Fancy Pants (6 page)
to a
plump, matronly woman standing near the ropes. "Ma'am, maybe you'd
better put down your
purse and come on over here so you can hit the
next one for me."
He bogeyed the final hole and Johnny Miller birdied it. After the
players had signed their scorecards, the tournament chairman presented
Miller with the first-place trophy and a check for thirty thousand
dollars. Dallie shook his hand, gave Miller a few congratulatory pats
on the shoulder,and then went over to joke with the crowd some more.
"This is what I get for letting Skeet hold my jaws open last night and
pour all that beer down my throat. My old grandmother could
have played better out there today with a garden rake and roller
skates."
Dallie Beaudine had spent a childhood dodging his father's fists, and
he knew better than to let anybody see when he was hurting.
studied her reflection in the wall of mirrors built into one end of her
bedroom, now decorated with pastel-striped silk walls, matching
Louis
XV chairs, and an early Matisse. Like an architect engrossed in a
blueprint, she searched her twenty-year-old face for gremlin-induced
imperfections that might have mischievously appeared since she last
looked in the mirror. Her small straight nose was dusted with a
translucent powder priced at twelve pounds a box, her eyelids frosted
with smoky shadow, and her lashes, individually separated with a tiny
tortoiseshell comb, had been coated with exactly four applications of
imported German mascara. She lowered her critical gaze down over her
tiny frame to the graceful curve of her breasts, then inspected the
neat indentation of her waist before moving on to her legs, beautifully
clad in a pair of lacquer green suede slacks complemented perfectly by
an ivory silk blouse from Piero De Monzi. She had just been named one
of the ten most beautiful women in Great Britain for 1975. Although she
would never have been so crass as to say it aloud, she secretly
wondered why the magazine had bothered with nine others. Francesca's
delicate features were more classically beautiful than either her
mother's or grandmother's, and much more
changeable. Her slanted green eyes could grow as chill and distant as a
cat's when she was displeased, or as saucy as a Soho barmaid's if her
mood shifted. When she realized how much attention it brought her, she
began to emphasize her resemblance to Vivien Leigh and let her chestnut
hair grow into a curly, shoulder-length cloud, occasionally even
pulling it back from her small face with hair slides to make the
likeness more pronounced.
As she contemplated her reflection, it didn't occur to her that she was
shallow and vain, that many of the people she considered her friends
could barely tolerate her. Men loved her, and that was all that
mattered. She was so outrageously beautiful, so utterly charming when
she put her energy to it, that only the most self-protective of males
could resist her. Men found being with Francesca rather like taking an
addictive drug, and even after the relationship had ended, many
discovered themselves coming back for a damaging second hit.
Like her mother, she spoke in hyperbole and put her words into
invisible italics, making even the most mundane occurrence sound like a
grand adventure. She was rumored to be a sorceress in bed, although the
specifics of who had actually penetrated the lovely Francesca's
enchanting vagina had grown a bit muddy over time. She kissed
wonderfully, that was for certain, leaning into a man's chest, curling
up in his arms like a sensuous kitten, sometimes licking at his mouth
with the very tip of her small pink tongue.
Francesca never stopped to consider that men adored her because she was
generally at her best with them. They didn't have to suffer her attacks
of thoughtlessness, her perpetual tardiness, or her piques when she
didn't get her way. Men made her bloom. At least for a while . .. until
she grew bored. Then she became impossible.
As she applied a slick of coral gloss to her lips, she couldn't help
but smile at the memory of her most spectacular conquest, although she
was absolutely distraught that he hadn't taken their parting better.
Still, what could she have done? Several months of playing second
fiddle to all his official responsibilities had brought the chill light
of reality to those deliciously warm visions of royal immortality she'd
been
entertaining—glass-enclosed carriages, cathedral doors flinging open,
trumpets playing—visions not entirely unthinkable for a girl who'd been
raised in the bedroom of a princess.
When she'd finally come to her senses about their relationship and
realized she didn't want to live her life at the beck and call of the
British Empire, she'd tried to make her break with him as clean as
possible. But he'd still taken it rather badly. She could see him now
as he'd looked that night—immaculately tailored, exquisitely barbered,
expensively shod. How on earth could she have known that a man who bore
no wrinkles on the outside might bear a few insecurities on the inside?
She remembered the evening two months earlier when she had ended her
relationship with the most eligible bachelor in Great Britain.
They had just finished dinner in the privacy of his apartments, and his
face had seemed young and curiously vulnerable as the candlelight
softened its aristocratic planes. She gazed at him across the damask
tablecloth set with sterling two hundred years old and china rimmed in
twenty-four-karat gold, trying to let him understand by the earnestness
of her expression that this was all much more difficult for her than it
could possibly be for him.
"I see," he said, after she'd given her reasons, as kindly as possible,
for not continuing their friendship. And then, once more, "I see."
"You do understand?" She tilted her head to one side so that her hair
fell away from her face, letting the light catch the twin rhinestone
slivers that dangled from her earlobes, flickering like a chain of
stars
against a chestnut sky.
His blunt response shocked her. "Actually, no." Pushing himself back
from the table, he stood abruptly.
"I don't understand at all." He
looked down at the floor and then up again at her. "I must confess I've
rather fallen for you, Francesca, and you gave me every reason to
believe that you cared for me."
"I
do
," she replied
earnestly. "Of
course
I do."
"But not enough to put up with all that goes along with me."
The combination of stubborn pride and hurt she heard in his voice made
her feel horribly guilty. Weren't the royals supposed to hide their
emotions, no matter how trying the circumstances? "It is rather a lot,"
she reminded him.
"Yes, it is, isn't it?" There was a trace of bitterness in his laugh.
"Foolish of me to have believed you cared enough to put up with it."
Now, in the privacy of her bedroom, Francesca frowned briefly at her
reflection in the mirror. Since her own heart had never been affected
by anyone, it always came as something of a surprise to her when
one of
the men with whom she was involved reacted so strongly when they parted.
Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. She recapped her pot
of lip gloss and tried to restore
her spirits by humming a British
dance hall tune from the 1930s about a man who danced with a girl
who
had danced with the Prince of Wales.
"I'm leaving now, darling," Chloe said, appearing in the doorway as she
adjusted the brim of a cream
felt bowler over her dark hair, cut short
and curly. "If Helmut calls, tell him I'll be back by one."
"If Helmut calls, I'll tell him you bloody well died." Francesca
splayed her hand on her hip, her cinnamon brown fingernails looking
like small sculptured almonds as she tapped them impatiently against
her green suede slacks.
Chloe fastened the neck clasp of her mink. "Now, darling ..."
Francesca felt a pang of remorse as she noticed how tired her mother
looked, but she repressed it, reminding herself that Chloe's
self-destructiveness with men had grown worse in recent months and it
was her duty as a daughter to point it out. "He's a gigolo, Mummy.
Everyone knows it. A phony German prince who's making an absolute fool
of you." She reached past the scented Porthault hangers in her closet
to the rack holding the gold fish-scale belt she'd bought at David Webb
the last time she was in New York. After securing the clasp at her
waist, she returned her attention to Chloe. "I'm worried about you,
Mummy. There are circles under your eyes, and you look tired all the
time. You've also been impossible to live with. Only yesterday you
brought home the beige Givenchy kimono for me instead of the silver one
I asked
you to get."
Chloe sighed. "I'm sorry, darling. I—I've had things on my mind, and I
haven't been sleeping well. I'll pick up the silver kimono for you when
I'm out today."
Francesca's pleasure in hearing that she would get the proper kimono
didn't quite overshadow her concern for Chloe. As gently as possible,
she tried to make Chloe understand how serious all this was. "You're
forty, Mummy. You need to start taking better care of yourself.
Gracious, you haven't had a facial in weeks."
To her dismay, she saw that she'd hurt Chloe's feelings. Rushing over,
she gave her mother a quick conciliatory hug, careful not to smear the
delicate taupe shading beneath her cheekbones. "Never mind," she said.
"I adore you. And you're still the most beautiful mother in London."
"Which reminds me—one mother in this house is enough. You are taking
your birth control pills, aren't you, darling?"
Francesca groaned. "Not this again . . ."
Chloe withdrew a pair of gloves from an ostrich-skin Chanel handbag and
began tugging them on.
"I can't bear the thought of your becoming
pregnant when you're still so young. Pregnancy is so dangerous."
Francesca flicked her hair behind her shoulders and turned back to the
mirror. "All the more reason
not to forget, isn't it," she said lightly.
"Just be careful, darling."
"Have you ever known me to lose control of any situation invoiving men?"
"Thank God, no." Chloe pushed her thumbs beneath the collar of her mink
and lifted the fur until it brushed the bottom of her jaw. "If only I'd
been more like you when I was twenty." She gave a wry chuckle. "Who am
I fooling? If only I were more like you right now." Blowing a kiss in
the air, she
waved good-bye with her handbag and disappeared down the
hallway.
Francesca wrinkled her nose in the mirror, then jerked out the comb she
had just arranged in her hair
and stalked over to her window. As she
stared down into the garden, the unwelcome memory of her old encounter
with Evan Varian came back to her, and she shivered. Although she knew
sex couldn't be
that dreadful for most women, her experience with Evan three years ago
had made her lose much of her desire for further experimentation, even
with men who attracted her. Still, Evan's taunt about her frigidity had
hung in the dusty corners of her consciousness, leaping out at the
strangest times to plague her. Finally, last summer, she'd gathered her
courage and permitted a handsome young Swedish sculptor she'd met in
Marrakech to take her to bed.
She frowned as she remembered how awful it had been. She knew there had
to be more to sex than having someone heaving away over her body,
pawing at her most private parts with sweat dripping from his armpits
all over her. The only feeling the experience had produced inside her
had been a terrible anxiety. She hated the vulnerability, the unnerving
sense that she had relinquished control. Where was
the mystical
closeness the poets wrote about? Why wasn't she able to feel close to
anybody?
From watching Chloe's relationships with men, Francesca had learned at
an early age that sex was a marketable commodity like any other. She
knew that sooner or later she wouid have to permit a man to make love
to her again. But she was determined not to do so until she felt
completely in control of the situation and the rewards were high enough
to justify the anxiety. Exactly what those rewards might be, she didn't
quite know. Not money, certainly. Money was simply there, not something
one even thought about. Not social position, since that had been very
much assured her at birth. But something ... the elusive something that
was missing from her life.
Still, as a basically optimistic person, she thought her unhappy sexual
experiences might have turned out for the best. So many of her
acquaintances hopped from bed to bed until they'd lost all sense of
dignity. She didn't hop into any beds at all, yet she'd been able to
present the illusion of sexual experience—fooling even her own
mother—while at the same time, remaining aloof. All in all, it was a
powerful combination, which intrigued the most interesting assortment
of men.
The ringing of the telephone interrupted her thoughts. Stepping over a
pile of discarded clothes, she crossed the carpet to pick up the
receiver. "Francesca here," she said, sitting down in one of the Louis
XV chairs.
"Francesca. Don't hang up. I have to talk to you."
"Well, if it isn't Saint Nicholas." Crossing her legs, she inspected
the tips of her fingernails for flaws.
"Darling, I didn't mean to set you off so last week." Nicholas's tone
was placating, and she could see him in her mind, sitting at the desk
in his office, his pleasant features grim with determination. Nicky was
so sweet and so boring. "I've been miserable without you," he went on.
"Sorry if I pushed."
"You should be sorry," she declared. "Really, Nicholas, you acted like
such an awful prig. I hate being shouted at, and I don't appreciate
being made to feel as if I'm some heartless femme fatale."
"I'm sorry, darling, but I didn't really shout. Actually, you were the
one—" He stopped, apparently thinking better of that particular comment.
Francesca found the flaw she'd been looking for, a nearly invisible
chip in the nail varnish on her index finger. Without getting up from
the chair, she stretched toward her dressing table for her bottle of
cinnamon brown.
"Francesca, darling, I thought you might like to go down to Hampshire
with me this weekend."
"Sorry, Nicky. I'm busy." The lid on the varnish bottle gave way
beneath the tug of her fingers. As she extracted the brush, her eyes
flicked to the tabloid newspaper folded open next to the telephone. A
glass coaster rested on top, magnifying a circular portion of the print
beneath so that her own name leaped out at her, the letters distorted
like the reflection in a carnival mirror.
plump, matronly woman standing near the ropes. "Ma'am, maybe you'd
better put down your
purse and come on over here so you can hit the
next one for me."
He bogeyed the final hole and Johnny Miller birdied it. After the
players had signed their scorecards, the tournament chairman presented
Miller with the first-place trophy and a check for thirty thousand
dollars. Dallie shook his hand, gave Miller a few congratulatory pats
on the shoulder,and then went over to joke with the crowd some more.
"This is what I get for letting Skeet hold my jaws open last night and
pour all that beer down my throat. My old grandmother could
have played better out there today with a garden rake and roller
skates."
Dallie Beaudine had spent a childhood dodging his father's fists, and
he knew better than to let anybody see when he was hurting.
Chapter 4
Francesca stood in the center of a pool of discarded evening gowns andstudied her reflection in the wall of mirrors built into one end of her
bedroom, now decorated with pastel-striped silk walls, matching
Louis
XV chairs, and an early Matisse. Like an architect engrossed in a
blueprint, she searched her twenty-year-old face for gremlin-induced
imperfections that might have mischievously appeared since she last
looked in the mirror. Her small straight nose was dusted with a
translucent powder priced at twelve pounds a box, her eyelids frosted
with smoky shadow, and her lashes, individually separated with a tiny
tortoiseshell comb, had been coated with exactly four applications of
imported German mascara. She lowered her critical gaze down over her
tiny frame to the graceful curve of her breasts, then inspected the
neat indentation of her waist before moving on to her legs, beautifully
clad in a pair of lacquer green suede slacks complemented perfectly by
an ivory silk blouse from Piero De Monzi. She had just been named one
of the ten most beautiful women in Great Britain for 1975. Although she
would never have been so crass as to say it aloud, she secretly
wondered why the magazine had bothered with nine others. Francesca's
delicate features were more classically beautiful than either her
mother's or grandmother's, and much more
changeable. Her slanted green eyes could grow as chill and distant as a
cat's when she was displeased, or as saucy as a Soho barmaid's if her
mood shifted. When she realized how much attention it brought her, she
began to emphasize her resemblance to Vivien Leigh and let her chestnut
hair grow into a curly, shoulder-length cloud, occasionally even
pulling it back from her small face with hair slides to make the
likeness more pronounced.
As she contemplated her reflection, it didn't occur to her that she was
shallow and vain, that many of the people she considered her friends
could barely tolerate her. Men loved her, and that was all that
mattered. She was so outrageously beautiful, so utterly charming when
she put her energy to it, that only the most self-protective of males
could resist her. Men found being with Francesca rather like taking an
addictive drug, and even after the relationship had ended, many
discovered themselves coming back for a damaging second hit.
Like her mother, she spoke in hyperbole and put her words into
invisible italics, making even the most mundane occurrence sound like a
grand adventure. She was rumored to be a sorceress in bed, although the
specifics of who had actually penetrated the lovely Francesca's
enchanting vagina had grown a bit muddy over time. She kissed
wonderfully, that was for certain, leaning into a man's chest, curling
up in his arms like a sensuous kitten, sometimes licking at his mouth
with the very tip of her small pink tongue.
Francesca never stopped to consider that men adored her because she was
generally at her best with them. They didn't have to suffer her attacks
of thoughtlessness, her perpetual tardiness, or her piques when she
didn't get her way. Men made her bloom. At least for a while . .. until
she grew bored. Then she became impossible.
As she applied a slick of coral gloss to her lips, she couldn't help
but smile at the memory of her most spectacular conquest, although she
was absolutely distraught that he hadn't taken their parting better.
Still, what could she have done? Several months of playing second
fiddle to all his official responsibilities had brought the chill light
of reality to those deliciously warm visions of royal immortality she'd
been
entertaining—glass-enclosed carriages, cathedral doors flinging open,
trumpets playing—visions not entirely unthinkable for a girl who'd been
raised in the bedroom of a princess.
When she'd finally come to her senses about their relationship and
realized she didn't want to live her life at the beck and call of the
British Empire, she'd tried to make her break with him as clean as
possible. But he'd still taken it rather badly. She could see him now
as he'd looked that night—immaculately tailored, exquisitely barbered,
expensively shod. How on earth could she have known that a man who bore
no wrinkles on the outside might bear a few insecurities on the inside?
She remembered the evening two months earlier when she had ended her
relationship with the most eligible bachelor in Great Britain.
They had just finished dinner in the privacy of his apartments, and his
face had seemed young and curiously vulnerable as the candlelight
softened its aristocratic planes. She gazed at him across the damask
tablecloth set with sterling two hundred years old and china rimmed in
twenty-four-karat gold, trying to let him understand by the earnestness
of her expression that this was all much more difficult for her than it
could possibly be for him.
"I see," he said, after she'd given her reasons, as kindly as possible,
for not continuing their friendship. And then, once more, "I see."
"You do understand?" She tilted her head to one side so that her hair
fell away from her face, letting the light catch the twin rhinestone
slivers that dangled from her earlobes, flickering like a chain of
stars
against a chestnut sky.
His blunt response shocked her. "Actually, no." Pushing himself back
from the table, he stood abruptly.
"I don't understand at all." He
looked down at the floor and then up again at her. "I must confess I've
rather fallen for you, Francesca, and you gave me every reason to
believe that you cared for me."
"I
do
," she replied
earnestly. "Of
course
I do."
"But not enough to put up with all that goes along with me."
The combination of stubborn pride and hurt she heard in his voice made
her feel horribly guilty. Weren't the royals supposed to hide their
emotions, no matter how trying the circumstances? "It is rather a lot,"
she reminded him.
"Yes, it is, isn't it?" There was a trace of bitterness in his laugh.
"Foolish of me to have believed you cared enough to put up with it."
Now, in the privacy of her bedroom, Francesca frowned briefly at her
reflection in the mirror. Since her own heart had never been affected
by anyone, it always came as something of a surprise to her when
one of
the men with whom she was involved reacted so strongly when they parted.
Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. She recapped her pot
of lip gloss and tried to restore
her spirits by humming a British
dance hall tune from the 1930s about a man who danced with a girl
who
had danced with the Prince of Wales.
"I'm leaving now, darling," Chloe said, appearing in the doorway as she
adjusted the brim of a cream
felt bowler over her dark hair, cut short
and curly. "If Helmut calls, tell him I'll be back by one."
"If Helmut calls, I'll tell him you bloody well died." Francesca
splayed her hand on her hip, her cinnamon brown fingernails looking
like small sculptured almonds as she tapped them impatiently against
her green suede slacks.
Chloe fastened the neck clasp of her mink. "Now, darling ..."
Francesca felt a pang of remorse as she noticed how tired her mother
looked, but she repressed it, reminding herself that Chloe's
self-destructiveness with men had grown worse in recent months and it
was her duty as a daughter to point it out. "He's a gigolo, Mummy.
Everyone knows it. A phony German prince who's making an absolute fool
of you." She reached past the scented Porthault hangers in her closet
to the rack holding the gold fish-scale belt she'd bought at David Webb
the last time she was in New York. After securing the clasp at her
waist, she returned her attention to Chloe. "I'm worried about you,
Mummy. There are circles under your eyes, and you look tired all the
time. You've also been impossible to live with. Only yesterday you
brought home the beige Givenchy kimono for me instead of the silver one
I asked
you to get."
Chloe sighed. "I'm sorry, darling. I—I've had things on my mind, and I
haven't been sleeping well. I'll pick up the silver kimono for you when
I'm out today."
Francesca's pleasure in hearing that she would get the proper kimono
didn't quite overshadow her concern for Chloe. As gently as possible,
she tried to make Chloe understand how serious all this was. "You're
forty, Mummy. You need to start taking better care of yourself.
Gracious, you haven't had a facial in weeks."
To her dismay, she saw that she'd hurt Chloe's feelings. Rushing over,
she gave her mother a quick conciliatory hug, careful not to smear the
delicate taupe shading beneath her cheekbones. "Never mind," she said.
"I adore you. And you're still the most beautiful mother in London."
"Which reminds me—one mother in this house is enough. You are taking
your birth control pills, aren't you, darling?"
Francesca groaned. "Not this again . . ."
Chloe withdrew a pair of gloves from an ostrich-skin Chanel handbag and
began tugging them on.
"I can't bear the thought of your becoming
pregnant when you're still so young. Pregnancy is so dangerous."
Francesca flicked her hair behind her shoulders and turned back to the
mirror. "All the more reason
not to forget, isn't it," she said lightly.
"Just be careful, darling."
"Have you ever known me to lose control of any situation invoiving men?"
"Thank God, no." Chloe pushed her thumbs beneath the collar of her mink
and lifted the fur until it brushed the bottom of her jaw. "If only I'd
been more like you when I was twenty." She gave a wry chuckle. "Who am
I fooling? If only I were more like you right now." Blowing a kiss in
the air, she
waved good-bye with her handbag and disappeared down the
hallway.
Francesca wrinkled her nose in the mirror, then jerked out the comb she
had just arranged in her hair
and stalked over to her window. As she
stared down into the garden, the unwelcome memory of her old encounter
with Evan Varian came back to her, and she shivered. Although she knew
sex couldn't be
that dreadful for most women, her experience with Evan three years ago
had made her lose much of her desire for further experimentation, even
with men who attracted her. Still, Evan's taunt about her frigidity had
hung in the dusty corners of her consciousness, leaping out at the
strangest times to plague her. Finally, last summer, she'd gathered her
courage and permitted a handsome young Swedish sculptor she'd met in
Marrakech to take her to bed.
She frowned as she remembered how awful it had been. She knew there had
to be more to sex than having someone heaving away over her body,
pawing at her most private parts with sweat dripping from his armpits
all over her. The only feeling the experience had produced inside her
had been a terrible anxiety. She hated the vulnerability, the unnerving
sense that she had relinquished control. Where was
the mystical
closeness the poets wrote about? Why wasn't she able to feel close to
anybody?
From watching Chloe's relationships with men, Francesca had learned at
an early age that sex was a marketable commodity like any other. She
knew that sooner or later she wouid have to permit a man to make love
to her again. But she was determined not to do so until she felt
completely in control of the situation and the rewards were high enough
to justify the anxiety. Exactly what those rewards might be, she didn't
quite know. Not money, certainly. Money was simply there, not something
one even thought about. Not social position, since that had been very
much assured her at birth. But something ... the elusive something that
was missing from her life.
Still, as a basically optimistic person, she thought her unhappy sexual
experiences might have turned out for the best. So many of her
acquaintances hopped from bed to bed until they'd lost all sense of
dignity. She didn't hop into any beds at all, yet she'd been able to
present the illusion of sexual experience—fooling even her own
mother—while at the same time, remaining aloof. All in all, it was a
powerful combination, which intrigued the most interesting assortment
of men.
The ringing of the telephone interrupted her thoughts. Stepping over a
pile of discarded clothes, she crossed the carpet to pick up the
receiver. "Francesca here," she said, sitting down in one of the Louis
XV chairs.
"Francesca. Don't hang up. I have to talk to you."
"Well, if it isn't Saint Nicholas." Crossing her legs, she inspected
the tips of her fingernails for flaws.
"Darling, I didn't mean to set you off so last week." Nicholas's tone
was placating, and she could see him in her mind, sitting at the desk
in his office, his pleasant features grim with determination. Nicky was
so sweet and so boring. "I've been miserable without you," he went on.
"Sorry if I pushed."
"You should be sorry," she declared. "Really, Nicholas, you acted like
such an awful prig. I hate being shouted at, and I don't appreciate
being made to feel as if I'm some heartless femme fatale."
"I'm sorry, darling, but I didn't really shout. Actually, you were the
one—" He stopped, apparently thinking better of that particular comment.
Francesca found the flaw she'd been looking for, a nearly invisible
chip in the nail varnish on her index finger. Without getting up from
the chair, she stretched toward her dressing table for her bottle of
cinnamon brown.
"Francesca, darling, I thought you might like to go down to Hampshire
with me this weekend."
"Sorry, Nicky. I'm busy." The lid on the varnish bottle gave way
beneath the tug of her fingers. As she extracted the brush, her eyes
flicked to the tabloid newspaper folded open next to the telephone. A
glass coaster rested on top, magnifying a circular portion of the print
beneath so that her own name leaped out at her, the letters distorted
like the reflection in a carnival mirror.
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