Princess Daisy (75 page)

And Patrick Shannon. Daisy carefully inspected the shabby turf of the Sheep Meadow before she lay back on it. Patrick Shannon. Patrick Shannon. He loved her. He didn’t love the
idea
of “Princess Daisy”—he loved Daisy. She had been so agonized yesterday that his words hadn’t really hit her with their full impact, but now, as she lay staring up at the sky over Central Park, her heart, to which entirely too much had happened in the last twenty-four hours, leapt around like an unleashed lurcher surrounded by pheasants. How much of her fine new courage, Daisy wondered, how much of this feeling of glorious freedom, how much of her new wisdom, how much of this unmistakable intuition of permanent change, came from the knowledge that Patrick Shannon loved her? How much of it came from the realization that she loved him, as she had never loved a man before or ever would again?

Daisy jumped up.
That
was one more question that definitely didn’t need answering. To hell with weighing, measuring, examining, testing, holding back, calculating, protecting herself, always protecting. Over! She looked at her watch.

There was still a half-hour before she had to meet Kiki at the zoo. She whistled for Theseus and
dodged
another Frisbee. As she bent down to attach his leash, she almost snarled her hair in the catch. Daisy straightened up in surprise. What had happened to her scarf? She pivoted and spotted it lying where she had been sitting and thinking. Evidently … apparently, unless you believe in ghosts who
go around untying scarves and undoing hair, she must have done it herself. Daisy laughed in joy and reached into her shoulder bag for the
little
brush she carried there. She brushed out her silver-gilt hair, brushed and brushed it until it streamed down her back like a cape and danced in the wind like a thousand bright butterflies. She looked in her compact mirror and used a dab of powder on her nose and some pink gloss on her lips. She dropped her sunglasses into her bag, tucked in her pullover and threaded the scarf through the loops of her jeans and tied it with a huge bow in the front.

Daisy and Theseus strolled leisurely toward the zoo, both of them, the proud dog and the proud princess, holding their heads high. As she approached the zoo, the crowd began to grow thicker. The fine fall weather had brought out half of New York; not just the nannies and children and out-of-work and the elderly. As Daisy approached a bench, two middle-aged women who were sitting there, passing a copy of
People
back and forth, spotted her.

“Oh, look! It’s just got to be her!” one of the women said to the other.

“I think—yes, you’re right. Oh, I don’t believe it, Sophie. I just don’t believe it.”

“I’m going to get her autograph,” the first woman said excitedly.

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t dare, oh, Sophie, don’t.”

“Just watch me.” The woman snatched the magazine away from her friend and walked up to Daisy.

“Excuse me, but you’re Princess Daisy, aren’t you?” she asked.

Daisy stopped. So it was starting. She hadn’t thought it would be so soon. She smiled at the woman.

“Yes, I am.”

“Could I have your autograph—would you mind?”

“Oh, it’s—it’s okay—it’s fine—but I don’t have anything to write with.”

“Here, here’s a pen.” Daisy took it and started to write her name on the cover.

“Oh, no,” the woman protested, taking the magazine and turning to the photograph of Daisy and Danielle. “Here’s where I want it. And could you write to Sophie Franklin? That’s spelled S-o-p-h-i-e F-r-a-n-k-l-i-n,” she added helpfully.

Daisy looked at the big black-and-white photo. Two girls, together, both smiling, both happy. She wrote quickly, gave the magazine back to the woman and walked on.

“Oh, look, just look what she wrote,” Sophie Franklin said delightedly to her friend. “See—it says ’With best wishes to Sophie Franklin from Princess Daisy and Princess Danielle Valensky. Well! And you didn’t want me to ask her!”

Kiki was sitting grimly at a table outside the zoo cafeteria clutching an extra chair and snapping at people who tried to sit down and share the table with her as was the zoo custom.

“Are you keeping that chair for anyone, lady?”

“Daisy!”

“I’m sorry—am I late?” Daisy laughed, taking the chair.

“No—I got here early—but … my God, Daisy, you look gorgeous!”

“So, what else is new?”

“Daisy!”

“Kiki, do you think we could eliminate these exclamations of ‘Daisy’ every other sentence? I know I’m Daisy, you know I’m Daisy, we both know I’m Daisy, so why make such a point of it?”

“Daisy!”

“Really, KM, you’re not getting the point again.”

“You’re goddamned right I’m not,” Kiki said. “I was thinking of myself as a Saint Bernard dog or a knight in shining armor, or at least a friend in need, and what do I find but a blooming, downright glowing … no, more like delirious … what’s come over you?”

“I’ve come over me.”

“That makes no sense at all.”

“Well it does to me and that’s what counts. Poor darling Kiki, you must have been so worried. I’m sorry I gave you such a bad time.”

“Me? I’ve had a wonderful time compared to everyone else involved in this shindy. Luke came home absolutely wrung out last night And the whole media department spent the afternoon on the phones canceling the network commercials and the print ads—whatever wasn’t too late to be stopped …”

“
Wait a minute!
The only things Pat said he was going
to cancel were my interviews and the store appearances and maybe the party! What are you talking about?” Daisy asked in alarm.

“Oh, Christ Maybe I shouldn’t have told you … I just don’t know … they had a meeting yesterday afternoon at Supracorp and Shannon told them he was going to give up the entire Princess Daisy line. Luke agrees with him that without you the whole thing just wouldn’t work. Shannon decided to cut his losses before they spent any more money than they already have. Luke said it’s got to be at least something like forty million down the drain what with one thing and another in the last eight months. He says they’ll probably try to sell Elstree—if it’s worth anything now.”

“But Kiki, I am going to do the publicity and the stores. I’m going to do everything—everything I said I would.”

“Daisy!” Kiki groaned. She wished her friend would be more consistent All these changes were confusing, even to someone as poised as she.

“God, Kiki. Where’s the phone? What if it’s too late?” Daisy said in a sudden frenzy of realization.

“They can cancel the cancellations!” Kiki shouted at Daisy, who was running rapidly into the cafeteria. “Don’t worry!” She sat down and looked at Theseus. “Don’t ask me why, kiddo,” she told him, “but I’m going to get you eight hotdogs. No? Ten? Oh, all right then, I’ll make it a dozen. We both know you’re spoiled, so why fool around?”

In the phone booth Daisy fumbled frantically in her change purse. It bulged with infuriating pennies and unusable half dollars. No dimes. Finally she dredged out two quarters. She dialed Supracorp, got a wrong number and listened, appalled, as the first quarter dropped. The second time she dialed with the care of a scientist dealing with a dangerous bacteria culture.

“Mr. Shannon’s office,” trilled one of his secretaries after Daisy had been put through by the switchboard.

“Please, may I speak to him?” she asked, breathing so fast that she could hardly speak.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Shannon is in conference and he particularly asked not to be disturbed,” the secretary said with the self-satisfied pleasure of the shoe clerk who tells you he has nothing at all in your size. “Would you like to leave a message?”

Daisy took a deep breath and found a voice of ringing
metal. “This is Princess Daisy Valensky and I want to speak to Mr. Shannon immediately,” she commanded.

“Just one minute, please.”

“I’m in a pay phone, I’ve run out of change and if you don’t put him on in two seconds, I’m going to …” Daisy realized she was talking to dead air. The secretary had put her on hold.

“Daisy?” Shannon said, with tense concern.

“Pat, is it too late?”

“Too late for what? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “I’m fine. But is it too late to put the Elstree thing back together, everything, the whole campaign, me included, media, stores, everything—is it too late to go back to yesterday where everything was before I saw you?”

“Wait a minute, how do you know what’s been going on?”

“Kiki told me, but that’s not important. Pat, Pat, it’s too complicated to explain on the phone but I’ve … oh, I’ve come into my own
self
is the best way I can say it … it’s …”

The operator’s voice intoned, “Five cents for the next five minutes, please.”

“Daisy, where are you?” Shannon shouted.

“Will you take five pennies, operator?” Daisy asked pleadingly.

“Daisy, what’s the number there for Christ’s sake?”

“Oh, Pat, just listen, I could have been one of quintuplets and I’d still be me, I could cut off all my hair or dye it black, I could never paint or ride again, or I could learn Speedwriting or sky diving, or I could become an interior decorator or a movie star or a bookbinder, and
I’d still be me
,” she exalted.

“Where the hell are you calling from?”

“The zoo. Pat, Pat, don’t you see? I’m the person you know, just her—or is it just she?—never mind, but I’m no one else, I’m me, Daisy Valensky, from the inside out, all the way through down to rock bottom and I like it, it feels good for the first time, really good, and
real
, Pat, real, as if I deserve it, the good of it and the bad of it—oh, I keep forgetting—it’s not too late to go back to the plans for the Princess Daisy business, is it, to cancel the cancellations?”

“Hell, no, of course not, but Daisy, where are …”

His voice was cut off and the shrill of a nonfunctioning telephone replaced it.

Daisy looked in astonishment at the box on the wall. She, the utterly efficient organizer of a thousand complicated location shoots, had failed to follow the basic technique required of the lowliest production assistant: when calling from a public booth, give your number and wait to be called back. She hung up the phone and went to borrow some change from Kiki. She hadn’t finished talking to Patrick Shannon, not by a long shot.

If a person lives in Manhattan long enough he gets to accept the fact that there are perhaps only a dozen perfect days in any given year; days during which New York City regains that sea-girt light that once was responsible for so much of the magic; days on which a breeze sweeps the city but does not blow so hard that it creates whirlpools of filth on the pavement; days on which it is possible to remember and understand that the city was once a pastoral island, surrounded by swift rivers; days on which the eye is able to see clear across town from the Hudson River to the East River; days during which New Yorkers congratulate themselves on sticking it out during the rest of the year.

It was on the night of such a day that The Russian Winter Palace Ball took place. An unexpected calm descended on the detail-burdened spirit of Candice Bloom as she woke up that morning, looked out of the window and sniffed the air. She knew immediately that there would be no last-minute illness in the ranks of Warner Le Roy’s four hundred and fifty employees at the Tavern on the Green; no single one of the six hundred guests, carefully culled from the upper reaches of every segment of New York’s overlapping worlds of society, the arts and power, would fail to appear; there would be no problem with the ice sculptures melting before they could be displayed; none of the horses hitched to the troikas would bolt and run off with their precious passengers; the night would be mild, the stars would be clearly visible in the plum-colored New York sky and there would be no need to put up a tent on the outside terrace of the restaurant, that, only yesterday, had been planted with seven hundred pots of tall daisy bushes flown in from California. No moon, but who needed a moon with two thousand candles and sixty thousand twinkle lights? In every bone of her lanky and skimpily fleshed frame she knew that Friday, September 16, 1977, was going to be her lucky day.

Daisy woke up early on that same morning with a moment of confusion before she realized that last night she had gotten into bed with Patrick Shannon and never left it. This was the first time she’d spent a whole night in his apartment and she blamed it entirely on Lucy, Shannon’s lurcher, who, after first flirting and then spurning Theseus’s affections for an absurdly long time—at one point tucking her tail resolutely between her legs and biting him on the nose—had finally, cautiously, changed her mind just as Daisy was about to take a crestfallen but still willing Theseus home to his own pillow. Lucy was not an easy customer, Daisy thought sleepily, but if there was ever to be a chance to breed true lurcher puppies so that she could give one to Kiki, she would have to put up with the bitch. She fell asleep again for a few minutes and woke up in Shannon’s arms. Oh, but this was something outside the realm of past experience, this emotion of deep, sure gladness. From head to toe, her body was dancing with joy and welcome. There was a lack of any barrier between their two skins and their two minds and their two hearts, as, intertwined, they seemed to lie in a pool of golden light, pure, gay and penetrating, even though the sun itself had not yet entered the room. Daisy felt as if she were at the very center of the earth, like the pit of a great fruit, and at the same time she felt as if the two of them were flying together at the rim of the world, on the outer edge of experience.

“Is this bliss?” she whispered to him.

“This is love,” he whispered back and when she reached up to put her arms around his neck, he felt the tears of happiness on her cheeks.

The snow-making machines had started on the bridle path where it coiled past the entrance to the park at 59th Street. They had spread a thick carpet of snow, one hundred feet wide, all the way to the Tavern at 67th Street. There the bridle path passes directly in front of the terrace of the restaurant and the snow makers continued to cover the path until the terrace was out of their sight. Then they doubled back and covered the entrance court of the Tavern and the street leading out to Central Park West, so that the guests, whether they came by limousine or by troika, all crossed into winter. From as far as Florida, Maine and Texas, Jenny Antonio had located
thirty troikas and had them trucked to New York, but even she hadn’t been able to get enough for all six hundred guests. Troikas are in short supply in the United States and, in spite of the dictionary-assured fact that any carriage drawn by three horses could be reasonably called a troika, Candice had insisted on picking only those that looked foreign, if not absolutely Russian. “I don’t intend this to look like a
nouveau
version of ‘Wagon Train,’ ” she told Jenny with asperity.