Scruples Two (25 page)

Cora de Lioncourt entertained so well that it was inevitable for her to branch out into the field of parties. Women were always asking her for her secrets and she was generous with them, knowing that by the time they copied her she’d have found new sources to use. The florists whose shops she made fashionable, the caterers she discovered, the musicians she suggested, all paid her yearly fees with gratitude, for where Cora led, others followed.

There were several areas Cora chose not to venture into. Hair salons were too unpredictable, and she didn’t intend to risk losing a friend over a bad haircut; she trusted no jewelers or furriers except the great ones, whose reputation stood behind everything they sold, and such businesses had no need for her. She never felt the slightest desire to steer women into buying clothes from any particular store where expensive errors were bound to be made.

After three years of solid success making money from antiques dealers, decorators, restaurants and all the trades that were used in entertaining, Cora de Lioncourt found herself ready to undertake the launching of people. Here all her taste and discrimination and cleverness were essential to the delicate task.

People who required launching, new people who had recently arrived in New York or natives who had finally made big money, of whom there seemed to be more and more every day, were so often simply not launchable, lacking the material she required. She would only accept clients who had the real possibility of swimming on their own once she’d given them a send-off. She could guarantee nothing, as with the restaurants, and she made sure that she got paid up front. Ah, but when the right client came along, Cora thought, smiling to herself, when the right couple from the hinterlands telephoned, or the right newly single woman with huge alimony presented herself, then there was an opportunity in gold indeed! There was almost nothing such people wouldn’t pay for a toehold in New York society, and when Cora de Lioncourt invited them to a few of her famous little dinners, when she introduced them gradually into her wide circle, when she helped them to entertain on their own, in the apartments that had been decorated by people she suggested, they could hardly complain if they didn’t click.

It all made one big, grand circle, a dance in which every move led some solid sum to drop into her lap, and from there into her rapidly increasing portfolio of stocks and bonds. And in the dance Cora had established, new leaders were always needed, stars like Billy Ikehorn who would add a glittering layer of the highest luster to the world Cora had created around herself.

A close association with Billy Ikehorn, even if she spent nothing, never bought so much as a teaspoon, would be worthwhile to Cora, but she was convinced that with the right encouragement Billy Ikehorn was on the verge of spending more money than any other woman to whom she had so generously unveiled her sources. The Scruples advertising idea would have brought her no commission at all except Billy’s gratitude. Occasionally, for special people, she gave away such tips, which she thought of, reveling in the delicious lowness of it, as “loss leaders.”

The fall party for Scruples would merely be a beginning. Clearly, Billy had to have an establishment in New York. It was incomprehensible to Cora that Billy kept nothing but a four-room pied-à-terre in the Carlyle, that she had only one home base in California. It was almost a scandal, Cora thought, for such a rich woman to live so meagerly, so stingily, in such a small and unpretentious fashion. She owed it to the tradesmen of New York, if to no one else, to spread some of that money around.

Her plans for Billy were going to be no less than a public service, Cora de Lioncourt promised herself, even though she would never be able to take public credit.

When Spider was out of town on business, Valentine found it doubly difficult to sleep. She’d always been prey to insomnia, but it was almost bearable when she could prowl around their apartment, knowing that Spider was sleeping. Now, when she found herself alone and awake in the middle of the night, she was more restless than ever. Thank God, Spider would be home from New York tomorrow, she thought as she went to watch television in the living room at two in the morning, for insomnia was far worse when she was lying in bed than when she was up and doing something. She could have gone to New York with Spider, as he had begged her to, but Valentine had decided to take advantage of the days in which the store was closed for redecoration to look for a house.

No man could be expected to have the patience to inspect house after house with a real-estate saleswoman, but Valentine had plunged into the process this past spring, knowing that somewhere the perfect house lay waiting for them. Today she thought she had … perhaps … found it, and her sleeplessness was compounded by her excitement at the idea of taking Spider back there tomorrow to get his opinion.

She turned the television off in disgust. No, nothing so bad could be endured. There was only one remedy, to which she had recourse frequently before her marriage and even now when her husband was out of town. She must work until she fell asleep from sheer fatigue, and to do that she had to go to Scruples, to her design studio. The house she’d seen today had room for a studio, as this apartment did not, Valentine thought as she dressed hastily, room for a garden, room for a library, room for children, room … so much lovely space … it would be a different sort of life, although no life could be better than hers was now.

Quickly she drove the short distance to Scruples and let herself in. Because of her nighttime visits she had a key to the service entrance and knew all the security codes. The store smelled of fresh paint, new lumber and sawdust, Valentine noticed as she made her way to her studio, and Scruples looked huge and strange with all the inventory temporarily removed and put into storage. It had been emptied and made totally available to the crews of painters and carpenters, dozens of them still working overtime to get the job done quickly, but her studio was forbidden territory. She had allowed no repainting there, thank you very much, for she was up to her eyebrows in work on the
Legend
costumes, and could not be disturbed for anything, she had told the painting contractor indignantly.

Valentine turned on the bright overhead lights of the studio and looked around in relief. Here she could spend the night profitably and even sleep for a few hours on the battered old chaise longue she kept in a corner, half buried under her collection of fashion magazines and old copies of
Women’s Wear Daily
. It was an old, friendly, familiar habit, leafing through back issues of
WWD
, looking for pictures of old friends, seeing what had happened months ago in the frenzied world of Seventh Avenue that she was happy to be part of no longer. Valentine often took a break in her daily routine, curled up there for half an hour and browsed through the papers, but she hadn’t had time to do so recently, because of the press of work.

She was simply going to have to demand a larger studio, Valentine realized as she looked around, if Billy ever again asked her to design costumes for a film, as she had with
Legend
. The studio had never been so impossibly crowded before, but in order to create the costumes for Melanie Adams on the schedule she had agreed to, Valentine had been forced to have a dozen dressmaker’s dummies made exactly to Melanie’s measure.

The actress had neither the time nor the patience to stand still for lengthy fittings for the sixty-odd costumes Valentine was designing. Each of the dummies was presently clad in a gauzelike material, a kind of heavy, flexible tulle, that Valentine was using instead of the traditional dressmaker’s muslin, which was too stiff to use as a
toile
, the working design for these 1920s and 1930s costumes she was creating, costumes that must drape softly and becomingly.

In addition to the crowd of dummies, the small studio was littered with old photographs from films in which Garbo and Dietrich had starred in their early days; piles of yellowed old newspapers that showed the two actresses as they embarked or disembarked from Atlantic crossings or posed for publicity stills, as well as books of film history that had been brought by the studio for Valentine to study. Her usually orderly studio had never been in such a mess before, Valentine thought, dismayed, but it wouldn’t remain that way for long. There was just enough room for her to move around the dummies, cutting, pinning, draping and redraping the resilient soft gauze; the silent, white, headless figures were more agreeable company to her than any middle-of-the-night television movie.

Valentine worked industriously for several hours. The worst of the labor on
Legend
was almost finished, Wells Cope had approved all her sketches, and only another half dozen costumes were left to be worked on next week and then translated from gauze into actual cloth. Melanie Adams would have to bring her precious self here in person for the last costume fittings, but that particular problem was one she would leave to Mr. Cope to cope with, Valentine thought sleepily, for she was pleased with her work and ready to stop. Exhausted, she stretched out on the old chaise and lit a Gauloise Bleu, so redolent of Paris, from the package she always kept there. As Valentine lay back and puffed, she felt delightfully relaxed … yes, definitely, she must have a studio in their new house, she thought just before she plunged into a deep sleep.

The burning cigarette dropped from her hand and landed on a pile of brittle photographs, which caught fire instantly. The photographs ignited one of the old newspapers, and within seconds the entire studio was ablaze, the gauze on the dressmaker’s dummies going up in flares of flame, the paper that filled the room feeding the roaring fire that quickly consumed Valentine’s studio. The fire raced through the newly painted offices down the newly painted central staircase and attacked the piles of lumber left everywhere by the carpenters. It was fueled by the cans of paint that were standing about in every corner, some of them carelessly closed by the painters who were to return the next morning. Hungrily the roaring blaze destroyed floors and walls and newly varnished display cases, rushed to attack the paneling in the Edwardian Winter Garden, and leapt through the freshly papered walls of the dressing rooms that stood with their doors propped open for the workmen’s convenience.

In just a few fierce, catastrophic minutes, well before the Beverly Hills Fire Department arrived, Scruples was gutted, its interior burned to the ground within its setting of formal gardens that kept the store separate from Rodeo Drive. Valentine was dead, quickly asphyxiated long before she could have known what was happening.

9

A
lmost a year after the fire, in the spring of 1981, Josh Hillman, for all his lawyerly attention to detail, felt that no matter how carefully he looked for a still-unfinished piece of business, the Scruples file could be closed. Too agitated to sit down, he paced about his own office in the imposing Century City offices of Strassberger, Lipkin and Hillman, unable to feel the usual relief of a man who knows that a difficult job of work is behind him.

Billy had never laid eyes on the site of the Beverly Hills Scruples again, he thought, remembering how she had come to him straight from the airport and given her orders in a state of grief that he would not have believed possible during their years of a close business relationship.

“Bulldoze the outside walls to the ground,” she had said, in a parched, ragged, all-but-unrecognizable voice, “bulldoze the gardens, clean it up and sell the land immediately.”

He’d nodded assent and made a note, but then she continued to pour out instructions that simply didn’t make any sense to him.

“Sell the Chicago store, sell the New York store, the Munich store, the Honolulu store, the Hong Kong store; stop construction on all the other stores that are underway, sell all the parcels of land that I bought for future construction, get rid of them as quickly as possible, Josh.”

“Billy, I understand how you feel about the Beverly Hills store,” he’d told her gently, “but selling Chicago and New York? That’s going too far, Billy, much too far. As your lawyer I have to advise you that it’s the worst possible business decision you could make. Both of those stores are doing amazing business and their locations can never again be duplicated. Nobody in his right mind would sell them in today’s boom market. I know how deeply upset you feel, but, believe me, this is not the time to make any long-range plans. We’ll talk about it in a few weeks if you still—”

“Josh! Shut up! I’ve made up my mind and I’m not interested in profit or loss.”

“Look, you’ve got to absorb some of the shock. You’re not rational now, it’s normal to feel this way but if these orders are carried out, you’ll ruin the Scruples empire.”

“The sooner the better,” she’d said in a tone of such arid, corrosive intensity that he’d stared at her incredulously, for no one knew better than he how much the triumphant success of the Scruples boutiques meant to her.

“Billy, forgive me, but I just don’t understand,” he’d said, utterly at a loss.

“Valentine would be alive today if I hadn’t asked her to design the costumes for
Legend
. I’m sure that was what she must have been doing in the store—she was overworked and trying to meet the deadline. It was my fault, Josh, and that’s all I’m ever going to say about it to anybody but you. The only reason I’m telling you is so that you’ll stop objecting and get to work.
It was my fault
. This is the only thing I can think of to do—I know it won’t bring her back, but … somehow.… it’s right.”

“Billy—” he’d stopped, arrested in mid-protestation by her ghastly voice.

“Josh, I expect you to work with the Ikehorn estate lawyers in New York, I want nothing more to do with it, I leave it in your hands. Pay six months’ salary to everyone who had worked in the Beverly Hills Scruples, two months’ to the people from Chicago and New York, and pay every outstanding bill of whatever nature at once, without discussion, Josh, without discussion. Never, under any circumstances do I intend to talk to you about this again.
Scruples must cease to exist.”

Billy had disappeared from his office even before he’d had a chance to tell her that he would follow her orders. He had accepted her crazed haste, her irrational feelings of guilt, but he had not acted without his customary thoughtful precision. It had been a year before all those orders could be carried out and finalized, down to the last comma on the last sheet of legal paper. Josh Hillman had liquidated the Scruples holdings, wherever they existed, at an efficient but businesslike pace. He knew that the market for choice retail locations had never been higher and was growing by the minute. By the time he’d finished disposing of the stores and the land he was able to take a grim satisfaction in the fact that the destruction of the Scruples empire had realized a substantial net profit, particularly in the case of the Chicago and New York stores, which he was able to sell immediately. The rest of the work was completed now and all that remained, although no one in the world knew it, was the piece of apricot marble with the Scruples name carved on it that had been fixed to the front door of the boutique on Rodeo Drive. It had been routinely delivered to him by the Beverly Hills Fire Department, in his capacity as Billy’s legal representative, and he had not been able to part with it.

The nameplate was all that was left to him of Valentine, Valentine whom he had loved from the first instant he laid eyes on her; Valentine for whom he had divorced his wife of many years; Valentine who had intended to marry him, so he believed, until the very day she eloped with Spider Elliott. No one had ever known of their love, not even Joanne, his ex-wife. Josh Hillman had had to accept Valentine’s marriage in the same stoic, terrible silence in which he had grieved for her after her death. It was the only thing he could do for the woman who had given him such joy.

Josh Hillman looked east from the windows of his twenty-second-story office. It was a smogless day and he could see as far as the outline of the tall apartment house in which Valentine had lived, first alone, and later, after her marriage with Spider. Where was Spider now, he wondered.

The check for ten million dollars, which represented Spider and Valentine’s share of their partnership with Billy, had been delivered to Spider by messenger while he was still in Los Angeles, but no one had seen him since the memorial service for Valentine. Through a yacht broker at Marina del Rey who had called him before he accepted Spider’s check, hastily written on a local bank, Josh had learned that Spider had bought an ocean-going vessel, a battered, third-hand, but basically sound old sailing boat with no frills, a boat that could properly be termed anything from a yacht to a hulk. It was some fifty-five feet long, carried a reliable motor besides its sails, and possessed four cabins, enough for a small crew as well as the owner. Within the week Spider had moved a few belongings on board, hired two seasoned crew members, stocked the boat, and simply disappeared in the direction of Hawaii. Twice there had been word that someone had glimpsed him, but he communicated with nobody. He had been spotted at an anchorage off Kauai, and then he had been lost to view for months until he anchored at Raiatea, in the Society Islands of French Polynesia. There, in a region as large as western Europe, Josh supposed that Spider had remained, for lack of other news.

He wished he could do the same, Josiah Isaiah Hillman thought, he wished he could just tell the world to continue on its way to perdition without him and sail away and try to come to some bearable terms with life, but he was forty-seven, the senior partner of a great law firm, a man with three children and duties to the community. The only romance in his orderly, upright, achieving life, a life of responsibility and probity, had been his passion for Valentine, and now that she was gone he would continue on as he had before he met her, knowing that he could count on habit to keep him going.

Thank God, he thought, no one had dreamed of asking him to speak at the memorial service that had been held for Valentine in Billy’s gardens. He would not have been able to utter a word without breaking down, any more than Billy or Spider, who had sat withdrawn from each other and everyone else. He had not dared to look at Spider, but he had glanced at Billy and seen that her face was almost entirely hidden by the wide brim of the black hat with which she had sheltered herself from view. Dolly Moon had spoken, telling them of her magical experiences with Valentine with such overflowing love, and the control of the great actress that she was, that her words had been healing. And Jimbo Lombardi, Valentine’s great pal from her days as a New York fashion designer, had remembered her with his saving humor, recounting a trove of whimsical memories of the years in which Valentine had been the most vivid member of the coterie that swirled around her former employer, John Prince. Wells Cope had spoken too, in a grave, eloquent appreciation of Valentine’s talent, and finally Gigi had uttered a few short phrases in her clear, unfaltering voice, although she trembled visibly, speaking of the first day on which she had met Valentine, and of the other days on which they had been together, only happy days, only days of joy. And then it was over.

Billy had closed the house on Charing Cross Road, leaving Josie Speilberg and Burgo O’Sullivan in charge of supervising its upkeep. A cleaning crew went in once a week, to keep the unused rooms spotless, the gardens continued to be tended, but Billy seemed to have deserted California forever when she had gone away a year ago, taking Gigi with her to spend the rest of the summer with Jessica Thorpe Strauss and her family in East Hampton.

And he, Josh Hillman thought, had to go home now and dress for another dinner party at Susan Arvey’s, because, according to her, he was now the most eligible single man in Hollywood. He wished on no other man such a dreary, useless, pathetic fate.

“I can’t believe the Labor Day weekend’s coming up,” Jessica said mildly, her famously sad lavender eyes wide, her famously enchanting mouth drooping in its famously irresistible way. She looked up from her book in the last week of August 1980, through the cloud of baby hair that still retained its Pre-Raphaelite vagueness. She and Billy had been sitting silently, reading on a screened porch. All summer long, from the time Billy and Gigi had arrived after Valentine’s funeral until today, two months later, Jessica had avoided any hint of a word that might seem to raise the question of Billy’s future activities, but now the end of summer was upon them, and something had to be settled.

Three years older than Billy, Jessica had seen Billy through the most important changes of her adulthood, but never in sixteen years had she known her friend to be closed off from her in this granitelike grief, an inaccessible statue of a woman who had come half alive only when she threw herself into sailing and playing tennis with Jessica’s own five kids and Gigi, as if Billy had come to East Hampton instead of going to summer camp, seeking nothing more than the adolescents’ youthful spirits and joking company. She had avoided being alone with Jessica as much as possible.

As if I’d ask her questions, Jessica thought, as if I’d try to give her sensible advice, as if I don’t know that there are some things that words can’t touch and that I can’t do anything to help her.

But after Labor Day the Strausses would have to begin to think about packing up and organizing their yearly return to Manhattan, for the junior members of the family would all be returning to their various schools in September and there were clothes to be bought and arrangements by the dozen to be made.

“Labor Day … oh, Jessie, no, not the end of the summer … I’ve always hated Labor Day, but this year …” Billy said slowly, lowering her book reluctantly. “I can’t remember when the approach of any holiday has made me so anxious.”

“Hmmm.” Jessica made a neutral noise. She wasn’t going to interrupt, Jessica thought, not when it seemed as if Billy might finally be ready to have the discussion that was inevitable.

“Jessie,” Billy said, sitting up straight and pushing the book aside, “I’ve been taking advantage of you all summer, don’t waste your time saying it isn’t true and other nice, well-meaning crap because we both know that all I’ve been doing here is trying to get myself back together. I’m so sick of kids I could scream, so I guess I’ll have to talk to you.”

“Hmmm.”

Billy smiled faintly. “You can go ‘hmmm’ all day, I won’t mind, so spare yourself, you need to save that energy for shopping for shoes with the twins, they’ve told me they plan to refuse to wear anything but sneakers all winter—oh, I know all your kids’ secrets, Jessie, including that David junior is insanely in love with Gigi, but since they’re the same age he might just as well have a crush on Jeanne Moreau in the maturity department, but I swore not to tell you, so promise you’ll pretend that you don’t know, all right?”

“Hmmmmmmm.”

“However, he’s so cute that she does let him make love to her.”

“What!”

“I knew I could get a rise out of you.” Billy actually laughed at the expression on Jessica’s face, and Jessica, hearing the laugh, relaxed. If Billy could tease her, things were beginning to get back to normal.

“So what am I going to do with my life? That’s the question you’re asking yourself, aren’t you?”

“It has crossed my mind,” Jessica said with mild encouragement.

“Listen to this,” Billy said, “ ‘you just have to
go on
when it is worst and most helpless—there is just one thing to do … and that is to go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.’ Doesn’t that sound like good advice?”

“For what? Navigating the Amazon?”