Carriage Trade (58 page)

“Perfect,” I said, and we drove off into the night.

Don't ask me why I did those awful things. It wasn't a temper tantrum, exactly. It was more like a fit of jealous rage. They were crazy things to do. But when you're in love you do crazy things.

Driving down Heather Lane, he was still nervous, and he made me scrunch way down in the seat so I wouldn't be seen in case we passed anyone he knew. But when we got out onto the Long Island Expressway, he relaxed and let me sit up. He put his arm around me and pulled me close to him. “I've loved being with you this weekend, Smitty,” he said. “I hope we can do this again very soon.”

“So do I, darling,” I said.

Enough for today? I'm exhausted—emotionally exhausted—remembering it all.

At this very moment, just a few dozen blocks to the south, Moe Minskoff is on the telephone. “Yeah, Eddie,” he says. “You got any news for me? … Okay, shoot.… She left the apartment at ten-thirty
A
.
M
. this morning and got into a cab.… You tailed her in another cab to the Dakota, One West Seventy-second.… Yeah, I know the building, creepy old place.… She got out and went inside.… In there about two hours.… Came out, got in another cab, and went home.… That was her total today's activity.

“Okay, now, Eddie, did it occur to you to slip the doorman a fin and find out who she was going to see in there? … Good boy! … His name's Peter Turner, huh? … Yeah, just as I suspected. You find out anything more about this guy from the doorman? … Middle to late twenties, single, lives alone, some kind of writer, carries a tape recorder around a lot of the time.… Yeah, that's the guy. You done a good job, pal. This assignment's completed. I'll call you when I got another for you.…

“You figure eight hours on the tail, total? Okay, that works out to four hundred and eighty bucks, right? … Well, maybe I did say sixty-five an hour. That makes it five hundred and twenty I owe you.… Yeah, plus two cab fares and a fin for the doorman.… No, I ain't payin' for your lunch. Lunch is on you. When I hire a tail, I don't pay for its lunch.…

“I'll have the money for you Friday.… No, I ain't got it right now.… Look, don't give me a hard time, pal. I said I'll have it for you Friday. You can wait till Friday.… Look, I had a really lousy day at the track today, Eddie. Fuckin' jockey double-crossed me. I had a deal with this jock. He was supposed to slow his horse in the stretch and let mine win, but he double-crossed me and came in first in a photo. Can you believe that? Anyway, it's getting so you can't trust nobody! … Eddie, I said I'll have the full money for you
Friday
. Have I ever broke a promise to you? … Okay, that's more like it. See you Friday. Have a nice day.”

He hangs up the phone and stares thoughtfully into space.

30

Diana Smith (interview taped 10/20/91)

So that was how it started, our love affair. I spent many weekends at the farm after that, whenever Connie went out of town. Fortunately for us, she traveled a lot. She went to all the collections—in London, Paris, Rome, Milan, even to Tokyo, where there were a couple of Japanese designers she admired. Her Tokyo trips were longer, and that meant Si and I could often spend two consecutive weekends together. And the store paid for all this glamorous travel of hers, I happen to know. Because she was considered an international fashion figure, her trips could be written off by calling her a fashion scout.

I'll say one thing about the man I loved. He may have had a lot of other women before me, but after he met me I was the only one. I know that, because he swore it to me, and I believed him.

We did take a couple of trips together, while she was away. We spent one weekend in Las Vegas and another in Atlantic City. He chose touristy places like that because there was less chance of him running into any of his fancy Tarkington's ladies there, and being recognized. We even talked of a weekend at Disneyland, but we never got around to it. He was always nervous traveling with me. We had to sit in separate sections of the plane. In a hotel, he always wanted separate bedrooms for us. Partly it was fear of us being discovered. But also, when the lovemaking was over, he always liked to go to his own room to sleep. I didn't mind that. Two people sleeping in the same bed together isn't always all that great, you know. People snore. They fart. Separate bedrooms are more romantic, it seems to me, and, besides, I think Si liked tapping on my bedroom door in the morning and having me let him in, all showered, shaved, and smelling nice.

I do remember one bad moment at Las Vegas, when he
was
recognized. We'd registered under phony names, of course, and we were sitting by the pool at Caesar's Palace, just minding our business and reading our paperbacks, and a waiter came over and said, “Excuse me, sir, but aren't you Mr. Silas Tarkington? I used to be a room service waiter at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, and I remember serving breakfast to you and Mrs. Tarkington. It was June of nineteenseventy. I never forget a face, and I never forget a date.”

Si jumped to his feet.
“You … are … mistaken!”
he shouted. When Si got angry, he had a temper almost as bad as mine. He picked up one of the poolside chairs, and I thought he was going to brain the poor guy with it. “Get the hell away from here, or I'll report you to the manager for annoying the guests!” he said. Then he threw the chair into the pool.

The poor waiter backed away. “Sorry, sir,” he mumbled.

Then Si grabbed my arm and said, “C'mon,” and we went back up to our rooms where we could have some privacy.

But on the whole those little weekend trips were happy times. I dug out some photographs to show you, and these are pretty rare, you know, because he didn't like to have his picture taken. This was taken in Las Vegas, in the dining room of the hotel, the two of us having dinner. Don't we look happy? It was taken by a couple we'd met earlier in the day. The wife came over to our table, and handed this to me, and said, “The two of you look so much in love that we decided to take your picture.” Si started to get angry and asked to have the negative. But when the woman explained that the picture was taken with a Polaroid so there wasn't any negative, he simmered down.

This is just a silly picture of the two of us taken on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, with our heads poked through cardboard cutouts that make us look like a couple of tramps. He wasn't too worried about anybody recognizing him in
that
picture.…

This is Atlantic City again, the same trip, some pictures of me he took on the beach, and these are some pictures I took of him.…

This is my favorite picture of him, I think. Even though he's got his hand across his eyes to shade them from the sun, you can see what a handsome man he was. And look at that physique. Isn't that the body of a much younger man? Look how well he fills out a bikini. I bought him that bikini, mostly as a joke, because I was always teasing him about how well endowed he was. I think this was the only time he ever wore it, but I think he looks pretty sexy in it, and I told him so. Of course I can't expect you to call another man sexy, but to me that's a pretty damned sexy man. That's why the difference in our ages never mattered.

Of course he never worried about these photos. They were all taken with my camera. He trusted me. He knew I'd never show them to anyone. But now that he's dead, it doesn't matter, does it? And it's nice to have these to help remember some of our happy times.

Still, he was always most relaxed at the farm—eighty-two acres of total seclusion and privacy, with the entrance gate closed and locked, the servants let go for the weekend, nobody to disturb us. Of course I wondered how much the servants, especially Milliken, knew about what was going on. But I imagine he paid them well enough so they'd keep their lips well buttoned.

During our weekends at the farm, he told me I was to treat the place as though I owned it. It was at the farm that he first mentioned marriage to me.

“I'd love to be married to you, Smitty,” he said. “So we could go out in public, wherever we wanted, and not be hiding all the time.”

“I'd love that too,” I said. “Would Connie ever give you a divorce?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I just don't know.”

“Could you ever get anything on her that would give us a little leverage with her?” I asked him.

“Like catch her in bed with one of her fag designers? I doubt that,” he said.

“What about her denying you your—you know, your attentions? Your rights as her husband?” You see, I was already working on a plan of my own that might give us a little leverage with Connie.

“That's been more or less mutual for some time now,” he said.

He was always comparing me with Connie. He told me I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He told me I was the first woman who really understood him, including his mother. He told me I was the first woman who'd really shown an interest in his business.

You see, the thing he liked about me was that I was more his kind of woman. I'm a down-to-earth person. I was brought up always to tell the truth, to be completely honest, and not to try to pretend that I'm something I'm not, like that bitch he married. Connie was, and is, nothing but a decorative detail, like one of the red ribbons on her canopy bed. He never really felt at ease with Connie and her so-called friends in the so-called International Set. But he felt comfortable with me. He could be himself with me: warm, humorous, spirited, down-to-earth, no pretense.

“Do you know what I love about you?” he said to me once. “You're common.”

“Common?”

“Yeah, like me. I may run a fancy store, but deep down I'm as common as dirt.”

“Well, I guess that's a compliment,” I said with a laugh.

“Hell, yes! You call a man's cock his cock, which is what it is. You don't mince words and call it a wee-wee. When you go to the toilet, you go to the toilet, not the powder room.”

“Like—
she
does?”

“Yeah. And speaking of cocks, I've got a stiff one. Let's fuck.”

“Right here in the Japanese garden?”

She had a garden she called her Dell Garden, landscaped in a Japanese style, with an artificial lake and an arched bridge, and we were walking there. Like everything else she did, it was perfect. Too perfect.

“Yeah, let's muss up all these carefully raked little Japanese pebbles of hers. The gardener will think the dog did it.”

“Those little pebbles do look temptingly smooth,” I said. American pebbles wouldn't do for Connie, of course. Her pebbles had to be imported from Kyoto.

“Whaddaya say?” he said.

“I say okay!” I said.

You see, when he talked with me, he even spoke differently—more down-to-earth, more direct. People always talked and wrote about Si's
courtly
manners, his
polished
poise, his
impeccable
tailoring, his
suave
bearing, his
dignified
appearance. That was just his corporate pose, his boardroom manner. With me, he was uncourtly, unpolished, non-impeccable, non-suave, and downright undignified. With me, he could loosen up and be himself. With me, he was just the overgrown kid from the Bronx that he really was at heart. He could let his hair down. He didn't have to put on an act.

I hope you can get that across in your story—the other side to his personality that he showed to me. He was really like two different people, the public figure that everyone else saw and the private man he was with me.

Love letters? No, I never wrote him any love letters, and he never wrote any letters to me. Are you kidding? That would have been much too dangerous. Letters can be found, lying around. We had to be very careful, particularly at the store, so no one would suspect what was going on. At the store, it was no more than a wave and a “Good morning, Mr. Si.” If I had any business with Si, I was careful to route it through Tommy Bonham, who was more and more beginning to run things for him.

Meanwhile, the person at the store I began to dislike more and more was Tommy Bonham. I decided Tommy Bonham was a hagfish. Do you know what a hagfish is? It's a particularly nasty little marine creature of the South Pacific. When it gets swallowed by a bigger fish, it doesn't get digested and it doesn't die. Instead, it starts feeding on the innards of the bigger fish until the bigger fish dies. Then the hagfish swims away, looking for its next meal, which will be some other poor fish's mouthful. To me, that describes Tommy to a T. To me, that's what Tommy's doing right now, sucking up to Miranda, looking for his next meal. I just hope she's not foolish enough to swallow his bait.

A year or so ago, I even began to suspect that Tommy was plotting something against Si. I had a question to ask Tommy about some merchandise I'd ordered, and I went up to his office. Linda, his secretary, was away from her desk, and I started to go in when I saw he was with somebody—a fat man—so I stepped away without their seeing me.

I heard Tommy say, “Si isn't going to like this little scheme, you know.”

“But that's the beauty part of this particular proposition,” I heard the fat man say. “Si ain't gonna know whether he likes it or not likes it, because Si ain't gonna know about it!”

Later, I ran into Linda, who'd become sort of a pal of mine, in the ladies' room. “Who was that fat man in Tommy's office this morning?” I asked her casually, as though I really didn't care.

“That,” she said with a wink, “was the famous Mr. Moses Minskoff. Watch out for him. He's a fanny-pincher. And also a tit-grabber.”

“I thought he hardly ever came into the store.”

“Son-of-a-bitch hardly ever does. Today, we had a rare treat. My left nipple is still sore.”

So that was the other half of Harriet Minskoff, who liked to be called Honeychile, formerly of the funny jewelry, more recently in the luggage business. I saw the Minskoffs again, that night when people gathered at the farm after Si … died. But I didn't speak to them. In fact, I gave them both a wide berth. I was only there for a few minutes, to pay my respects. I didn't want to go at all, but Connie begged me to come. She said I
deserved
to be there, which I thought was a funny way of putting it. Like it was my … punishment, or something.