Scruples Two (27 page)

But now, just when she’d totally settled into her new job, Sasha thought, where the working hours were not too demanding, the colleagues pleasant and the gossip splendidly instructive, now, when she’d just about acclimated her plants to the gloom of her room-and-a-half, now that she was on the verge of planning to straighten out her closets, now that her cat, Marcel, was finally housebroken, now that her three most favored dates had been allotted their time in her strict schedule, she, Sasha Nevsky, the magnificent one, was to be uprooted and moved to a place so classy that it wasn’t even near a subway!

Of course, she could take the bus crosstown and change on Eighth Avenue, she could even take taxis on her salary, but she was saving her money fervently so that one day she could open her own lingerie shop. If there was one thing Sasha Nevsky knew about, she told herself, it was what women wanted to wear under their clothes.

She couldn’t dance, but there was a future for her in retailing, she’d bet on it. She’d also bet that Gigi Orsini wore white cotton underpants and didn’t even need a bra. Obviously, with Billy Ikehorn as her stepmother, the dumpy nonentity she remembered must have become a spoiled bossy brat. And probably still a virgin.

Gigi explored her new apartment tentatively, opening and closing linen and china and glassware closets filled with unfamiliar wares, including a sterling silver service for twelve and a complete Limoges tea service. Every shelf in the kitchen was crowded with supplies, the fridge was bulging. What had Billy been thinking of? Did she expect her to be giving dinner parties?

Gigi felt like a burglar casing the joint, rather than the legitimate occupant. She’d slept here alone last night, on one of the two new beds in her room, after seeing Billy off to Paris, and no place had ever seemed so frighteningly quiet, although she knew that the building was as well guarded as a harem at the height of the Ottoman Empire. It was the first time in her life she’d been alone at night, all on her own, she realized, wondering uneasily when Sasha Nevsky would arrive.

The last time they’d seen each other must have been something like five years ago, Gigi thought, counting backwards to another life, and if they had talked she didn’t remember it, for the almost-four-year age gap that separated them had been all but unbridgeable. However, she remembered Sasha because she’d been so silent, visibly not at home in her skin, gawky and ill at ease, not one of the bubblingly attractive and competitively lively offspring of the Orloff sisters.

At least Sasha had the retiring and backward qualities that were desirable in a roommate, since Billy had decreed with all of her authority that she couldn’t be allowed to live on her own in New York without one. Gigi had put on her most disgraceful jeans and T-shirt, her oldest and dirtiest sneakers, so that she wouldn’t frighten the timid girl with any of the sensational new clothes that Billy had bought her before she took off for Paris. However, self-respect demanded that she put on a great deal more mascara than usual and add a few touches of new color to her hair, since this was New York and Sasha Nevsky was, if nothing else, a New Yorker.

A roommate should be invisible.… a mere presence.… a shadow … a neutral ghost who left you alone, whom you left alone, someone who respected your privacy, as you would respect hers. In 1980 it seemed bizarrely anachronistic that two girls who had nothing in common should be coerced by others into the enforced intimacy of living together. The only thing that connected them was Gigi’s mother, Mimi O’Brian, who had long ago been a friend of Tatiana Nevsky’s, and once a year Mrs. Nevsky would phone Gigi in California to find out how she was getting along.

Gigi shook her head in dismay. She was convinced that establishing Sasha Nevsky as her roommate was Billy’s way of making sure that she had a chaperone. Although she had understood Gigi’s desire to start to earn a living, once she’d found a suitable apartment for her, Billy had attached the Nevsky girl to the deal, a girl who had undoubtedly been instructed to watch over her, just because she was older. Who knows? Sasha might even be reporting to Billy every time she had a date, if anybody ever asked her out. Fortunately there was so much room in the apartment that they would each have a widely separated bedroom and bath. She’d simply have to work out a way to keep Sasha Nevsky at a distance.

Nervously, for she didn’t expect Sasha for an hour and she had nothing else to keep her occupied, Gigi did the first thing that came to hand in the unnaturally neat apartment, and mixed up a batch of her own bittersweet Dutch chocolate-chip cookies and put them to bake in the new oven. She was trying to take inventory of the contents of the fridge when the doorbell rang shrilly. She jumped at the sound, and wiping her hands on her apron she went to answer it, a deeply skeptical frown on her face.

“Yes?” she said irritably to the magnificent brunette who stood there, a tall, imposing creature of frightening sophistication, her black hair piled high, wearing a superbly fitted black suit, a suspicious look on her face, a modern-day Gibson Girl of lush Edwardian beauty, tapping her high-heeled shoe impatiently and holding a gigantic white Angora cat in the crook of her arm.

“Does Gigi Orsini live here?”

“Why?” Gigi asked, looking up through the filigree of her bangs.

“Does she or doesn’t she?” Sasha asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“Sasha Nevsky.” It was true, Gigi realized with a sinking heart, seeing something in the intruder’s face that looked familiar. Her impressively tilted nose was pert but haughty, her full upper lip seemed to curl upward in an expression of inborn superiority and her out-of-fashion noble brow was splendidly courageous.

“I’m Gigi,” she admitted reluctantly.

“No way,” Sasha said flatly.

“I am,” Gigi insisted, outraged.

“Prove it. Tell me my mother’s maiden name.”

“Stalin. And you’re just as impossible as she is.”

“Maybe we’ll get along,” Sasha laughed, walking uninvited into the apartment, “if you like cats.”

“Nobody mentioned one word about cats,” Gigi sputtered. “A cat is no part of this arrangement.”

“Like hell it’s not. Those two unindicted co-conspirators, my mother and your stepmother, would have agreed on my being your roommate even if I’d brought a small zoo. You’re lucky it’s just my dear little cat.”

“Ha! That thing’s as big as a dog, and it’s walking around like it owns this place.”

“It does, cats own every place they go. And his name is Marcel. Where do you get your hair dyed?”

“I do it myself … peroxide on a comb.”

“It’s sensational. Do you do the collars and cuffs too?”

“Huh?”

“Pubic hair, so guys will think you’re a natural tangerine-head.”

“No … but I will … damn! I should have thought of that myself, it’s a dead giveaway.”

“So you’re not a virgin?”

“Of course not,” Gigi said indignantly. “Are you?”

“My dear,” said Sasha grandly, “you are trying, rather pathetically, to insult the Great Slut of Babylon.”

“Wow! The ideal chaperone. Do you do it for a living?”

“Merely an avocation.”

“What makes you think you’re so great?”

“My reviews … all raves.” Sasha sat down and gestured at Gigi to sit down too, with the air of a gracious hostess. “If Sasha Nevsky’s reviews could be printed, I’d be world-famous. My God! Marcel likes you! He never does that!”

Gigi looked at the long-haired animal that had jumped into her aproned lap. His purring seemed more aggressive than friendly. She hoped she wasn’t allergic to cats.

“How many men,” Gigi asked curiously, “does it take to be a Great Slut?”

“Three. Always three, never less, never more. You have to know exactly where to draw the line or you’re just an ordinary slut.”

“Three at once?”

“Really, Gigi! Consecutively, and not on the same night. Each one gets two nights a week and on Sunday I sleep alone.”

“That’s an active sex life, but what exactly makes you a Great Slut instead of just a bimbo or a tramp?” Gigi asked, fascinated.

“Attitude, the key is all attitude. It’s entirely a mental concept. I make all my own rules. I’m capricious, I’m arbitrary, and when I’m feeling unusually kind and at my best, I’m still erratic and wayward.”

“Inconstant, fickle, temperamental—maybe verging on … cruel?” Gigi suggested.

“You’ve got it,” Sasha said approvingly. “Gigi.
Men Must Suffer
. Those are the three key words. Remember them. Without them you’re nothing but another girl, extremely cute, I admit, in fact I’d go so far as to say way beyond cute, into individual, into special, but still just a girl. If you were a Great Slut you couldn’t lose. What’s that wonderful smell?”

“Oh shit, I forgot!” Gigi jumped up and ran into the kitchen and rescued the cookies just in time. Sasha followed her curiously, and Marcel jumped up on the kitchen table and hovered meaningfully over the cookie pan.

“As soon as they cool a bit, we can eat them,” Gigi said.

“I should have known. Marcel was sucking up to you because he could tell you’d been making cookies. I wonder … hmmm … did you make them from a mix?”

“A mix? Look, Sasha, you may know everything about being a Great Slut, but can’t you recognize homemade cookies when you see them? I happen to be a superb cook, and I’m only telling you that because you don’t exactly hide your own light under a bushel.”

“Really great?”

“One of the best.”

“A superb cook who masters the arts of the Great Slut would be the
Ultimate
Slut,” Sasha said thoughtfully. “If you can teach me to cook, I’ll teach you how to be a Slut … there are a million vital details you’d never be able to imagine on your own, but you’ll have to get some decent clothes.”

“I have decent clothes. I just wore this old stuff so I wouldn’t intimidate you.”

“Maybe I can’t dance, Gigi, but you’re talking to a Nevsky here, and the daughter of an Orloff. We don’t intimidate.”

“I noticed,” Gigi said. “Somehow that came across.”

“I like you,” Sasha said. “And when I like someone, she stays liked. I’ll never make you suffer.”

“I like you too,” Gigi said, throwing her arms around Sasha’s waist and giving her a kiss on the shoulder.

“This could be fun,” Sasha said.

“It’s fun already,” Gigi declared. “Do any of your victims have a friend for me? I lost a lot of time before I met you.”

Perhaps, she thought, one day in the distant future she’d know Sasha well enough to confide in her about Quentin Browning and the mass of black-and-blue tissue she used to think of as her heart. After he’d decamped, Gigi found that some essential sense of faith in herself had vanished, some conviction about her own worth that she didn’t know she’d possessed until she’d lost it. She became convinced that she’d asked for the kick in the teeth she’d received; she’d set herself up for it, given herself to a stranger, without using any of the armor a girl was supposed to protect herself with, without pretense or holding back or coyness or any of the arts of flirtation that were taught in the movies and even at Uni High. She’d literally flung herself at him that first night, she’d latched on to Quentin like a leech, and finally he’d been driven to show her how little she meant to him, how little he respected her. No, she wasn’t a virgin, and she intended to learn as much about making men suffer as she could, but she couldn’t imagine that she’d ever be able to trust a man again. She could be a Great Slut even without a sex life. It was, as Sasha said, all in the attitude. She’d learned her lesson early, perhaps too early, but it had been necessary for the future. Her motto still held true; she regretted nothing.

During Christmas of 1980, Billy returned to New York to spend the holidays with Gigi. She’d been invited to the Nevskys’ for a fairly small family dinner of a mere two dozen people, and there she’d discovered how lucky she’d been in finding the demure, tongue-tied and unthreatening Sasha Nevsky as a roommate for Gigi. The girl could be an arresting beauty, Billy thought, but unfortunately she was unaware of her potential; she presented herself so mousily that you could easily miss her among the colorful cousins. Sasha held herself shyly apart, jumping and mumbling whenever Billy tried to draw her out in conversation, clinging to Gigi as her sponsor even within her own family, all of whom had embraced Gigi as an adopted Orloff-Nevsky. Better, far better a colorless and dependable roommate for Gigi than a hip New Yorker. As far as she was concerned, the later Gigi grew up, the better.

Billy had poked around Gigi’s apartment, asking indirect questions to find out just what their boyfriend situation was, but both girls seemed stuck, not at all unhappily, in that age of innocence which lasts from that final visit to the pediatrician to the first visit to the gynecologist to get a supply of the Pill. Since Marcel had given Billy an attack of hives, she couldn’t return for more in-depth investigation, but she was satisfied that Gigi was learning a great deal at Voyage to Bountiful, and Sasha’s job, which apparently was something to do with bookkeeping in a Seventh Avenue lingerie house, obviously kept her gainfully occupied. And the two girls kept the apartment immaculately; it almost looked as if it had never been slept in.

Early in 1981, soon after the New Year, Billy returned to Paris, where she occupied a vast four-room suite, as luxuriously spacious as a house, on the second floor of the Ritz, the suite in which the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had lived for long enough to give it their name. Billy sat curled up on one of the rose damask sofas in her favorite of the two sitting rooms, thinking that at last she was ready to start house-hunting. The briskly burning, well-tended fires of the Ritz fireplaces were, for all their warmth, hotel fires; the flowers everywhere had the rich but stiff impersonality of hotel flowers; the atmosphere of the rooms, as cozy and perfumed as the interior of a giant muff, was nevertheless a hotel atmosphere. She had managed to impose some of her personal presence on the rooms: the writing table was covered with her pads and pens and books of phone numbers; her favorite photographs of Gigi and Dolly and Jessica in their heavy silver frames stood on the mantel and on the end tables; books, magazines and newspapers were piled everywhere; the firelight was reflected from a dozen personal surfaces, from her highly buffed fingernails to the deep, almost greenish luster of the long string of black pearls she’d just taken off and was playing with idly—but she wasn’t truly at home here. Los Angeles was over, New York was over, Paris must provide her with a new home base.