Scruples Two (26 page)

“It’s some advice given to F. Scott Fitzgerald when he was having trouble with
Tender Is the Night
. I think it could apply to just about anything except eating a chocolate cake. So I’m going to follow it and just go ‘straight on through.’ ”

“Through what?”

“Through life, you know perfectly well that’s what I mean,” Billy said with such bravado that she sounded shrill. “I’m going to pretend that I’m an appallingly rich, not half-bad-looking, single and still young woman who can buy literally anything in the world that she wants. I’m going to own houses in the right places, meet the right people, fuck the right men, give the right parties, and be photographed at the right places at the right time of the year.” She paused, scrutinized Jessica’s unjudgmental expression and continued in a lower voice. “Only a very few people will know that I’ve utterly failed with my life because I refuse, from now on, to collaborate in my ruin. What people think about you ultimately depends on what you admit, and henceforth I admit nothing unless it looks, smells and sounds like triumph.”

“Good grief,” Jessie murmured.

“Well, what do you think?” Billy’s question was uneasy, defiant and touched with panic.

“Why ask me? Nobody that triumphant would need my opinion.”

“I mean it, Jessie, I really do intend to do just what I said, because I’ve got to have a plan and it’s the only one I can seem to imagine that won’t hurt anybody but myself. I’m aware that it’s not the prescription for getting to heaven—”

“It involves only three of the Seven Deadly Sins, actually,” Jessica said thoughtfully. “Lust, greed and pride.”

“What are the others?”

“Envy, gluttony, sloth and anger, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, although I don’t know who appointed him.… but looked at that way, you’re marginally—just barely—on the side of the angels.”

“I wouldn’t care if I committed six out of the seven. I couldn’t possibly do gluttony.… I just want to get out of this place I’m stuck at in my head, and the high life is all I can think of. I know I should be devoting myself to the betterment of humanity, but I can’t kid myself that I’d last long at that … I’ve given Josh carte blanche to use my money to do it for me, he’s so good about knowing how to give money where it’s needed.”

“What about Gigi?”

“We’ve talked quite a bit. She doesn’t really want to go to college, and I can’t blame her, I never went either, and I certainly can’t force her. She’s impatient to become independent as soon as possible, so she’s gotten herself an entry-level job with the fanciest caterer in New York, it’s called Voyage to Bountiful, Cora Middleton suggested them. Of course I’d like to keep her on a chain so that she’d never get far from me, but officially what can I do but be in favor of it, given Gigi’s abilities?”

“But where will she live?”

“I’ve rented an apartment for her in the building with the best security I could find. She’s going to share it with a girl named Sasha Nevsky. Sasha’s a very grown-up, responsible twenty-two, and her mother was friendly with Gigi’s mother. I arranged the whole thing over the phone with Mrs. Nevsky … she was thrilled because Sasha’s been living in a walk-up in a dubious neighborhood. Now the two girls will be almost around the corner from you, so at least I know Gigi can always drop in on you for advice when she needs it, and when she has a vacation she’ll come and visit me or I’ll come to New York to visit her.”

“Coming to visit from where, for heaven’s sake? How come your high life doesn’t start in Manhattan?” Jessica asked, alarmed for the first time in this conversation.

“I want to live outside of the United States for a while, Jessie,” Billy said slowly.

“Oh, Billy, don’t go away,” Jessica pleaded. “Why do you have to leave New York?”

“Ah, come on, I need a fresh start and New York is too public, I feel I’ve used it up, everyone knows everything about me … you understand, don’t you?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“And I won’t be any farther away than I was when I was in California,” Billy said in her most persuasive voice, “at least not at first. It’s the same three thousand miles either way, Paris or L.A.”

“Paris! You’re
not
going back to live in Paris! Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop, I don’t believe it!”

“French is the only foreign language I speak, and anyway I have unfinished business there.”

“I’ll just bet I know what it is.”

“Oh, Jessie, you don’t know everything, you only know almost everything.… oh, so what, maybe you’re right, I did leave Paris when I was poor and rejected, with my tail between my legs, and it is tempting to think of a grand return … and if you’re going to go in for the high life, you look for it where they’ve known how to do it right for hundreds of years, no?”

“I suppose that was Cora’s idea too, no?”

“She’s horrified. She wanted me to stay right here, just like you.”

“Oh Christ. I’m being abandoned again. As if it weren’t tough enough being the discontinued woman.”

“Huh?”

“My glove size was the first to go,” tiny Jessica said mournfully, “or maybe it was my bra, it was so long ago I hardly remember. Nobody wears a 34A cup anymore, that I guarantee. Then came my panties … they stopped making size-four panties and didn’t even warn me so I could stock up. Forget shoes, they stopped designing size-five shoes for grownups years ago, and I even have to buy my tennis socks in the children’s department. As for clothes, what used to realistically be labeled a size eight is is now called a size four or six, you’d never believe my alteration bills. Am I shrinking, I wonder, or is there some growing prejudice against divinely delicate women? Just about the only thing I can still be sure of getting in the right size is prescription reading glasses. You
can
be too rich … like you … or too thin.… like me.… but you can never have enough reading glasses. They discontinued my lipstick color and my favorite mascara and—oh, there are the children.”

“If a magnificent six-foot-two-inch lad can be termed a child. What’s David junior singing?”

“His new ode to Gigi. It’s sung to the tune of ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ … ‘I’ve grown accustomed to her shoes, her heels, her soles, her mules, hold no mystery for me now, her infinite variety is on the wane, it’s time I looked for different cooze again, I’ve grown accustomed to her shoes.’ Sweet, isn’t it, even if it doesn’t quite scan?” Jessica sang in her high, pure soprano, enjoying her revenge for Billy’s joke about Gigi and David.

“Jessica!
Cooze?
How dare he? And where did he hear that word? Gigi didn’t say he was making love to her, but she didn’t say he
wasn’t
, either,” Billy hissed.

“Then I guess we’ll never know, will we?”

“Mothers of sons are insufferably smug!”

“I have daughters to worry about, too.”

“Don’t waste time worrying,” Billy said, suddenly serious. “It doesn’t help. The things you pick to worry about don’t happen, and then you find out that you wish they had, because they wouldn’t have been that bad after all compared to what did happen.”

Sasha Nevsky sat on the floor, surrounded by half-packed suitcases, and gave herself up to a gloomy fit of disappointment and anticipated disaster. She had many reasons not to want to leave her pleasantly messy room-and-a-half without a view on a rundown street off West End Avenue. She had been coerced into giving up her very own inviolate place, by God, to move across town to a newly furnished, luxurious apartment in the very center of the best part of the East Side that she was going to have to share,
share
, with Gigi Orsini, who was almost four years younger than she, a girl whom she barely remembered as a sort of Munchkin with pounds of awful hair, a girl who looked as if she hadn’t reached puberty. Sasha was perfectly aware that her mother had sold her down the river to Billy Ikehorn, and all for the sake of solicitous, round-the-clock doormen, a guarded service entrance and an elevator that was still run by a real live man, not just by pushbuttons. She was going to have to give up her privacy, her priceless, hard-won privacy so necessary for her complicated life, just because her mother wanted her to live in a good neighborhood in a safe building.

But when Sasha’s mother, Tatiana Orloff Nevsky, that terrorist gypsy, took to a notion, no member of her family dared to cross her, a fact Sasha accepted bleakly. It had been difficult enough getting permission to move out on her own, and she was still keeping a discreetly low profile, because of the nature of her particular calling. Her mother had opposed her job for a year, before giving in and letting Sasha exercise her talent, but, as she reminded her daughter regularly, her permission had been given on a temporary basis.

How could one tiny, bright-eyed woman manage to be so powerful as to prevent her daughter from using her own abilities for so long? Sasha wondered. What gave her mother the unquestioned and absolute rule she enjoyed in the wide family circle? If she could ever figure out what invisible but unquestioned moral authority made her mother the unrivaled boss lady of six families, each one of them headed by one of her mother’s five younger sisters, all born Orloffs, she’d look for those qualities in herself, develop them, Sasha resolved, and take over the world.

Glumly, sorting out panty hose by color, Sasha reviewed her twenty-two years of life. She was the Nevsky misfit, the all-but-disgrace to the entire close-knit Russian Jewish tribe of the Orloff sisters, the only one among the host of her talented cousins who couldn’t sing, couldn’t act, couldn’t play any musical instrument and, tragedy of tragedies, couldn’t dance. She couldn’t tap, couldn’t attempt ballet, couldn’t even manage a simple time step, she had no fucking
rhythm
in a family in which babies were born auditioning for Hal Prince.

Family Thanksgivings had been the worst, Sasha decided. She’d have to sit there, hating her too-tall, too-skinny, untalented self and listen to tales of musicals past and musicals present and future, on Broadway or off, revivals or tours, for old musicals never died. When they stopped swapping musical stories, she’d heard endless accounts of her cousins’ lessons and recitals and triumphs in dance and music school, of her aunts’ hopes and plans for them, all the while wondering what she would do in life, for academically she had nothing much to boast of either. Her native shrewdness, her quick mind, had never translated into the good marks that might have commanded a little respect.

She knew what the rest of the family thought of her. They pitied her in their boisterous, good-natured way if they ever bothered to think about her at all; she was their family wet sparrow shivering on a branch, a harmless stick of a girl, Tatiana’s one failure, overlooked and unconsidered, without any of the necessary juices that went into the rich Orloff-Nevsky stew. She used to look at herself in the mirror and persuade herself that there was nothing really wrong with the way she looked, but as soon as she found herself within the Orloff-Nevsky circle, Sasha became so uncomfortable that she made herself as inconspicuous as possible, withdrawing into whatever corner she could find. Whatever looks she possessed she hid, hunching her shoulders forward and slumping, making herself as plain and small as possible, with the instinct of the outsider for protective coloration. She knew that if any of the family were to notice evidence of the smallest attempt to make herself attractive, it would become the major news of the day, sure to be commented on with a deluge of too much well-meant surprise, too much encouragement, too much advice. Only the constant loving reassurance of her brilliant older brother, Zachary, a many-talented boy five years older than she, had kept up Sasha’s self-esteem during those formative years.

Until. Until she’d grown into her splendid set of assets at a much later age than usual. Maybe the Orloff-Nevskys, a naturally lean and fairly flat-chested group, with typical dancers’ well-muscled legs and spinal flexibility, didn’t think it was an asset to have the prettiest pair of perfectly shaped tits and the most delicately emphatic of rounded asses and the most desirably tiny waist in the world, but another group of people did, and would pay for them, and so she, formerly an ungifted, hopeless, skinny wretch, she, Sasha Nevsky, had turned into the top lingerie model on Seventh Avenue.

The top
. A lingerie showroom was as close to a theater as she’d ever get, Sasha realized, but if there had still been a Ziegfeld, she’d have been his lead showgirl because she walked like a divinity. Sasha Nevsky, she mused, thinking of herself in the third person as she often did, walked with a pure inspiration no dance lessons could have taught, she walked with a natural and inimitable mixture of exactly enough sass and exactly enough sexiness and exactly enough dignity to display the expensive panties and bras and slips and nightgowns manufactured by Herman Brothers, in a way that caused them to jump out of the showroom into department stores and specialty shops all over America.

The fact that Herman Brothers had been in business for almost a hundred years and was one of the most solid and respected lingerie firms in the United States, hadn’t been enough to convince her mother that working there wasn’t a form of white slavery. It had taken a visit to their impressive offices and a long talk with Mr. Jimmy, son of one of the original Herman brothers and now the stout, white-haired, bon-vivant owner of the firm, a man known for his benevolence and kindliness, to persuade Tatiana Nevsky to allow her daughter to take a job that paid her as much as any gypsy earned in a month, and, more important, paid it regularly.

Sasha had been working for Mr. Jimmy for over a year, and the same sense of drama that served her in the Herman Brothers showroom had been translated into her daily life. She straightened up to her full height of five feet nine, threw back her glorious shoulders, learned the minimum she needed to know about hair and makeup to give her native beauty full play, and carefully began to buy the kinds of clothes she had always dreamed about when she read fashion magazines. However, she never allowed the new Sasha to go to family parties, for her mother’s worst fears about the immorality of the lingerie world would only have been confirmed by the sight of such a sinister difference in her quiet but safely innocent and unblemished daughter.