Scruples Two (23 page)

Slowly she wrote two more words and added a question mark.
Public relations?

No, that wasn’t quite it, but there was something.… something in those words that she could work around. She would never become a PR woman; they worked like dogs, which she had no intention of doing, and a large part of their work consisted, basically, in asking favors for their clients. Anyway, she didn’t know the rules of that game.

She wanted to
do favors
for people and get paid for it, Cora de Lioncourt decided. Was there a name for that profession? She smiled a chilling smile none of her acquaintances would have recognized. No, whores got paid for different services and pimps for yet others … but surely there was room in New York City for a woman who
facilitated
things? A woman who made things happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen, an intelligent, elegant, highly placed woman who just happened to be able to accomplish the impossible for a discreetly paid sum?

Indisputably, Cora told herself, there was always a need for such a woman in bumbling, uncomplicated New York, where so many women were striving to make their way upward, yearning for guidance. Only in New York did she suspect she could earn the kind of money such services should command. The French were too cheap to pay the high prices she hoped to establish. As for the British, they didn’t need her. They had their own traditional arrangements for grace and favor.

So. She got out of bed and walked slowly around her apartment, gently touching an object here and there; standing at this place and that place to appreciate a happy juxtaposition of the view of one room from another; looking at herself in various mirrors, all of which gave back her image backed by a reflection of such beauty massed behind her that it was, after all, a bit sad, although no one knew better than she the unfortunate condition of the paint on the walls. But the apartment would sell in a day, considering its location and size, and the proceeds would buy another, in far better shape, on a good street in New York. And everything, every single object, every piece of furniture, would come with her. Rearranging them in their new home, contriving a new background that would show them at their greatest advantage, was exactly the kind of thing she liked best to do. Unfortunately she could never do it for anyone else, since professional decorators had to compromise somewhere to keep their customers happy and she would never compromise with the arrangement of an interior, nor would she trust a customer not to change things or add things the minute her back was turned.

Would she miss her French friends? Cora de Lioncourt snorted. No one who had not been born French, no one who had not gone through the French school system, truly had French friends. French society women made their friends in school,
en classe
, most particularly at the convents to which most of them were sent, and they consolidated these friendships at the
ralleys
, those teenaged social groups into which their mothers organized them tightly, almost as soon as they were born. She knew two hundred people who would be delighted to eat a dinner at her table, and who would invite her in turn, but unless you had been born into their circle you would always be no more than a guest in their eyes. All her French relationships had been based on Robert’s family connections, and these people had always known that Robert had no money before his marriage. In French society the Lioncourts could not possibly pass for rich people. Nor was Robert’s family particularly distinguished. They had never, she admitted to herself, made it to the top of the ladder, never absolutely
made the grade
. She would never forgive the French for that. She’d be glad to leave Paris, a city that had, in any case, seen its best days.

But, oh God, the sheer
hell
of dealing with French moving men!

Spider and Billy sat at Le Train Bleu, a newly opened, expensive French restaurant off Madison Avenue, waiting for Cora de Lioncourt to join them for lunch on a day in late June of 1980. They were in New York for a few days on business while the Beverly Hills Scruples, over four years old, was closed for repainting and some new construction. June was a dead month in the retail business, too late for their kind of customers, who chose their spring and summer wardrobes in late winter and bought for fall in July, so Billy had decreed that closing the store would be no loss at all.

“Why are we meeting this woman?” Spider asked.

“We can use her,” Billy answered. “It’s as simple as that. Anyway, I think you’ll like her. I’ve met her here and there every time I come to New York and she’s remarkably pleasant. She knows everybody … on my last trip she gave a small dinner for me, and I had the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”

“Aside from worming her way into your affections, just what is it she can do for us that we need?”

“Oh, Spider, don’t be so suspicious.”

“Mrs. Ikehorn, there’s a look on your face that tells me that you’re up to no good.”

“Mr. Elliott, have I ever been up to good?”

“Jesus, Billy, ask me a question I can answer.”

Spider gave Billy that happy, sensuous grin to which she had tried to become immune. When Valentine had agreed to leave New York and come to work at Scruples in 1976, she had conned Billy over the phone into giving Spider a job as well. Billy had found out about Valentine’s trick before she met Spider, yet he had managed to persuade her to give him a chance. The first thought she’d had about Spider was that he was one man she could never allow herself, and she repeated that thought every time she was alone with him, erecting a barrier of playfulness that kept his attractiveness, for he had only grown more attractive as the years passed, at a distance that was comfortable … or almost comfortable.

Billy sipped her white wine, meditating on those particular qualities that made Spider, along with her lawyer, Josh Hillman, one of the two men in the world she trusted. There was not the slightest taint of affectation to him, she thought; his raw manliness, like his outrageous masculinity, his rogue energy, was bred in the bone. He had a manly energy, a manly gentleness, a manly openness, a loyalty and a kindness that were steady and unconscious, part of him no matter with whom he was dealing. He had juice, that damned sexual juice that was so difficult for any woman to ignore, but it was his pith, nothing he turned on or off for reasons of his own. She couldn’t imagine him telling her a lie, but above all else, in spite of his glamour, Spider had a manly simplicity that no amount of worldly experience had tarnished or diminished, quite probably because he had never really grown up.

While Billy sat composedly, looking over the new and interestingly decorated restaurant, Spider gazed at her reflectively. She had seemed like such a difficult customer when he’d met her that nothing could have persuaded him that four years later he’d consider her a close friend. She had never lost certain qualities that must to this day make her seem impossible to other people; she was still royally impatient, still a demanding perfectionist, still impulsive and determined to have her own way, still capable of springing into sudden autocratic rages when her detailed orders weren’t carried out properly.

Unquestionably many people feared her, Spider realized, but they were not the people who knew her best. No question that there were a multitude of poorly organized architects and decorators, contractors and heads of construction crews in Hong Kong, Munich, Honolulu, Rio, Zurich and Monte Carlo who developed migraines at the sound of her name.

When Billy announced that she was coming to visit here in New York or in Chicago, Spider knew that no one who worked at either store relaxed until she had flown back to Los Angeles. Billy was one holy hell of a tough boss, no question about it, but she never remained unreasonable or unfair when conditions were explained to her, even during the difficulties of creating the first Scruples. She gave people a second chance, on occasion even a third, before she fired them, and those who performed satisfactorily were promptly rewarded with loyalty and generosity.

He was curious about this new friend of hers who had invited them both to lunch. He and Valentine often wondered why Billy had so few women friends. She created an ever-so-slight, but distinct, wall of distance between herself and almost every woman they knew; only a few, like Susan Arvey, were treated without that tiny touch of reserve, and Billy didn’t even like Susan Arvey, although she respected her mind.

Valentine and Billy had grown very close in the last few years. “Today Billy told me that she feels that Dolly, Jessica Strauss and I are her three dearest friends in the world,” Valentine had told him, just the other day. “I felt so touched, so pleased, and yet a little sad for her, I don’t know quite why. Perhaps because she doesn’t have a husband to be her best friend, the way I do.” It
was
sad, Spider thought, that you couldn’t be as rich as Billy was and still expect to be a normal woman, with normal friendships. Certainly not with a normal dating life, God knows. She tried to deal with the men who went after her, but she was gun-shy now, and who could blame her?

Marriage to that miserable peckerhead, Vito, had humanized her, but the divorce had made her suspicious of all men. He dreaded to think what else the divorce might have done to Billy if Gigi hadn’t been there. Gigi had brought out a tenderness and a deeply feminine sweetness in Billy that Spider hadn’t realized she possessed, but she could still be swept into a moody unhappiness that he sensed came from someplace in her he didn’t understand.

Billy looked younger now than when he’d met her, but he knew she was thirty-seven, not quite a year older than he. It might be the haircut, Spider thought, for not long after the divorce she’d had her long, dark brown hair cut very short, so that it had shaped itself into a careless point at her nape and sprang back from her forehead in thick, blunt-cut, large, loose curls that looked as if no hairdresser had ever come near them, a deceptively casual-looking style that had to be trimmed every two weeks. Her head, held high by her powerful throat, seemed more imperious now than when it had been softened by the hair she used to wear to her shoulders. Her luscious mouth was as full as ever, her naturally rosy lips still covered only by a layer of transparent gloss, and her eyes had lost none of their smoky mystery; in fact, they had gained in their dark, unflinching challenge. If you had no idea who Billy was, you’d have to turn your head to look at her, he thought, for she carried an empire in her eyes. Billy’s beauty—for she was a raging, flaming, tearing, wild-ass beauty, Spider admitted—retained its strong, verging-on-virile quality that made her seem to be one of a long line of huntresses. Today, in the fitted, belted red linen jacket and crisply tailored trousers Valentine had designed for her, Billy, oblivious of the fact that everyone in the crowded restaurant was aware of her, looked as if she could leap on a charger and lead a troop of redcoats to the sound of martial trumpets. She only needed a sword.

“Madame is late,” he remarked.

“We got here early,” Billy answered, looking at her watch. “In exactly one minute she’ll be one minute late and there she is now, so stop your whining, you’re just hungry.”

Billy introduced them and as he sat down, after rising to greet the newcomer, Spider looked her over curiously. A strange and strikingly distinctive bird, he thought, reserving judgment, for he was a man who liked almost every woman he’d ever met, and he meant to give this lady a fair chance, although something told him, way down where he kept his deepest instincts, that she might turn out to be an exception to his feelings. Yet she was charming, perfectly charming, bubbling with amusing things to say, listening intently to what was said to her, and as far as he could tell, she was unimpressed by Billy’s position, an attitude Spider knew was rare.

“Cora has the most marvelous apartment I’ve ever seen, filled with the most exquisite things in New York,” Billy informed Spider.

“Do you like things, Spider?” Cora de Lioncourt inquired.

“Could you be a little more specific, Cora?” he replied.

“Antiques, objects, bibelots, great junk, ‘smalls,’ ” she said in her lovely voice in which the Southern echoes had never died.

“What’s a ‘small’?”

“A British dealer’s term for an addiction, a little object you hadn’t intended to buy and certainly don’t need, but end up paying too much for and take away with you, filled with the thrill of possession.”

“I get a kick out of great junk, but ‘smalls’ sound like a new kind of candy, too rich for my blood, and antiques are something I’ve never lived with and don’t know about … bibelots I tend to break.”

“Then you simply must come and visit me, let me show you my things, and be converted,” Cora said, seeming to be captivated by his indifference. “I have ten friends who say you’ve changed their lives by your incredibly perceptive advice about clothes—taste, in my experience, is never confined to only one area. I’m sure you’d have an instinctive knowledge about things, I’d bet money that you could tell a great antique chair from a merely good antique chair, this very minute, without knowing why, just because of your eye. Do say you’ll visit me!”

“I appreciate the invitation,” Spider said, “but I’m not much of a shopper. I like to advise women on how to make the most of themselves, but I consider that activity called ‘going shopping’ a kind of terrible torture.”

“Spider, Cora isn’t talking about shopping, she’s talking about collecting,” Billy laughed, familiar with his deliberately obtuse manner. Sometimes, though not often, Spider could be rubbed the wrong way.

“Billy, speaking of shopping, I had an idea last night just as I was going to sleep,” Cora de Lioncourt said, “and I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget. I thought that your Scruples ads, fabulous as they are, might possibly be made even better. I know absolutely nothing about advertising, so shut me up if it sounds ridiculous, but why don’t you appear in the ads yourself, instead of using models? It would be so much more interesting for women to see you, the actual owner, wearing the things you’re selling, and you’re probably roughly the age of your best customers, no matter how unfairly young you look. I’ve seen enough photographs of you to know you could carry it off—is that a totally stupid idea, or does it make any sense?”