Act of Darkness(5)

Now, of course, she was the universally acknowledged Most Beautiful Woman in the World, even at sixty considered to be more attractive than most of the children who had risen to success in the Industry behind her. Her mother was long dead, buried out in Forest Lawn next to Victoria’s first pet Pekingese dog. Some of the two-room apartments were part of Victoria’s portfolio, spruced up (barely) and reclassified as condominiums. It would have been a success story for the ages, if it hadn’t been for one thing: the pain of Victoria’s childhood had been real, and she still felt it. When nobody was looking, she spent endless hours in front of the mirror, trying to see what everybody else saw and failing. Looking at her face was like looking at one of those pictures that changed from a tree to a duck depending on how you tilted it. She could never get the tilt just right or make the picture change.

Fortunately, she was not so blind when it came to her daughter, the grandchild Victoria’s mother had once called “that damned little cancer of defeat.” Victoria’s mother had wanted her to abort, but Victoria had been smarter than that. In the first place, she hadn’t believed in it. In the second, she hadn’t wanted to. In the third, it was 1948 and the procedure was illegal as hell, carried out in back rooms and likely to lead to sterility or death. It made more sense to disappear for a year, to pretend to have been married and divorced. Women in Hollywood did that all the time and nobody ever asked any questions. They knew better.

So Victoria had Janet, and Janet was beautiful, as beautiful as her father had been. If it hadn’t been for that odd streak of repressive conventionality, Janet would have been the unalloyed joy of Victoria’s life. Even with it, she was the one thing Victoria took really seriously, the one cause for which she would let herself be ruined rather than betray, the cornerstone and single element in what she couldn’t help thinking of as her honor. It surprised her, sometimes, that emotion: not love so much as a commitment so total and so passionate as to leave no room in her for anything else. Like a butcher with his thumb on the scale, Victoria weighed everything with Janet already part of the equation. Stuck in the hospital with gallbladder surgery less than six months ago, she had worried about how Janet was taking it. Even her choice of clothes was dictated by what she thought Janet would feel if she saw her mother photographed in them and on the cover of the National Enquirer. It was a piece of good luck that Janet was more amused than annoyed by Victoria’s flamboyance. It was not a piece of good luck that Janet had married Stephen Whistler Fox, and it was aggressively bad luck that Stephen never went anywhere without that first-class thug, Dan Chester. Victoria leaned forward on the couch and picked up Janet’s wedding picture, secure behind glass in its sterling silver Tiffany frame. It was her fault Janet had met Stephen—that had happened at a Democratic party fund-raiser Victoria had organized herself—but it certainly wasn’t her fault that the two of them had married. Victoria had done everything short of having Janet drugged and kidnapped to put a stop to that. And she had been right. Considering everything that had happened since, she had been more than right.

She put the photograph back, down among the complimentary hors d’oeuvres the management had sent up when she arrived, the caviar in the tiny ice sculpture swan, the tea in the Wedgwood teapot, the. cold shrimp in the silver bowl. There were two Limoges vases filled with a dozen red roses each on the coffee table, too, and her own sterling-silver brush and comb and mirror set. She smoothed her famous pile of honey blond hair and pushed the buzzer for Melissa. Then she sat back and waited for Melissa to arrive.

Victoria Harte traveled with a personal masseuse, a personal trainer, a personal nutritionist, a personal shopper, a wardrobe woman, a hairdresser, a makeup woman, a secretary, a bodyguard, a chauffeur, and a maid. She also traveled with Melissa, who had no title and was young. When pressed, Victoria sometimes called Melissa her “companion,” but that was not quite right. What Melissa actually was, was one of the world’s most talented gossips, and Victoria’s personal spy.

She was also the kind of woman who seems destined to spend her life in flat-heeled shoes. She arrived at the door of the living room in brown oxfords, four plastic fake tortoiseshell haircombs, and the twin set she’d bought in Harrod’s in 1982. It was the only time Victoria had ever known Melissa to buy clothes.

“Yes?” she said. And that was it. The reason Melissa was one of the world’s most talented gossips was that she rarely said anything. She listened.

Victoria fussed at her hair again—Melissa always made her nervous—and then said, “Did you get hold of Janet yet? Is she coming over?”