Scruples Two (39 page)

“Speaking of which …” Sasha said meaningfully, dipping her tongue in her sherry like a bear after honey.

“Speaking of which, ladies, Gigi will get a piece of the profit on every piece we sell, but not until I know if this is going to be a success or not.”

“I was thinking of another system,” Sasha said smoothly, “an advance against royalties, like they have in the book business. Since Gigi’d be picking the lingerie, writing the copy and doing the drawings, she’d be acting in the capacity of editor, author and illustrator. She should get a certain amount when she agrees to put in the time to do this for you, she should get another amount when she’s completed all the work so that you’re ready to start manufacturing. That way, if you don’t make a profit, God forbid, she’d still be paid back fairly for all her hard work. Otherwise she’s done it all for nothing. After all, Mr. Jimmy, thirty cards! And drawings! Thirty new women to invent!”

“Interesting approach,” Mr. Jimmy grumbled. “But would it make me a gentleman book publisher instead of a garmento?”

Listening intently, Gigi realized that, scruples about authenticity aside, she was excited by Mr. Jimmy’s idea. It was pure fun for her to search for lingerie and create cards, but she’d never realized there was a way to make money from it. She cleared her throat.

“My literary agent, Miss Nevsky, has found a solution that I find workable,” Gigi announced, sounding exactly like Emily Gatherum at her most authoritative. “Of course, she’ll have to negotiate the terms of the advance against royalties with you, Mr. Jimmy, while I’m not present, for which she’ll receive the customary agent’s fee. The creative person shouldn’t have anything to do with the business side. It’s bruising to the psyche. Just thinking about it makes me queasy.”

“Gigi’s the sensitive, fragile one of the two of us, Mr. Jimmy,” Sasha said. “I’m the ruthless agent.
Nothing
makes me feel queasy. So shall we discuss the advance tomorrow, in your office? I see our food coming, and I never like to eat lobster Fra Diavolo and talk money at the same time.”

14

M
adame Ikehorn?” Mademoiselle Hélène, the
gouvernante
of the second floor at the Ritz, tapped lightly at Billy’s bedroom door for the fourth time that morning. Yesterday the chambermaids had reported that there were Do Not Disturb signs on all of the doors to Billy’s suite and they had been unable to make up the room. This in itself was not remarkable—privacy might be highly desirable for such a length of time—but on the other hand such lengthy repose was invariably accompanied by several calls to room service. However, Mademoiselle Hélène had checked with room service and they had filled no orders from the suite since teatime the day before yesterday. The concierge, when she questioned him, answered that Madame Ikehorn had returned from the opera before midnight on Thursday and had not left the hotel since. That meant, Mademoiselle Hélène calculated, that her most curiously erratic guest had remained in her room now for two nights and one full day, as well as this entire morning, without ordering anything to eat, or being seen by any of the staff.

Madame Ikehorn had been at the Ritz for so long, and they were all so accustomed to the irregular hours at which she came and went, that until now her reclusion had been taken to be just another of her varied caprices. Today, however, measures must be taken.

The young woman in her smart black suit tapped once more and then inserted the passkey in the lock. The door was chained shut on the inside.

“Madame Ikehorn,” she called through the small opening, “are you all right? Can you hear me? It’s Mademoiselle Hélène.”

“Go away and leave me alone.” Billy’s voice came from the bed. The room was totally dark, the shutters closed and the curtains pulled, although it was almost noon in Paris.

“Madame, are you ill? I’ll have a doctor come immediately.”

“I’m fine. Just leave me alone.”

“But, Madame, you have had nothing to eat for almost two days.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“But, Madame—”

“Stop bothering me! What do I have to do to get some peace and quiet around here?”

The
gouvernante
closed the door softly. At least Madame Ikehorn was alive. She hadn’t slipped in the tub and drowned; she hadn’t fallen on a wet tile floor, hit her head and bled to death; she wasn’t lying unconscious in her bed. For the moment Mademoiselle Hélène’s mind was eased, but she was determined to keep a close watch on the situation as she gave her orders to the floor staff. They were to watch the suite and let her know immediately when anyone came out or entered. No one should be allowed to go hungry long at the Ritz in Paris, and even worse, be subjected to sleeping on the same sheets for two nights in a row.

Lying in a tight ball under the frail armor of bedclothes that was her only protection from reality, Billy tried to go back to sleep without success. When she’d returned from Sam’s studio she’d taken a massive combination of tranquilizers and sleeping pills to take the edge off her utter anguish. She’d ranted and raved out loud at the walls, still trying to explain to Sam—it was all so monstrously unfair, so bitterly unjust!—and at the same time she’d felt as incredulously abandoned as if Sam had suddenly died in her arms. She’d ached for a single word of understanding as she feverishly paced back and forth through the rooms of her suite, as if one or another room would make any difference to her dry-eyed, impotent despair, offer any comfort, any sign that there was still hope. Finally the pills had started to take effect and she’d rolled into bed for an endless night of hideous, half-awake, fragmented sleep during which she’d kept seeing the look on his face as Sam told her that she disgusted him.

Now, Billy realized, as sleep resisted her completely, she’d worked herself into a state of horrifying clearheadedness. Her mind felt like a bare plain, scoured by wind and rain and a blazing sun, a plain on which no grass could possibly be expected to grow. She seemed to live both on and somehow
in
that plain, where only one thing was absolute: in the matter of men and money she was damned.

Her grief was not a storm of blind emotion. She would have welcomed hours of tears if they had helped to give her some relief, but tears wouldn’t come. Something held her mind clamped hard to the facts that had brought her to this place in her life. Obsessively, without forgetting a detail, Billy had been reliving her nine months with Sam and her year with Vito, trying to turn over and examine every detail of her relationships with them. When she separated their very different personalities and considered only the facts, the fatal truth was plain. She was a rich woman, and no man could manage to love a rich woman.

She had stopped being human to Sam the moment he learned she was rich. He had blocked her out, the woman he knew, at that second, or he couldn’t have been so uncharacteristically angry, so unkind, so unwilling to even listen. He could never have said that she disgusted him—Sam, whom she had known in such direct passion and the sweet intimacy of love—if she hadn’t become
another
, transformed instantly because of wealth. He had refused to acknowledge her, stamped on all the honest emotion she had for him, because he felt insulted, suspected, not trusted. His pride hadn’t survived that blow, and his pride was more important than his love.

Vito had resented her money from the beginning. He’d never stopped believing that it gave her an upper hand, a power he wouldn’t be able to fight. All her actions had been judged against that power. And he too had turned against her. Had he ever seen her as a plain, unadorned female who loved him? The aura of riches, from which she’d tried to protect Sam, had been inescapable.

Vito had accused her of being an imperious queen bee. Sam had accused her of not considering him an equal. Would they have believed these things of her if it weren’t for the money?

Even if she knew the answer, even if she knew exactly what a Billy Ikehorn was like without money, she could never
be
that person to anyone but Jessica and Gigi and Dolly. Only another woman could think of her as a human being like herself. They shared being a woman with her, they knew that no amount of money could change that essentially vulnerable condition. A woman with money has as great a need for love as any other woman. Why couldn’t a man see that?

Billy burrowed into her wrinkled heap of pillows and faced the fact that there was no satisfactory solution for a woman with her kind of problem—the kind of problem a hundred women out of a hundred probably believed that they’d like to have, the kind of problem for which many women would trade their own lives without a second thought. She had so much. What right
did
she have to want more? She should give the whole bloody, impossible search up once and for all, she should train herself not to hope for love. She should expect nothing more from any man than she would from a trip to a foreign country: novelty, new food, new scenery, new customs, the sound of a new language. Then when she’d had enough, she would be able to return home untroubled at heart, as she had intended to from the start. That way she couldn’t be hurt. Lowered expectations—wasn’t that what they called it? Or just reality?

A sound of stealthy voices came from behind her bedroom door. It must be Mademoiselle Hélène, Billy thought, trying to get into her room. She’d put nothing past the woman, including taking the door off its hinges, to make sure her charges were all right. God damn it to hell! Was nothing sacred in the Ritz?

She jumped out of bed and staggered angrily to the door in the darkness, listening to hear what they were up to outside.

“I bet it’s a hangover.” Billy recognized the voice of one of the chambermaids.

“Or else she’s on a binge. There’s enough in the minibar to keep you drunk for days,” the second chambermaid calculated.

Billy hastily retreated to her bed and looked at the large clock on the wall. It said either noon or midnight. The room was too dark to give her a clue. She went swiftly to a window and tugged impatiently on the heaviest of the three layers of curtains that covered every Ritz window, a vast expanse of green brocade thickly lined and interlined, made more weighty by its four rows of braid in four contrasting shades of green and its trim of fat puffs of green and rose ball-fringe. The curtains parted enough for her to reach the elaborate, rose-colored silk undercurtains. She opened them and peered through the last layer of gauze curtains, outside of which were tightly closed, white-painted metal shutters that rose and fell at the touch of a button on the wall by the window. She pressed the button and immediately streaks of daylight entered the room. Noon. Thank God, Billy thought as she went to the phone to order a large breakfast. She called housekeeping to make up her room, unbolted her doors, and disappeared into the bathroom for a long shower. She washed and dried her hair, brushing it carelessly back from her face, and quickly, automatically put on her makeup, forcing herself through these motions out of an instinct of self-preservation.

When she emerged, still in her pink toweling robe, Billy found the curtains of every window in her suite pulled back, her bed made, vases of fresh white roses standing on every table and bureau, and her covered tray waiting with a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
. Startled, Billy discovered that it was Saturday. No wonder she felt so dizzy and so hungry. She must have taken more pills than she’d meant to—but what suspicious minds those chambermaids had! Too many years at their trade, no doubt, had made them expect the worst. She ate everything on her tray and called down for more croissants and coffee. While she was waiting she looked at the sunlight falling on the floor, that rare, fragile, precious light that sometimes comes to Paris in the winter, reminding Parisians that their city is on the same latitude as Helsinki. Billy’s mind floated away from herself and her pain, and with a start she remembered that the opening of Sam’s show had taken place the night before. In an instant she found herself on the phone with a concierge.

“Monsieur Georges, could you do me a favor, please? I’d like you to call the Templon Gallery on the Rue Beaubourg and ask if any of the pieces of sculpture from yesterday’s opening were sold. Please don’t say who you are.”

She hung up to await his return call. Surely, after Adam and Eve, God had invented the Ritz concierge.

The phone buzzed within minutes. “Oh no! Five pieces! Yes, yes, Monsieur Georges, it is good news! Thank you.”

Billy’s head whirled in surprise and dizzying joy. Five pieces the first night! Who had ever heard of a success like that for an American who had never shown in Paris before? Sam must be triumphant beyond triumphant. He must feel.… he must.… no,
she
, she must seize this opportunity, she must write to him immediately, before his flush of victory could fade—she must make him understand all the things that he hadn’t let her explain to him in the shock of discovery. Surely he would be receptive now—more than receptive—he must be dancing on the ceiling, his fears forgotten, his artistic insecurities thrown off—his mind must be open and ready to let her in!

He had already forgiven her! Billy was suddenly convinced of it. And he didn’t know how to find her, he hadn’t the least idea where to look for her! If she didn’t write to him he’d never know. He could be tearing his hair out trying to imagine where she was, desperate to see her, remorseful, hating the words he’d said … oh yes! Busy finding pen and paper, she could see him so clearly, see the look on his face as he realized that she’d disappeared, that he’d lost her. Quickly, she must write quickly, for she couldn’t approach him again until he’d read her letter.

The idea took complete possession of her and carried her along as she scribbled page after page, vividly describing what it was like to meet every man with the fact of her wealth invisibly pinned on her dress like a price tag. She hadn’t been insulting him, she wrote, Sam had to see that, she had merely been waiting for the right time to tell him the truth. She had been tempted to be honest with him so many times, but at first she’d been too happy just being Honey, reveling in being loved for herself. Yes, that delight had been too important to her. She’d been weak with herself—she admitted that freely, but
never
had she suspected him of any of the loathsome things of which he’d accused her. There had been such delicious novelty at first in putting on a mask, an innocent charm that did no one any harm. Then, by the end of the summer, he’d become so deeply involved with the show, growing more and more concerned about it. How could she have disturbed him then, during those four difficult months of mounting nervousness before the show had opened? Oh, surely he must know that she’d believed totally in his success!
But he had to prove it to himself
—so she’d made herself wait until after the exhibition. She saw now that she’d been totally wrong, horribly misguided, but it had been a miscalculation created by the depth of her love. Couldn’t he make allowances for her stupidity, based on her past experiences with other men, and couldn’t he forgive her for it? Stupidity was her only crime.