Princess Daisy (68 page)

When the door clicked open, Daisy, closely followed by her dog, ambled into the small and crowded reception room which was already filled with people waiting for her. While they chirped greetings, Daisy surveyed her surroundings. They were remarkable chiefly for the absence of Danillo.

Daisy had expected this. She had overheard too many models gossiping not to know that Danillo would stage his entrance much later in the proceedings.

She felt the glances of sweeping appraisal from Alonzo, the make-up artist, and Robertson, the hairdresser. The two were veterans; they knew when Danillo booked them that they would have to put in at least three hours work on his subject before he started to shoot. His work depended on their talents. He needed them in order to achieve his trademark, the more-perfect-than-life face. His success was not based on his camera technique or communication with his subject or any depth of inspiration. All of his portraits had the same basic quality, an easily identifiable, inhumanly slick veneer, a spurious but convincing imitation of invention that resulted in a faultless, irresistible and dependable surface of resolute, just-short-of-plastic perfection that editors loved. They never worried about the results of a sitting with Danillo, and Alonzo and Robertson, who were paid seventy-five dollars an hour, with a minimum guarantee of five hours of work, were delighted to have been chosen today from his pool of fawning painters and crimpers.

“I won’t need either of you,” Daisy said, smiling at the two men. “I thought that had been settled.”

Robertson glanced swiftly at Alonzo. Who did this one think she was?

Candice Bloom hurriedly intervened.

“Daisy, I told Danillo what you’d said, but he insisted
absolument.
” She made a piteous face at Daisy to indicate that the people from
People
were not to be upset by any ructions—the cover story was simply too important Alonzo tried to lure Daisy into the dressing room.

“Just come in here and sit down, dearie,” he said, “and we’ll get started. It’s a bit late, you know.”

“I think not,” said Daisy. The magazine researcher, sensing a confrontation, automatically slipped out her pad and pencil.

“Get Danillo, Robbie,” the make-up man commanded. “And what kind of nice doggie is that?” he asked Daisy while the hairdresser hurried up a flight of stairs.

“Theseus? You might say that his pedigree is unknown.”

“Oh, I’m sure of
that
, dearie. Or should I call you Princess?”

“Daisy will do,” she answered briefly. God, how tired she was of that question.

Danillo appeared, annoyed at being interrupted in his real art, that of retouching. The photographer was slender, unobtrusive, with close-cropped blond hair. In one keen quick glance he observed the inescapable power of Daisy’s beauty and rejected it. She was a twenty-five-minute job, one of hundreds this year, and the adamant impersonality of the famous man in faded jeans and high-heeled boots had punished the egos of many women who had thought themselves tougher than he. He raised one indifferent, languid eyebrow at the crowd in the reception room. “We’ll do it my way,” he announced.

But Daisy persisted. Years of making commercials had taught her a great deal about make-up, although she used very little of it

“I’ve done my eyes and lips, Danillo, and I never use a base,” she insisted. “So why do I have to be made up?”

“Boys, you’re running late,” Danillo said, not in reply, but as if she hadn’t spoken. With Candice Bloom grasping one arm and the senior of the
People
editors clutching at the other, Daisy realized that she was not only outnumbered but that nothing could be more ludicrous than a scuffle. She shook them off and walked into the narrow dressing room where she found a high, backless kitchen stool in front of a long table, behind which ran a mirror. Theseus settled himself on top of the red vinyl couch.

“Danillo, darling,” she heard the senior
People
editor say anxiously, “you
are
going straight for the regal quality, aren’t you?”

“I thought we were agreed to try for
ancien regime
nostalgia, Marcia,” the junior editor said in surprise.

“I have nothing against nostalgia, Francie, so long as it’s majestic,” Marcia snapped.

“Try some fresh papaya juice,” Danillo said and left them abruptly.

Daisy sat still and watched Alonzo deftly cover the warm blush of her skin with a thin, even layer of beige liquid that turned her into the blank page on which he intended to paint his own concept of what she should look like. He covered her face and neck completely. Even her lips lost their own deep rose and were wiped out by beige. Her golden eyebrows disappeared as the coat of base extended from her hairline, where the tiny tendrils of her silver-gilt hair sprang untamed, right down to the base of her throat

“This gets a bit messy. Don’t you want to put on a
robe?” Alonzo asked, pleased at the obliteration he had wrought.

Daisy opened her mouth to speak.

“Don’t talk!”
he cried warningly. “I haven’t got your lips on yet.”

Danillo’s stylist, Henri, a tawny boy, lounged in the doorway, carrying a King Charles Spaniel in his arms, and surveyed the scene disdainfully. However, he condescended to hand Daisy a terry robe and indicated a bathroom in which she could change. Then he saw Theseus.

“Who brought that
thing
in here?” she heard him ask indignantly. Daisy shook with laughter behind the door at the thought of anyone with intentions of evicting her animal. She hoped he’d try. As she emerged, the King Charles Spaniel, who rejoiced in the name of Yves St. Laurent, was yapping in high-bred protest at Theseus’s existence, but a glance at her own dog told Daisy that he was maintaining his ruffian dignity, the saturnine yet convincing composure of a dexterous and unrepentant scoundrel.

“Doesn’t anyone want to order
un petit
sandwich?” Candice Bloom asked eagerly. P.R., as she had so often told Jenny Antonio, was
merde
, but today things seemed even more tense than usual. However, there was no situation that couldn’t be helped by food. This was lesson number one from the public-relations course Candice aspired to teach at a great university in the far future. Everyone, including the hair stylist and Alonzo, hungrily gave her complicated and detailed orders, and she sent Jenny off to the nearest delicatessen.

Daisy returned to her uncomfortable stool and looked on in resignation as Alonzo began to sculpt shadows on her beige mask with a stick of brown grease.

“Five different psychics told me that I was going to be called to Hollywood this year,” he confided to her earnestly, dabbing away. She tried to signal polite curiosity with her looming eyes, the only thing left on her face that still showed any expression, but their very darkness was too intense to convey such pallid emotion.

“Do you know Hollywood? No! Don’t talk! Close your eyes.” Relieved, Daisy did as she was told, and the small room, crowded with watching people, faded behind her lids as she felt him doing things with brushes of various
sizes. She felt hands on her hair and heard the angry admonition, “Get away, Robbie! You can have her when I’m finished and not before. You almost jiggled my arm!”

While the editors and Candice chattered, Daisy reflected on the fact that she had never been looked at the way Danillo had looked at her; not coldly but not warmly, neither approving nor disapproving, but with a simple and absolute lack of interest. He was bored, Danillo was, she decided, and she realized she didn’t care. He had sittings like hers as often as twice a day, every day of the week, charging an average of three thousand dollars for the single shot that would be chosen. Even the best plastic surgeon, doing two face lifts a day, didn’t make more money than this man. Four babies could be delivered by a Park Avenue gynecologist for one of Danillo’s portraits, Daisy thought, trying to ignore the tickling of a brush inside her ear. “You can open now,” Alonzo instructed her. Warily, she raised her lids and confronted her image. The beige mask still looked at her, embellished by deep, unfamiliar shadows that had settled on its cheekbones, its neck and its eyelids. “We’re only getting started,” Alonzo explained to Candice Bloom.

Robertson, the hairdresser, wearing an expression of exaggerated patience, slumped against the wall, his battery of curling irons and hot rollers unpacked in readiness for a job he wouldn’t start for at least an hour and a half. Featherbedding. Daisy knew his expression well, from years of dealing with the unnecessary grips and gaffers on whom the union had insisted. She felt sharp, poignant regret for those days, so recently over, those hectic, harried days, so many of which had resulted in thirty or sixty seconds of the finest commercials ever made.

Jenny Antonio came into the dressing room bearing a platter of thick sandwiches which she had unwrapped and arranged in a tempting pile. She put the platter down on the couch and joined Candice and the
People
editors in their inspection of Daisy. Alonzo had started to fill in his new version of Daisy’s mouth, and when she tried to say something he wagged a stern finger at her. Five women clustered around while he deftly redesigned Daisy’s upper and lower lips to his satisfaction. “Okay,” he grunted, “you can talk now.”

“I’m afraid it’s too late,” Daisy said, trying to sound regretful.

“Too late for what?” he asked.

“Lunch,” said Daisy.

Seven pairs of eyes looked at the bare sandwich platter. Seven pairs of eyes accused Theseus but no one had seen him move, no one had heard him eat, he was sitting, as ceremoniously uninvolved as Al Pacino during a gangland murder, in the same position he’d been in since he first sat down.

“I fed him before we came, but …” Daisy tried to explain.

“My God, he’s a monster,” breathed Marcia, the senior
People
editor, but the researcher, who had grown to know Theseus while interviewing Daisy, said, “He can’t help it.”

“How
dare
he?” shrieked Marcia, deprived of her ham and swiss on rye with plenty of mustard and coleslaw.

“I’ll tell you when we get back to the office. It’s a long story,” said the researcher with an informed smile.

“Jenny,
vite, vite!
More sandwiches!” Candice ordered urgently. Lesson number two in her public-relations course would be to never permit a
chien
, no matter to whom it belonged, on any job she was involved in, ever again.

Alonzo stolidly continued his handiwork. Daisy felt as if she’d been sitting on the stool forever, although only two hours had passed. If she’d had Alonzo on a location shoot he’d have been long dead by now, she told herself, with mounting irritation. She would have stabbed him herself with one of the many instruments he was using on her. But it was typical of the anointed necromancers of the glamour business to insist, as Danillo did, on subjecting his subjects to discomfort. For a sitting with Danillo one had to step within his magic circle, pay endless obeisance before this very mirror, showing an essential neediness by putting up with this transfiguring nonsense in order to be assured of the master’s imprint.

Jenny returned with a new supply of sandwiches and Daisy was relieved as the room cleared. At length Alonzo decided that he’d done all he could do and he turned her over to Robertson.

She no longer recognized the painted person in the mirror, with the wrong mouth, the wrong brows and the wrong skin, who looked ten years older than she had this morning. The face in the mirror had nothing to do with her, and when Robertson began to build her hair into an elaborate, tall coronet, rather like that of Princess Grace
at a Monaco Red Cross gala, Daisy didn’t bother to object

“I have to make a base for the tiara,” he told her as his hands deftly reduced her hair to a solid package of complicated swirls and curls.

“Tiara?” she questioned with lips that moved in a strange and disquieting way.

“Henri’s borrowed a tiara and pendant earrings and a dog-collar necklace from
A la Vieille Russie
,” he told her. “We’re going for a real pre-Revolutionary look, kind of Anastasia, you know, the whole Romanov bit.”

“I didn’t know,” said Daisy, “and I wish you hadn’t told me.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” Candice Bloom, with her little French phrases, dropped like a tic into every other sentence, had evidently made plans she hadn’t seen fit to tell Daisy about. Daisy’s visual indigestion was being joined by a feeling of actual nausea at the thought of being turned into a reincarnation of the long dead and pathetic Grand Duchess. But just as she was about to get up and speak to Candice, Henri sauntered in carrying several black velvet boxes. Without a word he clasped the dog collar of emeralds, rubies and diamonds around her neck, and he fastened the matching tiara in her hair.

“You don’t have pierced ears!” he whined, accusingly.

“Would you care to try and pierce them?” Daisy asked softly. He backed away from the menace in her eyes.

Danillo’s voice could be heard calling impatiently from the studio. He was finally in the mood to work, and if everyone was on schedule he’d be finished with this in less than a half-hour.

“Ready?” asked Robertson.

Daisy took one more look in the mirror. It was hopeless to make any objections. They’d done so much to her that she hadn’t the faintest idea of where to start to make it less awful.

She got up gingerly. The stool had cut off the circulation in her legs and she felt stiff and weary. She didn’t need to change from the terry robe since she would merely slip it off her shoulders for the head shot. She belted it more securely and turned to look at Theseus.

“Now you stay right here until I get back,” she told him. Instead of his usual patient acceptance of her instructions, he stood up on the couch, bared his teeth at her and
growled low in his throat, breaking his lurcher’s silence. It was unthinkable. Daisy went closer to him and he suddenly cringed away, growling desperate protest all the while.

“Theseus!” she cried. He shivered all over at the sound of Daisy’s voice coming from the stranger’s face, and when she put out her hand to him, he flinched and refused to sniff it.