Scruples Two (28 page)

Fortunately, Cora Middleton was in Paris too. She had arrived only yesterday, on some legal business connected with her husband’s estate, and when she’d telephoned, Billy had invited her to tea. Cora had offered to help Billy find a real-estate agent.

“There are so many of them,” Cora had said, “that it’s all but impossible to tell the good ones from the bad, but luckily I know someone I trust entirely. Her name is Denise Martin, and if you’d like I can manage to put you in touch with her. The best way to work with real-estate people, whether you’re buying or selling, is to use only one. If she knows you have three other competitors looking for places for you, she won’t break her back for you the way she will when you’re exclusive to her. Since you’re a serious buyer, one agent will show you absolutely everything on the market, even if she has to split the commission with another agent. As far as she’s concerned, fifty percent of a sure thing is better than working for a hundred percent of a commission that may not happen.”

As always, Cora’s advice had been excellent, Billy realized, in the weeks to come, as Denise Martin and she combed the Seventh Arrondissement together. This ancient, noble quarter of the Faubourg Saint-Germain on the Left Bank was the only part of Paris in which Billy would consider living. Like Madame de Staël, who once said that she would willingly give up her beautiful country house and view of the mountains in Switzerland for “the gutter of the Rue du Bac,” Billy felt that the Seventh offered the only chance to be a part of the secret, well-guarded charm of a Paris in which history was still alive. However, the rare private houses that became available there sold through personal relationships, almost never reaching the open market. People whose ancestors had lived in the Faubourg Saint-Germain long before the time of Louis XV had been known to languish for decades waiting for a small apartment in the Seventh.

Nevertheless, in less than two months Denise managed to hear a rumor that concerned an
hôtel particulier
whose owner had just died, a private house on the Rue Vaneau that none of the half dozen heirs could afford to buy from the others and keep up on their own. It was not palatial, a mere twenty rooms, but nevertheless the owners were asking the price of a palace: eight million dollars. Several days after she saw the house on the Rue Vaneau, Billy found herself in a musty office, surrounded by a pair of
notaires
, one acting for her and one for the owner, as well as a pair of real-estate agents who could only try, unsuccessfully, to conceal their eagerness.

The purchase of property was one of the areas in which Billy had, through the years, become a seasoned, tough businesswoman. Although she had never before consummated a deal without having the final legal papers vetted by Josh Hillman, she knew the steps of the process thoroughly and prided herself on always getting her money’s worth. As she sat at a large table, with everyone’s eyes on her, her pen in her hand, she hesitated.

She was about to sign the check for the
promise de vente
, a check for ten percent of the price of the house, a check for eight hundred thousand dollars, nonrefundable if she didn’t go through with the purchase for any reason whatsoever, including her death. Billy was keenly aware that no matter how desirable the house was, no one had ever dreamed that she would pay the asking price, as she was about to bind herself to do. The price, like all property prices, had been set unrealistically high to allow room for bargaining. In addition, it was customary, in fact essential, for a buyer to have an inspection made by a qualified expert to find out if the structure was sound, before signing anything. No Frenchwoman, not the richest and most capricious in the country, would dream of buying, at its inflated asking price, a house she’d seen only days before, no, never, it was unheard of under any circumstances. The
notaires
and real-estate agents would have every reason to consider her the biggest sucker they’d ever come across. She would be letting herself be nailed, pronged, hustled, rustled and whatever was the French equivalent of screwed, blued and tattooed.

“If you don’t sign today, someone else will certainly come along, and quickly too, on the Rue Vaneau,” Denise said to her in a low voice, as Billy sat without moving. “The heirs’ acceptance of the
promise de vente
means that they must, legally, sell to you, no matter what happens. And what if this afternoon someone else sees the house—there are so many rich people buying in Paris now, attempting to establish themselves—and offers them more than their asking price? Without the
promise de vente
, you could lose the house. It happens all the time when people hesitate.”

Utter rot, Billy thought. She had never quite trusted Denise’s judgment, and now she knew she’d been right. The trust Cora put in her was mistaken, that of a woman who was accustomed to buying small objects, not large properties. No
hôtel particulier
, even in the best of locations, would sell in an afternoon; the house would cost a fortune to maintain, it had been allowed to go to seed by its elderly owner, and there would be many months of hugely expensive renovation before she could start to decorate. She could safely negotiate for weeks.

Ah, but hundreds of years ago that particular house—not a mansion but a manor house—on the Rue Vaneau had been built for her, Billy thought. It had waited more than two centuries to capture her. A chord had been struck in her deepest fantasies from the minute someone had opened the high grilled gates set into walls over which ivy clambered densely and showed its glossy tips on the street side. Billy stepped into a large courtyard irregularly set with cobblestones and looked at a supremely pleasant house that immediately invited her to enter. She walked forward toward the welcoming double doors set above four semicircular steps, barely glancing at the two flanking wings of the house, one of which, guarded by a statue of a prancing horse, was obviously the stable wing. Even in her eagerness she had time to note the distinctive, finely cut gray stones of the unimposing two-story house, the peeling gray-white shutters, the shell-headed carvings over the French windows, the air of rustic calm that had fallen over her as soon as the gate to the street had been closed. In a dream she walked into a circular entrance hall with inlaid, sagging parquet floors and ideally discreet measurements that spoke to the sense of proper human dimensions lodged somewhere in her brain. The noise of Paris disappeared entirely as she wandered through the shabby, interconnecting rooms that all possessed such a happy wastefulness of space, such a multitude of windows and fireplaces, that she knew that once the house had been surrounded by country gardens, once it had been a very fine house—though never a coldly grand house—in which generations had lived and died in grace and dignity.

Billy had stepped into a glorious past, where the patient passage of time was confirmed by every room: cobwebs glinted in the corners like mathematical drawings in spun silver; tall, dim mirrors set into paneling showed her dreamlike reflections splotched with gold; floors creaked with intrigue and intimate recognition of her step; every window seat, spilling stuffing, invited her to kneel and observe the fanciful play of creepers on the windowpanes. If she looked outside she felt she would see brave, arrogant horsemen with feathers in their velvet caps and beautiful women in powdered wigs, whose vast skirts concealed a happy amorality, whose titles illuminated the pages of old books. She didn’t care if every pipe in the house had to be replaced, if every piece of slate on the roof let in rain, if there were rats in the wine cellars and mice in the top floor and dry rot in the moldings.

She was in the mood to buy, and buy instantly, buy big and buy recklessly, a mood she’d believed she’d never feel again, with the listless, empty indifference of someone who has outgrown a vice. But now she felt herself being lured into the thrilling undertow of her old passion to own, to possess, to acquire; she was being filled by the old covetousness, the frenzied impatience to make something hers. Caution and common sense were equally absurd, for she was feeling desire again, desire, that life-giving force; desire, that need that can’t be called up by any force of will; desire, by whose rules she had lived for so long; desire, the pleasure that had given her up after her divorce.

Billy signed the check slowly, forming each letter of her name with mounting pleasure, utterly indifferent to the exorbitant fees of the
notaires
, the twelve different taxes she deliberately hadn’t asked about, the commissions on commissions that would curl Josh’s hair when he saw the documents.

Christ, it was bliss to spend too much money again.

From the street, Billy’s high gates presented an impenetrable façade that was as properly gray and austere as the other eighteenth-century houses in the neighborhood. Like the many old palaces in the neighborhood, the manor house on the Rue Vaneau was built
entre cour et jardin
, possessing the traditional
cour d’honneur
in front and a spacious garden at the back. Every one of its rear windows looked out on the parkland of the Hôtel Matignon, the official residence of the Prime Minister of France, which stood, guarded by police, several hundred feet away on the Rue de Varenne, at right angles to Billy’s house. The Matignon’s splendid park, for it was far too vast to be called a garden, stretched for many acres, and only a wall separated Billy’s garden from the great trees and wide lawns of the Prime Minister. In the
Plan Turgot
, drawn in 1738, Billy’s house didn’t exist, nor did the Rue Vaneau. The entire area had been covered with trees, lawns and flower gardens as far as the eye could see. Now the Matignon’s rural possessions had been reduced in size, and a number of the most desirable old houses in Paris lined the Rue Vaneau, an aristocratic street so quiet that the only transportation back and forth was by foot, bicycle or private car.

Once the renovation of the house was under way, but before she decided on a decorator, Billy had gone to Monsieur Moulie, the brilliant landscape designer who also owned Moulie-Savart, the most chic of Parisian flower shops in the Place du Palais Bourbon. She asked the droll, bouncy and agreeably flirtatious young Monsieur Moulie to redesign her conventional and overgrown garden into something rare and fine, knowing that full-grown trees would have to be carried straight through the house with their root balls intact, a project that had to be completed before the decoration was begun. Monsieur Moulie had given her a garden in which the trees and shrubs were chosen because they would stay green through the long, rarely freezing winters, until the vines and flowers he planted so cleverly began to bloom.

Billy continued to live at the Ritz, but she spent a large part of every weekday at the Rue Vaneau, supervising the work of renovation. She had learned that the progress of contractors the world over demands constant watchfulness to keep it on track. In the case of a French contractor, whose crews were allowed by their unions to work no more than thirty-nine hours a week, the work was further complicated by the early-Friday-afternoon disappearance of essential workmen, pleasure-bent, as well as the frequent long holiday weekends on which the entire construction crew expected, like the rest of France, to
faire le pont
, “make a bridge,” an arrangement that gave them off the day before the holiday and the day after.

The house on the Rue Vaneau totally consumed her. She had become willingly fixated on every detail of making the old house structurally sound again. With far less personal involvement and emotion than she now expended on one old manor house, she had been able to ride herd on the construction of half a dozen new stores in half a dozen countries.

Every night she returned to the Ritz, peeled off her clothes and plunged into a hot bath in the deep white tub. As she looked tiredly around at the white marble bathroom with its sink and tub faucets in the shape of golden swans, and piles of peach-colored Porthault towels, Billy admitted to herself that if she had done the sensible, normal thing and started to work with a great Parisian decorator, a Henri Samuel or a François Catroux or a Jacques Grange, as soon as she’d bought the house, it would now be as much her decorator’s concern as her own. He would have set someone in charge of all this basic construction, he would make weekly inspections, he would report to her only when it was necessary. She could be off skiing or lying on the beach of some private island or looking for a country place in England or buying racehorses or … but no, she might as well admit it, there was nothing else that she wanted to do except stay in Paris.

As Billy dressed for dinner she looked at herself in the mirror and laughed at her glowing face. She was as possessive as a doting mother of a new baby. She didn’t want any decorator near her house yet, she didn’t want to share it with a single soul, she didn’t want advice, no matter how good, she didn’t want help, no matter how necessary. It was
her
house, by God, and she’d spend her energy gladly to bring it back to life. Hanging about supervising the renovation of a neglected manor on the Left Bank was not why she’d told Jessica she had moved to Paris, not what she’d planned on before finding the house, but now she knew that even if she wanted to release her grip on the project, she wouldn’t be able to make herself do so. She was hooked.

10

Q
uickly a full life in Paris built itself around Billy, taking her out of the seductive cocoon of the Ritz, where every comfort could be attained by touching a button, and sending her off in many directions, accompanied by her driver, Robert, who expertly maneuvered the inconspicuous black Citroën that was appropriate to Paris, as if he had radar.

Invitations had started arriving almost before her suitcases had been unpacked. Her arrival had been unheralded by anything more than her reservation of the Windsor Suite, yet somehow it was mentioned in Maggie Nolan’s well-read English-language society newsletter. Her purchase of one of the last of the beautiful houses of the Ancien Régime that had remained in private hands merited a small squib in the
International Herald Tribune
. Billy suspected that Denise Martin and probably someone at the reception desk at the Ritz were a key station on the underground circuit of Parisian gossip.

At first the bulk of her invitations came from the established business and social leaders of international society to whom Ellis had introduced her on former visits, and from the American Ambassador to Paris. Each party she went to brought more hospitable people into her life until the mantel of her fireplace was piled with “stiffies,” as Billy had once heard an Englishwoman call engraved invitations. She was frequently engaged for lunch, during which no work took place at the house in any case, for the workmen all consumed a serious picnic, complete with much red wine, at an improvised table in her future kitchen.

The French version of the ladies’ lunch serves the purpose of bringing eight or ten close friends together to engage in close inspection of all attractive newcomers. Keeping to her intention to go to all the right parties, Billy accepted invitations right and left, only stopping short at agreeing to spend weekends at various châteaux in the surrounding countryside. After a diet of two or three lunches and some four dinner parties or balls a week, Billy wanted her weekends to herself.

She had made dozens of the right new acquaintances. The descendants of the noblest names in France, although some of them had always remained unbendingly aloof to Cora Middleton de Lioncourt, melted into wholehearted welcome at the arrival of Billy Ikehorn. Her celebrity piqued their interest; well-known foreigners, long before Benjamin Franklin, have always been a hot ticket in Paris; her money fascinated them, for aristocratic Parisians are as materialistic a group as has ever existed. With her beauty and her perfect command of French, Billy instantly became French society’s equivalent of the hottest new girl on the block.

One or two of the clever, glossy women she had met might possibly become more than mere acquaintances, Billy judged, although her social life was growing almost too quickly for real friendship to develop. In addition she was too deeply involved in her right and necessary folly of a house to have the time to cultivate intimacy. Now, Billy realized, the only things missing, to make her life the triumph she had prescribed for herself to Jessica, were more time to shop and the right man to fuck. Sex and shopping … where had she heard that catchy, promising phrase before? In a song? In a book?

Sex? Perhaps she had been too sanguine? The men she’d met in Paris were a disappointment. They were married and faithful, or married with a mistress, or married and casting about for a casual affair, or unmarried and looking for a fortune, or professional “extra” men. For a woman of thirty-seven the prospects of finding the right man were just as dim as they had been in Los Angeles and New York. Never mind, Billy thought, as she tore herself away, from time to time, from the tunnels of scaffolding and the forest of new pipes on the Rue Vaneau, to hurry to a fitting at Saint Laurent or Givenchy, never mind, there was always shopping floating in the air of Paris, and where there was shopping, sex would somehow follow.

On those weekends she guarded for herself, Billy indulged a new addiction that was linked directly to the future she so clearly saw herself leading in her house. A Saturday or Sunday didn’t feel complete without a visit to the huge flea market, the Marché aux Puces at the Porte de Clignancourt, where she discovered the minor, personal, amusing things that no decorator could choose for her.

With experience, Billy learned how to dress to shop effectively in the Marchés Biron, Vernaison or Serpette, the areas of the Puces where such small treasures could be discovered. Over the plaster-spattered jeans she wore at the construction site, she wore a heavy gray sweater she had bought for its evident cheapness, and wrapped a battered beige raincoat over the result. She used no makeup and tied a plain scarf in a nondescript shade of maroon under her chin. She laced up her oldest tennis shoes and carried plastic shopping bags from the Monoprix chain store in which to bring home her booty. She tucked a tube of lip gloss and a wad of cash in a deep inside pocket of her raincoat, but she left her handbag at the Ritz.

She looked truly disgraceful, Billy thought, immoderately pleased with her all-but-unrecognizable reflection as she stalked through the Ritz lobby very early on weekend mornings. The three courtly concierges behind their desk, the gentle, hulking Yugoslavian guard who prevented the merely curious from wandering more than a few feet into the hotel, and the squad of doormen and package carriers who could always get a taxi when there were none to be had, were thoroughly accustomed to such garb when their more experienced clients headed to the Puces.

Such a disguise was necessary in order to bargain with any chance of success. Billy, who had so often surrendered herself to spending with an abandon so total that it felt omnipotent, now found that living in France gave her a new attitude toward a different kind of spending. She was fascinated by the Puces because it provided the opportunity to spend money with miserly caution, with tightfisted reluctance, small sums paid in small bills with a fine and exhilaratingly guilty feeling of parting with
real
money, money she managed to believe, just before the moment she gave it up, that she really couldn’t afford—an authentic twinge of sweet sin that she hadn’t known since her youth. When she wrote a check on funds she knew to be bottomless, the money simply wasn’t real. The only way she could experience her money as actual and palpable was when she had to pay in cash, to peel off each bill and see it counted out after a long transaction that involved the game of bargaining.

She was not fool enough to flatter herself that any Puces dealer would let her get away with a genuine bargain, but at least she looked so far from rich that she could haggle until she had reached somewhere near the lowest price the dealer would happily accept, coming away feeling that both of them were satisfied with the transaction and that the business had been concluded as properly as if she were a Frenchwoman.

One clear, chilly April morning in 1981, Billy stumbled out of the long, shop-lined streets of the Marché Biron, worn down by many hours of all-but-fruitless search. The antiques dealers, heartened by the arrival of the first free-spending tourists of spring, had been unusually stubborn today, and she had reacted with the resistance of the native who feels she’s being treated as a sucker in her own country. She had bought only one tiny, mysterious ivory bottle, and as she sat in a crowded sidewalk café drinking coffee and hungrily eating a croissant, she unwrapped the bottle from its layers of protective newspaper and placed it carefully on the table to give herself something, no matter how small, to gloat over. She loosened her raincoat belt and slumped back in the wicker chair, with her tired feet sticking straight out in front of her, and carefully surveyed the two-inch-high bottle. She didn’t really crave it, Billy realized suddenly. The ivory was unquestionably old, but she had no idea what it was, nor did she care. But it would be a souvenir of the freedom she felt sitting here so anonymously, the freedom that came from being in a disguise that would attract no one’s attention, of being part of a crowd in which no one knew her, of being a stranger in a strange land, yet one in which she felt at home. She hadn’t felt so free in years, Billy mused, her eyes glazing over.… Feeling free was the same as feeling young.

“That’s a damn good shape,” said a man’s voice from the table behind her.

“Are you talking to me?” Billy asked wearily, over her shoulder.

“Yeah, Would you mind if I took a better look at it?”

“Sure,” she said. He was American, certainly a tourist. Billy turned, holding the bottle, and gave it to the tall man who was seated behind her, an empty coffee cup in front of him. He put on a pair of glasses and turned it over in his hands, running his fingers over and over its tapered cylindrical shape slowly and carefully. He twisted its tiny, rounded stopper experimentally, removed it and replaced it.

“It’s a beaut. How did you find a Chinese apothecary bottle here? It must have held something fairly lethal, judging by the size of the stopper.”

“Do you collect bottles?” Billy asked, thinking that since she’d spent over four hours at the greatest Parisian bazaar of antiques and managed to emerge with an ivory bottle that wasn’t even French, she must either know something arcane or be very stupid.

“Collect?” His deep voice was humorous, speculative and leisurely. “Occasionally I accumulate junk, or rather it tends to accumulate around me, but that’s not collecting. I’m a sculptor—it was the shape of this bottle that attracted me.… it’s kind of wonderful.”

“Please keep it,” Billy heard herself saying.

“What!”

“Really … I’d like you to have it. You appreciate it more than I do.”

He thrust the bottle back at her, shaking his head. “Hey, thanks, babe, but no thanks, you’re a little nuts, did you know that? You look as wiped out as if you’ve just fought your way through the trenches of no-man’s-land to find it, you can’t possibly give it away.” Now the humor in his voice turned to concern.

“I’m probably hungry,” Billy said, suddenly self-conscious. She knew all too well what she must look like.

“I’m getting you a ham sandwich on a baguette. Or cheese. That’s all they have here, babe, unless you want pastry.”

“No thanks,” Billy refused automatically. Pastry!

“Mind if I join you? At least let me buy you another coffee.” He stood up, without waiting for her assent, and sat down next to her. She’d eaten that croissant so quickly that she must be ravenous, he thought. She was ridiculously generous too, for she was obviously a tourist, a working girl who’d probably saved for a long time to come to Paris in April, and old ivory like that couldn’t have cost less than fifty bucks. Didn’t she know she’d be better off spending her money on a decent sweater than buying a useless bottle and offering it to a stranger? The sculptor in him cried out against seeing such authentic beauty muffled by such clothes.

Billy drank the coffee he ordered, glancing at him sideways. She had never talked to a stranger in a café before, or allowed herself to be picked up, not even during the year she’d spent in Paris when she was twenty. She’d been too shy then, and later, when she’d visited Paris, she’d been with Ellis. Yet what were French cafés for?

This sculptor person, who called her “babe” so casually, was noticeably lean and decidedly angular, and probably in his late thirties. He had exceptionally thick red-brown hair, cut very short, so that his handsomely shaped skull was clearly outlined. Under his cheekbones his cheeks went in instead of out, so that there was a patrician gauntness to the shape of his face. His long, battered nose gave him a tough, capable profile. He’d taken off the large horn-rimmed glasses he’d put on to examine the bottle, and she could see now that his thick eyebrows overhung deep-set gray eyes that looked at her as if she were funny. Comic, for Christ’s sake. His long mouth was quirky, with a good-natured twist, yet he looked like a man who could take care of himself in a fight. In fact he gave out so much physical strength just sitting there that he’d probably welcome a fight. On the other hand he had something of the unmistakably scholarly mien, the furrowed forehead of a professor crossing the Harvard Yard, she realized, remembering her Boston years, and the arrogant young section men who made a fetish out of sporting jackets in such bad shape they couldn’t be given to Goodwill. This man wore his beat-up tweed jacket, work shirt and jeans in a way that told her they were his daily garb, not put on for a visit to the Puces, but he wore them with brio. He was clearly something of a roughneck, and just as clearly Ivy League.

“Sam Jamison,” he said, introducing himself, offering his hand.

Billy murmured hello, shook his hand, and said, “Honey Winthrop.” She had decided, while taking her inventory of his face, that she couldn’t tell this man she was Billy Ikehorn. Any American would almost certainly recognize her name. She wouldn’t use the name Billy Orsini either, for she had been famous under that name too recently for comfort. Honey had been her despised nickname as a child, but she couldn’t think of anything else and she didn’t want him to know anything about her except what he saw. She was deeply curious to find out what it would be like to talk to a man who knew nothing about the endless baggage train of wealth that followed behind her, heaped with a load of invisible but acknowledged treasure, wherever she went in her nighttime Paris.