Princess Daisy (47 page)

“What
has
she had in return? That’s precisely why I don’t trust her. She is simply not the kind of woman who does nice things for the pure joy of it. I know her better than you do, Kiki, love—tell me what she’s getting from me?”

“Ah …” Kiki was momentarily wordless.

“Another party guest? You don’t really think that’s enough, do you?”

“Well—
yes
, if you’re a people collector, and she is.”

“Come on, Kiki. I’m not all
that
important or that glamorous or that anything.”

“You underestimate yourself—will you never stop! Look, you don’t do the New York social scene because you’re too busy during the week and on weekends you’re usually away working at your portraits, so you have a definite
scarcity value
. That means something to Vanessa!” Kiki’s eyebrows shot up to their most demonic heights. She thought it only normal and right that the Valarians should be generous to Daisy. It infuriated her that Daisy had never taken advantage of the collateral she possessed merely by being who she was, that she didn’t milk her beauty and her title for all they were worth, that she hadn’t jumped on board the great American celebrity train that was just waiting for her to ride it. “Daisy, you’re not Cinderella, you know, you’re legit.”

“And you’re a romantic—you still believe in fairy tales—no, take that back, you’re a terrible cynic who wants me to cash in on an accident of birth. Even Serge Obolensky doesn’t use his title anymore.”

“Well, he doesn’t have to sell portraits to Horse People—and plenty of other Obolenskys are still called prince and princess.”

“Kiki, do you think we could stop splitting imperial hairs and get started on figuring out what I’m going to take to Venice? What do you suppose the weather is like in Venice in September?”

“Changeable,” Kiki answered authoritatively.

“Luke should take a stick to you.”

“He doesn’t go in for kinky sex,” said Kiki smugly.

“Oh? And just what does he go in for?”

“Hugging and kissing and touching … giving pleasure and caressing and …”

“Fucking?”

“Really, Daisy, how crude! As a matter of fact … since you insist, he definitely goes in for … making love,” Kiki said, prim as a mid-Victorian clergyman’s daughter.

“Mercy, mercy! Aren’t you ever so pure now that you’ve got him … you
do
have him, don’t you?” Daisy asked with a touch of anxiety.

“I just don’t know.” Kiki’s small, pointed face suddenly looked like that of a baffled kitten. “I did everything you told me. I only accept dates with him every other time he asks—sometimes not even that often—I’ve worked up a whole fantasy world of other men that’s so real I believe in it myself, and I’m more and more in love with that son-of-a-bitch every day. But he e
ludes
me!” She pounded her small fists on Theseus who licked her hand. He liked pounding. “Do you think I shouldn’t have gone to bed with him … was that a mistake?”

“Of course not. The day is over when a girl can get a man by withholding sex. That wasn’t my point at all when I told you to be essentially unavailable. ‘Essentially’ doesn’t mean sexually, dumbbell—it means somewhere way down deep. In your soul.”

“I think my soul
is
available,” Kiki said despondently, “and he knows it. Can you harden your soul the way you harden your heart?”

“Do you have a spiritual adviser?”

“Of course not.”

“Perhaps you’d better start looking for one. Now, come on! What do you have that I can borrow?”

Arnie Greene, North’s business manager, was unhappy. He’d advised North against taking the Pan Am job. It was a top account, but a Venice location meant that North and Daisy and Wingo would all be out of the studio for almost a week, unable to attend production meetings with other clients during the entire period, a fact that might cause a few days gap in their work schedule when they got back.

“Isn’t it going to take more time than it could possibly be worth?” he asked North when Nick-the-Greek first brought in the job and asked him to bid on it.

“Probably,” North had answered. “But for some reason or other, I’ve never been to Venice, and I want to get there before it sinks.”

Arnie sighed. If he had his way, North would never shoot on location farther from the office than Central Park. He reluctantly accepted the fact that when a story
board called for flocks of pigeons, the Piazza San Marco and gondolas, you couldn’t do it in Central Park Lake … the pigeons maybe, but not the piazza. With melancholy, he wondered if gondolas were as unpredictable to work with as kids or animals. Well, he’d made damn sure that there was enough padding in the bid to absorb the overtime of even the most incompetent gondolier. Hell, he’d even taken out insurance in case a gondolier
drowned
. Arnie had also taken into account everything he’d always darkly suspected about
La Dolce Vita
, assumed that local technicians, wardrobe and make-up people, all brought in from Rome, would insist on two-hour lunches, counted on problems of crowd control and pigeon shit, figured out what it would cost to transport North, Daisy, Wingo and six models to Venice and back, first class all the way, added in a per diem living cost for all of them at the Gritti Palace which would pay the rent on his apartment for almost a year, made sure that every single item on the five-page list every commercial producer has to submit to the agency was as exact as he and Daisy could estimate,
plus
. They’d done their job. Even if something went wrong and North had trouble, they could handle the extra expenses out of the padding of the bid—standard procedure. Fortunately they weren’t financially responsible for the delays caused by weather. If he’d had to worry about the weather he’d have three more ulcers than the two he already had.

“All right, but for Christ’s sake, North, don’t fall in a canal. The water will give you, at the least, hepatitis.”

“Arnie, have I ever fallen into a canal?”

“You just said you’d never been to Venice. And don’t eat raw shellfish … also causes hepatitis.”

“Is it all right to look at the sunsets, or will they give me eyestrain?”

“Nobody appreciates me.”

“Not true.” North gave Arnie a friendly glance. “But you worry too much.”

“Well, something always does go wrong, doesn’t it?”

“Sure—if it didn’t we might as well be making buttonholes. But you know Daisy will take care of it, whatever it is. That’s what we pay her for, isn’t it?”

By the time the luggage was retrieved at the Marco Polo Airport and they’d gone through customs and piled everything into a
vaporetto, the
Venetian equivalent of a bus, it
was too dark and too late for either Daisy or North to see much of Venice. Wingo and the six models, three male and three female, were due to arrive the following day, but North had decided that he would leave a day early in order to see the sights of Venice undisturbed. Daisy could use that extra day to make a last-minute survey of the locations, check with the local police about crowd control and make sure that the accommodations were ready for the technical crew, wardrobe people, make-up people and hairdressers who were due in from Rome the next afternoon.

Venice was an audible shock, Daisy thought, looking out of the window of her room directly onto the Grand Canal, still hearing the slap of little waves against the side of the
vaporetto
. It didn’t matter how much one had read about Venice or how far back in memory one had known that it was built on water, the reality came as a total surprise. It was impossible, she realized, to
imagine
Venice. In spite of the thousands of paintings it had inspired, it had to be experienced to become real, and even as a reality, it seemed improbable, as if she had, like Alice, gone through the looking glass into a land of wonders, a play world, insubstantial, so romantic that it was almost ridiculous, a city that was one vast composition of great art, presumably dying and crumbling for hundreds of years, yet still vital, the inexhaustible subject of so much prose that there was nothing left to be said about it, yet millions of words had not drained one drop of magic from it. What ambitious creatures men were, after all, to have even attempted such a city!

Across the canal, in the middle of the moonlit night, she could plainly see the dome of Santa Maria della Salute, that supreme masterpiece of Venetian Baroque. The fact that it was actually exactly where it should be was somehow miraculous and unexpected.… Daisy wouldn’t be surprised if it had vanished by morning, nor if it remained standing long after New York and London had been reduced to rubble.

Tomorrow, at 7:00, she had to be up to start work, Daisy realized with a start, turning back to her high-ceilinged room, gay with striped blue-and-white satin walls and pink brocade draperies. That meant five hours sleep at the most. Luckily she had been able to nap a little on the trip over. North had sat in the front aisle seat of the first-class compartment, where he had room to stretch out
his legs, and Daisy had taken a vacant seat several rows behind, so that she wouldn’t disturb him. She knew that before a shoot as complicated as this one promised to be, he liked to withdraw into himself even more than usual, in preparation for the energy he would be pouring out during the next few days. As she got ready for bed Daisy wondered if, as she had plotted, she was going to be able to return to New York by way of London so that she could see Dani. She hadn’t been able to go to Europe at Christmas this year. The two large oils and six watercolors she had done had just covered Danielle’s expenses, so Daisy had been forced to choose to make the money rather than to make the trip. It had been too long, oh, really much too long, she thought, since she’d seen either Danielle or Anabel. She had decided not to ask North about taking the extra days off until the shoot was almost over. Then, with London so near, it would be difficult for him to refuse and her ticket could be rewritten at a minimum of expense.

Wearily, Daisy pulled off the ancient jeans, T-shirt and British Army Commando jacket—fifty cents at a church jumble sale in London five years ago—that she’d worn on the plane and hadn’t had off since they left New York. She took a shower, a long, languorous shower, very different from the brief “working” shower she was used to at home, which, dictated by the inadequate plumbing, she told Kiki was as much fun as bathing with a Water Pik.™ Her nightwear was ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalogue, an old-fashioned straight-top vest in pink cotton with a drawstring around the top of the camisole and ribbon straps. Instead of the matching bloomers, Daisy wore purple satin basketball shorts, and her man’s dressing gown was from Sulka, a dark-red, figured silk with a shawl collar, still in excellent condition after twenty-five years, even if it swept the floor in a way it had never been intended to. Her mind jumbled with practical considerations and the waiting excitement of Venice, Daisy fell into a light and confused sleep, full of fragmentary dreams.

When her traveling alarm clock went off, she was glad to jump out of bed and run to the window, the dreams disappearing in the promising, water-refracted light of morning. Dazzled, almost paralyzed with wonder, she stared at the view until she shook herself out of her reverie. It was really insane, she thought, to be expected to work here. They should have come a week earlier just to
get acclimated to the beauty. But perhaps even a month wouldn’t have been enough. Bitterly she envied North his day of sightseeing and promised herself as she dressed rapidly that she’d get everything checked out so efficiently and quickly today that she’d have a few hours, at least, to roam around by herself before the others arrived.

Late that afternoon, when North finally wandered back to the hotel, he found Daisy waiting for him right inside the entrance, curled up in a chair.

“All set?” he asked her.

“Not exactly.”

“What d’ya mean? If everything isn’t buttoned down, why are you hanging around the lobby? Isn’t there something you have to do?”

Daisy stood up, her hands on her hips, her feet apart, her energy restored.

“North, hold it.” She put up a hand like a traffic cop. “It seems we have a small problem.”

“You and your problems,” he said indifferently. “My feet hurt.” He started for the desk to get his room key. She followed and tapped him on the shoulder.

“North?”

“Oh, what the hell is it? Honestly, Daisy, isn’t it your job to worry about the little things? Oh, all right, tell me … there’s a permit missing, the gondola’s painted the wrong color, one of the models has a pimple? Improvise—how many times have I told you?
Improvise
, Daisy. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times—you take care of the little things and I’ll make it come out all right once I start working.”

“Do you think you could get Alitalia to go back to work?”

“Why worry about Alitalia—we’re working for Pan Am. Christ, Daisy, you have no sense of proportion,” he said, turning away in exasperation.

Behind him she said softly, “None of the other airlines is landing in Italy, North. Sympathy strike.” He spun around. “Wingo and the models can’t get here.”

“So what?” he said in renewed irritation. “Worse things have happened. Haven’t you contacted models from Rome? If I can’t use the girls I picked I’ll use others, and I’ll manage without Wingo. Rome is full of cameramen—and beautiful women.”

“The trains are on strike too,” Daisy said softly.

“Tell them to
drive
, damn it! If they start now they’ll be here by tomorrow. If they’d started when you found out about the strike, I bet they could have been here by now,” he added accusingly.

“The technicians are out on strike too. No crew, North. There’s nobody in Italy to handle the equipment, which, incidentally, is sitting somewhere between Rome and here. No camera, no brutes, no fey lights, no clapboard, no dolly, not even a stopwatch—
nodal
And that’s why I didn’t book models from Rome.”

“All right, very funny, very clever. Didn’t it occur to you that we could drive to France or Switzerland and shoot there? Get ready to leave,” North snapped.