Lovers (34 page)

At that thought, Gigi turned on the light, got out of bed, and searched her bookcase. She needed something solid to read, something that would tide her over till morning. Jane Austen? Yes, Jane would be perfect, transporting her to a world in which sex was never mentioned, in fact didn’t exist at all, and advertising and filmmaking were as undreamed of as disco dancing, miniskirts, or the entire state of California. The well-worn volume fell open to the first lines of one of her favorite novels. “It is truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

You too, Jane!
Gigi threw the book down as if it were on
fire, went to the kitchen, and ate an entire box of corn flakes and milk, crunching down as fiercely as if they were made of coconut shells.

Ben Winthrop had sent a limo to take her to the Burbank Airport. He was on his way east anyway by private jet, he’d told her, to do some business in Philadelphia, so she might as well hitch a ride to New York, since they were both going to travel on Saturday. She’d have Sunday to catch up on jet lag before she started her round of meetings during the following week.

Gigi had become deeply involved in the development of the prototype Enchanted Attic, for Ben had virtually requisitioned her services from Victoria, who was in no position to refuse, since he had quickly approved an image-creating advertising campaign for the still-unopened chain, which was currently running in every prestige magazine published. According to Ben, the Mullers, the family who had started Kids’ Paradise, had elected to retire to Sarasota, leaving their interest in the business in the hands of Jack Taylor, an experienced merchandise manager. Taylor, an ambitious middle-aged man, struck Gigi as someone who lacked imagination himself, but made up for it by providing her with an elaboration of details from which to choose. Ben had given her a free hand in creating the new stores, and although it frequently took Gigi away from her writing copy, she couldn’t resist the opportunity to develop her concept to the fullest.

In New York, during the coming week, she had plans to meet with three interior decorators, each proposing a different scheme for the Enchanted Attics. Jack Taylor had contacted the creators of unusual toys and hand-made dolls from cities all over Europe and the United States, and they would be arriving to show her their merchandise. Silversmiths and other craftspeople of all types would be bringing her their designs for gift items made especially for the store, as would the designers of gift-wrapping paper and ribbons.

During Valentine’s Day, Gigi had realized that The Enchanted Attic stores could carve out a second market, one that would be directed to men looking for romantic gifts at any time of the year. A woman of almost any age, she knew, was never indifferent to a really exquisite version of a little girl’s present, and she was planning to be on the lookout for such items, from elaborate copies of Victorian dolls to exceptional stuffed animals. Gigi had taken a clue from Scruples and decided that The Enchanted Attics should be designed so that men would feel as welcome in them as women, and to counter the self-service policy of Toys “ ” Us, she had already decreed that each salesperson must be trained in an exact knowledge of appropriate gifts for every age and type of child. No one would ever be abandoned to wander the aisles wondering if something was too young or too old for a five-and-a-half-year-old tomboy.

But right now she didn’t care if the first Enchanted Attic ever opened, Gigi thought. She’d finally managed to get fifteen minutes of numbed sleep just as the sun rose, and then her phone had started to ring, with Sasha and Billy full of last-minute advice about things she mustn’t forget to do or buy or see while she was in New York. Billy had insisted that she be sure to wear no makeup on the trip and use moisturizer and lip gloss every hour to counteract the dry air aloft. As if she had the strength to worry about makeup, Gigi thought as she put on the gray sweatshirt and matching sweatpants that were the most comfortable things she owned.

Although it was her first trip in a private jet, Gigi got into the plane with the blankly languid look of someone who had never traveled in any other way. She drooped into her armchair and looked blindly out the window while Ben, looking absurdly collegiate in a Dick-Stover-at-Yale letterman sweater over an open-necked shirt, set himself up at the other end of the large main cabin, worked quickly on a computer, and ignored her. Gigi was conscious of extremely discreet understated luxury, of quiet, undemanding
colors, of a steward who brought her tea and cookies and fruit, but as far as she was concerned, the interior of a private jet was merely a long, narrow room in the sky.

“You look droopy,” Ben said, looking up from his work. “Do you want to lie down? The sofas aft make up into beds. Maybe you could nap.”

“Oh yes,” Gigi said gratefully. That made the difference. A nap. She had to have one. The world’s most expensive nap. How much a minute, she tried to estimate, as she took off her clothes, put on an oversized silk pajama top that the steward had put out for her, and slipped under the covers. How much a minute? Who the hell gave a good goddamn, so long as the bed remained horizontal?

Gigi was still sleeping when the jet landed, refueled, and took off again. About three hours later she woke up, splashed her face with water, brushed her teeth, put on one of the bathrobes she found hanging in the closet, and staggered into the cabin, trailing Sulka crimson silk sashed at the waist.

“My God, I’ve slept almost all the way to New York! What time is it, Ben?”

“L.A. time?”

“You’re right, it’s a silly question. When do we land?”

“Sometime in the afternoon, depending on the winds.” His smile seemed even more deliberately considered, more slowly introspective than usual, and Gigi’s sense of his presence, as intent in repose as in action, took on an added weight because the two of them seemed suddenly very alone in a well-lit capsule outside of which lay an unthinkable vastness of space.

“Ben, I’m a little disoriented,” Gigi said with a shade of impatience. “I’m not used to taking a nap in the middle of the day, so riddle me no riddles.”

“I’m serious.”

“Oh, stop!”

“You’ve been skyjacked.”

Gigi looked at Ben Winthrop carefully. She had grown
to know him well during the last few months of working with him, and raging whimsy had never been characteristic of him. Nor overstatement. He had a sense of humor, but he didn’t make ridiculous jokes. In many ways his personality had the gift of perfect pitch.

“All right, I’ve been skyjacked,” she said agreeably, sitting down in the chair by his side. “Why not, after all? It’s the weekend, people are supposed to indulge in mindless, healthy recreation. I’d still like to know where we’re going, or are we flying around in circles?”

“Venice,” he said. The furrows in his forehead deepened slightly and his basic blue, trustworthy eyes looked down his big, aristocratic, bumpy Boston nose at her with a gleam of some rare and precious amusement. He had never looked so much like a college girl’s fantasy of the significantly sexy young English professor who would invite her into his office to discuss improving her grade on top of his desk, Gigi thought briefly, or would it be more comfortable under the desk?

“Venice Beach?” Gigi asked. “We can have dinner at Chinois on Main.”

“Venice, the state of mind.”

“Venice … Italy?” Her voice was so cautious it descended an octave lower than usual.

“It occurred to me that for your first skyjacking the destination should be worthy of the occasion.”

“Venice!”
Sparks of incredulous joy, tiny bursts of emerald fireworks, filled her eyes.

“So, no objections?” He sounded more anxious than she’d ever heard him.

“I don’t have anything to wear!” Gigi wailed. “Oh damn, why didn’t you warn me?”

“It wouldn’t be a skyjacking if I’d warned you,” Ben said reasonably.

“How come you
didn’t?”
Gigi asked, realizing that her first reaction, although normal to her in any other travel surprise, was perhaps not the first matter of business. “Why’d you think you had to fool me?”

“Would you have come if I’d said ‘Let’s go to Venice’?”

“Maybe … I don’t know. Why not, after all?”

“I didn’t think so, somehow. You’d have had too much time to think about it. The agency would have had to be informed, Billy would have told you of the perils involved in traveling with a man—”

“What perils?” Gigi asked, her eyebrows disappearing into her bangs, the tilted tip of her nose almost bristling at the thought of such an impossibility. “Billy would never say anything so boring and conventional, goodness, you don’t really know her at all.”

Gigi clearly remembered that one kiss Ben had given her on the night they’d met, one kiss that she had felt, so absurdly, was in some way seriously dangerous. He’d never tried to repeat it on any of the occasions they’d worked together on The Enchanted Attic, and by now he must have forgotten the whole strange moment. She felt totally safe with him.

“Perils indeed,” she scoffed. “This is the twentieth century.”

“Unless you’re in a perilous mood.”

“I don’t even know what mood I’m in,” Gigi said, the upturned corners of her mouth lifting into a considering smile that slowly deepened into a fine intensity, “except hungry, but that’s not a mood.”

“We can have dinner whenever you like. I was waiting till you woke up.”

“Oh, Ben, I feel so divinely, beautifully, utterly free! Nothing but sky outside, Venice waiting out there somewhere … what more could a girl want?”

“Oh … quite possibly … a passport.”

“My God!” Gigi’s hand flew to her throat. She’d never owned a passport.

“There’ll be one waiting at the airport in Italy … an old buddy in the State Department managed it.”

“What a well-planned skyjacking,” she mocked him. “Are you in the CIA?”

“No, but my old buddy probably is. He went to Yale
instead of Harvard, which I always consider a suspicious sign.”

“Why are you going to so much trouble for me, why are you being so adorable?” Her face was all vividness.

“Because I want to. Because it’s fun. Because you need a vacation and so do I.”

“Good answers. Consider them accepted.” Gigi yawned, stretched herself out so that her back touched the armchair only at her shoulders and her rump, her bare legs stuck out on the carpet as far as they could go. Her head was thrown all the way back and her arms dangled limply.

“A little champagne wouldn’t be unwelcome,” she announced, gleefully and imperiously. “I’m on vacation now.”

As soon as the jet landed at Marco Polo Airport, an official from the United States Embassy in Rome provided Gigi with her passport. The customs officials made haste to clear Ben and Gigi, and they walked down a wooden pier and stepped down onto the deck of a long, sleek speedboat, with a hull of gleaming honey-colored wood, that was waiting for him. Ben shook the captain’s hand and greeted him as Giuseppe, as a deckhand heaped the luggage inside the cabin of the boat.

Gigi looked around eagerly. There was nothing to see but a great deal of ordinary sky, a very wide, very flat stretch of greenish water dotted by a few flat islands, and a blurred row of some sort of human habitation in the far distance. The air smelled vaguely salty, but not like sea air.

“Where’s Venice?” she asked Ben.

“That way,” he answered, pointing to the flat line of buildings in the distance. “We really should have arrived by boat, that’s the grand classic way, but they put the airport out here, in the aptly named
Laguna Morta.”

“You should have kidnapped me and brought me here by yacht. I want my first impression to be grand and classic.”

“Wait. Just wait.”

The speedboat started suddenly, and Gigi almost lost her balance.

“Do you want to go into the cabin?” Ben asked. “It’s windy.”

“I’m standing right here, Ben Winthrop, until Venice shows up. I’ve seen enough paintings and photographs to know it when I see it,” Gigi retorted as the wind whipped her hair away from her face. She put on the sunglasses she always kept in her purse, and held tightly to a railing, while Ben stood behind her. The journey over the wide lagoon was swift, but as they approached close enough to see the buildings clearly, the captain slowed the boat considerably.

“That’s so we literally don’t make waves,” Ben explained. “We have to proceed at a crawl once we’re near Venice. One of the reasons it’s sinking is the way the water used to be allowed to pound the stones.”

The dilapidated houses grew slowly larger, and flapping clotheslines strung with newly washed shirts and dresses were the first visible detail of
La Serenissima
, “the most serene,” the Bride of the Adriatic. Soon the speedboat entered a narrow canal and Gigi turned eagerly from one side to another, seeking out picturesque details, but finding only a vast number of cats, several unremarkable stone bridges, and hordes of screaming children. They turned a corner into a larger canal, and Gigi, dancing with impatience, was outraged to see that it was filled by a wide dirty barge piled high with crates of soft drinks and bottled water, clearing the sides of the dirty stones only by inches.

“Don’t tell me,” Ben said. “We should have taken a helicopter from the airport. How come I didn’t think of that? Because there aren’t any.”

“Do we
have to
follow this thing?”

“We do.”

“Isn’t there a shortcut?”

Ben laughed at her face as their
motoscafo
slowed down even further. “When they built the canals they built them for the width of gondolas. You can’t be in a hurry in Venice. You can run up a mountain in Nepal or dash
across the Great Wall of China or even try to speed around the Place de la Concorde, but going through here, you can’t move faster than the slowest boat in front of you, so sit down and wait.”

Grinding her teeth, Gigi followed his advice. They were proceeding inch by inch. She shut her eyes in frustration. This could go on forever.

“Open up,” Ben said, nudging her.