Scruples Two (16 page)

When Melanie Adams had turned from modeling to acting, she’d found that during the time the camera was rolling, she felt real. Like somebody else, of course, yet
actual, there
. But the camera had to stop eventually, leaving her beached and sad, absorbed again by her core of emptiness, her ever-renewed quest to break out of an intense, inescapable connection with her own image and emerge into the world, like a chick trying to peck its way out of an unbreakable eggshell. Melanie’s need to take and take in order to create the smallest, always fleeting sense of selfhood had taught her how to inspire love, but no amount of adoration had ever been enough to release her from the chains of narcissism.

“I said, of
reproducing
reality,” Valentine said softly, correcting her.

“Oh, I suppose, but it’s the same thing, isn’t it?” Melanie said vaguely, running her fingers over the bolts of fabric that leaned against the wall near Valentine’s desk, lightly touching the panne velvets, the melting cashmeres, the icy satins. She turned to Valentine with curiosity, seeming to come out of a dream.

“You’re married to Spider Elliott, aren’t you?” she asked. She had seen photographs of Valentine in
Women’s Wear
, but she’d never come across her in person. She hadn’t anticipated that Valentine would be so sympathetic, so understanding. In fact, she hadn’t wanted to meet Spider’s wife, and only Wells’s insistence had brought her here today.

“Elliott and I have been married for two years,” Valentine answered matter-of-factly.

“I used to know him … in fact, he took the first test shots of me when I started modeling. In a way, I guess you could say that he started me on my career.”

“You could say that,” Valentine agreed, “but any other photographer could have done the same—Elliott said it was impossible to get a bad shot of you. I remember when Harriet Toppingham first saw those test shots at
Fashion and Interiors
—Elliott said that she called you ‘killingly beautiful’—did you know that?”

“No,” Melanie laughed, delighted. “Harriet was always over the top, absolutely excessive—but a great editor. Goodness, you must have known Spider well for him to have told you that, such a silly detail, and it happened at least four years ago. I’m amazed that he still remembers.”

Valentine took out her tape measure. “Let me get some measurements before I forget,” she said. “Just stand still.” Deftly she began measuring the crucial distances from the nape to the top of the spinal column, from there to the precise end of the shoulder bone, from the shoulder bone to the point of the elbow, from the elbow to the wrist, from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger, measurements that were only the beginning of what she would need, yet measurements she trusted no assistant to take.

“It wasn’t that he remembered exactly,” Valentine said, continuing to speak as she plied her tape measure. “You see, we were neighbors in our little lofts, and at night Elliott told me everything that had happened to him during the day. I was weak-minded enough to cook dinner for him any evening that he wasn’t going out, but it was either that or let the poor foolish man starve to death. The day he met you, he told me that he’d blurted out that he was in love with you when he didn’t even know your name! He said he surprised you so much the only way he could get you to stay in the studio was to make you a great liverwurst and Swiss cheese sandwich on rye bread,” Valentine’s voice rang with humor. “I was frankly impressed that under such circumstances of high emotion he still had enough presence of mind to make a decent sandwich, when all he could ever think to make for me, when I came crawling to him for comfort at the end of one of my own tragic love affairs, was his eternal Campbell’s cream of tomato soup with Ritz crackers.”

“He
told you
about falling in love with me?”

“But of course,” Valentine said with a shrug. “We had no secrets from each other. I suppose that sounds strange, in fact I know it does, a woman and a man who tell each other everything, who continue to have no secrets from each other, but that’s what happens when you don’t start out with love, just with plain, ordinary friendship.”

“Ordinary friendship? It sounds like more than that to me.”

“Oh no, truly not. In fact, at first I didn’t even like Elliott … or rather I didn’t approve of his habit of falling passionately, head-over-heels in and out of love with half of the most beautiful models in New York. I’m sure you must have realized that was his pattern at the time you met him. How could I put my faith in a man with such a record of going from woman to woman, of loving wildly here and loving wildly there, almost indiscriminately, so long as the girl was beautiful? He had to go a long way to win my trust, fond as I became of him.”

“How … did he convince you … that you could trust him?” Melanie’s faltering question seemed to come from a distance, so thin was her voice.

“Ah, I must not tell you that,” Valentine said, smiling gently. “You would be too flattered, and if we are going to work together well, I can’t become yet another person who flatters you.”

“But it had something to do with me? Come on, Valentine, you have to tell! It’s not fair to hint at it like that, it’s really wrong of you. If you weren’t going to tell me, you shouldn’t have brought it up.”

Valentine laid down her tape measure. “You know, Melanie, you’re right. There are some things that Elliott told me that he should have kept to himself. I should have kept silent.”

“But I insist! I promise you I won’t be upset … since he told you everything, why should he have kept one thing back? What was it, Valentine?”

“Well … you’ll remember that after you’d finished your first picture, there was a long wait before Mr. Cope decided what your next career move should be?”

“How could I forget? I went crazy with the waiting, but what does that have to do with it, with your trusting Spider?”

“At that time, Elliott hadn’t seen you since you left for Hollywood, since you left him rather suddenly one afternoon in New York—ah, Melanie, I had to comfort him over that shock, let me assure you. Poor Elliott was quite broken up about it for a while—weeks and weeks, yes, as long as that before he found another love—but in the end it was good for his male ego to find that there was at least one girl who could say no … Where was I? Oh yes, quite a while after that time when you came to see him at home here in Los Angeles, and …” Valentine’s voice trailed off. She blushed and turned her eyes away from Melanie’s face.

“What about it?” Melanie demanded roughly.

“Melanie, of course it was natural, was it not, that you two made love? And that it was delicious for you? Both of you. I understood perfectly why you wanted to resume your old romance with Elliott, so many girls found him difficult, almost impossible to forget … but when he told me about it, and—how can I put it?—how he was forced to explain to you that his feelings for you were over for him, no matter how good the lovemaking was—well … I think the fact that he had been totally cured of you, which is something I imagine no other man who ever loved you could say—that it was then, at that time, that I began—slowly, I grant you—to trust him, to believe that perhaps he had grown up and had recovered from his addiction to loving every beauty who came his way. Does that answer your question?”

“Fully,” Melanie said, in a strained attempt at humor.

“And I have not flattered you too much?”

“I’m not sure, Valentine. I’ll have to think it over.”

“Bravo! So, let us begin. I’ve made some preliminary sketches, some rough ideas, that I had no intention of showing Mr. Cope until you gave me your own opinions. It is you, not he, who will wear the clothes, so it is you, not he, I design for. Come to my desk and I’ll show them to you.”

As Melanie turned the sheets of paper over, examining them closely, Valentine felt surprised at herself, with an inner merriment that she still had so much to learn about her own emotions and abilities. She left Melanie rapt over her designs while she treated herself to a rare cigarette. She always kept a pack of Gauloises Bleus in her office for times when she wanted to retreat into thought and now she felt a sudden need for one as she sorted out her emotions. First of all, she hadn’t dreamed that she could manage to so skillfully misrepresent her own Elliott as a man who had been in love with many women, not just two. And in the second place she had not known until today just how violently jealous she had been of Melanie Adams. Back when Elliott had been involved with Melanie, she, Valentine, had almost managed to convince herself that she thought of him only as a friend, although now she knew that she had loved him from the day she first saw him. And finally, in spite of all the confusion of these past emotions, she knew that she would make the once-hated Melanie truly magical clothes, that she would surpass herself.

Valentine resolved to create for Melanie clothes that would make the poor lovely creature less sad. She would never have believed, until today, that the strongest emotion she would feel for Melanie Adams was pity.

Susan Arvey left Mark Hampton’s office humming, her step as light as a debutante’s. As soon as the famous decorator could manage to take the time, he would be flying out to California to take a good long look at their house before he came back to New York and started to plan to redo it from stem to stern, from head to toe, from laundry room to drawing room. And what a nice man he was! His knowledge of the history of great interior design of the past was encyclopedic, yet his relationship to the needs of today was so sensitive that for someone like her, who insisted on out-and-out grandeur, yet
domesticated
grandeur, so that comfort ruled all else, there could be no better choice. He understood to their depths the uses of extravagance and luxury. And she responded deeply to the last thing he had said to her during their consultation: “The only dogma worth observing is one that is self-imposed.” Actually, he’d said it about the way to decorate bedrooms, but she thought it was an observation that could be broadened and used for life itself.

Waiting in the early-evening rush for the light to change so that she could cross Fifth Avenue, she felt lightheaded and giddy as she always did when she abruptly found herself walking on a New York street after a trip from Los Angeles. She visited the city frequently, but she always forgot how many people there were in Manhattan, each one competing for his little bit of space, actually afraid that the light would change before he managed to get across in safety.

Thank God, Susan thought, as she always did on the first day in Manhattan, that she had been born on the Coast. In New York, even Joe Farber’s daughter and sole heiress would only be one of many hundreds of equally rich women with an always-to-be-reestablished claim on society’s attention. If she lived here she would be flung into a swarming pool of women like herself, competing, as anxiously as these people waiting for the light, for her place in the fashionable world. She would have to get in the ring, year after year, with women whose money came from ancient family fortunes, women with far more pride of birth than she, and with women with new fortunes made in banking, in industry, on Seventh Avenue, in publishing, in literally every single one of the great money-making businesses of America whose owners lived in New York.

In Hollywood, that single-industry town, where her father had been among the handful of financial giants and her husband was, in today’s terms, another, she could hardly have helped rising to the top. Her success had been assured unless she’d gone out of her way to avoid it. Susan knew that; any woman who calculated as clearly as she could not help but accept that particular fact. Nevertheless, she had dedicated her energies to making sure that she was always at the top of the top; she competed for ascendancy even when it wasn’t strictly necessary, aching daily for more power than male-dominated Hollywood would allow her.

Yet … yet … in New York a woman could sometimes seize her
own
power, not have it come to her as a reflection of the power of her father or her husband as it almost always must in Los Angeles. In New York a woman could run a magazine or an advertising agency or a fashion business, and owe nothing to a man.

But to do that would mean becoming a working woman, a career woman, a woman who had to risk failure, Susan Arvey realized, and such a life didn’t appeal to her at all. No, she didn’t mind getting up early for a tennis lesson, but to go to an office! As the British used to say, “It wouldn’t suit.”

When she reached the apartment at the Sherry Netherland that the Arveys had bought years ago, she phoned home. It was almost dinnertime in New York, afternoon in Los Angeles.

“Yes, Curt, I’m fine. I’ve just left him … he couldn’t be nicer. Yes, darling, we decided to do the whole house. Redecorating keeps you young, out of a rut. After all, you wouldn’t want me to get so restless that I’d sell the paintings and start a whole new collection of those modern artists, would you? Oh, it’ll be about three more days before I can leave … so much to do. How are you, sweetie? Feeling better? Good. You should try to forget about that film entirely. Everyone else has. Tonight? I’m doing the usual. Natalie’s discovered a play that’s so far Off Broadway I think it’s in Newark. Don’t worry, Curt, of course I’m arranging for a limo, you don’t think I’d get into a New York cab, do you? That’s like shutting yourself in a closet with a maniac. I’ll call tomorrow. Take care, try to get some sleep tonight. ’Bye, darling.”

Her wifely duties completed, Susan Arvey took off all her jewelry and put it in the safe she had had installed in her closet. She made another phone call, had a short conversation and fixed a time later in the evening.

As she took a long, self-indulgent bath, she thought fondly of Natalie Eustace, who had been her roommate during her freshman year at college, before she left to marry. Curt loathed Natalie’s artistic pretensions, her delight in plays that should never have been written, much less produced. He was always grateful when he didn’t have to spend an evening with her. In fact, he hadn’t seen Natalie in years, for Susan spared him, making dates with Natalie only when Curt wasn’t in New York with her. Curt realized that she needed to go to New York more than he did, considering her interest in art, given her great collection. There were so many exhibits to see, so many new galleries to check out, so many auctions that were promising, to say nothing of revisiting her favorite museums. He could live without all that perfectly well, thank you, Curt told her, but if she enjoyed it, why not?