to buy a dress?”
“But more and more of the city’s money is moving to the suburbs,” Tommy insisted, and he had charts and graphs and demographic studies to back him up, and Si decided to go along with him. Tarkington’s would take Scarsdale and Morristown by storm. The suburban stores would each add a new department, called “Country Living,” featuring more casual designer apparel.
Well, it hadn’t worked, for the very reasons Smitty outlined, and after a while both suburban branches closed. Smitty had been right, and Lord knows how much money Si lost in that experiment. And the day the suburban closings were announced—meeting Tommy Bonham in the hall—she hadn’t been able to resist saying sweetly, “I told you so!”
He had given her a look of purest hatred. Tommy the hagfish.
Prettyboy Bonham didn’t like being told he was wrong. He liked it even less when that person was a mere buyer. He liked it less and less when that person was someone ten years younger than he, and even less than that when that person happened to be a woman.
She twists the ring slowly on her finger. A diamond of that size and importance looked smart when worn facing the palm of the hand. It would also look smart knotted in a scarf.
Suddenly, she is swept with an almost sexual longing for this stone. The feeling seizes at her very innards. She must have this stone and no other. It is hers. It was promised to her, and promises cannot be broken, can they? “A man is as good as his word.” Si was always saying that, and so it must be hers, and now is the time to claim it. That’s what she’s doing: not stealing it, claiming it. Claiming her rightful property. She extends her left hand to the light. This stone excels in all four C’s of gemology: color, clarity, cutting, and carat weight. It is ice blue. In the sunlight it will throw off prismatic flashes of red and lavender. In terms of clarity, it has been rated flawless. It has been cut in the full glory of fifty-eight facets, thirty-three above the girdle and twenty-five below. In the quaint language of gemology, this stone would be classified Extra River, from the early days of African mining when the finest diamonds were found in the alluvial wash of riverbeds. Yes, it is hers, it is hers.
She could write it up as a sale. There is a client in Venezuela whose husband’s bank pays all her charges. No bill has ever been challenged.
“Nice-looking ring, Miss Smith.” It is Oliver, moving silently across the thick carpet, making his rounds, a witness.
She tries not to appear startled. “Yes, isn’t it?” she says easily. “I have a client, in town from Caracas. I’m
thinking of taking this over to her hotel and showing it to her.”
“Caracas. Is that in Ohio?”
“Venezuela. South America.” Her alibi.
Larceny, she thinks. Grand theft. Zip to ten years in the state pen. Prettyboy Bonham would like to see her in jail. Next to seeing her dead, he would like to see her in jail.
And yet, she thinks as Oliver moves away, would she ever feel the same about this ring as she would if he had actually slipped it on her finger, the way he had promised to do? That would always be missing, that one final gesture. Missing that final gesture means a lot. The promise cannot be real without that final gesture. And, worst of all, worse than knowing that the final gesture never came, will never come, is knowing that it was her own damn fault.
“Yes, you really blew it this time, Smitty old girl,” she tells herself. “You really blew it this time, didn’t you? You blew your last chance.” Once again, she feels dizzy.
“Someday that Irish temper of yours is going to get you into big trouble, young lady—big trouble,” her mother used to say when she was growing up, when she would sob and curse and kick the stairs whenever she didn’t get her way. Locked in the kitchen as a result of some infraction she can’t remember, she had hurled all her mother’s best china out of the cabinets, smashing it, piece by piece, on the tile floor, and then stamping on it with her feet until the Wedgwood looked like drifts of snow. “Oh, you rotten, rotten little girl, you worthless little girl!” her mother had screamed, chasing her through the rooms with her younger brother’s baseball bat. “You’re worthless! I’m going to kill you, you worthless little girl!”
And so, that day, their last time together, when she could have reasoned with him, could have tried to calm him down, instead she lost her Irish temper and then—
Slowly she removes the ring from her finger, places it back in its little pocket, slides the drawer closed, and locks the cabinet. For a moment, she rests her hands on the cabinet, and her reflection in the glass is moonlike, disembodied, unreal. Perhaps my mother should have killed me, she thinks. Perhaps that is what I deserved.
And so she makes her way out of the store, waves good night to Oliver as she passes him, and, ringless, leaves by the side door, knowing she will never be certain whether she left the ring behind because she is essentially an honest woman or was just afraid of getting caught.
On the street, she joins the crowd of pedestrians moving uptown. If you saw her, you would think this was just another attractive, well-dressed young woman with something weighing heavily on her mind. The Valiums are wearing off.
She makes a decision. Tomorrow morning, when the store opens, she will march into Prettyboy’s office and resign. She will not give Prettyboy the satisfaction of firing her—or terminating her, as they say nowadays.
There are other good jobs in this city, she thinks. There are other nice places to live, and there are even other cities; she is sick of New York, sick to death of it, and New York didn’t keep its promise to her.
There are also other men, men who will keep their promises. There are plenty of other men. You’d think Si Tarkington was the last man on earth, for God’s sake! She’s still young, still has her looks, her figure. She’ll find someone.
Suddenly, instead of despair, her world is bright with expectation, hope, and a crimson thing called courage. She thinks of Scarlett O’Hara. Tomorrow is another day.
At the corner, she raises her arm to flag a taxi, just another bright young Manhattan career woman in a hurry.
“Hi, Smitty!” someone calls to her.
“Hi!”
She has always hated the name Smitty, which was given to her in high school, and has stuck, and now will probably never become unstuck. When they made love, he called her Diana, repeating it over and over, “Diana … Diana … my goddess of the hunt.…”
A taxi pulls over to the curb.
6
Peter Turner, struggling freelance writer, sits in his ninth-floor apartment at the Dakota, thinking.
The Dakota is considered a rather grand New York address, but Peter Turner’s apartment is far from grand. The grand apartments are on the floors below, particularly those facing south, over the breadth of West 72nd Street, and those facing east, overlooking Central Park. The grand apartments of the Dakota are owned by celebrities of the magnitude of Lauren Bacall, Yoko Ono Lennon, and Roberta Flack. Peter’s apartment is in the upper northwest corner of the building, tucked under a gabled, crenellated dormer window, and his only view is of the unadorned brick wall of the building next door.
The top two floors of the Dakota, on one of which Peter Turner lives, were once a warren of tiny servants’ rooms, from the days when people kept servants. Out of these rooms, small apartments were patched together in somewhat haphazard fashion, like Peter’s. The top two floors of the Dakota are where the gays live, and many little old ladies. Bicycles are parked outside apartment doors as often as wheelchairs, along the narrow corridors that link these residences in a pattern graspable only to those who live there. Peter Turner is not gay, though he lives alone, and though he has had admiring glances cast in his direction by certain neighbors. Not that Peter Turner is all that good-looking, though most would say he is not bad-looking, either. His face is composed of many planes and angles. “Your face is all corners,” a former girlfriend once said to him. But he has one feature he is secretly very proud of: a thick, curly mop of black hair. Someone once told him that if a man can keep his hair past the age of twenty-five, he need never fear baldness. Peter Turner passed that watershed year three years ago, heaved a sigh of relief, and stopped worrying about it.
Now he is thinking about Blazer Tarkington. He would not be interested in Silas Tarkington’s story if it hadn’t been for Blazer. If it hadn’t been for Blazer, he wouldn’t have thought twice about it, wouldn’t have given it the time of day.
Peter Turner and Blazer Tarkington were in the same class at Yale, and for a couple of years they both lived at Calhoun College. Peter had no idea why the guy was called Blazer. He assumed it might have something to do with the blazer jackets they all wore when they got dressed up. Every Yale man worth his salt owned a blazer, and it had to be dark blue, double-breasted, with solid brass buttons, preferably antique. The best blazers were custom made by Morty Sills. These jobs were made with real buttonholes on the sleeves that you could button and unbutton. So if you had a blue blazer with, say, a bright red silk lining, you could unbutton the sleeves and roll up the cuffs to show off the lining, and that was considered a real Yale look and you were ready for the tables down at Mory’s. No breast-pocket insignia, please. That was taboo.
But the thing was, Peter doesn’t think he ever saw Blazer Tarkington wearing a blazer. He was always kind of a scruffy dresser—T-shirts with hostile messages printed on them, torn jeans, dirty sneakers, that sort of thing. There was also a dirty old cap he sometimes wore, a duckbill type, and he always wore it backward. That was very un-Yale, that cap. Sometimes he also wore wire-rimmed granny glasses. Peter used to think Blazer was trying to look like John Lennon. He was built kind of like Lennon, tall and lanky. You’d never have guessed he was a rich man’s son. For one thing, he never seemed to have any money. Sometimes Peter and his friends would ask Blazer to join them for a few beers, but he would just pull the insides of his pockets out, which was his nonverbal way of saying he was broke.
He wasn’t unpopular at Yale, exactly. But he wasn’t exactly popular, either. He was always kind of a loner, never seemed to want to be friendly, never seemed to want to get into a conversation. Blazer never had any real close friends at college. He wasn’t unfriendly, just aloof, as though he had some kind of private chip on his shoulder. He went out for boxing and made the team, which was unusual for a skinny guy, and Peter always thought boxing was a good choice. It helped him work off the hostilities he seemed to have.
He was into a lot of other things at New Haven. He worked on the Record as a photographer. He sang baritone in the g
lee club. He was a pretty good outfielder for the junior varsity baseball team. But you couldn’t really call these social activities. Boxing, taking photos for the Record, singing baritone, playing outfielder—these weren’t activities that required much social contact, or interaction, with other team members. At Yale, Peter tended to think of Blazer as an outfielder, always somewhere out in left field. Later on, after his classmates had all more or less gotten used to him and his antisocial ways, many of them decided that Blazer Tarkington was just a bit peculiar.
Peter was born and raised in Wisconsin, so he had never heard of Tarkington’s store and the name meant nothing to him when he got to New Haven. Then, in the fall of their sophomore year, Blazer’s stepmother arrived on campus. Peter never forgot that afternoon. It was the first hint he’d had that there was money in the picture.
He happened to be standing in the quad when Consuelo Tarkington’s Rolls-Royce pulled up to the curb. Her driver, in a gray uniform and cap, hopped out of the car and opened the back door for her. First a long slender leg appeared. Then a gloved hand, holding a long cigarette holder with a lighted cigarette in it. Then the whole woman herself emerged and stood there. Just stood there.
It was not just that she was beautiful. She most certainly was—an icy blond beauty, with perfect white skin and cool blue eyes. Her hair, done in what in those days was called a bouffant style, was almost the color of her cigarette smoke. She was about Peter’s own mother’s age, so it would not be accurate to say that he found this woman beautiful in terms of being desirable or sexy. And it was not just that she was elegantly dressed, which she certainly was, though he can’t really remember what she was wearing, except that it was something dark. It was simply the way she stood there. He’d never before seen a woman whose very posture could transmit such a sense of self-possession and self-command. She seemed to have complete authority over herself. Everything about this woman seemed so sure. Then she stepped from the curb onto the sidewalk, and there was certainty in the way she moved, too. Though he was standing at least fifty feet away from her, Peter swore he could smell her perfume in the autumn air. He recognized, for the first time, that hers was the assurance and self-confidence of money, and he knew all at once, with a pang of self-realization, that he would never be that rich.
Carriage Trade Page 8
