Carriage Trade (51 page)

“Yes, and I have a question to ask you about that, Tommy.”

“Hmm? What's that?”

“In those weekly sales figures you let me see this morning—”

“Yes?” The right corner of his mouth had begun to twitch again, but he touched it quickly with his fingertip and the twitch disappeared. Perhaps she only imagined she had seen it.

“On August thirteenth, the day you gave me this, there's a record of a sale, either of this ring or one that sounds just like it, to a Señora Lopez-Figueroa in Caracas.”

“That's right,” he said brightly.

“You mean Smitty was carrying two rings like this in her inventory? If so—”

“No, no,” he said.

“If so, where's the record for the sale of this one? If both rings were sold the same day, that department would have had a record day.”

“No, no. You don't understand,” he said. “Señora Lopez-Figueroa is just a bookkeeping entry code we use. It's a gimmick, really. You see, I didn't know whether you'd like the ring. I didn't know whether you'd accept it or not. We often do that, with clients we know who want to take something out of the store on approval. We let them try something for a few days, see how they like it. Everybody does that for good clients. Cartier does it, Winston does it, everybody does it.”

“I see,” she said, but she wasn't sure she really did see.

“Certain special clients may even borrow a piece like that—for a party or some sort of special occasion. When the piece of merchandise leaves the store, it's written up as a sale to Señora Lopez-Figueroa. It was your father's idea. It makes good business sense. It builds goodwill.”

“I see,” she said again. “You mean that Señora Lopez-Figueroa doesn't exist?”

“Oh, she exists all right,” he said. “She's a very good customer of ours. Her husband owns the Bank of Venezuela. Her brother-in-law is president of the country. Her father is the Venezuelan ambassador to the U.N.”

“But it said Charge-Send,” she said. “Does that mean she'll be charged for it?”

“How could she be charged for it when it wasn't sent?” he said. “How could it have been sent, when you're wearing it right now? Look,” he said with a sudden grin, “why don't I tell you the real reason why I punched Lopez-Figueroa into the computer? Because I didn't want you to find out how much I'd paid for it. And of course I didn't pay retail. I got it at cost, just as I get everything I buy in the store at cost, just as you and your mother get things at cost, and your father got things at cost. So now you know my shameful secret. I'm an old-fashioned, orthodox cheapskate.”

“Well, hardly,” she said a little weakly. “But I guess, as you can see, I've still got a whole lot to learn about retailing.”

“Look,” he said, “sit down. We've got more important things to talk about than numbers.” He patted the Victorian sofa, and she seated herself beside him, her drink in one hand. He lifted the hand that wore the ring and squeezed it gently. “I must say it looks beautiful on you,” he said. He looked deeply into her eyes. “And you look beautiful tonight, Miranda. But then, you always do.”

“Thank you, Tommy,” she said, and he released her hand. “Anyway, I think I've figured out a way to get Mother to vote her shares against the takeover. It involves Smitty, believe it or not. I don't want to tell you what it is right now, because I'm not sure it's going to work, but I think it will, and if we have Mother's shares, and my shares, and your shares, and Aunt Simma's shares we'll have a clear majority. And Aunt Simma thinks she can get my grandmother to go along, and if that happens nobody can touch us! Moe Minskoff has sold his shares already—thank God! That puts him out of the picture.”

“Not yet. Not quite. All he's done has been to trade his shares for some Continental shares. If Continental wins, Moe will be part owner of Tarkington's all over again.”

“But Continental's not
going
to win! We're not going to
let
Continental win. Mother's vote is essential, and I'm going to try my plan on her this weekend. Tomorrow, in fact. I'll have her all to myself.”

“Okay, good,” he said. “But enough talk about numbers, enough about the business. That can wait till Monday. Tonight, there's something much more important I want to talk to you about, Miranda.”

“Our partnership, you mean?”

“Yes, that, and—”

“I did a tarot reading on myself the other night. The cards said I'd work well in partnership with a man. Not that I believe in tarot cards, but it did give me a little boost of self-assurance.”

“That's fine—”

“I've been doing some thinking about this,” she said, “and here's what I've come up with. You're a super salesman, Tommy, you really are. And so I thought that anything that had to do with selling the merchandise and dealing with the customers would come completely under your domain. Meanwhile, my bailiwick would be the buying end. I'd work with the buyers and the merchandise managers, and also with the vendors and designers. That was more or less Daddy's specialty—going out into the market. Granted, I don't have much experience at it, but the only way to get experience is to go out there and do it. Daddy didn't have any experience to speak of when he started out either, and look what a success he became! He used to talk about what a jungle it was out there, but I don't see why a woman couldn't deal with that jungle as well as a man—maybe even better. After all, most of the vendors and designers are men. So you'd be the umbrella over the store's entire selling effort and sales force, and I'd handle the buying aspect. Of course, we'd meet at least once a week to discuss overall merchandising strategy. Does that sound fair to you?”

“It sounds just fine, Miranda,” he said. “But do we really have to discuss business right now?” He reached out and took her hand again, twisting the ring on her finger. “Beautiful,” he whispered. This time, it was she who withdrew the hand.

She thought: Is he going to try to seduce me? Is that the hidden agenda of this evening's little rendezvous? If so, he is not going to succeed. Drop your anchor, she told herself. Steady as she goes. Don't lose control of your ship. She had heard too much about Tommy Bonham's alleged sexual prowess. A business partnership was one thing, but a love affair was something else again, and the two things did not mix. She began to wish she had left the ring at home or, even better, had not accepted it at all. Did men still think they could buy women with expensive jewels? Maybe so, even in the Year of Our Lord 1991. And what had Smitty said to her the day she quit her job at the store? That it was
her
ring. What was Smitty's role in all this, anyway?

“As for the accounting end,” she continued, “I mean—well, we do have this little problem with the pension fund, and the books seem to have been kept—well, somewhat casually, it seems to me. I really think we should bring in an outside accountant. I mean a real C.P.A. Neither of us is a C.P.A.…”

His hand had traveled to her knee, and while she wondered how to deal with this, divine intervention came. From behind the drawn curtains of his windows came a sudden pale flash. “Lightning!” she cried, and jumped to her feet. “We're going to have a storm. My convertible top is down!”

“Now, now,” he said, reaching up and taking her hand and pulling her gently down to the sofa again. “Don't you know how to count out a thunderstorm? We count the seconds: one … two … three …” At the count of eleven, there was a smothered concussion of distant thunder. “You see?” he said. “The storm is eleven miles away and moving east, away from us.”

Proving him right, there was another pale flash of lightning at the windows and a longer pause before the fainter, faraway rumble of thunder. The deity had intervened but was now abandoning her.

He was gazing deeply into her eyes again. “Don't you understand what I'm trying to say to you?” he said. “I'm trying to tell you that I love you, Miranda.”

She was on her feet again. “Oh, for heaven's sake,” she said. “Why do you want to complicate things? Aren't things messed up enough already? You don't love me, Tommy! You just want to get laid! If that's what you asked me out here for, why can't you be honest enough to come right out and say so? At least Mike Tyson was honest enough to say right away what he wanted—or so he said. I don't want to be another one of your famous conquests, another notch on Tommy Bonham's belt. Let's have some of Nino's Filipino chicken. I'm hungry, and it smells done to me.”

“Now wait a minute,” he said quietly. “Please listen to what I have to say. Please hear me out. It's something I've wanted to tell you for a long time, Miranda. I've got to tell it to you now. If you don't like what I have to say, we'll have another drink and go in to dinner, and you can go home, and that will be the end of it, and I'll never mention it to you again, I promise. Will you please just listen, Miranda? Will you please sit down and hear me out?”

“Oh, all right,” she said, and perched herself on the far corner of the sofa. “We'll let the super salesman make his pitch.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all. But I thought you quit.”

“I did. But now and then a cigarette helps, in certain situations.” He reached for a pack in the left inside pocket of his velvet smoking jacket. His too-handsome face in the blue-green flare from the lighter looked determined, preoccupied. It was a finished face, she always thought, a completed, sculpted, Michelangelo face. The flame went out and he exhaled loudly, the smoke rising in a long, thin stream. He shaped his cigarette ash along the edge of a silver ashtray. He hunched his shoulders toward her, not looking at her, now, but at the cigarette between his fingers. “How to begin?” he said.

“I'm listening,” she said.

“Do you remember when you and I first met, Miranda?”

“Nope,” she said, though in fact she did.

“It was in the early summer of nineteen-eighty. I can even give you the date. Saturday, May seventeenth. You were only thirteen, and you'd come down to the farm for the weekend from Ethel Walker. I was of course older—twenty years older. I'd been invited to the farm by your parents for the weekend too. It was before I bought this house. I was sitting by the pool, reading a Ngaio Marsh detective novel. I was on page twenty-six, and her detective had just discovered the second body. You appeared at the pool. You were wearing a blue swimsuit, a blue two-piece, and your hair was tied back with a piece of yellow yarn.”

“I remember that swimsuit,” she said.

“It had a red mermaid appliquéd on the right side of the panties, a red mermaid smiling at her tail.”

“Yes, and you were wearing—”

“I don't remember what I was wearing.”

“White.”

“So you do remember.”

The smoke spiraled upward from his cigarette. Somewhere in the distance on Heather Lane a motorist's automobile horn had stuck and was moaning plaintively across the night. Then, gradually, it faded away, like a loon's call across a lake, and the night was blanketed in silence again.

He stubbed his cigarette out fiercely in the ashtray, half smoked.

“What was your first impression of me?” he asked her.

“That you were very—good-looking,” she said.

“We spoke. Not much, because you suddenly ran off, into the pool house, pretending you heard a phone ringing. There was no phone ringing. At first I thought I might have frightened you. Because I'd had an inappropriate response to a thirteen-year-old girl. Because I'd felt something pass between us in that moment. It was like an electric current, passing between us. It wasn't at all appropriate, I knew, and I suppose you knew it too. But I know I felt it, and I think you felt it too. It was desire.”

“I was only … a little girl,” she said. Suddenly she felt that she had dropped her anchor in the sand, that her ship was being dragged by the tide, that she was drifting inexorably toward the reefs and shoals of some dangerous and alien shoreline. “Only in my second year at Walker,” she said, struggling to adjust her course, to find the channel, the safe passage through the rocks.

“A woman in a young girl's body. Your breasts—your wonderful breasts—had already begun to bloom. I thought you were the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen. I never finished the Ngaio Marsh. I stopped caring who the killer was because I'd fallen in love with you.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Why didn't you ever tell me any of this before?”

“It was out of the question. I couldn't.”

“Why not?”

“Your father. He wouldn't have stood for it. I wasn't good enough for his only daughter. Remember, I was only a boy from an Indiana cornfield. He wanted someone out of the top drawer for his daughter, and that wasn't me at all. He was always telling me I should get married. He was always urging me to marry one of his unattached rich Tarkington's ladies, who would turn me into a kind of gigolo. ‘Get married, get married,' he kept telling me. ‘It will be good for the store's image. People are beginning to think you're gay.' Well, one day I'd had enough of this, and I said, ‘There's only one woman I've ever wanted to marry, Si.' ‘Who's that?' he asked me. ‘Miranda,' I said. He flew into one of his white rages. He said, ‘If you ever lay a hand on my daughter, I'll ruin you. I'll see to it that you never work in this town again, or in any other town.'”

“Daddy said that?”

“Oh, yes. But he's dead now, so I can tell you. Let's face it, I've been with a lot of women—too many, perhaps—but none of them ever meant anything to me. They never meant to me what you do. Often, when I'm making love to a woman, I try to fantasize that I'm making love to you. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Because you're the only woman I've ever loved or wanted to make love to. Miranda, let me put that ring on the third finger of your left hand. That's what I really bought it for. Marry me, Miranda. Ah, Miranda, I love you so!”