Scruples Two (14 page)

“Just a minute, Maze, just one little minute,” Gigi objected. “Woody Allen’s been on my Dream Team for months. You can’t suddenly want him too, that’s not fair.”

“Why not? You’d still get to see it first. You wouldn’t have to tell me anything.”

“Oh, sure. I could take a good long look, maybe even a Polaroid, and then I’d keep the information a secret from you. What kind of crummy friend would that make me?” Gigi looked laughingly at her ever-rational companion and offered her another celestial brownie.

“You mean you’d share? You wouldn’t mind?”

“Sure, I’d share. Think how much more we could enjoy his movies if we knew the ultimate truth, what
really
is there underneath those rumpled boxer shorts he’s forever walking around in? There’s got to be a reason he never wears Jockeys.”

“But sharing isn’t in the rules,” Mazie objected.

“Listen, this game was my original idea, so I’m making up a new rule today, a sharing rule, it gives us each double opportunities.”

“But isn’t the point to have to narrow it down? To agonize?”

“Maze, you take it too seriously, you’ve got to loosen up. We’re never going to get to see their stuff anyway, so why not be greedy? Let’s get going. I’ll take Sinatra. Dream Team.” Gigi snapped her fingers triumphantly at Mazie’s expression of horror.

“Good God, Gigi, they’re getting older and older with you! Is this some sort of gag, or are you just being perverse?”

“Historical interest.” Gigi looked as superior as Gloria Steinern, as she tried on Mazie’s glasses. “Maybe Ol’ Blue Eyes has an ol’ blue dick. Remember, in his youth hordes of women would have killed for it.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll take Richard Nixon, in that case, I can be weird too.”

“That’s beyond weird, Maze, I don’t advise it, I really don’t. I’ll pretend you never said Nixon,” Gigi said generously.

“Okay. And I won’t count Sinatra. Now down to business. Dustin Hoffman, I wanna see Dustin Hoffman. Dream Team.”

“Me too, ever since
The Graduate
. We’re sold solid on Dustin Hoffman. He’s a double Dream Team if there ever was one, a gotta-see,” Gigi agreed. “But moving on into the world of fiction.… Norman Mailer?”

“Never! Not even on the fifth team.”

“I was just testing you. He’s not on the playing field, not even a water boy, him and his sacred sperm.”

“Philip Roth?”

“No argument,” Gigi said. “Except that it’s a totally banal choice, it’s too obvious. And once you’ve read
Portnoy
you’re on such familiar terms with his horny horror that it’s lost the charm of novelty. A wasted vote. I wonder if old J. D. Salinger is still in business?”

“Oh, Gigi, stop! The man’s a hermit!”

“Yeah, but he could write. Golden oldies, Maze. Oldies but goodies.”

“Gigi, if you bring up Walter Cronkite again, we’re through.”

“I’ll bet he’s gorgeous. He’s on my Hall of Fame team.… you can retire, but you’re always a member for life.”

“Another new rule,” Mazie complained.

“I’m feeling rebellious today. If I could, I’d repeal the Constitution and start this country all over again. I pick Andy Warhol. Dream Team.”

“Gigi!”

“Warhol, I say! It’s my choice, my right, my team.”

“That’s literally
disgusting
! Oh, Gigi, you
revolt
me!”

“But you’d never have thought of him, would you?” Gigi crowed triumphantly. Her fun came as much from Mazie’s reactions as from her choices. “Don’t I get points for originality?” Gigi made her eyebrows jump under her bangs in fierce triumph, a trick Mazie’s nerves could never resist.

“Sometimes I worry about you.” Mazie ate the last brownie with a sigh of concern. In the last few weeks Gigi had streaked her hair without warning, using the contents of an entire bottle of peroxide on a comb and running it repeatedly through her nice brown hair; she’d taken the spotless new white Volvo that Mrs. Ikehorn had given her, because it was the safest car going, and had it spray-painted shocking pink; and now her fantasy life was getting out of hand. Sinatra … Warhol … was this a bad sign?

“Gigi,” Mazie ventured cautiously, “the Uni football team?”

Gigi made loud, convincingly real retching noises. “Yuck!
No boys!
You know we said no boys! Feh, phooey, double feh!”

“Right,” said Mazie, relieved. Gigi hadn’t abandoned their major principle. “And the coach?” she asked slyly.

“Ah, the coach, the eternal problem, my Maze, my old pal, whether to go for the coach or not. I’m still sitting on the fence on that one. There’s something so banal about picking the coach, but … still, he
is
gorgeous. I can’t seem to figure out if I really want to see a real person’s penis, a person I actually see walking around campus, a person I personally know, or whether that’d be too much of a … responsibility.”

“I don’t get why you’d feel responsible. It’s not as if you’d have to tell him you’d seen it.”

“But there’d be this terrible temptation. Let’s say I saw it and I liked it. I wanted it. Then my responsibility would be to try to seduce the coach, to make actual … contact.”

“Want it? Who ever said anything about wanting it?” Mazie cried in alarm.

“But clearly that’d be the next step. After seeing, wanting, after wanting, touching.”

“No, no!” Mazie shrieked in outraged denial. “Absolutely not … you’ve changed one rule too many. You’ve gone too far!
Touching!
You know we said no touching!”

“No touching, never ever, I promise,” Gigi agreed hastily, having succeeded in frightening herself. “The coach is
out!
Just don’t bring him up again, don’t remind me.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.”

“Girls? Girls? Are you doing your math homework?” Billy’s voice called to them through the door.

“Yes, Mrs. Ikehorn,” Mazie said quickly, “we’re in the middle of it.”

“Good, because if you’ve made some real progress you can take a break. I thought maybe you’d like to try to get into the early show of
Kramer vs. Kramer
and then grab a hamburger at the Hamlet—that is, if you’re still interested in seeing Dustin Hoffman.”

“Oh, we are,” Gigi answered quickly, “we definitely are. We’ll be finished in time, Billy, count on it.”

In the course of his career, Vito Orsini had been up and he had been down and yet no one could say that they had seen him crestfallen. His bold, energetic countenance never collapsed into a look of weakness, he bore trouble with the same self-assertion with which he encountered prosperity. Thanks to his Italian heritage, his aristocratically aquiline nose, the fullness of his well-marked mouth and his air of easy prosperity in his endeavors, any signs of insufficiency or disappointment were foreign to his exterior. It was easy for Vito to look strong. When he telephoned Maggie, expecting to set the time at which they would meet for dinner that night, and discovered a message from her answering service to tell him that she had left town and could only be reached by leaving his name and number, he received the news with nothing more than an irritated twist of his lips and an angry frown.

No one watching him would have realized that he had just received an authoritative announcement that
The WASP
was doomed, as clear as if he’d read it in a headline on the front page of the
New York Times
. The meaning of Maggie’s sudden departure was unmistakable, or would have been to anyone but Vito.

Maggie, who thought herself so clever, was a fool after all, Vito told himself as he hung up the phone, she’ll feel like an idiot when the picture became a success. Worse, she’ll know she was a coward, and it was he who was the fool to have expected more cinematic intelligence from a twenty-seven-year-old television gossip who had been nobody but a women’s magazine writer only five years ago. To hell with her, he thought, and dismissed her absence from his mind. He had never loved her, but she had been, or so he had believed, that rare woman with whom he could be honest, that female friend he could fuck and trust. So he’d been wrong about her. Life was full of mistakes where women were concerned, and Maggie would be the loser.

In the next few days, as the reviews began to appear, Vito, as was his habit of long standing, refrained from looking at a single newspaper or discussing the reviews with anyone who had read them. In the early days of his career, when he had gone to Italy and produced a string of critically reviled spaghetti westerns, Vito had decided once and for all that the public knew what it wanted to see, and no reviewers could keep them away. The westerns, so despised, had brought in amazing profits. However, a number of his later films, which he had considered to be among his best, films that had been the darlings of the reviewers, had failed to attract a paying audience. The whole thing was, always had been, a crapshoot, he told himself, and this time he felt lucky, he smelled success, the success in which he had never failed to believe throughout the struggle to produce
The WASP
.

By the end of the first week after
The WASP
was released, Vito no longer felt lucky. He felt almost nothing but total panic. So great was the fall from his expectations that there was no gradual spread of creeping disillusionment, no slow, relentless realization that the picture was falling off too quickly from a good start. The drop was as swift as that of a head from a guillotined neck.

On the first day, a Friday, the box office had been strong as the diehard Redford and Nicholson crowd showed up with a morbid curiosity to see for themselves just how bad the picture was, unable to accept the critics’ unanimous and ferocious recommendations that no one waste a single minute watching the atrocity that had been wrought on a brilliant book. The reviewers, all of whom had admired the book, overlooked anything good about the movie in their eagerness to condemn the desecration that the corrupt devils of Hollywood had visited on it. It was a bloodletting without precedent, an eagerness to destroy that not even Susan Arvey could have anticipated. However, on the second day, at least until the first 6:00
P.M
. show, box-office receipts had been acceptable, and until the evening there was always the hope that on Saturday night business would pick up.

But word of mouth, that extraordinary force that is stronger than any ad campaign, stronger than any star appeal, had done its work. It was as if everyone in the country who had seen
The WASP
on Friday and Saturday afternoon had decided to call ten people to tell them how bad it was, and as if each of those ten people had called ten others, a verbal chain letter that kept the audience out of the theaters except for a few movie-buff death-watchers who wanted to see the picture before it was yanked so that they could report exactly how much worse it was than they had been led to believe.

Everyone who actually paid to see the picture
hated
Redford as a scheming bad guy, and
loathed
Nicholson as a helpless good guy. They felt personally insulted by every scene in the picture because they felt so bitterly cheated by the use that had been made of two of their favorite stars, a use that made them falter for a while in their necessary belief in the Redfordness of Redford, the Nicholsonness of Nicholson. It was as if Vito had scalped and eviscerated Santa Claus in an orphan asylum on Christmas Eve.

By Sunday it was all over; the picture would play to empty houses only until the theater owners could scramble to replace it. Vito had cut off all communications to anyone involved in the movie from the moment it opened. He had spent the time driving alone in an orbit of Los Angeles, from San Diego to Santa Barbara to the far reaches of the San Fernando Valley, searching out the theaters that had booked
The WASP
to see if there were any signs of life from the outside of the marquees, knowing that this occupation was futile and ridiculous, but unable to stop. By Sunday noon he knew there was only one thing left for him to do.

“It’s your father,” the butler, William, said, calling Gigi to the phone.

“Hi, Dad,” Gigi said, trying not to sound too surprised. “How are you?”

“Couldn’t be better. Listen, if you haven’t got anything else to do tonight, how about having dinner with me?”

“Oh! Well.… sure … terrific! I’d love it. Where are we going—I mean, what should I wear?” Gigi knew she sounded confused, but she hadn’t had a phone call from her father in two months or more.

“Don’t bother to get all dressed up, just look nice. Ask Billy, tell her it’s Dominick’s, she’ll figure it out. I’ll pick you up at a quarter of seven sharp.”

Vito hung up before she could say another word. Gigi contemplated herself in the dim glass of the painted and carved Venetian wood mirror that hung over the phone table in the hallway where William had found her. She made astonished eyes at herself and shook her head solemnly as she made her calculations.

She and Mazie had remained in their respective homes this weekend to study for a major English exam that was being given tomorrow, and was too important to study for together. Gigi had spent all of Saturday at her books, and intended to do her last-minute cramming on Sunday evening. She had planned to spend the coming afternoon in the kitchen with Jean-Luc. Billy had been in New York most of the week and wouldn’t arrive back at the house until after dinner, so Gigi and the chef had laid elaborate plans to use his free time to make a whole poached chicken in the fashion of François Premier, with wild mushrooms, truffles and heavy cream.

Forget the chicken, Gigi instructed herself, cram until a quarter of six and then get dressed.

“Jean-Luc,” she asked the chef, after she’d apologized and called off the lesson, “have you ever heard of a restaurant called Dominick’s?”

“Here in Los Angeles?”

“Yup.”

“Never. So you abandon me for a Dominick?”

“You know I would abandon you only for my father.”

“Have a good time, Gigi,” the chef said, showering Vito with mental curses, this so-called father who inconsiderately snatched away the most promising pupil he’d ever had, just before he intended to expose to her the ten most important things to know about truffles and their passionately interesting possibilities in conjunction with the meat and juices of a chicken.