Scruples Two (30 page)

“I don’t always dress the way I did today. You can’t teach in jeans and sneakers.”

“We can go to your hotel tomorrow, then, and get your clothes and stuff.”

“Sam, wait a minute! I’m not planning to move in with you.”

“Why not?”

“It’s … well, it’s just not a good idea. It’s too soon to do anything like that, in the first place, and besides, I have to be independent. That’s just the way I am.”

“You mean I’m rushing you.”

“Sort of. It just isn’t—sensible.”

“You’re not a sensible girl, babe.”

“True, I’m not, I never have been. It’s one of my major fatal flaws … and if I move in, you’ll find out all the other ones.”

“Okay, I’m willing to find them out one day at a time. But the invitation’s open. My house is your house, my clothes are your clothes, my bed is your bed.”

“Sam, how could any woman let you get away? How come you got divorced?”

“We married too young, right out of college. I didn’t have the brains to know that sculpture doesn’t pay unless you happen to hit it just right … and by the time I had a dealer and started to sell enough to support us, she’d lost patience. I never blamed her. And you, Honey, darling—no, I simply can’t deal with that name—babe, darling, why did you dump your husband?”

“I found out that he was a basic shit. A first-class basic shit, mind you. I guess you can’t blame a man for his character—you have to blame yourself for your choice. But to hell with it, if I were still married I wouldn’t be here, and that idea—the very possibility of missing this particular day of my life—it’s.…
unthinkable
 … entirely out of the question! Oh, Sam, what if I hadn’t bought that bottle?” Billy asked, suddenly appalled at how much had depended on her last-minute purchase.

“Come on, you know I’d have found a way to talk to you, once I saw you sitting there alone. The bottle was the perfect excuse.”

“Is it or isn’t it a Chinese apothecary bottle, Sam?”

“Look at it this way, why shouldn’t it be? If you really want to know, darling, we should ask an expert. I haven’t got a clue.”

Billy returned to the Ritz early Monday morning, leaving Sam, who had been working in his studio since shortly after dawn, as was his habit. She found a large pile of phone messages and invitations waiting for her on the desk in her sitting room. She read through them impatiently, threw them back on the desk and settled down on a couch to think. All these pieces of paper represented an entire life that she could no longer lead and still be with Sam. He thought she was going to spend the day at the Bibliothèque Nationale, but she’d promised to return with a bathrobe and a few clothes at four o’clock when he always quit work.

She picked up the Michelin green guide to Paris that she kept handy for planning the museum excursions for which she still hadn’t found time. On one of the first pages she pounced on the map she needed. Billy put a red X in each of three places, the Place des Vosges, the Place Vendôme, where the Ritz was located, and the Rue Vaneau. The X’s formed a greatly elongated triangle with the Place des Vosges at its longest point, to the north of the Seine. It was the easternmost square of historic Paris, as far distant from the Ritz, on the Right Bank, as it was from the Rue Vaneau, on the Left. She drew a circle around the Marais, stopping short of the Pont Neuf, that popular stop on the tourist circuit of Paris. Many people she knew would be taking that inevitable stroll across the Pont Neuf as spring advanced, she thought, wishing desperately that nobody had ever decreed that a visit to Paris in the spring was an obligatory part of the good life.

Wouldn’t you just know, Billy thought, that a new vogue for living in the dilapidated, formerly royal quarter of the Marais had just come into existence? The glory of the Marais as a residential quarter had reached its height during the seventeenth century, but during the reign of Louis XVI the nobility had started to move westward. After the French Revolution the Marais had been abandoned for almost two hundred years. Wasn’t it just her luck that when she’d found a man who loved her for herself, he’d be living smack in the center of the newest chic place in Paris for finding an old apartment and renovating it?

Still, the interest in the Marais was just beginning, it wasn’t as if Sam had a studio established opposite Dior, and he’d told her that after his long working days he found more than enough café and bistro life in the Marais to keep him there almost all of the time, particularly since getting from the Marais to anywhere else in Paris was difficult by bus or Métro and damn near impossible by taxi. This morning it had taken her taxi three-quarters of an hour to fight its way up the Rue de Rivoli to the Ritz.

Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop,
think
, she commanded herself. You lied yourself into this double life and now you’ve got to stick with it. If only she weren’t so rampagingly giddy, so dizzily euphoric, so flushed with the kind of dangerous erotic excitement that brooked no consequences. She had to stop thinking about Sam, stop thinking about the firmness, already so dear, of his lips and the amused, slow sound of his voice and those impossibly fascinating hollows under his cheekbones, she had to stop, stop it this very second, stop and figure out what she was going to do.

The woman Sam had met two days ago was a woman no other man had seen with clear eyes since Ellis Ikehorn had stopped to take another look at her when she was a twenty-year-old secretary. Sam had met a woman who was no more, no less than a plain human being, the essential human being of seventeen years ago whom nobody alive now knew besides Jessica and Dolly.… and yes, to be fair, Spider Elliott, who’d never paid the slightest homage to the fact that she was Billy Ikehorn and could buy the Ritz itself if the Sultan of Brunei, the richest man in the world, who had just bought it for himself, wanted to sell.

Billy Ikehorn, the life she led and everything she represented, didn’t exist for Sam Jamison. He probably wouldn’t have anything to say to such a person and certainly wouldn’t dream of getting involved with her.

Involved. That was what they were. Intimately involved. In love? In love with love? In love with that ever-young legend of Paris in April? She couldn’t say exactly, she was afraid to be any more impulsive than she’d already been—it had been the most impulsive forty-eight hours of her impulsive life—but nothing in the world could stop her from being with him tonight and tomorrow and the day after, and that was enough for now. She felt total interest in Sam Jamison. It wasn’t just sex. Since her divorce she’d had a few cautious flings, but sex hadn’t survived her fear of being a mark, of being a target. Sex had never been enough to keep her with a man she suspected was an opportunist. And, Wilhelmina Winthrop, if you don’t stop thinking about tonight with Sam, you’re never going to get your plans made.

Billy jumped as there was a light tap on her door. Almost immediately, even before she could answer the knock, the door opened and a
gouvernante
entered, carrying a large vase full of the first pale peach tulips from Holland that the Ritz buys by the thousands each week. Each section of the hotel has its own
gouvernante
, a young, good-looking, smartly dressed, highly efficient woman who speaks at least six languages and whose function in life is to see that all the staff are performing their tasks impeccably and that all the clients are well taken care of in every detail.

“Oh, Mrs. Ikehorn, forgive me, I thought this room was empty. The maids said they’d just made it up and they’d noticed that some of your flowers weren’t quite fresh.”

“I just came in, Mademoiselle Hélène,” Billy said. “Thank you. Please put them down on the table.”

Mademoiselle Hélène’s eyes flicked longingly over the roses on the mantel, and Billy knew that left to her own devices she’d check out the absolute freshness of every last one of the arrangements with which the Windsor suite was automatically filled. But her training was too good for her to be unaware that Billy wanted to be alone, and she left with a quick smile.

As soon as the room was empty, Billy jumped up and started pacing back and forth between the windows that looked out over the Place Vendôme. The Ritz, she thought, the bloody wonderful Ritz! It was like living at home with your parents and two hundred servants, all of whom want nothing more than to please you, a matter that merely requires that they know where you are at all times.

She’d been living here for eight months, since last September, leaving only for Christmas in New York, during which time her suite had, of course, been kept vacant. This morning the maids who made up the rooms must have noticed that her bed hadn’t been slept in. They would have assumed she had been away for the weekend. If she spent nights with Sam, the
gouvernante
would probably not be notified that she wasn’t sleeping at the Ritz for another week, possibly less. It might be a few days more before Mademoiselle Hélène would become uneasy. It was her profession to worry about the guests. Anything unusual would inevitably come to her notice, particularly since the rate on the four-room Windsor Suite was so high that few people left it unoccupied overnight. Mademoiselle Hélène would be far too tactful to dream of asking Madame Ikehorn why she was spending several thousand dollars a night on a hotel suite she didn’t use, but no tact could keep her quick mind from drawing the right conclusion. Billy sighed as she realized that there was no way of preventing the news from spreading through the hotel.

The familiar room-service waiters who brought her breakfast every morning and the second set of waiters who brought her strong tea as she dressed for dinner at night would exchange notes. The men at the reception desk who were in charge of the safe deposit boxes would begin to wonder what had happened to her when she didn’t emerge from the elevator almost every night, fully dressed except for her jewels, which she removed as she needed them, signing a receipt each time she opened her safe deposit box and each time she returned her treasures to the vault. Robert, her driver, who was outside the hotel this very minute waiting for her, would expect to drive her to the Rue Vaneau as usual, to wait for her there and drive her back to the Ritz to dress. Later he would be ready to drive her out to dinner and back again to the Ritz. At the concierge’s desk, messages would continue to pile up; carbons of these messages, as well as all letters and invitations would be routinely sent upstairs and slid under the door. The three concierges of the day shift and the three of the night shift, all six of whom she saw every day, would soon put their heads together. Within a week everyone from the top management of the Ritz down to the sous-sous-chef in the kitchen, who scrambled her eggs every morning just the way she liked them, would know that she was spending her nights on the tiles.

No one would say a word. No one would even
look
a word. As long as her bills were paid, the Ritz provided her complete freedom to come and go as she pleased, dressed as she pleased. There was nothing in the area of acceptance and physical comfort that money couldn’t buy immediately at the Ritz, except for two things, Billy thought. They’d need a few hours’ advance notice to manage a typically American Thanksgiving dinner, since turkey, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes were rarely eaten in France. And at no price in the world could she buy privacy.

What
was
she going to do, she asked herself, inhaling the fresh tulips and discovering that, as usual, they had no scent at all. Of course she could disappear from the world of the Ritz and move to another luxury hotel, without any explanation. However, the concierges of all the top hotels in Paris knew one another by their first names, they all belonged to the same professional organization of the
Clefs d’Or
, and it would only be a short while before the staffs of not one but two great hotels were aware of her doings.

How could she even transport her luggage, her dozens of suitcases, without everyone knowing? What’s more, she’d have to notify Gigi, Jessica, Josh Hillman, her contractor and at least a few of her new friends, or, unable to get in touch with her, they’d think that she had disappeared from the face of the world. Eventually Josh would bombard the hotel with inquiries, and if he was not satisfied he’d be on the next plane. Another hotel merely added complications.
Unless
. Unless it was the kind of hotel where no one would pay attention to her, where no one would notice her, where her name on her passport, which was demanded on registration by all French hotels, would be meaningless. Either a very large commercial hotel or a small, unknown hotel on a little street.

Billy considered the possibilities. Sam would have to know where she lived eventually; she couldn’t flit away, as she had this morning, to some hotel whose name she had managed to forget to tell him. A teacher on a sabbatical year would be unlikely to live in a large commercial chain hotel, a Hilton or a Sofitel. It would be too expensive, even if she had a tiny room, and most of the large hotels were located in the center of Paris. That added to the chance of meeting someone she knew, someone who might wonder what she was doing out of context. If, God forbid, she ran into Susan Arvey at the Ritz, it would be entirely natural. But if she ran into Susan Arvey coming out of a Sofitel! It would take half an hour of lying to make it seem unimportant.

Why did people want to be rich and famous? It sounded so desirable until you needed to disappear and just love and be loved without your lover knowing who you were in real life.

A small hotel, then. She’d take a room in the kind of small hotel that was too understaffed to care who came or went, the kind of hotel in which Sam would expect her to be living. She’d keep her suite at the Ritz in order to receive messages and to maintain the façade of the life she’d constructed in Paris. Sam could be told that she lived in the small hotel, and the Ritz, where she’d actually sleep for two nights a week, would remain her base.

She truly didn’t care that the staff and management of the Ritz would know that she kept the Windsor Suite and rarely slept in it. On those nights she’d maintain her Paris social life, greatly reduced in scope. People would say she was a snob or perhaps merely exclusive. Whatever they said, it didn’t matter, for her world was newly made and they had no importance to her. As far as the Ritz personnel were concerned, she was sure that they had all seen far stranger and more suspicious behavior on the part of their clients, and that once the fact that she spent many nights away had been thoroughly discussed, it would be forgotten as just another sexual caprice.